Highlighting The Difference, Unintentionally

The whole battle between myself and the cultists at Shame On You Transgender Edition began because I simply pointed out that I do not identify as transgender.  There are good reasons for this, and a couple of their latest posts show this about as clearly as possible.

The first was a fawning tribute to "Kristin" Beck, who apparently now styles himself as "Lady Valor."  Beck was a Navy Seal, a member of what is commonly called Seal Team Six, which was the unit that provided the men who took out Osama bin Laden.  Beck, like Mr. "Autumn" Sandeen, served twenty years, before leaving the Navy.

The second story was a rather telling piece, entitled "All You Need is Love," which states some classic transgender rhetoric (note I said transgender, not transsexual)…

As transgender women we have a tendency to dislike, or outright hate, our male sides. We loath anything that remotely reminds us that we were tragically born in the wrong body. The mirror can be an enemy because it reminds us that we are not perfect and we will always have male characteristics no matter how well we pass. What? You disagree? What is the shape of your pelvic bone?

Okay, dare I say it?  This is clearly a man, in this case, Mr. "Michelle" Spicer, speaking.  Only a transgender male would make such a statement…  This is straight out of Transvestite 101. Sorry, but this is what I make the differentiation that I am a transsexual, that I am a woman, and that yes, the kooks at Shame On You Transgender Edition are a bunch of delusional cultists.  The simple truth is, no one is perfect.  There is not a perfect man or woman, period.  Everyone has some flaws.  I had a friend who was a female to male transsexual who had a more masculine hip structure than I do.  He was short of stature, but his body shape was extremely male, and, contrary to some stereotypes, he had born a son (I remember reading a book on FTMs that basically claimed that no FTM ever would get pregnant) and had gone through some serious complications because his pelvis was too small for the child to easily fit through.  

You have to love how the more extremist transgender kooks, in order to cling to their manhood, even while proclaiming themselves to be women, love to focus on things like this. They want to beat post-ops over the head with their prostates, while ignoring the fact that women have the same gland, although it serves no purpose.  And yes, in extremely rare cases, women (and not transsexual women) can die of prostate cancer.  Of course, most doctors would not call it that…in women it is referred to as a Skene's gland, or paraurethral gland, and is, for the most part, ignored.  However, it is increasingly referred to, quite accurately, as the "female prostate gland."  Boy, are the transgender kooks going to hate that one.

No, the simple fact is, I don't have a "male side."  Then again, to be blunt, crossdressers don't really have a female side.  They have a fetish.  There is a clear difference between someone who grows up with a brain that is differentiated at odds with their body, and someone who simply wishes to play dress-up.

And this brings us back to Beck.  Beck claims to have "always" had a female gender, like Sandeen, and like Sandeen, Beck was able to not only survive in the military through basic training, all the while hiding this supposed "feminine nature" but in Beck's case, to also survive SEAL training, which is extremely intense.  And on top of all this, both Sandeen and Beck thrived in this hyper-masculine, testosterone fueled environment for the full 20 years needed to reach retirement.

No, in both cases, you have someone who was, quite probably, a very closeted cross dresser.  They are not transsexuals, they do not want SRS, and they are not really interested in being anything other than transgender.

You see, this is what underlies transsexualism.  It is not just about a desire to change one's physical sex to match one's brain, it is about wanting to be normal.  And transgender is about wanting to be different.  I have heard transgender people often express this view.  Some, such as Suzan Cooke will go so far as to attack people who are "normborns" as though that is a bad thing.  I have heard them say stuff like, "I would not want SRS, because then I would not be 'special.'"

If someone wants to choose to be "different" or "special," I suppose that is their choice, but they have to accept that society may not respect that choice.  And that brings up another major difference.  Transgender is a choice, transsexualism is not.  Although some try to make the claim that they were "born this way," transgender people choose their behavior.  Most had relatively, if not completely, normal childhoods, showing no signs of having an issue with their gender until later in life, and then beginning with, as stated above, fetishistic crossdressing.

So, the bottom line, again, is that there really is a difference between transgender (which is ultimately a highly subjective term that refers to a social/political construct that has no basis in reality) and transsexualism, which is a medical condition that is, in reality, unrelated to transgender in any meaningful way.