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commitment to a certain way of treating oneself and other people, and the courage to oppose cruelty, greed, and inequity. Being different, and even being persecuted, is not the same thing as being a better person than anybody else.
    Transmen have the same potential to be radical feminists as any dyke. They have the same opportunity to work for a more just society. And they don’t necessarily have the protective blanket of heterosexual privilege or male privilege to keep them warm while they are out in the cold, cold world of trying to bring about radical social change. People who claim this have no inside knowledge about how the lives of transpeople really work.
    First of all, many of us never fully transition, and couldn’t even if we wanted to. There are abundant numbers of transgendered people who do not identify as male or female. Some of these folks call themselves genderqueer; others employ different terms like androgyne, psychic hermaphrodite, ungendered, gender resister, two-spirited, etc. Many of us who do identify as men or women, and would like to live full-time in those genders, can’t. The fact that we have gone through the wrong sort of puberty has given us bodies that can’t be altered enough by medical technology to pass. Or the socialization we had in the wrong gender has given us habits, mannerisms, ways of speaking or moving, that set off cisgendered people. Even if an MTF (male-to-female or transwoman) or FTM takes hormones, gets surgery, and legally changes her or his current identity, a paper trail leads back to the past. If you try to go stealth (start a new life in which you hide or deny your transsexual experience), you are vulnerable to being blackmailed or outed. We never know, if we make a friend or take a lover, whether we are letting somebody get too close and trusting the wrong person. Does that sound like any kind of “privilege” to you?
    Being out of the closet gives you peace of mind when it comes to being manipulated by a guilty secret, but cisgendered people just love to remind you that they would have known you were trans even if you kept your mouth shut. I don’t know why this is so important to y’all. God forbid a tranny get an hour or two to think about something else, like doing the dishes or reading the newspaper. An exlover of mine who worked as a bartender at a popular club for bears bitterly called this his “daily reminder.” It may be that trans liberation is motivated by much the same thing that led to the Stonewall Riots—the simple desire to be left the fuck alone.
    If I sound a bit raw, it’s because I am. I find this whole topic unbearably painful. I came out as a lesbian at age seventeen. By then, I had pushed my little boy so far down that I had almost forgotten the childhood arguments and ridicule that took place every time I told adults that I was not a little girl. Feminism, I thought, would cure me. I believed I only felt that way because a sexist society had taught me to hate being a woman. If I became a very strong and liberated woman, one who could do anything that men took for granted, and in fact beat men at their own game, I wouldn’t want to be a man any more. This repression was certainly aided by the fact that when I looked at the way most men lived, I was repulsed. Until I encountered the men’s leather community, I never saw men who might be role models or idols for me.
    So how am I, and how are you, to understand the three decades that I spent loving dykes, living in the lesbian community, and writing about the world from a queer woman’s point of view? I know that for many people, the political stances that I took were radical only as long as they were taken by a woman. It’s commonly believed that there’s nothing radical about a man defending pornography, for example. I’m sure Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, John Rechy, John Preston, Edmund White, Alan Dershowitz, and a bunch of ACLU