ANOTHER TRANSSEXUAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Oh goodie. In addition to the Teresa Reeves "Declaration of Transsexual Independence," I found another one online, the "TS-Specific Declaration of Independence" written by Courtney Holder. I don't know which precedes the other. This one brings up some of the same points, but in shorter format. I might as well take a whack at this one as well. Here you go. This time, my added clarifications are in blue:

To: LGBT Community, TG Community, human rights groups, the general public
TS-Specific Declaration of Independence

We are a community comprised of people who were born
in bodies that do not match our sense of gender and
who wish to correct this physical condition and get
on with life, with the opportunity to assimilate into
the mainstream and even hide the condition if we so
desire (we reserve the right to erase our own identity and history).
We expect and even demand all the same
treatment, rights, expectations, and protections as
genetic born members of whatever gender we claim as
our own (and we want to achieve these "gender" rights outside any affiliation with any group that shares our general gender incongruity).

We assert the right to form a community comprised
of individuals who support the concept of two
genders despite having this condition (in other words, even though our existence refutes the strict "gender" binary, we choose to deny our own uniqueness in favor of conforming to a dying paradigm). We do not
wish to be connected with individuals who support
more than two genders, individuals who don't
believe in gender, nor those who support infinite
shades of gender (we also believe in the dualism of good/evil, black/white, up/down, and a flat-earth). Nor do we wish to be connected
with movements of individuals whose main purpose
is to change social and legal attitudes towards
sexual orientation (homosexuality is an abomination). We maintain that we have a
medical condition that LGBT's and TG's do not have (and reserve the right to redefine the word "transgender" in this manner so that it specifically excludes anyone who wants or needs what now is termed "Gender Reassignment Surgery" and/or its medical precursors).
We maintain that our condition is medical and is not
anyway connected with any sexual practices, and it
hurts us when we are slandered in such a manner (heaven forbid that anyone get the idea that "transsexual" has anything whatsoever to do with "sex").

This declaration lends itself to support the
following rights:

1. The right to a name, label, or title that is
uniquely ours, and ours alone (i.e. "transsexual").

2. Freedom of association and dissociation, and
the right to have our own community of only
fully transitioning TSs who have or want SRS (i.e. " transsexual separatists" as defined strictly by a vague surgical criteria, which, sorry, pretty much eliminates most F-t-Ms, and social passability, which, sorry, pretty much eliminates you 6'-4" "ladies" because you are not going to be able to erase your history and true identity, and also must exclude the waffling pre-ops who don't want surgery enough to get it done. Buh-bye, losers).

3. The freedom to gain separation from the LGBT and
TG communities and to maintain such (because such people make us mad by not buying fully into our self-delusion of being just regular men and women... except for this little birth defect and our life history up to the time we chose to seriously seek the surgical solution).

4. The right to fight for our rights alone, without
any outside interference or "help," and the
right to be to be the only ones speaking for us (because only we can properly articulate the selfish inaccuracy and depth of delusion of our arguments).

5. The right to privacy and secrecy if we so desire (because our most fervent desire is to trade one incongruency for another).

6. The right not to be compared to LGBT or
transgendered individuals (because we hate unity, equality, liberty, diversity and community... well, except the dreamy community of femininity which we demand to join without any guff from anyone, including those other females... you know the biological ones.).

7. The right to separate care, separate programs,
and separate research studies from transgendered
and/or homosexual persons (because we might get cooties from the transgenders and transvestites and homos, and deserve our own specifically tailored medical, psychological and social rights and programs and attention, which already exist and are continuing to grow and proliferate largely as a result of our being part of the LGBT community, a truth we reserve the right to add to all the other facts we wish to ignore).

8. The right to expect honesty and truth in
labeling from those who claim to be our allies (in other words, you are either with us or with the terrorists. If you don't buy into our delusion, you are not our friend).

9. The right for MtF TSs to marry males, and FtM
TSs to marry females, and for such marriages to
be considered heterosexual marriages and be
performed in accordance with existing laws (like those prohibiting same sex marriage, which is a perversion of sexuality, not that we "transsexuals" ever think about sex; we just want to be part of normal, nice society, not the world of you sexual, or gender, or whatever, deviants).

10. The right to have all legal documents have the
gender which we believe ourselves to be, and for
the documents to be fully honored by all parts
of the government, medical establishment, legal
profession, employers, and the insurance field (which, admittedly, the "transgender" political effort has succeeded in advancing, but which we now wish to usurp and commandeer, expecting all of those previously involved in that effort to abdicate and repudiate the term "transgender" and swear an oath of allegiance to the "transsexual" creed, or to remove themselves from any association, alliance or connectedness to said movement).

11. The right to do all things that those who are
members of the gender which we declare ourselves
to be are allowed to do, without double standards,
exceptions, or different expectations (well, except, hee-hee, to be able fulfill the biological mandate of that "gender").

12. The right to hold any religious, political or
moral views, and to assemble with like-minded
persons. We shall have the right to practice our
beliefs without our gender or the legitimacy
of our medical condition called into question.
Implied in this is the freedom from peer
pressure to attempt to force conformity in any
of these areas (because, after all, we don't like having our black/white vision of the world challenged by the "transgender" rainbow. We resent and reject their attempt to force us to conform to nonconformity of societal norms).

13. The right to be seen as members of our correct
gender who have/had a physical birth defect, not
as members of the wrong gender becoming members
of the right gender. Eg., MtFs are women born with
a physical birth defect, not men becoming women (and in this belief we demand that no one, including ourselves, shall examine our biological structure or our life history for scientific and cultural evidence of the opposite reality).

14. The right to not be seen as CD/TV/TG persons who
become TSs. TSs are that way from early in life
and never are CD/TV/TG. CDism is a chosen
behavior of those born with a male identity. MtF
TSs are women born with a birth defect who choose
to correct it. CD/TV/TG are labels for different
types of crossdressing men, and men can never
become women, ever. MtF TSs are born with a
female identity but forced to pretend to be
boys/men. MtF CD/TV/TG persons always have the
identity/soul of men dispite how they may dress or
pretend, and they can never jump categories to
TS. A TS who says they "used to be a crossdresser"
is either lying, confused, or not a TS. TSs are
born as TSs and CDing men remain CDing men. There
is no category jumping (because as we all know all things in the universe are as God created them and never change. So, to clarify, a "transsexual" is born and must defiantly struggle against their subjugation, bondage and birth defect from Day One, NEVER losing their fierce resentment for their birth defect, NEVER freely acknowledging their status as the wrongly assigned gender, NEVER indulging in the pleasures and privilege of that wrong gender, NEVER fulfilling ANY of the biological mandates of that wrong gender lest it be said, FOREVER, that they willingly and, perhaps, happily, went along with the wrong gender for some time or some experiences, including - TRAITOROUSLY - having children, which would only serve to CONFIRM and CEMENT their acquiescence and allegiance to the wrong gender. Biological XY persons with penises acting as men ARE men. But "men cannot become women", and therefore those who have ever, for a single second in their life, failed their "real" gender identity, are forever disqualified from calling themselves "transsexual" and cannot become women, because "there is no category jumping").

15. The right to reject pity. We are not inferior to
other women or men (and we reserve the rights of normal women and men to feel superior to deviants like transvestites, transgenders and homos).

16. The right not to be connected with any sexual
practices, nor be lumped in with any group that
promotes such things (because, as dualists, we reject the full range of sexuality diversity within nature and the human family, in favor of a black/white, good/evil and wholly conformist world, and because we fully recognize our own and society's squeamishly deranged obsession with sex, and therefore seek to distance ourselves and our movement from the subject by calling ourselves "transsexuals"). 

Sincerely,
The Undersigned
Petition to LGBT Community, TG Community, human rights groups, the general public was created by Members of the TS-Specific Community and written by Courtney Holder (ts_research@yahoo.com).  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service.

NOTES:

I find it interesting that nowhere in Courtney's declaration is the word "transsexual" actually used. Huh? She happily uses the initials "TS" repeatedly, which we all know stands for "transsexual," but she can't quite bring herself to utter the sex-linked term, even while demanding the right to a name, label or title of their own. No label is provided other than "TS." What does this mean? Could be that she innately recognizes that "transsexual" is a loaded term, full of old baggage and sexual connotation. Courtney tries to shoo that connotation away when she says that her group "is not anyway connected with any sexual practices," but of course, that simply will not fly with a word like "transsexual." If you don't want sexual practices evoked by a label, it better not have the word "sexual" embedded in it.

Another strange thing is how many times Courtney uses the term "gender" as opposed to "sex." "Gender" is mentioned 14 times. "Sex" is mentioned just five times, and four of those are in reference to homosexuality, which this particular "transsexual" explicitly rejects (I do note here that Teresa Reeves, as an aspiring lesbian, may not agree with Courtney's interpretation). So, the concept of "gender" dominates this document, sex is pushed aside as nothing particularly relevant, yet they want to separate themselves, "transsexuals," from "transgenders." They maintain that their gender has never changed, but this is usually, clearly, not the case. The vast majority of post-op "transsexuals" have a long history of living in the gender that aligns with their sexual biology. Many even produced children, in full utilization of that biology. By transforming their lives to live as the opposite gender, they are very definitely transgender. What any human is unable to do is to change their full sexual biology. One hundred trillion cells with chromosomes cannot be changed, nor can the fundamental purpose of sexual apparatus: reproduction. Yes, certain aspects of sexual apparatus can be modified, but that does not mean that the underlying sex of that individual has in any major way been altered. No F-t-M can biologically father a child, and no M-t-F can have a baby, and this is the very meaning of sexuality. Through hormones and surgery and other programs, an individual with a gender dichotomy is able to greatly relieve the mind/body incongruency, which is great, but it's not a sex change.

A conservative religious and political bent is easily discernible in this declaration. The political definition of conservatism is the predilection to conserve traditional socioeconomic hierarchies and institutions. Here Courtney is solidly conservative in defending traditional man/woman, heterosexual, Christian and Republican, orientations. These "transsexuals" adore the gender binary, and have convinced themselves that it is possible for them to entirely cross over to the other side. Alas, as she goes on to describe the process of how one is born "transsexual," followed by a disjointed set of restrictive prerequisites that astonishingly few people of transgender experience actually qualify to join the club. Perhaps that is why the number of people who had signed her online declaration on the day I visited her site is... zero.

What this declaration of rights really amounts to is a demand to be given license to bamboozle themselves and the rest of society. They start with a delusion: that there is a gender duality. There is not. There is a vast spectrum of masculine/feminine potentiality, with possibly as many genders as there are people, and each person should have the liberty to create - and change whenever they want - that identity. Then they add two more delusions: that they can wholly and completely cross the gender divide... by changing their sex. No and no. Probably no single woman or man who ever lived experienced precisely the same perceptions of their woman-ness or man-ness, but there are certainly commonalities to their experience based entirely upon their biology and history. It is the height of hubris for someone who comes from an entirely different biological and historical source to presume to claim that they have the ability, or the right, to take some hormones, have a nip/tuck, close their eyes, click their ruby slippers, make that leap of faith, and all of a sudden they awaken just like "any other woman" (as Teresa Reeves stated it). It adds up to a triple delusion that the "transsexual separatists" expect us all to honor and respect.

Sorry, I, as a post-op TRANSGENDER NOT TRANSSEXUAL PERSON, refuse to go along with your stupidity and selfishness. Courtney, you actually are exactly right: "there is no category jumping" when it comes to sexuality. You weren't born transsexual because there is no such thing. The term is inaccurate and obsolete. But you were probably born transgender, or you became that somewhere along the way. And you will stay transgender all your life, though you are free to pick and choose where you feel most comfortable upon the gender spectrum. You don't have to tell everyone about your history; you can be a "woman" as you move through culture, but you have to be honest with yourself, your family and your close friends. You will never be just like any other woman because you will never have their biology or history. You do have your own special biology and history, and a wondrous life story. The transgender journey is sacred. Honor it. By running away from it you disrespect it. You are a transwoman... different from a transman, a gender queer person or a crossdresser, with special needs, but still part of the transgender family, just as a human is part of the primate family.

This "transsexual" position is based upon a raft of ignorance and ethical hollowness. Your belief flies against the facts of science itself, while your motive is to ever separate and divide from others, and from your own true self (which you are blind to see). The path to acceptance is not through division and usurpation of some fervently wished-for but false identity, but by joining your true essence with all of those who share some commonality and the allies who also believe in the cause. Your cause is a sure loser. Stop fighting so hard for the right to "hide," and to be something you will never be, in order to conform to people who will never fully accept you as what you are pretending to be. That's actually a pretty crazy way to think and live when there are so many people ready to accept you for who you really are.