Loathing "Transsexuals"

Yahoo! Answers wouldn't let me post the following answer to the question "Do the Transgendered gross you out?" saying in their Violation Notice Appeal Response: "You have posted Content which is Inflammatory and which incites to Violence."

I am indeed grossed out by "trans folk," both FtM and MtF, on many levels. Apart from the dreadful surgical mutilation of their bodies--about which I shudder even to think--and their grotesquely parodic imitation of the genders they claim to be (or, as they say, to "present as"), I find them in terms of character, largely ignorant (or misinformed), slow-witted, ill-educated, coarse, vulgar, delusional, mendacious, irrational, and appallingly ill-bred. Moreover, I keenly resent their claiming the right to associate with me, or to belong to some sort of existential, acronymic "family" with me, simply because I am a gay man. In the ordinary course of things, I do what I can to ignore so-called "trans women," with fair success, despite their clamorous vulgarity, because we have so very little in common, either of concerns or interests. But it has lately dawned on me, to my unspeakable horror, that, as a "cisgendered" gay man, I am a hapless object of prurient interest to the neurotic women who imagine that by pretending to be "gay trans men" they can persuade me to have sex with them--in light of which revelation, I am thinking of purchasing and carrying on my person some small, harmless defensive weapon, like a pea-shooter or a dressage whip, with which I might inflict a dismissive sting, without having to touch their vile bodies with my bare hands.

Wikileaks Exposes The War Crimes of the U.S. in Iraq - The Final Loss of Credibility, Moral Authority, and the Right of Governance....

Astonishing how feeble are the hisses of protest from the Saurian Thing that possesses the Central Authority: feeble, and muted, as of something paralyzed, which, for fear, can't quite draw a full breath. The headline for Pravda of October 19th says it best: Wikileaks eats Pentagon from within. Horror on horror, infamy on infamy--Dante would have had to have lived as long as Methuselah to describe the unspeakable sadistic hell that the United States and its military and para-military forces have created over the past seven years in Iraq, and which is revealed in the latest (yesterday's) Wikileaks document-dump. And now it lies before us--all of it--in all its criminality and delight in the victimization of the innocent, palpitating and writhing, and absolutely irrefutable. And now? Now--listen to Julian Assange--the truth they tell, and "the attack on truth that these documents reveal" has three distinct tenses: Before the "War," during the "War," and now. Ah, so. And I would just like to point out one of the more obvious and fundamental implications: So far, the single most persuasive argument against the "9/11 Truthers" has been that it would have been unthinkable for the Central Authority to have attacked itself. We now see plainly that any power, which is capable of having perpetrated the obscene military adventure in Iraq, would scarcely have thought twice about murdering its own people.

Week of Wonders

Last things first: Yesterday my friend Jean sent me notice and a few excerpts from David Sedaris's latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, every single fable of which that I have so far read has so delighted me that I can only compare it to the similarly and exquisitely poised-between-beast-and-human verse fables of Jean de la Fontaine. So far my favorites have been the first, 'The Cat and the Baboon,' and 'The Mouse and the Snake.'



And the day before yesterday I finished reading, virtually in one sitting, John Vaillant's The Tiger -- about, well, a man-eating Amur Tiger (the Russians call man-eating tigers "cannibals"), and about all the many, many things that have to do with Amur Tigers in the Modern World....

And then, four or five days ago, I discovered that, through no fault of my own, I am directly, father-to-son descended from Nicholas Snow, "Old Comer" to the Plymouth Colony, and husband of Constanta Hopkins, daughter of Stephen Hopkins, original signatory of the Mayflower Compact: Kiss my ass--I am a Mayflower Madam by every bit as much right as Sydney Biddle Barrows! What's funny is that, twenty years ago, the physical resemblance between me and Ms. Biddle Barrows--as well as our similarly (Do NOT detain me!) aristocratic attitude--was evident to my friends (and, frankly, to me too), and was several times remarked on. Good bones, and good Puritan genes, I guess. What's also funny is that the other descendants of my Great-Grandather Madison Marion Snow, my father's cousins and uncles--though well-to-do, and prominent in local politics in Latah County, Idaho, and rather splendid Alumni Emeriti of the University of Idaho--they appear not to care a fig or a rat's patootie about the illustriousness of their Real Original Americanness--and none, according to the official Historian of the Mayflower Society in Idaho (with whom I have corresponded) has thought it worth the $245 enrollment fee in the Mayflower Society, or the bother of tracing and documenting the lineage from Samuel Snow (5th generation descendant of Nicholas Snow); through his son Freeman Snow (B: About 1752, Eastham, Barnstable, MA); through his son Cushing Snow (B: 14 Aug 1790, Sandisfield, Berkshire, MA); to his son Madison Marion Snow, aforementioned. But all that aside, what's been truly wonderful in this search for 'Roots' has been the unexpected, and riveting, revelations of the personal character of my forebears--hardly any of whom seem to have behaved like 'Puritans,' and who certainly don't seem to have thought of themselves as such. Of which more anon.