Candle Light Memorial for Stacey Blahnik

The House of Blahnik has announced there will be a candle light memorial tomorrow (Saturday, 16th October) in Philadelphia for Stacey Blahnik, found murdered in her home on the 11th.  Since, for somewhat complex reasons, I am currently in Philadelphia I will be attending.  Although I was not familiar with Stacey, we lose too many trans women, especially trans women of colour, for me to not pay my respects to her especially given her work as a trans activist.

The details of the candle light memorial are as follows:
Candle Light Memorial
Saturday, Oct. 16th
6:30pm – 9:30pm
Love Park – 15th/JFK (Phila, PA)
4 info contact Father Kiron Prodigy 267-401-5085

I hope that anyone who can make it to memorial will attend.  I hope to see you there.

Rage: (Cis) Feminists Other Trans Women

This is going to be a short ragy post because, as a feminist and a trans woman I find it depressing to dwell on this subject much.  Feminism has a long, shameful history of only being for some women, the right women.  The sex-positive movement, womanism, and others owe part of their existence to the fact that feminisms, or perhaps more accurately, feminists have not lived up to any sort of ideal that feminism is the radical idea that women are people.  As a trans woman I'm definitely not people and often not a woman.

Now I'm not just talking about the transphobic radscum types who take pride in their hatred for trans women.  Haters are everywhere, only their supposed justifications differ.  Radscum really say the same things as the religious fundamentalist haters.  So I dismiss them pretty easily.  Except.

Except it's amazing how most cis feminists don't actually denounce radscum.  Oh, they're happy to give lip service about how awful it is that they say these things but they're otherwise happy to accept that they really are feminists who are concerned about all women.  Or, you even get cis feminists who claim to not be transphobic and then make approving comments at radscum hate sites.  But the most annoying thing is when cis feminists don't necessarily do these things but make statements that exclude trans women as women and as feminists.  Like this lovely quote I found in a recent post by a cis feminist elsewhere:

I am always fascinated when transgendered people describe (witness!) the sexism they have encountered, and chronicle the differences in the ways they are treated after transitioning to man/woman. I don't think any better witnesses concerning the realities of sexism can be found, since they really have experienced it from both sides of the gender spectrum. 

That's pretty othering.  Trans people as witnesses to sexism.  Like we're subjects of an experiment that cis feminists are running.  Like we're not feminists but only exist to "fascinate" cis feminists.  This is the sort of reason why some trans women are saying they are no longer feminists.  Because feminism doesn't include us.  At best we're examples for feminism in its relentless theorising, our lived experience considered in the most limited way. Silly trans women!  We show how the system is broken!  Thanks for that.  Maybe feminism will liberate you when they liberate all women (ie, never).  But don't con yourself that you're a feminist who can theorise and analyse like cis feminists!

So why do I stay a feminist?  Because I do believe in the ideals.  Because I know feminists won't listen to non-feminist criticism.  Heck, they barely listen to feminist criticism.  I'm sure at some point it will be too much for me to bear any more and feminists will drive me out of feminism.  No great loss.  Same old, same old.

Body of Work: On Transition and Gender Expression For All

Transition has also changed me a lot physically.  Now I'm not going into all the physical changes I've done in transition because I find cis people seem to treat it as entertainment or use it to misspeak truths about me.  I will however mention the most obvious public changes.  My chest has changed significantly which I'm getting used to although I still often glance down and think "Oh, that's right, I have cleavage."  My face has also changed, although I personally have a harder time seeing that change because I still seem to seek out what I've always seen in my face.  I also am still slowly getting "hippier" and more bum, but that is a longer-term movement of fat. My hips sway more, although I can't say why.  I am certain it's not a conscious thing, but that's about it.

I'm sure, of course, that a few readers here are going to be thinking I changed to look "pretty" or because "I like to wear frocks" or other reasons.  Which, while it would have been hurtful to hear those words not that long ago, now I just find it funny.  I never thought I would look pretty, although some people now tell me I am (and I'm willing to grant that I may be cute), so that's a non-starter.  I could have worn dresses without transitioning.  Actually, wearing dresses is something I had to be more or less convinced into wearing by cis people.  I was surprised to find that dresses actually look better on me than jeans and T-shirts.  They're also a lot cooler which is a big deal to me as my body often feels overheated.

But, here's the thing, I don't need to defend my wardrobe choices to anyone, any more than  I need to defend my grooming choices, surgical choices, HRT choices, and anything else that affects my bodily appearance.  Yes, I should be reflective about why I do things in a society that places so much emphasis on certain bodily disciplines for the two recognised genders, but ultimately I have to choose what I think will let me be safe in a violently transphobic society, what I feel comfortable with, and what I think expresses myself within the context of my culture.  For instance, I think it's very inappropriate of butch women to declare that femme women are less feminist than them, are obviously too straight-identified even when the femme woman is often some form of queer, and that femmes need to stop identifying with disempowering feminity.  Similarly, androgynous (or other non-gender-specific-expressing) women need to stop telling butch women to stop imitating men because it's showing a shame in being women, although obviously they shouldn't be too feminine.  Femmes need to not consider themselves the only "true" feminine women.  In case you're missing the subtle point, each type of gender-expressing women mentioned is defining "the proper way to be a woman" as her gender expression.  There is no One True Way.  Period.

I'm not going to tell you what your gender expression needs to be, because I likely don't know you or anything about you.  I don't know what makes you feel comfortable.  I don't know what you find makes you attractive to the people you're trying to attract (assuming you're trying to attract anyone).  I don't know what you find properly communicates who you are to other people.  Thus, my only advice to you is consider how you express your gender and then do so in a way appropriate to you.  Be yourself.  But think about who you are.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that there are likely some limits and influences on your gender expression.  Available income can be a strong determinant of the kinds of things you have available as choices.  Available time can make it difficult to be able to see what's out there that you might like.  Region can also be a factor.  For example, I noticed that in one queer pub I was in in Liverpool the butch women were the ones not wearing (so much) makeup and with their hair pulled back in bands.  Which makes a certain amount of sense as the Scouse standard for women based on what I saw on the streets of Liverpool and in conversations with a Scouser woman seems to be what I'm used to thinking of as femme.  So butch there seemed less butch than what I'm used to.  For trans women we often have to have more markers of femininity than cis women to be gendered as women.  Disability can at least sometimes result in different choices for gender expression.  Race and class can certainly be factors as well.

The point is that we are individuals.  Demands that we adhere to standards based on feminist arguments/ideals is ultimately no different than demands that we adhere to societal standards.  They are not and should not be absolutes for all of us.  At best they are things to consider, things to reflect about.  But if I see one more feminist blog post discussing shaving as a feminist issue, I'm going to barf.  Such posts inevitably end up with people expressing what choices they have made and often doing so in defensive ways.  If there's a wider discussion to be had, no one is having it.  Sure, knock yourself out on your personal blogs, but for heaven's sake we really do have other issues we should be discussing than yet again whether or not we remove hair from certain parts of our body.  Think for yourself, perhaps consider what others say, and make your own decision.

Gender and Feminism Conflict?

For once I'm going to kind of agree with those whacky transphobic feminists who claim they are radical feminists when they claim that feminism isn't about gender and that feminism is about sex.  Okay, I'm not really going to agree with them, but I hope that got your attention.  The point I am going to pick up on is the conflict that feminism seems to have with gender, which the transphobes do suggest.

Before I go further, it's perhaps helpful to give a quick idea of what I mean by "gender".  Here I mean it as that which exists in the social sphere and is usually regarded as arising from physical sex and reveals itself in varying ways in the personal and social.  Gender, as it relates to feminism, is the means by which women are defined as less than men in society, the means by which sexism operates.  Feminism has pointed out how gender is a social construct and done lots of analysis to investigate the many ways in which gender operates upon men and women as well as working to try to deal with ending sexism.  Gender has proved very fruitful for feminism.

The problem arises for feminism in that many, if not most, cis feminists seem to have decided that because they have learned so much about the way in which gender affects (cis) women and (cis) men that this means that feminism is the only, or at least the best, place that gender can be dealt with.  This has resulted in cis feminists deciding that they know best how trans people should deal with the role of gender in our lives and prescribing and proscribing what we should do.  It has almost always meant that they blame trans people for enforcing and upholding societal standards of gender while showing no awareness of their complicity in those standards (Hint: If you're telling trans people how to deal with gender, you're almost inevitably enforcing gender standards.), and, most egregiously, their drafting of trans people for the "end of gender"/gender revolution/whatever (On this last point, I would at the least suggest that revolutionaries who are drafted are not going to be committed to the revolution; just saying.).  That is to say, feminism seems to flounder in gender when it tries to expound upon an understanding of gender beyond that based in cis men and cis women.

So, long post short, we see that cis feminists haven shown a limited understanding of gender.  I'm almost willing to grant them expertise on gender and cis wo/men except they have often shown a lack of understanding that gender does not affect even all cis women the same way and have a nasty habit of totalitising their gender analysis based upon a certain type of cis white women in the developed world (ie, they're universalising their own experiences).  Now I'm not going to suggest that trans people have any sort of lock on gender (That would be making the same mistake that cis feminists made.) but we certainly do have a variety of gender understandings that is not found among cis feminists.  If cis feminists bother to listen they might learn something and might even gain new insights into the way in which gender works among cis people.

Body of Work: Introduction

In reading what people, especially cis people, have written about trans people, especially transsexual people, I've been struck by the role the body is both front and centre and yet ignored, invisibilised, or erased.  I mostly mean the trans body, but also the cis body.  To me embodiment (by which I mean "being with a body") is an important part of trans, and cis, life and experience.  So I'll soon be starting an indefinite series of posts about bodies, particularly my body (because I'm the one I know best).  I suspect I might repeat what other people have said, but I'll see if I can't also be somewhat original and definitely personal when talking about my body.  I hope it'll be useful to people besides me.

Kyriarchy Illustrated - A Border Crossing

"Kyriarchy Illustrated" is an occasional series of posts where I talk about the effects of living in a kyriarchy via my personal experiences.  See the first post in the series "A Dyke-Bashing in Liverpool" and find all of the posts so far by clicking on the "kyriarchy illustrated" link at the end of the post.

One of the more annoying things about being discriminated against is you can't always be absolutely sure you are being discriminated against let along be able to prove it to anyone else.  For one thing, you're really most familiar with how people treat you and not so much other people, which makes it hard to compare treatment.  For another thing, most people, contrary to the beliefs of many, don't call you names or otherwise make it very obvious when they are discriminating against you.  They may even think they're being perfectly fair (eg, the US justice system and the racist treatment of convicted murderers).  But, perhaps most importantly, many of us have not been told how to identify and deal with discrimination when it happens (eg, in the US, the focus is almost exclusively on not discriminating, not on dealing with discrimination when it inevitably occurs).

Thus, I had grown somewhat complacent crossing international borders as a trans woman.  Yes, with my name, my appearance, and my sex/gender marker on official documents I was playing a trans version of "One of These Things Is Not Like the Other" from Sesame Street, but the routine of them all being considered as congruent by either inattentive or polite officials lulled me into a sense of normalcy.  So, it wasn't until after I left my encounter with an immigrations official who found something wrong with every answer that I gave and flipped furiously through my passport, minutely examining every stamp within it before stamping my passport with a final insinuation that I was wholly unaware of immigration law (Au contraire!), that I reflected on just what had gone wrong with the encounter.  Playing the encounter back in my head from the start, I realised that it was pretty much right at the time that the immigrations official would have found the answer to that Sesame Street song.  This is why filling out forms and showing ID tend to be very stressful, even dangerous, for trans people.  Because I'm sure that official could have refused me entry had zie chosen to do so.  Sure, it might have been reversed at some point on appeal, but it might not have been and would have been even more stressful and humiliating plus possibly earning me a black mark as a "troublemaker".  Instead, I left the encounter angry and feeling humiliated, knowing that the official acted within hir remit but in a way not in keeping with treating me as I treated hir.

Of course I can't prove any of what I relate above.  Unless the official noted something in the record of my crossing, it's merely my word against hirs and besides I'm in the country so what am I complaining about anyway?  But that's what I think the nature of a lot of discrimination in a kyriarchy is about, the kind that you can't prove happened but yet others like you talk about as happening to them and identify it as discrimation as well.  The patronising attitude, the assumption that you are stupid or ignorant, the seeming to pick you out to be belittled. Those don't strike me as uncommon experiences for those who have experienced discrimination.  The sort of discrimination I experienced is not the kind the law can touch, not the kind the law can remedy all by itself, not even the kind HR policies can eradicate.  Which I think it's why it's the most pernicious form.

So, I'm left angry, upset, and yet with nothing to officially complain about and no way to assure that it won't happen again and with a good chance of being faced with the same official in the future (in case you wondered why I have given no distinguishing characteristics).  This is what I get for daring to cross borders having dared to crossed a social border.

[Perhaps the most annoying thing about relating this is going to be the people who decide that I'm showing some sort of "male privilege" at thinking I don't deserve to be discriminated against (which is pretty hypocritical when they're arguing against discrimination against themselves and others they see as like them), that I'm engaging in the "Oppression Olympics" (except I'm not directly comparing my discrimination to anyone else's, let alone suggesting it's worse), sweep it aside as some sort of general problem that occurs to the "gender non-normative" (except my gender is pretty normative and my gender presentation/expression is much like my peers or, perhaps worse, my mother.  ;)  Hi, Mom!), or otherwise excuse this away.  But then I'm not really writing for those people, and I suppose I shouldn't let other people's hypocrisy, lies, and deliberate misunderstandings bother me.  But I like teaching so it really irritates me to have people refuse to learn when all they have to do is listen or read.]

The Transphobe Who Can Ruin Your Day

Just when I was hoping that Julie Bindel had moved on from being actively transphobic, she's appeared in an, at-best, centre-right magazine called Standpoint (What the heck is a feminist, especially a self-proclaimed radical lesbian feminist, doing cosying up with the right?) with an article entitled "The Operation That Can Ruin Your Life".  Three guesses as to what operation she's referring to and the first two don't count.  I hate being a puppet dancing to strings being pulled by Ms Bindel, but I also can't let this sort of hate pass by uncommented.  I'll mostly be snarking, so fair warning.  I'm skipping large parts of the article because a full fisk would be interminably long.  It's also worth noting that in many ways this article is sort of her "greatest hits" on trans stuff in that she's stitched together material from previous articles she's written.  She even includes the quote about trans people and Grease that she later apologised for, showing just how insincere she can be when apologising.  That said, let's get to her article.

Almost immediately one has to wonder what world Ms Bindel lives in.  Referring to last year's Stonewall awards she says that "I, along with a police escort, walked past a huge demonstration of transsexuals and their supporters, shouting 'Bindel the Bigot'."  This should concern everyone.  In that I mean it should concern everyone that a protest of about 150 people is a huge demonstration in Bindel's eyes, that she remembers a chant that was not chanted, and that she also remembers having a police escort while others don't.  Of course since she also refers to the demonstrators as a "powerful lobby" who have been "hounding [her] for "five years", the real point here is to establish that: a) trans people are possibly dangerous, b) there are a lot of trans people, c) trans people are not activists trying to assert their rights (as feminists might be described) but are like industry lobbyists, and d) trans people are personally out to get her.  Notice how this is reinforced at the end of the same paragraph: "I now find that a number of organisations are too frightened to ask me to speak at public events for fear of protests by transsexual lobbyists."  Trans people are boogeypeople that scare people away from Bindel with their lobbying, ehr, protests.

"Feminists tend to be critical of traditional gender roles because they benefit men and oppress women."  Yes, yes, we do.  I couldn't agree with you more, Ms Bindel.  Glad we could find common ground.  Of course, then she completely rips that ground away by immediately following up by saying that "[t]ranssexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is 'natural' for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls."  By talking about the "nature" of transsexualism (as though it somehow exists independent of actual transsexual people) and what is "natural", Bindel is trying to hit us over the head with the usual "You naive fools, you don't understand it's all socially constructed!" thing.  Just in case we were unclear on that she goes further with: "The idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism."  Again, I couldn't agree with her more since I am a feminist.  Gender roles are socially constructed.  How could they not be?  Of course the problem is that as a feminist and a transsexual woman, I see a difference between gender identity, gender expression, and gender roles.  For Bindel, like other radical feminists, gender identity, if it even exists, is the result of the imposition of gender roles as is gender expression.

Now, tell us how transsexual people came to be, Julie!  "Gender dysphoria (GD) was invented in the 1950s by reactionary male psychiatrists in an era when men were men and women were doormats."  Get that?  Transsexual people did not exist prior to the invention of the psychiatric definition of gender dysphoria.  Just like lesbians did not exist prior to Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886.  Gender dysphoria was also invented by reactionaries making transsexualism reactionary as well and unable to be changed by transsexual people from those roots.  Just like feminism can never change from its roots as a movement only concerned with the rights of some women.  Hmm, maybe she does have a point there, after all.  It's also vital that we remember that the psychiatrists were male because this also makes transsexuality, and thus transsexual people, forever the handmaiden of patriarchy, eternally opposed to feminism.  No transsexual person can really be a feminist (I'm a sparkly pink unicorn with a false consciousness).

"[Gender dysphoria] is a term used to describe someone who feels strongly that they should belong to the opposite sex and that they were born in the wrong body."  Yes, it does describe people who think that.  Of course, it also no longer exists as a diagnosis anymore, having been replaced quite some time ago by "gender identity disorder".  But if Bindel used the current term she couldn't as easily ignore the difference between gender roles and gender identity.  Also, a number of transsexual people disagree with the whole "born in the wrong body" thing.  My body is not the wrong body, it's my body.  What other body would I have been born in?  Also, I don't believe I should belong to the "opposite sex" as this implies that there are only two sexes, that these are natural and not somehow socially constructed, and that intersex people do not exist (or exist only as "mistakes" of one of the two sexes).  I do claim that I have issues with my body, but I have a hard time being able to articulate these issues in a way that is comprehensible to cissexual people, as it can not reach them unfiltered by societal and personal prejudices.

"[Gender dysphoria] has no proven genetic or physiological basis."  And your point is?  Neither does sexual orientation or bipolar disorder (Thank you, Arwyn!).  Does this mean that lesbianism doesn't exist?  Wait, I forgot, Bindel is a political lesbian who appropriated a lesbian identity as a result of her politics.  Actually, I suspect that Bindel's point is that this means transsexuality must be a mental (read: "not real") illness with all the bad connotations that being "crazy" carries with it.

"But no oppressed group ever insisted its emotional distress was the sole basis for the establishment of a right. Indeed, transsexuals, along with those seeking IVF and cosmetic surgery, are using the NHS for the pursuit of happiness not health."  Bindel makes a complete disability fail here.  People with mood disorders?  They need to stop being treated by the NHS, because they're only pursuing happiness not health.  Women who've been emotionally abused?  Not a health issue, because they're just pursuing happiness not health.  I could go on, but I think I've made the point.  The idea that happiness is somehow independent of health  is a privileged notion, expressed by those for whom happiness is not a health issue.  Honestly, I don't think transsexual people would be all that emotionally distressed if we didn't have to deal with a world where Bindel's views are the norm.  The emotional distress arises mainly from the rejection of our autonomy, the insistence that we are bad, that we are wrong, that we are the symptom/cause of societal problems, that we are to blame for the prejudices of others.  Speaking of autonomy, I base the establishment of a right to treatment not on emotional distress but on bodily autonomy, the same basis for the right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term or not.  My body, my choice.  But, of course, Bindel wants to portray transsexual people as emotionally disturbed, vain, and unnatural (don't think I missed the comparison to IVF and cosmetic surgery) just the same as has been done to women seeking the vote and queer people seeking the right to live openly.

Speaking of treatment, can you tell us about it, Julie?  "Treatment is brutal and the results far from perfect."  Wow, brutal.  Why exactly is it brutal?  Is it because it sometimes involves surgery?  Do they not use anaesthetic?  Or, is Julie just using inflammatory language?  I'm glad that Julie is there protecting transsexual people from the mistaken belief that we can evaluate for ourselves if surgical results are acceptable enough for us for those contemplating surgery.  But, no, surgery must be perfect.  BTW, what exactly does perfect mean and who decides what is perfect (if not Julie, since I'm sure she can't be called in for a consult for everyone considering surgery)?  We already ruled out transsexual people.  Maybe we should have a poll on the Daily Mail's website?  Also, I would say that hormone replacement therapy, which Bindel significantly fails to mention at all for transsexual women, is neither brutal nor far from perfect.  It hasn't hurt a bit and I'm fairly happy with my breasts (though not as happy as my fiancée is;  ahem).  Bindel's preoccupation with surgery is typical of cissexual fixation on "the surgery" (which usually only means surgery for trans women) as though it were the defining event in all transsexual people's existences (I'm certain she wouldn't bring up the removal of facial hair for transsexual women at all if she couldn't characterise it as painful).  She willfully ignores the fact that not all transsexual people undergo any surgery, since some never desire surgery, some decide that the results aren't acceptable for them, and some don't like the pain that any surgery involves (I was personally less-than-thrilled with the pain of recovering from my emergency appendectomy).

Since Bindel has made clear she is totally not transphobic, she'd never misgender someone, a transphobic act.  So this never appears anywhere in the article: "In other words, a pre-operative man could apply for a job in a women — only rape counselling service and, if refused on grounds of his sex, could take the employer to court on the grounds that 'he' is legally a 'she'."  Nope, that does not appear in the article at all.  Again, note the preoccupation with "the surgery".  After all, we all know that one of the requirements for counselling is that the counsellor expose her genitals to the person being counselled.  Oh, hang on, no, it's not.  And, it's not like such a trans woman would know anything about being raped because she might have been raped.  Oh, hang on again, a trans woman might well know.  So we're left with the simple transphobic assertion that trans women aren't women.  Because "woman" is socially constructed and absolutely based on the determination made about the woman's genitals at birth.  It's socially constructed on biological essentialism.  As we've already seen above, physical sex can not be socially constructed.  Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Now we get to where Bindel clearly misrepresents a quote while failing to properly attribute it.  She introduces it with "A definition of transsexualism used by a number of transsexual rights organisations reads:"  which is then followed by a paragraph which I will reproduce in a moment.  I tracked down where the paragraph of quote came from since I'm always suspicious of direct quotes loosely attributed to unidentified organisations.  It turns out she copied it from Beyond the Binary: A Tool Kit for Gender Identity Activism in Schools which was put out in 2004 by the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, the Transgender Law Center, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (notice how only one of those is specifically a trans rights organisation and it's not exclusively for transsexual rights).  The paragraph Bindel quotes in her article comes from a section at the beginning entitled "What is Gender?".  Bindel quotes the paragraph thusly:

Students who are gender non-conforming are those whose gender expression (or outward appearance) does not follow traditional gender roles: "feminine boys," "masculine girls" and students who are androgynous, for example. It can also include students who look the way boys and girls are expected to look but participate in activities that are gender nonconforming, like a boy who does ballet. The term "transgender youth" can be used as an umbrella term for all students whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth and/or whose gender expression is non-stereotypical.

 She then uses it to say that "According to this definition, a girl who plays football is trans-sexual."  Harharhar.  Only Bindel is being intellectually dishonest.  She doesn't quote the whole paragraph which continues on to say:

Some transgender students transition or change from one gender to another. Transition often means changing the way you dress, selecting a new name, and sometimes getting help from a doctor to change your body.

But, wait, I thought this was a definition of transsexualism?  Why would they say that some transgender students transition since that's what transsexualism involves?  It's simple.  This is not a definition of transsexualism, it's an explanation of gender non-conformity and transgender (including transsexuality).  In a nifty sleight of hand, Bindel uses the explanation of gender non-conformity as though it's explaining transsexualism.  Which lets her make her snarky little comment, which isn't even that original (WARNING: link to trans hate site).  Of course, last I checked, football (that's soccer to North American-types) is played by girls and women.  World Cup?  Olympics?  Is any of this ringing any bells?  Maybe Julie could catch a match at the London Olympics in 2012?  Heck even when I was a child (centuries ago) girls played to a remarkable lack of comment.  Anyway, moving on from the fact that Ms Bindel seems to be completely clueless about girls' participation in sports, there's the far more important issue that she feels that twisting, warping, misrepresenting...  Heck, let's be honest.  The far more important issue is that she lies.  This was not simply misunderstanding.  She went to some effort to twist what was said to be able to use it to imply that transsexualism causes transsexual people to mistake one thing, lack of conformance to norms of gender expressions, for another, having a gender identity that conflicts with one's body.  We have a false consciousness.  Except, of course, we don't.  But Bindel is hardly one to let reality stop her from getting her way.

Of course Julia next trots out Claudia, the same woman who she's been using as an example of how damaging transsexual treatment is since 2003.  However, the problem with using Claudia as an example of trans regret is how Claudia ended up transitioning.  I'm not going to go into it here, but looking at the article Bindel originally wrote about Claudia in the Guardian, the facts are more complex than "Here's a trans woman who regretted her surgery."  In fact, Claudia's case reminds me of the sorts of situations whereby lesbians and gay men can end up married to someone of the "opposite" sex and with children before they come out.

Skipping a bit, Bindel again lays down the unalterable facts of biology for us.  "Medical science cannot turn a biological male into a biological female — it can only alter the appearance of body parts. A trans-sexual 'woman' will always be a biological male."  I could go into how even the most ardent of transphobes, Janice G Raymond, acknowledged that what defined male and female in a biological sense was a combination of chromosones, types of gonads, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, hormone levels, and so on (although she, like Germaine Greer and others ultimately fetishises chromosomes) and the fact that we've already covered the erasure of intersex people, but I'd rather just say, "So what?"  Even if we grant what she says is true, that there is some sort of absolute, non-arbitrary measure of biological sex, what does biological sex have to do with social gender?  By using the case of a trans woman rapist, Bindel implies rape is only by penis and no penis means no rape.  This erases the fact that some FAAB people rape (even though English law does not classify it as such) and shifts the blame from people to body parts.  More insultingly, it erases the fact that trans people are far more likely to be victims of rape (eg, when trans women are placed in men's prisons) than perpetrators.

Next, we move back to the "trans people are big meanies" line of argument with which Bindel started this article.  "There is a handful of radicals in the world today who have dared to challenge the diagnosis of transsexualism."  I agree.  That's why there have been so few people at things like protests of the APA's lack of reform of the diagnosis in the DSM.  But, of course, what Bindel really means by challenging the diagnosis, as she has already made clear above, is challenging the rights to autonomy of trans people.  Because if she was only challenging the diagnosis she would find that a lot of trans people would join her in doing so.  I would.  But in demanding that we submit to her ideas of what we should do with our bodies, she is not radical, nor is she challenging a diagnosis.  She then goes on with examples of what big meanies trans people are and frankly I'm bored with that sort of thing and won't address them (beyond saying that I do not endorse wishing a painful death or harm on anyone).

Now we come to the conclusion, where Julie shows her true opinion of trans people: we don't deserve to exist.  Or, as she puts it: "In a world where equality between men and women was reality, transsexualism would not exist."  To her, we're a symptom of social inequality between the sexes.  We lie when we talk about who we are not having to do with that (and, in fact, making it harder for getting people to understand who are because people assume it has to do with the fact that men are treated one way and women are treated another).  She has decided what the truth is, and we're not going to change her mind even if she has to lie to herself and others to insure that she doesn't.  Speaking of which: "Sex-change surgery is unnecessary mutilation."  She has not proven this because she can't prove this even as she can't prove trans people won't exist in a world of gender equality.  She can only assert it and ignore what trans people say about the matter, because, to her, we lack the knowledge of our own lives, our own bodies, society and so on to choose for ourselves.  We need her paternalistic concern, her protecting us from ourselves, to replace the paternalism of the current gatekeepers of psychiatrists and others.

Finally, there's this: "Using human rights laws to normalise trans-sexualism has resulted in a backward step in the feminist campaign for gender equality."  I keep seeing this assertion made by Bindel and others.  I'll be frank.  I don't see this.  When people assert this they never point to examples of how this is happening that don't involve the assumption that the advancement of trans rights is a defeat for gender equality, something I don't buy at all.  Only if one subscribes to the twisted fable of transsexuality that Bindel pretends is a reality does this make sense.  The reality where I transitioned to wear pretty dresses and make up and am demure when I stay at home and cook for a man.  The reality of a fantasy world.  Here in the real world, I wear jeans and t-shirts, no makeup, am not demure at all, am a university student, and am working on learning to cook for a woman.  Oh, yes, and I try to work towards actual gender equality.

Still, I'm sure all of this won't change Julie Bindel's views.  She lives in that elaborate constructed fantasy where there's a theory that explains why I'm trans (just like the psychiatrists have theories) and anything I have to say has no bearing on it.  Instead, I write this to point out that in pushing this malarky, Bindel argues not for a world of equality but for a world where she gets hers and others pay the price for it.  Her words also support treating trans people as incapable, incompetent, as less than others, as deserving the treatment we get.  In other words, she may not directly encourage harm to us, but she certainly gives intellectual cover to those who do.