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By Root 1891 0

hands down, is race. I think that was true in 1776,1876,1976, and I think that it’s true now. America is uniquely fucked up because of race. The peculiar institution of racially based slavery is essentially an American phenomenon. So, can you ignore race? Is there anything to race? Does race exist? Yes, obviously, some people have dark skin, some people have light skin, and social constructs have been built around that. Is the transgender movement basically all about bathrooms and who is going to piss where? Yes, but go back to Martin Luther King and before, what was the civil rights movement about? Getting rid of the whites-only and coloreds-only bathrooms, and everybody pisses in the same place.

So, as far as “is there anything to gender?” Let’s say that originally there weren’t very many Homo sapiens on this planet, and it was important that the reproduction rate be really high because of high infant mortality rates, medicine doesn’t exist, people are being trampled to death, et cetera. It’s that kind of world. I’m trying to make this funny, but I’m serious too. Now we’re in a world that’s overpopulated. There are too many people. Naturally, there’s going to be more homosexuality.

Are we [transgendered people] more of a percentage of the population? I don’t know. Are there more people with a propensity to gender variance? I don’t know. Are more people manifesting it? Yes!

I belong to all kinds of e-mail groups, conspiracy theorists, UFO [abductees], whatever. I’m no better than the rest of the nuts, but at least I have a sense of humor. But I also belong to something called the climate concern group. I’m one of the few non-Ph.D.s on that group. It’s a different thing from the UFOs and the “Lone Gunman” [theorists] and the other stuff, though that stuff is more fun. Anyway, actual scientific fact: there are more hermaphroditic polar bears than there used to be. There is a rise in hermaphroditism among arctic polar bears. I wasn’t looking for transgender stuff but I just happened to run into it. The same is true of several species offish in the Amazon River. There are all kinds of [transgendered and intersexual] animals. Maybe there are more transgender people because it was one of the unexpected results [of the scientific revolution]. Instead of the bombing of Hiroshima giving us Godzilla, it gave us me. Something is definitely happening. We can theorize about it, and I wish to hell that people would start theorizing about the scientific message, rather than [viewing transpeople as] signs of the end of the world foretold in the Bible.

I’m into science. I’m an avid science fiction fan. Something I’ve discovered … there’s only one thing that the trans community agrees on. We all love Star Trek. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. Among MTFs anyway. I think that the two professions that have the most transsexuals in them, in no particular order, are prostitution and computer geeks. There are two basic groups of transsexuals, the prostitutes and the computer geeks. And most of us are people like me who have been both. If they wanted to make Star Trek more realistic, one of the captains would say, “Damn it, the computer system is on the fritz again. Where’s the transsexual?” Am I right?

RUSTY: If they had really evolved, they wouldn’t say, “Where’s the transsexual?” They would’ve just had the transsexual come in and fix the computer. Star Trek is so popular with transpeople because they accept, without even thinking about it, all these weird-looking people. This total variation, no question asked.

Q: That’s also true of certain kinds of rock and roll, isn’t it? You can be any thing you want to be onstage, and no one bats an eye.

CHELSEA: I want to say something about music, because it’s something that gets ignored. Music helped me come out. Lou Reed’s Transformer album, okay, helped immensely. [iVngs] “Holly came from Miami FLA / Hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A. / Plucked her eyebrows on the way / shaved her legs and then he was a she.” Later on, I actually met Holly Woodlawn, after I was out.

The New York Dolls