Bill Weintraub:

In my view, it's sad that people want to have this surgery at all.

That said, what do trannies have to do with gay and bi men?

And how is it that we are an "L G B T" community?

How did that come about?

Originally, in the heady days after Stonewall, we were simply the "gay community"; which consisted of gay people -- that is, people whose sexual orientation was towards people of their own sex.

That was clear and simple.

If you were gay, you were erotically attracted to people of the same sex.

So there were gay men, and there were gay women.

And that was it.

But then, around 1974, the gay women -- or at least a very vocal portion of them -- decided they wanted to be called "lesbians," because they did not want to be tainted by a word, "gay," which also applied to men.

Men and masculinity, they argued, were the oppressors of women, and women should have nothing to do with anything male.

Confronted with this demand, our allegedly irretrievably sexist and patriarchal gay men, said --

"Sure thing."

And so we became the L and G community.

Now, I know that thirty years later, when the term "lesbian" has become widely accepted, this will be hard for many to understand, but at the time, that decision was a political and public relations disaster.

Which in my view, as someone who was there and very politically involved, set us back at least 10 years.

Because what we were trying to do, at that point, was de-stereotype and humanize gay people.

Saying to the public, "We are everywhere, we're your sons and daughters and grandmothers and uncles and aunts and co-workers and bowling buddies etc."

"And we're people -- men and women."

Not some alien species.

And that was the great advantage of the terms "gay people," "gay man," and "gay woman":

They contained the words "people," "man" and "woman," which made us identifiably part of the human race.

That was not true, 30 years ago, of "lesbian."

A lesbian, in the public mind, was akin to a Martian -- a creature utterly alien and strange.

So be it.

Certain women insisted they be called "lesbians" rather than "gay women," and that was it: we were now lesbians and gay men, rather than gay men and women.

From that point forward, the lesbians in the movement became increasingly critical of the men and increasingly demanding.

In San Francisco, for example, they demanded that "dykes on bikes" -- that is, gay women on motorcycles -- lead off the Gay Pride Parade, and that they be allowed to be topless.

And of course they got their wish.

Now you might say, fair's fair -- there were men in drag in those parades too.

But in my view, neither group should have been there.

And they would not have been, had either group thought in terms of the welfare of "their" community.

Because this was at a time when we were desperately fighting to retain the few civil rights protections we'd won earlier in the decade; and we were losing them all under the onslaught of the religious right.

Topless motorcycle dykes and drag queens -- neither of which represented the overwhelming and vast majority of gay people -- did not help our case.

Nor did their presence encourage the great mass of gay men and women, who were by and large, like most Americans, conservative in their habits of life, to come out.

The result was that when, at the end of the decade, AIDS hit, we had no effective political organizations, and were sitting ducks.

Political, social, and religious conservatives could do anything they wanted to us, and that's what they did: they let us die.

They wanted us to die -- and that's what happened.

But hey, at least the women got to be called "lesbians."

So the "L&G community" lurched onward, and a little further down the road, the letter "B" for "bisexual" was added.

And that in my view made sense, since although the overwhelming majority of human beings are bisexual, few in our culture acknowledge their bisexuality, and it seemed right therefore that those who did be included in the "community."

But what about the "transgendered?"

How did we go from "LGB" to "LGBT?"

The "transgendered" are people who assert they were born of one sex but have a compelling inner need to be the opposite sex.

Now I put the term "transgendered" in quotes because I'm not convinced that transgendered people actually exist.

I've known a number of people who considered themselves "transgendered," and they are certainly sincere in their belief.

But so are analists.

So are the HIV denialists and the Flat Earthers.

Sincerity alone doesn't cut it.

However, the issue here isn't whether "transgender" has some objective reality, but whether gay people and gay men in particular have anything in common with the "transgendered."

The answer is No.

And I posted the Reuters article about trannies and pump parties because it makes that very plain.

The "transgender women" in the article are male to female transsexuals, and what they want is to look as much like women as possible by erasing their male secondary sexual characteristics and replacing them with female secondary sexual charactisics.

Or at least the facsimile thereof.

Says Reuters: "Their goal is to make their hips, lips, cheeks and buttocks appear more feminine."

Thus their injection of silicone.

But gay men want to look like men.

Gay men, like straight men, avidly pursue and seek to accentuate their male secondary sexual characteristics:

Given a choice, gay men, like straight men, will virtually to a man opt for broader shoulders, narrower hips, bigger muscles, a deeper voice, and of course a bigger dick and heavier balls -- all of which are secondary sexual characteristics which denote "MALE."

The only male secondary sexual characteristic which is not universally sought after by gay men is body hair.

But that's a reflection of the general culture's obsession with a pseudo-Nordic model of beauty, which emphasizes a "naturally smooth" body.

And even then, many gay men -- perhaps most -- like body hair and seek out other men who are to varying degree hirsute.

Given then, that gay men and the transgendered have nothing in common, why then did we suddenly become an "LGBT" community?

Because it suited the ideological needs of some feminists, for whom a man who wants to be a man is evil, and a man who rejects not just his masculinity but indeed his penis is good.

Notice that I said "some feminists."

Did the gay masses get to decide whether they thought the transgendered had enough in common with them to be included in the "LGB community?"

Was there a vote, a referendum, a plebescite?

NO.

The "leadership" -- whoever that might be -- DECIDED that we were an LGBT community, and so we are.

But the overall effect has not been good for our community.

As Frot man Mark said in an email,

1. I am not a member of any Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender "community." The transgendered people hitched their wagon with the gay community for political reasons, but as you know there is no relationship between transgenderism and homosexuality. Like most gay men, I'm just a man who likes to have sex with men. I don't want to be a woman or dress in women's clothing. Just when we were starting to get some public awareness of the differences between cross dressing, transgenderism and homosexuality, here comes this confusing LGBT thing.

2. The analists claim that gay men who act effeminate are just expressing who they are. However, I believe this sort of behavior is learned. Boys don't naturally call each other "bitch," "girlfriend" and "Miss Thing," nor do they normally dress up in drag which makes them look like trashy hookers, nor do they naturally act like Joan Collins on Dynasty. And it is not natural for a young gay boy to want to be anally penetrated multiple times like a cheap whore. While good feminine qualities like compassion and sensitivity should be celebrated, effeminate gays are indeed bitchy parodies of women. These men think of themselves as cheap whores, so they do a parody act of women to conceal their self-contempt. Current politically correct theory has not evolved at all.

Mark's right of course.

Men who have sex with men aren't women, and effeminacy is a learned behavior.

As to the transgendered -- they may or may not actually exist.

I suspect they don't, and that thirty years from now "gender reassignment surgery" will be viewed the way lobotomies are now -- as barbaric.

Of course I could be wrong about that.

But what I'm not wrong about is that gay men and trannies have nothing in common.

Gay men are men, and like straight guys, seek to accentuate their maleness.

Male to female trannies are former men who have, for whatever reason, rejected their masculinity.

And they're not gay.

A "transgender woman" can have sex with a man, in which case the sex act is, by definition, heterosexual.

Or "she" can have sex with a woman -- in which case the sex is lesbian.

But "she" cannot have homosex with a man -- because she's no longer a man.

"She's" a woman.

Fact is, the addition of trannies to the gay "community," by throwing our traditional understanding of masculinity into question, by strengthening the conflation of gay and bi men with women, and by implicitly endorsing anal penetration and effeminacy, has done a lot of harm to gay and other men who have sex with men.

But wasn't that the intention?

Guys, you have to be clear:

If you value your masculinity, you're going to have to fight for it.

Because there are powerful forces, both on the analist left and the religious right, which would, literally, take your manhood from you.