Transgender…..Not
21.03.2005I’ve decided I hate the word transgender. Why?
The number one reason is that it does not include transsexual in an understanding way. By this I mean transgender does not include within itself a recognition of the impact of science, technology and medicine on transsexual lives; it refuses to acknowledge the piercing of injectable hormones, the psychic changes incurred through hormones, the cutting and sewing of flesh; it cannot understand the noose that is bureaucracy.
Transgender is now comfortable. Transsexual remains uncomfortable, a word that creates ambivalence and anxiety in the listener.
Transgender is driven by a political agenda; Transsexual is driven by revelation.
I have watched lesbian and gay communities ask me, “what do you need?” I respond, “better access to health care. Remove transsexual exclusions.” Then I watch the same lesbians, bois, butches, gay men, fairies run out and seek to enact anti-discrimination legislation. Then stop there.
Back in the 1990s when I said transgender and transsexual people have things in common, I never said that I was the same as a transgender person. But somehow, the 1990s, when the only people fighting for our rights were other transsexuals, transformed into the 21st century, where now I am Not Really An Activist because I Refuse To Come Out; where I am Not Queer Enough because I Support the Binary Gender System through my choices…..
What an utter lack of imagination! To paraphrase Max Wolf Valerio, I’m not queer, I am a Freak. Proudly. With Needlepricks and Warrior Marks and Tears cried from joy and frustration.
Valerio continues in his essay Joker’s Wild:
I like to call it [transsexuality] a crime of passion, a moving target for bores and narrow-minded fuss-buckets, a necessary and inevitable subversion of the quotidian law of averages. After all, changing sex is a nearly savage act of body modification occupying a charged realm far beyond our culture’s current obsession with “safety.”
Like Valerio, I believe my life is one of the most extravagent experiments of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
I am a consequence of science, a living, breathing cyborg, made through my own designs and initiatives, connecting points in our infinite existence.