On Wanting to Be a Mean, Tough Bitch
By
David Gottfried
Actual dialogue overheard while eavesdropping on two young ladies at NYU Law School (Reported by my fellow student Chuck J):
Beth: Tina, how was your date last night ?
Tina: Oh, I don’t how my date was. I just don’t know what I think about it.
Beth: WELL, where did he take you out to eat ?
Tina: Oh, it’s the third time he took me out for Japanese food.
Beth: WELL, Japanese food is twice as expensive as Chinese food so you had a good date
When I was young, I wanted to be big and strong. My favorite book was a book about brawny construction workers digging huge holes all over Manhattan island. Indeed, I was furious when my Mother refused to buy “Wonderbread” because television commercials had told me that Wonderbread “helps to build strong bodies in twelve ways” while the TV screen showed a little boy becoming a big man in about 20 seconds.
Of course, to be truly big and strong, one had to be a bit of a woman too. In my childhood, women seemed to be packing heat. My family consisted of conformist, upwardly mobile, irreligious Jews trying to climb the ladder of American success. I am sure Gloria Steinem would hang me from my balls for saying this, but I think just about everyone except Jewish liberals realize that Jewish woman are JAPS (Jewish American Princesses) through and through. If they aren’t JAPS, they are dour Bolsheviks (such as Bobby Fisher’s Mother who abandoned him in a vermin-infested apartment while she joined the revolution), schizophrenogenic Freudian teachers and shrinks (think of Melanie Klein, a shrink who psychoanalyzed her own son when he was five; he killed himself in young adulthood) , histrionic vocalists (Barbara Streisand) and smothering, overprotective Mothers (consider Sophie Portnoy, Alex Portnoy’s Mother in Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”)
I may be a bit unfair to my faith. I also envisioned women as powerful because my Father was deceased. Also, I can’t forget dear old Auntie Maiming. To say that my Mother’s Sister was a bitch on wheels would vastly understate the horsepower of her hate. She was a bitch on hydrogen, rejoicing when a former friend got bone cancer (I am not exaggerating), claiming her hydrocephalic infant patients in Kings County Hospital should have been put to death because such unproductive people sap the strength of the state, and forever screaming about everybody. When I was young, I was terrified of her, and I wanted to be just like her. (This is one of most basic psychic defense mechanisms: Identification with the Aggressor.)
My maleness programmed me to strive to be strong and it seemed clear that my Aunt was the Julius Ceasar of our apartment house. When I was 6, I occasionally said that I wanted to be a queen. (I wanted to be powerful) I had no interest in sporting a vagina. I didn’t want to lose my penis. I just wanted to be the most obnoxious blistering bitch in the world. I wanted to make people miserable the way my Aunt made me miserable.
By the time I was 7, I transcended my brief bout with “transgenderism.”
Of course, it wasn’t transgenderism. It was Bitch-envy. It was Bette Davis envy.
Of course, guys could fight. Guys fought all the time. However, a guy could get shot. Bette Davis can say whatever the fuck she wants to say, but no one will sock her in the Jaw. If a guy spoke like Bette, he’d be getting socked all the time. When I was six, I decided that I did not want to go into the battle; I wanted to order other people to kill and die while I reclined, like Bette Davis, on her throne in “Elizabeth, the Queen.” Man, to order people to war while sitting on a plush velvet throne eating Frosted Donuts and Drinking Coca Cola. That was the life.
I think that in many cases guys who want to dress as women, or to be women, don’t really want to be women. I think they want to be mean and by being a woman they are able to realize the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford fantasy of Imperial Bitchery. (I once knew a very egotistical gay guy who gave me extra party favors whenever I called him “the Empress”) If you don’t believe what I am saying, take a good look at a garden variety drag queen (Yeah, I know they all think they are divine and unique but as a woman drama coach once told me, they are all employing the same basic dramatic technique: It’s called Grand Dame and it’s about rolling your eyes and pretending you’re one half Queen Victoria and one half Tony Curtis in “Psycho.”)
Did you ever see a Drag queen who behaved like a lady. Or like Elizabeth Taylor. Or like any genuine women. They behave like very pretty boys ready to go to war. Its sort of like queer cowboys and Indians. Take Ru Paul. I don’t care how far he pulls his cock between his legs and butt cheeks. He will break your neck if you don’t call him fabulous. [I remember Holly Woodlawn, one of Andy Warhol’s
“girlettes” (and the inspiration for the lyric “Holly came from Miami Fla…shaved her legs and then he was a she,” in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”) said that he/she knew a Puerto Rican drag queen who threatened to kill a prettier drag queen]
Although I only wanted to be a crabby bastard ala my Aunt, I shudder to think what would have happened to me if I had been a six year old today, in these knife-happy times. It is quite conceivable that after watching a cartoon in which a woman monster flies a rocket ship to the moon, I might have said, to a politically opinionated social justice warrior masquerading as a kindergarten teacher, that I wanted to be a woman. I suppose then she and other acolytes of the lets-bash-maleness movement would have then tried to persuade me to wear dresses and would have complimented me on my girlish figure. And pretty soon they would have told my parent(s) that reassignment surgery was appropriate.
Of course, one might argue that before anything as drastic as a sex change were considered, social workers and shrinks will carefully scrutinize a child ‘s behavior and psyche to arrive at a correct diagnosis. However, I fear that many people in the field of sex reassignment, and ancillary fields, are psychologically and intellectually incapable of making a valid diagnosis. As I said in a prior essay which delineated some of the ways in which politics subverts science and medicine, (https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/a-satire-on-the-political-subversion) I think that some doctors ceased being scientists years ago and are, instead, shills for various political factions. I think that many people who work in the field of sex reassignment are working there because they are gung-ho about changing people’s sexes, because they hate men, or because they are, in some ways, just out of their mind.
The psychological aberrations of doctors in this field were plainly on display in the reality series “I am Jazz,” which chronicles a boy’s journey into dismemberment and faux femaleness. The epic wounding took place at Mount Sinai Hospital. One doctor, who appears to be of Asian origin, can’t take care of his own face. His face is momentously ugly as he seems to have had more plastic surgery than Joan Rivers. The lead surgeon is a hateful harridan whose life calling appears to be chopping off cocks. Finally, these docs are so messed up that they said, up until the time surgery commenced, that they did not know how they would proceed because Jazz’s testosterone blockers made her penis exceedingly small, but penile skin had to be used to make a functioning vagina. Jazz had three fucking surgeries at last count and they have thought of using part of her colon, as a substitute for penile tissue, in making her vagina --- and that would have made her pussy smell of shit. As I said, those doctors are affiliated with Mount Sinai. Whatever Happened to Mount Sinai? I guess the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane crowd took over.
Of course, many people will say that I am the crazy person and that Mount Sinai is eminently wonderful (Hell it owns millions and millions of dollars in property and we Americans know that richness is next to Godliness). Of course, they said that Pasteur was crazy when he said doctors should sterilize their instruments, and they said that modern astronomers were crazy and that the sun orbited the earth.
But one does not have to go so far back into history to find that Medicine is always changing its mind and redefining what is crazy or sick. Around World War One, many Americans were in love with high colonic enemas. Then they fell out of favor. Now some mental munchkins seem to be bringing then back. I once advised a doctor – I think his name may have been Kotler -- that I feared that I had intestinal parasites. He said “Oh, that disease was very in vogue 10 years ago. We’re bored with that.” I once read an article that said that medical opinion is constantly changing its mind on the virtues of tonsillectomies. Years ago, many doctors realized that giving menopausal and post-menopausal women estrogen could increase the risk of cancer, then doctors were persuaded to believe that that was just not so and now we are back to square one and people realize that too much estrogen can mean more cancer. (One of Warhol’s girlettes, Candy Darling, died of breast cancer ages ago, at a very young age, because he pumped himself to death with estrogen). We all knew that Opiates were very addicting, but then the makers of Oxycontin used doctored evidence to convince clinicians that its drug was really swell and not really addicting at all and look at what they have wrought.
Sometimes people see different things because they are looking for different things. In, I think, 1968, a leading medical journal published an article entitled, “Manhattan, The Tropical Isle,” which noted that many gay men had diarrhea and that it was caused by intestinal parasites. Almost 5 decades earlier Sigmund Freud said that many gay men, or repressed gay men, had diarrhea and that it was caused by guilt over homosexuality. (If you read Freud, you will find that he is not as antediluvian as American Freudians and feminists make him out to be. But who reads his actual words; “progressives” and feminists just read breezy, superficial shit in Salon or some other organ of bicoastal, bisexual, unjustified elitism.)