The attitudes of many gays against transgenders are highly regretable - raging from the hetero-like machismo to contempt. The irony is that it is always the "weak" and the "feminine" boys who are the first on the barricades, while all the "real men" are watching the riots from the safe distance.

Supreme Court Of Canada declines transsexual case



Oh yeah. Glad to see we're really on the same page with this one. Funny how the right to define oneself always ends up defining who isn't you at the same time. Funny how the right to determine which interests you will serve always ends up determining which interests you will not serve. Funny how all that just boils down to determining Kimberly Nixon's sex. See, she's not a "real" woman. Apparently only the "real" women get to decide who is a "real" woman. Yah... them Canadians are powerful funny that way. Just a barrel of laughs.

It has been said:



Yup. I remember the babble threads on the Nixon case well. I remember how the fallout from those threads rippled out onto EM as well. In this particular instance, I chose to take the advice that Molly Ivins probably would have given me. I chose vodka though, not gin. I have to be in a particular mood for gin. Meditation was out of the question mostly because I use active rather than passive meditation, and active meditation would have told me a great deal about what it all meant but would have done sweet fuck all to make me "calm down." Valium was out of the question too. My doctors won't give me Valium. All the women I know get all manner of helpful prescriptions... me, I get to suck it up. I can have some Prozac though, if I really want it. But yeah... calm.

This case doesn't really put "people who should be allies at odds." It certainly looks that way from a certain angle, but it is an illusion. A case like this highlights how very brittle tactical alliances are when they're mistaken for natural alliances. One shouldn't do that -- mistake tactical alliances for natural alliances. Just who are these "people who should be allies"? I know who the transgendered are. They were there at the Compton's Cafeteria Riot, they were there at the Stonewall Riots, and I do believe they were there at the White Night Riot as well. In fact, at every turn they were there. There is a value in steadfastness. I know without thinking which side I'm on in this case and make no mistake: there are sides, and the line between them seems to be very clear. It seems to be very easy to find yourself suddenly on the wrong side of that line.

The 'T' in GLBT (or LGBT if you eschew vulgar Americanisms) stands for 'transgendered' and has for decades. Now certainly, all transgender issues are not gay issues. In fact, most of them just aren't. All bisexual issues are not gay issues and all lesbian issues are not gay issues. There are even gay issues (quite a lot of them) that have precious little to do with lesbians, bisexuals, or all the transgendered who aren't also gay. Each of these communities is quite distinctive and the entire GLBT alliance boggles the imagination some days. Still, you can only poke at one of the letters so hard before you end up poking at the entire acronym.

Transsexuals don't have rights in Canada (or much of anywhere else, for that matter). Everyone... every single one... conspiring to deny those rights is engaged in a great evil, pure and simple. Those conspiring to deny the rights of the 'T' in GLBT inevitably get around to conspiring to deny the rights of the GLB as well... they just haven't troubled themselves to get around to it yet. When they do (and they do), they will use the same reasoning, the same excuses, and the same tactics. Waiting until they bother to get around to it is stupid.

It's not all that hard to tell who your friends are -- look to see who's standing right next to you.

It's not all that hard to tell who your enemies are either -- they're the one's attacking your friends.