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Not every TS is going to stand up and tell the world they want to be a boy or a girl. I've studied the boy-girl gender blender for more years than I'm going to admit. If there is one thing that is absolutely true about all of them. They are each an individual unique to their own self.
I absolutely HATE the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care the medical society has placed on transgender. Many outside looking in have made the mistake they can be categorized into a one rule fits all diagnoses. We, society, has categorized them into a class and made a rule which fits all of them. And then wonder why we failed them and there are so many suicides?
Until society stops looking at them as monsters, misfits, abominations, diseased life forms, most will remain stealth. Living the lie they were born with afraid to push out of the boundaries society has placed upon them. Science and medical research finally proved men and women's brains develop differently. Transgender are hardwired to be what they are driven to be. The old saying "it's all in your head" is equivalently true in their case. But in their lives it is physical as well as mental desire.
Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus
http://aebrain.blogspot.com/p/transsexual-and-intersex-gende...
Far too many are like Dana in the story "Broken Cup". Dana was silently wishing for that kind of life. The demo record he sent in was one of the below the radar indications he wanted it. Even the denial he could accept singing as Candy but moved forward anyway was another.
Lynn is one of the pioneers in this gender blender mess. She has a good web for the laymen trying to get a handle on what trans is and isn't. Also lots of eye candy from the ladies who made it and are willing to share. Lynn is the person responsible for your computer being able to talk to my computer although you won't find her listed as such. Unless..., you dig really deep. She was a guy back then. She left patents in her wake for every company she worked for.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSsuccess...
Please don't make the mistake of trying to place all of them in a one category definition. They are some of the most unique, fascinating individuals one will ever meet. They aren't lepers. One won't turn into a transsexual because you got close to one, or they touched you, or looked at you with their laser eyes and melded your mind with theirs.
Comments
Last link broken
It should be http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSsuccesses.html
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
broken link
thank you, the link was cropped on copy and paste for some reason.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
It's all a matter of being non-critical FIRST
I will admit that, earlier in my life, I found the concept of transgender to be confusing. Then it became a bit of a curiosity. Now, I'm firmly in the "everyone is unique, and I have no right to judge." If only everyone would think that way.
My counselor and I figure that I'm probably about 55-60% on the line which links female thinking and feelings and such, and male thinking and feelings. With my hormone problems, gynecomastia and sporadic lactation, I've learned to embrace my feminine side, to let my emotions show instead of bottling them up like I had for too many years. I LIKE feeling sensitive, and sometimes soft. I finally understand people with gender issues. And my family is confused by my behavior change, because I'm much more emotional (on the tender side), and they don't understand that I LIKE how I am, including my tiny breasts, because it's how I feel about myself now.
If only the bigots would have such an experience, so they'd understand too. The world isn't black and white, they claim about everything else; why should it be with gender identity?
Imagination is more important than knowledge
A. Einstein
AeBrain is intersex
So, I don't think she is TS at all, but Intersex.
And, as time goes on I think we will find that all TS folk are intersex in some way and when that becomes public knowledge it will change the world. Yes, I am saying there is a medical reason for TS.
GID is curable...
So to cure GID all you need is to find a donor and perform a brain transplant - if only Robert Heinlein had known that
Rhona McCloud
No, it is genetic
And, soon, less than 50 years we will know how to fix, or if they should be fixed many of them. I never met a gay or lesbian who wanted it. Perhaps also, in these studies that there is an evolutionary purpose for many of these problems.
In 50 years, perhaps we will have stopped labeling people.
Gwendolyn
That's what I meant Gwen in
That's what I meant Gwen in that the information suggests that to "cure" someone of GID all you have to do is kill them - I.e. replace their brain with that of someone else.
Rhona McCloud
The origin of unsuitability
I think that all too many of these things that appear in the DSM are actually symptoms of abuse by human culture. Perhaps if people would be treated right in the first place, they would not act out with symptoms that mimic mental illness.
So Heinlein was right in "I
So Heinlein was right in "I Will Fear No Evil" and the "cure" would necessitate replacing both the brain and the body.
Your point on accepting difference is well made in this podcast Gwendolyn:-
Alice Dreger
11th August 2011
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/alice-dreger-intersex-bo...
Rhona McCloud
Transsexualism is curable
Once they changed my birth certificate to female and gave me legal status, I was cured. It's not a medical condition it's a legal one (though I do admit the plumber did do a small modification).
Does it matter what caused it? And what's the point of piccies of beautiful women who've made it? That just keeps us in the ghetto. Sod that for a game of sojers, beautiful or not, I like to think I'm a relatively successful woman, holding down a busy job and so on, like loads of other ordinary women. I've done my bit running a helpline for four years and being a trustee of a TS charity for several years. I just want to live quietly and share my writing with those who care to read it, so I'm happy to stay in the background where I've been for the past twenty odd years.
Angharad
We are not bit players
In our own lives. I like both the tone and the points made in your blog very much. Each of us come from a slightly different point in expressing our personality and our gender. It is the nut jobs in the world who try to put people in little boxes to fit there little post box minds. Gender like all things biological is messy, and some of it is fun.
Your points are solid and well made thanks.
Huggles
Misha Nova
With those with open eyes the world reads like a book
I'm at a loss
To set the scene, I have a lot of transgendered friends. I've been around a fairly long time, and I've been out for most of it, so, well: people. Some of my best friends are transgendered :-)
What hurts is seeing so many transgendered friends, men and women, who are stalled. Afraid to express themselves. And who don't enjoy their lives.
When I was younger, long before I began the process of transitioning, I would look in the mirror and try to see what others would see. I'd ask my friends, "How do I look? Is this my color? Is this too young, too old? Is this me?" I made a lot of stupid hair, clothing, makeup and so on mistakes, but I made them with my friends pointing and laughing with me. Helping me. As my confidence (and skills) grew, my pleasure in daily life grew. My confidence in who I was grew.
Many of the people I meet nowadays have the support of friends and family, but more often, FAR more often, their first reference is the internet. Not support and information sites, but movie, music and porn stars. Perfect models, beauty queens and sculpted abs. Thousands and thousands of dollars of plastic surgery. Photoshopped skin and the kind of artificial perfection none of us could have managed on our best ever day, ever.
The same kind of pictures that taunt every person who ever opened a GQ or Vogue or Elle or InStyle. Impossible beauty.
Showing me these online pictures, my friends say, "I'm... ugly, look like a gorilla, too tall, too fat, too hairy, too bald, too tiny, never gonna pass..." compared to the pictures.
And they're not going out until they're better looking. Then they'll look right.
Or they say they're saving up for facial feminization surgery. For cosmetic dentistry. For the laser treatment to be finished. Or implants. To "look like her." And then they can transition.
Then they think maybe they can go out dancing.
I appreciated seeing the pictures of "successful" women. I really appreciated that they weren't all models.
I have a friend who showed me this website just last month. She pointed out all the beauty queens.
This is a woman who goes to work in drab, ugly clothing to hide her body, and lives in fear of someone asking about her HRT-related changes. Who has twice quit jobs because they "found out." She pointed to a woman twenty years her junior and a different ethnicity, who she in no way resembled.
Who she wanted to look like.
Priorities and insecurities
We all have our demons. The only criteria I had was to be reasonably passable at the time I went full time, and that did happen. For me that was electrolysis, voice and deportment. Passable does not mean perfection. Join the crowd of all those imperfect genetic girls.
Indeed
Here I am, having some wine with a very late meal after the last of a string of 12 hour shifts. Another bit of correspondence with a senior manager where I mention the Equality Act 2010, another more direct suggestion to a more junior manager that he put his ideas where the sun shineth not. Another set of conversations about why I decided I needed to become female, and another set of replies about the simpler fact that I don't need to become female, I simply AM. And another thank-you to someone for the simple humanity they have shown me, met with "Thank you for what?"
I stick by my faith in basic and commonplace decency. I agree with Angharad here: I simply want to get on with my life. I act as an equality and diversity advisor, and my status is not only widely known but bleeding obvious. I don't do FFS or implants, I am just another imperfect woman trying to get through life, and my birthday was yesterday as well as 17 days before that.
I give back what I can, but while all I want to do is get on with life. I can fully understand the 'stalled' because the whole process is fucking frightening. I can be straight here: I don't make a gorgeous woman, but a woman is what I was made (natal...) and all I can do is work with what I have got.
Funnily enough, that is what all women have to do. Some are luckier than others, but we all continue to exist. As I have written so many times, the alternative leaves fewer choices.
Happy birthdays
The wine sounds nice and your day sounds like it was much too long. I hope you've been properly caked on your natal days, and if not, a birthday splurge is your divine right/rite.
:-)
Michelle
Cake
Remind me again why it is me that has to take the cakes into work on my own birthday...
Never mind. It was a very, very nice Marks and Spencer one with CHOCOLATE.
Lynn
Lynn's influence extends far beyond computers, to almost anything with an electronic chip designed in the last 25-30 years. Her book "Introduction to VLSI Systems" shaped the education of generations of microelectronic engineers.