Relevant excerpt from Jennifer Diane Reitz’s memoir
When I was first facing transition, I had only one book, Jan Morris’s ‘Conundrum’, and a few snatches of televised information as my entire basis for understanding my plight. I just assumed that I would become a heterosexual woman out the other side, a proper Suzy Homemaker with husband and adopted baby. This was certainly what my doctors seemed to desire me to be, and I dearly wanted to please my doctors, because they held my very life in their hands. I was willing to do anything, be anything, to earn my passage to womanhood. I had little concept of even what that meant exactly, only that that was clearly my goal.
Certainly nothing would stop me in my quest. Not even the truth. My first, early, evaluations by a psychologist indicated that I had a “masculine oriented mentation”, and would not be a safe candidate for surgery. I was “penile fixated”. This was news to me. So I had hit the books at my college library, to find out how on earth such a conclusion could possibly be reached. What learned shocked me. The tests I had been given, the Rorschach Ink Blot Test, as well as other visual tests involving pictures of people and scenes, were not grounded in any rational science. In fact, they are essentially arbitrary, culturally based catalogs of expected interpretations, based on a laughable model of what it means to be female or male of mind.
For instance, if one sees in a random inkblot suitably feminine images, such as flowers and cooking pots, then one is judged female. If one sees cars and planes, then one is judged a boy. It is that silly. In my first evaluations, I saw what was relevant to my life. I played fantasy games, so I saw dragons and griffins. I read science fiction all of my life almost exclusively, so I saw starships and galaxies. I studied science, so I saw cells and DNA. Guess what? According to respectable psychology, none of these things could possibly interest a woman. Only men should care about, and envision such things. Women should only see domestic subjects, or matters relating to child care.
To say this angered me alone would be to ignore the vast disillusionment and disgust I felt. I resolved that no idiotic psudoscience would determine my survival. I studied the same textbooks that my psychologist used.
My next evaluations uniformly portrayed me as the ideal of blessed womanhood. I saw butterflies and daffodils. I saw train tunnels and doughnut holes. I saw diapers and teapots. And the most telling part is that my psychologist ate it up with a spoon. Of course all of that useless, degrading therapy I endured to meet the standards of care must have helped me to grow into a successful female psychology. How wonderful was the science of psychotherapy. Back pats all around, and a hug for our exemplary case study.
There is no shame in lying to tyrannical fools to save your own life.
