Sunday, January 16, 2011

Your Oppressors Are Not Other Trans People



Ever since I transitioned back in 1994, it seems like at least once a decade we go into this cycle where we have post-op transsexuals screaming the nonsense that pre-ops, crossdressers and everyone else in the trans rainbow are 'oppressing' them.   
Another variant of that tired argument is that post-ops are being labeled against their will as transgender people and as people with a medical condition they need to break free of the "tee gee's" who are taking rights away from them.
Bull feces.   It was your post-op sisters back in the 90's that suggested we adopt the 'transgender' label to describe this vast community to legislators because in the words of one of them, 'they didn't want to be stigmatized by being described with a medical condition label (transsexual) that our community didn't create. 
For all the overheated hyperbolic rhetoric from some quarters lately about transsexual women being 'oppressed' by others in the trans community, it's just as wrong for some transsexual women to pimp an exclusionary wrapped in radical feminist gender binary BS dogma for their own selfish purposes as well and claim others are 'oppressing' them.
Time for some of y'all to buy a vowel, get a fracking clue and realize who your real oppressors are.   
Your oppressors trans boys and girls, are the fundamentalist people and conservative movement politicians who hate us all no matter where we fit on the trans spectrum.
We lost rights we received after Christine Jorgenson stepped off the plane from Denmark in 1953 for a variety of reasons.  One of those reasons was the fact we were too busy trying to assimilate into society instead at the behest of the then HBIGDA rules, which in effect made us invisible to the general public    
We should have been building community and fighting tooth and nail to secure whatever meager civil rights we did have and agitate for the ones we didn't.
But I have the advantage of historical hindsight on that.   One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that our 'white' wing oppressors have been busy hatin' on President Obama, gays and lesbians and Latinos right now.  But you can be assured that they will turn their undivided attention to the trans community to jack with our civil rights, and we'd better be ready to meet the challenge head on..
So stop pimping the Big Lie that the 'tee gee's' took away transsexual people rights and wake up to the cold reality that the people who have been feverishly working to roll them back aren't your fellow trans people.
The sooner you stop telling that Big Lie, the sooner we can unite to fight our common foes in the conservative movement, transphobic ministers, trans-hating radical lesbian feminists, and transphobic gays and lesbians. 



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