Stupid Transphobic Dickhead, er, Douche, er, Person

Rob Tisinai

August 14th, 2014

My genetics gave me terrible vision. I’ve never met anyone with correctible vision worse than mine. Over the years, I’ve had three surgeries involving scalpels slicing into my eyes, and four surgeries with lasers burning flesh off the surface of my eyes.

Does that make you cringe? I don’t blame you. But at least now I don’t have to poke rigid plastic lenses onto my eyeballs, lenses I could only wear for a few hours at a time, with the only alternative being glasses that made me literally unrecognizable to people back in the days before fancy polymers made coke bottle lenses obsolete.

Even that milder, eye-poking option may have made you scrunch your eyes shut in irrational self-protection. I don’t blame you. I’m not offended. I realize that your visceral response — while quite natural — is not a moral revelation of condemnation against my situation.

By the way, I’m an XY person. I have a penis, and I’ll protect it. If a dozen tennis balls were launched at me simultaneously, I’d cover my eyes with one hand and my flesh-and-blood balls with the other. As just as you might have scrunched up when reading about my eyes, I’d fold inward and cross my legs when hearing about a woman having her balls cut off.

Yes, a woman having her balls cut off.

An ass named Gavin McInnes has published a long, disgusting rant called “Transphobia is Perfectly Natural.” I won’t link to it. Google it if you like. I call it disgusting because it does nothing but play into the same squeamishness you may have felt when I talked about scalpels cutting in to my eyes. His reasoning argument rant goes mostly like this. He says (sarcastically):

In fact, the only thing more normal than castrating yourself and taking tons of hormones to grow tits is chopping them off.

He’s squeamish, fine. His moral failing, though, is that he raises that squeamishness to level of moral truth. He writes:

By pretending this is all perfectly sane, you are enabling these poor bastards to mutilate themselves.

And in case that wasn’t dickish enough – I mean, douchey enough — God, even our most basic insults revolve around genitalia! And in case that wasn’t repugnant enough (odd that genitalia stand in as synonyms for repugnance, isn’t it?), he even jokes:

And ladies, if you’re a butch lesbian, you’re a lady with a lot of testosterone. Put a dick on a belt and fuck your girlfriend. You don’t need to turn your vagina inside out. You’re not a man. You don’t even know what Turf Builder is.

Not only is the joke lame — really? fertilizer is your symbol of manhood? you might want to take a Freudian look at your own sexuality — but it’s built on ignorance. Being a strong, powerful lesbian does not mean you identify as a man. Wanting to lie back and get reamed doesn’t mean I identify as a woman.

But this person, this Gavin McInnes, has set himself up as a little god. His clenched up little reactions have the force of moral law. But you know what, Gavin? It is perfectly natural for an XY person who identifies as male to clench up when he thinks about a knife cutting up his dick. But that’s not transphobia. Transphobia is when you take your personalized genital clenchiness and turn it into a Great Commandment for the rest of the world. That’s not natural. That’s not brave. That’s not ballsy. That’s just narrow-minded megalomania.

Damn, I don’t know why this pisses me off so much. It just does.

Mark F.

August 14th, 2014

Well, all I have to add is that you must be going through a lot of suffering to feel that you need to have the sort of surgery and hormone treatments that many transsexuals get. Especially when you have various body parts (which I happen to enjoy) amputated. I don’t “get” feeling that you are a woman trapped in a man’s body, but then I don’t get being sexually attracted to women either. But I can respect your choices.

Spunky

August 14th, 2014

I Wikipedia’d this guy. He looks like a giant media troll–half his stunts involve faking something terrible fooling people into thinking they’re real)–and he isn’t worth anyone’s time.

enough already

August 14th, 2014

I just don’t get it. Why on earth would anyone feel the need to criticize someone for choosing to bring their physical anatomy into alignment with their actual gender?
It just doesn’t make sense to me. At. All.

Eric Payne

August 15th, 2014

Rob,

I guess I’m just a simple kind of guy — to me, someone is the gender that tell me they are, and (in my dealings with them), that’s that. I’ve always been that way.

I also understand the uncomfortability a person can have with their own body, especially when that uncomfortability is based on something immutable, or changeable only through expensive surgical procedures.

You’ve, obviously, dropped quite a load of cash into your eyes over your lifetime. Without slipping too much into the psychological, I’d wager as a child you had parents who reacted entirely differently over your ocular issues and — outside of treatments to thwart the threat of actual blindness — chose a singular treatment for you: glasses. Thick, heavy, hey-everybody-look-at-me-and-laugh black plastic-framed glasses.

My issue is my back. When she was pregnant with my older sister (older than me by exactly one year; my birthday is Sunday, hers is Monday), my 18-year old mother was placed on Thalidomide by her doctor in Crab Orchard, WV (yee haw!). My sister was fine. But with every successive birth, the babies had interior difficulties.

Mine were the most severe. The vertebrae of my spine did not fully form nor separate. I do not have a neck — my head literally sits atop my shoulders. It’s an effort to stand up straight, even as an adult; I still tend to slouch, and the way I tend to stand, naturally, makes it appear I am hunchbacked. At birth, my head was huge. My heart was weak, my lungs under developed.

This being 1959, and medical science being what it was, my parents were told I was a “classic Mongoloid” (yes, that was an actual, clinical diagnosis, then), and it would be best to just put me away, and try again.

Instead, they took me home. My father created his own little “therapies” for me that worked… though some of them, today, would be considered child abuse… like building a special crib insert for me; a wooden Hal-box, just my length and width, I was placed in, on my back, and strapped down to, snugly, to “straighten” my spine. Or frames that kept my legs locked in place (no bending of the knees) when it came time to learn to walk. I’m not sure what therapy my father might have devised if my mental capacity was limited — perhaps his own little “Clockwork Orabge” set-up, where the television was replaced with flash-cards, I guess.

But my physicality never changed. At the age of 5, I got sent off to kindergarten to begin my interaction with the world… and have been an object of public derision ever since.

Sunday, I’ll be 55. It took a lot of years and a lot of crying and hiding before I became comfortable with my body. And while I have a healthy “fuck them” attitude to persons who make neck jokes (both to my face and behind my back… if, on Monday, a doctor would tell me about some surgery that would “fix” my spine, and give me that extra three-to-five inches between my shoulders and ear lobes… I’d give it some serious consideration,

Victor

August 15th, 2014

By even informing BTB acolytes that Gavin McInnes exists you have given him infinitely more power than he deserves. A person like this is best dispatched with a single sentence sent directly to them – not in a fashion that gives them any of the public opprobrium that they take as approbation.

Ben in Oakland

August 15th, 2014

It takes far more courage to stand up as a trans person, and far more courage to stand up as a gay person, and far more courage for a man to put on a dress and high heels, then it takes to be hetero white male and type anti-people screeds from the safety and anonymity of a computer screen somewhere in majorityland.

Sharon B

August 16th, 2014

Maybe if Mr. McInnes woke up dickless tomorrow, and with a vagina and enlarged breasts, but otherwise unchanged, maybe, just maybe he’d start to get it.

Naw, he’s just a braindead, empathy starved, publicity hounding ass-hat. The effort would be wasted.

Jay

August 17th, 2014

I don’t quite understand why you are not coming to the defense of Gavin McInnes, since he has now been fired or suspended. Free speech and all that. Or do you only defend the free speech rights of people like Brandon Eich who experience backlash for their actions that hurt gay people?

Since you signed the infamous letter asking for Eich’s reinstatement, you have missed out on the opportunity to defend the LA Clippers owner as well.

Spunky

August 19th, 2014

In his defense of Brandon Eich, Rob explained that he had no confidence in Donald Sterling as an owner.

Not that I’m siding with Rob on that issue–I was happy to see both men go. But he didn’t defend Sterling (or Phil Robertson, for that matter).

But anyway, McInnes’ company was facing boycotts if it didn’t punish him–I think even free speech advocates would understand the predicament.

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