Towards a TS dictionary -- the letter Rr

   BOLD=cross reference, see item when appropriate letter posted

Radical Drag

a)     The drag performers who emerged from the RadFems of London Gay Liberation Front, who combined gender-mix drag with radical left politics.  Bloolips became the major performing troupe, taking inspiration from the New York troupe Hot Peaches, and Bette Borne the best known performer. 

b)    More generally, drag that mixes male and female clothing, and is often acquired in charity shops.  See also Gender Fuck.

Radical Faeries

A movement founded in 1979 by Harry Hay and Don Kilhefner.  A major concept was the rejection of Hetero-imitation, supplemented by the values of the 1960s counterculture and creative spiritualism.  Inspiration was taken from indigenous cultures.   It remained gay-centred.  Trans persons were accepted in, but the movement was not a trans movement.  A type of Men’s Liberation.

Radical Feminists

a)     RadFems. A term for the more gender variant of males involved with London Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s.  Drag became the thing at Gay Lib dances and meetings, and then evolved into street theatre: most notable in support at the trial of women for disrupting the Miss World contest, and the disruption of the 1971 Christian Festival of Light.  These Radical Feminists lived in communal squats in Brixton and Notting Hill, and wore drag all day.  They aligned themselves with the lesbians in GLF, and after the women split, they came to dominate the all-London meetings.   However, the movement had run its course by late 1973.   As far as it is known, no Radfem from this movement ever completed a transgender Transition.  See also Bethnal Rouge.

b)    A branch of feminism, that arose from the second-wave feminism of the 1960s, that concentrates on the role of the Patriarchy and its rules, that Gender is a Social Construct that enables the patriarchy.  Gender equality can be achieved only by toppling this Social Construct.

c)     A subset of (b).  The Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) who faced with trans people, some of whom are actually deconstructing the Gender Binary in their own lives, decided that that was not what they meant by destroying the Gender Social Construction.

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)

The supposed phenomena of teenagers suddenly self-identifying as Trans, probably at the same times as others in their peer group.   Some regard this as a social coping mechanism for a non-discussed disorder of another kind. The paper initially proposing the concept was based on surveys of parents of transgender youth recruited from three anti-trans websites, and is not recognized as a valid mental health diagnosis by any major professional association.   See Transtrender.

Reclaimed, Redeemed

Some words, previously used as slurs, have been reclaimed by the group that they refer to, and thus used as words of pride.  Examples include the words Queer, Virago, Decadence, Sissy, Travesti, Baeddel, Bakla.

Read                          

a)     To realise that someone's sex or gender is other than as presented, or was so at some time in the past.  See also Parviscience.

b)    To insult imaginatively - NY ball scene usage.

Read to filth, read for filth

A stronger form of Read (b).  To scold, to call out, to correct.

Real, Realness

A term used by the New York Voguing Houses for those able to pass in sunshine or under bright lights.

Real Disguise

A term proposed by Roger Baker with reference to Cross-Acting on stage or film performance.  A performance such that the audience accepts it as portrayed even if the off-stage gender of the actor is known to be other.   Baker nominates the Boy Actresses of the Renaissance stage as a prime example.  See False Disguise.

Real girl

A term for a cis woman, used by trans women in previous decades. This is an example of False Consciousness in that the trans women are downgrading their own realness, 

Real-life Experience/ Test (RLE)

The requirement by gender clinics that a trans person should have lived a year or more in the target gender before Completion Surgery.  Some clinics even require it before prescribing Hormones.    There is merit in the practice, as opposed to the requirement, in that if the person does change their mind, Detransition is more achievable if there is no surgery to be reversed.   However, for those who are quite certain of their path, this is an extra frustration.    The refusal of some clinics to acknowledge Real-Life Experience before registering with the clinic is particularly exasperating.    The requirement for RLE before being prescribed Hormones is counter productive is that the person may not therefore pass and thus be subjected to abuse.   While many GICs require a one-year RLE before surgery, there is much evidence of trans persons who have avoided this and thrived well afterwards.

Real name

There is a persistent fallacy that one’s initial name (pre-Transition) is one’s real name.   Unsympathetic interlocutors will demand of a trans person: what was your real name?  This is both rude and illogical.   A trans person has gone through an Ycleptance. A taking of a new name that is as psychologically intense as an Ycleptance for a woman who takes a new name at marriage, or a person who takes a new name as part of acceptance into a religion.  A person’s real name is the one that he/she answers to. A new name fully taken is one’s Real Name.  Also see Heteronym,.

Realignment

An ironic redrafting of Sex Reassignment Surgery is Sex Realignment Surgery.  This avoids the problematic assumption that doctors and surgeons assign and reassign sex/gender. 

Real Self

It is an irony of Transgender change that one must alter one’s body to manifest one’s Real Self.

Recognize Alan Hart, Ad Hoc Committee to

Portland’s The Right to Privacy Political Action Committee held a big fund-raiser each year in the 1990s using Alan Hart’s pre-Transition name.  Local trans persons objected, but it took direct action interrupting the proceedings before the name was changed.  In this they were supported by the Lesbian Avengers.

Rectosigmoid vaginoplasty

The construction of a Neo-Vagina using a section taken from the rectosigmoid colon of the patient.  This was first done for a cis woman with Vaginal Agenesis in 1892 in Paris by Dr WF Sneguireff.   Such surgery for trans women was pioneered by Dr Donald Laub at the Stanford School of Medicine in the mid 1970s. 

Red Pill

A reference to the 1999 film The Matrix, in which the protagonist is offered a choice between a blue pill (and return to obliviousness) and a red pill (which reveals what is really going on).  The term has been adopted by the alt-right for those who convert to their racist, misogynous, homophobic, transphobic viewpoints.  The irony is that in the film, the pill is offered by a black man, and the film was directed by two trans women, and taking the red pill is also taken as an allegory for transgender hormonal therapy.

Regina v Tan, UK 1982

“It is an offence for a man knowingly to live wholly or in part on the earnings of prostitution”.  By this wording only a man can commit this offence.

In 1982 Gloria Greaves of Belgravia, London and her tenant, Mrs Tan, were both arrested and convicted of keeping a disorderly house under the Disorderly Houses Act of 1751.  Furthermore, Mrs Greaves was convicted under the Sexual Offences Act 1956 of living on the earnings of prostitution in that she was Tan's landlady, and her husband of living on the earnings of male prostitution (that is of his wife's).  Mrs Greaves had completed surgical Transition in the early 1960s, and was recognised as female for national insurance purposes.  She was sent to a women’s prison.  

Re-Identify

A person who declared that they were trans, but before surgery, hormones or even cross-living, changes back and Re-Identifies as their birth gender.  Not to be confused with De-Transition where more serious steps were taken.   One type of Change-Back. 

Rén yāo  人妖    

A Chinese term for person altered from nature, a freak or person fond of dressing up and make up.  Applied to trans persons in a derogatory fashion.   Rén=person; yāo=want or request.

Reparative Therapy

A term proposed by Elizabeth Moberly for Homosocial Bonding to replace a failure of bonding with the same-sex parent.  She sees this ‘failure’ as the primary cause of homosexuality.  Where the failure of bonding is particularly severe, ‘a defensive detachment from the same sex implies disidentification: not just an absence of identification but a reaction against identification’. In other words, transsexuality is Extreme Homosexuality.  Her therapy has been condemned as ineffective, and her theory was revealed as based on the reading of only three writers with no new research.     

Replication

Any discovery in science should be able to be replicated by other scientists using the published description.  Alleged Etiologies or causes of gender variance often fail this requirement.   See BSTc, H-Y Antigen, and also Heuristic.

Retro-disguise

A person in disguise playing a role of his/her original persona. This trope was named by Victor Freeburg in his writing on Renaissance theatre. As a dramaturgical device it dates back to ancient Sanskrit drama and was quite popular in Italian and English Renaissance drama. This is not necessarily a gender trope: it can be done with racial impersonation, when characters who are technically black but able to pass as white put on black-face for narrative reasons.  A variant retro-disguise uses the gender of the actor as the first gender-role. This was common in the British theatre until the Restoration when Boy-actresses played females who disguised as male. A modern version would be to cast a woman as a drag queen.

Retrojection

The use of a name acquired or chosen later in life when discussing the early life of the person.   For example, the Wikipedia article on the writer Fay Weldon retrojects her name inappropriately. Weldon was born Fay Birkinshaw, and by a first marriage became Mrs Bateman.  However, the Wikipedia authors refer to her as 'Weldon' in childhood and again when she was Mrs Bateman, that is before she married, or even met, her second husband Ron Weldon in 1960.  A similar practice is that of referring to a person who Transitions, say at age 40, and using the post-transition name for the person’s childhood.

Reverse Discourse

The employment of the terminology of psychiatrists or other authority groups in such a way that the meaning is quite different and even counter to the original.  See e.g. Collusion with Delusion where trans patients supply the contrary-to-fact expected data to psychiatrists.

Ridiculous Theatrical Company (RTC)

A Greenwich Village theatre founded by Charles Ludlam in 1967 which was part of the Theater of the Ridiculous movement.  Over the next twenty years the RTC was a major part of the counter-culture in New York.  The plays were often parodies or re-workings of pop culture with much Camp, Drag, kitsch, grotesque etc.

Rough Trade

A man, who affects to be thuggish, and may be involved with criminal activity or even have membership in a Mafia, who has an affair with a trans woman or a gay man.  He may put the trans woman on the street to sell herself, and live off her income.  It was a stereotype before Stonewall that a trans woman should have such a lover, as is depicted in Jean Genet’s Notre Dame des Fleurs. See also Trade.

Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT)

London’s oldest surviving gay venue.  The building was built 1860-2.  It first attracted a gay clientele after the Second World War.  In the 1960s drag performer Chris Shaw and business partner Peter King started the drag shows that the Vauxhall became famous for.  They were performed along the bar after it was cleared of drinks and glasses.  Mrs Shufflewick, Hinge and Brackett, Regina Fong and Lily Savage performed there and Freddie Mercury of Queen was a frequent visitor.

Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle

Charles Armstrong, endocrinologist, specialised in intersex patients and that included transsexuals. He testified for the trans person in both the Forbes-Sempill and the Corbett v. Corbett cases. Surgery on intersex and trans persons ceased in late 1978 when the surgeon, Mr Edwards, retired and was not replaced.

Rupantarkami

A Bengali term for one who desires transformation of their form (roop).  A term used of Transsexuals.