Note:
Enough Non-Sense is based on one premise: classic transsexuality should not be included under the transgender umbrella nor associated with the GLBT. Anyone who reads this blog and is old enough to comprehend the written word would undoubtedly walk away knowing that is our position…unless, of course, they choose not to; TS-Si has chosen to do just that.
On many occasions, both in this blog and others, both GLBT oriented and in the lion’s den of the mainstream blogs, I have stated support of the concept of Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS). But due to the horrible reputation the term HBS has gotten, due to the rant of some of the more radical fanatics who support it, I have chosen to refer to the issue simply as classic transsexualism.
I have known Leigh Smith for many years; I know her husband as well and was actually with her the evening they met. We have played pool together at Handle Bar’s in El Paso, while listening to the very finest Tejano rock imaginable, until we dropped, before heading over to the Three Legged Monkey, also in El Paso, and betting $50 a rack with the locals until the place closed down…while having dinner one evening in Sunland Park, New Mexico, we met the owner’s of a local club and were personally invited by them to visit that evening as their guests; we took them up on it and were treated royally with every drink on the house…in Scottsdale, Arizona we drank beer at the Billet Bar for hours during Bike Week one year and closed down their karaoke bar the next as we sang and danced all night…we have played in the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument all day long like kids in a sandbox…we’ve hung out with the biker’s enjoying the incomparable burgers at the Iron Horse Saloon in Lewisville, Texas…we’ve danced and drank our way through the Ernie’s and Arthur’s meat markets of Addison (North Dallas)…and, we have even sat on the balcony of JR’s sipping drinks, making out with our dates and laughing our behinds off at the freak show of Dallas’ Oaklawn Halloween parade. We’ve done a lot together…we are best friends.
When we met, Leigh and I lived thousands of miles apart…later, we lived in the same city…we now live half way across America from each other. I have been a guest in her home; she has been a guest in mine. When she and I are visiting, we almost never discuss gender issues; it’s one of the reasons I think we both have remained friends for so long.
Leigh transitioned to full time in 1978 before undergoing GRS in 1985.
As close as we are, clones we are not. We are both strong willed and have gone weeks and sometimes months without speaking due to some disagreement over an issue both of us were passionate about…mending ways only after we both realized how, in the big scheme of things, each of our points were valid in their own ways and not worth losing a lasting friendship over. However, through these years, we have had countless (and I mean countless) conversations regarding the transgender movement and our mutual disgust at classic transsexuality being covered by the transgender umbrella term.
I have made my feelings toward TS-Si quite clear. This is Leigh’s response to a most inaccurate and misleading essay they have published.
SA-ET
08-20-08
By Leigh Smith
The more I peek inside the HBS and their particular brand of holier-than-thou fanaticism, the more I dislike what I see.
Don’t get me wrong here, it’s not that I have a problem with the concept of HBS or that I deny, much less reject, the science in favor of a transgender platform that would have us all under this ridiculous and huge spectrum umbrella…the research is promising if not overwhelming. On the contrary, I embrace the move away from the now hijacked term of transsexual (which once defined a group of people of which I am one as a medical condition) toward a new term which is slowly gaining ground, Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS).
I use the word transsexual in this context as that defined by Harry Benjamin. I also refer to it as classic transsexualism.
However, HBS, as a term, goes one step further in that it now attempts to define itself as a step removed from classic transsexualism by creating a new rule to the entrance qualifications…that being, self awareness of the brain sex being out of alignment with the physical sex of the individual must be recognized at an extremely early age. Depending on who one might believe, this age could be as young as 3-4 years old.
Apparently, according to TS-Si, a non-profit organization and group of HBS women that set themselves up to be the authority on all things HBS, if someone doesn’t have recollection or awareness of their incongruence by a very young age they are transgender…or possibly even AGP (autogynephilia)…or a crossdresser…but they are not HBS. And if that is the case, sorry, you don’t get to join the club and most if not everything one might say after that is of very little importance to them. And, if you care to debate them, you will be further demoted…simply because they are the authority on all things HBS and have, they claim, the readership to prove it and you …don’t!
This cavalier attitude from this particular corner of the HBS movement is akin to the transgender mentality of “your either with us or your against us”. TS-Si’s position is apparently that anyone who is not one of them or who presents any sort of argument contrary to their wisdom is, in their words, Roundheads, Know Nothings, and Transgender Post-Modern Fundamentalists. Aside from the fact that Transgender Post-Modern Fundamentalist is a comically ridiculous term that is meaningless to anyone other than its inventor, that mind set is simply idiotic.
This group of know alls go one step further than what is considered tasteful and post an article in which they state that a post-op woman (me), of whom transitioned to full time just over 30 years ago…and of whose SRS was performed in the “golden era” of experimental sex change surgery some 23 years ago, long before the procedure was essentially standardized…is nothing more than a “transgender fundamentalist”. The implication from TS-Si is plain and it is specific: I am not a real woman like they are.
And why did Lisa Thompson of TS-Si say this?
Easy answer…because I had the conviction to call them out as hypocrites. Of course, they had nothing to say about the issue that led me to challenge them. Instead, they wrote an article on their website entitled Roundheads, Know Nothings, and Transgender Post-Modern Fundamentalists which had the full intention of discrediting me and reducing all those that might disagree with them as transgender fundamentalist.
Arrogance at its worst.
The arrogance and elitist position of TS-Si goes one better. When I posted rebuttals on this discrediting and inaccurate excuse of an essay, only one of their group, (a reader that had mistakenly thought that the petition I had asked them to sign was created by me rather than by Cathryn Platine), had the integrity to actually offer an apology, couched as it was in a further admonishment of my use of foul language on a totally separate article to a transgender activist on this blog, Enough Non-Sense.
The TS-Si article they wrote was careful to take statements out of context to make it look as though I support something other than what I actually wrote.
Lisa Thompson writes in the TS-Si article in question:
Especially if it asserts, as Leigh Smith does, that:
The transgender are right about one thing, there is a “spectrum”, a continuum if you will, upon which we all fit somewhere. The transgender believe its is one in which male crossdressers are on one end and female transsexuals are on the other. [N2]““It’s nice for Smith to have those beliefs, but TS-Si.org – and we – are about science and the grace of life fully lived (and incidentally, post-op).
I must now direct your attention to that footnote notation [N2] you see in Thompson’s quote above. The footnote asks the questions (emphasis mine):
[N2} Other than HBS women, where do the other women fit on this transgender spectrum? At which end are the transmen and the female transgenders and crossdressers? Is transgender simply a club designed by boys that want to include HBS females so it can pretend to be more than just guys in dresses?
The answer to her questions, and my position would be absolutely crystal clear to anyone reading TS-Si’s slam of me if Thompson had had the integrity to quote me in context. Decide for yourself, this is all of what I said…the bold emphasis is on what Thompson did not publish:
The transgender are right about one thing, there is a “spectrum”, a continuum if you will, upon which we all fit somewhere. The transgender believe it is one in which male/crossdressers are on one end and female/transsexuals are on the other. Based on the fact (and depending on what stats one wants to believe) that there have been some 40-60 thousand gender reassignment surgeries performed in the United States alone since 1960 and that the vast majority of those post ops have disappeared into the mainstream, do not identify as either HBS or transgender, don’t comment on either position, and are not active members or participants of any particular blog group…the petition has shown us that on this imaginary spectrum, we have the transgender on the left, the HBS on the right and the very overwhelming majority of post ops firmly in the middle…with no comment or opinion either way.
So much for TS-Si’s claim to present the arguments with accuracy, integrity, and objectivity. Their tactics are most transparent. The question is begged as to how many other articles have they published which have been carefully edited to assert their claims and legitimize their arguments?
Nobody, not even the transgender themselves would claim that I am pro transgender and advocate their positions. If you are reading this essay, then almost certainly you have read many of the GLBT and transgender oriented blogs of the likes of TransAdvocate, Trans Universe, The Bilerico Project, etc. A review of those blogs and many others, including here at Enough Non-Sense will illustrate beyond any reasonable doubt that I am not in the least bit sympathetic to the transgender cause; I challenge Lisa Thompson to come up with any evidence to the contrary. I call it like I see it, and my stand is street level. I see things from the point of view that the common man and woman see things. My posts might not provide links to the facts nor the science behind them but that does not define me and others as “know nothings”. Grass roots opinion may not be what many want to hear but it is, in the final analysis, what most of us succumb to. And, that is what most of the so-called experts hate and fear the most. Most men and women on the street level will make up their own minds on a given person’s gender, and all the science and theory and facts and Harry Benjamins and Pride parades and scientific papers in the world will not change their opinion.
After I rebutted every commenter on the TS-Si article for their inaccuracies and insults, Sharon Gaughan, the VP & Executive Director of this non-profit authority on everything HBS , warned me that they were losing patience, insinuating my approach and demeanor was disruptive to their blog and should I continue, the hatchet would fall. I replied (emphasis mine):
And I suppose that this snippet from Lisa was not intended to say or imply or slur either?
“Oh, and Smith would like us to sign a petition. That neither of us would sign the petition, combined with the fact that we will not conform to Smith’s personal brand of transgender fundamentalism, only mean, in her mind, that we both must be against the transgender movement. We are ruining transgender solidarity.” (Quoted from Lisa Thompson’s essay)
Now, setting my response to TS-Si apart only momentarily, my quote of what Thompson said in her essay that I mention directly above really threw me for sure. Consider this: Cathryn Platine authors a petition intended to be presented to GLAAD calling for the separation of classic transsexualism from the transgender umbrella and Thompson in some weird way associates that petition as some form of transgender fundamentalism. Or, by proxy, accuses Cathryn Platine of being a transgender fundamentalist herself. The petition is undeniably anti-transgender and pro classic transsexuality, how could Thompson possibly come up with associating THE PETITIONwith transgender fundamentalism when the transgender fight classic transsexuals tooth and nail to include us under their ridiculous umbrella…essentially colonizing transsexualism and holding classic transsexuals hostage to a term we have no desire to be associated with?
My response continued with the following corrections to Lisa Thompson’s article:
Warning Noted – but it would be fair if you were to point out to the “readership” that I have been unfairly targeted on several points:
a) I am certainly not a transgender fundie
b) I did not write or instigate said petition
c) The petition itself is anti transgender
d) I have not used bad language on your blog
e) Enough Non-Sense is not MY blog
f) Many have misquoted or not even read what I HAVE said and simply replied with a knee jerk reaction based on what others wrote.”
TS-Si and Sharon’s reply to this, faced with indisputable inaccuracies?
“Leigh, Let’s take this offline…”
That’s it! No recognition of fair play…no apologies…no correction of the inaccuracies…no nothing ! As has been said, TS-Si just disengages. The article remains in place, the juvenile insults remain in place, the inaccuracies remain in place…or, in other words, TS-Si’s latest rendition of history…remains.
So, here we have Lisa Thompson and Sharon Gaughan, relatively recent post ops, no more or less transsexual that other classic transsexuals, caricatures of everything female, having spent most all their life in male mode, now holier-than-thou as the revered and respected scientific super trannys of the HBS movement, replete with their assigned corporate titles associated with a non profit website that sells nothing other than a convincing line of elitism, which in no way reflects the true purpose of what HBS was meant to convey, defining those that came long before them as nothing more than Roundheads, Know Nothings, and Transgender Post-Modern Fundamentalists.
Suck it up… ladies!
Cathryn Platine made this statement here at Enough Non-Sense with regards to THE PETITION and whether to sign it or not to sign it:
Sign it if you support the right of those of us born with a neurological intersexed condition to self define…don’t if you support the rights of other to define us against our will.
TS-Si has made the decision not to sign it, support it, or endorse it.
What are you going to do?
Sign THE PETITION…now.
