My message is that I love you; you’re amazing. You don’t have to share my vision(s) – they’re mine – but given the amount of human hate heaped upon us, I hope some of us can hear how gorgeous and spectacular and ordinary and wonderful we are. ALL of us.
love.

Hi Veronique! Your position is sort of where I am. I have less interest in tearing down the binary than I do in reforming it. This is why I resisted at first when asked to contribute to the book.

However, Bear and Kate assured me that they wanted to include my viewpoint, even if it didn’t seem to match the radical genderbender archetype. I was a little wary, but soon I was very happy with how openminded and welcoming they were!

Ryka

If you’re looking for modern, hip queer-positive… they don’t write books, they’re on forums or, sometimes, blogs. Honestly, the women I know who did transition young and really lived in stealth weren’t what I would call happy characters (although some are very accomplished). But tellingly, quite a number of them have come out (in the forum world anyway) as they got into middle age. It’s hard to find someone who did that who doesn’t have a certain amount of bitterness.

I’m not an etymologist (and barely know how to spell it). Obviously as it is now, “shemale” is owned by the sex industry (and I would argue “tranny” only slightly less so if we’re truly honest about it). Which is why I compare it to coon, a similar word which had its beginnings with a different meaning (it originally referred to countrified white people while shemale was occasionally used in the 19th century towards women who did man’s work), was used as an occasional pointed pejorative for black people later in its history (as Janice Raymond did with ‘shemale’) but “came into its own” when used by minstrels (there was a famous hit song called “zip coon” basically about an urban/dandy black man) and it came into popular (though not polite) usage for the next 40-50 years and constantly appeared in song titles, stories, humor monologues, etc. (including those written and performed by black people… albeit targeted for a white audiene) It commodified and codified an oppressor’s image of black men. Shemale does much the same thing. It turns trans women’s bodies into commodities and objects of oppression… as coon did with the black men. But, like coon, it has pretensions to being “a joke” or part of the entertainment world. The supposedly humorous aspect allows the term to assume a mark of irony and satire which (in our PoMo world) is often used to shield terminology and expressions of oppression against criticism. The reality is, in this society, most (not all) young trans women who do porn are doing it for survival. The endless stream of Brazilian and Asian Anyway, Someone like Susan Stryker or Lisa Harney could do a much better job with this than I could.

I just want to add Kate Bornstein’s frequent reference to how “tranny” is a community-generated term originating in Australia is a crock. Zie admits hir sole source of information was Aussie drag queen Philip Mills (AKA Doris Fish). This is akin to believing a white woman really did get on all fours in an elevator because a black man entered it with his dog and said “heel”… because someone you know told you so and saw it happen. Yet zie continues to repeat this “fact” no matter how flimsy the source. Zie is a writer/performer/ex-scientology bigwig, not any kind of acknowledged expert (whatever that means) on the subject of gender nor an activist. So why do gender studies departments give hir such a free pass and accept everything zie says at face value? I think it’s because zie tells them what they want to hear. Once a Scientologist, always a …

I haven’t read the N Word, but I heard him at an Author’s Talk speaking about his book on Obama.

Have you ever written a piece about the term that explains its history & why it’s offensive? I would like to read something like that, & it’d be a good thing to establish for academia.

I’m not sure if youv’e ever read The N Word, but it’s amazing:
http://www.amazon.com/Word-Who.....0618197176

Maybe I’m mistaken, but what I know about “she-male” is that it’s an old term that was adapted for pejorative use of trans women, that it’s used primarily as a “marketing” term in the porn/sex work industry, & is obviously intentionally de-humanizing, etc. Or is it the specific use by Raymond that makes it so historically offensive? That’s what I want to know.

& Yes, I have read Patrick Califia’s book, but it was a while back & I have to say I can’t remember the finer points of his critique of Kate. It’s an amazing book all around.

In the meantime, I would really like to find a well-written narrative by a woman who transitioned younger, lives stealth, etc. If you know of one, let me know. Right now the only ones I can think of are Blumenstein’s Branded T and the 30-year old Canary Conn memoir (which are both problematic in different ways). I’d really like to see a happy trans memoir by a productive, cool woman. Ironically, it’s what’s missing from the trans canon.

Btw, I highly recommend Patrick Califia’s critical deconstruction of Bornstein’s writing in his book: Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism.

Yes, I admit to being incredibly sick of the Bornstein cult and the uncritical sway zie has over Gender Studies departments.

“shock factor” is half the point of the book, & half the point of someone self-identifying as “she-male.” that is, the shock value was there in the book, intentionally, long before i wrote my blurb.

btw, i appreciate you using “non trans” up above. out of respect, i will not use “she-male” ever again, unless i am directly quoting someone else who says it.

the only thing i’m saying those terms have in common is that they are identities explored in the book. nothing more.

So when I read books like the above, I’m reading about someone else, not me, and I have no problem with that. The only problem is when people lump us all together and think we’re all radical gender-benders. I could be flattered, I suppose, to be considered avant-gard, but really, I’m no ground breaker. I leave the ground breaking to those for whom it’s the right fit.