So I see Rex Wockner, and Andrew Sullivan are in agreement with John Aravosis that transgendered people have basically hijacked the gay rights movement.  Dan Savage is at least on board with the transgender free Barney Frank/HRC bill that just passed the house.  Somehow, it’s…unsurprising…to see the "No Fems" contingent bellyaching that they just don’t get the transgendered.  Here’s Wockner giving it his best attempt…

I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?

Any deeper then this and Wockner is in danger of getting his own reality TV series.   Wille.  Wille.  You know, not all transgendered persons go the sex reassignment surgery route, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the "No Fems" crowd to have picked up on that.  Geeze…and I used to think I had a problem with things female, my libido and my emotions being so relentlessly polarized toward the male sex.  But the worst I ever was, was indifferent.  I didn’t dislike girls and I don’t now, they just don’t register on my radar like guys do.  I like guys.  I like being a guy.  I like being around guys.  I like being made sweet sweet love to by guys.  But there really are males, heterosexual ones too amazingly enough, who just get deeply anxious when confronted with anything even vaguely suggestive of femininity, and never more so then when it’s within another guy.  I guess they’re afraid of their own dicks falling off or something if they get too close.  Notice Wockner’s problem is with "a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts" and "become a woman".  Notice further that he’s saying this right after talking up Shannon Minter, born female, now living as a man.  

I do, in fact, count myself among those Americans who still don’t fully understand and "get" the whole concept of being born in completely the wrong body. I’ve asked Shannon for a personal, one-on-one crash-course the very next time we’re within range of each other on the national map.

Probably because Shannon is butching it up and Wockner can deal with that better then with a person born male but who considers themselves female.  Well let me say I don’t "get" what the goddamned problem is here.  Has Wockner, after all this time, never pondered what makes some people gay and others straight?  There is a mountain of evidence building now, that sexual orientation is innate, something in our biology, that draws us to mate to our own sex.  It’s not in our willies, but in our heads.  Is it really that hard to look at this, and consider then that gender expression may also work in some similar way?   And for Christ’s sake it’s not like issues of gender haven’t been animating American politics ever since…oh…the feminist movement.  I know that serious questioning of whether gender expression is more nature or nurture, biological or sociological, have been tracking alongside the same questions regarding sexual orientation since at least my own teen years and I’m older then any of these three deep thinkers (Aravosis doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of this at all so much as machine gun jerking his knee…)

I think my eureka moment came some decades ago while reading an article on boys who had been born with deformed or missing genitals and were, shortly after birth, surgically assigned a female gender and raised as girls.  Tragically, horribly, it didn’t work.  There was one boy in particular, who said he’d kept on reflexively trying to pee standing up all through his childhood.  That opened my eyes.  As it turns out, it’s not what we have between our legs that makes us masculine or feminine, it’s what we have between our ears. 

Here’s Sullivan trying to make heads or tails of the implications of that after a reader reminds him…

What T’s have in common with LGB’s is that primary opposition to all of you comes from your subversion of proper, binary, complementary gender roles.  You may be quite different from the inside, but from the outside you look similar.  I heard my southern baptist grandfather give a sermon in which one of the ills of the modern world was "men not wanting to be men."  I’m pretty sure he had gays in mind.

Surely you know this.

To which Sullivan reliably babbles… 

If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don’t conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?

Not to worry Andrew, a lot of gay folk don’t regard you as being part of our community either.  Not after you swooned over the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy laws because he thought they were a valid expression of the morality of the majority of Texans.   But, no you drooling moron, the entire point of anti-discrimination laws Is how other people view us, not how we view ourselves. 

Yes, yes…we’re all different from one another in so many little ways.  Men and women from other men and women.  Whites and blacks and Asians from other whites and blacks and Asians.  Gays from other gays.  How many different sub groups within that vast rainbow of humanity that are homosexual?  Bigotry on the other hand, ignorantly lumps people together.  Since when did prejudice ever make sense?  No, the color of your skin doesn’t say anything about the content of your character.  Neither does your sexual orientation.  Neither does your gender.  Neither does your gender expression.  And as for why ‘T’s are part of this movement too, well let’s let Jack Chick explain something you need very much to understand:

Now, look at that.  No…Really Look At It.  Anti-discrimination laws aren’t about how minorities see themselves.  What they address is how popular prejudices view and treat minorities.  Look At That Image.  This is what the bigots see, when they look at us.  They don’t see difference one between the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s you idiot.  They don’t even admit there is such a thing as sexual orientation. let alone something called transgender.  To them, it’s all sex perversion.  You’re a man and you’re having sex with other men and that means as far as they’re concerned, that you’re acting like a woman.  Never mind you don’t think you are.  It’s not about what you think.  Butch it up until you’re growing hair on your palms and it still won’t matter to them. They see a man making himself into a woman.  They see gender non-conformity.  In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1969, I was taught that as a literal truth: that homosexual men think they’re really women.  You’ll always be a fairy to the bigots Sullivan. 

None of us, the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s behave according to the gender expectations of the majority.  That’s why we’re discriminated against.  That’s the stinking rotten core of it, along with a healthy dose of misogyny.  Men rule, women serve men, wives gracefully submit to their husbands who are the head of the household and all is right with the world.  Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered people all throw that nice neat little "natural order" into question and they can’t deal with it.   But you need to understand that the problem from their perspective isn’t that you’re homosexual.  Many of them insist there is no such thing as a homosexual to begin with, merely damaged heterosexuality. Their problem is that you’re a man who, by having sex with other men, makes himself into a woman.  That’s the thinking going on here.  They see no distinction, zero, zilch, nada, between a transgendered individual and a homosexual.  None.

And this is why any anti-discrimination law that does not include gender expression in it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.  Incrementalism is fine I suppose, when it actually gets you somewhere.  Civil Unions before marriage.  Okay…I can dig that.  I don’t like it but I can dig it.  At least Civil Unions are a step forward; at least they’re something.  The EDNA passed last week is nothing but hot air and a bunch of preening politicans and HRC lobbyists patting themselves on the back for appearing to be doing something when all along they were too goddamned timid to actually fight for something honestly worthwhile because that might be risky.  You know…behaving like democrats always do these days.  Any bigot with half a brain can simply say they fired you because you weren’t conforming to their company gender norms, not because of your homosexuality.  And Barney Frank has given them the green light to do that, by insisting that the law Specifically omits gender expression as a protected catagory.  Lambda Legal has been all over this big honking loophole, and Frank and HRC (say…I thought you didn’t like them Andrew) went ahead and did it anyway.

But then…why someone who doesn’t believe in anti-discrimination laws in the first place is bellyaching about including ‘T’s, when he thinks ‘G’s and ‘L’s and ‘B’s shouldn’t be protected classes either is beyond me.  I guess you just have to jerk your knee at every fucking thing that liberals are for, or that you imagine they’re for.  The guy who once said that liberals might mount a fifth column against the war on terror is certainly no stranger to how bigots think is he?   And I see that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton has you back to nearly full time snarling at the Clintons again hasn’t it?  Jesus Christ you are one big fucking bundle of surly knee jerk reflexes aren’t you?

Instead of writing the transgendered out of EDNA, maybe Barney should have just written "No Fems…" into it.  That would have made you guys happy, wouldn’t it?

No fems please…we’re all manly cocksuckers here.  Hey…don’t get me wrong…I’m a big fan of Y chromosomes myself.  Just not the big stupid ones. 

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Ben Franklin