Pre vs Post Op Tension

I came across this article by chance (honest). All I can say is that there are a lot of vested interests on this earth. Its now officially impossible to avoid offending one of the myriad interest groups that abound. Goodness me.

"While I appreciated your inclusion of an article about female-to-male transsexuals [" A Real Man," Nora Vincent, November 23], I found the use of a sutured Barbie doll to represent the FTM on your cover completely offensive. As a female-to-male transsexual, I can attest that the image is our worst nightmare. It is exactly what we pray not to become when we begin the process of transition: a feminine woman with male body parts sewn on, haphazard and incongruous. Much more goes into transitioning than mastectomy and phalloplasty (penile construction). As Drew Seidman said to Nora Vincent, it's not the penis that makes the man. "It's much more than the skin I'm wearing." Sadly, your cover art did nothing to evoke the complexity that exists beneath the skin of the transsexual but instead reduced the transsexual, and all people, to mere body parts, to meat.

I would also like to address Vincent's reply to two letters in the December 7 issue. Vincent wrote, "As an androgynous woman and a drag king, I resent deeply the implication that I in any way misled, mistreated, or disrespected Drew." While drag kings and FTMs might both reside beneath the transgender umbrella, the two are hardly the same thing. A drag king explicitly performs gender, whether on stage or the street; he is parodying masculinity. When the performance is done, the drag king goes home and removes his costume, his spirit-gummed mustache, and resumes life as a woman (androgynous or otherwise). The FTM lives the life 24/7. To even imply that a drag king should speak for FTMs is like saying that Al Jolson, because he put on blackface and sang "Mammy," spoke for African Americans.

So please, Nora, don't try to put on the mantle of transsexual oppression, because it just doesn't fit on a drag king's shoulders. And as far as being an "androgynous woman" goes, I was one myself for a number of years and it is nothing like living day-to-day as a transsexual man."

Jack Griffin
Manhattan