Articles (interesting articles found on the subject of the transexual spectrum)

[Samhain]

read any good or interesting articles, that you think may be of interest to others?
post them here!
S

[Samhain]

what follows is an article about male to Female Transexuals in Bizarre magazine, with Bizarre magazine you get what it says really, a no hold bar look at things that are strange and unusual.
while I wouldn't regard this subject matter to be strange and unusual, it would probably be seen as such in the eyes of main stream culture.
the article is actually very good (forgive some of the slang!) and is a guide to what a person would expect if they are following the male to female pathway in the UK

FROM HE TO SHE

here's more to a sex change operation than simply snipping off your John Thomas. Joe Gardiner follows the long route from gender awareness to post-operative lifestyle.
Transexuals don't actually have a choice. It's the way they're born. Something goes wrong when they're developing in the womb that ultimately leads to them feeling that they are a woman stuck in a man's body, or less commonly, a man trapped in a woman's body. The feeling isn't a learned auto-erotic arousal like transvestitism - a male transsexual actually has a woman's brain.

For one in 10,000 of the population, a hormonal imbalance in the uterus about six to nine weeks after conception is where it all starts. A study from the Netherlands examined the brains of straight and gay men, women and male-to-female transsexuals. They looked at part of the hypothalmus, an area of the brain that is affected by sex hormones during its development, and discovered that while the brains of straight and gay men were the same, the transsexual-to-female brains were almost identical to the brains of women.

However, knowing that the way you feel is due to a quirk of nature doesn't make life any easier, especially when puberty kicks in and your body starts to head off down a route that is diametrically opposed to the way you want to go.

"I have people turning up who are on the point of suicide," says Fran Springfield,specialist gender identity counsellor, "and self mutilation is not uncommon." But, in a strange way, these are the lucky ones - they've recognised their situation and have taken the first step. Others are not so lucky. "Many transsexuals go through periods when they attempt to suppress or deny their condition. Some choose hobbies or jobs that are hyper-masculine in order to try to prove that they are not transsexual."

Transsexuals can be found in all walks of life: Springfield has even had former SAS members come to her for help. Some transsexual-to-females who visit are in the 40s or 50s, have married and have children. Having made the initial contact the patient is now ready to embark on the journey from transsexual-to-female.

STEP ONE: Counselling

"Clients undergo many hours of counselling to determine that they are really transsexual and to rule out other psychiatric problems," says Springfield. The only specialist nurse gender counsellor in the country, she has worked in the gender field for ten years, and is a member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, an organisation which governs the treatment of transsexuals. The client is then referred to a psychiatrist for further evaluation.

STEP TWO: Hormone Treatment

Transsexual-to-females are given oestrogen which prompts them to develop breasts and a smaller waist. They will see more fat on their hips and smoother skin along with a reduction of body hair and loss of libido. Hormones do not usually stop beard growth which has to be removed by electrolysis. It can take up to 1,000 hours of electrolysis at £35 per hour to remove a full beard. Hormones do not alter voice pitch either, although speech therapy can help in that respect.

STEP THREE : Changing gender role

Patients will have to live in their new gender role for at least 12 months before an operation can be performed. During this time, all documents relating to the client are changed - driving license, National Insurance, everything except birth certificate. The patient must also come out at work - following the case of P vs Cornwall Council in the European Court in April 1996, transsexuals are now protected against discrimination in the workplace. A Home Office working party is expected to report in 2000/2001 on changing the birth certificates of post-operative transsexuals to reflect their new gender identity.

"The real life experience is important," says Springfield. The 12-month period is a duration laid down by Harry Benjamin, who actually coined the term transsexual and, on a quite unrelated point, lived to be 102 years old. During this time transsexuals are checked up on to make sure that they are not cheating.

STEP FOUR : Counselling and Referral.

Psychiatric examination follows more counselling to rule out delusion in the patient. After all, there will be no going back after the operation.

STEP FIVE : surgery

It's not only the end results that are good, there are also very few complications following the 4-5 hour operation. The patient is out of hospital in ten days and can be back at work in three months. The risk of prolapse is small and usually only occurs if patients have sex too soon after surgery or if the surgery is poor. Satisfaction rates with good surgery are 100 per cent. "The patient has got they body they always wanted," says Springfield. "To see patients going from desperation to complete satisfaction makes the job very rewarding."

Following surgery cases, 40 per cent of transsexual-to-females live as heterosexual women, 40 per cent are lesbian and 20 per cent pursue a bisexual lifestyle.

"Transsexuals are ordinary people who've gone through an extraordinary experience," says Springfield. "Many live their lives without anyone knowing their background. You have probably met some without even knowing."

You can contact Fran Springfield http://members.aol.com/gics

[mynameiskc]

hehe. that's nice.
http://www.nydailynews.com/10-24-2006/news/story/464637p-390955c.html

[a_rabid_pineapple]

Well things are slowly getting better!

[mynameiskc]

if i were the guy pictured, i definitely prefer the ladies room. you never know when some random whack job homophobe type is gonna decide to beat some ass. odds are good the ass beater is gonna be bigger if he's a man.

[Samhain]

if i were the guy pictured, i definitely prefer the ladies room. you never know when some random whack job homophobe type is gonna decide to beat some ass. odds are good the ass beater is gonna be bigger if he's a man.
Great article, I think the 'guy' pictured would probably state that she wants to be refered to as female though.
does anyone think that any straight men would go to the lengh of dressing up as women just to spy on them, as one person suggests??
S

[mynameiskc]

hardly. especially not in new york.

[mynameiskc]

well, now, wait a sec, i HAVE known a couple guys who would have, but they weren't quite right in the head.

[Samhain]

hardly. especially not in new york.I thought the person pictured said that he felt like a woman and had changed his name to a female one, am i getting confused?
S

[mynameiskc]

no, just habit to refer to her as a guy, considering the conversation relating to her usage of female restrooms, since the controversy is over how the other females in said restrooms would be looking at her, which to the less understanding, it would be to view her as a man in woman's clothing. but i was saying that i did know a couple voyeurs before who WOULD go to any lengths to peep on women in whatever situation. but those guys were mentally ill, unlike this transgendered who is trying to be more herself.

[seamonster66]

You would have to be an especially weird perv to spy on women in the subway bathroom....I have never even peered into one of those

[mynameiskc]

yeah, they are especially sick. totally driven just to see what they're not supposed to see, to see something, anything, that's private. it's a compulsion. it's ALMOST sad, but not really, since a violation of my privacy is an espeically heinous crime in my opinion.

but the person in question in this article would definitely be safer using the ladies room and maintaining her privacy and personal safety.

[Samhain]

yeah, they are especially sick. totally driven just to see what they're not supposed to see, to see something, anything, that's private. it's a compulsion. it's ALMOST sad, but not really, since a violation of my privacy is an espeically heinous crime in my opinion.

but the person in question in this article would definitely be safer using the ladies room and maintaining her privacy and personal safety.
absolutly, I would expect she may get funny looks in the ladies, but not so much of a risk of having a fist in ones face.

btw welcome Gary i think thats the first time you've posted here!
S

[mynameiskc]

well, and you know she'd be in the men's room with men trying to figure out how she goes, what she does to go and all that. i imagine it would be very embarassing.

[Samhain]

well, and you know she'd be in the men's room with men trying to figure out how she goes, what she does to go and all that. i imagine it would be very embarassing.
its amazing how quickly you can get to a cubicle as a woman, but I'm not addinf anything more to that :p
S

[mynameiskc]

well, now, that's hardly true. there's always lines in the ladies room, and none in the mens...usually. i've used the men's room a couple times when the ladies was jsut way too full.

[Samhain]

well, now, that's hardly true. there's always lines in the ladies room, and none in the mens...usually. i've used the men's room a couple times when the ladies was jsut way too full.
now isn't that interesting, in the UK it tends to be the other way round, I always thought it was because in mens toilets they have urinals so its quicker for men to pop in if they just want a quick pee!
S

[mynameiskc]

yeah. women will rarely ever use the stall for anything but peeing. however, this can lead to a lot of trouble when there's a lot of women who just have to pee. sometimes those bitches can take forever in there just peeing. like it's some major production. but the men's room, if a man's in the stall, typically it's because he's gotta shit. so that takes longer.

[Samhain]

yeah. women will rarely ever use the stall for anything but peeing. however, this can lead to a lot of trouble when there's a lot of women who just have to pee. sometimes those bitches can take forever in there just peeing. like it's some major production. but the men's room, if a man's in the stall, typically it's because he's gotta shit. so that takes longer.
this threads just lovely!!
S

[mynameiskc]

i have very little ability to filter what i should or shouldn't say. you really shouldn't take advantage of me this way.

[Samhain]

i have very little ability to filter what i should or shouldn't say. you really shouldn't take advantage of me this way.
KC wrote a thread about men taking a crap it'll go down in history
S

[mynameiskc]

i'm not kidding you, for some unknowable reason, people remember me and every stupid thing i've ever said.

[Samhain]

i'm not kidding you, for some unknowable reason, people remember me and every stupid thing i've ever said.
thats cause we all love ya
S

[mynameiskc]

i have a very high embarassment threshold.

[a_rabid_pineapple]

Me too...^_^;;

Well I don't think that men coming into the ladies just to spy is much of a problem. Although if that did happen it would be rather creepy. Once my girlfriends and I tried to drag our male friend into the ladies (very few people were in the building) and it was the funniest thing ever. He kept shouting about how it was wrong and that he'd get in serious trouble. Yeah well with who, no one's there but us and we didn't want to leave him outside since we knew we were going to take a long time...

[mynameiskc]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/nyregion/07gender.html?ei=5090&en=2586a6f49b530f49&ex=1320555600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

making it legal to change the sex on your birth certificate without the reassignment surgery. they're moving right along. the only thing that i think may cause trouble is if in the event of a crime or accident, identifying the victim could become tricky.

[mynameiskc]

as for the lesbian trans in the article, propositioning women in the lady's room, well, i've twice had a woman bust into my bathroom stall while i was zipping up to lay a liplock on me. i don't really see the difference, unless she was HUGE, in which case, it might be a little threatening.

[Samhain]

November 7, 2006
New York Plans to Make Gender Personal Choice

By DAMIEN CAVE
Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.

Under the rule being considered by the cityÕs Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.

ÒSurgery versus nonsurgery can be arbitrary,Ó said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the cityÕs health commissioner. ÒSomebody with a beard may have had breast-implant surgery. ItÕs the permanence of the transition that matters most.Ó

If approved, the new rule would put New York at the forefront of efforts to redefine gender. A handful of states do not require surgery for such birth certificate changes, but in some of those cases patients are still not allowed to make the change without showing a physiological shift to the opposite gender.

In New York, the proposed change comes after four years of discussion among health officials, an eight-member panel of transgender experts and vital records offices nationwide. It is an outgrowth of the transgender communityÕs push to recognize that some people may not have money to get a sex-change operation, while others may not feel the need to undergo the procedure and are simply defining themselves as members of the opposite sex. While it may be a radical notion elsewhere, New York City has often tolerated such blurring of the lines of gender identity.

And the proposal reflects how the transgender movement has become politically potent beyond its small numbers, having roots in the muscular politics of the cityÕs gay rights movement.

Transgender advocates consider the New York proposal an overdue bulwark against discrimination that recognizes an emerging shift away from viewing gender as simply the sum of oneÕs physical parts. But some psychiatrists and doctors are skeptical of the move, saying sexual self-definition should stop at rewriting medical history.

ÒThey should not change the sex at birth, which is a factual record,Ó said Dr. Arthur Zitrin, a Midtown psychiatrist who was on the panel of transgender experts convened by the city. ÒIf they wanted to change the gender for all the compelling reasons that theyÕve given, it should be done perhaps with an asterisk.Ó

The change would lead to many intriguing questions: For example, would a man who becomes a woman be able to marry another man? (Probably.) Would an adoption agency be able to uncover the original sex of a proposed parent? (Not without a court order.) Would a woman who becomes a man be able to fight in combat, or play in the National Football League? (These areas have yet to be explored.)

The Board of Health, which weighs recommendations drafted by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is scheduled to vote on the proposal in December, and officials say they expect it to be adopted.

At the final public hearing for the birth certificate proposal last week, a string of advocates and transsexuals suggested that common definitions of gender, especially its reliance on medical assessments, should be abandoned. They generally praised the city for revisiting its 25-year-old policy that lets people remove the sex designation from their birth certificate if they have had sexual reassignment surgery. Then they demanded more freedom to choose.

Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, said transgender people should not have to rely on affidavits from a health care system that tends to be biased against them. He said that many transgender people cannot afford sex-change surgery or therapy, and often do not consider it necessary.

Another person who testified, Mariah Lopez, 21, said she wanted a new birth certificate to prevent confusion, and to keep teachers, police officers and other authority figures from embarrassing her in public or accusing her of identity theft.

A few weeks ago, at a welfare office in Queens, Ms. Lopez said she included a note with her application for public assistance asking that she be referred to as Ms. when her turn for an interview came up. It did not work. The woman handling her case repeatedly addressed her as Mister.

ÒThe thing is, I donÕt even remember what itÕs like to be a boy,Ó Ms. Lopez said, adding that she received a diagnosis of transgender identity disorder at age 6. She asked to be identified as a woman for this article.

The eight experts who addressed the birth certificate issue strongly recommended that the change be made, for the practical reasons Ms. Lopez identified. For public health studies, people who have changed their gender would be counted according to their sex at birth.

But some psychiatrists said that eliminating identification difficulties for some transgender people also opened the door to unwelcome advances from imposters.

ÒIÕve already heard of a ÔtransgenderedÕ man who claimed at work to be Ôa woman in a manÕs body but a lesbianÕ and who had to be expelled from the ladiesÕ restroom because he was propositioning women there,Ó Dr. Paul McHugh, a member of the PresidentÕs Council of Bioethics and chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an e-mail message on the subject. ÒHe saw this as a great injustice in that his behavior was justified in his mind by the idea that the categories he claimed for himself were all ÔofficialÕ and had legal rights attached to them.Ó

The move to ease the requirements for altering oneÕs gender identity comes after New York has adopted other measures aimed at blurring the lines of gender identification. For instance, a new shelter policy approved in January now allows beds to be distributed according to appearance, applying equally to postoperative transsexuals, cross-dressers and Òpersons perceived to be androgynous.Ó

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority also agreed last month to let people define their own gender when deciding whether to use the menÕs or womenÕs bathrooms.

Joann Prinzivalli, 52, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization, a man who has lived as a woman since 2000, without surgery, said the changes amount to progress, a move away from American cultureÕs misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for oneÕs gender identity.

ÒItÕs based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes,Ó she said. ÒIn reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.Ó

[mynameiskc]

i couldn't cut and paste this morning for some reason.

[Samhain]

The Two-Spirit Tradition
The two-spirit (formerly called berdache) was a sort of Native American transgender person who wore the clothing of the "opposite" sex. Two-spirits were highly regarded and respected as artisans, craftspeople, child rearers, couples counselors and tribal arbiters, and yet, one of the reasons they got respect was out of fear, because two-spirits were considered to be touched by the spirits and considered to have powers on the order of a shaman. (In many tribes, a shaman would consult the tribe's two-spirit for advice in spiritual matters!)
It has been determined that there were male two-spirits in more than 150 different Native American tribes, but there were female two-spirits, as well. two-spirits were considered to be a "third gender," and female two-spirits were considered to be a "fourth gender" (similar to the way in which both male and female homosexuals are considered to be gay, while females are also considered to be lesbian).
Due to their perceived spiritual gifts and physical strength, male two-spirits were considered to be "super-women" and as such were often prized as mates. A warrior's strength was seen as being augmented if he counted among his wives one or more two-spirits.
The term berdache has had a checkered past etymologically, and had various negative connotations, so, in 1991, it was replaced with the word two-spirit by a group of Native American anthropologists. The new term has become politicized somewhat, so that the word is now used to describe gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Native Americans, and yet it is preferable in much the same way as the term intersex has replaced the word hermaphrodite. That said, few two-spirits were intersex, although a great many were androgyne, meaning they had the gender identity of both a man and a woman -- or neither.
Berdache had always been a slippery and hard-to-pin-down term for non-Native Americans, and the term two-spirit may well prove to be equally difficult to grasp, for some. And yet, for some groups, the new term has been a spiritual wake-up call. Quite a few non-Native American gays, androgynes and other genderqueers in the United States have taken to the term and its tradition as a way to connect with themselves, their spirits and their adopted homeland. The term's significance has not been lost on Native American youth, either, as there is now a renewed interest in the tradition.

[Wiyaka]

Some brief observations on the M2F aspect of two spirit in present day Native American culture based upon what I have seen and what friends have experienced.

Two spirits often receive the same prejudice that they do in Wasicu (white man) culture, including violence, many on the rez know nothing of the old ways or hold no respect for it. Some elders know of the old ways but there seems to be little acknowledgment for it. A friend who does Sun Dance (Lakota traditions are spreading to other tribes) with the Dineh (Navajo) asked about this, they knew nothing. There is a yearly gathering of two spirits that is held in different parts of the US and Canada. I do know 3 Winkte, one of which is considered an Elder, who have been very well received by their people. In my area I have seen occasionally Winkte dancing with the women at powwows.

My own experience has been good. I was invited to a Lakota Vision Quest gathering that also had people from other tribes and a number of us mixed blood types and Wasicu. While sitting in a group an Elder came up to me and said he had a feeling about me and asked if I would help work fire, he knew nothing of me being Winkte. I did this work a couple of years and was invited to attend lodges of both genders, I would only attend mixed gender lodges, and I was asked to do the welcoming back ceremony that normally only women do when people come back from the hill.

I went to a gender shrink to get papers so I could get a script for injectable hormones. I blindly picked someone from a list of locals doing this work, she turned out to be Native American. She followed the Benjamin standards but she knew the old ways and saw that I did as well. Even though I don't present as female she said in my living 8 years on hormones as middle gender I had more than fulfilled my real life requirements and that this was my true expression of my gender. When it was all over she wrote letters for hormones and was also willing to write letters for surgery which I will probably never do.

[mynameiskc]

that's fantastic. i suppose i would qualify in my way.