Right - isn’t that what I said? (Relax, I’m just needling you.) I should have phrased my question better. I think what I meant to say is “I presume transvestism may occasionally appear somewhere on the transgender scale?” My (admittedly vague) understanding is that there’s more than one “kind” of transvestism - fetishism is probably what you mean, where I think I mean “self-expression of the internal self.”
I think I used up my month’s quotation mark quota there.
Nope - you still don’t have it correct.
Transvestism is one disorder.
Transgenderism is another.
Schizophrenia is another.
Bi-polar disorder is another.
Marfan’s syndrome is another.
Diabetes is another.
They have nothing to do with each other, do not fall on the same “scales” and are unrelated.
A person may have more than one of these things at the same time.
Well to make things even more complicated…
Transgender is an umbrella term covering various categories unrelated except in their flouting of conventional genders.
Transsexuals are what we’re talking about in this thread - those born with one body who are or could transition into one their mind is correct for.
Transvestites are men (generally straight) who dress in women’s clothing for purposes of sexual arousal. I’m unaware of female transvestites being documented.
Then you have the more muddled categories of drag kings/queens, genderfucks, and the like which are not really disorders under most definitions of the term.
Has he actually self-identified as “transgender” outside the context of his standup? There’s a line in “Dress to Kill” where he says he’s a “male lesbian” but I never interpreted that as anything other than a joke made in the context of differentiating “transvestite” and “drag queen.”
Here is how I’m explaining my transsexuality nowadays:
From the time they began to grow, I wanted to get rid of my breasts, now, breasts were awsome during sex, but alas I can’t stay in bed all the time and having c cups were throwing off what I call my gendered body map each time I had to look at me in a mirror. I would scream in my head “wrong!! so wrong!!”, seeing them. Something coming from my guts, deep. Binding them wasn’t enough since, well, first it hurts and prevent breathing normally, and it just doesn’t look the same under a shirt than having a flat chest.
So two months ago I went under the knife to resolve that problem.
I also didn’t like my voice, really high, so different from my internal voice, my hairless body, something I find ugly, or the areas my body was putting fat on, the width of my hips, I even seriously thought for years my hips were deformed, when in fact they were pretty normal for someone having had an oestrogen based puberty.
I started taking testosterone almost two years ago and now feel all happy each time I’m witnessing the peach fuzz on my chest and belly becoming darker, longer, and turning into hairs. I like having more armpit hairs and seeing them extends. I like the feel of my face when I havn’t shaved for some days and yearn for the day I’ll have that blue shadow thing going on.
I feel calmer and happier when my body is not operating primary on estrogens.
I am not particularly masculine in my behaviors, interests and clothes, not feminine either, I see myself as neuter in those aspects.
I am virtually only attracted to men, always been, and I prefer to assume a submissive and bottom role in a relationship, sexual or not. I do not plan to have a penis constructed because I love to death using all that I have, and because of how the testosterone acts on a clitoris, changing its form and lenght, I do think I have somthing similar to a lil penis now.
I knew transitioning to male would make my lovelife a hell lot harder, I knew too my biggest fear on earth was staying alone all my life.
But I never imagined I could accept living with a female body, so I’m transitioning anyway, and yes, my love life is indeed a mess, from the hetero or bi guys who dig my body a hell lot but don’t want to be seen with a boy, to the gay guys who don’t want to be with someone without a dick.
(I’m speaking in generalities of course)
I’ve ceased to wonder if I see myself as a guy, usually I say something like the more people interact with me as a guy, the more it will reinforced my identity, so for now I’m like 65% guy, and I’m probably only half joking. Outside of its social meaning, this word makes no sense to me, so usually I’m seeing myself as simply “an ftm” when alone, identifying myself through the process I’m experiencing. This is a recent thing, through all my teen years I was pretty stable in my identity as a gay boy, and the hell if I know when exactly I began to refer to myself using masculine pronouns, I knew I was doing it constantly at about 11-12yo, but before, don’t remember.
One of the problems–one of the many, many problems!–of the transgendered is that it is entirely self-diagnosed. There is no strip of paper you can pee on and it turns pink or blue. The only physical manifestation is in the hypothalamus, and even that’s not conclusive. Research indicates the condition is caused by prenatal exposure to a hormone surge (at about the 7th week of pregnancy, when the brain starts to send out signals to the body as to which sex characteristics to develop). Transsexualism has existed in every country, every status of society, and in both sexes, since “sex” and “identity” have been written about–it’s just in the past 60 years or so that medical science has been able to offer a palliative.
And yes, you have a small percentage of self-hating gays and just plain loonies “wanting the operation” for the wrong reason, but they are supposed to be screened out by the rather stringent pre-op rules of most hospitals. But transgendered people have to convince the medical commuity and their families that they are not crazy . . . Which is enough to* drive* a person crazy.
As Eve mentioned, research on the stria terminallis strongly indicates that there is infact a male brain and a female brain. Unfortunately, the area in question can only really be examined during autopsy.
This is one of the reasons gender dysphoria is treated differently than the delusions of a schizophrenic.
Chairman Pow An mtf transexual individual isn’t seeking to ‘become a woman’. They are seeking to bring their anatomy in line with their self identity. A lot of other posters have mentioned this, and it’s essential to understanding transexuality. It isn’t ‘I want to become a woman.’. It’s ‘Despite the hair on my face and the thing between my legs, I am a woman. I can no longer live with a body that doesn’t look like a woman.’.
Considering the rate of suicide, and the risk of violence (There’s currently a Pit thread on a group of teens who murdered a preoperative mtf and are attempting a ‘transgender panic’ defense to get charges changed from murder to manslaughter) sexual reassignment surgery (Note-not sex change surgery. That would imply that the surgery somehow makes a man into a woman <or a woman into a man>. The patient is already a woman. The surgery merely corrects a birth defect) is far from drastic. There are numerous cases in which a patient who cannot obtain surgery gets a knife and attempts to perform it themselves.
The standards of care require years of counseling and at least a year spent living full-time as the desired gender. The surgery isn’t cheap or obtained easily. The odds of any post op waking up one day and thinking ‘On second thought, maybe I was better off with the penis’ are extremely low.
Of course, you’re right about beating a dead horse. I disagree that the errors were made out of ignorance since he’s admitted to using inflammatory language deliberately and I think he should apologize, but we don’t always get what we want do we?
Okay, this is just something I wondered when Inigo brought up schizophrenia-please believe me, I am NOT saying they are the same thing!
What I wondered is, has psychiatry, in the past, tried to treat transgenderism as something like a mental illness to be “cured” like schizophrenia? (Because we all know the kind and benevolent history psychiatry!)
Guinastasia How long was homosexuality listed as a treatable disorder? There are still shrinks out there claiming gender dysphoria is caused by something else and can be cured (My favorite wack theory is autogynophilia. The idea here is that gender dysphoria doesn’t exist. These folks are really men who have so erotically fixated on the vagina, they decide to have srs and become the object of their desires). Considering how recent hormone replacement therapy and srs are, I’m sure that for decades the accepted answer was therapy for an unresolved Oedipal complex or something similar.
Sadly, there are shrinks today who still hold the view that proper therapy will ‘fix’ a transexual. One of my many trips to nut hatch, I met a transexual with this problem. Years ago, she’d been a healthy woman who only needed hormones and corrective surgery to lead a happy life. After her parents and all the psychiatrists had spent years trying to ‘cure’ her, she has a fear of crowds, panic attacks, bouts of suicidal depression, and the fun of living for years at a time in a psych ward.
In looking around this site it doesn’t look like there was the sort of organized anti-trans attitude among psychiatrists as there was regarding homosexuality. I would imagine a lot of that would have to do with the near-total invisibility of transpeople even in comparison to gays.
Well, obviously I can’t speak FOR him, but in interviews I’ve read and heard with him in which he has talked extensively about his sexuality, he has said that he identifies as transgendered. From an article in the UK Guardian:
Before sex reassignment surgery was invented, about the only thing a man-in-a-woman’s-body could do was dress like a woman and attempt to pass as one. In places without access to modern surgery and medicine that’s still pretty much the only choice (other than denial).
I could see where this could cause confusion with transvestitism, where the person seeks not to change gender but to role play, has a sexual fetish, makes a great living as a female impersonator, or whatever other reason a person might have for dressing as the opposite gender.
There have, by the way, been historical instances of discoveries on autopsy that a “man” who had been known for decades turned out be a woman plumbing-wise. So it’s not just the folks with penises doing this sort of thing. There ARE women transvestites, but since our society allows women to wear just about anything they don’t stand out as much.
So while one particular behavior - dressing in clothes usually reserved for the opposite gender - may occur in a significant number of people, their *reason * for doing so may be very different and have multiple different sources. Including cultural/ethinic/historical reasons - I know lots of hetersexual men who wear plaid skirt-like garments called “kilts” for completely non-sexual reasons.
Billy Tipton. Jazz musician. Husband. (adopted) Father. Nobody suspected anything out of the ordinary until autopsy. Billy told his wife that his genitals had been damaged in a car accident.
Wikipedia won’t let me edit at the moment (database locked due to software upgrade) But this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Tipton needs to be changed. The writer refers to Billy as she. Billy identified as male and lived as a man for decades. To call him she is a denial of his identity and his ability to know himself. Billy had all the information there was on the subject of Billy Tipton. After a few years of life, Billy knew he was a man. For anybody else to call him a woman is to say ‘I know more about Billy Tipton than Billy Tipton did, and am a better judge of his identity than he was.’
Just a bit.
First of all, what you’re asking about is transsexualism, which is nominally a “type” of transgenderism but there’s significant differences between transsexualism and other forms of transgender behavior.
In my case, the hormones weren’t to “prepare” me for eventual surgery; they were to fix a fundamental endocrine problem, which is that my brain appears to work better (and is probably structurally composed to work better) with high levels of estrogen and low levels of testosterone. Since, unaltered, my body makes low levels of estrogen and high levels of testosterone, I have a problem. The solution has been to take oral supplemental estrogen and an androgen blocker; this resolves most of the mental issues. The hormones also encourage a bevy of secondary sex characteristic changes that I welcomed, but the main reason I take them is to resolve the chemical imbalance that caused my gender dysphoria in the first place.
I am a candidate for surgery and I intend to have surgery as soon as I can afford it, but in terms of quality of life, at least for me, hormones were far more important than I suspect surgery will be to me. (Of course, I am pre-surgical still; I may change my mind after I’ve had surgery.)
The reason I started hormone replacement is that it was evident that I had no other choice. I had tried every other form of accomodation I could think of, but nothing I had tried had been successful in dealing with the emotional problems I was having.
By the way, Chairman Pow, I enjoyed talking to you at Black Rock. 
Bodies have sex. People have gender. A male-to-female transsexual is of female gender regardless of the state of their body. I have always been of female gender, although I was not aware of this until my twenties.
Transsexuals change sex; they do not change gender. As far as I can tell, gender is fixed sometime before birth, and usually (but not always) corresponds to sex.
Quite simply, most transsexuals, prior to the advent of hormonal therapy options, committed suicide. People will less severe cases of gender dysphoria could sometimes manage simply by living as a member of the opposite sex, but that option doesn’t deal with the psychological effects of mismatched hormones, which is what drives so many transsexuals to commit suicide even today. About the only other option available has been castration, and that only for male-to-females. Castration, at least, reduces testosterone levels dramatically, which may improve matters somewhat for someone with essential transsexualism; this may explain ritual castrati such as the Indian hijra.
There’s a dramatic difference, psychologicaly and emotionally, between those who choose to live as a member of the opposite sex without hormonal or physical reassignment, and those who today seek hormonal or physical reassignment. The former course of action has always been available; the latter is new. Prior to the availability of hormonal reassignment, the only option available was suicide (or effective suicide through outrageously reckless behavior).
Historic figures who today are often identified as “transsexuals” because they lived as a member of the opposite gender would be categorized today as transgenderists. There are no true transsexuals prior to the advent of hormone replacement, although it’s probably the case that no small fraction of historic transgenderists would have accepted hormonal reassignment had it been available to them.
The more I read about Greta Garbo (1905-1990), the more I’m convinced she was transgendered; had she been born later she might have had female-to-male hormone therapy and surgery. Her biographies–to me–don’t say “bisexual” or “gay,” they clearly say “transgendered.” It explains so much of what people found bizarre about her, and explains her lifelong unhappiness and solitude.
Of course, if I wrote an article–let alone a book!–positing this, I would be hacked to death and burned by the Garbomaniacs.
I’d advise against a Garbo biography. The controversy could catapult you to national fame. But, you would have Garbo fans stalking you.
I should be the only one stalking you.
That and didn’t Greta just want to be let alone?
Great. A whole roomful of cartoon characters just paraded through my head, singing, “We’re Garrrr-bomaniacs!”