In the nascent years of the modern gay civil rights movement, the movement was precisely that—gay. The semantics of political correctness had not yet arrived in popular culture. Our people rejoiced at the advent of gay community centers, gay pride parades, and gay dances. Largely due to a patriarchal worldview that infected even the perception of sexual minorities, very few people—including budding gay activists—gave much thought to members of the movement aside from homosexual men. Mental health and medical professionals studied homosexual men almost exclusively. Freud offered the now anachronistic explanation of “domineering mother, distant father” without giving much thought to what made lesbians, bisexuals, and other sexual minorities tick.

When you consider the great risks the pioneers of the modern gay civil rights movement accepted, it’s hard to point an accusing finger at them for not being more inclusive. Today, though, things are different. We have gay people on television, in films, and on the airwaves. Our partners receive health and other benefits through many companies. In some parts of the world, we can even commit to our lifetime partners in an official, legal ceremony and adopt children. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way, baby.

Still, the burning question remains, and we’re reminded of it every time we form an organization or attend a pride function—just how inclusive should we be? We all agree that lesbians and gay men should have equal say, and bisexuals, though still frequently misunderstood or patronized, have deservedly gained quite a foothold within our movement.

But what about those darned “T” people—the transgendered? Do they deserve a seat at the LGB table? Or are they just pesky hangers-on, as a friend once informed me, psychologically confused individuals riding the coattails of the gay civil rights movement—at best, desperately searching for a social identity, at worst, grand poseurs?

I recently finished reading an amazing book that has solidified my longstanding position that not only the transgendered, but anyone with a real bone to pick with our culture’s narrow and oppressive view of sexuality, should and must be included within our struggle. The title of the book is As Nature Made Him. It tells the astounding story of David Reimer. Born in 1967 as Bruce Reimer, one of a set of identical male twins, a botched circumcision destroyed almost his entire penis. Following the medical protocol that had held strong for many years and held strong even until the past few years, Bruce’s parents were instructed to forget they ever had two boys and raise Bruce as Brenda. Sounds like fiction, doesn’t it? Sadly, it’s not.

Throughout a tortured, hellish childhood, Brenda’s family, teachers, and a large, conspiring team of psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors tried to convince Brenda that dresses, dolls, and romantic feelings toward boys were not who she should be, but who she actually was. Brenda was never let in on the secret. After extensive hormone treatment at the onset of adolescence, Brenda stubbornly refused surgery to solidify her floundering female identity, an operation that would have removed what was left of her penis and constructed a vagina. But despite his best tries, Bruce never felt like a Brenda, railing against the notion that he was a girl, knowing that something was “just not right.” When Brenda was 14, her parents, exhausted with the collapsing charade, confessed the details of “her” infancy and the medial experts’ insistence that he become Brenda.

Shocked but resilient, Brenda converted back to the male gender, stopped hormone treatment, and underwent surgery to construct a penis. Brenda chose the name David rather than his birth name Bruce, an allusion to the Biblical story in which a little boy fights a big giant and wins. Today, David is married to a woman and helps raise his stepchildren. But ever present are the demons of his growing up, the years spent trying to put up a front for his family and peers, trying to act a part that was not his from the beginning, forcing himself, with every inch of his will and cell in his body, to deny his true identity and sexual feelings. All those horrible years of denying his true feelings and identity, pretending to be someone else.

Sound familiar?

David does not identify as gay or transgendered, of course. At heart, he has always considered himself a heterosexual male. So what does all this have to do with the place of transgendered people in our civil rights movement? David’s parents were pushed to raise him as Brenda by a collusive gaggle of medical experts who believed that nurture, not nature, is responsible for sexual identity and even orientation. They consistently ignored numerous studies that pointed to such biological determinants as brain chemistry and structure, and the exposure of fetuses to differing amounts of testosterone and estrogen while still in the womb.

They ignored the testimony of partial and full-fledged hermaphrodites whose sex assignment shortly after birth clashed starkly and painfully with their own developing identities. In short, these doctors did not listen to their own patients. Convinced that doctors know more about their patients than the patients themselves, they ignored their patients feelings, thoughts, and words.

Anyone who has suffered through such injurious ignorance and blatant holier-than-thou bullying, has a huge stake in the future of any movement that strives to unshackle everyone from the chains of imposed sexual identity. That includes gay men. That includes lesbians. That includes bisexuals. That includes transgendered people, hermaphrodites, cross-dressers, and anyone else whose gender, sexual identity, sexual orientation, or sexual practices do not harm anyone else and lead to personal happiness and fulfillment.

Anyone. Period.

We are all allies in this fight for freedom. As the author of As Nature Made Him points out, when Brenda Reimer first learned that she was born as a boy and forced into the role of female, “…her first question was not about how or why her parents could have made such a decision; it was not to ask how such a devastating…accident could have occurred. Instead, she asked her birth name. She asked, in effect, Who am I?”

We all deserve the opportunity to answer that very question, in our own time, on our own terms.

Eric can be reached at eric.a.morrison@verizon.net. As a side note, Eric wishes to thank his housemates at 10 George, particularly Tom Minnuto, for a wonderful and unforgettable summer. Keep walkin’ those boots, girls!