Fairfax, VA, USA. Ashley Love is the latest in a long line of personal targets identified by Autumn Sandeen for deconstruction, serving no purpose other than fuel for Sandeen’s perpetual self-aggrandizement.

I have nothing personal against Autumn Sandeen, but she has become an intolerable burden that saps the energy of serious people striving toward real progress in basic civil rights and the relief of those who need our help. Increasing numbers of people who care about those born with the transsexual medical condition, who strive toward hormonal reconstitution and surgical correction, have long recognized that she is well past her shelf life.

Note an important difference between these two people: Ashley Love devotes herself to the service of others while Autumn Sandeen serves only herself. While Ashley takes setbacks as challenges to try harder, Sandeen mouths the seemingly proper and politically correct social slogans while ensuring the media spotlight is on her.

Ashley Love is a writer who has published in the Ashley Love: Huffington Post, and a transsexual and intersex advocate.

She organized the Media Advocates Giving National Equality to Transsexual, Transgender & Intersex People (MAGNET), an anti-defamation organization dedicated to educating the media about transsexual, transgender & intersex issues.

Love says she is “… pushing for more authentic and positive portrayals of trans people in the media."Autumn Sandeen published Ashley Love And Anti-Defamation as a four-part series at Pam’s House Blend. She started the series with false claims that Ms. Love had engaged in anti-defamation activities while deriding and defaming other people and subgroups under the “transgender community umbrella”.

She even invokes the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) as a model for anti-defamation while comparing Love’s tactics and language to that of the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) and the Family Research Council (FRC).

This isn’t the usual Sandeen excess because she goes on to analyze Ashley Love’s writings with a combination of annoying editorial nit-picks, a presumption of superior knowledge, innuendo, quotations out of context, tortuous logic, and outright mischaracterizations that converge in a tangle of lies. All of this is packaged with a condescending tone that depicts an otherwise accomplished and adult woman as a girl in need of parental correction. The attack on Ashley Love used the worst offerings in Autumn Sandeen’s banquet of transgender predations.

Normally, I view Autumn Sandeen as the lead exhibit in the Virginia Prince Hall of Anachronisms, with artifacts from her past actions that range from clueless (the attempted DADT co-opt) to smarmy (the grotesque pee video) to dangerous (embracing the non-op initiative at the expense of medically needy people). In those cases, she could mislead the gullible by making dubious claims of attacking problems and issues without reference to specific people.

But in this case, Sandeen has identified and publicly humiliated a woman who makes highly visible progress detached from Sandeen’s ideological quirks and preferences. This is not Sandeen speechifying from a bully pulpit but taking overt action as a schoolyard bully. This elevates Autumn Sandeen from a dated sideshow entertainment to an overt threat.

Previously, she became so wrapped up in her own bad behavior — and had become so self-referential — that she could no longer tell the difference between fact, opinion, and — certainly — literary practice. For instance, Sandeen had gone so far over the top that she and her supporters took an obvious parody we accepted for publication at TS-Si as a personal attack — with truly wild results. [cf. Note] And yet, there was not even a hint from Autumn Sandeen that perhaps, just perhaps, her own behavior had something to do with how she is perceived.

In any case, the parody did not work. With hindsight, I believe the reason is that Autumn Sandeen herself has become a self-parody brand, like something out of Monty Python.

Sandeen puts herself forward as an authoritative source of information and advocacy on behalf of the gay and gendered population. The consistency of her willful ignorance and domineering attitude, with a special misogyny aimed at post-corrected women, have long disqualified her as a commentator on intersex and transsexual issues. She isn’t even the best the transgenders have to offer; in fact, she may be the worst.

I am not opposed to transgendered people, just those people (of any description) who engage in coercive acts, especially when coupled with an intolerance for dissent (a special talent of transgenderism defenders).Autumn Sandeen relies on the coercive T construct in the GLB framework for her activism, something I view as an intellectually muddled and coercive sociopolitical construction.

The construction of an artificial trans "community" has set the sociopolitical preoccupations of transgender activists as primary over the genuine medical needs of intersex and transsexual people. Owners of the umbrella level accusations of disunity against those who rebel against being included without their consent. Forcible inclusion is oppression, while stilling the voices of dissent is tyranny. Over time the transgender activists see evidence of disunity and homophobia even when none is intended or acted upon. Membership in their clique is paramount.

Many of the specific critiques leveled by Autumn Sandeen against Ashley Love derive from this background, including some old shibboleths like accusations of derisive comments, misgendering, and violations of the GLAAD Media Reference Guide.

• No doubt, some people can and do exhibit bad manners, no matter what their backgrounds may be. However, to assert that transgenders and transsexuals are fundamentally different is a defensible position, not a derisive comment. And yet, Sandeen repeatedly accuses Ashley Love of making derisive statements just because she has a different position on the issues.
  
  Sandeen did this without offering a reasoned argument, falling back on her authority in such matters.
  
  
• Misgendering, the assignment of the incorrect gender by a speaker when referring to another party, raises many problems, not least the arch response by Autumn Sandeen who clings to a fixed position that does not allow for dissent. Sandeen accused Ashley Love of misgendering because she disagreed with Ashley, end of story.
  
  The misgendering term has been stretched beyond credibility by transgenders and has no purchase among the general public. In fact, I daresay most Americans view such goings on as at least odd, if not offensive, given that most people actually appreciate sexual differences. No matter. Sandeen is the arbiter of taste, criticizing Love for her supposed violation.
  
  Sandeen did this without offering a reasoned argument, falling back on her authority in such matters.
  
  
• The real hoot in all this stems from Sandeen’s insistence that Love violated the GLAAD Media Reference Guide. The Guide, sponsored by an explicit GLBT advocacy organization, purports to be the authoritative source of editorial practices that involve all sorts of people, including transsexuals. It contains such intellectually shallow terms as gender identity, a diminution of the term transsexual, and an outright ban of the term transvestite.
  
  The Guide is a convergence of post-modernist conceit and social relativism, where there is no blame, shame, or individual accomplishment. Individuals are free to void biology and claim whatever self-designation they please, no matter how delusory. Ashley Love used the term transvestite, much to Autumn Sandeen’s stern disapproval. Whether or not the GLAAD Guide really is an authority was beside the point and Love stood accused.
  
  Sandeen did this without offering a reasoned argument, falling back on her authority in such matters.

Autumn Sandeen’s writings at Pam’s House Blend and in various other postings around the web demonstrate a special knack for mischaracterizing the case for attention to the transsexual medical condition.

She does this by misrepresenting the intentions and views of people born with the condition, especially those who are now post-correction and view their past transsexualism as very much a past history.I could go on, but you get the idea.

Sandeen is a spectacle that must be seen to be believed, rather like an episode from an old 1980’s sitcom we are embarrassed to acknowledge as a once-favorite show. Or read in incoherent bloggings. Or heard on a video giving advice to girls on how they could pee standing up if they just used a certain device.

But Autumn Sandeen never read the cancellation notice. She has become the wonder of the new millennium, persisting in our nightmares, the star in a carnival sideshow: (1) Sandeen the noble warrior, (2) Sandeen the wronged victim, (3) Sandeen the true prophet of Gay Rights, (4) Sandeen cutting at the edges of gender theoretical. (n) Sandeen, Sandeen, Sandeen. …

Just a little bit of this makes one weary but altogether it feels like a long journey. And you never get only a little bit of Sandeen; it is always a full deck (though stacked).

Autumn Sandeen is a transgender caricature that is difficult to be taken seriously. Her ever-present public persona is everything that makes straight America, the ninety percent of the population that is not gay, lesbian, or gender diversified, uneasy.

I am left to wonder when even the committed transgender umbrella activists will generally recognize that Sandeen’s antics undermine their own prospects by contributing to the perception that their movement looks like an assemblage of sideshow attractions.

She has queered the steady progress towards straight and gay equality before the law and can no longer be taken seriously as a representative of either the gay or the transgender community. For sure, she has no bearing — other than being overbearing — among people born transsexual.

And in that, I do indeed take Sandeen seriously. I worry about her downward spiral and what awaits us when she reaches the bottom.

In the meantime, Autumn Sandeen should leave her betters alone, including Ashley Love.

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment