On the Future of the Transgender Community (1998)
Considering the profound nature of the change I expected, I thought it expedient to begin with a look at the transgender community as it existed at the time I began writing and end with speculation about the community’s future.
Read More
The Case Against Camping (2008)
Rebecca took great offense at the illustrations and turned her venom on me. She threatened to sue me. Telling her I did not select the images made no impression on her, nor did she seem to understand just what an editorial is. I eventually told her to go f**k herself. It made for a most interesting comments section.
Read More
The Shark in the Swimming Pool (1993)
Confronted, Willis claimed the increasing tensions within the group were the fault of the various group members, and certainly not his. He was insistent he was not the problem.
Read More
JoAnn Roberts: On My Mind (2006)
“On my Mind” was JoAnn Roberts’ column as publisher of LadyLike. Here she remembers and eulogizes a number of transgender community publications, including Transgender Tapestry. I was editor of Tapestry from 2000-2008.
Read More
Giving Christianity a Bad Name (2005)
This American Taliban, these Western-Mullahs will not stop even when they have succeeded in packing the courts with judges who will not punish those who intimidate, harass, and kill us. They won’t stop when they’ve passed laws forbidding our behavior and mode of dress and outlawing our expressions of sexuality and gender. They won’t stop even when they have robbed us of the very freedoms for which our forefather fought and died.
Read More
On Brains and Transgender Rights (2005)
Many transgendered people—and for that matter, many gay men and lesbians— direct enormous energy (and sometimes money) to attempts to explain why we are the way we are. This is a guilt thing: if our hormones made us do it, if our chromosomes are the culprit, if our brains are female, it’s not our fault. We can’t help it. We’re not responsible, it’s our darn female brains. (My apologies to FTMs.)
Read More
Ten Years of Transgender Protests Against HRC— At An End? (2004)
On Saturday, 7 August, the Human Rights Campaign announced its Board of Directors had voted to pursue only federal workplace protection legislation that is inclusive of gender identity and expression.
Read More
Concerns About Dr. Anne Lawrence (2004)
In June 2003, Andrea James published on her website a disturbing article about Anne Lawrence’s behavior. Although James’ article is in part an ad hominem (i.e. personal) attack, her allegations about Lawrence’s conduct mirror our own long-held apprehensions and provide corroborating evidence to previous allegations we have received about Lawrence’s behavior.
Read More
Editorials on J. Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003-2004)
If Michael Bailey had purposefully set out to write a book that deliberately demeaned its subjects; if he had set a goal of eroding any respect he might have had as a scientist; if he had intended to subject himself to scorn and derision, he could hardly have done better than producing the inappropriately subtitled The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism.
Read More
HRC (2003)
HRC is not our enemy. Those who continue to act as if it were should behave in a more moderate fashion. But despite the addition of transgender to its mission statement, it has not yet shown that it is our friend.
Read More
Transgender March on Washington (2002)
The true significance of the first transgender lobby day was not what it accomplished externally, but what it meant to the community. It gave us pride, a sense of what was possible. the March for Gender Rights has the potential to build upon that pride. If the organizers are smart, they’ll elect not to have the march in Washington, D.C., where it will have zero impact outside of our own community, but in a place where a thousand people will fill the streets and frighten the horses.
Read More
The Flip-Flopping Crossdresser (2002)
I firmly believe that when the world is safe for flip-flopping crossdressers, the world will be safe for me.
Read More
Preserving Our History (2001)
Ten years ago I came to realize that as a community we had little sense of our history. There seemed to be no libraries, archives, or repositories for transgender materials, and few of our national organizations maintained archival copies of their own materials. A few organizations, most notably Tri-Ess, had been wise enough to donate archival materials to universities and archives, but for the most part, our history was being discarded and destroyed on a daily basis.
Read More
9/11: Please Take Precautions While Traveling (2001)
To our readers who have lost loves ones, our deepest sympathies.
Read More
Christine Hochberg (2001)
If, as Dianna Cicotello says, our movement is about freedom of gender expression, then we must support the right for a 50-year-old man to dress like a 15-year-old girl. When we are affronted by Christine’s appearance, it’s a measure of our own internalized transphobia, our own uncomfortableness with who we are.
Read More
GenderPAC’s Implosion (2001)
GenderPAC has exited stage left from the transgender theater— but it still wants our money. What say, let’s not give it to them.
Read More
Virginia’s Ordeal (2000)
This year Virginia was invited to be the keynote speaker at S.P.I.C.E., a conference for the female partners of heterosexual crossdressers. A condition was placed on her participation, however— she would be required to attend the conference as “Charles.” She agreed to this, she told me, because she had something important to say to the wives.
Read More
Your Editor Spouts Off
Mark Twain once said it’s better to keep silent and let others think you’re a fool than to open your mouth and have everyone know for certain. He didn’t say anything about telling the whole country by way of an ignorant letter to a newspaper.
Read More
Never Give Up… (2000)
One Saturday afternoon in late July I was wakened from a nap by the telephone. It was my mother. By the time I was fully awake, we were chatting as if it had not been eleven years since we had spoken.
Read More
My Female Brain (2004)
Maybe it’s time for us to quit claiming we have female brains or male brains and just be honest— we identify as members of the non-natal sex. We have every right to do so. Let’s stop using our brains as justification.
Read More
When Heteropocrisy Comes Home to Roost (1996)
Tri-Ess is not really an organization of and for heterosexual crossdressers. It is an organization with a membership and a leadership which contains a significant number of underground transsexuals and bisexuals. Those who are willing to lie about their gender and sexual issues and those who for all practical purposes have a sex change but describe themselves with the words “heterosexual crossdresser” are welcome; while those who are honest about their issues or use other terms to describe themselves are shown the revolving door. The organization is based on a fundamental deceit.
Read More
Obama: The Most Transgender-Friendly President Ever—Re-elect Him!
I wrote this during the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential Election.
Read More
IFGE Consistently Disappoints (1998)
In 2011 the International Foundation for Gender Education quietly drained the “never to be touched” Winslow Street Fund of its approximately $100,000 USD balance and effectively disappeared as an organization. I called attention to this with a press release and published it simultaneously on this website and Transgender Forum. That wasn’t the first time IFGE had violated public trust by dipping into the Winslow Street Fund. I covered an early escapade in 1998 in AEGIS Online News—first as news, and then with an editorial.
Read More
The Paradigm Shift is Here! (1995)
In 1995, in the pages of AEGIS News, I noted the change of paradigm from the medical model of transsexualism to a healthy transgender model.
Read More
White Hats, Black Hats: HRC vs. NGLTF (1999)
HRC is a big-bucks organization. It’s been around a long time. Its staff is well-paid and experienced in the cynical arena of national politics. HRC is accomplished in the manipulation of public opinion. It knows how to put spin on an issue. And it’s spinning hell out of transgender inclusion, making itself appear concerned about us by publicly holding forth an olive branch while behind the scenes it works desperately to cut us out of ENDA.
Read More
Vaginal Politics (1994) (NSFW)
Does having a vagina make me any more a woman than if I had a penis? No. Women are not judged by their vaginas, nor men by their penises, except when in bed with their lovers, and most people are not their lovers.
Read More
AEGIS News Issues (1994-1998)
AEGIS News was the newsletter of the nonprofit American Educational Gender Information Service, which I founded in 1990. I designed, wrote, edited, laid out and published some 13 issues, all of which were distributed internationally.
Read More
Rites of Passage: Editor’s Remarks (1993-1994)
Rites of Passage began as a magazine published by activist Anne Ogborn. It became a newsletter after the second New Woman’s Conference; in fact, it became the official newsletter of the conference. I edited the magazine and did layout. The New Woman Conference was a three-day retreat for post-operative transsexual women. It ran for perhaps a half-dozen years.
Read More
Our Transgender Heritage (1999)
This disregard of our individual histories is reflected in our community’s lack of attention to its past. We have done little to preserve and honor our pioneers, our heroes and heroines, those men and women who gave their freedom or their lives because they dared to be themselves, those men who sweated blood to build the community.
Read More
Their Fifteen Minutes in the Sun (1995)
The takeover of the Transgender Health Symposium wasn’t born out of concern for transgender and transexual health issues. It happened because of the decades-old rage of Margaret O’Hartigan against the transexual program at the University of Minnesota. It happened because her colossal ego caused her to believe only she was capable of addressing transgender health issues.
Read More
Where is Our History? (Censored Editorial, 2004)
Rikki Swin has been absolutely irresponsible and has violated trust by not keeping the community informed of the collection’s condition and whereabouts. It could, for all we know, be poorly stored, shredded, or lost.
Read More
We Eat Our Leaders (1999)
The day of the charismatic ruler is past. It’s time for us to start hiring, electing, or appointing our leaders and paying them a living wage and giving them a retirement plan. Those who lead the community should be its duly designated, compensated representatives rather than its willing slaves.
Read More
A Word from the Editor: HBIGDA (2002)
In this postmodern age in which more and more of us are strong and sure of ourselves, I’m no longer sure of the appropriateness of the Standards of Care, and I’m becoming more and more certain that it’s unethical to apply constraints to a class of people without solid evidence that they are needed.
Read More
Some Notes on Access to Medical Treatment (1995)
We are convinced, after fielding thousands of calls over a period of five years, that free access to medical treatment would be disastrous. We are equally convinced that there should be a clear, non-obstructionistic process to get access to these treatments, and that transsexual people should not be singled out for special restrictions that are not given to other less marginalized groups.
Read More
The Case for Transgender Rights (With Jamison Green) (1996)
Is it “special rights” to ask that the people who kill transgendered people be brought to justice? Well, in San Francisco not too long ago a sister was murdered and her body dumped in an alley, and when the police came they laughed and told her friends “She wasn’t murdered, she just fell off her high heels.”
Read More