A long time ago in a country far, far away, somebody wrote a book called “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male” that said a lot of mean and silly things that we don’t agree with. It was a bizarre conspiracy theory based in ignorance and hatred, and it’s full of such incredible misinforation that it’s very hard to take it seriously if you actually know anything about trannies at all.

The Michigan Women’s Music Festival has a policy that only “womyn born womyn” are womyn-ey enough to participate. Many years ago, they used to kick out any trans people discovered in the fest.

These days, many of the volunteers and the festival-goers just don’t hate trannies like they used to and they don’t support or enforce the womyn-born-womyn rule.

It remains official policy, however meaningless it has become, as a kind of symbolic “fuck you” from the transphobic woman who owns the festival to trans people everywhere.

Transition isn’t easy. To even reach the point where haters even notice that you’re trans, you’ve probably been fighting to live as a woman for some time.

Haters will say that you can never be a woman, that they don’t believe you’re really a woman, that you’re still a man as long as you have your penis or that you will always be a man because you had one once. They say it like they think they can stop you just by saying it. But they can’t, because you’re already way past that.

It seems a number of Americans don’t like the name of this website. They think tranny is a dirty word.

Some claim that the word “tranny” originated in the porn industry. It’s difficult to tell whether this is an urban legend, as there is no evidence either way. Obviously a diminunitive form such as this would likely have been coined by someone who either is trans themselves or deals with a lot of trans people (such as in the porn industry).

While being trans of any kind is still percieved as a bad thing, transsexual, tranny, shemale, heshe, trans, transgender, transvestite, etc will all be insults.

I refuse to treat my identity as a derogatory swear word.

Thirty years ago American homosexuals tried to identify offensive words like “queer” and “queen” and only use non-offensive words like “gay”. In an impressive feat of cultural imperialism they convinced Australian homosexuals to do it too even though the word that Aussie homos used for themselves at the time, “camp”, was really not that grave an insult. But in the long run it didn’t work for them at all; today “gay” has become one of the most common insults precisely because it was decreed to be the accepted word for homosexuals.

American trans people today are telling us that we have to stop using our word for ourselves, but we see no reason to believe that trying to engineer language in this way is any less likely to fail than it did last time.

In the end, whether we choose to see this word as an insult is more important to us than how the haters use the word, because they always use any word for us as an insult, no matter what the word is.

The Stonewall riots were a turning point for gay liberation, and in the years that followed, trans rights were struck off the gay agenda. But who do you think threw the first bottle at those riots? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t a gay man.

A parody of the Brawndo ads from the movie Idiocracy.

The pathologised model of gender dysphoria isn’t the only way to be trans. Trannies aren’t all hopeless broken sadsacks, and being trans does not have to be a tragedy. How about a little gender euphoria!