recent article by Jennifer Bilek
'From Transexual to Transgender to Transhuman Part I'
(extract)
As a member of the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy (ICTLEP) since 1992, Rothblatt authored one of the first drafts of the Transexual and Transgender Health Law Reports, after meeting Phyllis Frye, another transsexual lawyer, in Texas. This document would later be referred to as the International Bill of Gender Rights (IBGR). Phyllis Frye has been referred to as the “grandmother of the transgender movement.” Though Rothblatt’s transhumanist preoccupations may garner him more attention, we must consider him as much of an influence in normalizing transsexualism (now transgenderism), as Frye. Together they launched a small meeting of transsexuals into an international project to drive transsexualism globally. A history of their meeting and subsequent growth of the transgender project in the culture, can be found here.
The Conference of Transexual and Transgender Law and Employment Policy became an international project once Frye was contacted by a transsexual identifying female in the UK named Stephen Whittle, now a professor of equalities law at Manchester Metropolitan University and president-elect of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) which has since developed an American branch (USPATH). Whittle too has been extremely instrumental in driving trans activism, especially in the UK.
The Transexual and Transgender Health Law Reports initiated by Frye and Rothblatt and then Whittle, became a working draft for another global document and committee outlining transsexual/transgender rights in the UK, the Interdepartmental Working Group on Transexual People, advanced by yet another male, transsexual, lawyer, Christine Burns and set up by the Home Secretary of the UK in 1999. Membership at the Working group included representatives from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the US.
These four lawyers, all transsexual identifying, have been the main generators of a project to deconstruct sex within the law, on a global scale and to have it replaced with medical identities representing how they feel about their bodies. Martine Rothblatt has gone much further in this deconstruction process."
www.the11thhourblog.com/post/from-transexual-to-transgender-to-transhuman-part-i