Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Because you weren't?

I didn’t I know I was transgender.

Reading this article of a former butch lesbian who has decided she is transgender after all does little to encourage sympathy; but that may just be me (and my new best friend Germaine - ha).

I think what really grates with me is the use of medical effort to endorse something which (in this woman's case) sounds more like a curious exercise in what it will feel like to be more manly in appearance than she already is.  

1 comment:

TimT said...

Alison Bechdel had a thoughtful response to the whole question of butch lesbians/transsexuality. (Well - thoughtful in terms of the parameters set out by tedious modern identity politics).

Q: In “Fun Home,” you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered? A: I think the way I first understood my lesbianism, before I had more of a political awareness of it, was like: Oh, I’m a man trapped in a female body. I would’ve just gone down that road if it had been there. But I’m so glad it wasn’t, because I really like being this kind of unusual woman. I like making this new space in the world.

Q: Among lesbians of a certain generation, there’s an ambivalence about the emergence of the transgender identity. A: I’m not totally tapped into that world, but I feel like people are more open to the genderqueer identity — they’re trans, but they’re not necessarily having surgery. There’s less of this binary pull, I think.