LC and Transphobia
2003-06-12, 7:26 p.m.

Today, in the mail, I got the July/August issue of Lesbian Connection (LC.) I've been reading it since 1988 -shortly after I came out. Lately it's been getting on my nerves more and more. Today, I read a letter from someone who made me mad! Here's the part that ticked me off:

"I want to put in a plea to all your butches out there to stay butch lesbians! Many of us femmes love you as butch lesbians rather than as transgendered males. We radical lesbian feminists are working hard to make a world that accepts you as you are! We know that you receive more of the brunt of homophobia than femmes. In the eyes of many bigots, we femmes pass, even when we don't want to. Heck, when some male is acting obnoxious, we often say that it must be testosterone poisoning. You don't need it."

Here is the rssponse I emailed to LC:

"To Pelican who wrote about the Femmes Parade:

At the risk of ticking off half the readers of LC, why, I want to know, do women who call themselves Radical Lesbian Feminists want to make everyone in the freaking world just like them?

A FtM (Female to Male) transgendered person is NOT going from butch dyke to transgendered male because people won't accept them as they are but inspite of the fact that people don't accept them for who they are. People such as Pelican. A person who is transgendered does not transition for convenience or because of homophobia. In fact, they hear quite a bit of transphobia from people who presume that they know why a person would choose to transition. If you say that you are working hard to make a world that accepts them as they are, shouldn't you find out how they are? Who are you to say whether they need testosterone or not? Yes, I know we say things about testosterone poisoning and all that. Doing so is just as ignorant and just as wrong as men who assume that every bad mood a woman has is menstrually related and that excessive estrogen is the cause of the "excessive emotions" in women.

Transgender is about identity not about behavior. It's about a person who is forced to develop an identity that has nothing to do with who they are. Sound familiar? It's the story of many lesbians .. forced to develop an identity as a heterosexual when they weren't. Thanks to the work of many, many women who came before us, lesbians have many more freedoms than we did even 10 years ago. Let's think hard before we perpetuate the same oppression on our trans brothers and sisters that has been perpetuated on us for centuries.