Evangelina made a comment about “transgenders transition”.
I really don’t think transgenders particularly came up with this term. Rather I think it came form those dear caring multitude of post 1960s psych professionals in search of clients to pay them so they too don’t have to work the sales floor in a big box.
I also tend to think that as a term it is probably more applicable to those who try and hide who they are behind masks until it becomes unbearable in mid life. then it becomes pretty much like any other mid-life change of course.
When transkids like I was get into a position where they can control what happens to them and they obtain medical care that helps them make the change then it is probably less a transition than growing up.
But the psychobabbling post moderning of our culture to the point where everyone has a paathology that can hopefully be billed to an insurance carrier even calls going from high school into college a transition fraught with risks.
Same for graduation from college and entering the job market.
I’ve come to look at psychobabble particularly about us as more aimed at both pathologizing us and making us into life long clients of psych professionals than anything else.
I used to say I “came out” because that was the language we used in 1969. Mostly that meant telling my friends, getting medical treatment and starting to deal with living as a woman prior to getting SRS and becoming a woman.
It wasn’t some major change, more an act of becoming.
But I’ve been around a long time and have helped many different sisters over the years and for some there is a far greater disconnect between who they were before coming out and after they “transitioned” so maybe for them it is appropriate although it still seems psych. profession generated.
Women Born Transsexual 
February 23, 2009 at 3:10 am
I think we read and sing from the same hymnsheet Suzan because I do not need to take much of an issue with what you have said here. The intention I had in mind when I made the statement was in line in so many ways with your own later thoughts.
The message I wish to convey on this is that HBS or in your parlance “Women Born Transsexual” have at their core a sense of self and sexual identity that is female and the physical changes that are brought about through surgery and hormones is a correction of physical abnormalities. If there is any transition involved it is perhaps one that should be espressed in social terms, except perhaps in cases like yours (and mine as it happens) where the contradiction has been obvious since early childhood. Your description of the process as a kind of growing up is good. When this happens later in life as it does for so many varied reasons the process may be expressed in terms of a physical correction and perhaps a social transition.
Put another way “Transgender” change sex (sometimes). HBS (WBT) correct sex. Issues of gender should be again restricted to nouns in non English laguages where they belong.
February 23, 2009 at 9:07 am
I didn’t correct my sex. I don’t dabble in word games. In street language I had a sex change operation. In more correct language that works with the concept of TS/HBS as an intersex condition rather than a psychiatric disorder I had sex reassignment surgery.
I was assigned male at birth based on the same sexing techniques applied to every one else. Later in life as it became obvious I had TS/HBS I under went physical reassignment (change) via hormones and surgery.
I don’t deal in post modern euphemisms but you can if you wish since YMMV
February 25, 2009 at 7:37 pm
That’s fair enough Suzan, you have your reasons and I have mine. It’s not that big a deal.
Just for the record though, I was not suggesting for one moment that transgenders came up with the term transition at all. I am sorry if I gave you that impression.