[DoodleBob]

He basically writes that surgical mutilation should not be considered therapeutic and that the rhetoric of “gender” should not be used to eradicate the fact of sex...(but as) silly and dishonest as our rhetoric about the “gender binary” can be, the fact that there exist people whose taste and behavior is at odds with classical sex roles would not have been news to a man of the 19th century.

[miss marmelstein]

Of course, what he’s not admitting in that quote is that people who role-played or cross-dressed in the 19th century were closeted people. In fact, they created small, secret worlds filled with weird and wild customs and taboos. They enjoyed playing in private unlike the activists today who want to do it in the streets. I once saw a play at the National Theater of Great Britain about homosexual bordellos of the early 19th century. Mind-blowing, to say the least.