“Emily Hobbie” (born 1969) is the pseudonym of an American transgender activist who created one of the important early transgender forums, GenderPeace. The support forum was active from 2002 until it was eventually ruined by transgender troll Denise Magner. The site went offline in 2008.
“Autogynephilia” activism
Hobbie’s personal life began to unravel in 2009, and by 2015, Hobbie had turned to Alice Dreger for attention and validation, as Denise Magner and many other indigent trans people had done before. At some point, Hobbie became an “autogynephilia” activist.
In 2016, Hobbie read Dreger’s book Galileo’s Middle Finger and began getting involved in the trans community response, almost all of which was negative. When the Lambda Literary Foundation rescinded their nomination of the book for a possible award in March, Hobbie sprung into action defending Dreger. Hobbie and fellow “autogynephilia” activist Jamie Faye Fenton launched blogs supporting Dreger on the same day in March 2016. This was Hobbie’s only entry:
I hate “AGP” as it’s misrepresented. Here is my representation.
I think the way I experience what I think of as my gender is most intensely is during sex. I suspect this is true for the vast majority of people and part and parcel of being sexual beings. I don’t believe in a “true” gender any more than a “true” sex — sex and gender are both way complicated — but I do think that the gender I feel most keenly during sexual arousal is the gender that makes the sense for me to live by, and happily tracks with the gender my sexual partners and society in general relate to me as much more naturally than that suggested by my XY chromosome or naughty bits with which I was born.
genderpeaceblog.wordpress.com
Hobbie, under the username TugWildGeese, created a single-purpose account on Wikipedia and used it between April 6 and 10 to puff up Dreger’s biography.
As with Magner, there’s a lot more to this sad tale. It’s a shame that someone whose legacy would have been fondly remembered tacked on this unfortunate epilogue during a time of personal crisis.
Resources
GenderPeace (genderpeace.com) [archive]
WordPress (wordpress.com)
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)