Gender Wars History Series: Transvestite and Transexual Liberation

An early example of trans insanity

As I’ve shown in my other posts for this Gender Wars History Series and much of my writing for The Distance, many of the arguments and demands of the trans movement are nothing new. The difference is that today they have scaled to society at large. I also maintain that this movement arose concurrently with the gay rights movement, not as a direct result of it.

Another historical example which demonstrates my position is a page from volume 1, issue 8 of the Detroit Gay Liberator, published on January 1, 1971. It provides an early overview of how “transsexuals” viewed women and womanhood as well as demands that they continue to make (and many of which have been fulfilled) today.

The page begins with an odd diatribe from a “transexual” named Pat Maxwell.

Maxwell writes that both assertive male and receptive female roles have been constructed by men. When most men “feel receptive,” they live out their desires by using women “as their dolls.”

According to Maxwell, “man’s transsexual fantasies are endless,” but it is only the transsexuals who take responsibility for these desires and become women. He argues that this comes from an “affirmation” of his “woman role” rather than a scorn for real women (yeah, right).

In fact, when a man “becomes” a woman (by magic, I guess?) he suddenly feels the total weight of chauvinist oppression (because the experience of being a woman is comparable to a man who gets strange looks because he is wearing ill-fitting women’s clothing).

Maxwell then seems to reduce sex roles to clothing choices, writing about how he dressed up in all sorts of different types of costumes as a child because he “wished to try out both sex roles.”

Then comes this hilarious assertion:

When a man in our society grows his hair long, puts on a dress, and walks among us, she is in effect giving up his male privilege. She is not oppressing women, she is threatening men! The queen is the lavender menace to the male chauvinist.

A man who grows his hair long and puts on a dress may face threats from other men in certain places, but there is hardly a better example of “male privilege” than that man’s ability to declare himself to be a woman.

(The actual Lavender Menace, by the way, was a group of radical lesbian feminists.)

Maxwell asserts that women will only cease to be sex objects when all men are able to cross this sex role boundary, which is hilarious because most of the men who seek to cross it do so specifically because of sexual desire.

The Gay Liberation movement, he says, should also affirm and not deny “the transexual in all of us.”

This odd essay is followed up by another section titled “Transvestite and Transsexual Liberation.”

It begins by noting that transvestites and transsexuals are oppressed by both homosexuals and heterosexuals and explains that “trans lib” began in the summer of 1969.

Then we are treated to a list of demands, which readers will recognize are similar to what the trans movement is still demanding now, 50 years later.

Note the particular demand to do away with any safeguarding for transition and for the state to freely provide hormones and surgery, no questions asked. This is essentially the point many Western countries reached before some (thankfully) began to walk it back.

What’s particularly interesting to me is that as far as this list of demands goes, it is still in many ways rather conservative by today’s standards. For example, it argues that only those who have made a full anatomical transition should be able to obtain full cross-sex identification. Today, we’ve gone much further with sex self-identification.

After the list of demands is a short section that declares “we share in the oppression of gays and we share in the oppression of women.”

In a refreshing bit of honesty, the section admits that a great majority of transvestites are heterosexual and that many post-operative transsexuals are heterosexual as well.

With many in the public at large still assuming that “trans women” are just gay men, the fact that this is largely not the case and, as admitted by trans activists themselves, has never been the case, cannot be stressed enough.

Unfortunately, this effort to force team the trans movement with the gay and feminist movements continues to this day, more fervent than ever.

The trans movement was born out of a hijacking of real liberation movements by men who wanted greater freedom to openly live their fetish. Today, it has morphed into something much greater and more pervasive, capturing even more segments of society. Nevertheless, “trans liberation” as declared here, is about these men’s desire to subsume the female for their own sexual ends.

“Only a man can be a woman!” as Maxwell writes, is perhaps the best summary and truest statement ever said about what “trans liberation” really has been from the beginning.