Category Archives: Sex

Issues involving sexual attraction, abuse, etc.

Introducing the Transgender Newsbank

Martha_Gellhorn

The Transgender Newsbank is a collection of more than 400 newspaper and magazine articles from 1911-1994, organized by year and date. I have spent 3 months finding and formatting these articles for easy viewing, in addition to typing write-ups about them and linking to other topical pages. The Transgender Newsbank is the largest effort of its kind on the Internet that I can find which is freely available, and like all Transas City features is uncluttered by advertisements.

While a Transgender Newsbank may be unexciting to some, it will form the basis of an online historical library to help researchers, scholars, and anyone who is simply interested in the history of our people.

The Transgender Newsbank

ESSAY: Una Rambles a Bit About the Cisgender Focus on Genitals

Vogue-Breathless

I confess that I saw the Barney’s photo shoot for their catalog which featured transgender models when the news first ran, and I didn’t feel it was really newsworthy enough to report upon. Vogue disagreed, and ran a transgender advocacy piece on their website, which is linked below.

The article is an interesting read, but there’s nothing really groundbreaking. However, this quote from the article caught my eye:

It’s astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex—trying to determine what goes where, and how often. They can’t imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it.

This is very true when I debate transgender rights on various message boards across the net, but in a different way. Many cisgender people want to focus on our genitals. It’s the first thing they think of when they meet a transgender person, and if they are socially inept enough one may be asked “OMG! Are those tits real? Did you have your dick cut off? OMG!” When a transman is encountered, the reaction can be “OMG! So do you like wear a strap-on all the time?! OMG!”

This of course is at best willful ignorance, and at worst thinly-disguised hate.

The questions also come fast and furious about our sexual preference: “So, um, do you date men? Does that make you gay, or ‘something else?’ So you stayed married to your wife? Are you, like, a lesbian? How do you have sex? Doesn’t the wife miss ‘the dick?’ ” (well if she did, I could introduce her to the giant talking one I’m facing right now…) And most charming of all, “um, hey, can I watch?”

Charlie Sheen; Jon Cryer
Yeeees…lesbians…

For all that many cisgender people define transgender persons by our genitals and sexual intimacy, they miss the glaringly obvious point that it’s they who are thinking about the penis, the vagina, the breasts, and all the rest of the naughty bits which fill the average American with a frisson of glee whenever the subject arises. In doing so they admit their ignorance on understanding what gender really is. What is a man? What is a woman? They ignore the entire 99% or more of our lives which are spent in a gender role – living, loving, going to work, playing, shopping, and everything else – outside of sex.

Conservative religious followers scream with fury “THEY WANT TO PUT BOYS IN OUR GIRLS’ BATHROOMS!” and contemptuously brush aside the overarching whole of “what does it really mean to be a girl?” Others claim that the Bible, Koran, and other holy books are always and forever literally true, every word of them: God created men and women, there is nothing else, and you don’t dare presume to change that fact. When confronted with the fact that intersex people exist, they either brush it off as a birth defect, deny that intersex people exist and claim it’s all part of a government conspiracy, or go so far as to claim that intersex people are demonic spawn who God personally wants them to ostracize, mock, hurt, and kill.

And these folks can vote. Think about that for a golden moment.

I’ve told these folks “Me personally, I don’t believe God makes mistakes. The fact is, intersex people do exist, transgender people do exist, and we are all children of God, a creator, or nature and the universe, depending on your beliefs. You believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God, but think they made a mistake somehow? What the hell, do you think they were they doing Jäger shots when they created me?”

Jager
God doesn’t make mistakes, nor did they do Jäger shots when creating intersex and transgender persons.

Rarely are their hearts and minds open to the possibility that their own God did not make a mistake, and rather it is ever-so fallible human beings who are mistaken when they wrote the Bible.

Perhaps if as a society we educated our children on understanding gender – not just the traditional roles, but the reality of gender fluidity and gender ambiguity – rather than sex, we would raise a generation of children wherein small-minded, hateful bigots would be a vanishingly small minority.

Breathless: Ignorance or Insensitivity? Dealing with Transgender Culture – Culture – Music, Movies, Art, Profiles, and More.

UK Court of Appeal Confirms: Stealth Trans People Having Sex are Criminals

NoDeception
Good grief! I saw this running around the web earlier, and found this good site which analyzes the ruling. It appears to be true, and it’s not that much of a surprise, given the UK. Their laws on “deception” prior to sex are fairly draconian, however it’s still unclear to me, and many, to what extent not disclosing your entire gender history is “deception.” Clearly whoever you are having sex with can see what you have and walk away if they want to…correct?
Court of Appeal confirms: Stealth trans people having sex are criminals « Complicity.

Transgender Artist Arrested After Baring Breasts on Plane

ArsenaultandSanfino

Making the news in a bad way…two transgender artists were arrested on a WestJet flight from Edmonton, Canada, on June 20, while heading for a friend’s wedding. From here the story becomes complicated.

Virago added that Sanfino allegedly bared her breasts while Arsenault filmed her for an art project on the relationship between trans bodies and public spaces.

“They were trying to create a piece on the demystification of trans women’s bodies in a public space,” Virago told Xtra.

The Toronto Star, however, reports a different story. The Canadian newspaper writes, “the incident was provoked by questions from the flight attendant, which they deemed inappropriate.”

“She came over and said, ’You guys have to teach us how to do our makeup,’” Arsenault, 39, told the Star. “And then they were like, ’You know, because you used to be guys, right?’”

Sanfino then allegedly took her top off and “walked down the aisle with quite a bit of grace and flamboyance and had her arms out,” Arsenault continued. “And then the flight attendants came and covered her up, saying ’Think about the children!’”

Because God forbid children should ever see breasts…
Transgender Artist Arrested After Baring Breasts on Plane :: EDGE San Francisco.

iHookers? ‘Transgender Sex Workers’ May Really Love the Meatpacking Apple Store

 

An incredibly biased article in the New York Observer, focusing on alleged transgender alleged sex workers allegedly using free WiFi etc. at an Apple store. The article is very subtly nasty, and an example of how an “innocent” news article can do a lot of harm.

iHookers? ‘Transgender Sex Workers’ May Really Love the Meatpacking Apple Store | Observer.