Gender Dysphoria is classified as a mental illness, yet being gay/lesbian/bi isn't. How do people go along with this? You don't need to see a doctor to be diagnosed as LGB, yet you do to be trans (or before self diagnoses was made common)
It's just so strange. It's literally grouping a mental illness with people who were born this way. You wouldn't group people with depression or anxiety with LGB so why transgender?
Yeah, this is so awful, people with actual conditions that really need hormones to have normal development have been invaded and invisibilized by trans activists
And don't forget co-opting the terms: AFAB, etc.
There is Old Guard LGBT and CAMP Trans - two different groups.
The gay community (LGBT) has had cross dressers, and a few people who go further and take hormones. Homosexuals that transition were politically kept close to the gay community - we had political goals in alignment. And there was a lot of ambiguity about it. Marsha Johnson. The character "Angel" from Rent. They were still homosexual men. Frankly - almost none of them had access to any kind of surgery.
Camp Trans is a completely different group. They claim that when they transition, they are literally a woman, and should be welcome in lesbian spaces. They demand that homosexual transitioners be "kicked out" of the community for being heterosexual. Camp Trans is the origin of both Serano (and the offensive books Whipping Girl and Excluded) as well as the murderer who killed a lesbian couple and their adopted son. They are the real scum.
A lot of us old timers still support the "lgbt" but not the Camp Trans wanna-bes. Unfortunately - a ton of perverts with money are transitioning, and they have a lot of pull and power (from pritzker to the matrix brothers to jenner).
The book I'd recommend reading is: Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution Paperback – May 25, 2010 by David Carter. He was considered the expert on it before he passed, and spoke out against the revisionist history (placing people there that clearly weren't there - no one saw them). I remember he interviewed someone who was a cross dresser at the time, but is just a gay man today.
Because a lot of cross dressers were gay and a lot of gay people cross dressed
There used to be laws they used against homosexuals when they raided gay bars that you had to be wearing a certain amount of clothing items designed for your sex. So if you were wearing trousers and a man’s blazer you were ok if you were also wearing ballet flats, a blouse, and a silk scarf.
This was an issue back in tje day. Stone Butch Blues does a good job discussing this (though IMO it is not well written the story itself is compelling) in the context of the mod century lesbian scene
Those stories about garment laws are mostly exaggerated or made up entirely out of whole cloth, so I'd take them with a grain of salt. Or a whole shaker.
In the US, various states and municipalities in the19th century passed laws and local ordinances outlawing people (mostly men) from wearing certain items of clothing for the purpose of disguising themselves for very specific illegal ends (not paying taxes, being a runaway slave, escaping an arrest warrant, being a fugitive on the run after a jail or prison break, committing fraud, etc).
Later on in the 20th century, some police forces in some localities in the USA used these laws to arrest and harass male transvestites who were out in public dressed "as women" - both the gay ones and the straight ones. Some cops in some places also made up their own fashion codes that they pretended had the force of law to harass and threaten lesbians who dressed butch.
But AFAIK, there was never a law on the books anywhere in the USA that decreed that everyone
had to be wearing a certain amount of clothing items designed for your sex.
Yes, there are "indecent exposure" laws requiring that people, particularly adolescents and adults, wear a certain amount of clothing in most public places so as to avoid exposing certain parts of the body, including the buttocks and sex organs (genitals and breasts or women's nipples) to other people's view. There also are and have been health and safety codes that require certain kinds of clothing in certain places - shoes in restaurants, protective gear in various workplaces, face masks in public during the Spanish flu and Covid epidemics. But there's never been a law saying that everyone has to wear a certain amount of clothing items designed for our sex. Such laws would clearly be unconstitutional, and they'd also be discriminatory especially against poor people and pregnant women, both of whom historically had limited options for attire and frequently wore hand-me-downs or borrowed the clothes of other household members of the opposite sex.
After mass-manufactured clothing became the norm, a lot of ready-made clothing such as Levis jeans, T shirts, button-down shirts, overalls, coveralls, sweat shirts and pants/trousers, running shorts, track suits and other athletic gear, motorcycle gear, cold-weather parkas, military fatigues, lab coats, rain gear, "painter's pants" and so on still were designed and made for men and boys, but women and girls wore them too - and it was completely legal to do so.
Similarly, it used to be that various kinds of footwear (cowboy boots, sneakers by Keds and Converse, Dr Martens) and so on were sold and marketed to both sexes as unisex items, but in fact they were designed using the lasts and measurements meant for boys and men.
I dunno what you mean when you say "this was an issue back in the day" but even 100 years ago there was no requirement that everyone "had to be wearing a certain amount of clothing items designed for your sex." If it was illegal for people to wear entire outfits consisting of clothing designed for the opposite sex, then instead of being movie stars Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn would have been subject to arrest and prosecution. So would a lot of other people.
Moreover, used to be that boys and girls grew up wearing a great deal of basically unisex clothing that was much more similar than different. Such as T shirts, jeans, cordouroys, overalls, long johns, turtlenecks, sweaters/pullovers, PJs, jackets, parkas, snowsuits/pants. As can be seen in the way Scout dressed in the early 60s film version of "To Kill A Mockingbird" which was set in the US South in the 1930s, and the little girl Ellen dressed in the late-80s film "Fatal Attraction" set in NY in that era.
In the 1930s and 40s, my mother and her friends wore plenty of men's clothing, particularly overcoats, jeans, trousers, sweaters, hates, coveralls - there was no law saying that if/when they did so, they had to be wearing X number of items designed for their own sex such as ballet flats, bras or hair bows. When pregnant, lots of women wore their husband's shirts and trousers and/or overalls - and some wore men's shoes too coz their swollen feet couldn't fit in women's shoes.
Growing up in the USA in the 1950s and 60s, I wore hand-me downs from my older brother as well as from my older sisters and lots of store-bought unisex items - and there was no law that when girls did this we had to balance out the male or unisex items we wore by also wearing X number of items designed specifically for the female sex at the same time. When I was a teen before the advent of chain stores like The Gap, all the girls I knew wore men's jeans and all sorts of other boys's and men's clothing, much of it bought at military surplus shops. No one gave a crap.
The US hit TV show MASH was set on a USA military installation in Korea in the early 1950s. But even in the US military and under the strictures of US military rules and regulations in the extremely conservative 1950s, Corporal Klinger went around dressed entirely in clothing not designed for his sex without running the risk of being arrested. Because the laws you say once existed never actually did.
Here's an article about the informal "three-piece rule" rumored to have been used by NYPD in the '40's through '60's.
San Francisco (of all places) prohibited cross-dressing.
Published in 1898, the General Orders of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Order No. 1587 §20 states no person shall “[a]ppear in a public place naked, or in a dress not belonging to his or her sex, or in an indecent or lewd dress” or be guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine “not exceeding one thousand dollars”, imprisonment “not exceeding six months”, “or by both such fine and imprisonment”.
The law is rooted in the very skewed demographics of post-gold-rush California, misogyny, and anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese racism, according to https://foundationsoflawandsociety.wordpress.com/2018/12/05/more-than-aesthetic-the-trajectory-of-cross-dressing-law-in-san-francisco/
(In Ellen Klages Passing Strange, about a group of lesbians who live and practice magic in 1940s San Francisco, a butch lesbian runs afoul of an abusive cop. Klages research is thorough, so I checked out San Francisco specifically.)
I see, that's interesting. But now that we know that gender dysphoria is a mental illness there's no need for them to be grouped with LGB, but at this point they're latched on for life because they probably know that they wouldn't get nearly the support if they were their own movement (no one to hide behind)
The thing is, most people with gender dysphoria don't ID as trans, and a lot of trans people, particularly TIMs, are now claiming they're fine with their bodies the way they are. There's overlap with GD, but it isn't the exact same thing.
But you're right, they still don't belong grouped with LGB unless the specific person actually is L or G or B in which case they go under that letter, not the T one.
And no, in case any of them are lurking, "lesbian" TIMs don't go under the L. They're straight men. Trans men who are into women would go under the L, however. HSTS TIMs would go under the G.
And no, in case any of them are lurking, "lesbian" TIMs don't go under the L. They're straight men. Trans men who are into women would go under the L, however. HSTS TIMs would go under the G.
We wouldn't put transbians under the L, and we would put HSTS TiMs under the G, but many of them would diagree. And, seeing as T is all about self-identity, they get to decide where they go by definition. Most "transbians" say they belong under the T and the L. Similarly, many HSTS TiMs identify with the T only and do not consider themselves gay.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons T has been circled in with LGB... because T changes LG into straight and straight into LG. It creates a conduit and a fluidity in those categories that is congruent with the boundary-busting ambitions of academic queer theory, as mentioned by @ProxyMusic
Non conforming with social standards in clothing and even drag or transvestites that are gay men with no confusion about they maleness are not the same as the people who has severe gender dysphoria and believe they have to change their sex. Actually there is other body dysphorias and mental health problems where people want to do severe things to their otherwise healthy bodies that are seriusly taken but this one is being used as some king of special thing and as something to do with gays when it's not
ETA: I have corrected my first paragraph because as I originally posted it, it contained a typo and was not clear. Apologies.
AFAICR and can tell, the term "LGBT" and its other iterations such as "LGBTQIA+" only started appearing widely since the 1990s and only came into widespread use amongst the mainstream media and general public in the 21st century. In popular discourse, press coverage, political campaigning and everyday conversation, the pattern of always using phrases such as "the LGBT" and "LGBTQ" any time that gay rights were mentioned or discussed only became the norm since about 2015-16. And the idea that there is one big unified group that fits seamlessly together and to
In the 70s, 80s and 90s, there was much discussion and coverage of gay rights and lesbian rights in the mainstream press, but the L and the G were not always lumped together the way they are now. Nor back then were the B necessarily lumped in with the L and the G either. The idea that there has always been one big unified group consisting of gay men, lesbian women, bisexual people of both sexes itself is fairly new. And the idea that those three groups of people have always been aligned and joined at the hip with the diverse groups of people, many of them straight, who now come under the T umbrella is even newer still.
Since the 1970s, the T continually tried to glom onto, insert themselves into and center themselves in the movement for gay and lesbian rights and liberation - and in feminists and lesbian causes - but they were mostly rebuffed. Because most people could see that the T and the LGG have very little in common.
In the past decade after the major goal of equal marriage was finally achieved in countries like UK, USA and Ireland, the T also finally succeeded in achieving its aim of piggybacking onto the LGB. And once the T were in the club, the T and their exclusive, selfish interests proceeded to dominate and run the show.
A main reason the T got tacked on to the LGB is that after achieving major goals such as marriage equality in Western countries, the leaders of LGB organizations such as the UK's Stonewall and the USA's Human Rights Campaign wanted to have a new cause to keep themselves employed, to hold on to the vast political power they and their orgs had accumulated and become accustomed to, and most of all to keep all the money rolling in. So instead of turning their attention and efforts to fighting for human rights for gay men, lesbians and bisexuals in the rest of the world where same sex relations are still criminalized and censured, the leading LGB orgs in the West decided to make transgenderism their new cause celebre. Now that gay people had achieved legal rights and social acceptance in the West, orgs that once had been for LGB rights rebranded as "LGBT" and "LGBTQ+" and began spending all their efforts complaining about discrimination against the T, promoting "trans rights," spreading lies that the T are the most vulnerable and oppressed people ever, and promulgating the incredibly sexist, homophobic, male supremacist and superficial gender ideology that the T is based on.
This Salon article from 2007 "How did the T get in LGBT?" sheds some light on what happened in the US. https://www.salon.com/2007/10/08/lgbt/
Also these articles give some insight:
https://quillette.com/2019/10/26/its-time-for-lgb-and-t-to-go-their-separate-ways/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/l-g-b-t/623604/
Another reason that the LGB got tacked on the T is that starting in the 1980s, queer theory and gender identity ideology began to take hold in higher education in the US - and eventually the theories cooked up in the ivory towers of academia spread to the broader public as young people educated on these ideas graduated and entered influential positions in the wider world.
Yet another reason is that championing the T is part of the male-supremacist, misogynistic backlash against the feminism of the 1960s, 70s and 80s which led to the phony "choice feminism" that began to emerge in the 1990s. Championing the T has given male supremacists and misogynists a particularly effective way to attack, demonize and shame lesbians whilst pretending to be progressive and feminist and being applauded for it. Pushing gender ideology and championing the T has also proven to be a shockingly effective way to reduce the numbers and political clout of out and proud lesbians, lesbian feminists and lesbian separatists in the West. Ariel Levy sheds light on the corrosive effects that the T and gender ideology have had on US lesbians in her excellent 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and The Rise of Raunch Culture.
Another reason is the emergence and rise of identity politics overall.
The term "LGBT" and its other iterations such as "LGBTQIA+" only started appearing since about 2015-16. The idea that the T belongs with the LGB is brand new to the 21st century.
This is definitely not true. I was in highschool in the 90s and came out as a Lesbian in 1996, when I was 15 years old, and LGBTQ was already a thing back then (although at that time the q stood for questioning, not queer). In fact elsewhere in your comment, you mention
This Salon article from 2007 "How did the T get in LGBT?"
And then a little later, you're talking about Ariel Levy's book from 2005. How can you cite sources from 2005 and 2007 and then assert that T only glommed onto LGB nearly 10 years after that? Was it just a typo?
Yeah I was confused by that too. I also remember LGBT being a thing back in the early 00s, and its brief predecessor GLBT.
Back then the T stood for "transsexual" and they were understood to be gay men who got "sex change" surgery. The idea of a "transsexual lesbian" was still considered perverted and stupid, for the most part.
Maybe in the early 00s many people thought that most "transsexuals" were gay men. But in the 1960s and 1970s, when "male to female transsexuals" were very big in the news in the Western world, it was no secret that many of the men who got "sex change" surgeries were heterosexual men who wanted to be considered lesbians.
The two most famous "male to female transsexuals" of the 1970s - Jan Morris and Renee Richards - were straight men and fathers who fit this pattern. Morris remained with his wife and 5 kids after his "sex change" and wrote a best-selling book about it, "Conundrum," published in the early 70s. A great many of the worlds' "male to female sex change surgeries" done in the 60s, 70s and 80s were performed by Georges Burou in Casablanca and Stanley Biber in Trinidad, Colorado - and nearly all their patients were heterosexual men we'd now recognize as AGPs.
Blanchard's first paper on males in Canada seeking authorization for "sex change surgeries" which established that 75% were heterosexuals with AGP was published in 1989. The fact that straight men outnumbered gay men by such a large ratio came as news to many, including apparently a good number of gay men such as Blanchard himself. But the fact that many of the T were straight men did not come as a surprise to a great many people who were most intimately familiar with the sexual proclivities of straight men. Meaning straight men themselves and the straight women who dated, married and talked about them. And many children of straight men with these proclivities.
I had a school classmate whose dad had a "sex change" and "became a woman" in 1974. He stayed with his wife (at least initially) and wanted to be considered a lesbian. That wasn't unusual for "transsexuals" of his era - he knew a lot of other men like himself. Similarly, when I was a very small girl in the early 1960s, a little boy who lived across the street told me his father wore women's underwear - and one day when his parents were out and his babysitter was busy talking on the phone, he showed me some of his dad's lingerie. When I mentioned it to my own parents, they weren't phased. They simply exchanged a look, smiled and my dad said matter of factly like it wasn't a big deal, " Some men like wearing ladies underwear."
When the stories of Morris and Richards were big in the USA press in the early-mid 1970s, the fact that they and many other men who had or desired "sex change operations" were straight blokes, macho men and fathers wasn't a secret at all. My mother and all her friends read "Conundrum" when Morris first published it in the early 70s, as I did at the time. I remember very clearly lots of "ordinary" everyday women in heterosexual marriages back then openly discussing Morris and his book and talking about Renee Richards too.
Just as many women in the USA lesbian community were having to put up with the AGP "transsexuals" trying to horn in on lesbian spaces during the 1970s, many women who were sexually interested in men back then were well aware that lots of straight men had cross-dressing kinks and fantasized about becoming women - and that some men were likely to get carried away by this erotic interest and hobby of theirs to the point that they might want to get the sort of magical "sex change operations" that some surgeons at the time were saying they could perform. Though my mother and her friends would be cast as "stereotypical 1950s suburban housewives" nowadays, they all had a lot of life experience and knew a whole lot about straight men and their sexual behaviors and fantasies. Though women like my mom were very pissed off at the audacity, entitlement and unbridled sexism of guys like Morris and Richards, they were not surprised that the big name men who "became women" in the 1970s were straight men who'd been married to women and fathered children. Disgusted and disapproving, yes. But surprised, no.
Yes, it was a typo. And the rest was badly explained and phrased. I will correct and will expand to make what I was trying to say a bit clearer. Hope I succeed.
Another reason that the LGB got tacked on the T is that starting in the 1980s, queer theory and gender identity ideology began to take hold in higher education in the US - and eventually the theories cooked up in the ivory towers of academia spread to the broader public as young people educated on these ideas graduated and entered influential positions in the wider world.
I think this is the main reason. This explains why the movement has taken hold first and most tenaciously in Universities, and is supported disproportionately by students.
My hope is that as these theories go out of fashion in academia and are superseded, and as those students grow up and gain a more nuanced understanding of the world, this will all blow over and hopefully there will be time to reverse or replace the policies and legislation that have ill-advisedly been influenced by what is a theory with no basis in science or reality.
I hate to say it but because a lot of LGB people are actually for this shit too. Simply put, they allow it and many are standing behind it. They think of discrimination they faced and they think it's the same thing when it comes to the T.
Here's an example of a gay male rep in Missouri going off against their legislature's Save Girls' Sports bill (which passed BTW):
Just more evidence of how gay men are not automatically women's allies.
This. In fact some tend to see women as alien, disgusting and flat out taking up space. Most of those I see taking the side of TIMs and bullying women actually seem incapable of having any sort of empathy for us. The misogyny of this type of gay men is surreal I find.
Yes. I know lesbians at work who are fiercely, aggressively pro-trans and will speak up loudly for the rights of trans-ID people, demanding policy change etc. on their behalf.
I think it’s because they’re groups that were on the outside of society that were broadly related to sex/sexuality.
Same reason kink and fetish gear is so common at pride parades. Same reason poly people try to include themselves. The way the movement has broadened itself now it’s just “every EXCEPT white cis straight people.”
Not even exaggerating; I’m a bisexual Latina but not out and I’ve been included in LGBT stuff by people who think I’m straight for the sole reason of me being Latina it’s really weird. I’ve seen heterosexual couples call themselves “queer” with no elaboration and claim they’re part of LGBT
This is where I get confused because surely trans (in its purest ideological sense, discounting AGP which they all deny anyway) is nothing to do with sexuality or sexual attraction. Yes it's about biological sex, but that's very different from sexuality, isnt it?
I don't even know. It all seems so inconsistent, unclear and illogical. A bit like 'Queer Theory' and Poststructuralism itself.
Because when the LGB community first started campaigning for rights, the T's were mostly considered femme gay men who lived as women, with or without surgery. (We know about AGPs but I don't think they were frequenting gay bars or hanging with gay men like the HSTS would). So it sort of became accepted that TIMs were simply extremely feminine gay men, therefore, were part of the LGB to begin with.
Because like being gay or lesbian, trans goes outside the mainstream public's expectations for what sex looks like and how gender plays out. So the end result is most of the public thinks trans is a "special kind of gay." Also the original "trans women" were gay men who wanted to live as women so they wouldn't be as persecuted. In a lot of places in the USA, you could "change sex" legally to get married to someone of the same sex as yourself well before we finally legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. So there's some cultural overlap there, even though it isn't really justified since trans is not a sexual orientation. Nor a "sexual identity" as Biden loves to label it.
Back when I got involved with the trans community in the early 00s, transsexuals (as they were called) were still widely understood to overwhelmingly be feminine gay men who got "sex change" surgery. Trans people promoted this idea, and that trans and gay were the same because "transsexuals and gay people are both transgressing gender roles. The social norms that say 'a male person can't wear makeup and dresses' are the same norms that say 'a woman can't marry another woman.' It's all just gender policing. On top of that, most pre-op transsexuals live as gay people before transition. The two communities are fighting the same battle."
That's how it was explained to me. At the time, it seemed to make sense.
The thing is, they would have had a point, if they were actually opposing gender-conformity. But they're actually doing the opposite. The worldview that says "a woman can wear cargo shorts and marry another woman" has nothing in common with the worldview that says "a woman who wears cargo shorts and marries another woman might actually be a man, you should harass zir for zir pronouns until zie has a mental breakdown and takes a trip to the gender surgeon."
forced teaming.
they have also appropriated a medical condition (intersex) into their movement, I have not seen a single DSD person online that agrees to be used as part of this movement and DSD charities have repeatedly complained about people using the outdated term intersex.
but the term intersex sounds way better for the cause then trying to use the term Disorders of Sex Development, after all that has the word disorder in it which is kind of unhelpful when your trying to spread belief that sex isnt just male and female.