LGB - T?

I've been thinking recently about the term 'LGBT'. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered. Some people talk about how the T just gets lumped on at the end there, how it's easier to just include us with the gays, like we're not really a part of them, but we're a bit weird and different too, so it's ok. But then, I see how people in the LGB part of the community act towards the T part of the community. They voice similar predjudices towards us that the heteronormative community so often does. I even saw one lesbian refer to a transwomen as "this transexual guy" "He's wearing a fetching pink dress todayy!". Just a complete disregard for this woman's right to be refered to as female, she clearly knows that the person is an MTF, yet chooses to use the wrong pronouns.

It makes me wonder why the LGB part of the community chooses to act like this towards us, you would think that being part of a minority, a communtiy already maligned by the greater heteronormative communtiy, they would be more sympathetic towards our community. Yet they're not.

So why would this be? When I think back to my time in the lesbian communtiy, there was this feeling of hatred and disdain for anyone encroaching on their community who wasn't an 'Alex Parks carbon copy dyke', this included me. I was too butch for them, plus I was into music like Slipknot, not the dance/pop music that was popular then. So even back then I didn't fit in, I was an outsider, I never got to understand the mentality behind this disdain. But it was there, it was real. I see others, who are members of the Butch/Femme community who, to this day, still experience this rejection from the greater lesbian community.

It makes me think, if the lesbian community (I'm sorry I can't speak for the gay community, I've never really had much experience with the boys) is still willing to reject other lesbians for something as trivial as being 'too butch' or 'too femme' what hope does the trans community have?

So I kept thinking. And then I watched a video by Charles (freshlycharles), talking about his expericenes as a female in a 'rape culture'. And it got me thinking some more. I remember hearing so many coming out stories, where women had said that at first they had sexual experieces with guys before realising they were gay. And it made me think, is there something, perhaps on some subconsious level that makes the lesbian community so guarded because they don't want the effects of this 'rape culture' to permeate? They don't have any sexual interest in men and so why would they want this male influence in their world? Do they view transwomen as really just men in women's clothes? Do they view transmen as dykes who 'sold out'? Deaddogx makes some good points in his video about this too.

When I look at the term 'LGBT', the first thing that comes to mind is that the LGB part refers to sexuality, the T refers to gender. Now, as I've mentioned before, these are two different things. Gender doesn't denote a specific sexuality and sexuality doesn't denote a specific gender. They're two seperate entities, so why are they pushed together like this?

Maybe that's a contributing factor to this 'us and them' feeling? Being a lesbian or a gay man doesn't involve having dysphoria, hormone treatment or surgery. There isn't the same kind of big changes involved with being gay as opposed to being trans. Lesbians are biologically female and female identified, as with the guys, they're biologically male and male identified. They are cisgendered people, who happen to be sexually attracted to people of the same sex and gender.

But then what about all the lesbian, gay and bisexual transpeople? They have every right to be a part of these communities, yet they still experience predjudice. But then I guess this takes us back to my earlier point.

I don't like this feeling of 'us and them', be it between the gay community, the trans community, the LGBT community or the heteronormative community. To my mind, conflict doesn't solve anything. We're all in this together, we're all human after all.

FTM UK - Tranny Chasers

I haven't really had any progress worth mentioning on the transition front, so I'll push on with the FTM UK topics to keep this blog ticking over. Week 7 was 'Tranny Chasers', this term seemed to confuse the guys on the channel strangely enough. Anyway, here we go...

To me, the term 'tranny chaser' counjours up images of a dirty old man in adult book shop. It's not a nice term, it's not a nice thing. My understanding of the term is that it someone who has a sexual fetish for transsexual people, I.E. they fetishise the transsexual aspects of those people. To me a tranny chaser isn't someone who has an attraction to the person, just the physical charactaristics that usually define transsexualism.

I know the term can be banded about far too easily and people in the trans community can be quick to label someone a tranny chaser when it's not the case at all. A friend brought up a genuine point, she was branded a tranny chaser by a group of transpeople because she expressed an attraction to transmen and women. She made the point, by their logic, if a transperson is attracted to another transperson, does that not then make them a tranny chaser? I know myself as a transman who has been attracted to other transpeople, that I'm not a tranny chaser, there's no fetish involved for me and the same is true for my friend.

So what does it make me? Well not a tranny chaser for one. When defining my sexuality, I tend to use the terms queer or pansexual. My primary attraction is to cisgendered females, but I'm not going to rule anything out, so I don't define it too specifically. There is a clear difference between someone who has a genuine attraction to a person who is a transsexual and someone who has a fetish for the transsexual aspects of a person's body.

What my greater concern is, why are we so quick to brand someone a tranny chaser? Why are we so quick to push these people away from our community? To slap this quite frankly derogatory term on them and react so violently towards them? I see the trans community talk about feeling excluded from the 'LGBTQPI' community as a whole, yet when someone from another letter in the acronym shows an interest, we reject it.

I used to see something similar when I was still identifying as a lesbian (a good many years ago!), in pubs and clubs on 'the scene' in Glasgow, the girls I was with branding others as "hettys" and being so disdainful and hateful towards them. I think they felt that it was an attack on their space, there are so many 'straight' clubs in Glasgow yet at that time there was maybe 3 or 4 gay pubs and basically 1 club. Is it the same mentality that is prevailing? A feeling of "us and them"?

Something I'm finding as the trans community comes into it's own, is that with the spectrum of gender identities out there, there's alot of 'gender fucking' going on. The porn that the queer community is producing reflects this, different body types, different genders getting it on and getting off. Where's the harm in that?

Personally, I don't want to be fetishised for those parts of my body. To me, they are abhorrant, and for someone's primary interest in me to be just those parts, it would be an insult to me. On the other hand, if someone was attracted to me for who I was, and who I am because I am trans, well that's just fine by me.