Went to the sex doc thing on Tuesday, again: 3 FTM trans-sexuals.

On Tuesday I went to the sex doc thing again, this time on the story of three female-to-male transsexuals ("FTM") in the process of readying for breast-removal surgery.

The doc was solid but nothing special, but one of the film-makers showed up, and like always, that quashed the conversation. She was this fedora-wearing earringed woman with a unisex name ("Sam") whose partner was a "he", and she called herself "gender queer"... As my one Kuwaiti friend's sister who's also my friend who's been going to this says, "I feel like I need a dictionary and a class in gender studies to even begin talking to these people," and then she added that she felt that of all the gender-queer people she's met who've come to the film series, like 2/3 have been in search of an issue, and they all seem to be trapped in this adolescent "searching for an identity and an attitude" mode.

Anyhow, the filmmaker asked the BDSM activist hostess if she could start out by asking a question, and so she asked everyone to go around in a circle and say what pronouns people should use, and that many people try to use "zee" and "heer" for gender-neutral 3rd person pronouns. This automatically put everyone on the spot, so everyone went around and agreed with her and said "zee" and "heer", but when it got to me, I said "they" and "them" and "themself", since we use those pronouns anyways in English conversation to talk about an unknown someone whose gender we don't know.

In terms of audience, there were a lot of trans-gender people at the meeting, and one, this college MTF who was thin but with a broad mannish face who said he'd been on estrogen therapy for a month, and that many people are uncomfortable with transgender people since they desire them, and that desire makes them uncomfortable.

Later, talking, me and my one Kuwaiti friend's sister who's also my friend agree that that's not really true, mostly it's because like 90% of them try to pass as the opposite gender and don't quite make it, so you're left with someone where you don't know if they want be a him or a her when you first meet them, but you don't know them well enough to ask, and you know in your heart that people will always treat them like freaks, and they tell themselves that "everyone desires us" story as a fairy-tale to make themselves feel better.

The filmmaker at one point, too, said that she had made the doc as her masters thesis in filmmaking at the New School in New York City, and that there was such a cool transgender community in New York where people would hold fundraisers at bars for each other every weekend, and that one time people even raised a fundraiser to send someone's dog to Australia.

Like my one Kuwaiti friend's sister who's also my friend said afterwards, there definitely was a "rich New York kid trying to pretend they're poor" feel to the filmmaker and the people in the film, and I said it would have been interested to follow along another New York FTM who wanted to undergo breast removal surgery but didn't have the money to make it, and to follow him and his feelings as his friends were able to go through with it, and she agreed that that would be interesting, and added that she could never live in New York for that reason, and she realized that again this weekend when she was visiting her cousin who lives there.

I did ask the filmmaker one question, how this one MTF in the film ("Keegan") felt about the massive scarring when her breasts were taken out, and then how did the one's girlfriend feel after, since she seemed hesitant.

The filmmaker looked at me and admonished me in front of the room and preceded her question by saying bluntly, "Keegan uses male pronouns" - something the BDSM activist hostess never would have done, she would have used that as a teaching moment! - and which made me realize that I had been thinking of Keegan as "she" all through the doc since as far as I can tell "Keegan" is a female name that her parents stuck her with along the lines of one of those 80s unisex names like "Madison" but for whatever reason she decided to keep during and after transitioning (though as I learned, transitioning is a lifelong process), which is kind of funny when you think about it, someone spends all these thousands of dollars to get their breasts out and be all manly, but then they're still stuck with this pussy-ass 80s girlie name.

Also, the filmmaker said that the girlfriend was fine with it, and that she tried not to focus on people's reactions to surgery since that's how most trans-sexual films are made, and it takes away the humanity of the person by focusing on the people around them.

(I think she selected me as her enemy for the night.)

The one interesting point from the evening is that feminists are uncomfortable with FTM trans-sexuals since if they can pass as male, they buy into a set of privileges associated with being male in society, and it's like they've found a way out of oppression, which made me wonder if that's true for black FTMs, since in many ways being a black male in white society is worse than being a black female, since police don't pull you over as much or you don't get followed around stores or you people don't cross over to the other side of the street as much if you're a black female.

Also, afterwards, me and my one Kuwaiti friend's sister who's also my friend were talking, and I was saying that when I was at the university pub with people from my program like last year, this one lesbian ph.d. student asked me if I knew this one really feminine-looking but apparently-male-identified queer Asian person who's friends with some people I had said hi to, since she was wondering if he had a vagina, since if he did, she'd be interested, since he was totally her type; and, anyhow, I went over, and that Asian guy's friends wouldn't tell me if he had male genitals even though he's male-identified, since he thinks "love should be about more than that" or "that's besides the point" or "he likes the mystery" or some bullshit like that, so I never found out, and when I got back and the lesbian student from my program asked me what he had since she was impatient and really wanted to know, I had to be even with her and be like, "I don't know, and they won't tell because he won't tell, and that's so fucked in the head not to tell you, that I wouldn't even bother trying to find out, because on some level that's just totally out of it."

And, my one Kuwaiti friend's sister who's also my friend agreed to my response.

Overall, though, I think there's a lot of frustrating misguided idealist issues around trans-sexuals, and for some reason it draws a reaction from me quite consistently.