Journal BarbaraHudson's Journal: F*ck the toxic LGBT community 177

Political correctness has gotten to the point where anyone is transgender, even if it's only a guy saying "I prefer cats - that's my feminine side" or a gal saying "I love my shotgun - that's my masculine side," they too can claim the label. Meanings have become so blurred that it's considered bad manners to call bullshit because you might offend that one poster who claimed his girlfriend has a penis and she enjoys it. That's not a transsexual - that's a gay transvestite transgenderist and you're also gay - just admit it already.

The stupidity from the entire LGBT community, as expressed on Facebook over the last year, made me re-examine previous assumptions. Some examples:

What was wrong with civil unions?

I was in favor of same-sex marriage long before it became popular. I was saying "Why deprive gays of the joys of divorce?"

But upon re-examination, marriage is a civil union. Nothing more, nothing less. The state regulates it under state laws, not any other organization. The state licenses it, and the state approves individual licenses and regulates the dissolution of marriages. Not a church or other group.

So what is the difference between marriage and any other civil union? Just like civil unions, marriages preserve many individual rights while granting others and imposing some obligations and restrictions. Marriage and civil unions allow the other partner to make decisions in medical care, jointly adopt, and pool assets. The only difference is that civil unions can set additional conditions that marriage cannot, and civil unions also envisage relationships that have nothing to do with marriage.

I think it would have been better to just pass a declaration that recognizes that all marriages are civil unions, and to be known henceforth as such. End all the mysticism surrounding the term marriage by deprecating it.

Would I undo same-sex marriage laws? Of course not - but in retrospect, the whole mess could have been handled much better by sticking to the facts - that marriage is a civil union.

The meaninglessness of the word "transgender"

Historically, this whole mess can be laid at the foot of the cross-dressing community, starting with Virginia Prince (Arnold Lowman). Prince mis-appropriated the term transgender thus:

That is a far cry from transsexuals, and the continued attempts by the LGBT community to blur the distinction so as to legitimize cross-dressing and other behaviours is both dishonest and seriously misguided, because now in the public mind transgender can mean anything, including transsexual.

It's gotten to the point that transgenderists insist that making the distinction between full-time cross-dressers and transsexuals is both wrong and "harmful to the community." Oddly enough, it's gay men, some of whom are cross-dressers, that are the most vocal in their attacks, which are only directed at male-to-female transsexuals. An example was a recent attack by a gay female-to-male transsexual saying that male-to-female transsexuals are cross-dressers, mimicking perfectly the accusations of transvestites. WTF? Another was by a gay cross-dresser who, after being invited to a discussion after misrepresenting himself as a male-to-female transsexual, started the whole "you're really just men in dresses" thing.

In the end, transgender means everything and nothing - it's a label that's as solid as Jello, and like Jello, impossible to nail down.

Organized LGBT discrimination against transsexuals

Why would LGBT groups and individuals want to beat up on transsexuals? One thing that becomes obvious over time is that they resent the fact that transsexualism by it's very nature tends to confirm the traditional heteronormative gender binary - especially male-to-female transsexuals. Female-to-male transsexuals get a pass on this accusation, same as they aren't accused of being cross-dressers by many in the LGBT community, not even by cross-dressers.

The Human Rights Coalition is a good example of the systemic nature of their toxic view of male-to-female transsexuals among their own workers.

No wonder people there wait years to transition publicly. With friends like these, I'd rather be dealing with fundamentalist Christians. Many of them change their attitudes once they get to know us personally.

People in "the community" say I should stop criticizing because it will hurt the community. My response nowadays is "Big f*cking deal. My community is family, friends, and neighbours. I am not part of your community, never have been, and never will be. There were no 'bathroom bills' until you guys got involved. People didn't make a habit of mis-identifying us as 'perverted cross-dressers'."

The "LGBT Community"

As I pointed out above, I don't buy into the whole concept, and from the responses I've seen I'm not the only one. People get beaten up in the local gay ghetto, but are afraid to leave it because they've bought into the lie that the rest of the world is even more hostile. This is not a supportive community - it's toxic as all hell. I don't know where the gay village is, but I do know I don't want to go there.

Transsexuals already had the backing of the medical community before the modern gay rights movement. Unlike the LGBTs, we didn't resort to violent public protests - we didn't need to. Nevertheless, the community continues to spread disinformation linking us to them, saying such things as "it was a transsexual who threw the first rock at Stonewall," when it was actually a transvestite.

It's so bad that if you're a transsexual, people automatically assume you're gay. While numbers vary depending on who you believe, about 30%-50% of heterosexual male-to-female transsexuals change their sexual orientation post-transition. Another large chunk are bi; only a minority are lesbians. Whodathunkit? And those who do switch are the gay community's worst fear - demonstrating that many transsexuals affirn the conventional heteronormative gender binary that they see as the oppressor.

The whole mental illness thing

This is a complicated question, and one that, on closer examination, I have to give a qualified "yes" to the mental illness argument. I know, what a shocker! The current argument, which I agree with, is that transsexuality itself is a physical condition, not a mental disorder, and that it's the mind (assuming male-to-female transsexuals) that is not completely masculinized before birth, giving rise to the condition.

So far, so good. The problem is, we have no studies of how many people who also had brains that did not completely masculinize do not suffer from gender dysphoria (the resultant distress of the brain saying "these are the wrong parts").

We know that schizophrenia is a mental illness with its' roots in the physical brain, but we don't hesitate to call the disease itself a mental disease. We don't hesitate to call PTSD a mental disorder, even though its' cause is experiencing an external physical event that is so horrific that it has a severe impact on the person. Ditto for major depressive disorder.

So why the change from Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria? In practical terms of treating it, there is no difference for transsexuals. However, the looser criteria have allowed non-transsexual transgenders to claim that they too fall under the same global umbrella. The same change that allowed transsexuals to escape the label of mental illness is very appealing to transgenderists searching for legitimacy.

If we use the original definition of a mental disorder as a mental condition that interferes with the patients' ability to cope with the world around them (such as negatively affecting their mood, thinking, and behavior), we are left with the fact that both Gender Identity Disorder and Gender Dysphoria certainly seem to describe the impact on mental functioning to a physical problem - in other words, a mental disorder.

Given the huge comorbidity with other mental disorders such as suicidal ideation, it may be time to re-examine some assumptions, and by this, I don't just mean disorders.

Is there really a difference between sex and gender? Even in transsexuals, the two are extremely tightly bound - treatment to reduce the difference between physical sex and perceived gender works with a 95-98% rate. It would be just as valid to state that treatment to reduce the difference between physical sex and perceived sex works. In chasing the idea that sex and gender are two different things in an attempt to explain transsexuality, we may have missed the obvious - it's only because of the "gender identity" concept that we miss the obvious - that it's all about sex. It's also why a perceived difference between perceived and physical sex causes distress in the first place. If they were completely separate, one would not impinge on the other, the same way that eye colour doesn't affect height.

Calling it gender identity instead of perceived sex led to the disassociation of the two. The concept of "gender identity" being separate from physical sex is hard for people to wrap their minds around; a lot harder than the correlation between physical sex and perceived sex, and the obvious problems that can be expected to arise when the two don't match. It also leads directly to the current alphabet soup of "genders" that is the transgendered community, and the confusion with transsexuals.

Screw that, and screw the LGBT "community", that loves using us to raise their profile for fund raising purposes and then continues to throw us under the bus. And those bathroom bills the LGBT community is "helping us fight?" Don't need your help. Permanent change will come via the courts if anyone is foolish enough to press charges. And considering they've already mistakenly arrested at least on xx woman, I'm not worried.