Stonewall Plus 31

From the June 20, 2000 edition of the Advocate:

Norahdvocate

…

Transsexual activists are always telling us that it’s a crime to surgically reassign hermaphrodites at birth. I agree. If I’m born doubly blessed in the south 40, then the doctors should let me be–even if I get teased–until I’m old enough to decide my own fate.

So why, as adults, do transsexuals mutilate their bodies in order to make them conform to the fashionable version of the opposite sex and gender? That only reinforces oppressive stereotypes every bit as much as liposuction or a bimbo’s boob job. If you’re a man in a woman’s body, then live androgynously if you’re such a revolutionary. Don’t conform. I do it every day, and it isn’t particularly easy. Half the time I’m sir, and half the time I’m ma’am, and that’s how it should be when sex and gender don’t matter.

If you truly want to thwart gender norms, don’t pull a fast one on the dictionary or your poor blameless privates. Live with all the polymorphy God gave you, body and soul. It’s a lot more radical.

Pride?

Advosham

More like prod…

as in cattle.

February 11, 2013
Categories: Corporatist media hacks, Dumbasses, Exterminationists, gay transphobia, History, Thugs, Trolls . . Author: Katrina Rose

11 Comments

  1. Comment by Bonze Anne Rose Blayk on February 11, 2013 11:11 pm

    I wonder whether Norah has changed her tune after trying to pass — occasionally, not full-time? — as A Self-Made Man over a period of 18 months, and thereafter suffering a nervous breakdown.

    “I was out in the woods with a bunch of guys who had rage issues about women and I was in drag … and I thought, oh, God, you know, what am I doing,” she added.

    She continued her emotional descent, and a week later, checked in to a hospital with severe depression. Identity, she concluded, was not something to play around with.

    “When you mess around with that, you really mess around with something that you need that helps you to function. And I found out that gender lives in your brain and is something much more than costume. And I really learned that the hard way,” she said.

    Vincent says she’s healed now and glad to be rid of Ned. But her views about men have changed forever.

    “Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don’t have it better,” she said. “They need our sympathy. They need our love, and maybe they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together.”

    ABC 20/20, January 20, 2006

    I wonder whether she got the idea of what it’s like to be a trans woman. Maybe she figured out why trans women in general suffer from spectacular rates of depression?

    Advocate.com: What was it about living as a man that pulled your psyche apart at the seams?

    Norah Vincent: It was emotionally exhausting to be an impostor, and also an impostor of the opposite sex. That’s what most transsexuals feel before they make the transition. When I started, I’d thought that gender had to do with costumes and haircuts. I didn’t understand that there was some mental component of how you view yourself in terms of gender that’s deeply embedded in your brain and that you can’t just pull that out and not expect trouble.

    “The Loony Bin Trip: A Conversation With Norah Vincent“, The Village Voice, BY Charlotte Abbott, January 03 2009

    Maybe not, because I’m not believing in her sincerity until I see a formal apology for writing crap like this:

    But it has taken the likes of Foucault, Derrida, and their imitators to kill something that is, arguably, far more precious. Namely, the self. And that, I submit, is what the rise of transsexuality indicates, or—to use the thoroughly fashionable term—”signifies.” It signifies the death of the self, the soul, that good old-fashioned indubitable “I” so beloved of Descartes, whose great adage “I think, therefore I am” has become an ontological joke on the order of “I tinker and there I am.”

    All of this came to mind of late because the San Francisco Board of Supervisors just voted in favor of giving city employees health benefits that include coverage of up to $50,000 for sex change operations and procedures. This struck me as an astounding capitulation to postmodernism.

    … there is a big difference between an equal-opportunity society in which people of all persuasions are allowed to pursue their own happiness—at their own expense—and an ideologically skewed culture in which special-interest groups are merely piggybacking on the latest trendy philosophies. And getting special treatment.

    Welcome to the Transsexual Age“, Norah Vincent, The Village Voice, May 22, 2001.

    Wow. Just wow. Being transsexual is all about killing the self, and Harry Benjamin was a “postmodernist”… the things you can learn by reading columnists!

    Reply
    • Comment by Zoe Ellen Brain on February 21, 2013 11:02 am

      She’s learnt the hard way.

      I wouldn’t sentence even the worst of the TERFs, the Trans Exterminationist Radical Feminists, to Gender Dysphoria.

      I think Ms Vincent has done her time in Hell.

      Reply
      • Comment by Katrina Rose on February 21, 2013 2:53 pm

        “I think Ms Vincent has done her time in Hell”

        But without ever having to wonder where her next paycheck was from.

        I’ve never heard an apology from her.

        She deserves any evil that may befall her – as does any and all who made the decision to run her exterminationist manifesto in the Advocate during Pride week.

        Reply
      • Comment by Katrina Rose on February 21, 2013 3:11 pm

        And, no, I don’t view this:

        Advocate.com:What was it about living as a man that pulled your psyche apart at the seams?

        Norah Vincent: It was emotionally exhausting to
        be an impostor, and also an impostor of the opposite sex. That’s what most transsexuals feel before they
        make the transition. When I started, I’d thought that gender had to do with costumes and haircuts. I didn’t understand that there was some mental component of how you view yourself in terms of gender that’s deeply embedded in your brain and that you can’t just pull that out and not expect trouble.

        to be an apology. Its whining and self-pity about her own situation. There’s absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever about her being a participant in Gay, Inc’s rhetoric war against all trans people (particularly transsexuals.)

        Reply
        • Comment by Bonze Anne Rose Blayk on February 21, 2013 6:35 pm

          After reading up some more in Vincent’s interviews on her experience of a total of 34 days in mental hospitals, which somehow winds up in the title of her book as Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin, I am thinking of Michael’s Herr’s Dispatches, the memoir he wrote of his time in Vietnam as a journalist.

          And how at one point, I believe the coda (where’d my copy get to? dammit!), if I may paraphrase… Herr talks about how all the grunts think the journos are crazy, because I have to be here. But what the fuck are you doing here?, and how the infatuation with war blossoming in the diseased hearts and wrecked heads of so many of the combat journalists there just fuels the addiction, the machine that keeps the war keep grinding on…

          And I’m thinking of Vincent and the cheap shots she takes, while seeking to stand outside of it all as an observer, and now she’s moving on with this chameleon act to the mental arena, and once again she is not embedded within that system, just a tourist, and again she seems to be angling for some location in the heights where she can obtain a nice view of the goings-on in the swamplands…

          “Once in some thick jungle corner with some grunts standing around, a correspondent said, ‘Gee, you must really see some beautiful sunsets in here,’ and they almost pissed themselves laughing. But you could fly up and into hot tropic sunsets that would change the way you thought about light forever. You could also fly out of places that were so grim they turned to black and white in your head five minutes after you’d gone.”

          - “Dispatches”, Michael Herr, p. 10

          And my thoughts on Vincent’s behavior and attitudes are anything but kind, and my laughter anything but polite.

          Sincerely,
          Bonze Anne Rose Blayk f/k/a “Kevin Saunders” … survivor.

          Reply
  2. Comment by Kathy on February 12, 2013 6:40 pm

    “It’s a lot more radical.”

    Yes…it’s always more radical to conform to someone else’s standard of what is more nonconformist. Thanks for the direction.

    Reply
    • Comment by Bonze Anne Rose Blayk on February 12, 2013 6:50 pm

      NORAH VINCENT IS “the Different Drummer”.

      “This message has been approved by the Council on Nonconformity.”

      Reply
      • Comment by Kathy on February 12, 2013 8:13 pm

        Is it really Different Drumming when one lacks rhythm?

        “But figuring out Saddam Hussein was one our greatest mysteries. He marched to his own drummer and frequently as this unfolded he made decisions which were sometimes inexplicable to us and sometimes didn’t look very smart.”

        -Brent Scowcroft

        Reply
  3. Pingback by ‘Separate But Equal’ « ENDABlog 2.0 on February 12, 2013 9:00 pm

    [...] Stonewall Plus 31 [...]

    Reply
  4. Pingback by Interview With an Actual Stonewall Riot Veteran: The Ciswashing of Stonewall Must End! | The Transadvocate on February 19, 2013 4:55 am

    [...] 20   Stonewall Plus 22   Stonewall Plus 26    Stonewall Plus 27    Stonewall Plus 29   Stonewall Plus 31    Not surprisingly, the white, gay, Mattachine Society member and author of Homosexuality: A [...]

    Reply

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