Saturday, Jul 19, 2008
Why should Internet millionaires date gold-diggers? Plus: The Irish still suffer; Horowitz is no conservative!
Sep 7, 1999 | Desperately seeking Silicon Valley studs
BY JANELLE BROWN
(08/30/99)
Janelle Brown mentions the "hordes of women" that "Silicon Valley's men are really looking forward" to meeting at American Singles' "annual convention" (read "sales pitch"). However, at the group's Web site, a search for single women in their 20s turns up a list almost exclusively composed of women living in the former Soviet Union, their profiles undoubtedly submitted by one of the many mail-order bride services.
If there are so many unmarried men in Santa Clara, one has to wonder why. Perhaps it's because few computer programmers are athletic enough to be referred to as "studs." Or perhaps they're looking for something other than the gold-diggers who "want to meet one of those Internet millionaires."
-- Benjamin Geer
Teen transsexuals
BY MARIA RUSSO
(08/28/99)
If the Internet had been available when I was a teen in the '70s, I would have been able to transition then, and my life since would have been very different. As it was, I thought of myself as a freak and lived with terrible shame and guilt for more than 20 years. It was only after my own suicide attempt that I finally decided to go to the Web to research the subject, and I was amazed to discover thousands out there like myself. Far from the serial killers and prostitutes the public most often sees as transsexuals in movies, I found we are doctors, lawyers, engineers, cops, artists, ordinary decent people, just like everybody else. Thus empowered, I was finally able to start my own long-overdue transition.
When I saw our suicide statistics I was appalled, and reflected on just how close I had come to becoming one of them myself. The Transgender International Rights and Education Day project was started to promote public education about transsexualism in hopes of countering the shame, guilt and humiliation that is responsible for our suicide statistics. If we can save a single transgendered child from this fate, it will have been worth all the effort.
-- Sarah Marie Scott
Director, Transgender International Rights and Education Day
There is enough medical evidence to make a strong case for a biological cause, for the feelings of "true" male-to-female transsexuals. They have no choice other than to either accept their condition or go into denial and in all probability commit suicide. The arguments against transsexuals made by some members of the lesbian and gay community, as quoted by the author, are reflective of their own emotional concerns and are both frivolous and groundless. I have heard them all before: "If gender roles are relaxed and no longer policed, no one will want sex changes," etc. Nonsense. Real transsexuals will tell you it has little or nothing to do with gender roles, but rather a strong aversion to possessing the physical characteristics of the sex they apparently were born into, and a need to have a normal female phenotype. A large portion of the male-to-females I know, are surprisingly normal women, given the fact they were raised as boys. You cannot transform a man into a woman, but appropriate sexual reassignment surgery is not an attempt to do so.
-- Natasha Lumna
Walnut Creek, Calif.
Get Salon in your mailbox!