Monday 26 October 2015

Jenner: not the face of trans women

bruce-caitlyn-jenner-not-trans

Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner. Not the face of trans women

If you’ve been anywhere near a media outlet over the last few months you won’t ave been able to avoid noticing that transgender women are getting a lot of attention. If you have seen images of Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner, and then Paris Lees, Janet Mock, Laverne Cox or Jai Dara Latto, who was  crowned Miss Transgender UK 2015, you might be forgiven for being a bit confused. You might be struggling to figure out what the connection is between an ageing sports jock who looks like a man in a dress, and a glamorous woman who looks like — a glamorous woman. If you’re at all liberal or PC, you might have just accepted that these are the same, but, you know, because time and stuff.

But you’d be dead wrong. There are two completely distinct types of transgender woman and there is no connection between them at all. The conflation that is going on is wrong and potentially lethal.

Keisha-jenkins

Keisha Jenkins, 22, an HSTS recently murdered. All of the trans women killed in the US (that we know of) in the recent spate were HSTS like her.

This is important because one type — which comprises the overwhelming majority of trans women in the world today — is the  subject of deadly and repeated violence, while the other colludes in it. Now I will show my cards here: my girlfriend is transgender. But she’s not like Jenner. And because she is — being of the other type — a potential victim of violence, I have to stand to the wire. Political Correctness is all very well until people start dying because of it; and that is what is happening. So let me explain.

The two types of MtF transgender are called, using the terminology of the man who first described them, ending nearly a hundred years of unsuccessful attempts, ‘homosexual transsexual, or ‘HSTS’ and ‘autogynephile’ or ‘AGP’. The scientist who established this is called Dr Ray Blanchard. Prior to his work, these types were called, respectively, ‘True transsexual’ or ‘Type One’ and ‘Pseudo transsexual’ or ‘Type Two.’

For examples, Janet Mock, Kevin Balot, Laverne Cox and Paris Lees are all HSTS and Caitlyn Jenner is AGP. It is important to understand that HSTS are not homosexual men; as women they are straight, attracted to men. But they were born as male and are sexually and romantically attracted to men, which makes Blanchard’s term intelligible at least.

HSTS  feel and act irrepressibly girly as children and are often remarked and bullied for being ‘sissy’ (read Laverne Cox’s comments on this for an illustration.) Most will wear girl’s clothes as children if they can, play with feminine-gendered toys and socialise better with girls than boys. (By no means all boy children who do this are trans; gender exploration is a normal part of growing up and most will switch back after a while. Some, however, will not. These are HSTS.)

In clinical terms they tend to present younger than AGPs although there is a crossover in the late teens and twenties. Janet Mock’s book ‘Redefining Realness’ is a good recent personal history of an HSTS growing up.

HSTS see their femininity in terms of their sexuality, romantic objectives and socialisation. They act like girls, they sound like girls and they look like girls. Put bluntly, they are girls. Sexually and romantically they desire a straight relationship with a straight man. Although they almost always have many gay male friends and indeed, many will have self-identified as gay at some stage, they are not interested in gay relationships at all. They are girls and completely hetero-normative girls at that.

Wherever there is a social space that these individuals can be themselves in, they will exploit it and transition. Life is just easier for an HSTS as a woman. Nobody takes them seriously as men anyway and they are useless at it. They have no hope of succeeding in the patriarchal status rat-race as men, but as women, their beauty is their ally. A good-looking HSTS like transpinay Kevin Balot (a Philippine celebrity) will have no difficulty attracting male partners and for a young woman like her, the dream may indeed come true — to find a straight man who really loves her.

transpinay-trans-kevin-balot

Transpinay model Kevin Balot

For Kevin, being a woman is just who she is. She doesn’t have to learn it; she just is. When she was little she was a little girl and when she grew up she became a woman. That’s it. Kevin suffered a great deal as a child, like many HSTS, but she could not change herself. She is what she is. It’s not really a matter of feeling, just of being.  She was always Kevin and there is only one Kevin Balot; she describes her name as the most precious thing her parents gave to her and she wears it with obvious and great pride. Being a woman is not an act for her, nor is she conflicted in her personality.

HSTS has been described for millennia and has always been more associated with matriarchal or matrifocal cultures. ( I have seen one fascinating reference to an 11th century Islamic scholar describing what might be AGP, but Islam is a patriarchy every bit as repressive as the modern Western one, so hey, no surprise; but I will pursue that.)

AGPs could not be more different. They show no femininity as children, though they may be detached and sensitive boys. They almost always succeed in masculine areas — sport (Caitlyn Jenner) academia (Julia Serrano and Lynn Conway); many join the armed forces. They usually marry and have children. Their awareness of themselves as women always appears later and never in childhood. (Their personal ‘recalled histories’ may assert childhood feelings of transgender but these are never independently verifiable and are in fact a product of their condition.)

Autogynephilia is a far more complicated profile than HSTS, in which the subject becomes consumed with the idea of self as a woman, and consequentially a desire to be a woman, along with the adoption of female characteristics and the removal of male ones. AGP, like all biological conditions, is a scale of variation, so some individuals feel the dysphoria it causes much more intensely than others. For some, dressing as women is enough; for others, surgical removal of the offending parts is the only relief. However, a majority of AGPs retain their assigned birth gender sexual normativity: they remain attracted to women.

The reason I mentioned Kevin Balot earlier is that names are a useful guide in distinguishing the types. For an HSTS, she is who she’s always been and most will just feminise their given names. Chris will become Crissy, Alan becomes Alana, Peter Petra and so on. Some, like Kevin, refuse to change at all, seeing no need. They are who they are and always have been. There is only one personality inside an HSTS’ head and that is feminine, from early childhood. (There is an exception, where HSTS working in the sex business adopt fancy names appropriate to that; but they do not usually use those names in private life, and in any case, cis men and women do this too.)

However, within the AGP profile, a second, pseudo-feminine personality develops around the fixation with self as a woman. This appears at puberty or soon after. It is quite distinct from the masculine personality that originally conceives it.  As this second personality develops, it acquires a name. This is usually very  different from the given name of the masculine personality — ‘Bruce’ becomes ‘Caitlyn’ for example.( For inexplicable reasons, there appears to be a tendency towards using exotic or foreign names — often misspelled.)

This second personality may become so dominant and aggressive that it overwhelms the masculine host personality and at this point — usually after years of cross-dressing, first in private, then with forays in public, to ‘cross-dressing clubs’ etc — the subject is fully consumed by the feminine personality. Then all the masculine physical characteristics of the subject’s body have to be re-aligned in concordance with it.

At the same time, the new personality has to have a history, which will be an adaptation of the truth in which feelings of ‘femininity’ were suppressed in childhood and so on. AGPs are not lying when they relate these, but they are still invented: they are a part of the second ‘feminine’ personality, which is destroying all remnant of the original masculine one. The subject is unable to know which memories are true (part of their masculine personality) and which are not.

It is at this point that a masculine (paradoxically) aggression response kicks in to counter any suggestion that the AGP’s ‘recalled history’ or feminine identity might not be real. This is frequently expressed as a narcissistic rage attack, such as has been directed at scientists and academics like J Michael Bailey, Anne Lawrence, Ray Blanchard himself, Alice Dreger (famed for her fairness and academic integrity) and anyone else who dares to challenge the assertions of AGPs.

These attacks should be seen as a defence response by the ‘feminine’ personality that has overtaken the host. In addition to personal insult and character assassination, these attacks also include the routine falsification and distortion of statistics and other evidence, and the insistence that AGPs are the only ‘true women’. This leads directly to the blatant attempt to erase HSTS trans women, who, just by existing, prove the illusory nature of the AGP personality.

AGPs, through this attempt to erase or devalue HSTS identities, in order to colonise them, are one component of the social problem that sees HSTS abused, harmed and killed. They deliberately present HSTS as a minority (which they are not) and as incapable of speaking for themselves, which is about as offensive as it gets. For an AGP, only his own personality matters; everything about him is only about him and he is focussed exclusively on the parasitic ‘feminine’ personality that is consuming him. It is narcissism gone made, with the subject totally obsessed with himself to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.

Gender dysphoria — universally accepted as the specific provocation of transgender — for an AGP is, therefore about detestation of actual physical body parts, since these symbolise the remnants of the masculine personality that has been destroyed. (Although sometimes not entirely, and this is why re-transition occurs.) Its social aspect is the relentless aggression of AGPs against anyone who questions their ‘narratives’, demands to be allowed to use women’s safe spaces and access to their bodies as well as, of course, the incessant attempt to harm HSTS.

(Incredibly, I recently saw, on an AGP’s site, the exhortation that women should just ‘stay out of spaces that [AGP MtFs] frequent.’ It is rare that I am rendered speechless, but I was that day.)

On the other hand, dysphoria for an HSTS — who does not have this internal conflict and is really a girl — is simply about social roles: a horror of having to socialise as a man and being more comfortable socialising as a woman since, in fact, that is what she is. Genital surgery for AGP is like the removal of a malignant tumour, the second personality’s final moment of triumph; for HSTS it’s more like having a boob job — it makes a more convincing woman, who can then socialise more easily as one. This is why so many AGPs do not use their neo-vaginas for sex, whereas HSTS always do: I mean what would be the point otherwise?

AGPs have no notion of what being a woman is, of course; theirs is a fantasy, possibly provoked by the repression they experienced as children. Unlike HSTS, who are in no doubt whatsoever about their feminine identity from their early lives and indeed are quite unable to prevent themselves from being girls, AGPs have to learn and, frequently, fail.

The AGP awareness of self as feminine is rather like a ‘negative shape': once you remove all the masculine parts, what is left is taken to be feminine. That this assumption could not be further from the truth is just ignored by AGPs, though it is the source of much of the conflict between them and natal women feminists.

AGP is a cultural by-product of the Western patriarchy; this is supported by the fact that in other parts of the world, it is extremely rare, to the point of ‘zero percent’ (of trans women) according to one study. Worse however, it acts for the patriarchy in erasing and silencing HSTS trans women, who are far more numerous. In this, AGPs are not alone: we shall deal with their allies in another post.

 

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Thursday 8 October 2015

Keisha Jenkins: Say Her Name

Keisha-jenkins

Keisha Jenkins, 22. RIP

Say Her Name. Go on. Say it. Keisha Jenkins.

According to Philadelphia Police, Keisha Jenkins, 22, was ambushed by about five men who began to pummel her moments after she exited a car around 2:30 a.m. She was then shot twice in the back and later died in a hospital. Keisha is the most recent in a wave of killings of trans women in the United States.

Keisha’s brutal death brings the total of trans women murdered in the USA — that we know of — to 21 this year. While the USA is not the most dangerous place in the world for trans women — that’s Brazil — the US  has undercurrents of racism and sexism that are not apparent elsewhere and which are conspiring to make matters worse.

The underlying cause of these killings is the patriarchy’s misogynistic premise that women are worth less than men. This powers the killing of both trans women and trans men as well as rape and ‘honour’ killings of women. These phenomena are all closely related and a symptom of the patriarchy, which is not an organisation but a parasitic disease that feeds on people.
The patriarchy only needs women to supply it with sons that bear their fathers’ names; since trans women cannot do this the patriarchy encourages men to kill them. This is what causes ‘passer-by’ killings, where there appears to have been no social interaction between the victim and her killers. They just killed her because the patriarchy made them believe they should. We don’t yet know if this was what happened to Keisha and, sadly, we probably never will: the history of the investigation of the murder of trans women suggests that their killers are rarely brought to justice.

A second issue is that the patriarchy attempts to control how and with whom men have sex. (It doesn’t really care what women do in bed as long as they make babies for men and do as they are told by them.) This is because human sex is our most powerful drive. It bonds societies together, and to do so, humans are evolved, like our nearest relatives the bonobos, Pan paniscus, to be both pansexual and gender-fluid.

I cover this in Why Men Made God and blogged about it at Pansexual: the human norm.

For our two species, same-sex bonding is part of our group dynamic. It ties, through sexualised bonds of love, the groups we are evolved to live in together, and so helps the individuals in them survive. Because the same-sex sexual bonding occurs alongside opposite-sex intercourse, and these two species, left to their own devices, have a lot of sex, there is always enough reproductive sex to ensure future generations.

The patriarchy put an end to that. For it, sex had only to be about procreation and not about shared pleasure. Women, indeed, were not expected to find sex pleasant; this was ‘unbecoming’. (A view still held by Christians and Muslims; for example; clitorectomy is specifically designed to prevent women enjoying sex.) This is because the patriarchy wants its control systems, principally religions but not exclusively, to be the ‘authority’ that governs us.

It is central to the patriarchal desire for control that men stop having sex with other males, so it teaches young men that such an attraction is demeaning and forbidden or even ‘unnatural’. This allows the patriarchy, through supplying sexual partners sanctioned by its contract of ownership of women, called ‘marriage’, to control men by regulating the supply of baby-factories to ensure their lineage is preserved. To enforce this it trains them to beat, bully and kill (as we see in ISIS and elsewhere in the Islamic world) men who express willingness to have sex with other men. At very least it is tantamount to a surrender of all the man’s status.

After all, why would any man jump through the hoops the patriarchy sets just for a little bit of sex if he could do otherwise? Men being creative, that is exactly what they do, and why the patriarchy so hates that they do, and why their ex-cathedra condemnation is so vitriolic.

Since the patriarchy sees trans women as men prepared to have sex with other men, it wants them dead.
At the same time the patriarchy teaches young men that women are sexual targets and that they have a right to penetrate them. (See here: Why America is the World’s Rape Capital ) It turns sex into a competition, with the highest status going to the man who penetrates the most women. (Religious sanctions like marriage are only intended to control women; men are not bound by them but in name.) This is an utter perversion of the way humans have evolved, but the patriarchy is supported in its blatant lying by religion, politicians, and, to its great shame, the academy.

The above two factors are catastrophically dangerous for one kind of transwomen, who are the majority. These women are sexually attracted to men and probably highly desirable, as Keisha was. They frequently find themselves alone with men, in the interest of having sex.

When the man, having succeeded in the challenge the patriarchy set him and penetrated the girl, finds out she has a penis, all hell breaks loose. Because he has been taught that all possessors of penises are men, to his mind he has just had sex with a man, and his patriarchal status has been totally destroyed. An episode of narcissistic rage (which men are very prone to) occurs and he beats the girl to death. This is EXACTLY what happened to Jennifer Laude, Gwen Araujo and countless others.
Frequently these murders do not happen immediately and the killer goes off to find some male friends who will help him recover his ‘honour’ by killing her. Is this what happened to Keisha? We don’t know.

The situation is even worse than it seems, however. There are two completely different types of male-to-female transsexual. The first, which used to be called ‘true’ transsexual, is now known as ‘Blanchard HSTS’ or ‘transkid’. They realise they are girls in childhood, may go through a phase of thinking they are gay boys (when they are vulnerable to quack psychologists) and most importantly, they are sexually attracted to men. Think Janet Mock, Geena Rocero, Kevin Balot, Jamie Clayton. Keisha and at least 17 of the other trans women murdered (that we know of) in the US this year, were of this type; they probably all were. These are the overwhelming majority of trans women.

The second type used to be called ‘pseudo’ transsexual, but is now known by the more accurate name ‘Blanchard autogynephile’ or ‘AGP’. These are all the MtF ‘transsexuals’ who are not principally attracted to men. Instead they are sexually attracted to themselves, as women. (Some do become attracted to men after they transition, but that’s for another day.) Autogynephilia is popularly known as male fetishistic cross-dressing, although it is actually somewhat more complex. Think ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner.
These latter are, definitively, not women. They are men with a paraphilia, a sexual fetish. They are heterosexual and prey on women. They are the most perfect expression of the patriarchy’s contempt for women: men with fake vaginas and boob jobs, gaining admission to women’s private spaces to rape them with their minds.
Although actually a minority, in the West autogynephiles claim they are the majority, but in order to do this, they have to pretend that the overall prevalence of MtF transgender is much lower than it is. They use out-of-date, debunked and plain old deliberately falsified statistics to try to shore their claim up, and suggest that the prevalence is of the order of 1:10,000.

However the true prevalence, as demonstrated in censuses and surveys all over the world, and in the US by prestigious organisations for such as the Williams Institute for Law of the University of California, and by Professor Lynn Conway, is around 1:250 or higher. There are at least 700,000 MtF transgender people in the USA and well over 90% of them are not AGP, but HSTS. (Williams; Conway’s total is higher.)*

However, were autogynephiles to recognise the actual prevalence they would immediately lose credibility for the status they have arrogated to themselves, of being the spokesmen for all trans women. By doing this, autogynephiles encourage under-reporting and contribute to the killing of real trans women. These are white middle-class, middle-aged men with good careers and money in the bank, presuming to speak for principally of colour, poor, largely under-educated trans women.
Although it is possible that one or two of the trans women murdered in the USA today are AGP, it is most unlikely. The majority of the dead were trans women of colour and AGP is almost exclusively a phenomenon of white, middle-class males.

Racism pervades US culture in a way that no European can really understand. Racism does exist here, but it is completely different. I saw a person of colour approach the school across the road yesterday. I didn’t know him, never seen him before. In the US, what would a white person have done? Be honest. You’d have called the police or maybe just got a gun and shot him. That is what you’d have done. I assumed he was a newcomer to the village come to pick up his kid from school and guess what? So he was. Next time I see him I’ll say hi and welcome to the community.

This racism in the US fuels the conflict between AGPs and the majority HSTS. Because AGPs are actually patriarchal white men, they will not tolerate women of colour speaking for them. It is essential to them that they maintain the illusion of their numerical superiority, in order to remain the spokesmen for the ‘transgender community’.

Did you really think it was coincidence that Bruce Jenner, an admitted lifelong cross-dressing fetishist, suddenly decided, at the age of 65, to ‘come out as a woman’? Open your eyes: the high ground has been taken by trans women of colour like Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Geena Rocero and many others. Jenner ‘came out’ to steal that limelight back for white cross-dressing men.

These people are parasitic male opportunists; ghastly succubi created by the patriarchy to feed off the identities of women while having sex with them. To them, HSTS are the enemies and they are unconcerned by their killings. This is why Jenner has been so strangely quiet on the subject.

Bad enough to be so betrayed by a competing group of transsexuals, but HSTS trans women of colour get it from another source too: gay men. The modern gay movement has banned femininity and smothered its expression. Why? Because it wants to be part of the patriarchy. Only people with a profoundly patriarchal mindset would spend so much time and effort to actually allow themselves to be bound by the patriarchy’s contract of ownership, marriage. But HSTS trans women flout that authority too. Since gay men actually see HSTS trans women as …well, gay men, they expect them to wear slacks and have pecs. When trans women refuse, gay men get nasty.

Amongst the most aggressive critics of trans women, alongside Bible-thumping preachers and others suffering from the delusion of religion, have been gay movement leaders like Jim Fourrat. The history of the gay male movement — led by squeaky white men — in the last three decades is of betraying and abusing HSTS trans women, mainly of colour, while sucking up to the patriarchy and also to AGPs — who are also white men.

Keisha Jenkins will not be the last to die. Many more will, HSTS trans women, mainly of colour. While they do, white gays and lesbians continue to congratulate themselves on at last getting their merit badges from the patriarchy and at the same time white cross-dressing men pontificate on how hard life is while getting sexually aroused at the thought of knitting, wearing frilly knickers or using women’s toilets.

I grieve for Keisha’s parents and for the loved ones of all the trans women who have been murdered. But we will not end this carnage until we see through the lies and propaganda that sustain their killing, and recognise that two of the most sinister accessories are gay men and cross-dressing fetishists. **

 

* The issue of prevalence and the blatant lies being promulgated by AGPs and their front organisations deserves a blog post of its own, which I will work up.

** A draft of this article was accidentally published yesterday. I have rewritten it in the light of the sad news about Keisha Jenkins.

The post Keisha Jenkins: Say Her Name appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

Wednesday 7 October 2015

The patriarchy is a parasitic disease

Every year, over a hundred trans women are killed in Brazil. In the USA, an epidemic of killing of trans women appears to be under way, and a woman is raped every 6 minutes. In other parts of the Americas, things are no better. In the UK and across Europe, trans killings are less frequent but beating and intimidation are commonplace, and rape is at an all-time high. In India, rape is epidemic. Why is this happening? Why the hate?

The underlying cause is the patriarchy, which is based on a misogynistic premise that women are worth less than men. The central plank of the patriarchy’s evil creed is ‘man=superior, woman=inferior’. This powers rape and ‘honour’ killings of women as well as the killing of both trans women and trans men. These phenomena are all closely related and a symptom of the patriarchy, which is not an organisation but a parasitic disease that feeds on people.

We’ve looked at rape before, so let’s look at trans killings here. Why does the patriarchy hate trans people so much? After all, they do share certain characteristics with men.

Well, we’ll come to the specific reasons later, but first you have to understand that there are two completely different types of male-to-female transsexual. The first, which used to be called ‘true’ transsexual, is now known by a range of more politically correct names, including ‘Blanchard HSTS’ and ‘transkid’. They realise they are girls in childhood, may go through a phase of thinking they are gay boys (when they are vulnerable to quack psychologists) and most importantly, they are sexually attracted to men. This puts them in harms way, because men are rapists and killers.

The second type used to be called ‘pseudo’ transsexual, but is now known as ‘Blanchard autogynephile’ or ‘AGP’. These are all the MtF transsexuals who are not principally attracted to men. They are sexually attracted to themselves, as women. (Some do become attracted to men after they transition, but that’s for another day.) Autogynephilia is popularly known as male fetishistic cross-dressing.  Think ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner.

Because trans women have the physical ability to be men but are not, both types offend the patriarchy’s hierarchy of status. This is just the first of its reasons for eradicating them.

The patriarchy only needs women to supply it with sons that bear their fathers’ names; since trans women cannot do this the patriarchy encourages men to kill them. This is what causes the ‘passer-by’ killings, where there appears to have been no social interaction between the victim and her killer. He just killed her because the patriarchy told him he should. Although AGPs are very rarely killed, when they are, it tend to be in these situations.

A second issue is that the patriarchy attempts to control how and with whom men have sex. (It doesn’t really care what women do in bed as long as they make babies for men and do as they are told by it.) This is because human sex is our most powerful drive. It bonds societies together, and to do so, humans are evolved, like our nearest relatives the bonobos, Pan paniscus, to be both pansexual and gender-fluid.

(I cover this in Why Men Made God and blogged about it yesterday at Pansexual: the human norm which may also cast light.)

For our two species, same-sex bonding is part of our group dynamic. It helps bond the groups we are evolved to live in together, and so helps the individuals in them survive. Because the same-sex sexual bonding occurs alongside opposite-sex intercourse, and these two species, left to their own devices, have a lot of sex, there is always enough reproductive sex to ensure future generations.

The patriarchy put an end to that. For it, sex had only to be about procreation and not about shared pleasure. Women, indeed, were not expected to find sex pleasant; this was ‘unbecoming’. (A view still held by Christians and Muslims; for example; clitorectomy is specifically designed to prevent women enjoying sex.) This is because the patriarchy wants its control systems, principally religions, to be the ‘glue’ that holds society together.

In order to do this, it is central to the patriarchal cults that men stop having sex with other males, so it teaches young men that such an attraction is demeaning and forbidden or even ‘unnatural’. It trains them to beat, bully and kill (as we see in ISIS and elsewhere in the Islamic world) men who express this. At very least it is tantamount to a surrender of all the man’s status.

At the same time the patriarchy teaches young men that women are sexual targets and that they have a right to penetrate them. (See here: Why America is the World’s Rape Capital ) It turns sex into a competition, with the most status going to the man who penetrates the most women. (Religious sanctions like marriage are only to control women; men are not bound by them.)

The above two factors are catastrophically dangerous for  transkids, who are the majority of trans women.* These women are sexually attracted to men and probably highly desirable. They frequently find themselves alone with men, in the interest of having sex. The man, having succeeded in the challenge the patriarchy set him and penetrated the girl, then finds out she has a penis. Because he has been taught that all possessors of penises are men, to his mind he has just had sex with a man, and his patriarchal status has been totally destroyed. An episode of narcissistic rage (which men are very prone to) occurs and he beats the girl to death. This is EXACTLY what happened to Jennifer Laude, Gwen Araujo and countless others.

As far as trans men are concerned, their numbers are smaller, but they are still victims. Here the issue is less sexualised. They are killed because they are seen by the patriarchy as usurping the status it reserves for men. To the patriarchy, women are ALWAYS inferior and must never be allowed to set themselves up as equals. Since for a woman to present as a man challenges the very foundation of the patriarchy, and trans men are a minority, the patriarchy thinks it can kill them with impunity and encourages the men who are its tools to do so.

 

*In the West autogynephiles claim they are the majority, but in order to do this, they have to pretend that the overall prevalence is much lower than it is. They use out-of-date,  debunked and plain old deliberately falsified statistics to try to shore their bogus claim up.

(One source of this misinformation is WPATH, formerly the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, an organisation run by and in the interests of autogynephiles.)

The true prevalence, as demonstrated in censuses and surveys all over the world, and in the US by prestigious organisations for such as the Williams Institute for Law of the University of California, and by Professor Lynn Conway, is around 1:250 or higher. There are at least 700,000 MtF transgender peopl in the USA and over 90% of them are not AGP, but HSTS. (Williams; Conway’s total is higher.)

However,  were autogynephiles to recognise the actual prevalence they would immediately lose credibility for the status they have arrogated to themselves, of being the spokesmen for all trans women. By doing this, autogynephiles encourage under-reporting and contribute to the killing of real trans women. These are white middle-class, middle-aged men with good careers and money in the bank, presuming to speak for principally of colour, poor, largely under-educated trans women. Nice.

The post The patriarchy is a parasitic disease appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

Tuesday 6 October 2015

Pansexual: the human norm

bonobos-chilling

Bonobos chilling to the beat — as well as being pansexual and gender-fluid, bonobos like music. How cool is that?

When we did the research for Why Men Made God we spent a lot of time looking at how societies might have been structured in the era before the development of agriculture and the establishment of the patriarchy (I will be calling these ‘traditional’ societies.) Clearly, we can’t directly study the human groups that existed outside Africa between 50,000 and 5,000 years ago, because they no longer exist.

They left very little evidence. Although they did use stone and bone, a great deal of their artefacts were made of wood or leather and were perishable. The few that we do have are somewhat mysterious.

To try to shed light on this, we reviewed a wide range of anthropological literature. We especially concentrated on extant traditional societies, of which there are a surprising number, despite the attempts by the patriarchy, especially the Christian and Muslim ones, to eradicate them. (As a matter of fact, Islam has been less damaging to many traditional societies than Christianity, as we see from the number of traditional groups still living, and respected, in Indonesia.)

We reviewed the mythology that was recorded soon after the invention of writing in the culture that leads to the Western Patriarchy, which appeared in Sumer in the 5th Millennium BCE. We then compared this to modern mythologies which form part of traditional cultures.

We also looked at close relatives of humans, particularly our closest, the Dwarf Chimpanzee or bonobo, Pan paniscus.

Bonobos bonding

Bonobos bonding

Bonobos have a fascinating social model. They are pansexual and gender-fluid. Males are not dominant and rape has never been observed in bonobo society, either in the wild or in captivity. Generally speaking, they have very relaxed, cool societies with notably low levels of aggression and stress.

In fact, bonobos use sex as the antidote to aggression and stress. Instead of fighting, they love each other, to be blunt. What is interesting is that when they do this, there is no dominance imperative: partners in bonobo sexual relations are equals. Females and males are equally likely to initiate sex. Furthermore, they have no defined preferences — they will as happily have sex with same-sex partners as with opposite.

Sex is a powerful bonding agent in bonobo society. It holds groups together and prevents division. This protects the group from falling apart and thus the individuals within it are more likely to survive. So sex has an evolutionary imperative alongside the reproductive one. In fact, bonobos don’t have sex to make babies, they have sex with their friends and for fun, because they like it. However, they have so much sex that there is no shortage of bonobo babies. Bonobos are evolved to be pansexual and gender-fluid, and we argue that this is the case for humans too.

It should be clear how this torpedoes the ‘homosexuality is an evolutionary dead-end’ argument. It might be, as far as individuals are concerned, but when everyone is having sex with everyone else, this is not the case. Being exclusively homosexual does mean an end to the individual’s genetic line, but this is not how same-sex sex works in either bonobo or traditional societies. The individual male only has to impregnate one female to reproduce his genes; and given the amount of sex in bonobo society, and the variety of it, this is easily achieved. The same, of course, holds true for females — if they give up having sex with each other occasionally to have it with a male, job done. Bonobos are naturally pansexual, to accommodate this, and we argue that the same is true of humans, and back it up with examples.

Further, bonobos are gender-fluid. This does not mean what some people think it does; it is not about wearing a miniskirt and sporting a beard. It means being happy to play either the penetrating or receiving role in sex. Bonobo males are routinely observed having sex, in which one penetrates and the other receives, and immediately after, having sex again and swapping roles. Then they will go off and have sex with females, who probably were having sex with each other in the meantime. Bonobo children are brought up by the group.

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Bonobo females having fun sex.

We share over 98% of our DNA with bonobos and our traditional social models are almost identical. We wondered if we would find something in traditional societies that pointed to similar behaviours in humans and we found it.

All over the world, traditional societies exist that do not follow the patriarchal model, which is, men appropriate women as their mates for life; women in the patriarchy are the literal possessions, the property of men, initially their father, then their husband and brothers. Yet in traditional societies, this is not the case.

In many such cultures, same-sex activity is normal; frequently this is observed between adult men and boys. (Unfortunately, and probably due to the fact that the anthropologists doing the research were men, there is far less information about the women’s sexuality.) The adult men in these relations have women partners too. We cite quite a few examples and refer to over 400 sources in Why Men Made God that develop this.

We know of the Spartans that not only the men but the women had normalised same-sex relations, and while Sparta was a matriarchy, this appears also to have happened in more patriarchal pre-Abrahamic cultures too, which surprised me, frankly.

In fact, being gender fluid (in a sexual sense) and pansexual appears to be as normal for humans as it is for bonobos. However, bonobos have had to do without the curse of organised patriarchal religions, so are still happily having sex with anyone they like, while we invented a whole raft of ridiculous rules and conventions about it.

So in a way, this question is the wrong way round; it should be ‘When and why did strict monogamy and heterosexuality become enforced?’ and the answer to that we give in the book.

Now a caveat: we are talking about sex. The modern idea, that one is only ever attracted to a specific gender, is a modern idea, a by-product of the artificial sexual model imposed by the patriarchy. In fact, we should be having sex with all our friends and developing stronger bonds with them; instead we invented golf. However the patriarchy doesn’t want people being relaxed and loving each other; it wants people to compete, so they miss how it’s shafting them. Again, we explain this in far greater detail in the book than I can go into here.

Gender in the patriarchy is a construct which was developed and is used to suppress women. Gender, in fact, is how you are having sex at one specific moment in time. That’s all. In five minutes you might swap. It confers no advantage or superiority, and one gender is not intrinsically more attractive than the other. Most of what you have read or heard about this is a patriarchal lie.

With that in mind, it is disappointing to see how the modern gay ‘accommodationist’ movement has modelled itself on the patriarchy and imposes rules of behaviour on those whom is sees as being under its aegis. There is nothing that says ‘once gay always gay’ or that a man may not enjoy sex with other men, and also with women and vice versa. These are pseudo-patriarchal rules of behaviour invented by white gay male academics and activists who seek access to patriarchal privilege. I never thought that would happen; but then, the patriarchy is devious and good at perverting people to its ends.

People will not be happy and at peace until the patriarchy, and all its ridiculous rules and conventions, is utterly destroyed. Can’t come quick enough for me.

bonobo4

The post Pansexual: the human norm appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

Thursday 1 October 2015

Gay is square and trans is hip

 

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Scottish trans woman Jai Dara Latto crowned Miss Transgender UK 2015. Congratulations and may the Zeitgeist go with you!

When I was at art school in Edinburgh in the early 1980s, there was only one place to be: the Hoochie-Koochie Club. Why? Because it was the only gay nightclub. Straight women liked it because there was an unspoken rule: straights are welcome, but no hitting on the women. Straight men liked it because we were much less likely to get battered in the face there than in any of the regular meat-markets in the city. There was no pressure; you could just chill, dance, have a drink.

But more than that, it was culturally cool. The gays always had the best music. They were the best-dressed cats in town and if somebody said ‘you’re looking a bit gay today’ you knew you had your fashion statement bang on. It was the era of the New Romantics and everybody was wearing eye-liner and bleaching their hair. Gender signals were profoundly mixed. Straight women wore sports jackets and top hats over jeans and men wore earrings and chiffon. The gay zeitgeist was as hip as it could be.

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Contestants at the 2015 Miss Transgender UK Finals

After I graduated I became Sabbatical President of my Alma Mater’s Student Representative Council. One of my responsibilities was to listen to the pleas of destitute and often homeless students who had spent the grant, that was meant to last twelve weeks, in four of solid, flat out partying. Having also burnt the £50 overdraft facility that Barclays Bank would give anyone who walked in with a matriculation card, they ended up in front of me, begging for a bail out from the hardship fund; which I always gave them. I remember one, Alan we shall call him, sitting on my desk, holding one of my hands in his and supplicating me for help, despite the fact that I’d already said ‘yes’. And when he left he flounced out in style, blowing me kisses and wiggling his bum.

Another of my roles was to oversee the opening of the new Student Bar, which had been years in the development. Pulling a political fast one on the hard left, who apparently wanted old bentwood chairs and sacking, I persuaded the Governors to give me enough money to turn it into the most gay-attractive place in Edinburgh — and so it became, the legendary Wee Red Bar.  (Yup, that was me.) Why did I do this? Because gay was hip. Gay was cool. Gay meant bums on seats and cocktails being drunk, great music, colour, women not being harassed by neds and NO HASSLE.

Everybody interesting was gay. Freddie Mercury was gay, George Michael and Jimmy Somerville were gay, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were gay and Marc Almond was even more dangerously sexy than Debbie Harry. ‘YMCA’, ‘Relax’ and ‘Tainted Love’ were the soundtrack. Gay was the zeitgeist, the iconography to follow. Straights had to infer some sort of a kink just to be taken seriously — just look at Phil Oakey. Gay was cool.

That was before AIDS. I remember the tragedy all too clearly. But I could not have foreseen, then, working as a freelance photographer and documenting this horror, through the tears I cried for friends taken — what was to come.

Gay isn’t cool any more. Gay isn’t dangerous or cutting edge. Gay people are surely as lovely as they ever were, but they lost the zeitgeist. Instead of sparkling young things with multicoloured hair, full make-up and the most provocative clothes anyone approximating masculine gender could possibly wear, we have…two near-identical, balding, inclined to sedentary spread, IT technicians getting married. Did someone say ‘After the Lord Mayor’s Show?’

Now don’t get me wrong. I am really happy that Marriage Equality is now legal in so many countries, even if marriage itself is a questionable institution, both an instrument and an award of the patriarchy. And of course it goes without saying that everyone should be treated equally under the law. I celebrate this, the culmination of decades of activism.

But you know what? It’s dull. It’s grey. It’s what I never would have believed gays could be, boring and conventional. Square.

What happened to the rampant ménages a trois, quatre, cinq or more that the Art School models used to tell us about during their tea-breaks? What happened to the flaming boys with their tongues so far down each other’s throats they could have retuned their vocal cords? What happened to the fashion statements? I think Stephen Fry is very sweet and avuncular but iconic? Are you kidding? Marc Almond was iconic. Stephen is…comfortable. And he is about the most dangerous gay man still left out there. The rest have been swallowed up in a tide of grey, the favourite colour of the patriarchy. What happened to the zeitgeist, dammit?

Gone. All lost. The leaders of the gay movement today belong to a group called the ‘accommodationists’ and no, it’s not a synth band. This group’s philosophy was articulated by Jim Fouratt, a New-York based activist. It may be summed up as: ‘please accept us; we’re just like you but we love other men.’

Which is a lovely sentiment, don’t you think? Except it is one of submission. The accommodationists believed they could never beat the patriarchy and they would have to join it. They thought that if they conformed to the patriarchy’s notions of gender, they might sneak under its radar. And they had a great stroke of political fortune when the AIDS epidemic wiped out most of the opposition.

So they erased and banished the real leaders, like Harry Hay, the ‘Radical Faerie’ a cross-dressing imp who founded the Mattachine Society, the forerunner of the modern gay movement. They erased the trans women and drag queens of colour who really led the Stonewall Riots, like Marsha P. King and Sylvia Rivera; so successful were they that the director of this year’s film ‘Stonewall’, (Roland P. Emmerich, as badly-dressed an accommodationist as one could wish for) actually rewrote history to give these non-white women’s roles to white men, and worse, wrote them out of the story completely. For shame. Who would have thought a proud and out gay man would be both transphobic and racist?

Could I ever have believed, remembering Alan, sitting on my desk in his cowboy boots and hot pants, his hair pink and blue and his nails painted, reeking of patchouli, that such would be the end of something so colourful and provocative — that the face of 21st century gayness would be two middle-aged IT technicians in bad suits taking the patriarchal pledge of monogamy and commitment to perpetuate it?

Gay and lesbian has become boring. It’s dull. It’s unattractive. It’s conventional. It’s Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell. It’s square, man. The patriarchy has bought it, drawn its teeth and clipped its wings. Face it: you can’t be a part of the patriarchy and be interesting.

Oh the Bisexuals are still out there having fun, but you should hear what the L and G have to say about them, darling. Conformity — that sad expression of social conservatism that is nowhere more at home than in the US — has sold out all the individuals in the name of patriarchal acceptance and capitalist economics. Square square square.

And then again.

Suddenly Laverne Cox. Suddenly Janet Mock. Suddenly Paris Lees. Suddenly Sass Rogando Sasot and Geena Rocero. And trans men too: suddenly Fox Fisher, Chas Bono. Suddenly smart, stylish, articulate and beautiful trans people are everywhere.

Gays and lesbians gave up the zeitgeist. They — or at least the mainstream — didn’t really want to be cutting edge, not once they were over twenty-five and got decent jobs anyway. They wanted to be part of the patriarchal club and that meant accepting their position within it, the status the patriarchy allocated to them. So they abandoned all the dangerous people and settled for conformity; a safe marriage, a mortgage and maybe kids. How sweet.

One flaming femboy, her bubble-butt stretching the velour of her lethally short pants, her bag slung on her shoulder, mincing along the street in ludicrously high pumps, does more damage to the patriarchy in ten paces than all the clone, accommodationist gays and lesbians will in their entire lives. They don’t want to damage the patriarchy: they support it and want access to its system of privilege. Our mincing poppet doesn’t give two hoots for the patriarchy. She throws its privilege system back in its face and laughs at it. She just wants to be drop-dead gorgeous and have lots of sex and most of all, she wants it on her terms.

The effect of that is cataclysmic. Thirty-five years ago, before the onset of the AIDs epidemic and the triumph of the accommodationists, the patriarchy was equally challenged. White gay men and lesbians stole the initiative and settled for second best; acceptance on the patriarchy’s terms. Now all that is changing. Trans people are appearing everywhere; they’re on catwalks, on television, on magazine covers, all over the Internet. They have grabbed back the zeitgeist and are running with it. They have the excitement, the danger and the attractiveness and they know it; they always knew it, but now they have articulate voices too, voices that are being listened to, voices that won’t be shouted down by privileged white cis-men and women, the way Johnson and Rivera’s were, or for that matter are being, by older trans people.

In 2004, Fouratt, in a speech that shocked many, claimed that trans women were ‘crazy queens’ who threatened ‘the way we live our lives’. What he meant was that feminine gay men should stop being feminine, that they should instead assert their masculinity and thus fit into his accommodationist model, which was less menacing to the patriarchy. This was not how it was read, at least by many trans activists, who threw the kind of storm in a latte cup they are famous for; but these were all so-called ‘late onset non-androphilic’ or ‘Blanchard autogynephile’ trans women. They definitely are not an extension of gay maleness; many in fact see themselves as lesbian. In the last two decades, however, they have been the ones who made the noise. Fouratt was torpedoed and sank from view.

But there is another type of trans women. These do like men. They are the ‘early onset androphile’, ‘Blanchard HSTS’, or more informally, ‘transkids’ (because they identify as trans while still children). They are the nieces of Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and the daughters of a line of trans women reaching back into history, far beyond the invention of writing.

They are cousins to the hijra and thirunangai of India, the kathoey of Thailand, the transpinays of the Philippines, the waria of Indonesia, the North American ‘Two Spirit’ people and the travestis of Latin America and Southern Europe, as well as myriad other populations all over the world. Once, they were priestesses to the goddesses Inanna, Ishtar and Astarte. The Roman writer Livy tells how devotees of Cybele distilled pregnant mare urine to extract the oestrogen, which they used to feminise themselves — and would secretly give to their enemies to emasculate them. In Rome they were the galli, boys who ritually self-castrated to become priestesses — a procedure we might find shocking but which is carried on to this day by the hijra. The ancient Vedic texts, the foundation of Hinduism, describe these women in detail. They have always been among us.

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Thai transgender model Nisamanee Lertvorapong in make-up

Overwhelmingly, they are a world majority of trans women. In Thailand they are estimated to be one percent of born-male population. Thailand is famously trans and gay friendly, but in Malaysia, which is anything but, one study put the prevalence only slightly lower at 1:170. The latest census in India, the first to try to count them, put the numbers of hijra close to half a million, but due to high rates of illiteracy and deep mistrust of patriarchal authority, most did not register. Support workers estimate that there may be as many as four million.

Anyone who has spent time in Asia knows that there is a continuum between feminine gay men and trans women. Traditionally, gay men in these societies identify as women ‘on the inside’ and they will express this if the circumstances are right. This depends on the level of social tolerance they experience, the cultural confirmation of their feminine identity — Asian societies have long-established traditions venerating trans people and indeed, may be more tolerant of trans women than of gay men — and, bluntly, how attractive they are as women.

There is little reason why this should not happen in the West. If you are a naturally feminine boy attracted to men, do you really want to become the image of the accommodationist gay man, an IT technician in a bad suit? It’s the last thing you’d do, if you could be a glamorous woman instead. This is what actually does happen, in most of the world.

In a way, the accommodationist gay movement and its counterpart lesbian one, have come to the end of their shelf-life. We should not be sad about this; they have achieved much. There will always be a place for gay men whose masculinity is too central to their personalities to let go of. But gender is a construct and its expression can be reshaped; the zeitgeist, furthermore, is a freight train coming. Best not be in the way.

Trans people’s star is rising. They have taken up the torch that was dropped by the gays and lesbians — of being stylish, of being shocking, of being iconoclastic, of being dangerously sexy but most of all, of waving the bold red rag of refusal to conform in the face of the patriarchy.

Trans is the new hip. Get ready.

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