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Transgaf: 'cause boys will be girls (and vice versa)

iirate

Member
Yay! My lesbian friend wants to go clothes shopping with me. Hopefully we'll hit up the gay part of town next week and I can finally get some girl things :)

Awesome! I'm going to be working on makeup with some friends this month, pretty excited. I want to start clothes shopping, but I really feel like I need to lose some weight first(only been on HRT for 5 months now, still lumpy in the wrong places =( ).

Getting my eyebrows done with the same friends soon, hopefully getting my ears pierced soon(would be against work policy, trying to find a workaround atm), and my voice is coming along pretty nicely(helps that I'm using it even around people I'm not out to).

The plan is part time in late spring, full time this summer. I have lots to do!
 

Nudull

Banned
Yay! My lesbian friend wants to go clothes shopping with me. Hopefully we'll hit up the gay part of town next week and I can finally get some girl things :)

Wonderful! I intend to try and fix up my own clothing options starting from next year, though I hope I can secure some sort of job in the near future.

And yes, your avatar is adorbs. :)
 
Hey guys.

The lgbt center hasn't called back.

Hope it's not like this therapist that we had called for unrelated reasons. We called them back in October and they called back like three days ago. We decided not to call back because they'd probably get back to us in like March or something.
 

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
Hey guys.

The lgbt center hasn't called back.

Hope it's not like this therapist that we had called for unrelated reasons. We called them back in October and they called back like three days ago. We decided not to call back because they'd probably get back to us in like March or something.
Be proactive to pursue the things you want. Give them a call and don't sit around waiting for them to call back and make up reasons why they haven't.
 

Junpei Heat

Junior Member
This is personal question to some of you. I read quite a bit from some you that you/can't/won't be transition for a while and I always wonder why? I mean If you live in England and have to deal with NHS, I understand that but if you live in the States it can't be that hard right?. I can't help but think of my own experience when I read someone isn't on/isn't starting for a while, not being(and occasionally being off due to awesome self medding) hormones was teriiiiiiible.

I put how I felt previously in their current place and I think "How awful" which is a tad silly because every ones level of dysphoria is different and not all trans people feel the same way. I guess I just had this rolling around in my head for a while and wanted to get it off my chest, I may not post anymore but I still lurk a bit(I remember when femmeworth was still nin4junpei and when lexi had a bridget avatar) and whenever someone says that, i just wonder "but why?"

So yeah that's really it. Oh and Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays.
 
Well I can't speak for those who actually have citizenship in the states or for anyone but myself really, but finding insurance that covers this stuff isn't really that easy as far as I've seen from other peoples experiences and without that (heck even with that) lots of stuff is still expensive. Even without that setback, some people have families and friends to contend with and without the solution right now of just cutting their ties and walking away(or may not even want to), because they are financially dependent on their family(or vice versa) . I personally can't transition until I have citizenship somewhere other than my home country (and by somewhere I mean like the US or Canada), I dont have the means to and even if I did, I dont feel comfortable transitioning here nor before I've finished undergrad university (I'm not too sure how well the scholarship people here would like it if they found out I was trans).
I'm not saying that I couldn't just ignore all these things and find a way to transition now or that things wouldn't possibly work out better if I tried now than I currently expect (heck everything I've done so far has worked out better than I expected) . But I'm just pragmatic and thus transitioning is still a good bit away right now.
 

Saligia

Neo Member
I have a question for Transgaf, if I may. In TV shows/comics/games where a male character gets turned into a woman (your Ranma 1/2s, etc), he always turns into a sexy/busty woman (frequently more so than the other female characters). Does that bother you? Would you rather see characters transformed into more realistic women, do you like it more because he gets turned into a super-feminine character, or do you just write it off as a sort of "it's anime/TV/video games, of course she has a huge chest"? Are plot points like that seen as offensive to you or are cool with it?
 

lexi

Banned
The fuck is it with people named 'Julie'?

I can't believe that article. That's below even The Daily Mail, and yet there it is in full glory, WITH COMMENTS DISABLED, on the fucking Guardian.

You know, maybe that cunt deserved to be driven off Twitter.
 

mollipen

Member
I have a question for Transgaf, if I may. In TV shows/comics/games where a male character gets turned into a woman (your Ranma 1/2s, etc), he always turns into a sexy/busty woman (frequently more so than the other female characters). Does that bother you? Would you rather see characters transformed into more realistic women, do you like it more because he gets turned into a super-feminine character, or do you just write it off as a sort of "it's anime/TV/video games, of course she has a huge chest"? Are plot points like that seen as offensive to you or are cool with it?

Doesn't bother me. In situations such as those, I'm not surprised that they go for the "fantasy" version of the opposite gender, as—in part—it helps play up the differences between the two selves. In the opposite regards, if a female character suddenly found themselves transforming into a man, I'd absolutely assume that it would either be a hugely muscular guy, or the suave, stylish pretty boy.

Otherwise, where's the fun of the situation they're being placed in?
 
I have a question for Transgaf, if I may. In TV shows/comics/games where a male character gets turned into a woman (your Ranma 1/2s, etc), he always turns into a sexy/busty woman (frequently more so than the other female characters). Does that bother you? Would you rather see characters transformed into more realistic women, do you like it more because he gets turned into a super-feminine character, or do you just write it off as a sort of "it's anime/TV/video games, of course she has a huge chest"? Are plot points like that seen as offensive to you or are cool with it?
It's a stupid plot device that is, as far I know, never used to explore gender dynamics in an interesting way. Just an adolescent fantasy. If they turned into an unattractive girl, then the author would have to deal with subject matter the viewers wouldn't be interested in, and would hurt the sexual fantasy aspect of it. Of course, I'm probably going to be the only one to take issue with it.
 

InfiniteNine

Rolling Girl
I have a question for Transgaf, if I may. In TV shows/comics/games where a male character gets turned into a woman (your Ranma 1/2s, etc), he always turns into a sexy/busty woman (frequently more so than the other female characters). Does that bother you? Would you rather see characters transformed into more realistic women, do you like it more because he gets turned into a super-feminine character, or do you just write it off as a sort of "it's anime/TV/video games, of course she has a huge chest"? Are plot points like that seen as offensive to you or are cool with it?

I don't really think about it much at all so I guess I'm cool with it. I place more value in something's ability to entertain me anyways.
 

Dead Man

Member
The fuck is it with people named 'Julie'?

I can't believe that article. That's below even The Daily Mail, and yet there it is in full glory, WITH COMMENTS DISABLED, on the fucking Guardian.

You know, maybe that cunt deserved to be driven off Twitter.

Sometimes my faith in humanity is restored. They now have 5 pages of comments with almost universal condemnation of the piece.
 
I have a question for Transgaf, if I may. In TV shows/comics/games where a male character gets turned into a woman (your Ranma 1/2s, etc), he always turns into a sexy/busty woman (frequently more so than the other female characters). Does that bother you? Would you rather see characters transformed into more realistic women, do you like it more because he gets turned into a super-feminine character, or do you just write it off as a sort of "it's anime/TV/video games, of course she has a huge chest"? Are plot points like that seen as offensive to you or are cool with it?

I would think that anyone IRL transitoning would want to end up as attractive., no?

Movies, comics and games are just fantasy so they don't settle for the banal. Even with no gender-bending issue/plot whatsoever, they usually have a disportionate amount of atttractive people.

Total non-issue unless you have huge personal issues already.
 

Platy

Member
"not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual"

Thanks for the kind words ... I guess.... but my body shape is far from the "ideal" body shape that the industry holds =P

Also, this article is a good counter argument from a feminist on this and notice on the #transdocfail tag that appeared on twitter that is almost out "1reasonwhy" ... but with sexist doctors =P

I have a question for Transgaf, if I may. In TV shows/comics/games where a male character gets turned into a woman (your Ranma 1/2s, etc), he always turns into a sexy/busty woman (frequently more so than the other female characters). Does that bother you? Would you rather see characters transformed into more realistic women, do you like it more because he gets turned into a super-feminine character, or do you just write it off as a sort of "it's anime/TV/video games, of course she has a huge chest"? Are plot points like that seen as offensive to you or are cool with it?

I always find problematic that it is not played closely to the lives of transmen .... I never saw a gender bend character bind their chest or even TRY to pass as their original male body.


But I guess it would make a fanservice situation way more dramatic
 

Emitan

Member
Sure are a lot of people defending that article by yelling "free speech!".

I am assuming the Observer has some sort of no bigotry or hate speech policy that this article is in clear violation of.
 
Sure are a lot of people defending that article by yelling "free speech!".

I am assuming the Observer has some sort of no bigotry or hate speech policy that this article is in clear violation of.

Lot of outrage about it too (and rightly so), thankfully.

In terms of breach of some policy - there's the PCC Code of Practice, which the Observer is signed up to: http://www.pcc.org.uk/assets/696/Code_of_Practice_2012_A4.pdf

12 Discrimination
i) The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual's race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.

The PCC has no real power and is kinda getting scrapped due to the whole journo-fuss in the UK, but: Editor of the Observer has said...

"Have seen comments re Burchill's piece. Observer takes such reactions v seriously. Have asked Readers' Editor to consider issues & respond"
https://twitter.com/jnmulholland/status/290465267291672576

Surprised it got published in the first place. Guardian editor has been on Twitter distancing himself from it - although they're sister publications and share a website, has spent the day responding to people complaining saying that it's not his fault, not a Guardian piece...
 

Amalthea

Banned
It's mind-boggling how she thinks it's necessary to put all that hostility and bad discriminating puns into such a piece, fishing for understanding on her friends part. Even if natural born single-mothers have a harder life it doesn't excuse being a foul-mouthed douche.
 

CHEEZMO™

Obsidian fan
Some dude on SA said:
Rather than the PCC, it may be better to complain to the editors themselves. A few hundred emails can be cause for introspection:

reader@observer.co.uk
cif.editors@guardian.co.uk
Katharine.Viner@guardian.co.uk

Making reference to their own CIF community standards may help, particularly:

3. We understand that people often feel strongly about issues debated on the site, but we will consider removing any content that others might find extremely offensive or threatening.

5. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate-speech, or contributions that could be interpreted as such.

Don't be unpleasant.
wynaut
 
Sure are a lot of people defending that article by yelling "free speech!".

There really needs to be like a class on freedom of speech/ opinions taught in countries. You know just to iron out misconceptions like people being free from criticism and punishment, opinions some how being sacred or incapable of being wrong/dumb, etc.
 

CHEEZMO™

Obsidian fan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/julie-birchill-bullying-trans-community

In case you were wondering about the tweets mentioned in there (the ones that kicked this off)

e5YB4.png


WYliy.png
 

Platy

Member
Also, a note has been added before the text :

This article is the subject of an inquiry by the Observer readers' editor, who responds in the thread here. For those reading this on a mobile platform and unable to view comments, his post reads as follows: "As you might imagine, I have received many emails protesting about this piece this morning. Thank you to those who have written. I will be looking at this issue and will be replying to all in due course."


And the comments are :

StephenPritchard said:
As you might imagine, I have received many emails protesting about this piece this morning. Thank you to those who have written. I will be looking at this issue and will be replying to all in due course.


GiulioSica said:
Stephen, there is no need to deliberate. Julie Birchill's comments unequivocally amount to hate speech. She has generalised to describe all transgender and transexuals in vile and abusive terms, because individual people on Twitter who describe themselves as trans abused Suzanne Moore.
This article is clear hate speech and the only reason I can think that this disgrace of an article has been allowed to stand is that hate crime towards the transgender and transexual community is not understood or is not recognised as real as racism, sexism and homophobia, which is inexcusable in a news organisation that professes to be liberal.
There is no way of squirming out of this and you will only make things worse if you try. Look at the comments, read them properly, look on social media from prominent feminist writers and a variety of prominent figures. This is not about allowing everyone to have their say, or about enjoying the click rate. Hate speech is illegal. This crossed the line. There is no doubt.
You need to act swiftly and decisively. I occasionally work at the Guardian as a casual subeditor and I feel ashamed and angry that this has been allowed to happen in the organisation, that there has been no swift response, that editors still do not seem to recognise the gravity of what Julie Burchill has done. I'm just flabbergasted.
Please, for the sake of everything this news organisation is supposed to stand for, act now, apologise, distance yourself in every way from these foul and abusive comments by Julie Burchill.
Sincerely, Giulio Sica
 
The ferocity of the language used shocked me, not just for the content but at how the author felt she had the appropriate audience from the Guardian's left-leaning readership.

The Guardian blog in question.

The brilliant writer Suzanne Moore and I go back a long way. I first met her when she was a young single mother living in a council flat; she took me out to interview me about my novel Ambition (republished by Corvus Books this spring, since you ask) for dear dead City Limits magazine. "I've got an entertaining budget of £12.50!" she said proudly. "Sod that, we're having lobster and champagne at Frederick's and I'm paying," I told her. Half a bottle of Bolly later, she looked at me with faraway eyes: "Ooo, I could get to like this…" And so she did.

I have observed her rise to the forefront of this country's great polemicists with a whole lot of pride – and just a tiny bit of envy. I am godmother to her three brilliant, beautiful daughters. Though we differ on certain issues we will have each other's backs until the sacred cows come home.

With this in mind, I was incredulous to read that my friend was being monstered on Twitter, to the extent that she had quit it, for supposedly picking on a minority – transsexuals. Though I imagine it to be something akin to being savaged by a dead sheep, as Denis Healey had it of Geoffrey Howe, I nevertheless felt indignant that a woman of such style and substance should be driven from her chosen mode of time-wasting by a bunch of dicks in chicks' clothing.

To my mind – I have given cool-headed consideration to the matter – a gaggle of transsexuals telling Suzanne Moore how to write looks a lot like how I'd imagine the Black and White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look. That rude and ridic.

Here's what happened. In a book of essays called Red: The Waterstones Anthology, Suzanne contributed a piece about women's anger. She wrote that, among other things, women were angry about "not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual". Rather than join her in decrying the idea that every broad should aim to look like an oven-ready porn star, the very vociferous transsexual lobby and their grim groupies picked on the messenger instead.

I must say that my only experience of the trans lobby thus far was hearing about the vile way they have persecuted another of my friends, the veteran women's rights and anti-domestic violence activist Julie Bindel – picketing events where she is speaking about such minor issues as the rape of children and the trafficking of women just because she refuses to accept that their relationship with their phantom limb is the most pressing problem that women – real and imagined – are facing right now.

Similarly, Suzanne's original piece was about the real horror of the bigger picture – how the savagery of a few old Etonians is having real, ruinous effects on the lives of the weakest members of our society, many of whom happen to be women. The reaction of the trans lobby reminded me very much of those wretched inner-city kids who shoot another inner-city kid dead in a fast-food shop for not showing them enough "respect". Ignore the real enemy – they're strong and will need real effort and organisation to fight. How much easier to lash out at those who are conveniently close to hand!

But they'd rather argue over semantics. To be fair, after having one's nuts taken off (see what I did there?) by endless decades in academia, it's all most of them are fit to do. Educated beyond all common sense and honesty, it was a hoot to see the screaming mimis accuse Suze of white feminist privilege; it may have been this that made her finally respond in the subsequent salty language she employed to answer her Twitter critics: "People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me. Good for them."

She, the other JB and I are part of the minority of women of working-class origin to make it in what used to be called Fleet Street and I think this partly contributes to the stand-off with the trannies. (I know that's a wrong word, but having recently discovered that their lot describe born women as 'Cis' – sounds like syph, cyst, cistern; all nasty stuff – they're lucky I'm not calling them shemales. Or shims.) We know that everything we have we got for ourselves. We have no family money, no safety net. And we are damned if we are going to be accused of being privileged by a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs.

It's been noted before that cyberspace, though supposedly all new and shiny, is plagued by the age-old boredom of men telling women not to talk and threatening them with all kinds of nastiness if they persist in saying what they feel.

The trans lobby is now saying that it wasn't so much the initial piece as Suzanne's refusal to apologise when told to that "made" them drive her from Twitter. Presumably she is meant to do this in the name of solidarity and the "struggle", though I find it very hard to imagine this mob struggling with anything apart from the English language and the concept of free speech.

To have your cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women – above natural-born women, who don't know the meaning of suffering, apparently – is a bit like the old definition of chutzpah: the boy who killed his parents and then asked the jury for clemency on the grounds he was an orphan.

Shims, shemales, whatever you're calling yourselves these days – don't threaten or bully us lowly natural-born women, I warn you. We may not have as many lovely big swinging Phds as you, but we've experienced a lifetime of PMT and sexual harassment and many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust me, you ain't seen nothing yet. You really won't like us when we're angry​

Background and reaction

The trans community has more things to worry about than the possibility that, if Julie Burchill gets really angry, she might find even nastier things to say about us. Her Guardian piece filled the bingo card of transphobic insults, short of accusing us of baby-eating and black magic. Nonetheless, when a minority is accused of intolerant bullying, it is always important that the slur not be allowed to stand, especially when the accusation becomes a pretext for hate speech.

Burchill's intervention came at the end of a long week, and new readers will need context. There was coverage of the charges being brought against Dr Richard Curtis before the General Medical Council for his practice in the trans community. It raised the issue of the appalling ignorance of many GPs and other doctors not only on specifically trans-related healthcare issues, but the general healthcare of trans people.

At this point Suzanne Moore reprinted in the New Statesman a piece about female anger that complained, among other things, that women were expected to look "like Brazilian transsexuals". A lot of people seem not to get why this upset most of the trans community.

In the first place there's the implied dichotomy between women on the one hand and Brazilian trans women on the other – as if Brazilian trans women are somehow not women. But far more important is the fact well over a hundred Brazilian trans women were murdered in the last year alone. The failure of the mainstream press to cover the worldwide war on trans people is a significant failure – one of the major trans community events for the last few years has been the International Trans Day of Remembrance.

Even though Moore has some trans friends, I don't expect her automatically to think of that point. In an ideal world, she would have recognised the problem with what she had said, and we could all have moved on.

Moore's subsequent reactions were mostly of the kind "how dare you bother me with your petty concerns when I am writing about important stuff?". She had to back down from the claim that no trans activists tweet about the attack on welfare, but then started in on the whole "cut their dicks off and think they're better feminists" trope, which Burchill also gets into.

Not all trans people are trans women; not all trans people can access surgery; and genital surgery is about remodelling, recycling and repurposing rather than amputation. I haven't read all the tweets Moore got, and for all I know some of them were horrible and offensive garbage. Nonetheless, there were real and substantive issues that she needed to deal with. A while ago Jonathan Ross messed up in a similar way, and when people called him on it, he apologised – it's possible to do that.

Moore and Burchill seem to have a weird objection to anything they think of as intellectualising. Intersectionality is not hard to understand – it's the simple observation that most people having a bad time in this society are getting it in the neck for several things at once, and the way we write about oppression needs to address that. This is not weird PhD fodder discourse; just a new vocabulary of tact.

It's hard to know where to begin with Burchill's defence of Moore – with "Black and White Minstrel Show", "bed-wetting", or her odd assumption that all trans people are middle-class and overeducated.

The basic point behind everything she says is that trans people lead essentially inauthentic existences and that hers, as a working-class novelist with a taste for lobster and champagne, is real life. The idea that some sorts of human life are true and others fake has a worrying history; you find it in many sorts of religious belief and various sorts of totalitarian philosophy.

If I weren't worried that Burchill would accuse me of having the PhD I dropped out of, I'd suggest she think of the German philosopher Heidegger's infatuation with such ideas.

Once you decide that some people's lives are not real, it becomes OK to abuse them; for people without the outlet of writing for a national newspaper, it becomes OK to shout things in the street, or worse. The trouble with Burchill's list of negative epithets for trans people is that she legitimises the basic currency of hate speech. Trans people are one of the very few minorities who some progressives feel entitled to mock and misrepresent – but then Burchill parted company with the left a long time ago. By now, she has parted company with common decency.

What I would ask Moore and Burchill is this: do you think that what you've written makes it more or less likely that an elderly trans woman living on a housing estate will get jostled on the stairs by her neighbours? Or that a teen trans man will be punched in the street? It's not anger-fuelled tweets, but that provocation, done with malice by people who should know better, that is the real bullying.​
 
I'm sorry .. but i'm not sure I understood your post ... why posting both the entire texts agains ?

First one is the article in question. The second is a commentary, criticising the first post as hateful, whilst giving a background context to it. I thought some here would find it interesting
 

lexi

Banned
First one is the article in question. The second is a commentary, criticising the first post as hateful, whilst giving a background context to it. I thought some here would find it interesting

Thanks for posting, I still find it unbelievable that was published in a 'proper' newspaper, it reads like something from Stormfront.
 

Platy

Member
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/1

Statement from John Mulholland, editor of The Observer:

We have decided to withdraw from publication the Julie Burchill comment piece 'Transsexuals should cut it out'. The piece was an attempt to explore contentious issues within what had become a highly-charged debate. The Observer is a paper which prides itself on ventilating difficult debates and airing challenging views. On this occasion we got it wrong and in light of the hurt and offence caused I apologise and have made the decision to withdraw the piece. The Observer Readers' Editor will report on these issues at greater length.

The comments posted beneath the article have also been removed in line with our deletion process and as a result these comments will no longer appear in individual users' profiles.

Fuck yeah =D
 

CHEEZMO™

Obsidian fan
Bullshit. "An attempt to explore contentious issues" my arse. They published hate speech and got called on it, and now the cunts over at the Torygraph and other shitty rags are pulling the "WAAHHHH, we're being oppressed by THE PC BRIGADE and the loony lefties FREE SPEECH no one has no right to be offended POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD" routine.

Hacks.
 
K

kittens

Unconfirmed Member
Yeah, that apology is not accountability. The Guardian needs to do a lot more to make up for that bullshit.
 

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
CHEEZMO™;46441997 said:
Bullshit. "An attempt to explore contentious issues" my arse. They published hate speech and got called on it, and now the cunts over at the Torygraph and other shitty rags are pulling the "WAAHHHH, we're being oppressed by THE PC BRIGADE and the loony lefties FREE SPEECH no one has no right to be offended POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD" routine.

Hacks.
Neat. That happens on GAF too!
 
Was it? Looked more like a thesaurus of anti-trans slurs to me.
I hate reading stuff written like that, even if I'm on their side. Using insults and name calling to try and get a point across is so childish. I'm glad they are taking some action but it feels like they are just trying to appease the raging masses instead of standing with them.

Maybe the Observer Readers' Editor will actually acknowledge that those slurs should have never been approved in the first place and have no business being part of even semi-intelligent discussion.
 
K

kittens

Unconfirmed Member
Neat. That happens on GAF too!
Yup. "If you're mean to people who are transphobic, you're just as oppressive as they are." It seems to be a rhetorical mainstay of people who say bigoted shit.

Maybe the Observer Readers' Editor will actually acknowledge that those slurs should have never been approved in the first place and have no business being part of even semi-intelligent discussion.
I want one essay a week that rips apart Julie Burchill's "analysis" and/or features trans people talking about their lives, experience, analysis, or whatever, really. The Observer and The Guardian owe a lot to trans people right now.

Edit : Also, is it okay if I post in here? I'm not trans, but strive to be an ally however possible.
 
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