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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