Susan Striker wrote a well-thought rebuttal to the crap Avarosis Salon piece I wrote about a couple of days ago, that makes several of the points I was trying to make much more coherently:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/10/11/transgender/
Striker corrects Avarosis bullshit view of queer history, for one thing, and rightly calls him on the claim that trans-inclusiveness isn’t something being forced on the queer community “from above” as Avarosis has repeatedly tried to claim (apparently he’s really on a roll over on his own blog; I’m loathe to give the idiot the clicks, but some of the comments to Stryker’s piece on Salon are fairly telling).
I suspect, though, that what’s really going on here is that Avarosis is one of a long line of “straight-acting” gays who really wish the gay movement would get back to providing him with fuckable nuggets of appropriately butch, straight-acting man candy instead of peskily bothering with equality for queers Avarosis has no particular interest in sleeping with.
Fundamentally, this comes back around to the question of just what we really mean by equality. Straight acting fags assume that conditional tolerance is good enough, but that comes at the cost of genuinely supporting gender variant people (gay, bi, straight or otherwise) who can’t or won’t conform to social expectations of gender. You simply cannot claim to “support” the rights of transgendered and transsexual persons while simultaneously claiming that they’re expendable in your quest for “pragmatic” political action. There’s no such thing as a scarcity of justice (to steal and rephrase an excellent point from one of the Salon commenters). Justice for all means absolutely everybody, which is an idea that even conservative gays like Avarosis ought to get behind, but he (and they) won’t…because the dirty little truth here is that he simply doesn’t believe in justice for everybody.
babble 