Tag transgender | VenusPlusX

What Kind of Trans Are You?

There is a tremendous eruption of discussion, categorization, and disagreement going on now in the Trans community. Two excellent articles were published by Jillian Weiss and Mercedes Allen on Bilerico and have garnered an astounding number of comments. This is, of course, usually the case when anyone says anything about Trans in a public forum. I have compared it to lobbing a bowling ball into a dense minefield, setting off a chain reaction far beyond anything you might have expected, as each personal expression of outrage triggers several more.

Briefly, Jillian speaks for Trans and LGBT unity idealistically and Mercedes criticizes Trans unity as artificial, yet needed in some better form to make progress. As I understand it, the core issue is how concerns of surgical transsexuals are addressed under the more encompassing term, transgender. The formal distinction is whether the individual has undertaken any form of deliberate body modification to acquire the physical characteristics of the opposite chromosomal sex (biosex). Thus transsexuals are people who have modified their bodies by physical, medical, or surgical methods. In this strict sense, transgenders are people who have any erotic or physical sexual characteristic that is similar to persons of the opposite biosex or unlike persons of the same biosex.

Practical XX and XY androgyny (click)

Thus, transgender really encompasses the intersex, the transsexual, the cross-dresser, the genderqueer, the “admirer” or “tranny chaser”, the bisexual, the polyamorous, and, in some limited sense, both the gay and the straight. It is a true umbrella concept. Since gender is a social artifice, while biosex is a physical reality of human life, we should find ways to remove gender details as a matter for debate and discussion. We need to get beyond verbal battles over the exact meaning of sex and gender, and open the door to social acceptance of all orientations and presentations. All people want to get on with much more important matters. The key concept lies within the term trans-.

In English, trans- can have many effects when applied to a root word. Trans-sexual specifies a sub-attribute of sexual that has a complementary formation, cis-sexual. The same is true of trans-gender and cis-gender. On the other hand, a form like trans-it or trans-portation implies movement from one place to another. Trans- can also imply a movement toward a new viewpoint from which true unities and harmonies can be discovered and enjoyed, as in tran-scend.

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One interesting modern use of trans- is in the term trans-human. The meaning of the term is quite clear—anything beyond the purely human, whatever that is taken to be by the speaker. The word may be a noun or an adjective and gives rise to the term trans-human-ism, which refers to the study (by trans-human-ists) of what it means to be or become transhuman and how that state or process might be achieved either now or in the future. There is a substantial community of human transhumanists, loosely organized as Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association), with a large number of dependent, allied, supporting, and affiliated groups focusing their efforts on different aspects of what it would / will / does mean to be transhuman either speculatively through the imagination, achievably in time, or immediately by simple direct choice from available technology.

Let us assume for the purpose of discussion that heteroerotic cisgender sexplay is, as so many humans agree, the only normative form of human sexual orientation and gender identity (SO+GI). Then transhuman SO+GI is necessarily something more than human and could potentially accommodate all degrees of variation on each dimension of SO+GI. (These dimensions are discussed in the paper I Am An Intersex Bisexual Transgender And So Are You, which presents a model for describing all forms of human erotic expression.)

Thus transhuman erotic behavior necessarily includes all possible forms of SO+GI expression and it appears that the vast transgender population is probably the majority of all transhumans on Earth. As individuals, we may or may not be transhumanists, that is, students of transhuman emergence. But we are all living transgender examples of what it means to actually be and live and love and creatively harmonize the transhuman, through our own personal transphysical, transmental, or transmotivational developments.

Collectively, we are all trans-. And specifically, we are all transhuman, because our experience and expression of the dimensions of SO+GI departs from the human norm. We should claim our place under the transhuman umbrella with many other people who are similarly transhuman because they have augmented their metabolism, nervous system, skeletal structure, mind function, or motivational consciousness by artificial means.

SO+GI is the most fundamental defining quality of our personal identity. From these dimensions of possibility flow all the unique personalities of individuals, being the instantiation of love in distinct persons. Oppressive acts of families and societies that deny the free expression of individual SO+GI fundamentally distort the growth and function of the human personality. No one has the right to tell another what SO+GI to express, and no society has the right to impose any strictures on individual or collective SO+GI expression.

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Transhumans do not pursue a collective agenda. Rather, they find a few important principles on which they can agree and give everyone the freedom to work to realize these principles without uniformity of viewpoint or approach. By itself, unity without uniformity is the transcending method of conflict resolution, and those who will completely devote themselves to its honest application will find the power to achieve any true and loving purpose.

Transhumans, to be successful as a growing body of committed individuals for the indefinite future, will have to be guided, as a group, by some great vision of a transcendent goal that, once achieved, will justify the efforts of transhumans to bring it into existence.

An initial step towards such a goal is to reach towards a position of unity among all trans- that necessarily recognizes the commonality of our desire to enhance our experience of life by the rational development and utilization of scientifically based technology.

I am a transhuman. I believe the time has come for the transgender community to recognize that we are each individually transhuman ourselves. As such, we are the natural successors to the human, hence the current social and economic warfare against us by those who are scared of the consequences of accepting the human transformation. We refute the foolish myths on which much of modern society is built. But this is not an exclusive club. Anyone willing to reorder life priorities based on love rather than hate is becoming transhuman. All transfolk are transhuman by nature. Our goal should be to recognize these unifying transhuman qualities in our transgender selves and visibly express them through the example of our lives.

—Dan Massey

Still a Virgin? Bi and Trans Can Help YOU!

Bisexual Erotica 8th Century Japan

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español Once you admit to yourself that you and everybody else in the world is “queer,” you have to confront the question of how the human race will continue if everyone is either L, G, B, or T. And this raises the question of how “straight people” can or should contribute to a modern, sex-rad society.

Of course, some people will immediately think, “If there are no straights, there will be no kids.” Well, that thought is a symptom of the famous disorder of thinking called “bisexual erasure.” Oh, yes, bisexuals reproduce all the time, like rabbits. It is their nature. Try and stop them. And their kids are going to be kinky, too.

But this isn’t about reproduction. The LGBT community can easily repopulate the world with nice people if the assholes suddenly go missing. But this isn’t about the assholes, either. So who’s left? Isn’t the world divided into two great camps, the LGBT and the assholes?

I have heard rumors that there are a lot of non-LGBT people who aren’t assholes. While I know that if these nice non-LGBT people thought about it much, they would realize they are really LGBT too, I accept them in fellowship as our “allies,” our “fellow travelers.” But they seem to be capable of so much more if they would learn our ways and join our joy.

If you think about it, an absolutely straight M/F couple is composed of two homosexual virgins, just as an absolutely gay M/M or F/F couple is composed of two heterosexual virgins. Our society has its virgins of many types, depending on market conditions.

Bisexuals, by comparison, are not generally virgins of any obvious type. Their basic virginities have all been properly addressed and remediated. They no longer limit their affections to but one half of humanity. All are fair game. All who will come may come, come who may. Right away it seems the bi’s must be the salvation of humanity, showing the way to cure sex and gender exclusivity in the vast community of virgins.

So, although the “straight assholes” are useless to humanity, our virginal friends of each sex and each orientation, including all those “straight allies” can help us reinvent the world as we help them reinvent their erotic range and sensibility.

But we also all really “know better.” It isn’t really a matter of either/or, even though almost everything in our cultural legacy works that way. We are all really trans on a whole range of dimensions—that is, our erotic and personal selves may be defined by fixed or changing, focused or inclusive characteristics—and nothing requires that we limit our expression or experience to any particular range of sex, sexual orientation, social affinity, gender identity, gender expression, or gender orientation, etc. The better we understand these dimensions in ourselves, the better we are able to understand and love our fellows.

The Transgender community breaks free from the assumed cisnormative roles of Bisexuality. The very concept of transgender refutes the idea that the bisexual experience can ever be erotically complete. Sad to say, cisnormative bisexuals are just another kind of virgin, needing to be healed. They are virgins to the amazing world of the transnormative experience.

I can imagine a future society in which the marked dichotomy in the pubertal development of secondary sexual characteristics (characteristics not essential to the reproductive function, now obsolete in an era able to technologically control such biological signaling) is viewed as a hereditary developmental disorder that penetrates almost the entire human species.

While social and natural selection may drive our species towards a dichotomous androgyny, there is no reason interim technological adaptations cannot also be used. For example, if adolescents of either sex were to receive supplementary hormones appropriate to their gender deficiency, many of the problems of natural breast development (in xy persons) or natural penis development (in xx persons) seen later in life would be greatly relieved.

Physicians already regularly administer GnRH blockers and trans-hormones to adolescents who plan to fully transition. Why should such therapy be denied the rest who will surely desire the androgynous results of trans-hormone therapy as their experiences of love grow and they come to embrace the full spectrum of joy available to them?

In the library you will find my paper Why We Are All Transgender, which explores the reasons we understand that the general transgender identity is actually the destined endpoint of human sociosexual evolution.

—Dan Massey