Friday, June 03, 2016
Appeal to Gay Militants: Would You Like to Send a Joint Message to Attack "Transgender/ed" Madness?
[Note: I initially conceived of this as an email to a friend and ally of DECADES, but realized he might be too busy to devote much time to the project I outline below. So I recast it as an appeal to other gay militants.]
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I have wanted, for weeks, since the world erupted in lunatic indignation about North Carolina's perfectly sensible and absolutely defensible law about people having to use the lavatory and locker room of their actual gender, to attack the insane reaction to that law, showing how good hearts have created appallingly bad public policy. But I get so ANGRY that I can't develop calm, reasoned argumentation. I thought perhaps you [the particular gay activist I originally had in mind] — of calmer head and more dispassionate editorial disposition — and I together could generate cogent points that will show dopy people the actually vicious nature of their insistence that crazy people should be left insane rather than encouraged to get help.
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We [my long-term activist friend and I] are very well positioned, thru our distinguished history in the gay-rights movement, to show people that there is a big difference between accepting that men can be powerfully attracted sexually, emotionally, and esthetically to men, and women could be similarly attracted to women, and the astonishingly insane notion that a woman can be a man or a man can be a woman — just because they want to be.
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I'd like to make points such as that people are wildly mistaken if they think that if only society adjusts to lunatics' delusions, deluded people would be happy, because good people want people to be happy. But lunacy does NOT equate with happiness. Rather, all lunatics are UNHAPPY, usually abysmally unhappy, and in many cases, nearly suicidally unhappy. If we want people to be happy, then, we must help free them from insane delusions that cannot ever make them happy but will always keep them MISERABLE. It is not society's rejection that makes them unhappy, but their own rejection of their own nature. At end, it really doesn't matter if all the world accepts you as something you are not if YOU don't accept yourself as what you ARE.
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That is where the organization I founded on April 1st, 1969 differed from EVERY OTHER "gay" organization during that turbulent time. I founded Homosexuals Intransigent! ("HI!"), as a single-sex, gay-male organization, not so much to change straight people's attitudes toward gay people as to change gay people's attitudes toward themselves and, crucially, each other. It was obvious to me that gay men's happiness depended upon each other, and upon accepting our nature and exulting in it. So when other organizations were demonstrating in the streets and sitting-in at newspaper or magazine offices, HI! was publishing materials (many of them still available today, online, and still enormously important, esp. for young gay men) that helped gay men accept themselves, appreciate each other, and come to realize that they had a FUTURE, if only they accepted it, with hope and optimism.
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We who are long-time gay activists need to show how a mistake we should have corrected decades ago, in accepting the bizarre notion that gay men and lesbian women are the same, and that we have to be "tolerant" of other "sexual minorities" — because we "are", after all, all "perverts" — resulted in the legitimacy of gay men's feelings spilling over to people who were never legitimate. We felt alone in the world, and cast about for allies who might work with us to do us some good. Alas, we chose our alliances badly, and the whole world, gay and straight alike, is suffering now from our refusal in the 1960s to disown "transsexuals" and "transgendered" people. Nostra culpa. Well, it's not exactly our fault, because neither I nor my organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, ever bought into the nonsense. But we didn't fite to end it either. That would have been rude, and gay men in those days wouldn't want to be seen as rude toward people who were willing to ally with us.
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I have always seriously doubted (no: actually and actively DISBELIEVED) that ANYONE really believes that they are of the opposite gender, because if they really believed something so insane they probably could not function in the real world in any regard. It would be like someone seeing the entire universe backwards, and trying to navigate, in such a thru-the-looking-glass universe, complicated further by its being upside-down, among the rest of us, who see everything right. But it might even be worse, as tho colors were reversed, and red traffic lites were blue, green were fuchsia, and on and on thru one distortion of reality after another. (I did not choose those colors at random but created hilited text in those initial colors, then hilited those texts again and thus actually saw their colors reversed in my word-processing program.)
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Madness is rarely self-limiting.
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I think we need to bring home to people the abusive nature of misguided laws and executive actions that now mandate that a locker room full of 30 men in various states of undress, and many of them completely naked, should have to tolerate a woman's walking into their midst as of right! The idea that men have to permit their sexual privacy to be DESTROYED and themselves to be sexually violated and humiliated, is absolutely unacceptable to any sane society, and only psychological castrati would tolerate that. Alas, the United States has become a completely castrated society. It seems to me that in the entire heterosexual-male population of the United States, there aren't THREE working balls. Do straight men enjoy being psychosexually castrated? Or would they like to feel themselves real men again?
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These are the kinds of arguments I think that we as gay men need to make to end the insane confusion among straight people about gender. It is bizarre that WE used to be confused, but now THEY are.
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I think someone, if not me alone or you [my friend] alone or both of us together, MUST send out such messages to places like the Letters columns of The New York Times, Washington Post, Psychology Today, and other major media. Or we could send a press release announcing our indignant opposition to the current politically-correct lunacy, electronically to dozens, or even hundreds, of major media, a list of which we could easily, but not necessarily in mere hours, generate, focusing first on the most prestigious and influential mass media (newspapers, intellectual magazines, television networks and news channels), and then moving on to include the newspapers of the WORLD'S best-regarded colleges, learned societies in the social sciences, etc.
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I am very indignant that gay men are being used by lunatics, in the form of absolutely invalid comparison, to justify self-destructive madness. I want crazy people to get help to free themselves from their mad delusions, which are assuredly (almost?) always sprung from gender confusion caused by gay and lesbian people's being raised to be the opposite of what they are.
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The astounding madness we see now is an unanticipated consequence of The Movement's refusal to tell gender-confused losers thru the many years since the very start of The Movement in 1950, that they are out of their minds and need help. We didn't tell them to put the hormone treatments aside. We didn't tell them forcefully enuf that there is no such thing as "sex-change" — or, more recently, "sexual reassignment" — surgery. We can take upon ourselves some of the blame for not helping enuf (tho of course I never accepted any of that crap, and always refused identification even with lesbians, whom we might regard as the mirror opposite of gay men; but opposites are not the same. Black is not white; left is not right; north is not south; and day is not night. I always understood that, and asserted it no matter how unpopular that made me among the sad, damaged losers who comprised the bulk of gay (and lesbian) people when we started our agitation for change.
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We need society to understand that the preponderance of gay people were always "damaged goods", people who were severely distorted, even twisted, just by being raised in what appeared to them to be an entirely heterosexual 'world', even universe, in which they could not ever have a "proper place". So the only way they could fit in was by reconceiving themselves as "women", and finding simpletons enuf who would accept, at least to their face, their insane delusions, as to "enable" them to "believe" the utterly unbelievable. Even when these "transsexuals" — or whatever fad term popped up — knew full well that they were NOT what they would have preferred to be; and even when they knew, in their "heart", that they would ACTUALLY much prefer to be who and what they were but with the right to seek relationships (if only one nite) with the men they wanted, without having to pretend to be women, they didn't have the integrity or "intestinal fortitude" to face down the bigots to be themselves.
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The further problem, of course, is that they understood that straight people did not mean to be mean in assuming that everybody was straight, and thus, out of consideration for straight people's tender sensibities, these sad, damaged gay men deformed themselves in preference to confronting straight people.
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It's like a comedy of errors, except that there is no laughter. Gay men didn't want to hurt the feelings of their parents, siblings, schoolmates, etc., etc., etc., so tried to jimmy their way into the affections of everyone around them by pretending to be, or pretending to believe themselves to be, what would make it easier for everyone around them to accept: that they were "really" women. I do not for an instant believe that they really believed that. It was always a knowing lie they hoped OTHER people would believe, tho they knew, themselves, that it was always and only a lie.
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In any case, you can see from the points I make above, the kinds of points I think SOMEBODY needs to make. We need to make straight people understand that their sympathies are seriously and hugely-destructively misplaced, and that when they sympathize with men who have been taught to hate their manhood, they are not helping but ATTACKING those men's quintessence, and "dissing" their manhood. The bulk of these simpletons never intended to attack and demean those sad, damaged people. But well-meaning but actually hugely destructive straight people need to be shown that what they SHOULD be doing is helping men who have been almost entirely stripped of their manhood, find it anew, assert it with pride, and, if they can't do that on their own, find the help they need to come to terms with their actual nature, and BE the men they ARE, biologically.
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What say you? Would you find it congenial to work together to try to SMASH the madness? This is an appeal to all sane gay people but esp. to distinguished personages in The Movement of the 1960's and 70's, to see if we can form a working group to undo the terrible damage that has been done by people's generalizing away from sane extensions of logic to INSANE extensions of ILlogic. Let me know your thinking.