What are your qualifications for saying this? I’ve seen hundreds of sets of genitals of post-op women. It’s very rare that they look indistinguishable than anyone else’s.
Thankfully the IOC and many other major US and international sporting bodies don’t agree with you.
Not only that, but after several years the cells will actually alter within a transwoman’s vagina to be female-type cells found inside the vagina of a ciswoman. This was found on accident and has since been proven to be yet another wonderful and strange thing about the human body, which we don’t know the root cause of.
Third gender is not the same as transgender though. This is a serious mistake people make when the refer to hijra and transgender - they are not, and have even tried to lobby for the United Nations to officially recognize them as a third gender, neither male nor female. Whereas most transgender persons are single-gender.
It’s a single citation. DSeid, you wouldn’t let me make a statement based on a single citation. I’ve previously posted at length on this message board several citations which back up that surgery is a better alternative than hormonal treatment or counseling alone.
I’m really tired of people just grabbing a random web link or the first hit from Google and not doing the research on differences in the transgender brain.
Here is an article written about the transsexual brain. It has 31 citations and also presents studies which refute the hypothesis. More than 100 studies were reviewed in the writing of the article.
This addressed the question of the effectiveness of surgery.
There’s much more discussion through the multi-page thread.
So what if some do? So what? How many? What study are you basing your conclusion on? What personal experience?
In any situation people want to game a system. Especially when they are desperate to the point where 4 in 10 will attempt suicide at some point in their lives.
I know hundreds of transpeople. I’m friends with scores. And I am one. I’ve never personally met someone who wanted to be known as mentally ill, insurance and paying for SRS be damned.
I shall bookmark this cite and use it in discussions of this sort.
I’ve done some reading on hijras but would love to know more. For those unfamiliar, hijras are the third gender of India. They are sacred in that they have special duties and privileges and can point to Arjuna one of the great Hindu heroes as their founder. They are profane in that they are looked down on, are outcasts, and have a long history of working as prostitutes. Some especially devout hijra have themselves emasculated in a procedure that involves no anasthesia.
Let’s quote what was quoted from McHugh above:
Sadly, people are missing the obvious reason why transsexuals adopt gender stereotypes. I don’t blame anyone - not one transsexual person on the SDMB has posted in this thread, and I’m the sole transgender researcher on the SDMB as far as I know.
The reason why transsexuals adopt “stereotypical” gender clothing and roles is because that’s how we fit in best for the rest of society.
Really. Think this one through with me.
M2F’s especially, who have more trouble passing, can’t just wear no makeup, blue jeans, and tennis shoes. Because so many of them don’t pass, and even the ones who do tend to have something which stands out and triggers a “male body” vibe. They dress hyper-femme so they will send out the proper social triggers to society which will tell people “this is a woman”, or at worst, “this is a person who wants to be addressed and considered as a woman.” This is why F2Ms have more flexibility in their dress and manners - once the beard comes in, the leg hair, the deep voice, they tend to pass with great ease. It’s rare that a meet a transman who doesn’t immediately trigger “he’s a dude” in me, regardless of how they are dressed. F2Ms can dress androgynously and they still set off all “guy” flags.
With M2Fs, it’s much more difficult…sad but true. We’ve been the butt of cruel jokes on the SDMB for ever since my first day on here 13 years ago. F2Ms…not so much. M2Fs need to give off, beat other people over the head with “female” social cues sometimes.
I am M2F. I’m also blessed with an intersex hormone condition which gave me female external features - I had real breasts before hormones. I did not grow body hair like a man. I didn’t lose scalp hair, even though every single male in my family tree did so by age 30. I’m short and thin, and I pass 100%. But even still, even with all that, the other women at work advised me to dress as femme as possible, act as femme as possible, to reinforce to the other managers, my employees, and my clients that “I was woman.” When I wore a pantsuit a couple of times, I got different reactions from my usual skirt-suit. When I came up in female blue-jeans, a “house top”, no jewelry and tennis shoes, I was not nearly treated the same. People took those dress cues, and they started referring to me in gender-neutral terms, or even skipped back to calling me by my old name.
So heck yes, I dress super-femme, because it works.
It’s much more complex than handwaving and saying “see!? This proves they’re delusional, because they’re obsessed with gender stereotypes.” It’s actually society which expects it. Sure, I could buck the trend, I could dress in female but masculine clothing, or androgynous clothing…and I could also hit myself on the head all day with a stapler too. Like many, many M2Fs I came out at a place where people knew me as the other gender for years. I need these social cues and signals for reinforcement. Why would I make more stress and less social acceptance for myself by not doing that? My job is hard enough as it is!
To understand transgender issues, one needs to really look at each problem from a multitude of viewpoints. Think of them as human beings, trying to live their lives and survive gender dysporia, something which would absolutely floor most people if it was suddenly dumped on them. Not as patients, not as freaks, not as manipulators, not as liars.
Survivors.
To add to my last point, I know transwomen who work in “butch” industries. One is an aircraft mechanic. The women at work wear coveralls - she wears coveralls. The women at work don’t wear makeup - she doesn’t wear makeup. The women at work wear steel-toed shoes - she wears steel-toed shoes. In other words, she dresses to blend in with the other women at work. This carries over into her leisure time - she dresses like her female friends at work dress in leisure time.
Another problem too is, unfortunately most people only have experience with crossdressers or drag queens, who are under the “transgender” umbrella. These folks are not transsexuals - they are men who identify as male and who have reasons for dressing female. They dress way over the top, they dress to attract attention, they dress to create a reaction.
The friction between crossdressers and drag queens and the transsexual community seems to be growing, very rapidly, as transsexuals are trying to toe the line and fit in.
My transsexual friends dress to blend and submerge, but while also trying to dress to give off as many gender cues as possible without standing out. It’s a frustrating tightrope to walk.
Did you read the article, or did you just read the abstract? Did anyone holding this article up as the word from on high actually do the legwork and pay for the article like I did, or did you just read the abstract too?
First off, if the authors boiled down 919 original articles to 169 worth a full review, narrowed that down to 28 high-quality ones, and those show that in 80% of the time with SRS gender dysphoria is improved…um, that’s like a good thing?
Sounds good to me. That single study was for patients at a single clinic, and was not a broad-based review. It also spanned 20 freaking years, from 1970 to 1990, for just these 17 patients. In terms of transgender treatment and SRS, 1970 may as well be the Bronze Age. Surgical techniques and evaluation and treatment have advanced markedly from that time. A single patient sought reversal (not 2/3 of 17, as was misreported, but 2/3 of 3). Note that the paper is in German (yes, I paid for it, rather than Google for abstracts) so it’s hard to tell exactly what they posit, but it appears to me that the primary basis for regret was the fact that after surgery, their peers and employers and others socially isolated them. In other words, surgery didn’t fix the fact that they couldn’t get a job and their family disowned them. Well…yeah. Duh.
There were some serious side-effects in some cases, true, such as loss of sexual function - but then it’s unclear if these were hormonal-based and not SRS-based, it’s unclear if these actually caused problems (not as obvious as you’d think), it’s unclear if they were due to psychological problems or comorbidities, and it’s unclear if it was due to poorer, earlier surgical techniques.
But back the original study. The author’s summary of the evidence as low-quality is to say the least, odd. For example, they state on page 229 that:
This is another “duh” moment. It’s a violation of WPATH guidelines, and pretty much all established guidelines in the entire freaking history of transsexual treatment, to perform SRS without HRT and psychotherapy. And to have hormones prescribed without psychotherapy. Anyone who doesn’t know this is too ignorant to be writing on this subject. Yet the authors state this as a “weakness.” In theory, it is, but in practice, it’s an unavoidable “weakness” along the lines of saying “our studies on childbirth are weakened because we were unable to survey many virgins who gave birth.” I mean, WTF?
How about this:
I mean, wow. Since it’s pretty much unheard of that ANYONE would be approved for SRS without a full experience with HRT and therapy, and it’s also unusual for a true transsexual person to have solely counseling and no other hormonal treatment, excluding all papers which did not explicitly mention HRT is like saying “in our study of runners, we excluded articles which did not explicitly mention that the subjects had legs.”
The actual paper is not nearly as damning as its abstract leads you to believe. Moreover, it does not state once in the entire article that NOT having SRS is better than having it. Methinks that the review itself has some serious methodological weaknesses, which the authors admit.
It seems that posters in here are applying their personal prejudice and phobias to set the guidelines for what is convincing evidence that SRS is effective treatment. It comes down to “transpeople are icky and it makes me cringe to think of losing my penis, so this must be wrong! I need six-sigma proof this works before I’ll sanction it!” Thankfully, you don’t have to take my word for it - the established medical authority, WPATH, as well as numerous other medical organizations too numerous to list, all approve SRS as a proper treatment for transsexuals. Take it up with them if you think the evidence is weak.
But in terms of Great Debates, picking a single paper and going off an abstract and then posting it as a “gotcha” or referring to it as chilling evidence is really unsupportable.
They are lucky it hasn’t yet come to a head. If I were a rich, unethical investor, I could scour poor villages for athletic young men who wanted to make their families rich. Pay for the surgery, train them in a tennis academy for a few years, and they would start to dominate the sport. In today’s tennis, you can make over a million dollars by winning a single tournament, even if you don’t have any sponsorship deals.
Though I’m not sure how tennis fans, or players who were born female and became increasingly shut out of the top tier of the sport, would feel about such a development.
It’s difficult to take this James Bond villain scenario seriously.
With so much money on the line, where are all the diabolical trans athletes taking away gold medals and endorsements from natal women? Show them to me.
I’m not even going to get into the devastating effects of female hormones and changes in power/weight ratios until I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with real-world scenarios and not hand-wringing over bad movie script material.
As someone who follows tennis it’s impossible to take seriously. You don’t just start playing and enter a tournament with a million dollars in prize money. First you put in years and years of practice and spend your time going playing events that hardly pay at all, and if you’re successful in those you might have a chance to get into the tournaments that pay a lot of money. It’s a large investment of time and capital that takes a long time to pay off, and that’s before you add the complications of gender reassignment. Supervillains stick to industries with bigger payoffs.
I’m not sure why we would call such a person a supervillain necessarily. Anyone who uses the rules as they stand at any given time is basically doing what sport is all about. The issue is whether the rules should or should not prohibit this. It took a while for people to catch on that certain Kenyans had a genetic gift for long distance running, but now professional academies are starting to target this group and train them and it is becoming a thing. In the case of running, clearly we are not going to prohibit that ethnic group from competing. OTOH they do not achieve their status through surgery (and yes, eventually we may have to look at knee surgeries and such the way we do steroids if they confer an advantage).
Right now the biggest impediment I would see in tennis (and btw I do follow the sport very closely) is the taboo aspect. But this is something that I assume you hope to see change over time and are working toward that. So let’s say that does happen, and drift forward a century or whatever (they’ve been playing Wimbledon longer than that, after all). Let’s further say it’s not even going to be desperate cisgendered men who do it only for the money and fame, but just people who legitimately want the surgery and also happen to play tennis.
Surely you must think that currently, the vast majority of people with these brain differences are suppressing their feelings, or can’t afford surgery, or both. Right? But maybe a hundred years from now, that’s not an impediment: as we’ve discussed elsewhere, technology by then may have spread a middle class lifestyle to everyone, including worldwide universal health care. So by combining widespread affluence with far greater social tolerance, we could see the potential ranks of Renee Richards swell, surely, to thousands of times their current potential. Agreed?
So: if we got to a point where most of the top ten players came from this group, would that be fair to players who were born female? For historical context on this, let’s remember that the 6-foot-2 Richards did not enter the women’s game until age 42, and entered the top 20 of the rankings at age 45, something I don’t believe any other woman has ever done. She also made it to the doubles final of the U.S. Open the first time she played it.
ETA: Ms. Richards herself now even admits it was not fair, and believes the IOC should not allow transgender athletes to compete as women.
Oh, and I didn’t even see this, from the link I posted above (I was posting it mainly for the video but ended up reading all the way down):
Okay, fair enough. Maybe I should be more accepting of the surgery as a stopgap measure while they keep studying these people’s brains and work on other avenues of treatment.
I think that’s part of monstro’s point, though: in a society with three genders, people have the possibility of identifying as any of the three genders. In one with two, there’s only two choices.
There are a lot of gender identification labels which have been tossed about in these forums which would never, ever have occurred to me - because my gender identification frame isn’t the same as that of the posters using them.
THIS times a thousand…Gender is a lot more complex then just male and female,and that is what trans people are missing…there are many different genders.Kate Bornstien started out as a guy,transistioned to female…and realized s/he was BEYOND gender,or more beyond our current thinking about gender.
I’m genderqueer myself b/c I think gender roles are bullshit.
I also think in SOME cases being trans is more like a symptom then a cause…I knew a girl who identified as f2m…The thing was …she was extremely mysgogetic and self hating and OBESSED with STRICT gender roles…it was really sick.
Una, thank you for the links and that comprehensive review.
Still I have to go with Cecil’s take: the evidence (as you present it) that the procedure is safe and effective as compared top alternative choices is weak. The lack of follow up is a big issue, your proposed explanation for it notwithstanding. A study with n of 95 that shows “psychotherapy alone yielded satisfactory results for the patient 76% of the time, hormone treatment 81% of the time, and SRS 84% of the time” is the strongest bit and seems unlikely to be a trend that reaches statistical significance. The increased suicide rate may bew a selection bias issue or may not be.
OTOH medicine is full of having to make decisions based on the evidence we have, not the evidence we want to have. Weak evidence is better than none.
As to the having it both ways comment - not based on studies, just merely on what people write in public venues. If the issue is coverage then strong and convincing arguments to consider it an illness; in other venues equally strong and convincing arguments to consider it a difference not an illness. Is it all based on gaming the system? I don’t know.
What is illness? It causes pain and dysfunction. Is that enough to call it an illness?
I don’t know what I think. I don’t know what about me feels “like a male”. I have a strong belief in being gender blind. A male can like baking and high fashion; a femal can wrestle, watch football and shoot guns. Each can be attracted to the same sex. None of that to me makes any of them less male or female.
Nice post, DSeid. I hadn’t even seen Cecil’s take; seems very odd in light of this that people are getting all huffy with me, as though my position didn’t even rise to the level of being a valid stance to take on a debate board. (Have I been less respectful than Cece was in points number 7 and 8?)