The Advocate has always been a transphobic conserva-queer Mattachine rag...you expected anything else from them?

Right now, at this moment you ARE the problem Angela.

I didn't pick the battle but it has begun (DOMA, not SSM). Either we win big here, put on a good showing or tuck tail and run for the next generation. What will it take for you to understand that?

If you cannot get onboard for the battle you are proving once and for all what so many A gays have said about trans activists, that they care nothing for the larger issues and don't deserve further consideration. Is that what you are saying?

It's time to use the pot or get off it.

No, no, no.

While it may be the litmus test now, surgical status is a /terrible/ way to judge things.

Why?

Because SRS is not covered by virtually any insurance, and costs tens of thousands of dollars. You can't really get bank loans for it, and ways to finance it tend to amount to 'save up for it'.

There are thousands and thousands of transgender people out there who /want/ surgery, but simply don't have access to it. I was blessed with timing and luck that I could roll the costs of it (All told, my SRS experience cost us AU$40,000) into the mortgage we were getting, as the price we got on our house was well below what it was really worth.

But until such time as good, quality SRS is available for free to every trans person who needs it, it can't be used as a litmus test, it's just a class test.

This doesn't even go into the fact that female-to-male SRS is not really at a state where many people want to have it. It makes male-to-female surgery look inexpensive, takes multiple experimental and uncertain surgeries, and the results are not good even then. Most F2M's go for a masectomy, yes, but getting a flat chest isn't the same as getting a penis.

No, the only 'fair' way to do it at this point is for legal gender to be changable when a doctor says that, yes, you are indeed trans, not when someone either saves up for a decade, spends an inheretence, or impoverishes themself for years to pay for a life-saving surgery that the world considers 'cosmetic' and 'optional' and won't support.

However, in some states, like Texas, you are not supposed to be able to get the BC chnged. The judge told me that when I filed for change of gender after surgery. It has been done, but if they wanted to get persnickity then they could go in there and just change it back.

And, by the same extension, Susan, to virtually everyone on the planet, you are a gay man who had his penis cut off.

Everyone but those of us who are trying to change that.

Its not a happy thing, I realize, and you know *I* don't think that way, but the argument you are making is pointlessly essentialist and utterly flawed.

Your external genitalia do not define you -- clinging to that belief is not only an error scientifically, but logically.

(btw, I did respond in that other thread)

Gina - it could be worse.

You could have 5ARD or 17BHDD, and look female at birth, but male after puberty. Or IPSR and look male at birth, but female later.

You 'normal' Intersexed people with a stable appearance have it easy. :D

(Cue Monty Python's 4 Yorkshiremen sketch)

But seriously - cisgendered people, straight or gay, have genuinely got no idea of the bizarre legal problems we face. Nor the very real possibility of imprisonment, rape and death every time we cross a border, or even get a traffic ticket for a broken tail-light. Such events are rare, but there's always that possibility.

No-one has ever been denied a passport for being gay, or denied the right to vote, or to board an aircraft or enter a federal building. Very few lesbians have been put in male jails and subject to repeated gang-rape there. But it happens to us.

What is it - 5% of the inmates of Californian jails report being sexually assaulted there? But for Trans and IS people, it's 60%. And GLBs don't realise that those figures are real, not propaganda.