Virginia Hall

[virginiahallauthor]

What is the first thing you would do if you woke up as the opposite sex?*

Awaking as the opposite sex -- bedside view

I would hit the morphine button to reduce the pain. Check the packing and look to see if the Foley catheter was patent. I would look to see what I.V. drip they had me on, hopefully with glucose as I likely would not be eating very soon. I would look at all the bandages that had me wrapped mummy-like around my abdomen.

I would look around the hospital room to get my bearings. I would see where the nurses’ call-button was and hope it was in reach. I might try some water and hopefully there would be a straw. My mouth would likely be very dry. After all I’d been on a ventilator. I would look to see why there was a pumping action going on in my legs. Ah, they have placed an air-driven device on each leg to prevent deep vein thrombosis.

I would look at my oxygen meter to see if my lungs breathing was good and how much oxygen was getting to my extremities — that little clothespin thing. In reads 99%. I would look over at the time and see that I’d been “out” for about four hours.

I would look over at the other bed to see if the other girl was awake. Ah . . . she’s watching TV . . . that’s what that sound in the background is. I’d ask her if the surgeon had been in to see me yet — likely I was too groggy to notice. Yes. He was in about twenty minutes ago and I was mumbling to him, but my roomie did not get the gist of it as the surgeon pulled a curtain around the bed and she could not quite hear, but he had walked out looking confident — a very good sign.

I’d try and give myself another dose of morphine but likely fifteen minutes had not gone by. I look over and see that the dose-button is locked out for another ten.

I would try to adjust my butt that was feeling pretty numb and realize how everything “down there” was somehow hooked to tubes and stuff. I’d notice how odd the Foley catheter felt — like it was pulling on my stomach.

Damn, I want to hit that morphine button again. Shit! Another nine minutes or so.

I would run my hand through my hair that’s all matted and sweaty, but that’s okay, no one is coming to visit me. My family has disowned me and for once I am glad about that.

I’d lie back, but use another button to raise myself up in the bed so that I am more upright. At least I was experiencing no nausea for the moment, but I know if I over-do the morphine, even according to dose, I would risk throwing up and as sore as I was, I would not want that.

I would let my mind actually go to my abdomen and the spot between my legs. I would allow myself to take everything in. Fuck! It feels like I’ve been hit with a mortar shell.

I would think that maybe adjusting the bed a bit back would be better . . . yes, but I would not like the view upward at the ceiling. At heaven.

I would take a deep breath and only after all that would the tears come and would I thank God.

— — — -

*In answer to a question on Quora.

[virginiahallauthor]

Passing Trans . . . Passing Dyke

[virginiahallauthor]

Grade-B Women

Please don’t hold our birth circumstances against us.

ILLUSTRATION BY JENNIFER KAHN from Broadly

____________________________

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made two unforced errors when she spoke about trans women’s lives.

#1 She spoke without real knowledge of the lives of actual women of transition.

#2 She doubled-down.

The first error showed ignorance. The second error showed arrogance.

The women’s movement has for years wrested with the concept of privilege. For decades fingers have been pointed as to who is more privileged than whom. Adichie’s view can be distilled down to a theory that women of transition are privileged because they were assigned male at birth. Trans exclusionary radical feminists who some call TERFs have created a political ecosystem based on this view that is undergirded by biological essentialism (you are what you are at birth) coupled with (male) privileged lives — an uncritical belief that men always have it better than women. But if this were so, why would anyone transsex — fully and completely adopt a role sex different from the one assigned at birth?

The cornerstone of Adichie’s argument is the assumption that women of transition had male privilege, as if the mere assignment of the “M” label meant that trans girls lived male lives. While there certainly are some cases where this was true, it skips past a large number of cases where this was patently untrue — a fantasy of the person looking at trans lives from the outside in.

Attaching modifiers to women classifies them, even unintentionally. White woman. Hetrosexual women. Married women. Upper class women. Educated women. Executive women. Trustfund women. All the aforementioned women could be said to have privilege. Adichie does not single out any of these classes of women though she well might. However these are women of power whose favor she needs to curry.

Trans women, who are largely disempowered and all too often marginalized, rarely have few, if any, of those privileges. They are the ones being murdered, disowned, disenfranchised, and despised. And now they are relegated to the class of grade-B women.

The women’s movement needs to look at what unites us rather than to start setting up a hierarchical system within itself. Let’s leave that sort of behavior to the patriarchy.

[you-can-call-me-he]

worth watching.

[virginiahallauthor]

Male, or female, or fluid, and beyond, everyone has the right to express their inner sense of the spectrum known as gender.

[humanrightscampaign]

Vice President Joe Biden

Vice President Joe Biden has stood up for the rights of all Americans to live their lives free from discrimination and fear throughout his remarkable career. Thank you, Vice President Biden, for being a champion of LGBTQ equality.

[crashchaoscats-deactivated20200]

A few notes on the history of the term “Gender Dysphoria”

Dysphoria has never been a precise term. It literally means “hard to bear” and refers to suffering, depression, restlessness and anxiety. Norman Fisk, the psychiatrist who coined the term “gender dysphoria”, used it to describe a wide range of psychological distress concerning sex and gender that often lead the sufferer to want to change their sex, from “true” transsexuals to people with psychosis. Fisk worked at the gender clinic at Stanford University as part of a team researching transsexualism and sex reassignment. He found that many different kinds of people were coming to him looking to change their sex, not just those who fit the current criteria for transsexualism. This included fetishistic transvestites, “masculine” lesbians and “effeminate” gay men, psychotic people and sociopaths, among others. He created the term “gender dysphoria syndrome” because transsexualism wasn’t broad enough to describe all people with “gender disorders” or who were distressed enough to want to change their body. It was never intended to refer only to what transsexuals experience, quite the opposite in fact.

It’s important to note that by “gender” Fisk was also referring to biological sex as well behavior, social role and psychology. What most people today would categorize separately as sex and gender, Fisk grouped together under “gender”. What some trans and dysphoric people describe as sex dysphoria would have been included as a form of “gender dysphoria” by Fisk.

Fisk wrote that “gender dysphoria syndrome” could present itself in a wide variety of forms and arise for many different reasons. He thought that transsexualism was the most extreme form of gender dysphoria and probably had biological causes. He also believed that dysphoria could be rooted in psychosis, neurosis or sociopathy, that some gay people were gender dysphoric and that transvestism was also a form of gender dysphoria. He thought that some gender non-conforming gay people and some transvestites unconsciously took on the symptoms of transsexualism and sought out sex reassignment to become more socially acceptable and escape the stigma of being “perverted” or otherwise ”deviant”. Thus Fisk used “gender dysphoria syndrome” to describe all manner of “gender disorders”, regardless of if he thought they had biological, psychological or social origins.  

If you’re a gay person who ever felt enough distress about your sex or gender to the point where you wanted to change your body, guess what? “Gender dysphoria” was invented to talk about people like you. It’s part of the history of how gay people, especially gender non-conforming gay people, have been pathologized and medicalized. Fisk explicitly talks about how some homosexuals have gender dysphoria and goes on to to say that some seek out a transsexual diagnosis and want to change their sex due to social pressures and stigma. Lesbians today talking about how we’re dysphoric or how we took on a trans identity and transitioned due to misogyny, lesbophobia and other social pressures aren’t straying too far from the original thinking behind the term. In fact, we’re more faithful to the original conception of “gender dysphoria” than people who insist that only trans people have dysphoria and that it’s entirely rooted in biology.

Whether we should be content with this term is another issue. Do we want to use a term invented by a (presumably) straight male doctor to talk about people with “gender disorders”? It was developed to better classify those deemed abnormal in terms of how they relate to their physical sex and sex role. It’s been used to mark some women as disordered, as psychologically and perhaps even biological distinct from “normal” women. It was never meant to empower us. It certainly wasn’t created to help us move towards greater social and political liberation. 

Fisk created the term partially to legitimize operating on patients who didn’t fit the criteria for transsexualism. This included some patients he saw as gay people and transvestites. The thinking was if these patients could adjust well to living as the other sex and were committed to doing so, why not operate on them? It was easier to make the patient happier by changing their body than to change society to accept the person as they were. Do I really want to use a term invented by a man who could’ve approved me for surgery even if he thought I was a self-hating lesbian caving into social pressure?

I’m not telling anyone to stop using the term “dysphoria” to describe their experience. I still use it. It fills a void. We need some kind of language to talk about what “dysphoria” is presently used to describe. But it’s good to be aware of where that term comes from and the thinking behind it and it’s good to question whether we should work towards new language in the future. Uncovering our history makes us stronger and expands our perceptions. We need to understand how we came to this present situation where many women continue to be pathologized for not fitting the female sex role and end up pursuing transition for social reasons. The better we understand how we got here, the better equipped we’ll be to get beyond this mess and create a world where no woman is “dysphoric”. 

Source:

Fisk, Norman M: Gender dysphoria syndrome: The conceptualization that liberalizes indications for total gender reorientation and implies a broadly based multi-dimensional rehabilitative regime. Western Journal of Medicine 120:386-391, May 1974

[androginking]

“i forget how we don’t pass as straight” @toomuchducky

[virginiahallauthor]

What do mean foooor-get!?

[rascova]

[you-can-call-me-he]

[virginiahallauthor]

Transgender People End the Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution of the 1960s was ruined by the LGBT

The LGBTQ movement has come very far very quickly. LGB is about who and how we love. T is about who we are. The advances in medical technology that undergirded the sexual revolution — along with the civil rights, the antiwar movement, and the women’s movement — are part of what created the perfect storm.

To be sure people have been transitioning throughout recorded and unrecorded history. People have been LGB since forever and societies have alternately exalted and executed people for it.

I knew I was a girl before I was three years old, though my parents tried to tell me otherwise. It was impossible for me to be a girl, but shortly after that Christine Jorgensen created a sensation by having a “sex conversion surgery,” as the newspapers called it, and as a pre-schooler I had a hero. I am going to do that. That will answer all the objections of my parents. Little did that six-year-old understand that my parents were the unofficial representatives of society.

The recently-ended Second World War had been a giant societal cement mixer of American society that set off all that was to follow.

When Syntex perfected and mass-produced the birth control pill in the early 1960s, the sexual revolution started in earnest. Cishet people were liberated, especially women who began to take control their bodies. The daughters of Rosie the Riveter became sexually liberated coeds who went to college for more than an M.R.S. degree. Free of perpetual pregnancy, these daughters had choices that were unimaginable one or two generations before.

Until then people assigned a gender that did not believe themselves to be had little alternative but to hide in women’s skirts or in men’s trousers — odd duck outcasts living in the shadows. But that little Syntex pill was used by some to do more than prevent pregnancy of cishet women. As a college grad in the late 1960s, this pill changed everything and at the cellular level for my body that did not produce enough E- and too much T-.

Hari Nef gave a Ted talk, FreetheFemme, and did that Syntex pill ever free me and countless other like me. And yes, I read up in medical books — we had a med school on campus with a massive library — and I knew I might never have children after ingesting the little yellow pill, but who cares! I knew I could never give birth, anyway, so it was a moot point — a cishet world view.

Then came Stonewall and Women’s Liberation and the perfect storm turned into calm smooth waters and some of us sailed toward womanhood, or manhood as the case may be, from there. A former Army MASH surgeon perfected modern affordable MTF surgery while working as a surgeon in a small town in southern Colorado. In the same year as Stonewall a social worker had asked the surgeon if he could help her — she was transsexual and needed the surgery — and he figured out the mechanics of it. Word got out and the trans youth flocked to the mining town to emerge the way that society demanded women to be physically.

Up until then only a social transition had been possible, but now changing the whole smash became possible and cishet society became all schiz about it. Cishet society dismissed trans people as dreaming an impossible dream and cited all the reasons people of transition weren’t the gender they affirmed. And, yet, when the transitioners went out to fulfill the “job description,” cishet society tried to stop them. “You can’t be a woman, because . . .” Then the person fixes that and then gets a new reason, which she fixes . . . on and on.

The women’s movement, Feminism 101 said, “Biology is not destiny” and once the movement got rolling I became a passing dyke right under the noses and in the living rooms of people who later became known a TERFs. It’s amazing how accepted you can be if you look and act like what they want to see, though in my defense I would not sign their petitions and I mostly did not want to be round bigots who did believe in their cores that biology was destiny. But hey, in the meantime the radfems got to sleep with some groovy women — each other.

Renee Richards unfortunately took a lot of heat during that era and we knew that even though we were doing what society demanded of us, we’d better not tell or they would make sure we were going to be very, very, sorry.

The rest is history. By the 1980s the demand for surgery grew fast and society was unaware of the extent of the cottage industry as surgical centers struggled to keep up with the demand. Some older transitioners who had missed the chance in their late teens and twenties, now came forward into a society. Everybody knew somebody, or had at least read about somebody, who was transitioning. And most of us know the story from there.

Cishet people are used to keeping the goodies for themselves. Free love. Birth control. Facelifts and boobjobs for those who can afford it. Even abortions to terminate a pregnancy. These things are NOT for people who aren’t like them.

But the gender genie can’t be stuffed back into the bottle or shoved into a closet.

Society wants it two ways. It says “don’t transition, it’s impossible,” but once you start it demands that the transitioner go all out. As Nef put it, they said “you must soften your face, get rid of all your body hair, get breasts, reduce your waist, get a vagina.” In my experience, you do that and they leave you alone.

Trans people are the rorschach test of cishet society’s own view of what gender is and they are still arguing over which is what, and who is whom in all this as gender variant people move on by, up, and out of the way.

Trans people are smart and they are largely doing what they need to do to stay out of the way of the cishet juggernaut and what it demands of us. We know that as long as we do what you want, not what you say, we’ll be fine.

[virginiahallauthor]

Being Trans and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD

Once it is over, the scars remain.

Trans people, especially trans kids, suffer from a lot of abuse, often from those who are supposed to be there to protect the child, throwing the child under the bus, so to speak, so they don’t have to deal with a gender variant child. Over the last forty years I have noticed many of us go through post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, once it is all said and done.

PTSD has been known among troops and survivors of the Holocaust. Troops . . . after the Civil War and the Spanish American War it was called nostalgia. In World War One it was called shell shock. In World War Two and Korea it was called battle fatigue. It started to be called post-traumatic stress disorder starting with the Vietnam War.

During the stress, the person often rallies and seems to be going through it all without any emotions. We seal ourselves off from the nastiness, name calling, and general abuse. We only need look on the internet to see how perfect strangers pile on, even if it is children, it matters not to the abuser. But then, thank the Lord, you transition and it slowly falls away. Now in the calmness the hardness of the emotional armor you placed around yourself comes off and then the emotions flood in.

“You’ve transitioned. Get over it. Why are you sad?” And yes, we are happy . . . happy to be alive, just like those soldiers and Holocaust victims . . . alive after having lost so much in the process of just coming through.

From the 1992 “trans” film, Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton, below, 

Daughter asks, “Why are you sad?” Orlando answers, “I’m not. I’m happy.” 

[virginiahallauthor]

Is Gender Identity Genetic? Maybe not.

Full disclosure—  for years Norman Spack M.D. (above) was my pediatrician, even though I was decades post-op and in my 50s at the time. Why? Because I was getting hormone replacement therapy, HRT, after going through an unwanted and disfiguring puberty, resulting in lingering effects that I would have to deal with for the rest of my life — something that today would be handled decades earlier and which leads to better outcomes.

Only recently have people begun to come to face the fact that many people are trans. The sad part is many of these patients can be identified and treated, while others, parents for one, question if this the right thing to do. Is this not going against some biological absolute? Some people argue that it is impossible for a boy to become a girl, or a girl to become a boy. I agree, only not in the way that those people are saying it. The trans person is proof that gender cannot be changed or they would not persist in protesting their assigned gender.

But isn’t it XX and XY chromosomes? Don’t the X’s and Y’s make some kids like blue and other kids like pink? Probably not, although all the scholarship is on-going, but more and more it looks like it isn’t the chromosomes. Likely it is something that happens in utero during the first trimester — something that should happen doesn’t, or something that shouldn’t happen does.

Case in point. The Maines twins.

Identical twins. One a cis boy. The other a trans girl.

There is a 90-minute Youtube video where identical twins are interviewed by Dr. Spack. One twin in early childhood declared herself to be a girl, but her identical twin brother had a male gender identity. Though it does not finally and completely settle the issue, the fact with one identical twin transitioned and the other did not casts doubt on a plain vanilla theory that chromosomes determine gender identity.

Below I embed the Youtube video for those who want to glance at it.

Introductory presentation by Dr. Norman P. Spack starts at 02:32 and runs 31 minutes. Conversation between Dr. Spack, Jonas Maines, and Nicole Maines begins at 33:39.

There is hope for kids today. I pray kids in the future will be spared what a generation ago kids went through.

[virginiahallauthor]

Scientific American Article On Trans Brains

Q. lmao you comparing a nose job to body mutilation?

A. Yes and no. Am I comparing gender confirmation surgery, GCS, to a nose job? In many ways. Is either surgery a mutilation? No.

I am borrowing from Riki Anne Wilchins who said something along the lines that a person can go in for a nose job or a boob job (and I would add can get all manner of piercings) but getting what she called a "crotch job" is off-limits.

Getting GCS solves one of the worst problems a woman could have. People getting GRS are usually trans meaning they were assigned a gender at birth that was inconsistent with how the person's brain is wired. The latest medical technology allows us to scan the brain in ways that could not be done a half century ago when McHugh came to his conclusions. It seems trans people share brain structures similar to the "opposite" sex. There is a straightforward article in  link "Scientific American," which gives a 21st century view of why trans people are taking the steps they are. Likely the brain gets hardwired for gender in the first trimester.

If YOU had such a surgery, yes!, it would be a mutilation since you have a male name and likely identify as male. For someone not identifying as male it is not a mutilation but bringing the body into alignment with the brain. Life saving.

[virginiahallauthor]

Trans Movie: Just One of the Guys

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a teenage boy?

Going to the prom pretending to be a boy so that Terry can be around the boy she really likes.

Just One Of the Guys is a comedy and without setting out to do so is one of the better “trans” movies. Made in 1985 it follows the travails of a high school girl, Terry Griffith played by actress Joyce Hyser, who sets out to win a journalism contest. Believing she was not selected as a finalist by her high school journalism teacher because she is female, she enrolls in a neighboring high school as a boy and submits her material only to again be told the story was not good enough to make “him” a finalist.

With her parents conveniently away, Terry sets out to “find” a story.

Yes, it was a comedy. No, we did not take it seriously. And yet it was the first "trans" movie where the main character was not the butt of an overly long joke, nor does the main character die tragically. Joyce Hyser pulled it off and the cast was superb!

It is SO faithful in capturing teens who are living in dual roles and having to fake it every day. When someone asks me what it felt like to be a trans girl "playing" a boy in high school, I haul this film out. I do this because the film tells the story with humor without ever trampling on the dignity of the characters--even Greg Toland, the high school bully.

Terry uses her brother’s room when another girl suddenly shows up, almost exposing the fact Terry is really a girl.

Recently a came across a clip of the actors, 30 years later and film director Lisa Gottleib, who screened a newly found print and afterward discuss their recollections on the set of the film.

Gottleib mentioned the movie might be re-released on blu ray. 

[virginiahallauthor]

I’m not a trans girl because I like pink

Gender stereotyping of young kids

Based on my own experience, I would like to question this connection between pink and being female. I had early onset gender dysphoria, GD, at 28 month. I recall it vividly, and yet not. I did not know there was anything amiss that I was a girl. I was unprepared for how my parents would first ignore the fact and then that they would get into a battle of wills over it which took years and in which I finally prevailed.

As I remember it I simply knew I belonged in the girls’ group. Yes, I knew there were boys and men and brothers and dads and that there were girls and women and sisters and moms. There was nothing wrong with the boys* group. It just wasn’t me.

I have gone back to that place and time so many times in my head. By the time I was four going on five, I wanted to wear dresses.

And there were big battles over this.

If a child wants to get a point across, she may do it non-verbally. Children might be looking for the gender cues shared by those whose gender they affirm. Put another way, there is nothing innately female about Barbie and male about GI Joe, but the kid whose verbal skills are not yet well developed might use symbolic behavior to get her or his point across. 

The child sees the girls and pink and so picks the pink thing to get the message across. The child is told, “You can’t be a girl. You have a penis.” Out come the scissors.

I will re-quote a section of my essay, Society Demands You Transition, and Hari Nef’s Ted Talk,

I wanted a body that allowed me to do the things I wanted to do in the way I wanted to do them, things men in this country aren’t really allowed to do. I tried to do them in the body I was born with, but people told me, “No. You can’t. You’ve got to soften up your face, get rid of all your body hair, get breasts, shrink your waist, get a vagina.”

This lessons starts early and continues on and on until you get it right. Until you master the things society demands you master in order to affirm the gender you believe yourself to be at your core.

This should be comforting to parents who worry that a boy-child jumps on a pink pogo stick or a girl-child puts on a blue baseball cap. Likely it is nothing. No GD present.

Only when people begin to insist, pointing out deficiencies, will the trans child start to conform to what is expected and ironic as it might be, much of what is asked of trans people is not of their wishes or making.

It is what society actually enforces. But as the dalai lama said, “You have to learn the rules in order to break them properly.”

[virginiahallauthor]

Transgender — It’s Dodge City Out There

In January 2017, a BBC documentary about trans people appeared on television.

17 year-old Ella from the BBC documentary Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?

An actual civil discussion appeared in some Youtube comments about being trans. A commenter writing to me agreed while there was no question about bona fide trans people, what of people who abuse the label in order to gain access to the ladies room for a thrill?

I answered:

Point taken. There are some people whose behavior challenges any system of reasonable accommodation. Examples abound from predatory teachers to drive-by shooters to boozers. Are these people deluded or taking just advantage? Malingerers come to mind. The solution is not to shut down schools, confiscate all firearms, reinstitute prohibition, or let injured people fend for themselves.

Apples and oranges, and in the case you postulate, bad apples.

There has been a Sturm und Drang about the demedicalization of “sex conversion surgery” as it was called in the 1950s when only a few dozen people a year in the entire world got treatment. At that time to qualify, a person’s life had to be a complete “disaster” and there had to be at least two documented serious suicide attempts to be one of the 25 people in Sweden or the 22 at Johns Hopkins to get surgery. That’s not per year. That’s ever!

By the same token, sane non-suicidal people were being selected out. However, by the early 1970s several centers opened in the United States that treated exactly those people. Being otherwise well adjusted was part of the criteria for surgery. The patient‘s’ head got shrunk but good. Were these people serious or was it a stunt? Was there a deeper problem such as schizophrenia, for example? Did the person feel guilty about being gay? Was the person a cross dresser who felt shame? This got sussed out up-front.

The quick acid test was whether the person actually did live, or even could live, in role without any surgery. After all, mostly people do not see another’s genitalia and most of life is visual cues where gender is a key determiner. “You’re a woman? Prove it!” and that proof consisted of living 24/7 in role for a year, sometime more. “Get on the bus, come down to my downtown office and tell me about your work week as a female,” or male in the case of trans men, said the psychiatrist. Could you hack it or did it become bloody obvious this wasn’t working out like you imagined? The term “magical thinking” was used. If you were 50 and balding before surgery you would be 50 and balding after surgery, not a hot 17 year old babe.

In the UK until recently you had to cross-live for two years and maybe then you could get hormonal therapy. And during this time, yes, you might have to go to a public sex-segregated restroom — unlike in France where they are integrated, although that has changed a lot. While cross-living, when you went into the restroom were you challenged or did no one pay you any mind?

After living 24/7 for several years a person would get two “letters” from accredited physicians or psychologists in the field and then surgery would be granted and all the paperwork would be changed by the government, with the exception certain intractable jurisdictions who might not change a birth certificate.

However, surgery was not often covered by health insurance. Casablanca, where many people went in the late 1960s cost $10,000 up-front cash on the barrelhead. That’s when gasoline was 24 cents a gallon for 113 octane, a brand new car cost $1999 (for a stripped down Maverick!) and a person could get into a starter home with a $10,000 mortgage, so it’s more like $100,000 today. Some (most?) people could simply not come up with that kind of cash.

Many people simply soldiered on without surgery and without updated identity papers and oh, by the way, you had to be full-on heterosexual meaning no wife and no kids and if you were lesbian? “There’s the door and don’t let it hit you in the backside.”

Enter the dreaded “gatekeepers” who were accused of running a cushy cottage industry off the backs of sufferers who were shelling out oodles of cash for not only therapy, but electrolysis (sometimes of the entire body), new wardrobes, new housing and new jobs at 59 cents on the dollar because they fired your sorry ass at the job where you had a pension going, all because you were a perv who started to use the ladies room. And the letter you got from the shrink who said you were mentally sound. “The shrink is probably a perv, too.”

That was the state of affairs until the turn of this century. As late as ten years ago, parents who affirmed a gender variant child’s identity would almost always have that child taken away by Child Protective Service and placed in a “normal” home were that “craziness” would be forced out of them.

Finally physicians and patients paused and asked, “what in blazes are we forcing otherwise sane people to do?!”

They looked to Holland where years before gender variant children’s puberty was being medically delayed with blockers, and with remarkably good outcomes — deciding either not to transition or to go forward when they were a little older. And by then a pre-op trans girl could go to Thailand and get terrific bottom work at world-class surgical clinics for half the cost or even less and without doctors’ letters.

A huge push for the demedicalization of gender transition arose. “Why must I get divorced, leave my children, leave my job, become a heterosexual woman, and all to just to get some pills!?” albeit pills to make me pretty.

And they won . . . and after that it was Dodge City.

And so here were are — there’s a lot more to this, but this is the Cliff Notes version.

So we are afraid some man will pull on a skirt, if that, and walk into the ladies room and start doing illegal sexual things. Men in men’s clothes have been doing that for years. They don’t need to hide behind women’s skirts or in them to rape. A third of all women have been sexually assaulted and most not in bathrooms but on dates.

Should we go back to the 1990s? Could we even if we wanted to? The gender genie is out of the bottle. Are we going to empower the Fashion Police to make sure everyone’s wearing the right clothes today? From what I am hearing is that the main target in women’s restroom challenges is to butch-lesbians.

So . . . here we are.

Thoughts?

 https://archive.org/details/BBC-trans-kids

[virginiahallauthor]

Society Demands! You Transition

Recently I posted about the Transparent series on Amazon and was startled at my own strong reaction to season two, episode nine, “Man on the Land.” I had heard Hari Nef’s name, but never taken notice, but she and Solloway and company blew me away.

Hari Nef on the set of Transparent

I discovered that Nef gave a TED talk and as virtually all TED talks are, it was short. But she said something that has echoed over and over since then. She shared something from her own journey and, in short, she said that if a person starts to live as a woman, society will demand she become one in every way possible.

I starved myself and abused laxatives so I could fit the clothes I wanted to wear. I did all this because I wanted a body that allowed me to do the things I wanted to do in the way I wanted to do them, things men in this country aren’t really allowed to do. I tried to do them in the body I was born with, but people told me, “No. You can’t. You’ve got to soften up your face, get rid of all your body hair, get breasts, shrink your waist, get a vagina.”

Of course I looked them right in the eye and I said, “f**k you!” turned around and did pretty much all of what they told me to do . . . It hurt . . . and it worked.

This was not quite the main point Nef made, but it clarified something I already knew.

Society pays lip service to the position that transition is wrong, deceitful, and impossible while on the other hand insists that people who transition do so with every part of their being, and if the transition seems to have worked, society more or less leaves the transitioner alone after that.,

What a mixed message! But it is true. For a trans woman, the more you look, act, sound, and vibe female, the more they will want to help you do so and the more they will forget preconceptions that have about an prior embodiment.

For me the heart of Nef’s message was,

I wanted a body that allowed me to do the things I wanted to do in the way I wanted to do them, things men in this country aren’t really allowed to do.

Society says we can be whatever and whoever we want, but in actuality it is not so, so that being fem becomes a survival skill.

#FreeTheFemme

Some theorists such as the redoubtable Kate Bornstein suggest that “gender is performance,” and being a “gender outlaw” is at the heart of transition. I agree, but not in the way the theorists seem to mean it. A satisfactory performance is one where the observer does not really notice the performance. It just is. An unsatisfactory performance is one that is dissonant.

The outlaw colors outside the lines. The fem colors within the lines as best she can. And when I say “outlaw” this is not referring to gender fluid, pan gender, or pan sexual people.

My sense from listening to cis women is that they are women because they color within the lines and they very often will embrace a woman of transition if she is doing her best to abide by the rules, and I am not talking just about the shade of her lipstick and what she wears when she shops at Whole Foods. 

Is it fear, or arrogance, or shame that causes some trans girls to reject the advice of cis women who are trying to get the trans women into the fold? Do the people who reject the suggestions from cis sister really know better? Are they afraid of the “fem” in themselves?

Are those of us who color inside the lines traitors to the so-called trans cause? And if so, what cause is that?

Nef is onto something and is saying it pretty well and I am listening. After all, it’s what I’ve been trying to do all my life.