Male, Female, Other
Richard O’Brien
Richard O’Brien sounds like my kind of guy … or gal … or sentient being. The creator of The Rocky Horror Picture show was recently and quickly quoted as being in agreement with the statements of Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries. To catch anyone up to speed who wasn’t paying attention, Greer (an Australian Feminist) and Humphries (aka Dame Edna) do not think that a trans woman can be a woman no matter what they do to make themselves a woman. In the eyes of these folks you can chop, lop, detach, enhance, and hormone therapy your way to womanhood but it will never make you A Real Girl.
Richard thinks you can’t be a woman, just an idea of a woman. I read further into O’Brien’s comments and of course found myself understanding what he was trying to say. Richard considers himself 70% male and 30% female. He’s a lot like myself where he doesn’t desire to transition or really do much about it. He does wish he could tick an “Other” box on gender forms instead of “M” or “F.” In a brash and insulting way Richard has said something I’ve been saying for years. Who wants to be a man or a woman when there are so many better things we could be?
I have always had a problem with people thinking they are deformed freaks of nature. I hate the part of society which tells people that they were born “wrong” and it must be corrected. I don’t like all of the time people waste within preciously short lives in order to haunt themselves with their genetics and then spend even more time “correcting” the issue.
I grew up feeling like I was a deformed freak of nature for society told me so. I got to wade through being unacceptable on so many levels, including that of a transgender level. All of that time wasted with the knife to my throat when I could have just lived. I spent enormous amounts of time lost in lamentation only to come out the other side realizing I was perfect from the start.
This is the part of the story where I tell you that I don’t have a problem with someone obtaining gender reassignment surgery. The problem I have is how long it all takes. The problem is what coming to the decision does to a person. It’s about what They make you go through just to be a person. If I want to be something then I should be able to be it straight away. The hoops that people are made to jump through just because they want to alter themselves — for whatever reason — is a stupid disgrace to individuality.
Your gender reassignment should not be a correction. It should be an addition, an upgrade, a new coat of paint to the drab flesh suitcase. There was nothing wrong with you to begin with. There’s nothing wrong with you. There was never anything wrong with you. You were great just the way you were, but if transition makes you feel better then go ahead and transition, because you’ll still be just as great.
It’s silly to make such a big deal out of all of this. It’s silly and that’s where I agree with O’Brien. We spend all of this time bickering over this way or that way, when neither way really helps us much as evolving human creatures.
The piece quoting O’Brien had him concluding, “I wish we would see ourselves as members of a sentient race of beings and be nice to each other as human beings as opposed to male or female.”
That’s where I stand. We worked so hard to dye our hair, plump our lips, lop off our breasts, surgically transform genitals; When we could have been becoming extra terrestrials. We could have been loving each other. We could have been combining our forces and exploring Outer Space. Instead we wasted all of this time fighting for an Inner Space we had hold of from the beginning.
It’s amazingly stupid to me that we are born squirming lumps of flesh and die squirming lumps of flesh. It begins and it ends. It happens to everybody. The lucky ones can knock out 100 year spans. It’s all pretty cut and dry. Yet what we have all chosen to do with those spans is quarrel about more labels and what we decided to do with our current and extremely temporary flesh.
We could have changed the world, but all we were concerned with was our bits and pieces. Let’s change the bits we want quickly and with acceptance so we can take the rest of our time changing the world for the better.
Category: Transgender Opinion
About the Author (Author Profile)
The Artist D is a true raconteur and provocateur! He has been performing online since the mid 1990s. A relic from the cam show age before MySpace was any space. Author of In Bed with Myself, an autobiographical tale of transgenderism and Internet celebrity. Executive Editor of Fourculture Magazine and host of the Kawfeehaus podcast.Subscribe
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This is a good article, with sentiments agreeable, especially, to transgender people.
The quote by O’Brien, “I wish we would see ourselves as members of a sentient race of beings and be nice to each other as human beings as opposed to male or female”, is interesting, but he’s expressing a wishful fantasy.
Put another way, he’s saying “I wish we would see ourselves ~ONLY~ as…human beings as opposed to male or female.” We already do see each other as fellow humans in many instances irrespective of sex but to pretend that there aren’t two distinctive and profoundly important subsets of human physiology is not rational.
Things are complicated by the two immensely powerful sexual drives – opposite but complimentary – but not everything is sex, or even gender. When I’m interacting with my sister or my good female friend, there is no sexual tension and, although I’m aware that they are ‘girls’, I can still have a productive conversation with smart, funny people.
Another point: transsexuals clearly do believe there is ‘something wrong’ with them, or they wouldn’t want/need to change ‘it’. We can advise them that they are ‘ok, just the way you are’ but they need that body modification to live in harmony with their soul.
Science and technology is moving toward the day when such changes are routine, via nanotechnology, gene editing etc. In such a future, we transgender folks won’t have to wait for reincarnation to have the bodies we long for, we’ll just take the nano-pill. 🙂