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What is wrong with some common transsexual ideas

by Inoue

Believing all transsexuals are really suffering from a problem of inner gender identity means uncritically accepting a lot of pretty strange ideas in our opinion. We think most people probably just want to be liberal and politically correct and not upset the transsexuals who assert and hold these beliefs. But we find many of these ideas harmfull because they redefine what transkids and girls or women experience. We don't think that anyone's lives should be redefined by them when we end up being hurt and erased. Here are a few commonly accepted "transsexual ideas" which we don't really accept.

"Girls are autogynephilic too. It's just natural female sexuality."

There is just so much wrong with this idea and it's annoying that so many transsexuals feel that the sexualities of other people are simply available for them to take and redefine as they see fit. Certainly girls enjoy looking nice and feeling attractive and sexy, guys do too. That does not mean that a girl gets all hot and bothered putting on her girl clothes and she feels like she has to lay down and get herself off sexually because "being a girl" is just so sexually exciting. If girls behaved this way wouldn't it also be reasonable to expect that guys would also be getting equally hot and bothered by their guyness and indulge that too? Transsexuals don't talk about that though, probably because it's easier and more advantageous for them to redefine girls' sexuality than guys. We think girls like to look good because it's part of sexuality that involves other people to want to be attractive to those people. We feel the same way about looking good and we suspect that normal girls get turned on just like we do, by attractive guys who care about their girlfriends.

"All transsexuals are the same, some just transition later."

Well first, if we were all the same we would probably transition at similar ages because people who are socially alike have similar social experiences. For instance hsts are very alike in many ways especially about transsexuality and we all transition before puberty ends. Usually the people saying that "we're all alike" seem to be saying instead that "we wish we were all alike" because being hsts seems socially understandable to most people but autogynephilia is more difficult for people to understand. Transkids are socially visible before transition and surgery not after as "transsexuals", therefore our experiences as transkids can be taken and redefined by adult transsexuals who become socially visible when they transition. We're really not around to dispute them because we don't end up as transsexuals. Feminine queer gay boys who may choose instead to live as girls do not grow up to be married straight men if they choose not to transition, they become effeminate gay adults. There is no such thing as a "late transitioning" hsts transkid.

"Homosexual transsexuals are all a bunch of ego-dystonic gayboy fags."

This is the illogical converse to "we're all the same". We find that the other type of transsexual wants to be like us as long as we go along with the deal and work hard to be supportive and understanding of them and provide them with interesting authentic details of our lives for them to appropriate. We're just sex crazed gayboys when they get mad at us though. Autogynephilic transsexuals object to hsts being called "Homosexual Transsexual" because in part it makes us harder to relate to in their desire to present as a population that they do not belong to. "Homosexual Transsexual" is not an identity though. Our "identity" is very self evident and socially obvious and hsts isn't what we "are" or our "identity", it's just how we got here since after all we were not born as girls we were born as boys.

"We were feminine and queer when we were young too but hid it from everyone."

This idea confuses feminine gender variance which is a goal and feminine gender variance which is spontaneous and a problem for children. What transsexuals mean when they say this is that they hid their desire to be feminine from people, not their femininity. There is a difference between wanting to be feminine and being feminine... wanting to be feminine is something you can know internally (as the agps do) but being feminine is a way of characterizing your spontaneous social conduct so it has to be recognized from the outside. One difference between hsts and agp ts is that hsts are told that they are feminine but agp ts have to tell other people that they are feminine. If you have to tell someone that you are feminine then probably you are not.

It's not very logical to believe that people who were hopelessly feminine and unable to conform to social standards of appearance and behavior as boys would grow up to be successful married men and fathers who often have stereotypical masculine jobs that women and feminine gay men do not hold, like in the military.

"There is a part of the brain that proves transsexuals have female brains."

If all transsexuals had female brains then wouldn't they tend to seem more like women, have more typical female type sexuality and socialize naturally into groups of girls not groups of boys as children? If the BSTc studies have any validity at all then they seem like they might actually show that the transsexuals who were being studied (all six of them) had transsexual brains since most transsexuals behave like transsexuals and not like girls or women. So what is really the meaning of an idea which validates transsexual ideas about "gender identity" but which has no social connection to their behavior or sexuality compared to the social behavior and sexuality of non-transsexual people, whose presumably "female" BSTc causes them to behave like females socially and sexually? It's like agp transsexuals often seem to think that their gender identity is like a subway pass that allows them to ride on trains that really don't go to their neighborhood. That doesn't seem very useful at all.

"The two types of transsexuals can be easily divided by the age they transition."

Not really any more. Maybe once this was fairly true but more recently many more young AGP transsexuals have been transitioning in their early twenties. The differences between the two groups are still very easy to see especially for someone familiar with the two types though and the relationship between age and transitioning is very different between the two groups. AGP transsexuals have transitioned in their early 20s and the age that they may transition extends up to old age. Hsts usually transition between around 14 to 22 depending on their social and familial situations but do not transition at all after masculinization, so there is a definite practical limiting age for each person depending on their biology. For hsts, coming out young means age 10 to 13, the common age is 14 to 18 and late transitioning means something like 19 to 22 (or whenever the choice becomes impossible, 22 is the oldest we know). Young transitioning for AGP transsexuals is more like early to late 20s, so there is some overlap in age now. But characterizing differences in transsexuals as differences in experience based only on the age they transition helps to erase the different motivations and etiologies between agp ts and hsts. The differences would be very obvious to someone who knew a 20 yo agp ts and a 20 yo hsts.


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