… is a complicated topic. A few weeks ago I read an article in the online magazine The Scavenger which gave me a lood of food for thought, so much so that I wrote to the Editor, Katrina Fox, offering an article in response to some of the issues raised. Happily she commissioned me and the articled has just bee published in the newest issue. If you are trans, I hope it’s of interest. If you aren’t trans I hope it gives you and insight into some of the issues.
I’m very pleased with it, so here it is.
Natasha Curson - a trans person 
Thank you for your article Tasha and I reposted it on to my Facebook page.
I do believe that the more these subjects can be discussed publicly with as varied a discussion panel as possible the better it will ultimately be.
Tasha,
Well done article there! It dovetails very nicely with a lot of things I’ve been thinking about recently as you might be able to tell from my own writing. Trans people were colonised by medicine and pyschiatry, and the means of expressing our bodily agency was tightly monopolised by interests that sought to powerfully shape our subjectivity before we’d be allowed to access the means of evolving our bodies in a certain direction. Put another way, if we wanted to modify our bodies we were forced to conform to the script of patriarchal medicine.
What has always angered me is the fact that we as a community have been blamed for this; we did not ask for it, were were coerced into it. Now that the controls on access to such things are being loosened ever so slowly and now that the means of knowledge production have been spread out to a wider audience of (relatively) united trans people, we’re seeing a proliferation of identities. As that rather unpleasant woman who commented on your post at The Scavanger serves to remind us, there are still people out there who balk at the road ahead- a road where people have the ability and the agency to name their genders and their bodies. But we are getting there.
As a trans woman, I never felt threatened by this change myself. I feel all the more liberated by it.
Anyhow, I’m just rambling! But I felt you deserved one more lengthy comment on that piece saying that you did a great job. 😉
Thanks for the positive and thoughtful response Quinnae. Our perspectives are clearly similar, and I’m finding more and more people who decline to be defined by other people’s standard but who are exploring their identity under their own control to maximise their personal freedom. That I might be one of these people is an amazing, unanticipated and wonderful development.