I think it’s time for the trans community to separate from the LGB community.
LGB has become pretty accepted. There are still issues to address and probably will be for the next 20 years or so.
The problem I see rising is that the Trans community has become so conflated with the LGB community at large, that Trans issues are damaging the LGB community and their hard won gains.
Comments in various online publications which were once about 50/50, pro/against LGB issues. Have become increasingly hateful and vicious about just “normal” LGB folks with the addition of the Trans communities never ending strident yelling.
While I agree that everyone should be teated kindly and equally. I don’t think that Trans issues as presented belong in the LGB spectrum. I also think that the way the Trans community is behaving has drawn the LGB part of the community needlessly into an agenda that is not representative of the average LGB person.
Comments in recent articles about Lia Thomas, and Rachel Levine demonstrate in my opinion that America is growing very tired of the Trans community and by extension the LGB community.
Many of the comments paint Trans people as gay or lesbian. Moreover, comments paint the entirety of the LGBT community as deranged, mentally unfit, sick, disgusting, evil, or perpetrating some kind of con on various institutions (Lia Thomas, I’m looking at you).
The Trans people that I have personally known may start out being homosexuals, but that appears to be a transitional phase. The person is homosexual because they believe with all their heart and soul, they were born in the wrong body. They’re intimate with the gender they find attractive but they still feel that their body isn’t right. Several of the Trans folks I’ve known, have entered into loving straight relationships after they’ve transitioned.
A former man, completes the required surgeries, and then marries as a woman to another man. They aren’t homosexual at that point.
The full transitions I’ve known, left the LGB community and went off to live in suburbia with their husbands and most have adopted children.
The LGB folks don’t believe they were born wrong. Typically they believe they were born a bit different but they’re content being whatever gender they were born. They don’t feel alien in their own bodies, they’re comfortable in preferring intimacy with members of the same gender.
I know for some, this is a difficult distinction, but it’s an important one.
My personal experience is very different from the strident demands of today.
What passes for the Trans community these days doesn’t seem to have the same appreciation for the gravity of the decision Transgender people had in years past.
It’s not just about pumping hormones into your body. Yes, that is part of it, but it’s about where your head is at. A transgendered friend told me that before the surgery when she looked in the mirror she perceived her male body as a suit she was trapped in. She said that she’d felt this way for her entire male life. When she woke up from surgery, during the months of healing she anticipated seeing her true self.
She said that the first time she saw herself in a mirror after healing, she cried with joy because she felt like she’d awakened from a terrible dream. For the first time in her life, she saw herself as the person she had always been.
As a male, she’d been somewhat androgynous. As a female, she was beautiful. You had to really look closely to see minimal telltales left by her time as a male.
As a male, he’d had a slight physique very little body hair and an average sized penis and testicles. His personality was sparkling, witty, and intelligent. He was a lot of fun to be around, a great entertainer, classy, with a sense of understated style. He was a great date, and knew how to please a man.
Post Surgery, as a woman, she had beautiful breasts. they were not ostentatious or out sized. The hormones added a little padding to her hips accentuating a femininity that I’d never noticed. She was still all the other things. Sparkling, witty, intelligent, classy, stylish, a great date, and she still knew how to please a man. She was different from any other woman I’d been with, in that she was always 100% engaged in sex. Her vagina was beautiful, and visually indistinguishable from any woman I’d been with.
She joked about it a little one night as we were cuddling in her bed in the dark. She said she’d paid for the full top of the line package and one of the best surgeons. She felt she was worth it since she was reclaiming her real body. Then she asked if she’d gotten her moneys worth.
I kissed her and told her, “Yes,” as far as I could see.
She later told me I’d been her last sexual partner as a man, and her first sexual partner as a woman. She liked the symmetry. Later she made a comment that stuck with me through the years. She said, “The unhappy old me died on the operating table, the new me is going to live savoring each day.”
About a year later, after all the documentation was settled, she took a job on the East Coast.
Several years later, there was a Christmas card with a picture of her, her husband, and his child from a previous marriage. The note inside said simply, “Can you believe I’m the ‘evil’ stepmother! I love my husband and while my life may be shorter than it would have been otherwise, it’s been marvelous so far. This is the life I always wanted. P.S. You were right I think. When we got serious I told him everything and let him decide from there. He thought about it for a week or two, then decided he didn’t care. We were married six months later. Thank you my friend.”
We’ve lost touch over the years, the last I heard she was still married, living in upstate New York and very happy.
Perhaps the fact that I’ve known intimately and personally someone who was transgender is coloring my view. When she began her transition, she dressed as a woman, and was never concerned about using the ladies room. She’d sometimes comment ruefully that she’d miss urinals because they were just so much easier to deal with. She had a group of close supportive friends and we all just accepted.
Perhaps it was easier for her and us, because pre surgery she could easily pass as a woman. Perhaps, it was that at the time that the LGBT community was far less divided, more forgiving, and more accepting than today. Perhaps, it was that he/she was really a she trapped in the wrong body.
One thing I learned from her is that people see exactly what they want to see. Pre surgery, Miranda took me to The Magic Castle in LA for my birthday. She wasn’t fooled too often in the close up sleight of hand room. Later in the evening, we bumped into the magician she’d inadvertently made sweat. He asked how she knew his tricks and if she was a magician herself. She smiled sweetly and said, “Yes, in a way. You think I’m a woman don’t you?” She hugged the stunned magician and thanked him for an impressive show.
I wondered at the time if the knowledge that people see what they want to see, was why she was so good in business negotiations.
The difference I see now, versus then is that the Trans community today is very much in everybody’s face. They’re apparently angry and hostile and I don’t get why.
The Trans people I’ve known in years past weren’t angry, they were kind and gentle spirits. They were in intense counseling, not to make them be something they were not. But to make sure that they fully understood all the ramifications and risks. They were the people most in-touch with their feelings. They’d put in the time to understand themselves. They’d done all this work prior to beginning the hormones and transition because at the time, it was one of those things that you only got one shot at. They also had very realistic expectations about what they’d look like afterwards.
Some Trans people just aren’t that pretty or believable when they’re done. Back in the day, if the outcome wasn’t going to be a good one, a surgeon might simply refuse.
It makes no sense to take a decent looking man or woman and turn them into someone that will never be happy with the results of the transition surgery. Why modify someone that’s already lonely but has a shot at dating, perhaps love, into someone that is unattractive and has no shot at dating or happiness? Doctors used to take an oath to do no harm. Lately I’ve begun to wonder if the oath they take today is set to Pink Floyd’s Money.
I mean really, would you date Rachel Levine? It’s not necessarily about age, even Lia Thomas looks much better as a male than as a female. In Thomas’s case artful surgery might make him somewhat appealing as a woman but he’ll always have the proportions of a man.
In this time of gender fluidity or non-binary sexuality it seems that folks aren’t thinking that way. What future will an ugly, angry, old, Transgender have? What ever happened to honestly estimating/evaluating the outcome of a surgical procedure?
Why don’t surgeons say, “You’re too masculine / feminine for me to make you look like the opposite gender. Your hips are too narrow or wide, your shoulders are too broad or narrow, your face is too characteristically male or female. We can do this surgery if you insist, but my professional opinion is I don’t think you’ll be happy with the results.”
The same could be said of tattoo artists. If a tattoo is the first part of a large piece, say a tattoo sleeve, then isn’t it incumbent on the artist to tell the client a particular tattoo isn’t going to work in the sleeve?
I’d really appreciate a tattoo artist telling me something like, “This isn’t going to work, let me see if I can redesign it so that it fits better with the whole piece. Come back in a week and I’ll show you some options,” I’d appreciate the thoughtfulness and concern.
Instead, what we seem to have is, “let me prescribe some puberty blockers or hormones for a while and let’s see how you feel.”
Having lived for a long time as a Bi man, I found that while my sexuality is non-binary, my gender very much is.
I searched for love and found it. I don’t and didn’t care what gender package that love was wrapped up in. Arguably, I’m far more comfortable with another man but I’ve never excluded the possibility that I might find an equally loving relationship with a woman.
Looking back, I loved Mark/Miranda. (She claimed she didn’t want to change the monograms on the towels. I think it was that Miranda or ‘Miri’ was an uncommon name and it’s as pretty as she was.) I wasn’t in a place where I was ready for commitment or marriage, She was. That doesn’t discount the fact that it was the person, not necessarily the gender that I cared for.
I throughly enjoyed our time together and yes, loved him/her in both genders.
The point is, you don’t just wake up one day and declare you’re a woman or man arbitrarily. Just saying you’re Trans doesn’t give you the right to play dress up just because you want to mess with people. Drs handing out hormone therapy or puberty blockers as though it’s not a big deal, to people who’ve not done the really hard work involved in counseling and therapy is, in my opinion, a very bad idea.
I’m not Trans. I can’t speak from inside a Trans person’s skin. But I’ve walked alongside a person who was. I’ll never know all the introspection and questioning that Mark did.
I do know it was years in the making and that I came on the scene only in the last few years. When I met Mark, he was content with his choice & still dressing as a man. During the time I knew him he began dressing as Miranda moving toward full transition. He was the most stable, put together, person I’ve known.
When Miranda came home from the sabbatical, during which she had the surgeries and recuperation, she was still the most stable person I knew. She was also the most serene person I’ve ever known.
The same is generally true of the other Trans people that have passed through my life. None of them were hostile, angry, or pushy. They were respected, and conformed to the social norms of the society at large. They were dressed as a specific gender, and acted accordingly. They weren’t about doing bad drag (which has its place,) they were making a very serious life decision that was theirs and theirs alone.
I’d bet Miranda would be at the forefront of demanding parents have a choice in what their children are taught, and when, regarding sexuality. I’m also pretty sure that she’d put a verbal smackdown on anyone who remotely pushed a child toward transitioning or puberty blockers before a child could understand what that really meant.
I suspect Miranda would ironically be called Transphobic by today’s standards.
I can almost hear her laughing about that label, in some activists face.
I don’t know if she’d agree with me about LGB folks distancing themselves from the current Trans community. She might not, and she’d have excellent reasons that she could defend. In the few arguments we had, it was 60% likely that she was right. 40% likely that I was. Her position was always well thought out and backed up with facts.
Even in winning, she was gracious and beautiful. She didn’t rub it in, and she’d hug me when I was crestfallen.
“You can’t be right all the time, settle for half… Do you want something to eat, or would you like to just cuddle,” she’d ask. Id always reply, “I’d feel better about it with both.” She’d just laugh.
I think that Miranda would appreciate my opinion. She might not agree, but she’d see where I was coming from. It’s about being silenced, told what I may and may not say.
It’s about being forced to accept things that I find fundamentally wrong. (Hormones, Puberty blockers, and a rush to transition without doing the work.) Today I can’t even speak that conviction without being labeled or cancelled.
Nowadays, being a part of the LGBT community implies that you agree wholeheartedly with anything and everything Trans. Which makes being a part of that community a complete non-starter for me and many others.
I’d prefer to see an LGB community and a separate Trans community. I’d prefer to see the LGB community support the real Trans community as we used to. With love, acceptance, and the knowledge that our Transitioned brothers and sisters may leave us, not in anger, but to move on with the life they’ve always dreamed of, and deserved.
Miranda… Miri, if by some weird chance you should ever read this, all my love to you and your family. You deserve all the happiness in the world, I’m very glad you’re living the dream you wanted.
