[joey tribbiani] So, Una… how you doin’? [/jt] 
I thought kitten heels were more about the shape of the heel than the height.
Wikipedia defines them as being short. In the general parlance I hear, it normally refers to the small-heeled pumps, or as they call them “Mary Tyler Moore” shoes.
Una, thanks for sharing so much of yourself here in this thread; it’s been very enlightening.
I’m curious for your thoughts on this essay by Eric Raymond, in which he asks some interesting questions about transsexuality:
The last claim is interesting, i.e. that surgery, hormones, etc. do not significantly alter suicide rates). Is it accurate? If so, is there at least an increase in quality of life among those post-op transsexuals who don’t commit suicide?
“lifestyle choice”? How exactly is being a transexual a lifestyle?
Second, the tranperson’s views that they have a brain of one sex in the body of another are backed up by science. Our own Una enlightens us The Transgender Brain | Transas City
Third, accepting the patient as their proclaimed gender and treating with hormones and possibly surgery have a better outcome than everything else we’ve tried for GID.
I’m sure I’ve missed something, but I have a bad cold and no energy. I just put a vacuum tube through the washing machine
Well, there’s also the fact that there’s a world of difference between wanting to become a normal, healthy, fully-functional woman or man, and wanting to physically disable oneself. I think it displays prejudice and/or fear on the part of the author that he phrases it as wanting to “amputate” their genitals rather than “alter” them. I mean, people have all kinds of plastic surgery all the time, in order to make their bodies look the way they want them to. If a woman wants to get a breast enlargement or a guy wants to get a nose job, most people don’t look askance at them, even though their body parts might have been completely normal and healthy to begin with. But beyond that, if someone has something actually wrong - if they’re born with, say, a few extra fingers, or a cleft palate - absolutely no one would say question their desire to surgically remedy the situation. The distinction, to my mind, between having elective or corrective surgery and amputating healthy limbs, is that the end goal is one of health and normalcy.
And I’m just a cissexual layperson, but I’d hazard a guess that a huge part of the reason the suicide rates don’t decrease all that much is the prevalence of attitudes like this guy’s. You just have to browse this thread to see why life might not suddenly become all sunshine and roses for a post-op transsexual just because they finally have the right body. Even if they “pass” 100% of the time, they often live in loneliness and isolation, constantly fearing that someone will discover their secret. But yes, despite the fact that surgery and hormones don’t help much, they’re basically the only thing that helps at all, and I’d hazard that if we treated post-op transsexuals the way we treat people who had some other congenital disorder corrected (i.e. as normal human beings), that the post-op suicide rate would indeed fall off precipitously.
Where was this thread about ten years ago? I used to work in a retail situation where one of the managers was like this – I mean, straight out of the old “Pat” SNL skits as far as complete and utter ambiguity, although this individual was very likeable and, even better, a really good manager, which is worth more than gold in a retail environment. Anyway, because I really liked this person I also found myself contorting verbally in awkward singular-they constructions rather than risk making a mistake and causing offence.
Re-reading that paragraph, I realized that it’s glaringly obvious that I never found out. I didn’t care, one way or the other, mind you – I just wanted to not make my grammar teachers roll in their graves!
You probably already know this, but you are a brilliant genius. Seriously. This is fantastic!
A brand-new poster who got the spoiler tags right on the first try? It’s true – miracles do sometimes happen. 
Welcome to our message board, Harmicky.
^^ username/post combo FTW!
I missed that. Good catch, and a very valid point.
First off, I really can’t take the claims seriously of a random blogger (who is this person? What what I can tell he’s some programmer who thinks because people throw roses at his Open Source feet, that his opinions on transsexuality matter? Bwuh?) who within a couple of short paragraphs says “As a libertarian I’m inclined to think that people have a right to mutilate their own bodies any way they like…” He’s already poisoned the well from the get-go and clearly made his bias known.
Suicide stats on post-op transwomen are very difficult to obtain. There are two reasons - first, there are not that many of them in the first place, compared to say the general population. Second, and most importantly, a significant number of us drop off the radar completely. Once surgery is over (before, actually) there is no need to see any gender counselor, no more doctor’s approvals for anything needed, no more “need” to be supported by a transgender community. In my city alone, perhaps 6 in 10 of the post ops have vanished into the woodwork. And of the remaining, 2 in 10 wish they could and are trying to.
There was a debate on this message board once where I posted the positive outcomes from psychotherapy, hormones, and surgery. I believe it was scattered through a thread in Comments on Cecil’s columns. The net result was there was a significant improvement in the lives of transsexuals as a result of the three, increasing in effectiveness.
But the effect is not huge - post-op transsexuals never end up with as low a chance of suicide as an average person. The reasons are many, but obvious: most states have no protection from discrimination, most transpeople will still have several or their entire family reject them, they’ve still lost their old friends, they likely lost their spouse, they have nearly a 50% chance of losing their career…really, they tell us and we tell the “young” ones in return - surgery will not fix a fucked-up life situation.
His points are fairly easy to demolish. First, thank you Doc Cathode for linking to my transgender brain article which was published on Transas City. The evidence for transsexualism being a genetic or fetal developmental difference is strong.
Second, the fact that transsexuals are incredibly resistant to other therapies - chemicals, ECT, insulin shock, aversion therapy, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, etc. has been known since the 1960’s, when even Harry Benjamin tried to “cure” transsexuals. He succeeded in “curing” crossdressers, via a combination of drugs, but nothing know “cures” a transperson. You don’t “cure” this, you manage it.
And that takes us to the third point - leading medical authorities around the globe are increasingly admitting that the proper and ethical treatment for transsexual persons is psychotherapy and counseling, hormones, real-life transition, and surgery. While some may point to “but Medicare doesn’t allow it and calls it experimental,” that policy is actually currently under review, and is expected to be overturned.
Fourth, BIID takes a fully functioning limb and removes it. It is destructive to the body, it creates a person who is lesser in capabilities. Whereas SRS takes parts which are non-functioning and non-useful and turns them into useful parts. Or else removes parts which had no real purpose any more.
The problem is…people think we transsexuals are too focused on our genitals? Bitch, please, as they say. It’s the intolerant cisgender people who are the ones to define me and my people by our genitals. They gleefully skip over the 99% of what it means to socially and legally be a certain gender and live and love and work and play as that gender, and focus on a few pieces of flesh. It’s one of the first questions we’re asked - “did you get it cut off? OMG I could never do that! OMG!”
Anecdote time - this week I had two lengthy conversations with my friend A., a transsexual woman who has been fully legally and socially transitioned for 13 years. If I posted a photo, your jaws would drop - she’s a stone-cold fox. Petite, almost elfin with tiny features, a beautiful smile, long luscious natural hair, and she’s a college professor, hella smart and witty to boot. Every semester her students ask her out, and every club we go to she turns down men chasing after her.
But she doesn’t want to - she’s firmly, unwavering hetero, but she cannot afford SRS. Due to a long period of unemployment and time in grad school, she’s just clawing her way from under massive debt. She has a penis and testicles - this is typically a turn-off for straight men who might date her. But even more than that, it’s a turn-off for her. She hates them, despises them, and is in despair from sexual frustration because she can’t have sex, can’t masturbate, she gets hot and bothered and can’t do anything at all. If she had SRS she could risk dating, risk falling in love, risk sex - risk a full physical intimate relationship.
She cried on my shoulder this week, literally. She wants to have an intimate relationship with a man, but can’t. She can’t even please herself - for one, the stuff doesn’t work, and for another she can’t bear to touch it other than daily cleaning.
So when my good friend gets her SRS, will she be “mutilating” herself? Really? She’d be gaining an enormous quality of life in so many ways. It would allow her to have a full life, sans childbearing capability. And while that’s unfortunate, a lot of women can’t physically or safely bear children.
Now compare this to a typical BIID person who says “I need my left leg cut off. Why? I just do.”
When you come face to face with the despair - especially when it’s from within your own self (as I well know), then the abstracting pontificating of some “libertarian” coder who knows almost nothing at all about our community and lives really pales in comparison in importance.
In some ways we can really dig into the term “mutilating.” Which one of these people are mutilating themselves as well?
- The woman who has breast implants.
- The woman who has breast reduction.
- The woman who has a pre-emptive mastectomy to prevent a breast cancer which hasn’t even occurred yet.
- The man who has an orchiectomy or vasectomy.
- A man who has penis enlargement.
- A woman who has an elective hysterectomy.
- The man or woman who undergoes substantial cosmetic surgery for vanity.
- What about a woman who has an abortion? Is she mutilating herself and/or her fetus?
- Some would go so far as to claim tattoos, tribal scars, and piercings are “mutilation” also. Why isn’t sticking large needles through our flesh to hang things from the holes “mutilation?”
“Mutilation” isn’t what people think it is. If you are sitting there, reading this, there is a huge chance you are cisgender. You are probably happy with your genitals. OK, the men want more, the women want better function, whatever. And since an early age the meme is for parents in conservative societies to teach us that “down there” is bad, evil, not to be talked about. So the thought of someone NOT being happy with the genitals, NOT being able to use them even by themselves, and making a positive chance to this “naughty area” sends a frisson of “OMG! Cutting dicks off! OMG!”
Clearly the author of this blog has no empathy for my people. Their protestations of just being concerned for our mental health ring false and ring familiar. They are the same arguments put forth every time a “reasonable” person wants to go down the path of discrimination.
Another quote from the article:
[QUOTE=blogger guy]
I’ve known two transsexuals well enough to believe I have some idea of what their inner life is like; I’ve met, I think, four others. I’ve felt sympathy for all of them – but Willamson reminds me that sympathy may be as easy but serious a mistake here as it would be with respect to a paranoid schizophrenic.
[/QUOTE]
First off, fuck you - you’ve known two transsexuals? Good for you, sport - you have no fucking idea about our inner lives. I’ve known hundreds. I had lunch with one today. I went to meet and greet Laverne Freaking Cox last night with a group of 7 others. I got a photo op with Laverne Cox, in fact. And I am a freaking transsexual. And I still can’t say I know with confidence what any other transperson’s “inner life” really is. And you feel sympathy but even think that sympathy, a basic act of human kindness, is a mistake?
How unfortunate.
You understand the issue very well. Really, I can’t say any more, thank you. 
If the penis is used in surgery then your friend should be able to masturbate the base like it was a clitoris. It would seem to me to be the same orgasm method achieved after surgery.
Perhaps you are not aware of the mechanics and procedures of SRS (few people are, actually), but that is incorrect. You seem to be saying that the penis is chopped off to a stump, or else a clitoris made from the nerves and tissue at the base. This is not the case. While techniques vary, the most common one involves a clitoris being fashioned with plastic surgery from the most sensitive tissue of the head and part below the head of the penis. Some of this highly sensitive tissue may also be used in the neovagina (the technical term).
A post-op transwoman uses her clitoris just like a cisgender woman does to masturbate. I know this from direct personal experience.
But this is aside from the point that she has an aversion to her own genitals which is lifelong and debilitating.
no, I’m referring to the base of the penis (balls side) as an area sensitive to stimulation which to me would more closely replicate female masturbation. I understand the surgery just throwing out something for her to do to kill time.
…something for her to do to kill time. I see.
Thank you for your concern.
It was a concern. I don’t have $$ to help her so unless you’re funding the operation today she has no way of sexual release between now and when she gets the money. Thought maybe there might be a way of helping in a small way in the mean time. Sorry to bother you. Carry on.
Respectfully you are missing the over-arching point which was said twice before: she has an aversion to her own genitals which is lifelong and debilitating, until she has SRS. This is not something she can overcome by the power of positive thinking or via suggestion of a new technique for masturbation.
Your suggestion is actually not bad for someone who does not have that over-arching issue. Another thing which the transwomen who can deal with their unwanted genitals will do is use a vibe on a very low setting on that area, in fact.
I actually get what you’re saying on this. My suggestion avoids the sensation of touching the organ itself. Not sure where I read it but the base of the penis, the parts inside the groin, are sensitive to stimulation and I’m not talking about the prostate. But since you know about the area and don’t think it helps that’s fine. It’s a trait of men to try and resolve problems as presented and a trait of women to empathize and console.
Do you mean like this? 
(WARNING, WORK-SAFE VIDEO WITH SOUND)
ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. That was painful to watch. But I think you nailed it. Or more precisely, that’s hitting the nail on the head.
Well, Una, after all, his name is Magiver, so no doubt he’s engineering a better way, with a soda straw and a piece of string or something.
So, you made your own vacuum cleaner? Awesome!