THIS PIECE. Thank you so much for sharing this piece of our history. I have a lot of thoughts as there is a lot the author got SPOT on and a lot that was missed but the fact that this amazing transsexual wrote this piece in 1994 is mind blowing. In 1994, I was just reading my sister's book on puberty for girls and wouldn't come to any sort of breakthrough about my own gender until 2005. Not to mention that I have now come full circle back around to the term transsexual as a means to indicate the FACT that I am changing my sex assigned at birth and that modern science has made it FULLY POSSIBLE despite the unscientific claims of bigots. Marvelous - thanks again.
I'm a fan of reading the perspectives of others that seem to be other. I attribute my political awakenings to a book I read in 6th grade on Nelson Mandela. I have no clue what's like to live in apartheid South Africa but reading his words and actions has profoundly impacted my sense of empathy.
I was under the impression that the terminology & narratives around being transsexual came from doctors with no personal connection to it, and that therefore transgender terminology/narratives was the reclamation. I did research on this at the Kinsey Institute during my senior year of college, but that was back in 2013. Either my memories have degraded, or I missed a wider swath of the history.
And, not everyone rejects terms just because they didn't emerge from within the movement/community. And the opposite is true. Tranny comes from inside the trans community, but is widely rejected by trans people. Some of us have used tranny for 20+ years.
OMG, so I go back and forth on this term all the time. It's like some dirty little secret inside my heart. My intial egg crack happened on a website called "Tranny Web" which was essentially a chat room with some blog hosting, all for anyone on the trans spectrum. My ally friends kinda gasp at me when I call myself a tranny. So then I feel like well maybe it is offensive. Then Mel 4Ever will use it on stage asking if there are "any trannys in the house" and I'm ready to raise my hand. She's a really bad ass trans woman who gets naked on stage so who am I question that energy.
Absolutely no one changes sex. By standard biological definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types -- ovaries [females] or testicles [males] -- and those with neither are technically sexless, neither male nor female.
See "Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes" by Jussi Lehtonen, & Geoff A. Parker in the Oxford Academic Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction (Volume 20, Issue 12, December 2014):
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
A fairly common perspective, at least among biologists and philosophers worth their salt. For examples, here are US "biologists" Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers quite clearly asserting – though they both have a tendency to talk out of both sides of their mouths – that some segments of the population don’t have sexes because they’re not able to produce either type of gamete:
JC: "Those 1/6000 individuals are intersexes, neither male nor female."
And a trio of reputable German biologists, writing in the Wiley Online Library, referencing Aussie philosopher of science Paul Griffiths:
WOL: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
THIS PIECE. Thank you so much for sharing this piece of our history. I have a lot of thoughts as there is a lot the author got SPOT on and a lot that was missed but the fact that this amazing transsexual wrote this piece in 1994 is mind blowing. In 1994, I was just reading my sister's book on puberty for girls and wouldn't come to any sort of breakthrough about my own gender until 2005. Not to mention that I have now come full circle back around to the term transsexual as a means to indicate the FACT that I am changing my sex assigned at birth and that modern science has made it FULLY POSSIBLE despite the unscientific claims of bigots. Marvelous - thanks again.
He's also writing from the FTM perspective, which might not transfer to MTFs so easily. Our lives are so very different.
I'm a fan of reading the perspectives of others that seem to be other. I attribute my political awakenings to a book I read in 6th grade on Nelson Mandela. I have no clue what's like to live in apartheid South Africa but reading his words and actions has profoundly impacted my sense of empathy.
I was under the impression that the terminology & narratives around being transsexual came from doctors with no personal connection to it, and that therefore transgender terminology/narratives was the reclamation. I did research on this at the Kinsey Institute during my senior year of college, but that was back in 2013. Either my memories have degraded, or I missed a wider swath of the history.
And, not everyone rejects terms just because they didn't emerge from within the movement/community. And the opposite is true. Tranny comes from inside the trans community, but is widely rejected by trans people. Some of us have used tranny for 20+ years.
OMG, so I go back and forth on this term all the time. It's like some dirty little secret inside my heart. My intial egg crack happened on a website called "Tranny Web" which was essentially a chat room with some blog hosting, all for anyone on the trans spectrum. My ally friends kinda gasp at me when I call myself a tranny. So then I feel like well maybe it is offensive. Then Mel 4Ever will use it on stage asking if there are "any trannys in the house" and I'm ready to raise my hand. She's a really bad ass trans woman who gets naked on stage so who am I question that energy.
So true. I was coming from too black-and-white of an angle earlier.
In 1998, trans man pioneer Max Wolf Valerio (author of The Testosterone Files) wrote and published the essay "Why I'm Not Transgender" - https://maxwolfvalerio.substack.com/p/why-im-not-transgender
That essay was republished in my book Manning Up: Transsexual Men on Finding Brotherhood, Family, and Themselves (2014 Transgress Press).
There is no such thing as a “transsexual.”
Sex is immutable, and you playing dress up to try to live a life of fraud doesn’t make you one of the good, reasonable ones.
You are the problem. Tolerating you led to everything we see, so stop pretending like you’re reasonable. There’s no reasonable way to live a lie.
Stop playing dress up and stop acting like you can be anything other than your sex. You’re not special, and you’re not the solution.
Amazing read 👏
Absolutely no one changes sex. By standard biological definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types -- ovaries [females] or testicles [males] -- and those with neither are technically sexless, neither male nor female.
See "Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes" by Jussi Lehtonen, & Geoff A. Parker in the Oxford Academic Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction (Volume 20, Issue 12, December 2014):
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
https://web.archive.org/web/20221214064356/https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990?login=false
A fairly common perspective, at least among biologists and philosophers worth their salt. For examples, here are US "biologists" Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers quite clearly asserting – though they both have a tendency to talk out of both sides of their mouths – that some segments of the population don’t have sexes because they’re not able to produce either type of gamete:
JC: "Those 1/6000 individuals are intersexes, neither male nor female."
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/06/04/sf-chronicle-sex-and-gender-are-not-binaries/#comment-2048737
PZM: “ ‘female’ is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female.”
https://x.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
Archive link: https://archive.ph/OL4EY
And a trio of reputable German biologists, writing in the Wiley Online Library, referencing Aussie philosopher of science Paul Griffiths:
WOL: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R