Chick with a dick. No, seriously.

Someone responded to this blog, by completely missing the point and deliberately trying to insult me by calling me a man. They said if I like my penis, then I'm no different from any other man. I strongly disagree, and here's my response:

You can call me whatever you want, I put no stock in it. You can't consider my genitalia in a vaccuum, you need to consider my mind as well. I currently identify as female, but I'm in no big hurry to cut my parts off. I'm satisfied with being female as I am, and it's a hell of a lot better than forcing myself to present as male. I have seen this happen: a guy gets into crossdressing for whatever reason, they decide to label themselves as a transsexual, then they proceed to force the issue, and they do the hormones, surgeries, RLT, and so on, because someone told them that's what transsexuals do, and they have labelled themselves as such Because of the application of the label, the person was unable to see the mistake they were making... they just assumed "I'm TS, so this is what I have to do." They became just as constrained by our community's label as we are by society's labels. They allowed the label to define them, instead of the other way around.

Is it so hard for people to accept that my sex (I had written "is male", but it's more like "is of no importance"), and my gender is female? I have considered myself female since I was around 5 years old, which is about as far back as I can remember. Through the years, people have tried to tell me that means this or that, but I decide what it means to me. To quote GWB... "I'm the decider, ok?" I can listen to opinions and so on, but unlike some people, I take that information and then think for myself. I form my own opinions about what I want to do, and I don't let anyone tell me otherwise. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the prejudice within our own community is pressuring people to consider sexuality and gender as something that must be made the same at all costs, even though we are constantly saying that those are two seperate things. The hypocrisy of some people just drives me nuts.

Perhaps my situation is unique, but I highly doubt it. What's more likely is that there are many people out there like me, but they are afraid to admit it because when they do, they have to deal with people like you calling them men. And there's really no point in that except to insult the person.

I will admit that there are people, like the one in my scenario above, who are not genuine transsexuals, and there are people who make the wrong decisions. It's not up to me to point that out to them though - it's their own busines, their own life, and if they want to fuck it up, then it's their own problem. I feel concern for those people, and I will occasionally give my opinion and try to help them sort out their own feelings, but I have no business telling someone they are not who or what they claim to be. I love discussing this kind of thing, I listen carefully to the opinions I hear, and occasionally something will cause me to re-think my situation, but that's what I'm going to do - re-think it, not just adopt someone else's thinking.

There is a lot of discussion on transgender mailing lists about how to classify, divide, and identify people. Do you not understand that all that does is serve to classify and divide us? It doesn't do anybody any good to try to apply taxonomy to our situation. That's one issue that we constantly complain about... that society wants to throw every human being into two discrete sexes. How can we complain about that, and at the same time be arguing about classifications within our own community? Don't try to force me into a box, I won't go, and you're likely to get scratched up trying to put me in there.

That's my morning rant :)
Now back to some real work!
Jasmine