Recently I decided to go back to the roots of the transgender movement and ordered a volume of essays by the person who first coined the phrase “transgender” and started agitating for their rights. It proved a fascinating read.
The most important of her essays is the one headed “Sex vs. Gender” where Prince lays down their take on the matter, they are quite surprising:
1) Sex and gender are entirely seperate. Sex is biological and physical. Gender is social and refers to societal controls and impositons placed on the members of each of the two sexes.
2) There can be no such thing as gender re-assignment surgery as surgery can be related to a biological change, not a purely social one. It is this which seperates the transgendered from the trans-sexual.The latter of whom are driven by psychological impulses to make a biological/physical change, something which are anathema to transgender folks who have no intention of undergoing such treatments. Indeed, Prince argues that once transgender males get full social acceptance there will be no need for surgical interventions whatsoever, something which, I gather, quite a few trans-sexuals point to as Prince not knowing anything about the trans-sexual experience.
3) There is no correlation between a transgender male and a homosexual one. This is a very common misapprehension which places an unhelpful burden on the backs of the former. For this reason gay cross dressers (as well as trans-sexuals) were excluded from both the social groups Prince set up in the US and the Beaumont Society.
4) More interestingly Prince declares that it is impossible for anybody with a penis to lead a female life and that only somebody who has undergone a full trans-sexual conversion should have any right to make
such a claim.
So far from being an all inclusive from the start, Prince’s movement was specifically aimed at heterosexual males who freely adopted a feminine persona on a 24/7 basis (as opposed to drag performers and transvestites who simply dabbled in trans-genderism part-time) as a social choice.
There is something of an irony in that the pioneer of transgender rights would be one of those being called out for being hateful and transphobic for their position today.
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