The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [84]
CHELSEA: Right. Transsexual is the least weird thing about me. I happen to be a transsexual. Aside from that, I’m way the fuck out there. So you’ve got that generation and then you’ve got the generation that Riki Wilchins represents, a generation that coincided in time, and then had a reaction to, that lesbian feminist crap from the seventies and eighties.
Q: What about the whole feminist attack on transwomen in the seventies?’ What was that all about?
CHELSEA: We met Janice Raymond. The short story is that Rusty came out to her minister in the Methodist Church. The minister said, “Take Chelsea out and shoot her. Just shoot her. She doesn’t have the right to live.” Then he said, “Read Janice Raymond’s book.” So I met this Janice Raymond. We were at this reading at some women’s bookstore. The thing is that Janice Raymond was wearing a pair of alligator Texas boots, a pair of jeans with an armadillo belt buckle, a cowboy hat, like “Howdy, Tex.” But she’s anti-trans?
RUSTY: She was definitely gender variant in the way that she dressed.
CHELSEA: Why the hell did anybody publish that thing [Raymond’s book, The Transsexual Empire Compare and contrast that book with The Turner Diaries, with the Unabomber’s Manifesto. She’s definitely out there with the rest of the crazies. Is it an exaggeration to compare Raymond’s book to Mein Kampf}
RUSTY: But the problem is that book has been quoted again and again and again and used as the basis for legislation. It’s like the role of Johns Hopkins. People have quoted to me over and over again this idea that “you must be wrong, because Johns Hopkins stopped doing transsexual operations.” They were the first university hospital to do the surgeries and they got a lot of press. Their decision to stop doing that surgery had tremendous impact.
CHELSEA: But getting back to Janice Raymond. You look at the first wave of that lesbian feminist crap. Robin Morgan used to hang out and smoke pot with Abbie Hoffman and me. She was part of all that. But then she went on to that “the new left is sexist” stuff. Eventually they [lesbian feminists] started to write history like ground zero was 1974, which I believe was the year that they reached critical mass and their dogma was canonized. It was coming together before that, but that was when they had their version of the Nicene Council to do the official canon. This is where the basic tenets of the faith were agreed upon. So they took ’74 as the cutoff point and if it happened before 1974 it didn’t happen.
The second wave of feminism was happening at the same time as the Black Power movement. Certainly there was an extreme in the Black Power movement, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and that whole mentality was the feminist version of the same thing.
You know what opened my eyes? I had finally figured out that I was transsexual. I had started taking hormones and started living as a woman. I figured out that I am bisexual too. Of course that’s a problematic word because it implies that there are only two genders, but you know what I mean. I figured out a lot of things about myself. But one of the things it took me a long time to figure out, trying to find myself, was that a large percentage of the so-called lesbian feminists were political lesbians, lesbians for political reasons, but not because they were sexually attracted to other women.
There’s a stereotype that I question that’s been around since the fifties, that lesbians must hate men. In my experience lesbians tend not to want to sleep with men, but they tend not to hate men. After all, if you look at the traditional lesbian things—trucks and hot rod cars and guitars are cool. The lesbians weren’t saying, “We hate men because they do those things;” they were saying, “We want to play with those toys too.” A reasonable point of view.
Q: That brings up a broader question, of course. What is gender anyway? Is there anything to gender?
CHELSEA: Is there anything to race? You saw the movie Bulworth? Bill Bradley said the biggest problem in the United States,