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the_fantastic_ms_foxRemember that post on why I think the process for being approved for sexual reassignment surgery sucks?
Someone wrote some pretty strong objections, then vowed never to return. Well enough, but I wanted to take this space to respond. Normally I don't engage in flame wars - and this is no exception. I'm writing this because these are the usual round of objections that I hear over and over and over. It's not the first time I've heard them and it won't be the last. And at some point, you may hear them too. So I see the need to process them publicly.
I've seen too many people walk on the RLT half way through.
It separates the women from the men. And hat if they had got what they wanted first, then decided it didn't work?
I think this still presumes that RLT has something to do with genitals when I can see no connection between the two (see #6). I can see people stopping RLT because:
- They don't see what changing your name and clothes has to do with their genitals either
- They are exposed to too much risk as out transsexuals. Because of where I live, my skills, social networks, my ability to pass and the fact that my manner is intelligeably female to most, I can live as a woman, get a job, keep a roof over my head and walk down the street safely. I can even visit my family and use public bathrooms. If I were an adoptive parent or there were any other custody questions, I'd lose my kids, but this doesn't apply to me (yet) so I'm okay (now). Others don't have these privileges, and I don't expect them to run the gauntlet.
Where have you seen or heard of people doing walking out on RLT? I haven't heard of this happening. People who run queer centres haven't heard of this. Usually I hear about people starting the real-life "test" unsure of whether or not they even want genital surgery. And if people do decide that transitioning is wrong for them, I don't see that this has to do with living in role. Plus, even after all the medical crap I'm going through, I could go live in my old assigned gender (shudder) and I know of other people who have been happy with the surgery but returned to their old role for reasons that are not mine to judge.
I'm not suggesting that people should go get sex changes on a whim, I'm suggesting that it should be up to the patient.
Its there because in the early 70s there were a lot of quacks handing out SRS to anyone who could pay, and there were suicides. A lot of them.
Those quacks are still around - sometimes you need to cross a border to see them, but that's nothing new either. From what I heard, much of the problem was that they did bad work. How are the suicides a product of the surgery? I know that some TS people commit suicide after surgery, and some commit suicide before. And some don't want surgery and commit suicide anyway. Why is suicide surgery-dependent? Perhaps they expect surgery to change their life, but the real-life test does nothing to dissuade this - rather it promotes genital surgery as finally finishing transition, as if this will somehow fix your life.
People got srs who shouldn't have. Closet homosexuals with religious guilt who though surgery would make them straight women. Transvestites who confuse their comfort of dressing with their core identities, mentally ill patients with dissassositive disorders and other identity issues, and even criminals on the run.
Those with enough money and knowledge can still circumvent the system, and yet I don't hear of "the wrong people" getting SRS now.
I'm all in favour of counseling before people decide on surgery. Heck, I tried to find counseling, but it wasn't available. But I would rather that, following counseling, the patient should decide for themself what is right. Letting a doctor have the ultimate say runs into the problems in section 8 and 9.
If they are totally mentally unsound, this means that they cannot legally consent anyway. But if the doctor thinks they're "not really a transsexual," well then screw the doctor. I've seen too many people run into this roadblock, travel elsewhere to get around it, and go on to benefit from transition.
It strikes me as improbable that criminals on the run would want to get SRS (unless they're transsexuals) partially because the months-long recuperation interferes with your ability to well, run, but if they still want it, good for them. It's not like it will hide them from the cops ("Could you drop your pants please? I need to see if your genitals match that of the suspect) especially at a time when cross-dressing was illegal . They'd be better off getting facial plastic surgery without a referral - which you can do.
Most of these cases strike me as improbable; loosely-grounded bogeymen dragged up by the medical system to justify its existence and role as protector. They're left uncriticized because they're published and republished with only a single years-dead doctor's name on it, and no-one thinks to double check the sources.
This happens with a lot of TS "common-sense facts," like the trope "there are 4 trans women to every trans man."
Tangent:
This is a statistic compiled by Christine Jorgesson's surgeon in the 50's, based on the letters he received from people looking for SRS. Why did he think that trans men would write in to a famed vaginoplasty expert in equal numbers? Subsequent statistics have tried to back tihs up, but a lot of them are flawed - in this case many people try to measure the number of trans men versus trans women (although I'm not sure why?). They see there are 3 vaginoplasties to every phalloplasty in such and such area, and since this is close to the above number, they call it there and declare, "okay, it's 3:1"
What!? But phalloplasties are waaaaay more expensive and invasive, have traditionally not had as good urinary or sexual function, and, if you used to identify as a butch and still have a lot of dyke friends, is the last straw and will get you kicked out of the dyke parties where your friends hang out. So maybe SRS is a shitty measurement of men versus women, but because it confirms trans "common-sense facts" it keeps going by unchallenged.
For other trans common-sense tropes that turned out not to be true, I recommend looking to T-Vox's page on hormone myths.
A year to be sure is NOTHING. Noting at all. From the time I told my therapist to the time I hit the table was 18 months. It wasn't that difficult. You spend your life knowing this is what you need, but you can't wait a year to be sure? If you are having a hard time with a government system don't count on a state system, or a national health to help you. It won't. We are supposed to envy YOUR health care system, what a joke.
The problem is that it doesn't take a year, it takes a lot longer than that (see #7), and the "one-year test" is just one more delay that winds up taking a lot longer than a year . My projected twenty-nine month transition is relatively speedy. Eighteen months is lightning-fast. Many people take more than half a decade to go through it, or are never able to finish because of fickle political decisions governing SRS.
I expect a health care system that charges me money to treat cis and trans people equally when it comes to identical surgeries.
I hear so many cry "BUT I WANT IT NOW" "I CAN PAY" they sound like straight male crybabies. There is a reason you can't buy drugs that will hurt you, or of you are unfortunate enough to live in Canada, play with dangerous toys. You may think you know, but till you are THERE you don't KNOW. You may think you do, but you don't.
The words "I can pay" are nowhere in my argument. My argument does however rest on "I have already been billed for provincial medical insurance, and as a subscriber, I expect to to treat cis and trans people's genitals equally."
Drugs: I can walk two blocks and buy crack with little to no fear of legal repercussions. I can walk eight blocks to buy alcohol and cigarrettes with no legal repercussions.
This "straight male crybabies" comment really bothers me, and I'm going to go off on a tangent that likely does not reflect the original spirit of the comment to show why. This way, when you hear someone dreding this up, you'll know its roots.
Tangent:
It's not because I it's kind of a non-sequitor as many trans men are straight and I'd like to see them treated equally as straight cis men, so much as this particular piece of rhetoric is used to dismiss trans women's desire for equal rights. This rhetoric rejects trans women on the grounds that trans women are "really" straight men who are demanding access out of a sense of male entitlement.
This is most famously found in Janice Raymond's "The Transsexual Empire."
(The link is to the most... uh... understanding webpage I could find that actually detailed the book)
Janice Raymond's argument states that transsexuals aren't really the gender they claim, but are really people who can't accept who they are and change their sex because it's easier (where is this marvellous country where changing your sex is an easy alternative?):
- Straight trans men are butch lesbians who hate themselves and have sold out to The Man
- Straight trans women are male homosexuals in denial
- While the existence of lesbian trans women might make you think that this argument is tosh, you need to understand that lesbian trans women are really straight men trying to infiltrate patriarchy into the women's movement. Expecting access to women's spaces is part of extending the reign of the straight man across the world. By entering women's spaces when they are not welcome (at least not by Janice Raymond - other women might be happy to see their friends or wives allowed entrance) they are raping women en masse. (No. Really.)
- Gay trans men? They don't exist. (A good thing too! It would make this argument sticky and awkward if we had to somehow explain that being a gay man is either categorically easier than being a straight woman, or that it represents women trying to worm their way into men's spaces.)
- Bisexuals are not found in this argument.
- The idea that people might discover new aspects of their sexual orientation over time, or through transition, is also not fond in this argument.
I am not making this up. I am not missummarizing Janice Raymond. And I am not using her as a straw target. Her book sold a lot of copies and somehow, in a spectacular failure of collective reason, was used as the basis to deny many trans women entrance into women's spaces, from music festivals, to dyke events, to rape crisis centres, to women's health information networks.
Side note: I imagine the reason underlying it probably has more to do with people getting squicked by transsexuals and they want an academic to justify it. Over decades, the women's movement has had a lot of problems acknowledging things like class bias, internal racism, homophobia, biphobia, religious discrimination, fear of femininity, and so on. Over time, it has started to deal with these things, but it's a slow process and there's still a lot of baggage.
Another side note: this theory is alive and well in an altered form at the Clark institute in Ontario, where they try to "cure" young male-to-female transsexuals into shunning all ties to femininity (like avoiding anything pink) to the point where they will just be gay men (if they're straight) or just being straight men without htis silly female-identity-fetish (if they're lesbians). These therapies "work," at least until the kids get old enough to leave home and find a competent doctor. Unfortunately they've already gone through male puberty at this point and some things (height, linebacker build, beard, deep voice) don't go away once they're in place. It's a real shame as puberty can now otherwise be postponed until a child is 16 at which point they pick which sex they want to live in and only have to go through puberty once.
Unfortunately, someone thought it would be a good idea to let these clowns write the chapter on transsexuality in the DSM-V, which is the big book of psychiatry, so there's an online petition calling on the American Psychiatric Association to please find anyone else. They're aiming for 10,000 signatures and they're over 9,000 as of June 17th 2008.
This idea gets extended to label any time a trans women sticks up for herself (y'know like feminism encourages women to do?) she is labelled as being full of "male energy." No, really. I'm serious.
It says "how very like a man to expect access to all spaces." Really? How very much like a woman to expect to be able to access spaces with "women" written on the door.
This is thoroughly debunked in Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, which is a revolutionary and very much needed book on feminism, femininity, sex, gender, biology, horomes, transsexuals and society. It's easy read, tips over a lot of sacred cows, addresses awkward questions like "it seems that hormones affect behaviour, but so do social pressures, so where do we go from here?" is very interesting, and it motivated me to write the post on SRS that started this mess.
And as for gay trans men? Here's a link to the middle of an article on Lou Sullivan, a man famous for building networks between gay trans men. This article goes relays how many people consider gay trans men inconceivable - including how the medical system saw them as not fit to transition (which it still, to an extent, does).
This is a one way trip, and there is only one way to be sure. living it for a year clears the doubts. You need to see what its like when its not a game or a costume. That's what the RLT is. And if you cannot see that you are a close minded child who wants his lolly NOW.
The doubts I has around SRS have been clear for awhile. RLT didn't resolve them. What resolved them was finding out that the horror stories I'd heard about genital surgery (often from medical-system related websites that were tied to justifying how SRS is dangerous and why you should trust that the HBSCA is trying to protect you) were decades out of date and not that accurate to begin with. It's been a year and a half "in role 24/7." It will be almost two and a half years - and that's because I'm lucky. It's been over a decade of wrestling with this issue. Enough waiting. Waiting accomplishes nothing.
Her lolly
Someone wrote some pretty strong objections, then vowed never to return. Well enough, but I wanted to take this space to respond. Normally I don't engage in flame wars - and this is no exception. I'm writing this because these are the usual round of objections that I hear over and over and over. It's not the first time I've heard them and it won't be the last. And at some point, you may hear them too. So I see the need to process them publicly.
I've seen too many people walk on the RLT half way through.
It separates the women from the men. And hat if they had got what they wanted first, then decided it didn't work?
I think this still presumes that RLT has something to do with genitals when I can see no connection between the two (see #6). I can see people stopping RLT because:
- They don't see what changing your name and clothes has to do with their genitals either
- They are exposed to too much risk as out transsexuals. Because of where I live, my skills, social networks, my ability to pass and the fact that my manner is intelligeably female to most, I can live as a woman, get a job, keep a roof over my head and walk down the street safely. I can even visit my family and use public bathrooms. If I were an adoptive parent or there were any other custody questions, I'd lose my kids, but this doesn't apply to me (yet) so I'm okay (now). Others don't have these privileges, and I don't expect them to run the gauntlet.
Where have you seen or heard of people doing walking out on RLT? I haven't heard of this happening. People who run queer centres haven't heard of this. Usually I hear about people starting the real-life "test" unsure of whether or not they even want genital surgery. And if people do decide that transitioning is wrong for them, I don't see that this has to do with living in role. Plus, even after all the medical crap I'm going through, I could go live in my old assigned gender (shudder) and I know of other people who have been happy with the surgery but returned to their old role for reasons that are not mine to judge.
I'm not suggesting that people should go get sex changes on a whim, I'm suggesting that it should be up to the patient.
Those quacks are still around - sometimes you need to cross a border to see them, but that's nothing new either. From what I heard, much of the problem was that they did bad work. How are the suicides a product of the surgery? I know that some TS people commit suicide after surgery, and some commit suicide before. And some don't want surgery and commit suicide anyway. Why is suicide surgery-dependent? Perhaps they expect surgery to change their life, but the real-life test does nothing to dissuade this - rather it promotes genital surgery as finally finishing transition, as if this will somehow fix your life.
Those with enough money and knowledge can still circumvent the system, and yet I don't hear of "the wrong people" getting SRS now.
I'm all in favour of counseling before people decide on surgery. Heck, I tried to find counseling, but it wasn't available. But I would rather that, following counseling, the patient should decide for themself what is right. Letting a doctor have the ultimate say runs into the problems in section 8 and 9.
If they are totally mentally unsound, this means that they cannot legally consent anyway. But if the doctor thinks they're "not really a transsexual," well then screw the doctor. I've seen too many people run into this roadblock, travel elsewhere to get around it, and go on to benefit from transition.
It strikes me as improbable that criminals on the run would want to get SRS (unless they're transsexuals) partially because the months-long recuperation interferes with your ability to well, run, but if they still want it, good for them. It's not like it will hide them from the cops ("Could you drop your pants please? I need to see if your genitals match that of the suspect) especially at a time when cross-dressing was illegal . They'd be better off getting facial plastic surgery without a referral - which you can do.
Most of these cases strike me as improbable; loosely-grounded bogeymen dragged up by the medical system to justify its existence and role as protector. They're left uncriticized because they're published and republished with only a single years-dead doctor's name on it, and no-one thinks to double check the sources.
This happens with a lot of TS "common-sense facts," like the trope "there are 4 trans women to every trans man."
Tangent:
This is a statistic compiled by Christine Jorgesson's surgeon in the 50's, based on the letters he received from people looking for SRS. Why did he think that trans men would write in to a famed vaginoplasty expert in equal numbers? Subsequent statistics have tried to back tihs up, but a lot of them are flawed - in this case many people try to measure the number of trans men versus trans women (although I'm not sure why?). They see there are 3 vaginoplasties to every phalloplasty in such and such area, and since this is close to the above number, they call it there and declare, "okay, it's 3:1"
What!? But phalloplasties are waaaaay more expensive and invasive, have traditionally not had as good urinary or sexual function, and, if you used to identify as a butch and still have a lot of dyke friends, is the last straw and will get you kicked out of the dyke parties where your friends hang out. So maybe SRS is a shitty measurement of men versus women, but because it confirms trans "common-sense facts" it keeps going by unchallenged.
For other trans common-sense tropes that turned out not to be true, I recommend looking to T-Vox's page on hormone myths.
The problem is that it doesn't take a year, it takes a lot longer than that (see #7), and the "one-year test" is just one more delay that winds up taking a lot longer than a year . My projected twenty-nine month transition is relatively speedy. Eighteen months is lightning-fast. Many people take more than half a decade to go through it, or are never able to finish because of fickle political decisions governing SRS.
I expect a health care system that charges me money to treat cis and trans people equally when it comes to identical surgeries.
The words "I can pay" are nowhere in my argument. My argument does however rest on "I have already been billed for provincial medical insurance, and as a subscriber, I expect to to treat cis and trans people's genitals equally."
Drugs: I can walk two blocks and buy crack with little to no fear of legal repercussions. I can walk eight blocks to buy alcohol and cigarrettes with no legal repercussions.
This "straight male crybabies" comment really bothers me, and I'm going to go off on a tangent that likely does not reflect the original spirit of the comment to show why. This way, when you hear someone dreding this up, you'll know its roots.
Tangent:
It's not because I it's kind of a non-sequitor as many trans men are straight and I'd like to see them treated equally as straight cis men, so much as this particular piece of rhetoric is used to dismiss trans women's desire for equal rights. This rhetoric rejects trans women on the grounds that trans women are "really" straight men who are demanding access out of a sense of male entitlement.
This is most famously found in Janice Raymond's "The Transsexual Empire."
(The link is to the most... uh... understanding webpage I could find that actually detailed the book)
Janice Raymond's argument states that transsexuals aren't really the gender they claim, but are really people who can't accept who they are and change their sex because it's easier (where is this marvellous country where changing your sex is an easy alternative?):
- Straight trans men are butch lesbians who hate themselves and have sold out to The Man
- Straight trans women are male homosexuals in denial
- While the existence of lesbian trans women might make you think that this argument is tosh, you need to understand that lesbian trans women are really straight men trying to infiltrate patriarchy into the women's movement. Expecting access to women's spaces is part of extending the reign of the straight man across the world. By entering women's spaces when they are not welcome (at least not by Janice Raymond - other women might be happy to see their friends or wives allowed entrance) they are raping women en masse. (No. Really.)
- Gay trans men? They don't exist. (A good thing too! It would make this argument sticky and awkward if we had to somehow explain that being a gay man is either categorically easier than being a straight woman, or that it represents women trying to worm their way into men's spaces.)
- Bisexuals are not found in this argument.
- The idea that people might discover new aspects of their sexual orientation over time, or through transition, is also not fond in this argument.
I am not making this up. I am not missummarizing Janice Raymond. And I am not using her as a straw target. Her book sold a lot of copies and somehow, in a spectacular failure of collective reason, was used as the basis to deny many trans women entrance into women's spaces, from music festivals, to dyke events, to rape crisis centres, to women's health information networks.
Side note: I imagine the reason underlying it probably has more to do with people getting squicked by transsexuals and they want an academic to justify it. Over decades, the women's movement has had a lot of problems acknowledging things like class bias, internal racism, homophobia, biphobia, religious discrimination, fear of femininity, and so on. Over time, it has started to deal with these things, but it's a slow process and there's still a lot of baggage.
Another side note: this theory is alive and well in an altered form at the Clark institute in Ontario, where they try to "cure" young male-to-female transsexuals into shunning all ties to femininity (like avoiding anything pink) to the point where they will just be gay men (if they're straight) or just being straight men without htis silly female-identity-fetish (if they're lesbians). These therapies "work," at least until the kids get old enough to leave home and find a competent doctor. Unfortunately they've already gone through male puberty at this point and some things (height, linebacker build, beard, deep voice) don't go away once they're in place. It's a real shame as puberty can now otherwise be postponed until a child is 16 at which point they pick which sex they want to live in and only have to go through puberty once.
Unfortunately, someone thought it would be a good idea to let these clowns write the chapter on transsexuality in the DSM-V, which is the big book of psychiatry, so there's an online petition calling on the American Psychiatric Association to please find anyone else. They're aiming for 10,000 signatures and they're over 9,000 as of June 17th 2008.
This idea gets extended to label any time a trans women sticks up for herself (y'know like feminism encourages women to do?) she is labelled as being full of "male energy." No, really. I'm serious.
It says "how very like a man to expect access to all spaces." Really? How very much like a woman to expect to be able to access spaces with "women" written on the door.
This is thoroughly debunked in Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, which is a revolutionary and very much needed book on feminism, femininity, sex, gender, biology, horomes, transsexuals and society. It's easy read, tips over a lot of sacred cows, addresses awkward questions like "it seems that hormones affect behaviour, but so do social pressures, so where do we go from here?" is very interesting, and it motivated me to write the post on SRS that started this mess.
And as for gay trans men? Here's a link to the middle of an article on Lou Sullivan, a man famous for building networks between gay trans men. This article goes relays how many people consider gay trans men inconceivable - including how the medical system saw them as not fit to transition (which it still, to an extent, does).
The doubts I has around SRS have been clear for awhile. RLT didn't resolve them. What resolved them was finding out that the horror stories I'd heard about genital surgery (often from medical-system related websites that were tied to justifying how SRS is dangerous and why you should trust that the HBSCA is trying to protect you) were decades out of date and not that accurate to begin with. It's been a year and a half "in role 24/7." It will be almost two and a half years - and that's because I'm lucky. It's been over a decade of wrestling with this issue. Enough waiting. Waiting accomplishes nothing.
Her lolly
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-17 07:54 pm (UTC)I laughed. That was a perfect way to end a rebuttal. :D
no subject
Date: 2008-06-18 09:46 am (UTC)Btw, "Serano" is how her name's spelled.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-18 04:23 pm (UTC)Fixed it.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-19 07:32 pm (UTC)Also, thanks for the links; I'm going to put the Serano book at the top of my to-read stack, as it sounds like she addresses a number of issues I've been trying to rectify in my own head around my own feminism, internalized misogyny, and attitudes towards femininity.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-20 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 06:07 am (UTC)