Brendan Eich and the Petition of Shame

     I have been actively involved in Queer Nation. I am a bisexual, currently in a monogamous opposite gender relationship hopefully until death do us part. I believe that the government should get out of the marriage business. If two people are married by a clergy-- marriage. If two people are partnered by a justice of the peace-- domestic partnership, with all of the rights and responsibilities of marriage. [No religious body ought to be forced to perform a marriage ceremony that it is opposed to].

     I don't have enough words to adequately describe my disgust at you people who signed the petition which "asked" Brendan Eich to resign from his C.E.O. position because he dared to give a thousand bucks to Proposition 8. We do not all agree on every political issue. Big whop. We do not have to. In a work-site, we really can work at something without agreeing on stuff. My outside politics or political activity should not interfere with my relationship with my co-workers or my ability to perform my job duties. Brendan Eich donating money to whatever cause he wants to ought to have been a non-issue. Oh, but I forgot. Corporations are now people. Obviously, you signers of the petition of shame picked up on the faux-fended butt-hurt feelings of Mozilla. How freaking brilliant. Not.

     The oppressed have truly become the oppressors. I am ashamed of my community. I am ashamed that I share the description of "human being" with everyone who signed that petition-- regardless of their sexual orientation. This is the goose-step of political correctness forcing people into boxes and those boxes have to be the same. Screw political correctness. Screw your petition. You FAIL.

     This is a small potato blog in a social media-sphere of giants. I don't imagine that Brendan Eich, Andrew Sullivan, or Steven Colbert will ever read any part of this blog. I want you to know that I stand with Brendan Eich. And I don't give a damn if he is "for or against" gay marriage or any other pet project of the politically correct folks who are not in favor of freedom of speech for all who agree with them.

radical sapphoq says: here are a few links if you want them:

http://brendaneich.com/

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/

Take a Transgenderist to Lunch

N.B.:  I am not a medical professional.  I am not a mental health professional.  I am not anything much.  The following is a combination of my opinions and my memories and may or may not apply to anyone's situation, diagnoses, or anything.  If you think this post could trigger you then stop now and use your back button.


My first exposure [that I know of] to trans-folk occurred in New Orleans many years before Hurricane Katrina.  New Orleans was a hotbed of activity and I had gotten to know her rather well.  I was familiar with the places that the tourists did not go to as well as the tourist traps.  The French Quarter with Bourbon Street running through it is the part that most people bring up when talking about New Orleans.  This happened at a bar on Bourbon Street.

We were young and drunk on a Saturday night.  It was humid-- it was always humid in New Orleans-- and the street was lit up by the artificial lights from bars with patrons spilling out of them with large glasses of booze in hand and jazz music flowing out into the streets.  There was one bar that was small and rectangular and unassuming in the midst of the wildness around us.  We went in.

There was a mirror and a small rectangular stage directly behind the bar.  We got something to drink and sat down on some old red stools.  I looked up at the stage.

"Those are he-shes," my friend Villary the Cajun told me.  "Watch."

[I have since learned to address folks by the gender they present as.  In this blog post, I will do so.  Back then, I knew nothing other than a couple of very short peculiar articles written about Christine Jorgensen.  That is to say, I knew nothing about gender orientation].

The woman announcer on the stage informed the audience that she and the women behind her "have our mothers' breasts and our fathers' appendages."  In other words, they were all pre-ops.  [Pre-op was another word I didn't know back then].  She admitted that many pre-ops become strippers in order to finance the procedures they needed to have done.

The women behind the announcer were all dressed in sparkly styles and stripped down to fancy bras and undies.  [I don't recall any nudity.  It seems to me now that there was a law against that but I could be wrong].  The women certainly had breasts.  Their penises were not evident to me.

It was hot and I wanted out of there.  "You were getting off on them," Vill teased me as we made our way through the predominantly hetero-coupled patrons and back out into the throngs on Bourbon Street.

I consigned the experience into the category of "strange shit that happens in New Orleans."  I carried on with my active addiction and with my life.



Years later I had figured out that I wasn't straight.  I'd been free from active addictions for quite some time when I began to hang out at a community center for folks who weren't straight.  There was no booze there.  If folks were trading drugs there, I never saw that.  There was a library and 12 step meetings and a coming-out group and a coffee bar and barbecues and presentations.  It was a fairly active place.  I was there the night that some trans-folk were scheduled to do a presentation.  I decided to listen in on it.

The presentation was very informative.  There was a slide show and an opportunity for questions.  The audience this time was not straight.  We were gay and lesbian and bisexual people.  The presenter carefully explained to us that sexual orientation and gender orientation were two different things.  Sexual orientation involved who you were attracted to.  Gender orientation involved how you thought about yourself.  Someone might identify as gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual.  [The words pansexual and polysexual were not in vogue then].  Those words referred to sexual orientation.  Gender orientation words included male, female and androgenous.  Gender orientation is separate from sexual orientation.  All of this was news to me.  I hadn't a clue.  The transgenderists had their own community center.  A general invitation was issued to visit.  So I did.

The following Friday night found me on a second floor surrounded by women who were applying make-up and getting dressed to go out on the town.  There was one man there.  The man had been a lesbian for some amount of time before deciding that he identified as a man and not as a woman.  The man was a convincing man.  The women were not as convincing, even to my untrained eye.

There was a discussion involving discrimination on the job.  One pre-op woman was forced to wear a sort of smock over her clothing so as to hide her budding breasts at her job in the nursing home.  Another woman-- who was quite tall-- had been informed by her boss that as long as she conducted herself as a lady, he had no problem with her presentation as a woman in the office where she worked.  It was in that clubhouse that I learned some of the finer points of transformation surgery.

The surgery is not just one solitary event.  Remove the c.b.a. and boom-- you're a woman-- uh, no.  First off it is several surgeries.  The surgical removal / rearrangement of the testicles and penis is the last step of the process which can take eight years or more.  Pre-ops are required to attend counseling and to live full-time as a woman for a year before anything else.  At some point, the woman is given estrogen pills which develop the breasts.  The woman will also take lessons on walking and talking.  She will replace her male clothing with female clothing.  She is told that she must have either sexual intercourse or masturbate.  The penis is not chopped off.  It is sliced down the middle and some of it is used to construct the labia and clitoris.  If a penis is not used sexually, there may not be enough tissue present for the final reconstructive surgery.

The hormone pills may make a woman moody or break out in acne or even give her heart problems.  At least this is what I remember being told.  There was a feeling that taking hormones had some definite serious medical risks.  This is not something I have verified so I don't know how accurate that info is.

A pre-op man will ask for surgical removal of the breasts-- I am not sure at what stage this occurs.  Before that event, a pre-op man will usually wrap or bound his breasts tightly so as to disguise their existence.  A man given testosterone will bulk out.  He may also experience anger and aggression issues as a direct result of the testosterone.

Pre-op women may also visit an electrolysis studio for concerns related to hair.  Some may elect to get their adam's apple shaved for aesthetic reasons.  And a few have voice lessons. 

We went out after everyone was ready.  Although the cross-dressers in the bunch were all heterosexual men, the gay bars are the places that embrace transgenderists and so that was where we all went. 

Going to the gay bar with the TG crew was fun!  There was one cross-dresser who was into gender-f*cking or genderbending.  He did not shave his legs.  He had a beard.  He wore an ugly dress and used balloons to emulate boobs.  "Feel my tits," was his line.  Some of the TGs camped it up.  Others were more straight in sexual orientation and acted accordingly.  I danced with anyone I wanted to and had a great time.

I got to be friends with a TG woman.  We went backpacking for a week together out in the wilderness.  She brought along her make-up.  Having not visited an electrolysis, she needed to shave daily.  Without the make-up, her male origin was more pronounced.  Out there in primitive lean-tos every morning, she would hang her mirror on a nail and put on her face.  She also brought along a solar shower.  The solar shower was not a comfort I had ever availed myself of [and still don't.  I am a serious back-packer type] and I luxuriated in warm water for the week.  It sure was different than taking cold sponge baths with freezing spring-fed lake water.

We had lots of fun that week.  My dogs took to her right away.  We slept in the lean-tos, cooked camp food, drank hot chocolate and teas, hiked all over, went swimming, and logged I think around eight or ten miles a day. 

I began serious gaming.  I got into Dungeons & Dragons in a big way-- and Mechs.  I attended sessions at a game room twice a week-- Saturday afternoons and Tuesdays.  There was another TG woman there and we also got to be good friends.  She had been in the Army when she found that she could no longer ignore her gender orientation.

And finally there was Annie.  I knew Annie when she was still living as a married man.  One day, Annie disclosed to me that she was TG.  I had no clue.  It was from Annie that I learned that hormones can unexpectedly change sexual orientation for a transgenderist. 

[After Annie, I met and was friends with two A.I.S. women.  Babies born with androgen insufficiency syndrome are genetically male but their bodies do not respond to testosterone.  Thus they are commonly reared as girls and are subjected to operations very young in order to reconstruct penises into female genitalia.  As teens they require estrogen in order to develop breasts.  100% of A.I.S. females are either bisexual or lesbian.  That is what both of them told me.  A.I.S. is sometimes referred to as being intersexed or as pseudo-hermaphroditism].

Annie came to a bad end.  She had major depression and was getting inadequate treatment for that condition.  She suicided.  Annie was free from active addiction for six years and she died clean.  That was not and is not a comfort to me because Annie is dead.  And she didn't have to be.

One of my closest friends for many years was a man who eventually came out as trans-folk.  His first therapist told him, "You have a penis.  Therefore you are a man."  I thought that statement was fairly idiotic and I still do.  Gender is far more complex than the mere presence or absence of specific genitalia.

He went on to gender-competent counseling after that one.  In his investigation, he elected not to do anything about his gender orientation.  He does not even cross-dress.  He decided to remain a male in spite of his self-identification as a female.  His decision was difficult but it is one that I respect.  Shortly after Annie's suicide, our own friendship came to an end.  Through the internet, I am aware that he has continued to remain in his male body and has gone on publically to involve himself in political issues rather than gender issues.

radical sapphoq says:  I support civil rights for all civils.  As a bisexual woman, my issues are more similar to those of transgenderists than they are to mono-sexuals.  I have marched along side my TG brothers and sisters in the Pride marches.  The transgenderist community is at its' best when celebrating.  But there is a darker side to all of this.

Adam's apples can be shaved.  Breasts can be removed.  Genitalia can be surgically reconstructed and rearranged.  Someone can be taught how to speak, how to walk, how to dress.

The size of hands and feet, the narrowness or wideness of hips and shoulders, the feel of the tongue [yes, male tongues feel different than female tongues] are things that no hormones or surgeries can correct to date. 

By anecdote only, I have often wondered if gender identity disorder is more closely related to body dysmorphic disorder than is commonly acknowledged.  Both involve an intense dissatisfaction with one's appearance.  Gender identity disorder adds to this base an intense dissatisfaction with assigned gender identity societal roles.  Both appear to this formally untrained eye to have bits of obsession woven into the psyches of the folks who have said disorders.  Is it possible that some percentage of folks who have been identified as transgenderists [with the label of gender identity disorder] actually have an obsession with surgical mutilation? 

I am aware that it is said by some that the younger transgenderists may have more evidence of a mild intersexed state [without qualifying for a diagnosis of A.I.S. or hermaphroditism of various sorts] than those to whom an awareness of opposite gender orientation comes later in life.  I am also aware of the common supposition that the younger someone is reaching post-op, the more aesthetic the results are said to be.  I don't know how accurate either anecdote is. 

The problem is that-- as least as far as post-op TG females are concerned-- the results are somewhat ugly.  The issue is far more than a transgenderist being taught to "pass."  I'm not saying that cis women are automatically beautiful either.  Specifically, the size of hands and feet along with the size of hips and shoulders detract from the appearance of pre-op and post-op women.  [The male vs. female tongue is a minor issue here I think].  We live in a society where appearance dictates everything.  That is a problem that we all face.

I support civil rights for all civils.  [By civils, you may read the word "civilians."]  I support the right of any civilian adult to determine how that adult shall live, including but not limited to decisions involving gender and sexual orientations-- as long as that adult does not harm children-- yet I also support the right to ask questions.  I have questions which have not been satisfactorily answered yet by science.  Among those questions is the question: Is transformation to match one's perceived gender the best option?  I suspect we do not really know yet. 

When transgenderists look to others for approval-- just like those of us who are cis do the same thing-- transgenderists are bound to be disappointed.  No adult should be focused on the approval of others as justification for existence or lifestyle choices or life decisions.  By all means, continue marching in Pride parades and seek legal protections against discrimination.  But please, do not expect that society owes you kudos for being true to yourself. 

Approval is something that kids need out of necessity before they learn how to develop skills of accurate self-appraisal.  Acceptance may be a bit closer.  Tolerance misses the mark entirely.  I want society as a whole to accept that people exist who are not clones of the majority.  Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, those born into intersexed states, transfolk, non-theists...  We are who we are.  I am not a product to endorse.  I am a human being that deserves the same rights and responsibilities that any other human being deserves.  I accept that people very different than I am-- a bisexual, cis [non-transgendered], non-theist woman-- do exist and have a right to exist without my interference.  I do not have to approve or disapprove of the existence of people different than myself.  I do have to accept that people exist regardless of my personal feeling about them and how they conduct their lives.

P.S. A word to the trans-folks who are involved in heated tweets with conservatives on Twitter:  You are wasting your time and breath.  When you come at someone demanding that they approve of you, it isn't going to happen.  When you come at someone insinuating that they have micro-penises or that their deeply-held convictions are stupid, it should not be a surprise when they snark back at you viciously.

If someone makes a statement in your Twitter stream and you cannot tolerate its' presence, block them.  Do not respond to them. Or respond once, re-tweet them if you want to, and then move on.  Ultimately, it does not matter what anyone thinks about us in social media.  Seeking out people to swipe at makes the seeker a readily available target.  Don't bother.  Pick your battles wisely.  Fighting with conservatives on Twitter to the point where everyone is calling everyone else names does nothing for your cause.  Stop it.  Just stop it.  

It's not about what others say or think about any of us.  It's about what we say and think about ourselves.



 

To Matt Barber, To All Teens Everywhere

To Matt Barber,

Quite frankly, I am glad that you are not my father.  My father never would have told me that I am other than who I am.  He respects my autonomy.  He knows that he does not own me.

It is the height of arrogance to assume that you can define your children as "gay" or "not gay" regardless of their sexual attraction.  While it is true that a gay man or a lesbian or a bisexual can decide not to act on physical urges for a sexual relationship with others of the same gender, they do not cross over into heterosexuality by doing so.  They will be who they are-- gay, lesbian, or bisexual-- even if and when they choose celibacy.

Our children will always be our children.  If our children are fortunate, they will grow into adolescence.  Those teens who are lucky will survive into adulthood.  Part of the parenting process involves letting go of our children as we perceive them.  Whether or not we "allow" our kids to be who they are, they are going to be who they are.  Whether or not we "believe" that a few of our kids are not straight, they are going to be who they are.  When my niece came out as a lesbian, I celebrated her willingness to live her life in an honest and truthful manner.  I love my niece exactly as she is today.  Her parents do also.  She is quite lucky that you are not her parent.

Your non-acceptance of non-heterosexuality in teens who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual is your problem.  If you are ever faced with this issue within your family, I hope that you will attend several meetings of P-FLAG.  You will still be a Christian after P-FLAG with your same objections to non-heterosexuality.  Of that I am sure.  The parents in P-FLAG have been where you are.  They learned how to accept non-heterosexuality in their family members.  So can you.  You can accept that your family member is not straight while still maintaining a warm, loving relationship with that family member.

I am not going to even attempt to sway you from your religious stance against homosexuality, lesbianism, or bisexuality.  You have a right to believe as you will.  And yes, you have a right to express your beliefs in the manner that you have expressed them in your open letter to gay [and lesbian and bisexual] teens.  I have a right to express my opinions.  And I have done so, without attacking you as a person.

Your argument that the world's major religions all condemn homosexuality is not satisfactory.  Some of the responses to your blog post indicate that neither the Hindu religion nor the Buddhist sects condemn homosexuality.  Your attempt to throw biology into the mix within the same argument is also not satisfactory.  Strawberries.  Strawberries reproduce in two ways-- sexually and asexually.  Homosexuality does in fact occur in nature.  Ask any farmer who has ever had the misfortune of owning a bull which turned out to be gay.  And even if all of the religions in the universe deny homosexuality a place at the table of salvation in the afterlife, it does not follow that homosexuality should be forbidden to us in this life.  There was a time when the vast majority of people believed that the earth was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, and that affliction is the result of sin.

Your argument that AIDS is an affliction of gay men is old and tired.  AIDS is a virus, not a sin.  People who have intimate sexual contact with those infected by HIV run the risk of becoming HIV+.  People who share needles with infected people run the risk of becoming HIV+.  People who receive blood transfusions of infected blood products run the risk of becoming HIV+.  Contact has to be made with an infected individual in order to contract the virus.  Heterosexuals do become infected by AIDS.  AIDS is not a disease that is limited to gay men.  We would do better to teach our teens to use protection-- rubbers for the men and dental dams for the women-- when having sex than to tell them that AIDS is a disease of the gay community.  We should also be teaching teens not to share needles.  Addicts who use injectables should have their own set of works if they are not willing or able to decide to quit.  The risk of infection is not limited to needles while using street drugs.  We should also be teaching our teens to insist that any tattoo artists use fresh needles and unopened bottles of ink when getting any future tattoos.  

You did not address transgenderism or inter-sexed states in your open letter to gay teens.  I will do so here even though you did not. A compassionate society would ensure that transgendered folk who wish to transition to their preferred gender could do so.  A compassionate society would also ensure that the medical needs of people born inter-sexed-- that is having characteristics of both sexes-- are provided for.  Those who are born with Androgen Insufficiency Syndrome are male by chromosome studies but are usually raised as female.  This is because AIS individuals do not respond to androgen.  Period.  An AIS female will need surgeries in order to correct genitalia  to an average appearance, estrogen in order to mature sexually, and competent medical services throughout her life.  While it is true that a transgendered person can choose to suppress thoughts and behaviors related to transgenderism-- it's called purging within the community-- this suppression is usually not a long-term "solution."

Again, Matt Barber, it is not okay for any of us to define who someone is.  Identity is personal.  Everyone has to do that for themselves.  You do not own your children.  Please allow your teens the dignity of self-definition.  It is a great tragedy to risk estrangement with your own children as they mature into adults because you could not or would not accept that gay teens, lesbian teens, and bisexual teens do exist regardless of your feelings about the issue.

Thank-you,
radical sapphoq 

 

To all teens everywhere, 

Not all adults and not all Christian adults believe as Matt Barber does.  Hopefully, your parents and families will accept you for who you are.  If they do not, it is their problem. However you choose to walk in the world-- whether straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans-folk, intersexed, queer, or questioning-- you deserve not to live a lie.  Whether you choose to be sexually active in whatever degree that makes sense to you or celibate, you deserve to be who you are always.  Whether or not society or your family celebrates who you are, there are people who will.  You are the future.  You will be here after the rest of us are dead.  You deserve the right to define yourselves.  Not even Matt Barber can take that from you. 

Respectfully yours,
radical sapphoq 

 








http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/an-open-letter-to-gay-teens/