Caitlyn Jenner’s transition has become a reality-show circus. Years ago, she would have been called transsexual, but today it’s “transgender.” After four decades of male history — and as the patriarch of a $100 million dynasty — we’ve watched Caitlyn sell her story to the world for really good money, the kind of money few trans women will ever have. It could buy a lot of love and acceptance, thus smoothing the road of transition.
In 39 years, I’m rarely asked about dealing with disclosure. I have not seen my father since August 1975 when I visited him in Ohio on his 53rd birthday, five months before my transition. My father and brother were never supportive of me. Dad was prepared to meet me with violence if I had gone to the funeral of my brother’s 12-year-old daughter, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered in July 1978, one year after my surgery.
He would eventually phone but never missed me enough to want to see me. There was always another new wife interfering with my attempts to reach him. I lost contact with him in 1994 when my mother developed Alzheimer’s, and I was her sole caregiver. I learned in 2010 that my brother had died while I was homeless in 2000, nine months after my mother had passed. It took until Christmas of that year for me to break through the Facebook block put there by my brother’s oldest daughter. She was the only one who could tell me that my father, at 88, was alive. But also she said that neither she nor my father ever wanted to see me again, and I knew she would block any effort to contact him.
My mother understood me when I told her I was born of a female mind in a male body, with a neurobiological imperative to attain a congruence of mind and body through surgery. Mom told me she had taken the hormone diethylstilbestrol to save her pregnancy with me from an infection. Studies have shown that this may have a critical effect on fetal brain development.
I found acceptance early in the progressive atmosphere in Women’s Studies classes at Santa Ana College in 1979. After Dr. Renee Richards’ story broke in 1976, lesbians and feminists turned against transsexual women. My career and life were ruined when I encountered extreme hatred from gay men and lesbians. I couldn’t even find a woman mentor after 1981. I never received my doctorate in counseling psychology at USC. I fell into despair, isolation and homelessness for almost 20 years.
After 1993, gay men and lesbians colonized, annexed, assimilated and homogenized a wide variety of “gender variant” people into the LGBT, labeling us all as “transgender.” They intended to own and control all sexual minorities, even those they didn’t consider to be truly gay or lesbian.
However, inclusion was never meant for transsexual women. The only “transgender” women welcome were the male-bodied partners of gay men, women who have a high rate of infection and death by HIV/AIDS.
If we are heterosexual women, we are not interested in or by gay men. If we are lesbians, lesbians do not accept us as real women. What are we doing in the LGBT?
They’ve eradicated the word transsexual, because they don’t want surgery, and don’t want us to have it. They resent us because it pressures them to change sex as our happiness makes them feel inferior.
My mother never understood why a woman in mind would want to keep a male body. How could I explain Caitlyn Jenner to my father when she transitioned so late? I was desperate to have surgery, while Caitlyn seems not to be. Some “transgender” women assert a right to incongruence, to act like a woman but to keep male sexual anatomy and functioning. They say “Sex is between the legs, gender is between the ears.” I tell them the next time they have sex to “Stick it in your ear!”
My transition ended in 1977, and I haven’t “transed” since. I have found acceptance as a respected woman among women in a feminist community. It’s just not a lesbian, transgender or lgbt kind of acceptance. I am able to make a difference in the lives of people, and I have been able to give back to a community that has given so much to me.
Teresa Reeves is an advocate working for homeless and transsexual rights, a writer and editor with Women’s Housing Equality & Enhancement League since 2008 and Antioch University’s Women’s Education Program since 2006. She joined the Real Change Editorial Committee in 2009, and she was elected to the Real Change Board of Directors in 2012.