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Article Excerpt
IF TINA BROWN were alive today, we wouldn't be able to escape talk of transgender buzz. The eighties were the gay decade. The nineties belonged to lesbian chic. Now it's a transgendered world. We have seen the rise of the transgender movie--The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything.' Julie Newmar (1995), Flawless (1999), Boys Don't Cry (1999), and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)--and, more recently, the appearance of transgender TV characters on Friends and The Education of Max Bickford, and even the transgender mini-celebrities. Boy George, RuPaul, and Ben Schatz (former advisor to President Clinton, cum drag-apella sensation).
Transgender people were once the forgotten stepchildren of sex interest groups. When the gay-rights revolution erupted at Stonewall in 1969, the transgender set wasn't even an afterthought. Twenty-five years later, the group has been completely embraced by the gay-rights crowd, with the word "transgender" tucked into the mission statement of every advocacy group in the cosmos, from the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund to the Human Rights Campaign.
Other groups have been more circumspect. Last winter an argument broke out on Ms. magazine's Internet bulletin board when it was revealed that one of the most strident male-haters was a transgender woman, which is to say someone who was born male. Many of the "WBWs" (Woman Born Woman) wanted to exclude the "WBMs" (Woman Born Man) from the talks, presumably because in the victimology sweepstakes, no group, no matter how marginal, is allowed to feel another's pain.
Here it may be helpful to provide a little taxonomy to readers who don't keep up with such things. "Transgender" is an umbrella term which...
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