How would you react to finding out you were making out with a transsexual?

[Yonadav]

Can't you be considered a transsexual if you identify as a genderfluid person with a vagina?

This just all seems a bit bizarre to me. I disagree that kissing someone without telling them what your genitals look like is sexual assault, but I don't know what that has to do with his sexuality.

Honestly Shell, there are a lot of understandings of what a transsexual is or isn't. But it is generally a taboo within transgender circles to try to shame someone over our personal prejudices about it, especially when we just do it because we are angry at them for disagreeing with us about something. For example, I have a personal prejudice toward those who self identify as non-operative transsexuals. For me, a transsexual is someone who has a gender identity problem that only a blade can fix. I generally don't say that out loud though, because every single transgendered person is vulnerable to some sort of personal attack. And I don't feel strongly enough about it to start a shooting war where everyone has a big bullseye painted on their backs. I would never tell TaraJo that she isn't really a transsexual, especially in light of her very strong feelings about not wanting to be with people who want her to do anything with the penis that she so clearly despises. So my prejudice isn't really directed at people like her. It's oriented more toward 'shemales' who like having penises and like using them.

I tell people that I project a binary sense of gender identity because I live in a society that has a binary understanding of gender. As a younger person before surgery, I would have eagerly taken a magic pill that would have just given me a normal sense of gender identity. I wanted to be a man who identified as a man. Or a woman who identified as a woman. But I identified as a woman and I had a male body. And the penis was just altogether too much. That thing had to go. So I got surgery, and I am glad that I did. I just couldn't live in peace with that penis. I hated it with a passion.

So after surgery I got on with my life pretty well. I was lucky, because I was rather attractive. People gushed about how much I looked exactly like Commander Susan Ivanova from Babylon 5. I didn't like men. My hatred of the penis that I had gotten rid of pretty much extended to all penises. I was fairly well accepted by gay women. I even coupled up with one for several years. Over the years, I actually did have some interesting straight men become pretty sweet on me. They were usually divorced men about two years out from their divorce. One of them I might have actually been interested in, had I not been in a relationship with a woman at that time. Hooking up with a man just never happened. Once I got over my hatred of men, it was sort of possible that I could consider a relationship with one. But I'm really, really picky with men.

The living as a man thing was sort of an accident. As a woman I didn't doll myself up very much. And I was always comfortable in jeans and a flannel shirt, which I looked pretty good in as a woman. I started to get interested in the religion of my people. I got sucked into it pretty heavy. No one told me that I had to live as a man if I was going to be religious. But I was poignantly aware that Jewish law says that you are always the gender that you were born as, and that it is prohibited for a man to wear women's clothing. At first, I dealt with it by attending services in the women's section of the shul, but wearing pants. That was sort of difficult, because Orthodox Jewish women do not wear pants to shul. So I was the only woman wearing pants. I was welcome there by the other women. But they did wonder why I didn't wear a proper skirt.

After a few months, I talked to my Rabbi about putting on men's clothing, cutting my hair, and attending services in the men's section. He consulted with his Rav, and his Rav ruled that it would be most appropriate for me to do that. So I cut my hair, got some proper male clothes, and started attending services with the men. My goal wasn't to stop being a transsexual. It wasn't to self identify as a man. It was just to comply with Jewish law. And it had been completely my idea to try it.

It was nothing like how much I had hated it when I had that super hated penis. It was a lot more tolerable. I didn't really think of myself as a man. But playing the role was now tolerable-- and even sort of fun. As far as I'm concerned, I am a woman who has been handed to role of playing a man and I enjoy playing my part.