We as transgendered people ask the lesbian and gay communities the following questions: Why have you for gotten our common history? Why are you, like your straight counterparts, so uptight about gender? Are you so desperate for civil rights that you will sell out the very people who, historically, faced the most police violence and harassment? And although some of you here today can say the mantra of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans gender,” what have you done for transsexual liberation?
In 1973, homosexuality was removed from the list of psychiatric disorders, a move which was hailed as a sig nificant victory for the modern lesbian and gay move ment. We need to celebrate these moments, but we must also think about their repercussions. In 1980,transsexuality entered the same list of psychiatric disorders from which homosexuality was removed. Currently psychiatrists decide who is a “real” transsexual and who is not. If you are a male-to-female transsexual who loves other women, or a female-to-male who loves men, you must lie about your desire, and pretend to be heterosexual. This issue affects lesbians and gay men, you see, because psychiatrists only sanction transsexual men and women who are heterosexual. The battle with psychiatry is not over.
As bisexuals and transgenders, we have a great deal to teach the lesbian and gay communities — about alternate ways to organize our erotic lives, about honouring sex trade workers, about living our bodies as we choose. We struggle for a world with a thousand million sexualities and genders — an infinite combination of bodies and desires. There are no easy answers, and if it appears to be politically useful, we respond with the statement that our lives expose the limitations of those lines. Do not mistake fluidity for fickleness - we fuck gender and sexuality because they’re already fucked.
All of this means that as bisexuals and transgenders, we don’t just want to be included in some willy-nilly liberal rhetoric of “diversite,” “a queer family,” or “children of the rainbow.” We do not just offer new or different names to call oneself. We pose a fundamental challenge to the ways in which gender and sexuality are organized in this society. Just as lesbians and gay men refuse the narrow options of compulsory heterosexuality, we refuse to be trapped by a hetero/homo, man/woman split.
Bisexual and transgender activists demand more than having our names tacked onto the end of the phrase “lesbian and gay.” We are tired of being stuck at the end, and we are more tired of people saying these words in a meaningless way. We do not accept the liberal argument that we must fight for lesbian and gay rights now, and that, maybe one day in the future, other sexual and gender minorities will have their turn. We want it all, and we will settle for nothing less. This is not a utopian dream, this is a committed activist programme. In a world where transsexuals who are HIV-positive are denied sex-reassignment surgery, in a world with no useful AIDS education for bisexuals, and in a world where gender outlaws face the threat of physical assault daily, I for one cannot mobilize my energies to fight for same-sex RRSPs. Some of us non-heterosexuals face issues more pressing than the accumulation of capital; do not be fooled into thinking that the ballot box and the legal transfer of property equal “freedom.”
Ki Namaste, “Diver/cité: The Rhetoric of Liberalism”, in the zine Gendertrash From Hell #3
This is from a Canadian zine published in 1995 and was written in 1994. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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