liminal_luke

On the bright side, Maddie started a thread about transgender issues and the most controversial subject to come up today is Lord Byron.

All that dark meticulously gleaming wood does look a bit vampiric.

Touche!

Most people here give themselves high-sounding aspirational names like Mysterious Sharon or Waterfall of Reckless Beauty. Ya gotta wonder about a person who surveys the infinite variety of the English language and then dubs themselves surrogate corpse.

How does surrogate corpse get across town? She takes public transit.

The time is coming, mark my words, when being trans will be depressingly normal. Enjoy your freaky malevolence while you can.

I can´t comment on your malevolence or lack thereof, but I´m not going to forget the penis of feminine power anytime soon.

I´m reminded of the time, many years ago, when I strolled through Portland´s Saturday market hand-in-hand with my then boyfriend. Even in uber-liberal Portland, Oregon we still got looks, albeit mostly of shocked approval. I´m a fairly introverted person and not used to taking "center stage" but I remember thinking there was a strange power in being able to command attention just by holding hands. All things considered, I wish my public handholding was an everyday event, but if ya gotta be a freak I guess ya might as well lean in. Was I being malevolent? Some probably thought so.

Thanks this issue came up with my mom´s partner and his transwoman daughter. My mom´s partner wanted to share memories of his daughter´s childhood "when she was a boy." This didn´t go over well. He´d saved a bunch of childhood toys for her and she didn´t want them, seemed to want to disavow her past. This was understandably difficult for my mom´s partner.

I have a question. Is it better to refer to a transgender person as always having been the gender they transitioned into? Is it OK when taking to a transgender woman, for instance, to say "when you were a boy..."?

Oh, thank you for clarifying. I really didn´t know what you meant. And you´re right that I don´t want my sexual lust taken away.

Me too. It´s tough not following precepts and all, but, on the bright side, we´re not bad Buddhists. Just look on the internet: those fellas know a thing or two about ethical lapses. Fortunately, you´re asexual which really cuts down on the suffering. As for myself, it hurts when potential bootie callers claim they can´t find my apartment. I keep telling them....go through the mysterious gate, go through the mysterious gate. But they never do. So I end up staying up all night beating the heavenly drum. Seriously though, ya spend the best decades of your life traipsing through China in search of lost teachings, and then, when you´re finally old and wise, nobody wants to drink from your gourd. Life sucks and then ya don´t die.

Not to give myself too much credit or anything, but I kinda knew that.

I´m not exactly sure what you mean (is the well asexuality or lesbian sex or a particular body part that will go unnamed?) but I´m just joking around.

Asexuality is sounding better and better.

One of my best gay buddies has a thing for transmen but not me. I´m all about the dick. If I was in a carousing space and had a choice between a transman and a transwoman with a dick, well, I´d go for the transwoman every time. Guess that makes me bi. Wait till I tell my mom!

Whew...this has been quite the ride. I often rethink my posts after I´ve written them and decided to let a few of my latest entries go. What came over me? This thread was winding down nicely and it seemed everyone had settled into a cozy and nearly miraculous peace. And then for some reason I decided to kick up some dirt -- go figure. Anyway, thanks to all who have contributed here and especially to Maddie. If the point of this thread was to make people think, then I count it a rousing success.

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I guess I still think dicks are a male thing because of the function the dick has in sex; the whole process of enseminating is quintessentially male. This is not a culturally imposed thing -- it´s objective reality. Just like pregnancy is a female thing. I continue to believe in anatomy as the basic marker of manhood and womanhood. How people fit into that or don´t fit into that is something else, but our anatomy does matter.

I would say you are succeeding.

@surrogate corpse If somebody experiences their dick as a powerful symbol of their femininity, well, who am I to say differently? That seems odd to me but I guess I´ll just add it to the growing list of things I don´t understand about this crazy life.

I don´t mean to exclude you, BES, or anybody else's for that matter. I just want my own understanding of myself to be included in this gender umbrella. I have a distinct memory as a young adolescent, perhaps around 13, of marveling at my genetalia. I thought then, and think now, that having a penis is a distinct marker of masculinity. I liked that. I don´t want anybody to take that away from me, not even for the sake of including someone else. Surely there´s room for all of our messy and contradictory human experiences?

This is, shall we say, a minority opinion. And it gets at the heart of what many people find disconcerting about what is often called "gender ideology." I get that it works for you to decouple genetalia from cultural meaning, but I´m a pretty phallocentric guy and the cultural trappings that normatively accompany having a dick work for me. My dick is very central to my identity as a male. To me, it´s not just a "choice" to call having a dick a male thing. Using the word "choice" here decontextualizes dick-edness in a way that gets my gruff. It´s one thing to decide to get rid of your dick because you don´t like it, quite another to impose a particular understanding of what it means, or rather doesn´t mean, to have a dick on the rest of the dick-possessing world.

Is it? Seems to me that almost everyone from a very young age can reliably sort people into male and female groupings at sight. There are some people of indeterminate sex, of course, but the vast majority of folks are born clearly male or female. I realize that these categories don´t feel comfortable to some people. Some people avail themselves of medical therapies to successfully change their outward appearance such they appear as a different sex -- and if this make them happier or relieves suffering then more power to them! But let´s not deny the reality of the categories themselves. Afterall, if "maleness" or "femaleness" didn´t exist there would be nothing to transition away from.