transphobia.

A long series of deliberate misidentifications by gay activists, as in Calpernia Addams' case, have led to tensions between gay activists and TG/TS people. The misidentifications have also caused further social isolation and invisibility of transgender people. Furthermore, many prominent gay men such as writer Jim Fouratt, and many prominent feminists such as Germaine Greer and Janice Raymond, are highly transphobic and have publicly worked against efforts to reduce discrimination against TG/TS people.

Fouratt is infamous among TG/TS people for his conflation of transgenderism and homosexuality, for equating gender transition to "anti-gay reparative therapy", and for writing that post-op transsexual women are really just "misguided gay men" who've undergone surgical mutilations.

Greer is notorious for her strident opposition to "sex changes" and for embedding transphobia into traditional "feminist theory". Her strange anger about the very existence of transsexual women is so profound that it prompted her (and thus other feminists) to engage in witch hunts to "out" and publicly defame post-op TS women during the 1980's and 90's (including physicist Rachel Padman at Cambridge University).

Raymond (a professor at Univ. of Mass.) is widely known in lesbian feminist circles for her deeply transphobic book "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male", a book which informed much of early feminist thinking about transsexual women. In it she condemns MtF "sex changes" as a "male conspiracy to create artificial women who will cater to male sexual fantasies". She then goes on to pillory transsexual women as tools of patriarchy for upholding stereotypes of women. A second printing of this highly transphobic book in 1994 has been adopted in feminist and women's studies courses in many large universities, and it too is now furthering the stigmatization of transsexual women among a new generation of "academic feminists" in U.S. universities.

The ongoing public rants of folks like Frank, Fouratt, Greer and Raymond have helped embed a knee-jerk type of transphobia into older-generation gay, lesbian and feminist culture, to the point where it's politically-correct in those circles to be "opposed to transgender and transsexual transitions" if one is a "well-informed" gay, lesbian and/or feminist person.

This stance is deeply confusing to young MtF transsexual girls who are often very liberated in their thinking (and thus quite 'feminist' in nature), and among whom there are many who are lesbian in their corrected gender. It will take years of outreach to TG/TS women from younger spokespersons in the gay, lesbian and feminist communities in order to counter the lingering effects of all this past stigmatization.

Along yet another axis, many other gay and lesbian thought leaders are trying to "normalize" the image of gay and lesbian people. Wanting gays to seem just like "everyone else", they want to eliminate old stereotypes that gays "look like transgender people". Unlike the gay activists who claimed that Calpernia Addams was a "gay man", these people don't want to claim "trans victims" as their own - nor do they want to be identified in any way with "trans people". This trend is increasingly stigmatizing transgender people within portions of the gay community, in a manner similar to the stigmatization of gays by heterosexual crossdressers. Miranda Stevens-Miller, a prominent trans-activist from Chicago, has written eloquently about how this trend further isolates and stigmatizes trans people.



'femenist uni's' - how is this even allowed?

Social movements emerge within many organizations and institutions, but there are relatively few studies of how such movements arise, impact institutions, and maintain themselves. This paper examines the growth of feminism within McGill University, describing how the women’s movement has changed the university since the 1960s and established organizational habitats within the institution. Important outcomes of feminist activism include the creation of women’s studies and a women’s research center, benefits for women faculty, staff and students, and changes in the campus culture. The larger women’s movement, changes in the larger society, and national organizations were important to victories won within the institution. Feminists within the university have links to the larger women’s movement community and have contributed to the larger women’s movement. The movement within the university is subject to some of the same problems as the external movement.


even in Norway + Sussex! fair enough women should be treated as equals to men but to create a university and brainwash young minds against men and that when people transition from male to female their not really female and shouldn't be classed as one. wrong. wrong. wrong.