Topic: Dallas Denny

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #104, Winter 2004.

But It All Seems So Normal!

Here?s a brief overview of my life:

- For the past 13 years I?ve worked for a county agency as a behavior specialist. My job responsibilities include psychological and behavioral assessments, client rights investigations, and the development and monitoring of behavioral intervention plans. I work 40 hours a week and try to cram my other activities and nightly sleep into the remaining hours.

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #104, Winter 2004.

In 1979, Boston?s Beacon Press published Janice J. Raymond?s pseudoscientific polemic The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Based on her Ph.D. thesis at Boston College, Raymond argued that male-to-female transsexuals (or, in her terminology, ?male-to-constructed females?), are tools of a patriarchal medical system, designed to make women obsolete.

Raymond?s book appeared in the same year as a methodologically flawed and almost certainly fraudulent study by Jon Meyer and Donna Reter of Johns Hopkins University, published in the professional journal Archives of General Psychiatry. Together, these two publications?one a 200-page political manifesto masquerading as science, and one a six-page politically-motivated article which also masqueraded as science, dealt American transsexuals a blow from which they are only now recovering.

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #105, Spring 2004.

by Dallas Denny

Pronoun Trouble

Several years ago, I went with a friend to a rainy Pride celebration in Atlanta?s Piedmont Park. Afterwards, muddy and damp, our hair frizzed, we decided to get something to eat. My friend pulled her SUV into the parking lot of a high-dollar Mexican restaurant, where we were greeted by a parking valet. He said to my friend, a transsexual woman, ?Good afternoon, sir.? A moment later, having taken a better look, he started over. ?Good afternoon, ma?am.? Inside the restaurant, my friend sat steaming about the perceived insult. I said to her, more or less, ?He just did what all human beings do?when he saw you, he made an immediate gender attribution. Then, when he looked more closely, he changed the pronoun. Maybe he thought his initial impression had been mistaken. Maybe he clocked you and was courteous enough to call you ma?am. In either case, how did he give offense?? She wasn?t able to tell me.

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #103, Fall 2003.

When I was (to be historically accurate) a young man, older and supposedly wiser heads told me my political views would change with age. I told them they wouldn?t.

Now that I?m of an age at which it?s customary to look forward to retirement, I find my views remain unchanged. That magical moment at which I was supposed to become a Republican has come and gone. That?s not to say I?m a Democrat, or that this little chat we?re having, although of a political nature, will be about politics in the partisan sense of the word. I?m here to talk about issues which have concerned me all my life, namely the rights to free speech and assembly, and a right that isn?t in the Bill of Rights but should be and doubtless would have been if the Founding Fathers had foreseen the Information Age?the right to privacy.

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #102, Summer 2003.

This year has seen the release of a book that is destined to have the gay and transgender communities up in arms. It?s called The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science and Psychology of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. The imprint is Joseph Henry Press, a division of the National Academies Press, and the author is one Michael Bailey, a sexologist.