Women Born Transsexual

Time to call Bullshit.

Yes there are people who detransition, people who start transitioning and realize it is not for them or that they don’t actually want SRS and are happy with their original genitals.

There are people who go back and forth over a life time, sometimes due to family dynamics, sometime due to the inability to pass and survive as a member of the sex they would prefer to be.

These people are not the problem.

Further as ultimately sad as the story may be neither are the people who detransition and/or can’t handle transition and commit suicide.

If anyone bears some measure of responsibility for those people it might be those who paint too rosy a picture of the joys of transition without pointing out the hardships that too often accompany transition.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s many transsexuals encountered their first psychiatric screening after being accepted into a surgery program.

In 1969 I spoke with a clinical social worker for about a half hour prior to having a doctor hand me hormones. This social worker spent most of his time telling me about social services I could access and the process of changing sex.

I also saw Dr. Benjamin.  I had been on hormones about four months or so and had been full time for about a month or so.  When he first met me he asked why I had come to see him.  I told him I was transsexual and wanted to have a sex change operation.  He looked confused and asked, “Why would a lovely young woman like you want to become a man?”

He went on to tell me how I was a perfect candidate for SRS, one of the most flawless transsexuals he had ever met.

Then…

Here it comes…

I would still have to live as a woman for at least a year before he would even consider writing a surgery recommendation for me.

I was young and pretty and caused gender identification problems for people trying to figure out what sex I was prior to my coming out.  Passed effortlessly and the most trusted doctor in the world at the time, the authority on transsexualism, first tells me how flawless I am, then tells me I still had to do at least a year long “Real Life Test”.

When I was in the Stanford Program there was a sister, who the people at Stanford considered their perfect Transsexual, a role model for the rest of us.  She had been married to a woman and fathered two lovely children.  She was still with her wife and children, employed as a highly trained professional, respected in her field.

A few years later there was a horrible accident involving her family that threw her life into utter chaos and nearly cost her and her wife parental rights to raise their children.  She wound up detransitioning.

Another person, who had SRS claimed it was all a mistake, sued the doctors and threatened Dr. Laub’s life.

Now people are required to follow the rules called the Standards of Care.

These rules require a far more extensive psychiatric work up than people of my generation were required to undergo.

The regreters  who blamed the doctors and sued are a contributing factor regarding this requirement.

So all TS/TG people have to pay for the bad judgement of a few people who may have been caught up in some strange “gender euphoria” and got carried away.

The problem is that people lie.  People self deceive while caught up in this weird “gender euphoria” and imagine these perfect lives they are going to have.

I had to sign a medical release prior to SRS that warned me of every possible problem they thought might arise.  I had to have a lawyer there to make certain I understood what I was signing.

I imagine the medical consent form is far longer today after so many of the doctors we depend upon have been sued by the regreters.

The tragic few regreters, who have made life much more difficult for the majority of transsexual people, perhaps it is time to turn the microscope upon them.

It isn’t hair.  If you get something cut off it isn’t going to grow back like an octopus who has lost part of a tentacle.

If you lie to the doctor you might well be able to deceive them.  Even sisters and brothers who have been around TS/TG people for many years are deceived by the liars who have taken the stories of others and woven them into a believable autobiography.

No one dealing with TS/TG people ever promises a rose garden.  They became disillusioned many years ago and stopped having fantasies of our having easy lives sometime in the mid-1970s.

If you get involved with some sort of insanely homophobic/transphobic religion and decide the surgery was a mistake,go to an Atheist for religious deprogramming, before going to a fucking lawyer to sue the doctor, who operated on you in good faith, based on the information you gave him/her.

Take some personal responsibility.  Stop blaming other people if you lied and deceived your way into getting SRS.  It is your own damned fault.  Own it.

People subjected you to the Standards of Care.  If you bypassed them you took the same sort of risk a person takes sky diving without lessons or training.  If it works out great, if it doesn’t you are the one who played fast and loose with measures that were put in place to help prevent you from making a mistake.

You are the one who made the mistake.  You are the one who has to live it.

BTW It was cases like this that led to those odious Standards of Care with the excessive Psychiatric screening in the first place.

The patient should be told no deal, no grounds for a law suit.  Any fool should realize the enormity of taking hormones and having sex reassigning surgery even if only on one’s secondary sexual characteristics.  It shouldn’t be up to the doctor to figure out you were deceiving him/her by pretending to be transsexual.

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/06/transexualism-gender-reassignment-richard-curtis

Dr Richard Curtis is under investigation following complaints over treatment of patients seeking gender reassignment

David Batty
The Guardian, Sunday 6 January 2013

A woman who alleges that she was inappropriately prescribed sex-changing hormones and then wrongly underwent a double mastectomy is one of several complaints being investigated by the General Medical Council about the doctor who oversaw her aborted gender reassignment, the Guardian has learned.

The GMC, the doctors‘ professional regulator, has received at least three separate complaints against Dr Richard Curtis, a London GP who specialises in the treatment of gender dysphoria, particularly transsexualism. The complaints concern the alleged inappropriate administering of sex-changing hormones to patients and at least one allegedly unsuitable referral for gender reassignment surgery.

It is claimed that Curtis, who provides private treatment to patients seeking gender reassignment, failed to follow accepted standards of care and breached conditions placed on his practice by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS), the GMC’s arm’s-length disciplinary body.

The allegations include commencing hormone treatment in complex cases without referring the patient for a second opinion or before they had undergone counselling, administering hormone treatment at patients’ first appointments, and referring patients for surgery before they had lived in their desired gender role for a year, as international guidelines recommend. One patient allegedly underwent surgery within 12 months of their first appointment. He is also accused of administering hormones to patients aged under 18 without an adequate assessment, and wrongly stating that a patient seeking gender reassignment had changed their name.

One of the most serious cases concerns a female patient who regrets switching to a male role. She underwent hormone treatment and had her breasts removed. The woman is one of the complainants in the current GMC investigation.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/06/transexualism-gender-reassignment-richard-curtis

From The New Civil Rights Movement:  http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/1-getequal-to-obama-hagels-anti-lgbt-history-makes-him-unacceptable-for-defense/politics/2013/01/04/57737

by David Badash
on January 4, 2013

GetEQUAL, the LGBT civil rights organization that is widely credited for helping repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, today told President Obama they strongly oppose Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. Hagel has a history of anti-LGBT comments, for which he recently apologized in the wake of his name being floated to replace Leon Panetta.

“GetEQUAL strongly opposes the potential nomination of Chuck Hagel to become the next Secretary of Defense,” Tanya Domi, GetEQUAl chair said today via a statement. “Hagel has, time and time again, taken every opportunity to lambast and denigrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans, and the Cabinet is no place for this kind of disrespect.

“Hagel’s recent apology for his insulting comments about the nomination of James Hormel as U.S. Ambassador to Luxemborg were hollow, politically expedient, and nakedly gratuitous,” Domi, a former Army officer and 15-year veteran, added. “The Defense Department has made important strides toward creating an inclusive Armed Forces, but has miles left to go — nominating Hagel to lead the Defense Department would be a staggering step backward for the LGBT community and an upheaval of President Obama’s past support for the LGBT community.”

From Daily Kos:   http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/06/1176169/-Marriage-equality-s-biggest-foe-sees-she-can-t-fight-the-new-family-values

Scott Wooledge
Sun Jan 06, 2013

The nationally syndicated column of Maggie Gallagher, founding president and board chair of the National Organization’s (NOM), is no more. As of Wednesday, syndicator Universal Uclick will no longer be distributing it to the 25-35 papers that carried it.

This is notable because this is another data point reinforcing the conclusion that hardcore social conservatives in general, and National Organization for Marriage in particular, are increasingly becoming marginalized and irrelevant in the national political dialogue.

Speaking with Huffington Post, Gallagher says newspapers are a dying media. She seems to comprehend the gravity of the losses her cause has suffered and says, ” I wanted more time to think. So many people are flailing, I want time to think,” and “I’m considering other projects, but I haven’t made any decisions.”

After NOM experienced what can only be described as a routing in 2012, the front woman for the anti-gay marriage movement is doing a pretty terrible job maintaining her game face. She has predicted that the Defense of Marriage Act will fall at the Supreme Court, courtesy of Justice Kennedy (and maybe Justice Roberts as well, she says). And Wednesday’s column seemed to be more evidence a sense of inevitable doom has overcome her, one that she can’t be bothered to hide. The exact title to her column is “This I believe: Farewell to Optimism.”

It isn’t a particularly unique column, just sort of an overview of her philosophies with regards to the “family values” movement. She speaks in simple declarative sentences: “Every life is precious.” “Men and women are different.” “Sex makes babies.” “On every key measure, marriage is weaker.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/06/1176169/-Marriage-equality-s-biggest-foe-sees-she-can-t-fight-the-new-family-values

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/the-blessings-of-atheism.html

By SUSAN JACOBY
Published: January 5, 2013

In a recent conversation with a fellow journalist, I voiced my exasperation at the endless talk about faith in God as the only consolation for those devastated by the unfathomable murders in Newtown, Conn. Some of those grieving parents surely believe, as I do, that this is our one and only life. Atheists cannot find solace in the idea that dead children are now angels in heaven. “That only shows the limits of atheism,” my colleague replied. “It’s all about nonbelief and has nothing to offer when people are suffering.”

This widespread misapprehension that atheists believe in nothing positive is one of the main reasons secularly inclined Americans — roughly 20 percent of the population — do not wield public influence commensurate with their numbers. One major problem is the dearth of secular community institutions. But the most powerful force holding us back is our own reluctance to speak, particularly at moments of high national drama and emotion, with the combination of reason and passion needed to erase the image of the atheist as a bloodless intellectual robot.

The secular community is fearful of seeming to proselytize. When giving talks on college campuses, I used to avoid personal discussions of my atheism. But over the years, I have changed my mind because such diffidence contributes to the false image of the atheist as someone whose convictions are removed from ordinary experience. It is vital to show that there are indeed atheists in foxholes, and wherever else human beings suffer and die.

Now when students ask how I came to believe what I believe, I tell them that I trace my atheism to my first encounter, at age 7, with the scourge of polio. In 1952, a 9-year-old friend was stricken by the disease and clinging to life in an iron lung. After visiting him in the hospital, I asked my mother, “Why would God do that to a little boy?” She sighed in a way that telegraphed her lack of conviction and said: “I don’t know. The priest would say God must have his reasons, but I don’t know what they could be.”

Just two years later, in 1954, Jonas Salk’s vaccine began the process of eradicating polio, and my mother took the opportunity to suggest that God may have guided his research. I remember replying, “Well, God should have guided the doctors a long time ago so that Al wouldn’t be in an iron lung.” (He was to die only eight years later, by which time I was a committed atheist.)

Continue reading at:   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/the-blessings-of-atheism.html

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/05-1

Series of actions on Saturday shuts down US-Canadian bridge

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/visions/real-causes-divorce-america-has-stop-blaming-it-women

Stereotypes about women’s behavior totally obscure the driving forces that can split a marriage.

By Lynn Stuart Parramore
January 4, 2013

A recent poll revealed a clear tendency to blame women for not keeping their husbands happy and a habit of viewing divorced women as unwanted and pitiable.

That was in the United Arab Emirates. But what about the United States of America? You’d think a more enlightened view of women and marriage might prevail.

Think again. The Huffington Post ran a front-page piece just this week with a headline that would make any old-school patriarch proud: “Women: Five Reasons Your Divorce Is Your Fault.” The author, self-appointed intimacy expert Laura Doyle, spent several paragraphs hectoring women for sins including “Taking the same approach at home as you do at work” and “Rejecting his efforts to make you happy.” She reserves special scorn for present-day Lysistratas who are cruelly “withholding sex” from their partners, as if they were using sex as a punishment rather than simply too tired or not aroused enough to want it. Doyle’s “remedy” for this transgression? “Consider making yourself available for sex at least once a week in support of your mutual goal of connecting.” Problem solved!

Yes, it appears that right here in 2013, somebody is paying Ms. Doyle to expound on the following fantastically stupid credo: “I teach intimacy skills, but not to couples and not to men. I only teach them to women because we are the ones who have the power to make our relationships intimate.”

Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, teach intimacy, evidently.

In Doyle’s binary universe, wives are tasked with creating intimacy in the home and men are emotionally deficient beings who require their guidance. This is a 21st-century redo of the famous “Angel in the House” motif common in Victorian culture, in which women were meant to radiate moral purity and emotional balance for men who were off dealing with the slings and arrow of the outside world. By criticizing women for bringing work skills and attitudes into the home, Doyle reveals her nostalgia for the days when women were financial dependents in marriage. “If all we’ve ever been taught is how to get ahead in school and career,” she moans, “but not how to foster intimacy, it’s pretty hard to change hats when the work day is done and we want a loving, supportive home.” Apparently keeping a roof over that loving, supportive home is an afterthought.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/visions/real-causes-divorce-america-has-stop-blaming-it-women

Other than the murder of the Indian woman what real difference is there between how rapist are treated there and how rapist football players are treated here?

Misogyny is misogyny where ever it occurs.

From Salon:  http://www.salon.com/2013/01/05/the_war_on_female_sexuality_is_globalization_to_blame/

From New Dehli to the war on women here, sexual freedom has sparked a global conflict. An expert explains why

By Tracy Clark-Flory
Saturday, Jan 5, 2013

Women’s bodies have become a global battlefield. The brutal New Delhi gang rape case, and the fierce protests it sparked, is just one example. From education of Afghan schoolgirls to veiling in France, female sexuality and freedom has come to symbolize a global conflict “over the nature of the self,” argues David Jacobson, a University of South Florida sociologist, in “Of Virgins and Martyrs: Women and Sexuality in Global Conflict,” which comes out later this month. It’s chiefly an ideological divide of “honor” versus “self-possession” — or, as he puts it in the book, “who owns and control’s one’s body, especially when it comes to women: is it the individual herself or the community, through enforced practices of honor, virginity, veiling, and marriage?”

What Jacobson does beautifully in his accessibly academic book is differentiate between politicized Islamist patriarchy and “the broader Muslim community,” the former being “a core expression of a deeper global fissure,” he explains. “In an honor society, patriarchal and tribal traditions dictate that a woman’s body belongs to and serves the community. … An interest-based society privileges self-determination, the sovereignty of the individual over her body, and ownership of one’s own capital, be it economic, cultural, or social.” As globalization improves the status of many women, it also incites a ferocious backlash against them.

The book offers hints on how to mitigate this divide not only in global conflicts, but also domestic battles over everything from birth control to prostitution. Jacobson spoke to Salon from his office in Florida about virginity, SlutWalks and even monogamy.

Why is female sexuality at the heart of some of our most significant global conflicts?

It’s extraordinary. What we’ve seen in Delhi recently is a horrifying symptom of this broader global phenomenon. The more patriarchal a society, the more vicious the backlash to the integration of women, not just in the labor market and education but to the growing autonomy of women in areas from fashion to consumerism to marriage. I think what’s happening is that women’s sexuality and women’s status has really become the hinge of two very different visions of society and visions of morality. What we’ve seen in recent decades is that women have been making these extraordinary strides in the aggregate. As a consequence, women’s sexuality has become this battleground and this backlash of the most patriarchal elements that control it. We can see women’s progress in these areas is dramatic, but it’s much more muted in the most patriarchal corners of the world from Southeast Asia, including India, down through the Middle East to North Africa. India’s an interesting case because, as has been seen in Delhi, it captures both the modern India and the patriarchal India, which get juxtaposed in what we’ve witnessed in these last weeks.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2013/01/05/the_war_on_female_sexuality_is_globalization_to_blame/

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/06-1

Andrea Germanos, staff writer
Published on Sunday, January 6, 2013 by Common Dreams

The grounding of Shell’s oil drilling rig Kulluk may bring its quest for Arctic oil to a halt.

The rig, which ran aground in the Gulf of Alaska on Dec. 31 and is on the southeast shoreline of Sitkalidak Island, Alaska, a critical wildlife habitat, may now be too damaged to be ready for the 2013 drilling season.

Fuel Fix reports:

It is unclear whether the Kulluk can be repaired even if it can be freed intact. Salvage crews on the Kulluk have discovered wave and water damage inside the rig, along with inoperable emergency generators. A number of water-tight doors were breached. One compartment, or void, surrounding the Kulluk’s inner hull also was damaged.

Dave Pursell, managing director of the Houston-based energy investment bank Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. adds:

If Shell figures out there’s enough damage they can’t get it repaired, I don’t know that they have enough time to acquire another.

Greenpeace USA Deputy Campaigns Director Dan Howells agrees that the Kulluk incident may thwart Shell’s Arctic drilling plans, and says other companies should heed the warning:

Complete article at:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/06-1

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/06/fossil-fuel-special-interests-barack-obama

The pace of climate change action promised by this pragmatic president is just too slow to tackle the physics of global warming

Bill McKibben for TomDispatch, part of the Guardian Comment Network
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 6 January 2013

Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents. Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.

Take, for instance, “the problem of our schools”. Don’t worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published “A Nation at Risk”, insisting that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened our schools. The nation’s biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We’ve had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and … we’re still in the midst of “fixing” education, many generations of students later.

Even facing undeniably real problems – say, discrimination against gay people – one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal supreme court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe. There’s certainly an argument to be made that moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of age.

Which is not to say that there weren’t millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts between people.

Continue reading at:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/06/fossil-fuel-special-interests-barack-obama