Women Born Transsexual

Bird of Paradox has a very interesting comment regarding Italy’s opening of a transgender specific prison over on her blog.

http://birdofparadox.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/italy-to-open-first-prison-for-transgender-inmates/

My first take on the idea was totally positive.  In 1968 I was gang raped in the San Francisco City Jail as a result of having been thrown into a hard core tank instead of the queen tank.

Back then one block of cells was set aside for people who were queens (transgender) and pre-op transsexuals.  I was about six months pre-coming out and was picked up in a raid on a Haight Ashbury apartment building where the cops did a no warrant, kick the door in on all three flats.

I was safe while we were together but we got the deserters out first and I was last to get out.

Later that year I was picked up again by the Tac Squad on the general “mopery with intent to gawk” harass the femme hippie queen bullshit.  This time a older black guard took one look at me and put me in the queen tank for my own safety.

How does this relate to today?

The general abuse of prisoners world wide is an abomination.  From arbitrary capital punishment and amputations to water boarding and other forms of grotesque torture there has been a world wide retreat from the idea of humane treatment of prisoners.

In the US you have Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose infamous abuse of prisoners is lauded by the ultra right wing conservatives as a desirable get tough on crime approach. This in a nation that has more people in the criminal justice system than any other nation in the world.

About twenty years ago I met a sister who later died of AIDS she contracted from being raped while in the California penal system.

Before we can even think about the questions raised in the commentary over at BOP I think we have to make sure that once in the grasp of the world wide prison industry people with transsexualism or transgenderism are treated in a manner that insures their physical safety.

No one TS/TG or non should be subjected to rape or abuse while in custody. One would hope that post-SRS people are assigned to the appropriate prisons or jails although I fear that this is not a given considering the vast cultural disparities.

I am given to think that special facilities especially if they are oriented towards those offenders convicted of such non-violent crimes as prostitution and drug offenses should be like the minimal security facilities used for white collar criminals. Places offering trans friendly health care and potential rehabilitatory job training.

Having transsexualism as a medical history rather than as an active concern probably causes me to locate the problem of transprisoners as an element of a larger picture and with less focus than one sees on BOP’s blog, nonetheless I think her post on this subject deserves a fair and honest read as it is very thought provoking.

A new publication regarding transsexual people in Germany seems to be creating controversy.

http://www.atme-ev.de/images/Menschenrechtstexte/menschenrechtsbericht-2009_komplett%20mit%20cover.pdf

I really am not into personally digesting this one.  While I might scan the English language portions I lack the knowledge of German to read much of it and Babel Fish is both tedious to use and lacking in nuance.

The fact is I would rather read what we have to offer regarding our own lives as we are the only valid experts. If you haven’t lived it you can only speak from the arrogant sort of position one finds when the imperialist speaks of the colonized or the misogynistic male  speaks of women.

Matters only worsen when this speaking from ignorance is done by academics wishing to polish their credentials and further their careers.

I’m sure criticism of this publication will continue over the next few weeks and months.  As time for studying it permits and translations become available I am sure I will revisit and critique it.

I would be willing to publish  reader submitted explanations, elaborations and critiques of this statement.  Let me know in the comments section and I will contact you regarding the submission of an article.

I sometimes get criticized for being too trans focused and other times I get criticized for being all over the place.  As in “What do your left wing politics have to do with anything?” Or fill in the blank..

Last night we watched Salt of the Earth, a 1953 film that was made by people Blacklisted from working in the movies because they were lefties and Joe McCarthy was running a campaign of right wing lies and smears.  Generally he was the same sort of conservative asshole as we have today in the Republican’t Party.

Salt of the Earth was censored into oblivion only to surface on the college classic films circuit of the 1960s.

The making of it is a story in itself and makes the US look as un-free as other nations we condemned for their lack of freedom.

It is the story of a strike by union mineworkers in early 1950s New Mexico.

The workers were Latino, some spoke only Spanish.  The union organizer was Anglo as were the sheriffs and the owner.

When the mine owner got a Taft Hartly Act injunction forbidding the workers from picketing the entrance to the mine to prevent scabs from coming in to break the strike the women took over the picketing.

Nearly 15 years before the start of second wave feminism this film presented a very strong feminist message even quoting Lenin’s “On the Emancipation of Women”.  It seemed right because the core truth to the McCarthyite charges of communist involvement in the labor movement and among immigrant laborers was that the right wingers oppressed and the reds fought the oppressors.

It was like hearing a woman in Libertarias (Juegos De Guerra) quote the anarchist, Bakunin.  It just felt right.

Salt of the Earth is just one of those classic films available now on DVD that reminds me of my days living in Hollywood when movies were a part of my life.

Our computers are over six years old now, still running XP.

Now we could go out and buy new ones, indeed we considered taking that path.

But that isn’t really my way of doing things so I am going to build our new machines on the I7 platform, probably with ASUS motherboards.

I’m researching the boards and components as I go.

It is something in my nature.  After all, as a transkid I was the only one I knew like me and it took a lot of digging to find what I needed to know to manage changing my sex way back when.

I wanted to be a part of history, not just intellectually but physically.

I became a radical, left home to live in the Haight Ashbury and Berkeley.  I learned how to cut mimeograph stencils, chair a meeting organize a demo.

I didn’t need counseling to aid me in changing sex because I had girl friends to teach me how to do things.  Consciousness raising raps along with political consciousness raising.  I learned to cook and worked with a food co-op and tenants union.

I wanted to learn photography so I bought a camera, read books, went to museums and taught myself.

Over the years I have met many people with extraordinary talents, often time working at mundane jobs.

One thing they all have in common with sisters is that they often hide or down play these things about themselves in order to keep their slave jobs that pay the bills.

I sometimes mention something like going to a show at one of the art museums and discover that the woman doing the returns likes the same French Impressionists I like.  Or that someone else has a recording studio he built in his garage that can do 24 track recording.

Not everything in society is corporate prepackaged for your consumption.  Some things are do it yourself.  Tina and I were talking to someone who still has a tube amplifier in his stereo system and telling him about how we had wired together all these CD changers and built up what has evolved into a pretty elaborat theater sound system.  We did it one component at a time over years.

Mostly it is a matter of thinking, “I can do that and going out and doing it.”  Rather than buying it or listening to experts who make you feel that you are inadequate.

One of the things I have noticed in the year or so that I’ve been blogging is that same DIY that gives anyone willing to do the work a soap box to stand on, a platform to speak from and present their positions.

One of the worst aspects of the debate with those pushing transggender as umbrella was their resorting to saying, “Well the academics all use ‘transgender’” or how certain activists were able via web sites and national offices to dominate the discourse.

Rather than just post comments creating our own blogs gives us platforms for our individual opinion.

Early today because I have to go to work and I am in a funky, punky Ani Difranco mood.

Way back when in 1999 I saw both androphilia and autogynephilia as being total BS.

Both are attempts to perversify the lives of transsexual to female people.  In a way they both suck worse than the “primary/secondary” description I used to use but abandoned for”early emerger/later emerger” in that those terms are based on when one comes out more than some pseudo sciency faith based attempt at perversifying young emergers as dick crazy queens and later emergers as fetishists.

I’ve listened to enough stories to grasp that there are two major factors at work:  Ability to pass and children.  The ability to pass easily as either ones birth assigned sex or as one’s core sex identity plays a big part.  So too does becoming a parent.

What is really some pretty oppressive bullshit is the attempts on the part of some to lord it over other using the perverse bullshit generated by the pseudo academics Zucker, Lawrence, Bailey, Blanchard and Green.

In fact it almost seems like the same group of people have been pushing this crap since about 1999.  I first encountered it when a cabal invaded Transtheory, a mailing list run by Stephen Whittle.

The first sock puppet, someone calling herself Sarah Cohen wrote glowingly about Janice Raymond, an anti-choice former Catholic nun turned anti-transsexual, anti sex missionary.

She was followed by Stephanie Velasquez and other sock puppets including Lawrence, herself, all pushing this crap about autogynephilia and androphilia.

(There will be more discussion regarding BBZLG forthcoming)

Some people embraced autogynephilia for reasons known only to them.  Like much bullshit it is possible to see the grain of truth and overlook the mountain of baggage that these carry with them.

One of the things about keeping track of history is that when someone claims something that is anachronistic in the extreme about themselves then it sets off alarm bells.  That was the error that caused me to see through them.

The cabal took my use of transkid (on transtheory dating back to my advocating for the throwaway kids) and turned it into a website that garnered a number of followers while indoctrinating them into the idea of AGP/AP.

Now the kicker is that both poles of that one suck.  the folks who come out young may like men but they generally are not the sex crazed gay men getting surgery in order to deceive straight men that is a the core of BBZLG’s androphilia paradigm.  Any more than the fantasizing and transference that sells fashion magazines deserved to be perversified in people who try not to transition by sublimating their inner needs rather than acting on them.

Trying to stick new names on either of these perverse labels and then sell us on using them is like trying to reposition the moron from Wasila as some sort of intelligent pollitical commentator.  You are forced to examine the motivation and question the sincerity of those pushing this crap.

Now I view “classic transsexual” as just another wrinkle on the AP/AGP dichotomy.  Classic implies old yet Lili Elbe and Roberta Cowell, subjects of two of the oldest actual biographies of WBTs that are available were both married to women.  I somehow doubt that marriage to a woman is an element of what those pushing the term “classic transsexual” mean.  Perhaps like Cowell and Jorgensen they mean, served in the military.  But somehow I doubt that one too.

If they mean those who come out young and like guys then they had better figure out how to say that without taking on the baggage of dick crazy homosexual seeks vagina in order to have sex with straight men.

Mostly though I just leave it as:  Real transsexuals actually get sex reassignment surgery and live as members of the sex to which they have been reassigned no mater how butch or femme they may be and no matter what their sexuality.

One of the really cool things about getting the New York times besides actually reading a real news paper that still at least pretends to present news reported by actual journalists is that you come across tidbits like this.  As Caroline said, “You could not make this stuff up.”

From Thursdays NYT Arts and Entertainment section

Arts Briefly:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/movies/14arts-VATICANPANSA_BRF.html?sq=Vatican%20%20Avatar&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Pat Robertson and the Prada Pump wearing former Nazi agree.  Freedom is a bad thing whether it is slaves rebelling against their masters or same sex marriage and women wanting the right to control their own bodies and not be treated like chattel.

There is a reason for the anarchist tag, “No gods, no masters”.

From The Advocate

http://advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/01/11/Pope_Calls_Gay_Marriage_an_Attack/

By Julie Bolcer

–>Pope Benedict XVI assailed same-sex marriages as a danger to humanity on Monday in an apparent response to Portugal’s move to legalize same-sex marriage last week.

According to Agence France-Presse, the 82-year-old pope said that humans “can be protected or endangered” in his address to the Vatican diplomatic corps.

“One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes,” said the pope, citing “certain countries in Europe or North and South America,” reported AFP.

“Freedom cannot be absolute,” said the Roman Catholic leader.

Last Friday, Portugal’s parliament approved plans to legalize marriage equality, which could receive a final vote before the pope is scheduled to visit the country in May.

I hereby nominate Pat Robertson for the 2010 “Shit for Brains Award”

Now I know it is early in the year.  But..

The earth quake in Haiti that killed hundreds of thousands of some of the poorest people on the planet was cause because…  I shit you not…  this fucking vile shithead claimed it was because the slaves in Haiti made a pact with the devil when they freed themselves from their slave masters, the French.

Now maybe in the sick twisted racist, misogynistic, homophobic mind of the rabidly delusional Robertson rebelling against those who own someone as a slave is the same thing as making a pact with the devil.

But I don’t see it that way.  The enslavement of people due to race is an act of such vile evil as to place the perpetrators of such an institution in about the same place where we place the Nazis.

To rise up and even kill the masters is an act of cleansing.  To rise up and destroy the institution of slavery is an act for which the people of Haiti should be honored by all and not disrespected by this self appointed religious fraud.

But then this religious fraud blamed the destruction of the World Trade Center by religious extremists in another branch of the Abrahamic cults on not the prepetrators but upon feminists as well as gays and lesbians.

Religion is a powerful tool of abuse.  Robertson has been one of the nastiest.

No god, no masters.

There truly is very little new under the sun when it comes to politics, religion and how they work hand in hand with the rich and powerful to oppress the many.

Marx described religion as the opium of the poor. Joe Hill described it as “pie in the sky when you die.”

Christianity extended the rule of Rome for centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. The church created the Dark Ages and perpetuated them by control over knowledge and learning. Literacy was limited to royalty and the church.

There was good reason why Jefferson pushed for a wall of separation between church and state to prevent religion from interfering with the ideals of the American Revolution just as there was sound logic behind Diderot’s epigram regarding how mankind will only be free when the last royal is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Has there ever been a more absurd idea than “the divine right of kings”?  Or a more oppressive one?

Religion has never offered freedom and has always directed those who are oppressed to acquiesce to the oppressor with touching platitudes about how the meek shall inherit the earth.

Without knowing history we are blind to the lies people choose to tell us regarding that history.

We fail to learn about how religion supported slavery during the 19th century using  the Bible as a reason for their racist oppression of Black people.

They used the same rhetoric regarding the destruction of the family and “god ordained” as reason to ridicule the very idea of women having the vote.

In Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism Susan Jacoby describes how the abolitionist Garrison supported women’s rights as did other progressive free thinkers such as John Stuart Mill.

Freeing the slaves would destroy society.  The Bible said that Blacks were the sons of Cain and descendants of Ham, that god’s curse was upon them and besides conservative values demands a respect for the property of those chosen by god to be the masters.

Women fared no better.  Man is the head of woman as god is the head of man.  Religion ordained women to be inferior to men.

The suffrage movement would destroy both the family and civilization.

A hundred and fifty odd years later and the conservatives as well as the religious leaders are still saying that about feminism.

They have added gay and lesbian equality to the mix that is supposed to destroy the family and civilization.  The mealy mouthed lies are the same, they are a never changing constant for those who use the invisible bully in the sky as a weapon of oppression.

At every turn one is reminded of another quote from Diderot, “Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.”

Indeed for all the trumpeting of American values on the part of the conservatives and the religious the very nature of the most sacred document America has produced, its Constitution, is routinely ignored.

When they form lynch mobs and demand that a majority have the right to vote a minority not have equal rights then they themselves lose the honor of being considered “true Americans.”

Too many in the mainstream media and all too often the less main stream have bought in to the right wing religious fanatics meme of “gay marriage”.

Marriage rights for same sex couples are not “gay marriage”.  They are equal marriage rights for same sex couples.

That same equality that is supposed to separate us from the theocracies in the Middle East and from totalitarian nations or monarchies.

The Christo-fascists have right wing think tanks telling them what inflammatory language to use.  They have used this name calling for over 70 years now.  It is scapegoating and un-American although they claim the meme of patriotism as well.

Notice they never use the less inflammatory “lesbian marriage”.

Read Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece in today’s New York Times

Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women?

It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes (although the last warlord I met there called himself a pastor and wore a button reading “rebels for Christ”). It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Koran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.

Yet these kinds of abuses — along with more banal injustices, like slapping a girlfriend or paying women less for their work — arise out of a social context in which women are, often, second-class citizens. That’s a context that religions have helped shape, and not pushed hard to change.

Continue at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10kristof.html?ref=opinion

The more extreme the religion the greater the misogyny.  Homophobia and transphobia are really really just another facet of misogyny.

Religion started as a method of gaining power by certain individuals claiming special knowledge.  Hence women’s original sin was eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Lucifer’s sin was thinking he was equal.

Religion uses an invisible tyrant in the sky with the ultimate spy system, one Stasi would have been proud of and the threat of eternal punishment to keep people obediant to the priest class.

No gods, no masters.

It has been just about 40 years since Robin Morgan published her original rant titled “Good-Bye to all That”.  I recently reread it and recalled all the reasons why I didn’t reject everything  I was into to embrace that version of radical feminism.

In that rant she demanded that we reject all sorts of hip artists who were challenging a wide variety of repressive mores that shackled both women and men.  I was involved with Weatherman and other hard core radicals in opposition to the war in Vietnam.

I was a part of the alternative culture.

A couple of years ago I reread The Feminine Mystique and discovered that Betty Friedan put down this one young woman who rejected the mystique by becoming part of the Beat Movement.

There seemed to be something very privileged about the feminist movement of the early 1970s with so many leaders from the Seven Sisters private universities.   There was a sort of academic detachment.

Yet women, myself included found aspects of feminism that did touch our lives.  Even if it was the equal pay for equal or even work requiring the same levels of skill.  Control over our own lives.

As early as 1974 when Jane Alpert wrote “Mother Right” there was the start of s schism between women who were fighting for rights and equality, and those women whose idea of feminism seemed to simply impose another set of strict rules of behavior.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The right to say no is meaningless if one does not have the right to say yes.  The feminist policing of personal style as well as conduct was odious to many.

The snotty use of “politically correct” did not come from the right wing initially but rather from women who were fed up with having to obey a party line or face criticism.

The phrase, “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice” may not have killed second wave feminism but it was deeply harmful.

I was involved with the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.  I took classes there.  I watched as the whole Wicca/New Age stuff replaced the idea of working for serious political change.

I was a photographer.  I would have liked to earn a living at it.  The women artists I met  at the Women’s Building wound up taking classes about finding the goddess within.

I took classes on money hoping to learn how to apply for grants from places like the NEA.  Instead the classes taught me about self-affirmations.

Mary Daly wove this fantasy and at the same time was a major force in the separatist movement that was about disengagement from society and the formation of these cult like collectives.

It sometimes seems at though the real feminists left things like “women’s studies” for Law School, Medicine, Art School etc.

Add in Dworkin and Mackinnon along with a few others touted as leading voices.  Tell women they have been brainwashed by male supremacist socialization and that instead they should give their lives over to a cult and you have a prescription for the destruction of a movement.

While Daly and others described themselves as radical feminists they had little in common with the real radical feminists of the late 1960s and 70s because rather than working for societal change they buried themselves in increasingly alienated fields of academic endeavor where all outside criticism was denounced.

While this isolating in a cult never resulted in the self destruction of say a People’s Temple (Jim Jones) it did help turn feminism into something to be ridiculed.

Under the Bush Regime when they were stirring the people up to go to war against Iraq because the terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade Center were from Saudi Arabia and…  How we ever bought that one is beyond me.

The right wing started using the term Islamo-fascists for Muslim religious fanatics.

It dawned on me that the right wing Christians including the Catholics were virtually identical in their homophobia, misogyny and bigotry.  So when I use the term I am using it to refer to the groups who abuse the word “family” in a manner that makes it Orwellian newspeak for “Nazi Family Values”, the sort that believes LGBT/T people should be killed.

Now there are still some sisters out there who think that if they embrace those values that these ultra right wingers will not come after them.  They are as delusional as the Log Cabin Republicans.  Sucking up to the Republicans will get you nothing.

Look at their trashing of Amanda Simpson.

Here’s the thing, even though I am an atheist and think all religion is foolish superstition including Buddhism and the Wicca I do not think all Christians are Christo-fascists.  For example Unitarians and MCCers are not.  To be a Christo-fascist require the abusive application of religion to deny the equality of other groups of humans in a manner that is inconsistent with the Constitution of the US.

If you deny LGBT/T people their equality as guaranteed by the 14th amendment to the Constitution then you are un-American.  The very idea that a minority group should be scapegoated and then have their equality put to the vote is straight out of another Christo-fascist playbook.  America and the rest of the Allies defeated that ideology some 65 years ago.

From Raw Story

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/christian-groups-slams-selfmutilating-obama-appointee/

By Daniel Tencer
Friday, January 8th, 2010 — 3:50 pm

The conservative American Family Association is calling on President Barack Obama to fire Amanda Simpson, Obama’s transgender appointee to the Commerce Department, because the appointment “puts the weight of the federal government behind the normalization of sexual deviancy.”

“‘Amanda’ is a biological male in every cell of his body, and no amount of surgical mutilation is ever going to change that,” AFA President Tim Wildmon said in a press release circulated Thursday. “It’s a mistake for our president to appoint such a sexually confused individual to a position of public responsibility.”

Wildmon went on to say that “gender is assigned by the Creator at the moment of conception, and no healthy society should ever regard sexual mutilation, even if it’s self-inflicted, as something that’s normal and merits approval.”

He ended by saying the “appointment should be rescinded immediately.”

Throughout the press release, Simpson is referred to as “he” and the name Amanda is put in quotation marks. That appears to be a tactic now employed by opponents of Simpson’s appointment. Media watchdog MediaMatters pointed out that the conservative WorldNetDaily did the same thing in an article about Simpson that stated she (“he”) had spent $70,000 on sex-change operations since 2000.

The gay-issues Queerty blog warns that the rumblings in the right-wing media about Simpson’s appointment could be a prelude to a “slime” campaign a la Kevin Jennings.

Her real worry should be with groups like MassResistance and Fox News, which have spearheaded efforts to slime other LGBT Obama appointees, including Kevin Jennings. These radical right-wing mouthpieces don’t care about the substance of your work nor your job qualifications, but about what makes you different. And we fully expect an assault on Simpson’s character, disguised as her “work ethic” or “prior missteps.”

The AFA was recently behind a boycott of Pepsi, on the grounds that the soda maker has backed gay rights, despite assertions by gay-rights activists that Pepsi’s main competitor, Coca-Cola, has arguably done more for the gay rights movement. The AFA claims half a million participants in its Pepsi boycott.

The AFA also ran a pressure campaign last year against the 7-11 convenience store chain, arguing the company was corrupting youth by displaying an issue of Playboy magazine that featured cartoon character Marge Simpson on the cover.

I don’t think I have gone to the same film twice in a week since the 1970s when I was living on Sunset Blvd with a girl friend who was also a film freak.

Yet after seeing Avatar on Tuesday, Tina and I went and saw it a second time on Thursday.

Along with it being a stunningly beautiful film it has a lot of subtexts.

Today over on Queerity I discovered a bit of strangeness.  It seems that a self described trans liberationist in San Francisco considers the film to be “transphobic”.

Now I thought I had heard all the politically correct criticisms and had answered them to my personal satisfaction so this one puzzled me.

I saw the story as one of transforming from one person to another being in a way that could be seen as similar to what people with transsexualism go through.  Taking on a new body and learning/becoming socialized in a world of expectations placed on a being that has that sort of body.

In the final confrontation with the evil mercenary thug, John Wayne type figure, Col. Miles Quaritch asks Jake Sully who has become Na’vi, “How does it feel to betray your race?”

I sometimes think that part of the hostility towards WBTs is that we are seen as having not just betrayed our sex as class but in doing so have called into question the whole ideology of male supremacy.

Suzi Quatro  48 Crash (1973)

Forwarded to me by Andrea Brown
Published: 7 Jan 10 16:15 CET

Online: http://www.thelocal.se/24252/20100107/

Young Swedes who suspect they are transsexuals ought to be issued special ID cards allowing them to hide their undesired gender during their trial phase as the opposite sex, according to one of the country’s most respected child psychiatrists.

“This has to do with the practical aspects of living life as the opposite gender,” Per-Anders Rydelius, chair of the maternal and child health department at Karolinska Institutet’s Astrid Lindgren’s Children Hospital, told The Local.

“They must be able to show their ID card without people thinking they are being deceived.”

Since 2001, Rydelius has led a team of doctors, including an endocrinologist, a reconstructive plastic surgeon, and a gynaecologist, which is overseeing a two-year long “real-life test” or “real-life experience” for young Swedes who think they may fit the clinical definition of a transsexual.

“Transsexualism has to do with having the strong feeling that one was born with the wrong gender and wishing to change to the right gender,” he explained.

Following parental consent and a thorough evaluation, young people participating in the trial start a regimen of counseling as well as hormone treatments designed to halt the onset of normal puberty.

“For example, a boy who views himself as a girl and wants to be a girl can stop being concerned about the growth of a beard, an enlarged Adam’s Apple, and a lower voice,” Rydelius explained in a letter to Swedish tax and health authorities requesting help with the ID card issue.

If the person is not found to be a true transsexual following the two-year real-life test, the hormone treatment is stopped, at which point “normal puberty proceeds again”.

While children and young people have long questioned their sexual identity, Rydelius said that it’s becoming more common for adolescents to take the additional step of seeking medical advice on the matter.

“People usually sought help when they were in their twenties or thirties, but with the advent of the internet and increased accessibility to media, more people are seeking help during their teenage years,” he said.

Despite the dramatic physical changes that can occur with the hormone treatment, Rydelius feels that administrative hurdles diminish the ability of would-be Swedish transsexuals to truly live life as the opposite sex.

“If a girl who wants to be a boy tries to go to a bank or a nightclub, his ID card can reveal that he really isn’t a boy,” he told The Local.

He also knew of several instances of young people undergoing their real-life test being denied bank services on suspicions of having presented someone else’s identification card.

In an effort to rectify the situation, Rydelius last autumn contacted the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket), which oversees both Sweden’s national population registry and the issuance of identity cards.

In a December letter, he proposed the agency allow young people undergoing a real-life test of their transsexualism to apply for special ID cards which let them hide their unwanted gender and the associated name.

“These young people should be able to have only their desired names spelled out on their ID cards, while their undesired names could be expressed only as initials,” he explained.

Thus, a girl who was initially registered as Birgitta Viola Svensson, but instead wishes to be named Lars during her real-life test, should be able to have an identity card with a picture where she appears more male and the accompanying name “Lars BV Svensson”.

While Sweden was the first country in the world to pass legislation formally giving people the right to change their gender, Rydelius regrets that the country’s administrative practices regarding names are lagging.

“It was only last autumn that a court ruled that a person should really have the right to whatever name they want, regardless of its traditional gender association,” he explained, referencing the case of a male cross-dresser from Luleå in northern Sweden who won a protracted legal struggle to go by the name Madeleine.

Rydelius, who also heads the Swedish Association of Mental Health (Svenska föreningen för psykisk hälsa) and the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (IACAPAP), said his Stockholm-based team now receives about eight inquiries a year from young people who suspect they are transsexuals.

“All told we’ve had more than thirty young people come to us for help since 2001, and all but five have ended up fulfilling the criteria allowing them to go ahead with gender reassignment surgery,” he said, adding however, that they must wait until they’ve turned 18 to actually undergo the surgery.

Similar teen-transsexual assistance teams have been formed more recently in Lund in southern Sweden and in western Sweden to assist youngsters in those regions wrestling with their sexual identity, although Rydelius wasn’t able to provide statistics for the two other groups.

While any measure allowing for special ID cards would affect a very small number of people, Rydelius nevertheless emphasized the importance of allowing young people to carry out their real-life test free from embarrassing situations resulting from presenting an ID card that doesn’t match a person’s outward appearance.

While he doesn’t expect to hear anything from the Tax Agency until the end of the month, Rydelius is hopeful a suitable solution will be found.

“The representative I spoke with agreed that this was an important issue,” he said.

“He agreed it would be good to clarify the matter once and for all rather than address it on a case by case basis.”

David Landes
david.landes@thelocal.se
+46 8 656 6518

I just finished rereading Roberta Cowell’s book.

She got her surgery around the same time as Christine Jorgensen.

She had been involved in auto racing and served as a fighter pilot in the RAF during World War II, was shot down and spent time in a German POW camp.  She married and fathered two children before divorcing and coming out.

Christine Jorgensen also served in the military (US) and filled a position (clerk) that according to Allen Berube in Coming out Under Fire was one of those jobs where the military place queens.

They both expressed a sort of revulsion towards the idea that they were presumed to be gay.

Now the psychiatrists who worked with both of them as well as other early sisters were not working with a huge knowledge base regarding matters such as transvestism and homosexuality. We are talking Krafft-Ebing, Mangus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud. Urnings, sexual inversion, total transvestism etc. So it is sort of understandable how psychiatrists viewing these early cases might have thought that transsexualism had elements of avoiding the social pariah status of homosexual, a staus made plain by Roberta’s expressions of disgust regarding “pansies”.

Roberta’s book makes it far more obvious that neither of them was “a first”.  She discusses Lili Elbe and other cases that were written about in the popular press.  Lili Elbe’s story appeared in Man Into Woman (1933) edited by Ernst Ludwig Hathorn Jacobson using the pseudonym Niels Hoyer.

The very fact that she mentions all these other cases suggest that like Christine, she spent some serious time in libraries grasping at threads and reading almost anything that even hinted at offering her an answer as to what was going on with her.  We did then and we still do today.

Like people today she offered explanations and like Christine describe her physical build as androgynous leaning towards feminine.  She too believed she was”born that way”.

These are the details I speak of when refer to the importance of the narratives, not for the details but for the tropes, those elements that show the common thread.

As I said some things never change.  She defends her realness by attacking Christine Jorgensen as someone who was a “transvestite” and whose body didn’t change naturally.  Yet Roberta describes getting an early version of FFS.

In reading these 1950s biographies at a later time it is easy to see why feminist claim that transsexuals reify gender stereotypes.  Changing sex is a process of resocialization and learning done at a point in time and consistent with the contemporary social milieu.  The 1950s were an era of backlash against the feminism that had produced women’s suffrage, no less so in the UK than in the US.

Today we still have post-op sisters trashing other sisters with the same claim that they are real and others are not even though both had the same operation(s).  We still have those claiming to be more real than others based on physical traits even when both may well have had similar physical traits.

As Linda Ellerbee used to end her news shows…

And so it goes…