You might do well to read the DSM-IV-TR, since it would probably educate you ever so slightly on your opinions vs. what is considered fact by the scientific community. Here is a link. May it serve you half as well as it has served me:)
On other matters, I see this quickly turning into a GD-type thread, so rather than responding at length to your post I will try to keep my response short (ha).
What is this particular psychiatric disorder, and what differences exist in those who have it and those who do not?
Given that “facts” can change (homosexuality used to be regarded - and treated - as a mental disorder by the APA), how do you defend your statement “…patently incorrect,” given that you yourself have stated clearly that you have no knowledge of the text of the presiding medical body (DSM-IV-TR, as put out by the APA) on this matter?
Thanks, but I think I’ll stick to something with valid medical weight. I have yet to see evidence that the Merck manual should be trusted over the DSM-IV-TR on anything.
This is a highly offensive statement. Perhaps, since you have shown yourself in need of education on transgenderism (good thing you found this thread:)), you should rely not on your previously-formed opinions but on scientific observation.
Yeah, because attempts to “cure the brain” have been SO successful when it comes to mental illness. That’s why we still do all those lobotomies.
Oh wait, we don’t. Since you obviously know nothing about mental illness I suppose it’s no surprise that you’re unware of this, but modern psychiatric medicine generally involves 1) some form of “talking therapy” to help the patient cope with their condition and, if available, 2) medication that affects brain chemistry in such a way as to control their symptoms.
I cannot think of a single mental illness for which there is a “brain cure”, although there are increasingly effective chemical treatments for some.
You’re saying transwomen are high in partially hydrogenated oils? I’ve got disagree. Just last year (purely for the sake of science) I tied on a blindfold and engaged in a taste test. The verdict? I Can’t Believe It’s Not Natal!
Martin Hyde Your posts to this thread have been some of the most ignorant I’ve ever read. Note, that I am within board rules to call a post ignorant. Broomstick, Iampunha and others have done a fine job fighting back with things like logic and science. I shall go off and hunt the cite that changes in the stria terminalis could NOT be caused by hormone therapy as you suggest. I know such a cite (written by a PhD and backed by statistical analysis) exists, I just forgot to bookmark it the last time I read it.
This thread has gone far beyond its original intent and has become a serious debate on the nature of transgenderism.
Moving this from IMHO to Great Debates.
I have a friend who is currently undergoing mtf transition. I couldn’t “get it” either, because for all appearances she could have had a myriad of other psychological issues*, but she decided to go for gender reassesment. (IIRC, she is now seeing a therapist as part of the process.)
*Don’t really want to get into the details here, but it suffices to say that she had serious problems with her self image. I can’t read her mind, so I can’t say whether this was a cause or an effect of her misaligned gender.
So I finally accepted her decision, because obviously she was unhappy as a man. Then she tells me that she likes girls, too.
Speaking as the type who likes girls, I cannot imagine what it must be like for people who identify as a member of the gender they are least attracted to. Kind of a reverse viewpoint.
Seeing a therapist is part of the standard of care for transsexuals. Part of being transsexual is gender dysphoria, basically being very unhappy with physical evidence in their own body of the wrong gender. This varies from mild depression about having the wrong parts and trying to cover up or deny their existence to being so unhappy with them and trying to remove the unwanted characteristics without the benefit of modern medicine. Problems with self image could very well spring from being a transsexual.
The therapist is supposed to find out if there are other pychological issues that cause the patient to want to transition e.g. a surgery fetish or the classic I don’t want to be gay so I must be a woman syndrome*. They also try to find out that the patient is mentally well enough to make that kind of decision and live with the consequences. The therapist are supposed to make sure that the patient copes well enough and has the mental and emotional resources to deal with starting hormones before they start them.
Therapist also try to make sure that the patient has realistic expectations of transition. Transition, living as the target sex, taking hormones, and surgery and the other physical changes certainly are life changing, but it is important that the patient does not expect everything to be magically better. I’m sure everyone has met someone who feels that some change in their life, whether it be losing 20 or 200 pounds, getting breast implants, or even getting their degree will make them happy, and that they can’t be happy until they accomplish their goal. That can be deadly for transsexuals.
*This is one of the reasons the standard of care was developed. Gay men who convinced themselves to have surgery to be a women have committed suicide.
Your physical sex is your genetic and/or phenotype sex.
Your gender is your sense of whether you are male or female. Usually this matches ones physical sex, but not always.
Sexual orientation describes which sex you are physically attracted to. In most humans, this is those of the opposite sex, but not always.
I was born a genetic male. That was my physical sex.
I identify myself as female. That is my gender.
I am attracted to females. That is my sexual orientation.
Because these usually occur in a predictable pattern–phsyical sex and gender the same, with sexual orientation towards the opposite–it is often mistakenly assumed that they must occur together. Once you get past that assumption, it becomes easier to understand on an intellectual level.
You may not ever understand on an emotional level. Your friend needs acceptance and support more than understanding anyway.
No, Broomstick, you misunderstood. The gays who had the surgery became despondent after they realized it was a big mistake. The problem wasn’t transsexualism, but the mistaken belief that they were transsexual when they really weren’t.
It’s more proof that SRS is not a treatment for homosexuality (something that was done for a while), proof that people do have an inherent gender independent of their genitalia, and proof that transsexuality is not a variant of homosexuality.
One of the major responsibilities of the therapist is to make sure that the patient requesting reassignment isn’t actually suffering from egodystonic homosexuality. Not as much as problem as it used to be, but this still happens. Failure to do this can result in an inappropriate reassignment, often with dire consequences.
Sorry - thinking out loud again and thrashing around…
No, I wasn’t suggesting that homosexuality was the same as transsexuality, or that SRS should be used as a treatment.
Let’ see if I can sort this out …
With transsexuals, you have a person who, for reasons we aren’t sure about, winds up with a mental gender at odds with their body’s sexual equipment. We know that this can lead to death.
With the SRS homosexuals, you had people who were one gender in their heads, had bodies to match, but had desires found socially unacceptable. So someone decided that a solution would be to change their bodies to match their desires. This lead to them having a mental gender of one sort, and a body that did not match that gender. Which lead to death in a significant number of cases. Presumably (from what I got from this thread) at a much higher rate of suiciden than in the general homosexual-but-not-surgically-altered population.
So, the point that I was trying to make was that the mis-match between mental gender and physical sexual equipment can be fatal, regardless of how that mis-match comes about. Which means, to my mind, this is an argument in favor of SRS if SRS can be demonstrated to lower the odds of a transexual ending his/her own life, through making both mental gender and physical equipment match.
Except, I do know that it’s not JUST about clits and dicks… since some transsexuals don’t feel a need to undergo surgery but are content to live with the appearance of their mental gender in an “in-between” state, with hormone supplements, and so forth. I do believe that occurs in somes cases due to costs, risks, and inadequacies of present surgical techniques, but that’s not an area I feel I speak very well about and I leave that to those who have more immediate personal knowledge than I do.
I think I’m pretty clear that transsexuality and homosexuality are two different things… a MtF transexual at the end of transition can wind up seeking either men or women (or both) because it’s not their sexual orientation that changes.
If any of that is confused it might because I am - like I said, I have to wade through these matters in a strictly intellectual manner because emotionally I just don’t get it, my feelings don’t give me any guide in this area at all.
I understood what you meant. Performing srs on gay men, created the same conflicts between anatomy and sexual identity that occur spontaneously in transexuals. Despite trying to convince themselves that they really were women, these men were caused great distress by their new anatomies, to the point that many committed suicide.
This is indeed proof, if proof were needed, that a conflict between anatomy and sexual identity is a cause of great distress. Broomstick You obviously also understand the difference between sexual orientiation and sexual identity. Even after srs, and despite now being the ‘proper’ gender to be attracted to men, these men identified as men and were profoundly unhappy. If all gay men were mtf transexuals, then reassignment should have made these patients happy. If all mtf transsexuals were gay men, then reassignment should make them depressed and suicidal. Sexual identity and sexual orientation are obviously two seperate things.
Appearance is a factor, of course, and the degree to which it is important differs from person to person, but at the core it’s not the alteration of appearance that is the goal, it’s the correction of the body to match one’s mental gender. In my case, the most important change was to my body chemistry rather than my physical appearance.
I was able to “pass” before having a single surgical procedure and before any hormone therapy. If this had been enough, there would have been no need for the hormone therapy and surgery in the first place. It wasn’t. Being able to look like a woman, even “pass” as a woman in public, didn’t fix the problem that I didn’t physically feel like a woman.
It was the hormone therapy, accompanied by an orchiectomy six months later, that was the big turning point for me. The changes in my body chemistry that occurred brought me a profound sense that this was right, this is how my body is supposed to feel. I was much calmer emotionally, and certain of my thought processes changed and became more stable. All of this occurred before there were any external physical manifestations of the radically altered hormone levels in my body.
I’m quite lucky in that I had a significantly lower than normal level of testosterone to begin with. This, combined with normal genetic variation in physical development, led to my having a somewhat adrogynous appearance before hormone therapy, and my body has responded very well to the hormones.
I am very happy with the externally visible physical changes that occurred as a result of my hormone therapy. The development of my breasts, hips, and thighs and the softening of my facial features is coming along quite nicely, and I’m not going to need any cosmetic surgery to look completely feminine. My electrolysis and lasering took much less time and I recovered much more quickly.
All of this pleases me greatly, but it was not the primary goal. A very important secondary goal, one that enhances my sense of who I am and gives me pleasure and more self-confidence, certainly, but not the primary one. How the world percieves me is important, but much less important than how I perceive myself.
Food makes a good analogy. Food provides you with calories and nutrients necessary to keep you alive. You cannot live without it. It doesn’t have to have the right taste or texture or appearance to do this. Foul tasting food will sustain you physically, and given the choice between starving to death or eating something that tastes awful, nearly everyone would choose the latter.
Food that tastes good greatly enhances the pleasure of eating. Sharing a meal with a person you care for enhances it still further. Getting all gussied up in a fancy dress and having an expertly prepared and presented meal in an elegant restaurant with the woman you love on your anniversary is one of the great pleasures in life.
But no matter how much taste, texture, presentation, atmosphere, and social factors enhance the experience of eating, the primary purpose remains the ingestion of calories and nutrients. If you remove the nutritional content of food, no matter how much those other factors might simulate the experience of its’ ingestion, you will die.
For a transsexual, feeling right in her body is the primary purpose of sexual reassignment, just as the ingestion of nutrients is the primary purpose of eating. And just as with the ingestion of nutrients, it can literally be a matter of life or death.
Cost is a very big factor. I’m fortunate to have health insurance that offers coverage for most of my treatments, but it does not fully cover SRS, and it’ll be some time before I can afford that. I’m not even absolutely sure that I’ll want to have it done when I do have the money. I feel mostly satisfied right now, but that may just be a rationalization of my financial inability to pay for the final SRS. Another factor is that an orchiectomy can sometimes be the final step, though just as often it’s offers temporary relief.
My therapist and primary care physician both warned me that my sexual orientation might be altered by the transitioning process. Despite my insistance that I did not find men sexually attractive at all, I was warned that one of the risks in altering my physical sex was that I might lose sexual interest in my wife, begin to be attracted to men, and losing sexual interest in either sex was a rare, but possible effect. None of this happened in my case, but they were risks I was willing to take, because the benefit greatly outweighed those risks.
The point, though, is that sexual reassignment is a treatment for a specific medical disorder–gender dysphoria–and not for homosexuality, which is not a disorder of any kind.
There are some things that can only be truly understood by experiencing them. You may never understand at anything other than an intellectual level. Tolerance, acceptance, and support are much more valuable in the long run anyway.
Do you know how long I have gone around and around in my mind struggling with that same thing? It’s like a conundrum, knowing I’m not nor ever will be of the “man” archetype but hesitating to call myself a woman. If it’s all about the hormones then I really do need to get started on them. In any case reading your post was a big wow moment because I can relate to a lot of what you said.
It’d be nice to hear from anyone whose orientation was changed in the process. I cannot imagine ever losing interest in women, but have often thought that once “properly equipped” I would likely be bi. So of course I am full of questions about what attraction is like in such case, and whether attraction to men is similar to or entirely different from attraction to women.
Yes, umop ap!sdn, a nice community we’re starting to assemble here. I thrive on contact with you sisters, even if it’s only through a message board. You know what a relief it is to find someone who understands and doesn’t insist on denying the reality that you have to live.
I just came across a book yesterday browsing in a store. It was about natural estrogen available from plant sources. The two sources were soy and flax seed. The isoflavones in soy and the lignans in flax provide phytoestrogen. That was a “wow” moment for me right there, since I’m vegan, right? So I’ve been living on tofu and soymilk as vegan protein sources for years, and some months ago I began adding flax to my diet for the omega-3 fatty acid health benefits (supposed to prevent heart disease and do other good stuff). I wonder if I had ingested enough phytoestrogen through food to help feminize me a little, maybe send me over the gender boundary to where I was able to acknowledge myself as transgendered. Over at the TG boards, they pooh-pooh the concept of botanical estrogen, and insist that pharmaceutical estrogen supplements are the only way to go. I wonder…
I had always known myself to be of a feminine nature and to prefer women’s interests including feminism, taking no interest in stereotypical “guy” stuff. The psychological changes in yourselves you two, Number Six and umop ap!sdn, got from taking estrogen, I have tried for years to achieve through yoga, reshaping my inner self by directing my conscious energy along those lines. People have told me for years that I have a soft, gentle, peaceful character, which I have tried to perfect via yoga, veganism, and an attitude of ahimsa. Also through concentrating my attention on the Feminine and making it my ideal and my religion.
If I could really take real estrogen, plus a testosterone blocker, I know I would enjoy having smoother skin, plus the relief at finally settling down into the feminine person I long to be. But just maybe the combination of conscious Shakti yoga plus soy and flax has brought me part of the way there already. I haven’t been to a therapist about it, but a friend from the local transgender association has referred me to one who specializes in gender identity issues. I think I’m going to make an appointment with her. See if there’s any hope for me. Each individual’s path in life is unique… I hope and pray to the Goddess, who has brought me this far, that I will succeed in finding how to be the woman I really am. Right now it doesn’t look easy.
I feel a sense of energy arising within my chest every time I think about it. One’s identity is the very core of one’s existence as an autonomous human being. Self-knowledge is the most fundamental human need of all. The sense of … what is it? Existential excitement? I feel rising as energy in my chest over this issue can either be joyous or painful. They call it “gender dysphoria,” but I’m telling you, when I first realized who I was, transgendered, I knew I was finally contacting my true self, and the exciting sense of self-discovery it gave rise to can only be called “gender euphoria.” The energy is there whether it’s euphoria or dysphoria. It’s there to make of it what I consciously will. Gals, your support means a lot to me. Thanks for sharing this topic with me.
Broomstick, I’m sorry, I seem to have misunderstood you. Yes, to your credit, you have hit on a very crucial point in understanding the whole nature of this phenomenon.
Love to all and Happy New Year, and a new beginning for our transwomen,
Johanna
Actually I haven’t been able to take any yet. I was just commenting that if that’s what makes the difference then it would explain what I am going through at this point in time.
Over the past several years there have been studies on the effect of phytoestrogens as HRT for post menopausal women. IIRC They all found that premarin etc were far superior. Some studies even suggested that phytoestrogens impeded the bodies production and use of estrogen. I would also like to point out that the estrogen sold by pharmaceutical companies is natural. It’s extracted from animals much like insulin. It’s also proven safe and effective.
I’d just like to clarify for lurkers that transsexual women come in as many varieties as the standard model. The more stereotypically feminine they are, the easier it is to convince therapists that they are transsexuals.
Kind of a reverse viewpoint. 