but you didn't need to be such a jerk about it. I related my experiences with mainstream feminism and agreed that it has/had huge gaps in areas like transgenderism, but that I hadn't experienced any institutionalized bigotry against transexuals. And I read your references and since I'm not a part of the LGBT community (nor have I ever said that I was) I was interested to read about all the struggles within the community between lesbians, gays and transexuals. I'm saddened by the level of bigotry, although a lot of what was in the article were examples from the 70's and what were described as "lesbian separatist" groups. That's not exactly the equivalent of modern mainstream feminism. Movements often break into different factions, some trying to move to the center and assimilation and those that want to move to a more radical place. Feminism and the LGBT community are no different. And in every movement you have a proportion of idiots. Janice Raymond being one of them; she's not only a bigot, but has been proving wrong by many studies since her 1970's thesis that sex/gender is fixed at birth. However you still haven't cited anything that shows how "many mainstream feminists actively want to discriminate against male to female transexuals." If you look at http://www.now.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=transgender you'll see lots of articles with the opposite position, where NOW and other groups are working together to make sure that transgender people are protected from discrimination. I'm not a big reader of blogs outside of Broadsheet, so I can't comment there except that many of the feminist blogs seem to be written by those seeking attention without putting much critical thinking into their writing...but I think that is the point of a blog. Most of the other feminist organization I've participated in are reproductive rights focused so I wouldn't expect them to be focused on transgenderism. I took several women's studies/human sexuality classes back in the early 90's and they were very open minded about transexuality and conflict between gender and physical sexual characteristics. Has it gotten less open since then? I'm in no position to judge since I'm not involved with campus politics anymore.

B.Star...I'm sorry you've had such bad luck with you girlfriends/female friends. That kind of explains why you dislike women so much. I guess I came from a very different experience since I was in a "subculture" back in my 20's where men looking and dressing like women was actually very much in style and gender roles were very fluid. Several of my boyfriends wore skirts and makeup and that really wasn't a problem (except when they looked better in my clothes than I did). I would be hurt if my husband told me that he liked to cross dress because it would be something that he kept secret from me. But if I had known that before we got engaged it wouldn't have changed my mind or my heart. I think what would be a problem is if he no longer wanted to be a man. In that case, I don't think that I could stay with him since I'm not sexually attracted to women. I definitely wouldn't be able to stay with him if he decided to become a woman and pursue men...I have no interest in being a man and I'm not interested in being in a polyamorous marriage. So I can see why some women would be understandably upset if their spouse sprung that sort of thing on them. If my husband had told me when we were dating that he orginally was a woman but went through sex reassignment surgery, I'm not sure what I would have done. I would be worried that we wouldn't have been able to legally get married and it would also mean that we wouldn't be able to have biological children. Those would be the things that I would be worried about, not that he had been born with ovaries. I really don't understand the "wymym being wymym" thing; so many different things both biologically and environmentally make us who we are. It seems ridiculous to reduce a person to their penis or ovaries. We are all just too complex for that kind of thinking.