Hi, I'd like to point out an error in the portion of the article by Leigh Smith. I didn't paraphrase the article on the Enough Non-sense blog, I instead cut and pasted text from the blog's author comment that she made on Pam's House Blend -- http://www.pamshouseblend.com/...Id=120073. I quoted EnoughNonSense's comment that she made for a different Pam's House Blend diary verbatim.

I'm aware that folk who write and comment on TI-SI, or on the Enough Non-Sense blog, will more often than not disagree with my viewpoints and opinions -- and that's how the marketplace of ideas works.

However, my comment here at TI-SI isn't one of disagreeing with Leigh Smith here on this website -- we already know we disagree on substance -- but instead one of hoping Ms. Smith corrects the factual error of how and where I got the quote that I used for the Pam's House Blend Q-Of-The-Day diary. I didn't engage in the kind of journalism that Ms. Smith accuses me of engaging in, and I'd appreciate if she would correct the record.

Following publication of this article, Autumn Sandeen informed TS-Si.org of a possible error in the text attributed to Leigh Smith.

At one point, Ms. Smith says "... where does Autumn (transgender journalist extraordinaire) Sandeen get off paraphrasing a blog entry ...". The counterclaim is that Autumn Sandeen quoted the text by Susan" verbatim from a comment she made on Pam's House Blend.

We have contacted all parties on this issue. We will take action, if necessary, to avoid misrepresentation of Sandeen's intentions and actions.

I will post further with any necessary clarifications.

Ms. Sharon Sinead Gaughan
TS-Si VP & Executive Director
Managing Editor, TS-Si.org

I have already addressed the editorial matters you mentoned in a previous comment and - more extensively - in my private email. Here, I will address another statement you made in your comment.

I'm aware that folk who write and comment on TI-SI, or on the Enough Non-Sense blog, will more often than not disagree with my viewpoints and opinions -- and that's how the marketplace of ideas works.

I speak for TS-Si. The people at Enough Non-Sense can speak for themselves.

It is true that some of the folk who write and comment in the TS-Si.org Opinion Section may have views that - to some extent - disagree with those of Autumn Sandeen. However, they are relatively few in number given the very large number of topics, articles, and authors in our coverage. One can see that by visting the menu item under "Index" entitled All Topics and Authors.

We do not operate a blog, nor are we particularly involved with blogosphere drama. Feel free to look around: there is good deal more on this site than you might suspect.

A previous comment has been suspended for violations of TS-Si policies. We have notified the comment's author with suggestions for revision.

Yes you are correct in that you did not "paraphrase" but instead "quoted" the article written by SA-ET at Enough Non-Sense.

Having said that, why don't you explain to all of us here, where you get off "Quoting" any of our articles on PHB, while at the same time banning us from commenting on PHB for minor TOS violations? Where do you get off setting yourself up as a professional transsexual expert when you have not even completed full transition? I realize that some trans activists have egos to feed, but does it have to be fed to the extent of "leading" an impressionable audience down the GLB path to the conclusion that all transsexual people need to jump on the GLB bandwagon as a means to their salvation?

There are plenty of us out in the mainstream that are getting a little tired of being cast as primarily gay individuals that had a sex change to express our gayness to the world. That is what happens when so called non-op and transvestic gay individuals set themself up as experts and role models, then go out proud in the world to set society straight that they are here and queer and transgendered and y'all just need to get over it!

Hell, even your own gay men and women on the street don't want to buy into your brand of gender confusion. Most gay men and women know the difference between what is a man and a woman, in fact they probably know the difference more than you and your activist ilk do. Where does that leave the general public at large when they come across one of us in transition, just trying to make a meager paycheck to pay for their costly transition. Where does it leave the tens of thousands of us that have moved off into mainstream, with a now highly educated public constantly on the lookout for anything that may appear a little odd about the man or women that works or lives next to them? A little digging, some gossip in the breakroom, and soon enough their cover is blown or at least suspect. A man that once flirted with them has suddenly grown cold, a group of women they used to hang with after work no longer invites them over.

This is the legacy trans activism has brought to our doorstep, all in the name of inclusion, where everyone that ever tried on their sisters panties, now becomes transgender and transsexual, supported and egged on by talk the likes of which you and others spew out in your daily columns. Talk that has no real relation to getting along in society. Talk that sets transsexuals up as gay men and women, talk that causes society to turn their backs on and discriminate against and act violently against.

In my opinion, transgender activism and the transgender activists are the root cause for most of the discrimination, backlash and violence that trans people are targeted with today. This includes you and the rest of the self appointed gods and goddesses of the GLB affiliated transgender activist movement. Most of you have not even finished transition and have the unmitigated gall to council others, speak for all of us as though you have some authority to do so, and to wear your pride like a badge of honor in this incessant fight to force mainstream to believe that you are not the gender you lovingly conceal between your legs. Mainstream doesn't buy it. Card carrying gay and lesbian, non gender confused, men and women on the street don't buy it, and I don't buy it either.

To blindly ban contrary opinion at PHB, contrary opinion that in fact eminate from your peers that have transitioned long before you even thought about it, is disgraceful! It does a disservice to your readership and your cause. It is plainly an effort to enforce GLBT dogma upon a group of people and to control that group of people to your own bent. That is what we at enough nonsense are trying to expose. We are mostly a group of post transition women that have had enough of the nonsense. Many of us there transitioned 10, 20 or even as in my case, 30 years ago. We have been there, we have done that. If anyone can be an expert in this stuff, then many of us come a lot closer to the mark than all of you non-op and part time crossdressing trangender activists could ever hope to be.

You ask the question when is it appropriate to tell someone your dating that you were born the other gender?.. well dear if they can't tell right away, the time to tell them is the first time you look in the mirror and see something on your person that is not part of the package the other person thought to expect. If your post op, then tell them after they get to know you and after you have determined that there is a chance of a relationship blooming beyond a casual date, if your interested in pursuing said relationship. But all of these questions should not even be on the mind of those in transition. Transition is not a time to start relationships, and its not a time to test your womanly wiles on unsuspecting straight men. That will get you hurt or even killed.

Leave the dating till after your post op, after you have transitioned, which Ms Sandeen... you have not!

Having said that, why don't you explain to all of us here, where you get off "Quoting" any of our articles on PHB, while at the same time banning us from commenting on PHB for minor TOS violations? Where do you get off setting yourself up as a professional transsexual expert when you have not even completed full transition? I realize that some trans activists have egos to feed, but does it have to be fed to the extent of "leading" an impressionable audience down the GLB path to the conclusion that all transsexual people need to jump on the GLB bandwagon as a means to their salvation?

You know you won't get an explanation.

Sandeen has no journalistic integrity, neither does anybody else at PHB.

The impression the mainstream population has of the TG community; that being a side show of people with issues is well earned.

it appears there is a need to clear up a few things with regards to this issue. First, Enough Non-Sense is solely my blog; I started it, I decide what is published there; no one else speaks for Enough Non-Sense but me. I do not have contributors per se. Certainly Leigh has posted essays there, as have others, but none of them are what I define as contributors...though those who have written essays that I have published were contributing. I have invited certain people to write essays for my blogs, some of whom I have known up-front would hold positions neither I nor my readers would agree with. I made those invitations in the interest of the broader debate. I am utterly and completely convinced that classic/true/HBS/(insert your preferred term) transsexuals will never, ever reclaim our position of legitimacy by addressing the issue only in our pro classic/true/HBS/(insert your preferred term) transsexuals forums, blogs or otherwise. Our societal legitimacy was robbed from us by the GLBT; they will not simply return it to us without taking the debate to them. To think otherwise is, in my opinion, more than a little naive.

Specifically with regard to the article Autumn Sandeen wrote let me set the record straight. Last Thursday, March 19th, Ms. Sandeen penned an essay at Pam's House Blend entitled Blaming the Victim, Angie Zapata, For Her Own Death. On Friday morning, March 20, I slammed the GLBT trans-activists with this paragrah, part of my comment:

Trans activist should take the unalterable position in their blog posts that pre-ops who desire to date straight men must disclose, every time...instead of after the fact endlessly lamenting how disgusting, homophobic, transphobic, etc. the attacker is. Sure the attacker is a scum bag, but that doesn't help the dead or beaten pre-ops who have read ad nauseum in the blogosphere how "a pre-op is just as female" as a natal woman despite still having male bits...or that "gender is in the brain, not the groin"...or that "genitals don't make a difference in defining me as male or female". To the average straight male, even one who does understand and is sensitive to the issue of transsexualism, genitals very much do make a difference.

Later that day, Friday, March 20, I got an e-mail from Autumn informing me she was going to use the comment I made earlier in the day, as a jumping off point on yet another article to be posted on PHB which would pose the question of when is the appropriate time to disclose one's gender status and does one's pre or post-op status factor into it. She also welcomed any feedback I might have on the issue. I replied to her in a fairly lengthy e-mail; I had complete knowledge that my comment would be used on PHB...Leigh was not aware of this.

There is one important issue in all of this that has gone unmentioned. Both on the original comment and the article Autumn wrote that referenced it there is a direct link to an essay I wrote back on August 1st of last year entitled Angie Zapata is Dead and I'm Upset. If one has read that piece they will find it a blistering criticizism of transgender, the transgender activists, and the major GLBT blogs in which they appear. Honestly, I was quite surprised PHB left the link to the above essay in on the original comment; I was even more surprised that Autumn also left it in on her "question of the day" piece. It is common knowledge that the GLBT blogs and the trans-activists who either own or post essays on them don't have, nor do they welcome, either contributors or guest posts from heterosexual classic/true transsexuals who abhor the transgender construct and intellegently argue against it. Enough Non-Sense is the only blog that I'm aware of that is heterosexual centric and speaks out against not only the transgender construct but its association with the GLB movement, both of which do not represent the vast majority of post operative transsexuals. Any time the mainstream GLBT want to link to my blog they have my persmission to do so, not that they require it.

As a side note, and adding a bit to what I alluded to earlier, just as the transgender have "gone insane talking only to themselves"...so it appears has the classic/true/HBS/(insert your preferred term) transsexuals. Barring the discovery of a definitive medical/biological cause for classic/true/HBS/(insert your preferred term) transsexualism that is universally agreed upon by the medical establishment, our legitimacy is no longer ours to lose but ours to reclaim. Endless and mindless repetitive comments filled with insults on the more popular GLBT blogs has, and will, only result in the moderators of those blogs either censoring or banning our positions and opinions outright. It is way more effective to post undebatable facts, regardless of how controversial or swallowable to the GLBT they may be, and then go away and watch those who comment on it melt down. I read many blogs, pro classic/true/HBS/(insert your preferred term) transsexual, transgender only, GLBT oriented, GLB only, and those of the heterosexual mainstream and very, very seldom do I see those who post on the pro classic/true/HBS/(insert your preferred term) transsexual blogs comment on some of the idiocy that is published on all of the rest. By failing to respond to those who have stolen our legitimacy (and now claim to speak for us) we can only look forward to nothing more than watching that same legitimacy slip further and further from our grasp. Preaching to the choir and talking only to ourselves is nothing more than an unexcusable cop out.

Even when you do go and post non emotional factual rebuttals or even informative posts you still get banned because (especially in the GLTB) people are so brainwashed they think reality is what they want it to be.

One day real soon we all are going to wake up to a very sad reality and then it will be too late to deal with it. All of this gender identity crapola is a distraction from what we really should be paying to, the destruction of the American economy and America as we knew it.

I don't see the point in preaching to anybody period.

I'm beginning to come to my senses and have realized the biggest mistake I have made in the last ten years was to become involved in this debate in the first place, it has taken on all the qualities of a side show.

Being invloved in this gender crap has been a big waste of my time.

The best thing anybody can do for themselves is to let the Sandeens of the world put on their freak-show and walk away and get on with their own life.

The best thing you can do, GO out and BE THE BEST HUMAN YOU CAN.

Set a good example of citizenship,
Be Paterotic and do something to help those in your immediate neighborhood.

I really have better things to do with my life.
So sick and tired of it all.

Sick and tired of wasting my valuable time.

@Sue Robins
I couldn't agree more.

In general, I dropped out of all transgender / transsexual dialogues, bulletin boards etc., about a month ago. Rather than try to have a say in the continuing trans world debate, I moved on to focus on women in general and also, more specifically women loving women. I posted this to my about page, and I hope it's ok to enter it here by way of explanation:

"The trans movement is of course a positive thing, but it is splintered - and the current internet dialogue too often breaks into emotionally charged reactions, creating an interference pattern that wastes a lot of energy. I know many feel that rolling up the sleeves for a battle of the brains is a reasonable way to flesh out differences, but it is simply against my nature to partake in these debates; the blogosphere is rife with emotionalism and repetition, voluminous tirades that from an aerial view, create a generalized flocking pattern. Once the patterns and the camps are established it is easy for leaders to manipulate the movement, and equally easy for the right wing to infiltrate and manipulate the trans agenda as well.

If you want to enter into the arena of war, you cannot draw a line in the sand, turn to your army for a resounding cheer, and receive, “Well, some of us were thinking that…”

Thank you for your comment. You said:

In general, I dropped out of all transgender / transsexual dialogues, bulletin boards etc., about a month ago. Rather than try to have a say in the continuing trans world debate, I moved on to focus on women in general and also, more specifically women loving women.

Strictly speaking, we aren't trans-anything, not do we run a TG/TS "dialogue" board, so you should feel at least partly at home.

It takes a column like this one (or some of Lisa Thompson's satires/parodies) to get some of our wilder responses.

Anyway, TS-Si generally is about different sorts of things. There are plenty of other venues for the outright conflict situations.

Sharon: Here is my reference to TS-SI from a post on my blog titled: The Great Tranny Mess Of The Century: Pam’s House Blend vs. Enough Nonsense

Take a look at the ongoing debate between classic transsexuals and transgender folk, this time with a referee included: TS-SI (Just to make things clear, I appreciate the work being done at TS-SI and also appreciate that they have taken this issue on and referee / hosted the battle on their site.)

http://tinyurl.com/csv97v

thank you for the kind words.

For everyone else, the link Brielle provided leads to a specific entry on her fine and interesting site, Women in Love.