Gender is used as a control mechanism that's just wrong. Gender is never anything to struggle with; gender is something to play with. Once you're free of the rules that all these hierarchical, oppressive systems place on gender, that's the tricky part.

The current transgender movement is composed of a great number of factions, divided by those old favorites of class, race, age, language, region, and nationality.

I know I'm not a man-about that much I'm very clear, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman either, at least not according to a lot of people's rules on this sort of thing. The trouble is, we're living in a world that insists we be one or the other-a world that doesn't bother to tell us exactly what one or the other is.

I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.

What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?

The transgender movement even divides itself up by gender, as many folks stick with their same trans-genders (female-to-male or male-to-female). Additionally, the movement gets strangely subdivided among, for example, male cross-dressers, sissy boys, butch women, femme dykes, drag kings, drag queens, transvestites, intersexed, transsexuals (post-op, pre-op, and non-op).

I know and know of more than a few MTF's (male-to-female trannies) who've developed strange cancers. Myself, I've got a nice little case of Chronic Lymphocitic Leukemia (CLL).