transconscious

The Persecution Complex

2005-08-25T17:04:00.000-06:00

While it's certainly not true that trans people have obtained equal rights, I do think there are some of us who are expecting more than our fair share of attention. It's unrealistic to expect normal people to be educated about, or even interested in, transsexuality. Why should they be, when the vast majority of them will never meet a trans person in their entire lives? I don't know anything about Micronesians either. And even if I did know someone from Micronesia, I still might not feel it necessary to learn about the culture they came from.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't think there's been a conscious effort to "erase" transsexuals. If you only represent, let's say, 1% of the population, it's not fair to expect more than 1% of society's attention, politically or socially. It's not realistic to expect doctors to be familiar with the details of every rare condition that exists in the world either.

I also bet that a lot of trans people don't even know that there are other serious medical conditions whose treatments are not paid for by the government. Many rear diseases are excluded from the health care plans of some or all provinces. They say it's because the treatments have not been proven effective conclusively enough, but that's because when a disease is rare it's difficult to get research money to get that proof. It's a Catch-22. Not having treatments for transsexualism covered by insurance isn't fair, but it's important for us to realize and remember that we're not the only ones in that position. And if you notice, virtually no restaurants provide meals approved for diabetics: We're not the only ones whose needs often aren't accommodated by society either.

In a nutshell, no one ever said life would be fair and it sucks sometimes. It's important to fight for what should rightfully be ours, but we're really not anymore "persecuted" than many other groups.

Justification

2005-07-10T16:47:00.000-06:00

I always find it interesting how, when challenged on why they think they need a sex change, transexuals spend virtually hours trying to explain themselves, going through examples, analogies, arguments, talking about research and proof... All of that can be reduced down to four words: It's a free country.

It baffles me why no one ever seems to think of that argument - the only argument that's irrefutable. (Now if someone is trying to understand transexuality then that's different - then you should try to explain yourself). In the free world, sane, capable adults have the right to, for example, refuse medical treatment if they so choose. What I'm doing is absolutely no different. That's the only justification I need.

The same thing goes for the contention that homosexuality is a choice. So what if it is? Homosexuality being a choice is only a problem if you believe/follow a religion that says it's a sin. If you don't, where is the issue? Let's say for a minute that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice - Well, last time I checked, people were allowed to make choices about how they lived.

I don't understand why the queer community in general gets so riled up about others saying that they "chose" to be how they are. My only guess is that no matter what they actually say, they're still subconsciously seeking the approval of rest of the world. Or they haven't been able to completely rid their psyches of the Christian/conservative values that most people in North America grew up with. I can honestly say I don't have that problem. Unfortunately I'm not exactly sure how I got to where I am now, or I would try to explain it.

Oh Canada

2005-07-04T17:08:00.000-06:00

I've heard many people say that Canadians are more tolerant and open-minded than Americans. I used to think that Canadians weren't necessarily more tolerant of the Other than anyone else, but that they're just more polite and more able to keep their opinions to themselves. The passage of the gay marriage law proves that I was wrong. It took the support of straight people to change that law, and doing so entailed a lot more than just being "polite" to those unlike yourself.

So that left me pondering question of why Canadians are indeed more liberal than Americans. There can only be one answer; it's because we have more immigrants. Not that all immigrants support queer rights - in fact most of them don't. But the smart ones realize that it could just as easily be them or one of their cultural traditions that people here refuse to tolerate. I know one of the Canadian Muslim organizations (the Canadian Muslim Congress, I believe) endorsed same-sex marriage for that very reason. Adversity makes for strange bedfellows. But that's exactly why we need *everyone* as part of this country.

So why is a transexual writing about racial diversity and same-sex marriage? Not only because I also happen to be bi, but because, like my example above shows, it's all the same fight. Discrimination and bigotry are discrimination and bigotry - it's only circumstance that dictates who the target is. I hope my fellow transsexuals and the rest of the queer community remembers that - Always.

Studies

2005-06-26T18:09:00.000-06:00

Since I've been out as trans, I've been subjected to a near-constant stream of psychologists and sociologists - both amateur and expert - who want to study me. The first time someone approached me for such a thing (in this case it was as a subject for a university paper) I was very agreeable and excited about it. I was new to all this stuff and I liked talking about it because it was consuming my life: Having people who wanted to listen sounded great. When I told a friend of mine about the university paper, he said to me that being studied doesn't necessarily lead to being helped. Now, over a year later, I know what he meant.

My experience has been (and this has been brought up in books on transgenderism) that the psychological and sociological communities have become self-serving: Their studies and experiments are only seen by members of their own profession, and many times they don't DO anything with those studies except read them. The trans community (and I'm sure other groups who get studied a lot as well) have basically been used to provide bedtime reading - entertainment - for people who enjoy that sort of thing.

There has been one exception though: The study I participated in that was authored by a social worker (the one I mentioned before). The questions she asked were mostly about my quality-of-life; something that matters to me, the subject. Her motivation for asking those types of questions can only be too prove that people like me do, or do not, need more help or support from society. Even if the outcome is negative, I think that's a worthy goal - It's information that will actually be useful. I think psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists wouldn't encounter the hostility they often do if they remembered that their job is to make life better for people and society in general.

Geek

2005-06-19T18:00:00.000-06:00

The other day I volunteered to be interviewed for a study a local social worker is doing on transgendered people. One of the questions she asked me was whether I had any friends in high school and if so were they the "cool kids" or not. I answered that I had a few friends but they weren't the cool kids, they were the geeks. She wrote that down. I didn't like the implications of that question. It seemed to indicate that she thought if I hadn't been transgendered I might have had "better" friends - Or maybe that I hung out with the geeks because, being different, they were the only ones who would take me. I don't think that's the case at all. I hung out with the geeks because I was one. In fact, although being transgendered is responsible for a lot of the pain in my life, I think I still would have been a social outcast even without that. It's part of my personality.

It seems that a lot of people in the transgendered community don't understand geekdom. If I were to make a list of all the things that I am, the word geek would come first, even before the words transsexual or FTM. Geekdom is an identity of intellect, which is higher in the hierarchy of things than identities of sex. Actually I think I'm lucky to have been a geek because in the geek community sex (both the noun and the verb, haha) is less important than it is in most other subcultures; the gender laws are less strict. I think that saved me from even more hardship growing up.

I remember when I first started to dress as a man an FTM friend I had came to me one day and said "Look, I saw this FTM who has the same physical features you do and he looks really cool, so you should dress like him." The respons that immediately popped into my head was "but I'm not cool." I'm a geek, and I know transitioning is not going to change that.

Maybe Freud was right

2005-06-07T16:03:00.000-06:00

A while ago someone came into a transgendered forum I visit saying that their girlfriend wanted a penis, and asked where she could get information about "the surgery." She said that this person didn't want any of the other elements of being a man, just the penis. I explained to her that you can't get that surgery without going through the whole transition, after which she went away.

I thought the encounter was strange, or maybe a hoax. I mean, why would anyone want to have the genitals of the opposite sex but otherwise stay the same? Then I ran into a bigendered woman who told me she'd had several girls - not just one - tell her the same thing. It seems like there's more than coincidence going on here.

It's too bad I didn't get to talk to any of these girls directly, because I wonder what their motivation for saying this was. From the information I have I doubt that they were really gender dysphoric. Did they want a penis because it's something that belongs to men, and men have more power in our society? Is it because sex is supposed to be better for men? I can only speculate. I used to think that Freud's idea that women suffer from penis envy was ridiculous - after all normal women are women, not men - Wanting a penis is one of the things that's supposed to separate me from them. But maybe Freud was onto something after all. It seems that nothing about sex is straightforward (except... well, you know...)

Ego

2005-06-01T19:09:00.000-06:00

Lately I've heard from other transsexuals that they are ashamed of even the non-sexual parts of their bodies because those parts don't look masculine (or feminine as the case may be) enough. I don't have that problem. The reason why is simple: I'm 5'2 and there isn't anything that can change your height. No FTM can compete appearance-wise with a naturally-born man (let's be honest here) but I can't even compete with other FTM's. So I had to learn to check my ego at the door before I even started the process of transitioning.

What I've discovered is that it's just like the Buddhists say: Throwing out your ego is the only way to make peace with yourself. It's not just a case of accepting the things you can't change; you need to embrace them. You would be surprised how much simpler my life got once I accepted (really, really accepted) the fact that 99.99% of the population won't find me attractive and that many people won't even take me seriously as a male - at least not as an adult one. Now when I go out I have more fun because I'm not even subconsciously trying to impress anyone. Since I don't think I'm remarkable in either a good or bad way, every good thing I accomplish is a thrill and every mistake I make is insignificant. I have more confidence now than I did before because I've stopped trying to judge myself by anyone's standards - including my own. (Yes, if there's a big secret to achieving inner peace, it's to stop using adjectives on yourself, period).

It's been a long journey to get to this point. I've tried to help others with the process, but I think that everyone, transsexual or not, needs to hit rock bottom before they can even take these ideas seriously. I think some of the people I've talked to about this are jealous that I've gotten there and they haven't. But what they don't realize is that defeating your ego is a lot of work because although it can be conquered, it can never be killed. "Enlightenment" as they call it isn't something you get and then keep, it's a way of life that needs to be practiced. I was lucky in that I encountered these ideas when I needed them the most, but I also worked hard to make them work.

Trans differences

2005-05-22T16:53:00.000-06:00

When I first heard about transsexuality I thought I'd finally found the niche where I belonged - the group of people who were like me. But it hasn't been that simple. Usually all trans people are grouped under the same label: "transgendered" or "trans" for short. But some people under that label are happy "living as" their chosen gender and don't want to get medical treatment in order to change their sex, and I know I'm definitely not one of them. They seem to think that if there was no such thing as socially defined gender - no gender-specific clothes, names, behaviors - they would be perfectly happy the way they are. I know I wouldn't be.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I care very little about what others think of me - in fact maybe if gender was just a social thing and there was no physical sex, I would be fine. For me it's ALL about the body. I can think of myself as a man all I want, but the fact is that every time I get undressed, I get proven wrong. No amount of rationalizing or intellectual acrobatics is going to change that. I hate the way a female looks, the way it feels, and most of all the way it works (or rather doesn't work, because if you ask me it's dysfunctional). Perception might be 9/10 of reality, but that remaining 1/10 can be a bitch.

I don't think the people who don't want medical treatment are wrong, and I don't have any problem with counting them as friends, but I also don't want to be classified with them. The fact that they "can live" in their birth
bodies undermines my credibility. "If they can learn to live with it, why can't you?" So I believe there should be two distinct categories - I think that's how the terms transgendered vs. transsexual were originally meant, but somewhere along the way their meanings got blurred. We need to go back to that, to make it clear that some people really do need a physical sex change.

Gender in the Boardroom

2005-05-15T16:42:00.000-06:00

Once on his show The Apprentice, Donald Trump once said that the "experts" claim that there's no sex in the boardroom but that he disagreed. Those "experts" are being politically correct; Donald is telling the truth.

When I came out as transgendered at work, my boss told me that some people called him upset about it - as if they expected him to be able to stop me or something. Luckily he was on my side and told them that if they had a problem with it they should seek counseling. I don't know who those people were, but I do know that certain people suddenly started looking me as if I'd sprouted horns out of my head. I think they've gotten themselves over it now, but they were definitely uncomfortable at first.

What all this proves of course is that people are still fundamentally sexist. Even in the environment where gender shouldn't matter at all - the business environment - it evidently does. A while ago I was researching androgynous names for a story I'm thinking of writing (yeah, we'll see if I ever get around to that) and I read one web site whose author said that he hated androgynous names because he couldn't tell who he was dealing with before actually meeting them or talking to them on the phone. I could see how this could be a problem for telemarketers and such - because they wouldn't know which salutation (Mr, Ms etc) to use when speaking to someone for the first time. And there's further proof - through the use of salutations, sexism is embedded in our culture. When you think about little things like that, you realize that we're making much better progress against racism than against sexism. Gender issues are definitely the last frontier.

Girls on Juice

2005-05-08T16:28:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago there was a spate of articles (here's one) in the media about teenage girls taking anabolic steroids to lose weight. I was baffled when I read this: One of the first things they tell FTMs about taking testosterone is that it will make you gain fat, not just muscle. In fact, they won't give it to you if you're overweight. Maybe things are different for adolescents, but I can't see them being THAT different. It is counterintuitive to think that testosterone could make a woman gain fat, so I can understand the teenage girls making this mistake, but what about the experts who were consulted on this article? Even if steroids don't cause fat gain in adolescents, you'd think they would mention that that's not the case for adults - afterall there are adult women who would do anything to lose weight too.

Another interesting thing about this article is that they list all the other affects testosterone on women except one: The enlarged clitoris and labia majora. In my experience nonspecialist doctors don't know about this, even though, if you ask me, it's just common sense. I also think it would be an important fact to include in this article because it happens quickly and at a relatively low dose of testosterone. It's pretty obvious that either the professors who consulted on this article weren't well educated, or the person who wrote it chose not to include some important information.

On the other hand, there is the possibility that they didn't mention the enlargement of the clitoris because they thought that might make girls want to take steroids even more. Interesting implications there.

Pride

2005-05-03T17:42:00.000-06:00

Pride is like medical insurance: If you're healthy it's usually quite affordable, but if you have a pre-existing condition the premiums can get really out of hand.

The cure for Gender Identity Disorder, as it's called, is hormones and surgery. In most parts of Canada, those treatments are not covered by public health insurance. For most trans people that means putting up with crappy jobs, crappy homes, and a crappy life in general in order to save money for surgery. When you haven't got enough money to meet your biological needs, you realize that pride is a luxury. You make compromises and deals with yourself. The list of things you "wouldn't do" or "wouldn't put up with" gets shorter and shorter.

We're not the only group of people in that situation: Poor people always are, as are people in the US who need expensive medical treatment for any condition (personally I don't know how they do it). It's disconcerting to realize that, in some of the world's richest nations, dignity slips so easily between so many peoples' fingers.

Trans people are still unique though because we're the only group of people - in free countries anyway - who need someone else's approval to get what we need to survive. When the course of your entire life is in the hands of a psychiatrist, they become like your god. It's your own personal Jesus - but not quite in the way they meant it in the song. If you had told me, five years ago, that my entire sense of self would be hanging on someone else's opinion of me, I would have said you were crazy. But here I am. My soul is being held as collateral so that someday I can afford to get some pride.

Intro

2005-05-02T18:24:00.000-06:00

Just like a lot of people before me, when blogs were first invented I thought they were a crazy idea. Who in their right mind would want to broadcast their personal thoughts and ideas, their life, their experience, to the entire world? And who would ever want to read about ME? Now I find myself creating one. I still don't like the idea of writing a diary of my day-to-day to the life on the Internet, and that's not what this will be, but numerous things and people have convinced me that recording thoughts and ideas is a good thing. I don't think I'm anyone special, but I do represent a tiny fraction of the population for whom the world is a different place; maybe just for that reason it's worth it to take the time to write things down. Maybe somewhere in the echoes of cyberspace this blog will have an effect - even if it's only on me.

P.S. Thanks to my friend raj for the suggestion of the name.