[candy_coated_bitch]

Heh. I was thinking since last night that I wanted to come in here and pretty much say what hb did.

I've read all the posts in the thread and I've been thinking about this a bit, and realized how odd it was starting to seem to me that people were feeling so strongly, and had such strong opinions based on very little information whatsoever. Granted, I did not do an exhaustive search of the internet--but a cursory search gleaned very little information about Jacki and Christine. Yes, the media.

Oprah is not a reliable source. Two or three paragraphs online is not a reliable source. Three minutes of a snipped video online is not a reliable source. Even one comment can be taken out of context and spun out in an article or edited interview. You know how teachers tell you not to use Wikipedia as a source? Well, don't treat three minutes of video from Oprah and a couple paragraphs from Huff Post's "Gay Voices" as any sort of ACTUAL information.

What do we really know about this couple? Christine went on Oprah to talk about her coming out experience and discovering her husband and was also gay. And that the Oprah show did a follow up with Christine and they discovered she was in a relationship with someone named Jacki, who got some sort of top surgery (it keeps being called a double mastectomy) so they could get married.

That's all we know. We don't know anything about Jacki's background or her feelings about gender, or if there were deeper motivations behind this than getting married--though that can feel pretty fucking deep to some people. Maybe there were, maybe there weren't.

Can you imagine if Oprah came knocking on your door again and discovered that you were a lesbian married to someone who was legally male, but kinda still identified as female anyways? Maybe they are just trying to control as much of their own story as they can.

WHO THE HELL KNOWS?

That's my point. The discussion is interesting and I like hearing differing points of view--BUT, I can't see getting that mad about it. I don't see how one person's choice invalidates trans* experience. What does that even mean? Phrases like "trans* experience"? That covers a lot of territory. And I'd also like to think that two people doing something, even if it turned about to be disingenuous, don't have enough real power to affect the trans* movement at all. Like, seriously if two queers that went on Oprah and had a couple tiny articles written about them can set us back--well then trans* activists and their allies aren't doing a very good job!

This slightly reminds me of the time that FTM got pregnant (who also went on Oprah, oddly enough, though I don't remember his name) and the community was in fucking UPROAR about it. This isn't quite the same uproar--but there was no trans* apocalypse after that. The sky didn't fall. As far as I can tell we've still come a long way in the ten or more years since that happened. His fifteen minutes of fame are over and those of us who care about trans* issues are still fighting the good fight.

It mystifies me sometimes how individual people's PERSONAL choices can come to represent so much just because we may disagree with them, or find them distasteful, or their choices scare us. Nobody I know outside of this bfp circle even KNOWS who these people are. I doubt they will have much actual influence on anything.