Please explain Transgenderism to me

Great Debates
141

For me it was chiefly about the hormones. Everyone is different, and you really shouldn’t base any decision this important on something you read on a message board (not that I’m saying you would, but this is too important not to be very careful about). Getting profesional help from a therapist trained to deal with gender identity issues and a doctor familiar with the risks and effects of hormone therapy is very important.

Keep in mind that I was paraphrasing and simplifying. Part of a doctor’s/ therapist’s job is to make the patient aware of all of the possible effects of a course of action so that the patient can make an informed decision. You’re obviously going into this with a different mindset regarding your orientation than I did, so the advice I was given may or may not apply to your situation.

Again, I can only speak from personal experience, and it’s questions like these that are the reason it’s important to get professional counseling before doing anything medical.

142

Of course. I didn’t mean to imply that I’d sidestep the counselling. :slight_smile: Seeing a counsellor would be the first step I’d take and IIRC they’re the ones who approve having a prescription written out.

143

I don’t have anything to prove to a therapist. I’m not trying to persuade anyone to authorize SRS for me. I can’t even think about it right now. I just want to find the optimal path through life that will let me be who I am. I don’t use the word “transsexual” for myself because SRS is not anything I’ve even begun to contemplate, I have no idea if I ever will, and I just want to proceed along this journey of self-discovery without prejudging. So the term “transgender” fits me just fine. I’m grateful to whoever came up with that word, because it’s the only useful description of where I’m at. My gender doesn’t match my body, that’s all I know; I want to resign from guyhood and enter womanhood by whatever means works best.

How exactly “transgender” and “transsexual” are different, I’m not quite sure. Transgender is a newer word and only just now beginning to be widely heard. It wasn’t until 2003 that I went to a conference and heard a talk that explained the word transgender, so that I could begin to recognize that it applied to me. (Before that, I had thought of myself as “androgynous” and being “transsexual” had never occurred to me; “transgender” filled the niche of meaning that I needed.) It may take a little while until it shakes out exactly how to distinguish the shades of meaning between “transgender” and “transsexual.”

144

I’ve heard that being a “femme” natal male makes convincing the Medical Authorities that one is a MtF transsexual easier… but I don’t think it’s about stereotypical interests.

For instance, I have always been a “tomboy”, very much interested in traditionally male pursuits, but I am not a man - I am very comfortable in my own, female skin. Fortunately, I have a good sense of humor and am not easily offended, but it does become annoying sometimes when someone assumes that because I engage in particular activity or group of activities I am either a dyke or a wannabe man, when the actuality is I’m a heterosexual natal female and quite content about the whole matter (no doubt this is one reason I don’t “get it” with transexuality on an emotional level - I’m involved in “masculine” pursuits yet feel no need to be anything other than what I was born. I’ve never had dissatisfaction with being female, although I’ve had plenty of dissatisfaction with gender stereotypes)

Of course, that is a big part of the problem - trying to hammer everyone into discreet little boxes when there’s always a bunch of us annoying humans falling outside those ridgidly drawn lines.

145

This was certainly true in my case.

Also true in my case.

Johanna: If you can find a non-medical path to becoming the person you were meant to be, whatever word you want to use to define that, that’s wonderful. I wish you luck, and I sincerely hope that you’re able to find happiness this way.

Transsexual and SRS are not equivilent. I was a transsexual before I began hormone therapy, I am one now, and I will remain so even if I never have SRS.

My statements to umop ap!sdn were meant as advice that if she was going to go the medical route, she should first seek counseling. Hormone therapy, when directed and overseen by a trained medical professional, can be very beneficial. Self-medicating with pharmaceutical hormones is not a good idea.

146

I understand what you mean… I think. It’s clear to me that “transgender” and “transsexual” overlap to some extent, but how far the overlap extends I’m not sure. If there is any general agreement yet on how far the two overlap, I don’t know. Also, what about transsexualism is different from transgender, and vice versa? How do you distinguish the two? If one person is determined to be “transgendered,” and another is “transsexual,” what will be different about the type and level of care given to each of them? I’ve been to various sites with their definitions of terms, but the relationship of transgender and transsexual still seems kind of vague to me.

147

AFIK transgender is a broader category which includes transsexuals. Transgender also includes IIRC transvestites, and the intersexed.

148

I’m not transvestite, and I’m not intersexed… so does that leave transsexual for me? Or is there another area of genderspace in addition to the above three you listed? One as yet not well defined?

149

I’m sure there are more categories that I don’t remember. But transsexual would seem the best fit. You say

So, your gender identity conflicts with your anatomy. For an actual psychological diagnosis, there’d be a lot more involved. For an internet message board, that statement really does indicate that you’re a transsexual. Whether you want SRS is irrelevant. No definition I know of requires that a transsexual desire surgery, counseling, or hormone replacement therapy.

150

OK, I get it. I had somehow gotten the impression that transsexuals were either “pre-op” or “post-op.” But for the people who go “Op? What op?” they made the category of “transgender.” Still learning as I go along. Call it OJT.

151

This thread has given me much food for thought.
I seem to recall widely publicized research a number of years back, finding that homosexual men have certain pituitary tissues more resembling hetero women than hetero men. I do not know if the correlation was borne out upon further study, but frankly I would be very surprised if it were not. I have no doubt that some physiological correlation for gender dysmorphia will also be discovered eventually.

In general, I do not share society’s support of gender reassignment surgery as a blessing. I did not feel that way just a few years ago. Then I heard about David Reimer. His penis destroyed by a botched circumcision at eight months, David underwent GRS soon after, based of the advice Johns Hopkins psychologist John Money gave to David’s young parents. The idea was that if David were given female genitalia and female hormones and a female upbringing, no one, especially not David, woudl ever know he had been a boy. Money’s regular reports on David’s (now Brenda’s) progress throughout the 60s and 70s transformed the culture. Not only were sex and gender inextricably tied, they were apparently completely malleable.

For gender dysmorphics, this was a two-edged sword, IMO. It gave legitimacy to their feelings, which led to greater acceptance, but it also promoted the idea of GRS as some sort of cure for these feelings. We should have known better. For it turns out Money’s reports were complete fabrications. David never felt like a girl, ever, and the attempts by Money to force him into that gender role wreaked havoc upon his psyche, not good considering he had a family history of depression. He commited suicide earlier this year.

I think the root of the whatever problem is here lies in the fact that, while some societies provide valid societal roles for men who wish to be seen as women and vice versa, ours does not. We do not seem to have room for a disconnect between sex and gender. This leaves gender dysmorphics with the idea that if they change themselves surgically, all will be in harmony. I will not declare to any of our transgendered posters that they are not happy if they feel they are, but I think the truth about David Reimer falsifies the notion that GRS is a universally beneficial treatment.

Reimer’s case tells us we can NOT change what we are, that we are the malleable beings Money would have had us believe ourselves to be. Most of us are men who feel like men and are attracted to women, or women who feel like women and are attracted to men. What needs to happen is widespread understanding that there are at least six other categories that a minority of people find themselves in, and to revive the valid roles such people can lead without feeling the need to go under the knife.

152

scotandrsn: Have you read anything in this thread? Because your post indicates that you just don’t get it.

The state of being transsexual is an internal conflict within the individual between his or her mental identity and his or her body. No degree of societal accomodation will resolve that conflict. Transsexualism is not a response to society. As I’ve said before, I would still be transsexual even in the absence of all social context.

What the David Reimer story stands for is that gender identity is an inherent, unalterable characterstic. What it does not stand for is the thesis that gender identity is necessarily linked to chromosomes – which is the false assumption that underlies your insistence that reassignment surgery is categorically inappropriate.

Another point: reassignment surgery predates the Reimer case by at least forty years. It was an accepted treatment for transsexualism before David Reimer was born.

153

scotandrsn, David Reimer’s case only shows that even when your body and your hormones tell you one thing, your brain can tell you something else entirely.

Despite how he looked, and the expectations of his family, he never felt female. He happened to feel that way because he was a natal man, transsexuals feel that way for some reason we don’t know.

David Reimer should have been given reconstructive surgery to create a penis and brought up as a boy. That case has no bearing on how transsexuals who desire SRS or other transitions to the opposite sex should be treated.

154

I’ve read most of the thread. I think it is YOU who needs to read MY post more carefully.

No doubt you would be, which is the point of what I was saying.

Now it is you who doesn’t get it. Any characteristic is either inherited or acquired. Period. If you wish to declare that gender identity is inherited rather than acquired, then the facts are that something in the body’s chemistry predisposes one to the trait.

Money’s work was all about showing that gender identity is achieved entirely through one’s physical surroundings. He was wrong, but lied about it.

GRS has been around in one form or another for centuries. An obvious implication of Money’s work with David Reimer would be to settle once and for all whether or not such a procedure really coordinated one’s sex and gender identity. Prior to that case, how could one really know if the irreversible plastic surgery cured the mentally anguished transexual, or if the recipient merely convinced themselves it did, a tenuous state of affairs that might lead to later problems?

Money’s work with Reimer (an infant at the time of GRS and therefore a “clean slate”) was meant to show that genitalia and hormone therapy determined all. If you had a female body and female hormones, you were female. Trouble is, it just wasn’t true, and the comparatively recent revelation of its falsehood has caused me to re-evaluate my opinion of GRS as a universally positive treatment.

155

Universally positive treatment for what? I’m not sure what you’re saying here. We agree that persons with a female gender identity born with male genitalia can be successfully treated with SRS? Reimer had a male gender identity so of course it was not the right thing for him. I don’t understand in which cases that would call SRS into question as a valid treatment, that it is already being used for. :confused:

156

I think you need to either read your own post more carefully, or else rewrite your post. Because it quite clearly does not stand for what you are now claiming it stands for.

A grave oversimplification, I fear. Is type I diabetes inherited or acquired?

What the Reimer case shows is that reassignment is inappropriate for nontranssexuals. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. The implications for medical treatment that flow from the Reimer case fall mainly on the treatment of those with ambiguous genitalia at birth and those who suffer injuries to genitalia in infancy or early childhood (before gender identity can be reasonably assessed).

The Reimer case also disproves a fundamental axiom of radical feminism, but that’s not really relevant to developing medical standards of care.

In my opinion, the disclosure that Reimer’s gender identity was not altered by the attempt at reassignment serves to proves that gender is an inherent, immutable characteristic that cannot be altered, and actually supports reassignment as an appropriate treatment for those who evidence a discongruence between gender identity and physically assigned sex. Yet you argue the opposite, without any good explanation as to why. Can you explain your position? The only way your position makes sense is if you accept the thesis that gender and birth sex are necessarily congruent (that is, you deny the existence of essential transsexualism). And yet you seem to disagree with that thesis.

157

Nobody in this thread has argued that sexual reassignment, either through surgery or through other means, is universally beneficial. Indeed, it has been pointed out that SRS for those who are not transsexual–like David Reimer–is just as harmful as denying it to those who are in need of it. In his case, SRS as a child created the very problem it is designed to treat.

Sexual reassignment is a treatment that is appropriate only for those whose mental gender does not match their physical sex, and it is the individual who is primarily responsible for identifying their mental gender. In Reimer’s case, his mental gender–male–matched his genetic and physical sex, making sexual reassignment inappropriate. It was also forced on him as a child, rather than a choice he made as an adult.

158

The David/Brenda case is not a good argument for transsexualism, because he was never a transsexual. He was a male who suffered an accident in infancy who fell into the care of a doctor who couldn’t resist using him as an experimental subject, especially given that he had an identical twin to use as a “control”

When Brenda was a teenager and the truth revealed it was an Ah-ha! moment for the teen, who immediately asked to be identified as a boy and wound up having the reconstructive surgery Dr. Money denied him as an infant and toddler. In other words, David asked for the SRS to turn him into someone with male genitalia and characteristics that he felt himself to be, instead of the female that much of his early life he had been told he was. And that is the only manner in which his case resembles that of a transsexual - his mental body image/gender did not match what his body and society told him he was. But in his case we know he started life as a normal male.

All of which demonstrates that there’s something about gender identity which is NOT connected to the physical genitals and the hormone mix in the body.

If you’re interested in the case read As Nature Made Him, which tells the story much more from David’s point of view than from Dr. Money’s.

His circumstance is also echoed in the experience of men with (if I get the formal name correctly) 5-alpha-reductase problems, who are born with the external genitalia of a girl but acquire/grow more normal male genitalia as they mature in their teens. Such men almost universally take on the identity of men, desire women, and even father children. And this is true whether they are in the Carribean, where the disorder is called guevedoche or in New Guinea where it is called kwolu-aatmwol among the Sambia (who have the highest rate of the disorder in the world) or in Pidgin turnim-men. When you see the same result time after time, despite cases being on opposite sides of the planet in very different cultures you have to start thinking “biology” rather than “environment”. Their external bits might look odd, but inside these people are male in a manner that endures despite what external appearances say.

Which, again, to my mind opens to possibility that while external and internal gender usually march in tandem, it is possible for them to diverge. In which case you might argue that transexualism IS a form of intersex state, a birth defect, and it’s no more wrong to correct it through surgery than it is to correct the genitals of a baby born with ambigous or malfunctioning genitals (which, to be honest, IS somewhat controversial). A major difference between the surgery typically done on intersex babies and that done on transsexuals is that transsexuals are consenting adults whereas the babies get no say - the decisions are made for them by others before the babies can express their side of the issue.

Now, whether or not the transsexuals on this board would agree with that assesment is another question. Fact is, I don’t view it as Ultimate Truth, either - it’s a possible explanation that may be entirely wrong. Unlike some folks, though, I don’t pretend to have the definitive answer on this. All that I can say for sure is that we have some people who are so very unhappy with their bodies that they’re willing to undergo quite an ordeal to change the situation, including the risk of death - and that level of distress alone speaks volumes to me. Maybe SRS is not the ultimate answer, but if it’s the best we have right now I can’t see where we can deny adult human beings that option for the relief of suffering.

159

Some of the posts responding to mine seem to me to mis-interpret my reasons for bringing up the case of David Reimer.

Any treatment for any sort of suffering must pass a test: Does the relief mean:

a) the patient is actually cured of their affliction, or
b) is the treatment merely providing false comfort while whatever is really wrong furthers itself, so much the worse in an atmosphere of lowered vigilance.

In the case of gender dysmorphia, where the suffering is completely within the perception of the sufferer, this can be very hard to assess. David Reimer’s case appeared at pretty much exactly the same time that Johns Hopkins was publicizing their transgender surgical techniques, which also coincided with the publication of The Transexual Phenomenon by Dr. Harry Benjamin. Clearly Dr. Money’s intentions with Reimer at this time when the subject was part of the zeitgeist were to validate surgery as a positive treatment for transgendered people by showing that when it is performed on a person free from the psychological baggage of growing up with a perception of onesself as a different gender, the surgery results in complete transformation of gender identity.

By publishing results indicating that “Brenda”, whatever “she” might have been born as, was developing as a perfectly normal, well-adjusted young woman, he was trying to answer my question above with regard to the treatment of transgendered feelings with surgery with an emphatic “a”.

His work implied that the outward reality dictated the inward reality, and the gender identity, rather than being one or the other and ne’er the twain shall meet, could be altered completely by a snip of the scissors and some injections. He seemed to say: “Look at this girl, who has no idea she was ever a boy. When this treatment is applied to a man who feels like a woman, it renders him completely and totally a woman, with no perceivable side effects.” All that was necessary was for society to completely rethink gender (which is what happened essentially), conclude that nature can “mistakenly” assign you the wrong physical sex, and accept this as the definitive cure for those willing to undergo it. Those who undertook it after a childhood of growing up as the “wrong” gender could seek psychiatric treatment for the memories, but otherwise, you had yourself a woman. Vice versa for women seeking to become men.

Except it was all a crock. “Brenda” was NOT developing normally, and did NOT identify as a female. The fact that the surgery was given to a non-transgendered person is not what invalidates it. It is Money’s false reports that return us to square one. If a man already feels like a woman, getting surgery to resemble and function physically as one will not necessarily make the man a woman, which was the implication falsely put forth by Money. The discrediting of his work with Reimer does not rule out this possibility forever necessarily, but we no longer have this “pure” result to give us confidence in this notion.

The revelation of the truth about David Reimer means we can NOT assume a) above as it relates to surgical treatment of gender dysmorphia, but must allow for the possibility that surgery can merely further the underlying problem. In light of that, I don’t see how we can recommend surgery as a treatment.

160

scotandrsn, your argument is a classic example of discrediting one theory by disproving an unrelated theory brought forward by the same proponent. Money’s attempt to reassign David Reimer was not an attempt to treat transsexualism; he was treating a case of gross genital injury in a small child consistent with his belief (since proven false) that gender is mutable at an early age. Since the treatment of transsexualism does not depend on the theory that gender is mutable at an early age, the disproof of this theory has no bearing on the validity of reassignment as a treatment for transsexualism.

In other words, your argument is fallacious. The outcome of the Reimer case does not support the conclusion you claim it does.