People who tell transsexuals they need psychiatric help have an “anxiety disorder” suggests post-op transsexual Julie Marie:

From philly.com comes the story of a transgender death:

Hamilton, 20, a male-to-female transgender from Little Rock, Ark., died during a spiritual cleansing inside the home of a Camden County voodoo priest on July 10.

Yesterday, the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office said that Hamilton’s death had been accidental, resulting from the combined effects of “physical exhaustion, ambient room temperature and an oxygen-depleted atmosphere.”

The only substance found in Hamilton’s system, her mother said, was cinnamon.

The /etc/login.defs file is containing the basic settings for newly created user on server like

MAIL_DIR /var/spool/mail

PASS_MAX_DAYS 99999
PASS_MIN_DAYS 0
PASS_MIN_LEN 5
PASS_WARN_AGE 7
UID/GID  MIN  500

UID/GID MAX 60000

UMASK 077

CREATE_HOME     yes

From a well-known transgender forum (edited for expletives):

You know what hurts me the most? When a bunch of handsome guys are coming from far and initially you hear ‘WOW! Look at that beautiful bombshell chick’ then when they get closer and realize what you are they say ‘EWWW, YUCKS! It’s just a disgusting faggot’. From far I’m a beautiful girl and from close I’m disgusting, don’t you see these f—ing extremist straights just have a prejudice against us in their f—ing idiot minds. IF EVER I SUCCEED TRANSITIONING, I’M GONNA SLAM DOWN ALL EXTREMIST STRAIGHT MEN 1 BY 1 AND ALL THOSE WHO MADE ME SUFFER. I’LL PROVOKE THEM, MAKE THEM FALL IN LOVE WITH ME THEN I’LL DOWNTREAD THEM ALL LIKE A SIMPLE INSECT! DAMN S–T!!!

Why is Blanchard so touchy about military matters, and what personally motivates his life’s work?

The best way to understand Ray Blanchard as a human is to consider the mindset of gay priests.

Gay priests and gay psychologists serve the same purpose and hold the same position within an oppressive power dynamic.

I imagine a number of questions turn over in Ray’s mind a lot:

• Why am I gay?

• Was my birth father gay?

• How can I connect myself to a man I never met?

• Why do attention-craving eccentrics rally around me and my work?

• Why are cross-dressing psychologists so enamored of my work?

• What do Maxine Petersen, Steven Pinker, J. Michael Bailey, Anne Lawrence, and Seth Roberts all have in common (besides psychology)?

I’m sure Ray thinks that being openly gay would bring his own objectivity into question

Chris Crocker on ‘Tranny bashing’:

From a well-known transgender website:

I hate my mother… and I want revenge…because she wanted a son. She got what she wanted and then has a problem with me being transgender. How it all began…

She first found out that I wanted to be a girl back in December 2004. I wrote a sexual fictional story and in the story I was a female. I had my ideal body and the way my life was then is just how it went in the story, except I was a female. I didn’t get to finish the whole thing as I didn’t have a computer back then and I would write a portion of it each night, so I only finished half the story. So anyway, she found the papers, the sexual pictures I’ve drawn. She has tormented me with them… she knew I was embarassed when I found out she found it. She has read the papers and the stories allowed to me, KNOWING that I was embarassed about it. I even stated several times that I was embarassed about it and said that she knew so I can stop saying it.

I think it was before that actually. In November, I can’t really say how, but let’s just say she caught me wearing her bra, pretending I have boobs. My mother would often tell me, “All done in the dark God will come out in the light,” and this would anger me to an endless degree because I always felt God was working against me. But that is until now… I finally realized that we are the creators of our reality.

My mom won’t let me be modest of my chest

I’ve already opened up a thread about this but that wasn’t the first time we’ve had that conflict. My mother, God be my witness, is so inconsiderate to me. She doesn’t care if I’m transgender. She’s such a gender Nazi and because she sees only what she wants to see, I’m forbidden to be modest of my chest. If I don’t want to remove my shirt she doesn’t understand that that’s my right and it’s always a problem, saying “Oh! You’re a boy and you think you’re a girl!” I know for certainty that if she was in my position that she would want to be modest about her chest.

She deserves a slap across the face for all that. I know as her child, I shouldn’t hit my mother, but don’t you people think she deserves it? I think so if no one else agrees. I don’t care if I’m in my own house, she won’t take her shirt off in front of me so why would she want me to take mine off in front of her? She has stated that in front of my female cousin that they would be free to change in their proximities because they’re women. But she knows I want to be a woman and won’t treat me like one anyway! GRRRRR! I will make her pay for this!

She acusses me of self-hatred

First off, transgender doesn’t nessasarily mean the person hates themself, and I am a perfect example. I mean, I can look into the mirror and like what I look at. When I tell her that I do love myself despite being transgender she says that I’m not making any sence. Secondly, the point I’m trying to get across here is that you can LIKE somebody and still not want to be them. She would always torment me and mock me… saying “You are a MAN!” Me… being a man… doing MAN things… NEVER! She would always tell me to do this that and the other thing because it’s a part of being a man! >:(

Isn’t being a man more than just looks anyway?

She always wanted me to do male things

I don’t wanna do anything like a man. I don’t wanna watch ANY movies that relate to manhood or read any books that cater to such a topic. I can’t raise the pitch in my voice or “it sound creepy.” I can’t be modest about my chest. One time when she was trimming my hair, I had my nail polished (I had my own nail polish) and she made a big deal of that and had the polish removed from my fingernails, AND she threw my nail polish away! By the way, the polish that I had, it was of a clear transparent color, so it was only barely noticable if you looked closely at my nails. I can’t say what I just want to do to my mother. If I did, most of you would think I’m psychotic and I would be banned.

She would always torment me wth the statement that “You are a MAN!”

The “rank”

This would go under the “How it began” section of this post but after reading the note i wrote, she tried to explain to me the whole Adam and Eve theory. I don’t care if God made men first and made Adam first and put Eve and the other women here to help the men. Women don’t really care about the whole Adam and Eve thing and if they did, they would want to be men so why should I give a crap? >:(

I could careless if women are at a lower rank then men, if it means being demoted. DEMOTE ME, please! I don’t care. I want to be a woman! >:(

I don’t even have to hope because Karma’s Law is on my side but I’ve been hoping that in her next life she come out born a M2F transgender just so she can live through all the Hell that I went through here. I stress again, my life as as a Male2Female transgender was flatout hell, even more so how my mother treated me.

Right now, I’ve been using her tampons. I would only take a few each month to pretend I’m menstruating, since that cycle is a part of womanhood. I’ve always wondered her reaction if she finds out but I don’t think that’ll be happening. I mean, there’s like a box full of ‘em, so how is she going to notice it’s a few of them missing? But in any case, if I do get busted, I’ll be ready to put up a good fight… and WIN!

Thank you all who took the time out to read this long post! ;D
~~BigLover

I’m going to start this post with one statement to all of my sisters out there:

You are beautiful. No exceptions. No dismissals. You. Are. Beautiful.

What brought this on? Well besides the obvious (that more of us need to be built up instead of being torn down) I recently spotted a search term that led someone to my blog. Normally these are trolljob bullshit terms, with a few exceptions. But this particular one seemed sincere and made me feel sad. Someone searched “im a trans girl, can i ever be pretty” on a search engine and came here. She may not be around anymore (this search term was a bit earlier) but maybe I can still reach her and help some folk learn a bit in the process.

Feminists are acutely aware of the media blitz. A veritable plethora of damaging signals regarding what is acceptable among body types, what is wanted, what is unwanted and how one’s body ought to be treated. This blitz operates in such a way as to strip self esteem, create very harmful impressions about worth and break down the capacity to create safe boundaries because of an expression of ownership over bodies. Neglectful and cissexist erasure of trans women in the media doesn’t mean that these signals don’t meet us. Unfortunately an awful lot of feminists like to cling to this idea that these signals don’t reach us, mostly based on the flawed concept that trans women inherently have all the aspects of male privilege prior to transition (if they so choose to transition). It comes down to a complete lack of understanding (or willful ignorance regarding) the concepts of gender dysphoria, bodily dissonance, and self conceptualization.

Gender dysphoria is heavily related to self conceptualization (in a two way relation). These aspects will not only negate many elements of male privilege (through making the way that society treats those perceived as guys as inherently damaging through triggering and worsening that dysphoria) through turning the events described by it into cissexism and transmisogyny they also open the signal dish of the mind. Guys don’t have that self conceptualization. That’s why they’re guys and not girls. So they don’t apply these signals to themselves because they’re not associated with themselves. There’s no psychological ping to the brain that says, “this shit is about people like me”. On the same token there are folks who are female assigned at birth but are not necessarily trans (more gender indifferent) but don’t really have that self conceptualization and don’t apply these signals to themselves. (you can also spot this with a good chunk of trans guys and nonbinaries that started on the F side of the equation, where they reject and ignore these media messages because it isn’t about their people).

Just because you have a vagina doesn’t mean the signals will hit you. Similarly, just because one has a penis doesn’t mean they won’t (I won’t get into the situations of IS folk here as I lack the background to say anything of use on them). Trans women are women. No exceptions, no dismissals. And trans women are affected by these media messages just like cis women, perhaps even worse.

Even just bodily dissonance alone or as a progenitor to gender dysphoria can lead to shit from the media blitz. For those that just started with the dissonance, self conceptualization often soon follows. It’s the primary reason why I do refer to my experiences up to a certain point (the point of my trans realization regarding my own bodily dissonance, which is what I described here under dysphoria. I rather like the word dissonance more.) as male privilege. For me, that bodily dissonance hadn’t translated to gender dysphoria and self conceptualization so when I saw things relating to women, I didn’t think of myself. That’s not to say the signal didn’t reach me at all, in fact we all pick up things from the media that we associate with those its specifically targeted at. Those subconscious trainings stuck in my head until my self conceptualization flipped and then I got nailed with a flood of preconceived notions that suddenly applied to me in very unpleasant ways. Other women of the trans variety, who are hit with it right away, have an even worse erosion of self esteem than I experienced (or even a prevention of it growing at all taking into account the fact that self esteem isn’t easy to come by already due to bodily dissonance, gender dysphoria and systemic oppression of trans folk). This is psychological fact. Undeniable by the cis feminists that use ignorance of the concepts to justify cissexist views (not that this stops them from trying, mind you).

The particular differences that categorize cis women and trans women do in fact make the media blitz more harmful to trans women (this is actually fairly normal for virtually any intersection of oppression in any context). The dissonance and social treatment by society already is damaging to self esteem and body image. The difficulties with articulating that dissonance especially often leads to conceptual translations of feeling ugly or disgusting, which further translates into self esteem and body image damage there too. Piling on media images and impressions that are unrealistic and wrong by any measure (even cis only measures) can only worsen this self esteem spiral. It isn’t just dissonance now, in addition these body types that are created through photo manipulation and these minority images of only certain types of women, create an even more damaging standard, made especially worse by the fact that the physical traits some trans women have are considered far from that standard.

The operative piece of wisdom here is constructing only one type of body as healthy, valid, sexual, attractive or of worth is not only sexist, ableist, racist (among a host of other isms), it is entirely cissexist too. The old adage, “women come in all shapes and sizes” truly applies to trans women but we lack even the counter measures of the cis feminist movement, who so easily cuts us loose from that saying. The media may not knowingly apply this blitz with the purpose of erasing our bodies, attacking our self esteem and rendering us socially invalid (hell they probably don’t intentionally do it for cis women either) but it doesn’t change the fact that those are the results. Feminists I hold to a higher standard, as they’re abundantly aware of what this blitz can do but often work to remove any defenses we would normally get from them against it. They ought to know better.

Well then, time to mount our own defenses.

Your body is beautiful. You are beautiful. The shape, the size, the form of your body does not make you less of a woman. You are not ugly and anyone that dares to say such garbage to you is ignorant and steeped in not only cis privilege (or internalized cissexism for the trans folk that pull it) but a social training built of falsehoods and lies, delivered through glowing screens and glossy paper. The media lies when they present only certain images of certain women. The media lies when they claim anyone who doesn’t fit these models is unattractive. The media lies when they construct an able bodied, white, thin, cissexual, north western European descent American woman who is within a certain height as the end all be all for what woman are and should be.

I am a trans woman. I am beautiful. And you are too.

Learn that. Repeat it. Own it.

This post was originally published August 31, 2009 here.

In a discussion that originally was built around Kennedy’s pragmatic (but sucky) dropping of the trans community in the ENDA during the Bush era (on the post about Kennedy on Alas, A Blog), the topic eventually turned to the visibility of nonbinary folk as a part of the trans community (and shifted to the link farm post as it started to get off topic). Well, a few comments in, it became abundantly clear that one of the commenters had some serious bigotry against nonbinaries. Ampersand, always a calmer speaker than me, put it best: “And since you’re not, as far as I know, non-binary, I find it more than a little arrogant of you to lecture non-binary people on what term they ought use to describe themselves and their lives.” (You can scroll up and view most of the comment line, the only stuff relevant to this entry is the nonbinary parts)

It goes beyond just that particular conversation though. A pretty firm bunch of binary TS folk are actually pretty damn bigoted against nonbinaries. I’ve seen it in multiple support sites and even in an IRL support group (the anti binary bs was stamped down quickly in my favorite support group, unfortunately the one who ran it so well is moving on to other things. I’ve already wished her luck in person but I’m gonna miss her skills in keeping that place safe and supportive). On the Site That Shall Not Be Named (because seriously, I think the owner is just crazy enough to sue me over this truth and I can’t afford legal costs even though I’d win. The STSNBN First mentioned here) the section of the forum for androgynes (the most prominent of nonbinary umbrella terms) was actually shut down several times for some seriously bullshit reasons and sometimes no reason at all. Numerous people on the site regularly hassled androgynes, claiming that they were just transsexuals who were on the fence or confused, or calling them “trendy” was regularly let go by the moderators, despite the rules against hate speech.

You would expect this mostly from the fallacy and paranoia driven vehement hate machine of the Neo HBS separatists but it’s not just them doing this. In fact some of the Neo HBS separatists have actually done better than the rest of the TS community and taken a live and let live, just separately, approach with nonbinaries, which is hella better than attacking their very existence. I don’t know whether some binary TS folk see nonbinaries as a threat to their own identity or if it’s just the “omg difference” bullshit that sits at the center of every instance of bigotry in every case. Or if it’s even an attempt to garner more safety by getting cookies from the cis oppression factory by kicking “those freaks” to the curb (which tends to be the Modus Operandi of the Neo HBSers). I do know that a lot of the arguments come down to the concept that we “have two sexes” and ergo can’t have more than two identities. We already know that split between male and female and the exclusion of other variations in body structure is pretty much cissexist bullshit and a massive, even dangerous, oversimplification of bodily development. So right from the beginning, that argument is rife with failure. But there are also arguments that have their basis in the hypothesis that something about the brain creates the identity and the dysphoria. The Neo HBSers go with some kind of neurological intersexed (NI) model (which tends to just impinge on IS folk, but another story for another time) and others, like myself, attribute a bodily integrity instincts (BII) model which isn’t essentialist and doesn’t colonize IS folk. The previous theory’s essentialist aspects are what makes them feel threatened by transitioning nonbinaries with dysphoria (essentially a nonbinary transsexual, although currently the terminology fails to reflect this) because it apparently challenges the concept of a “female/male brain”. Well actually it doesn’t, one only has to add more sexes onto the essentialist theory to accommodate nonbinaries. But that’s not a great solution due to the flaws in essentialist theory to begin with.

And the latter theory is often coupled with a complete lack of realization that hey, if there’s bodily instincts that reflect body structure (or fail to reflect it and create dysphoria in cases of BIID and some instances of GID) then they could reflect multiple types of body structure, even those outside of the male/female dichotomy. Which goes back to the brokenness of male/female binarism as already linked in the oversimplification mention above. So really, pretty much all of the theories (social model, NI model, BII model, psychological model, etc) are nonbinary inclusive, they just require people to get the fuck over their binarism and their binary privilege.

That’s right, there’s binary privilege. It’s the privilege of having the very concept of one’s identity and one’s designation as far as gender goes accepted, unchallenged and validated by society. Binary trans folk, like myself, might get challenged on the basis of our bodies or transphobia, but the word woman and the word man and their connected pronouns are not themselves challenged and attacked. Unlike nonbinaries, who have to defend on two fronts. Specifically whether their pronoun is applicable and whether their identity exists at all.

Binary privilege (or bin privilege as I call it sometimes) is something I have and it is something my partner does not have. I’ve made some stupid statements about nonbinaries before to my partner, who was understandably upset, so like any form of privilege, it can affect (and often does affect) everyone within its zone whether you empathize with or care for a nonbinary. Including binary trans folks too who you would think would know better.

It’s just absolutely enraging when bin trans people use the exact same fucking broken logic that is used against us to attack and marginalize nonbinaries. Hypocritical bullshit like that boggles the mind.

The conversation linked at the beginning was a bit of a first, though. I had yet to meet someone who used the misconstrued rad fem rhetoric to attack just nonbinaries and not transsexuals or individuals of transsexual history (when the twisted rhetoric is easily applied to binary transition and often is by rad fem transphobes). The sheer level of mind boggling hypocrisy and lack of awareness as to how inconsistent that was sort of blew me away. But it does give me an opportunity to address the rad fem twisting arguments as applied to nonbinaries and binary folk.

In the end, no matter how hard we fight, gender will not be stripped from society and removed as a force of harm any time soon. Which means that the people suffering need to do something in the meantime to survive. Marginalized women need to operate feminist discourse (even though it uses gendered language), transsexuals (binary or nonbinary) need to transition in some way to reduce the dysphoria and non TS transgender folk (binary or nonbinary) need to assert their identities and safeguard their self expression. All of this is done in the meantime. None of this means people aren’t fighting the gender system. Any rad fem or person using rad fem rhetoric who tries to justify preventing these mid term survival methods is a fucking idiot transphobe and is also setting up cis women to be harmed (or alternately is inconsistent about the argument, since it can be applied to feminist discourse’s language itself, fuck even the word feminism itself.)

So in the end, I’ve addressed trans binarism, rad fem transphobic bullshit used to skewer nonbinaries, and how the hypotheses of gender dysphoria don’t exclude nonbinaries if you aren’t a binarist asshole.

Because really, I think it’s time we started taking note. Nonbinaries should not be our punching bags.

Go here to read the comments on the original post.

This post was originally published August 15, 2009 here.

For those that remember the last post about people finding cisgendered offensive based on some of the most fallacious and stupid reasoning applicable, don’t forget, trans people are just as capable of fallacious silliness.

When in comes to fallacious arguments and pseudoscience, no one does it better than the Harry Benjamin Syndrome proponents. To give you a reasonably good idea of what they’re claiming would require me to suspend about 90% of my biology knowledge, beat my head against my desk until it became numb and try very hard not to make the wtf face that my friends are so very familiar with nowadays.

I will do my best for you. But first, there may be uninformed cisgendered people here. Cisgendered people who (provided they haven’t ran off from being so offended by the word cis) may want to know what Gender Identity Disorder (which is certainly not HBS) entails first. A point of comparison if you will. It’s blindingly simple to describe so it isn’t necessary to make an entire For The Uninformed post for it (but to be helpful, I will put a tag for GID and a For The Uniformed tag on this post).

For the Uninformed Mini Section: Gender Identity Disorder

Put simply Gender Identity Disorder (or GID for short) is a mental disorder wherein one exhibits a persistent (meaning it doesn’t go away) urge to exhibit traits of a different sex. These traits may be the somewhat ethereal and short lived cultural elements assigned to a given sex. Or these traits may be a simple self conceptualization and involvement with the social group of a given sex. Or these traits may be the actual physical bodily structures that arise from the developmental path of a given sex (not necessarily all of them either). Or all three. GID doesn’t specify, so it covers an epic shit ton (technical word) of symptoms.

GID is often characterized by dysphoria, which causes this urge and is persistent in and of itself. This dysphoria has triggers and normally the triggers are traits of one’s birth sex. It’s often described as a feeling of foreignness or wrongness to one’s body parts and/or social and cultural roles and expectations and/or sociological group and conceptual description as assigned at birth.

Okay, maybe not so simple. My fault for being a biologist and loving technical terms. To make it a little bit less sciencetastic: Your body’s sexed traits (penis, breasts, vagina etc) and/or your grouping in society (guys, chicks or androgynes), and/or your social/cultural roles and expected expressions (how society expects you to behave) causes you to hurt a lot and makes you want to change one or more of those things.

Ending of For the Uniformed Mini Section!

Transsexuality is more of a phenomenon then a disorder, it’s the phenomenon in which individuals with the conditions described by GID (or other folk with different issues) seek out, attain or finish a process known as transition. This transition can be physical or it can be social or it can be both.

So what does this have to do with HBS? After all, HBS’s website claims that it is an intersexual condition wherein the mind is the only section that possesses the traits of another sex (whereas more commonly intersexed folk may have genitalia and physical structures that do not strictly follow a male or a female development path alone). That doesn’t sound much like GID right?

Well actually, “HBS sufferers” (you will find out why I used quotes shortly) experience dysphoria, often seek out physical and social transition and are pretty much entirely medically and conceptually described by the phrases “GID” and “transsexuality”. In fact, the HBS people like to claim that HBS is “true transsexuality”. Well shit. So that makes things a lot more interesting now, doesn’t it?

First problem: HBS claiming “true transsexualism” (as a medical version of the word transsexuality, which is a fabrication in and of itself, as transsexualism is essentially the exact same damn thing) is a No True Scotsman Fallacy. In case you abhor hyperlinks, a no true scotsman fallacy is based around circular reasoning wherein the actual data or definition of a concept is ignored and counterexamples are dismissed as not being true so and so.

So if I were to say, “all MtF transsexuals like high heels,” and then someone else were to dispute that by saying, “I don’t like high heels and I’m an MtF transsexual” and I responded with, “you’re not a true transsexual, therefore your example doesn’t do anything” it would be circular fallacious reasoning based on misuse or complete ignorance of a definition.

Transsexual’s definition does not specify a brain intersexed condition. It doesn’t even really specify dysphoria or GID. So to make claims about “true transsexuality” or worse yet to attempt to pretend that transsexualism is a medical term replacing a political term, when those claims involve things that have nothing to do with its definition (while simultaneously dismissing all counter examples as not real transsexuals) is the textbook example of No True Scotsman.

And that is exactly what HBS proponents do.

Wait, it gets worse.

GID is established in the medical community for America and written into the DSM (diagnostic statistical manual, the book used to diagnose and keep track of the disorders that the psychological sciences know of). It has essential equivalents in the ICD (what the World Health Organization uses for the same purposes as the DSM). It’s backed by the psychological field and biological field’s research and the methodology of treatment has been tested and is detailed in the standards of care put forward by WPATH an organization of medical doctors, psychiatrists and other biology and psychology related scientists. It’s also accepted by the American Medical Association (which is usually a good sign for its scientific authenticity)

What does HBS have establishing it? Well… nothing actually. It’s a theory presented by a layman (an admittedly latently sexist word for non-scientist) named Charlotte Goiar and expanded on by more laymen, all of whom are transsexual and personally invested in HBS being taken as reality by the medical field. This theory is based on a flawed study that tested the brains of dead transsexuals who had already undergone hormone replacement therapy against the brains of dead cisgendered folk of the same birth sex who underwent no HRT. A study done in the 1990’s I might add.

The reason why this is flawed? Because exposure to estrogen or testosterone changes the brain, as established in this study published in 2006. Oh and the fun part? They based this study on a group of people with GID and a group of people without it, took brain tests using MRIs and whatnot and then exposed the people with GID to hormone replacement therapy. Which not only tests to see whether HRT changes the brain but also establishes what a pre HRT transsexual’s brain looks like.

The information revealed is pretty damning. The transsexual individuals had brains identical to cisgendered people of the same birth sex. After HRT, the transsexual individuals had brains nearly identical to cisgendered people of the same sex as their target sex. So this idea that trans people have intersexed brains? Completely and utterly unscientific. To the point where you can arguably state that the evidence used to back up the hypothesis has been scientifically disproven.

As a note: This is not to say that there couldn’t be elements of the brain’s structure that we can’t detect with current methods that are sex specific and could contribute to or actually inflict GID on someone if they were mismatched with the external birth sex. But the only study used to back up the idea of “intersexed minds” has been disproven so HBS has been relegated back to layman unbacked hypothesis. Any attempt to claim that it is scientific, empirically proven or backed by research is at best shoddy pseudoscience and at worst outright willfully ignorant lying

So the whole HBS thing? Fallacy and a lack of scientific backing. Good times. As Laura from Laura’s Playground has cautioned one should not take the HBS proponent’s standards of care seriously, nor should one take what they say seriously. The fact that they continue to peddle this abhorrent pseudoscientific garbage as scientific and medical fact is a pretty good indicator of either willful ignorance or outright self inflicted delusion. Not a great bunch to be taking advice from.

There are a few people though (especially because of the note above) that would ask, “well isn’t it possible that they’re still sort of right? That there might be an intersexed brain condition or something causing GID?”

Perhaps. But something that is important to remember is that anyone who claims that they know the single cause of GID is either full of shit or doesn’t understand how the disorder is named and defined.

You see, when I went over GID above, you’ll notice that it is (basically) a name assigned to a collection of symptoms. The name doesn’t yield a whole lot of idea about what might cause these symptoms and if you look around, you’ll find that there’s not a lot of ideas on what any causes might be. Considering the sheer numbers of substantially different experiences of dysphoria, transition and whatnot had by various trans people who still meet the definition for transsexual and meet the diagnosis of GID one would be hard pressed to make a viable argument that GID had one single unifying cause.

Like most disorders named after a collection of symptoms (like Multiple Personality Disorder was before it became DID) you really don’t know if there’s multiple causes. Whereas a disorder that is named including a causative agent (Dissociative Identity Disorder, same effects as MPD, but caused by dissociation fragmenting one’s identity and self conceptualization into multiple individuals) can definitely be shown to have a single cause.

So to sum it up GID does not contain a cause mention, nor do scientists really know the cause(s). And people with GID have had really radically different experiences. What does this say, logically? That it is highly likely that GID is multicausal. This means that there could be an intersex brain condition version of GID (maybe called Neurological Intersexuality Disorder if it exists, is discovered and split off). This means that there could be a sociologically and psychologically induced dysphoria version of GID (after all, there’s a few folks out there for whom the body is not the issue but the way society treats them is). This means that there could be a self conceptualization version of GID, unrelated to society (which would probably still be called GID if others are split off, honestly). This means, overall, that there could actually be quite a few different types of GID caused by different things (going beyond even what I listed above).

All of these versions (with the exception of hypothetical ones that defy what we do know about the brain, body and GID) are possible because nothing about what we know of GID suggests that any single cause is responsible for every case of it. So when people start talking about “true GID” or “real GID” or “the real cause of GID” they are, for lack of a better way to say it, full of shit.

Always good to keep that in mind for medical trans discussions.

Go here to read the comments on the original post. There’s over 60 of them so I guarantee it’s worth it. XD

Early in September 2001, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center got a routine report from Ahmed Shah Massoud’s intelligence service about two Arab television journalists crossing the Northern Alliance lines from Kabul. The CIA had renewed its partnership with Massoud in September 1996, after a gap of almost six years. The alliance focused mainly on Arabs in Afghanistan and reports were sent via dedicated lines that linked the Panjshir Valley to Langley. In this instance the Center took note. It did not seem of exceptional interest.

This information is almost towards the end of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning book for general non fiction Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, who was the managing editor of The Washington Post then and is with The New Yorker magazine now.

Osama bin Laden and the freedom he had under Taliban rule brought the CIA back into the region. Coll’s riveting and authoritative narrative paints an astoundingly vivid picture of the years starting from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001. The New York Times called it the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of al-Qaeda.

At the US Embassy in Islamabad the Taliban’s rise was evaluated as an isolated Afghan mystery. Many career officers in the US government believed, even as late as September 10, 2001 that Mullah Omar would hand over bin Laden on his own, as Pakistan was assuring them.

“Afghanistan after 1979 was a laboratory for political and military visions conceived abroad and imposed by force. The language and ideas that described Afghan parties, armies, and militias originated with theoreticians in universities and seminaries in Europe, the United States, Cairo, and Deoband. Afghans fought as ‘communists’ or as ‘freedom fighters.’ They joined jihadist armies battling on behalf of an imagined global Islamic umma. A young, weak nation, Afghanistan produced few convincing nationalists who could offer an alternative, who could define Afghanistan from within. Ahmed Shah Massoud was an exception.”

“Few in Panjshir could read or write, but Massoud’s parents were both exceptions. His father was formally educated. His mother taught herself to read and write, and urged her four sons and four daughters to improve themselves similarly. Ahmed Shah Massoud’s mother meted out family discipline, and because he was a child who seemed naturally inclined to mischief, his reprimands came often. She never struck her children physically, her sons recalled, but she could wither them with verbal lashings. Years later Massoud confided to siblings that perhaps the only person he had ever feared was his mother.”….Continued. Click on the headline to read the full piece.

By the age of thirty, Massoud had defied six direct assaults by the world’s largest conventional army and was widely known as the ‘Lion of Panjshir’. It frustrated him though that year after year the United States was just endorsing Pakistan’s agenda in Afghanistan.

The New York Times story more than two years ago that Pakistan was diverting American aid meant for the War on Terror to continue its covert war against India and to further bolster its forces on the eastern border should not have come as any surprise to the CIA; that has been a pattern since the 1980s.

According to Islamabad station chief Howard Hart (1981-83) there was so much cash flowing in around 1983 that there was no way of knowing who was making a reasonable profit and who was ripping off the CIA. Saudi Arabia effectively doubled the money after 1983 when they agreed to match CIA aid dollar for dollar; they were even less concerned where the money ended up. The book establishes how every politician from Zia-ul-Haq (1977-1988) onwards and every ISI director general starting from Akhtar Abdur Rahman (1978-1987) had perfected the art of deception.

Massoud tried hard to somehow make Washington understand the larger issue; the poisonous alliance of bin Laden and the Taliban with ISI complicity. Bin Laden according to him was just a part of the problem and Afghanistan’s political identity was the real issue.

There was just isolated support for Massoud in the American political system after 1996. It was at the Manson Family, as the CIA’s bin Laden unit was called, where Massoud had his most ardent believers. Massoud and his advisors were “confident that the CIA wished to do a lot in Afghanistan but their hands were tied. It was not an intelligence failure. It was political failure.”

Massoud frustrated bin Laden and the Taliban because of his extraordinary tactical skills, but also because he competed credibly for control of Afghanistan’s political identity. He had become the most prominent leader of what the French scholar Olivier Roy called “the only contemporary revivalist Muslim movement to take root among peasants.” He was indisputably tolerant and forgiving in the midst of terrible violence, patient, and prepared to work in coalitions.

The conspiracy that the two Arab journalists represented was hatched the previous May. Using a Kabul computer an al Qaeda planner wrote a letter of introduction in patchy French—Massoud had retained his French from his early years at an elite French-sponsored school.

On behalf of the Islamic Observation Center in London, the letter explained, ‘one of our best journalists’ planned to produce a television report on Afghanistan. He sought an interview with Ahmed Shah Massoud. A list of proposed questions in French included one infused with dark irony: “How will you deal with the Osama bin Laden issue when you are in power, and what do you see as a solution to this issue?”

A few previous attempts had failed as the Northern Alliance forces were very sceptical of the Arabs; but this time the al Qaeda planners prepared the deceptive legends of their assassins carefully, and exploited the long history of Arab jihadists in Afghanistan to complete the infiltration.

“Massoud’s independent character and conduct—and the hostility toward him continually fed into the American bureaucracy by Pakistan—denied him a lasting alliance with the United States. And it denied America the benefits of his leadership during the several years before 2001. Instead—at first out of indifference, then with misgivings, and finally in a state of frustrated inertia—the United States endorsed year after year the Afghan programs of its two sullen, complex, and sometimes vital allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.”

“And at the end of this twisted road lay September 2001 when the American public and the subsistence traders of the Panjshir Valley discovered in twin cataclysms that they were bound together, if not by the political ideas they shared, then at least by the enemies who had chosen them.”

On September 9, 2001, a colleague told Massoud that two Arab journalists had been waiting for many days in their guest house in Khoja Bahuddin, just inside the Tajakistan border, as Massoud prepared to fly towards Kabul. He said he would meet them in the cement compound used by his intelligence aide Engineer Arif.

Around noon he settled on a cushion designed to ease his back pain. The explosion ripped the cameraman’s body apart. It smashed the room’s windows and tore Massoud’s chest with shrapnel. He collapsed, unconscious. In a helicopter to a nearby hospital Massoud’s longtime bodyguard, Omar, held the commander’s head and watched him stop breathing. Omar thought to himself, he said later, “He’s dying and I’m dying.”

On the morning of September 10, the CIA’s daily classified briefings to President Bush, his Cabinet, and other policy makers reported on Massoud’s death and analysed its consequences for America’s covert war against al Qaeda.

They decided to send an envoy to Afghanistan to urge Mullah Omar to expel bin Laden or face dire consequences, as Clinton’s diplomats had done unsuccessfully for several years. Lots of other measures were discussed and decided. The deputies estimated on September 10, 2001 that the full project, if it all proved necessary, would likely take about three years.

Hamid Karzai, who is leading the opposition candidate Abdullah Abdullah amid widespread accusations of poll fraud in last month’s elections, was in Pakistan when his brother called him. He just had about three weeks before the ISI planned to expel him. Karzai had spoken to Massoud a few days earlier, and was told southern Afghanistan was not ripe for rebellion and he would be welcome in the Northern Alliance territory.

“Karzai’s brother said it was confirmed: Ahmed Shah Massoud was dead.

Hamid Karzai reacted in a single, brief sentence, as his brother recalled it: ‘What an unlucky country.’”

(Source: Ghost Wars by Steve Coll)

The sun comes up like a solitary heart
Below a sky of no questions
Answerless in pale blue doub’t
The morning’s devout rise under
A messiah of light!
In another day called life!

It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve put up a new post.  But Jamie left a comment on the “My Story” page, and my response got so long and involved, I thought it deserved its own post.  So Jamie, here are my thoughts:

Hi Jamie. First of all, thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment.

Having GID/being transgender really, really, really sucks. I’ve seen dark days in my life. Can you imagine how awkward, uncomfortable, dreadful, and awful it would be to have been born with genitalia of the other sex? To cross your legs or use a washcloth to cover up what you don’t want to see while in the shower/bath? To feel sick to your stomach while/after being intimate with your spouse? Etc. It’s hard!

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

I can choose my actions but I can’t choose to not be transgender.

You’re right. You can’t just “choose” the feelings away. It’s part of who you are.

I can’t change nor do I want to change my female wiring.

Nor do I. It would be like taking a knife to myself. It would be to destroy who and what I am. It has been the source of some of the deepest and most intense personal spiritual experiences I have had. But only after years of struggling. I have had those intense spiritual experiences only because I have struggled so long and so hard that I have had to strip myself of all sense of personal identity and cast myself before the Lord in abject humility, utterly naked in a sense, and tell Him that I would do and be what He wanted me to do and be rather than what I wanted. And after I had done so, He began to teach me what this all means to me and how it fits into my eternal identity and purpose—how the deepest yearnings of my heart could be fulfilled in a very literal and real sense, not by rejecting my role as a male, but by embracing it and fulfilling my entire mortal purpose.

I hope the same happens for you. And I hope it doesn’t take as long for you. I hope that you are wiser than I was, and that you commit yourself fully to the Lord with less fuss than I did. But I know that because He loves me, He permitted me to suffer as long as I needed to until I was ready to truly consecrate myself to Him.

Is it wrong for me to have strong, internal longings to be a loving mother, and a wife, and to nurture, and to care for others in a gentle, feminine way? Is it wrong to want to be a sister? To be a daughter of God?

No, no, no, and no. In fact, I think it means that you are tapping into your sense of eternal identity in a particular way that most people never do. That doesn’t make you better than them. It just happens to be the path to discipleship that the Lord would have you take. Remember, we all must travel the same strait and narrow path and enter in at the gate. But the Lord knows each of us well enough to know just what prick of pain we need to wrench us away from Babylon and drive us to our knees.

Am/Was I supposed to be able to go more than 12 consecutive months wanting hormones and a path toward sex change without doing so?

I have gone my whole life feeling an intense desire to change myself hormonally and physically. But I and many others have chosen not to transition. It can be done. And we have found our own places in the Kingdom and ways of dealing with it. I’m an Elders Quorum President. The fact that I shave my legs and often wear nylon stockings under my pants doesn’t make me unworthy of that calling. It’s just a coping mechanism. I have a friend who has found that an androgynous look works well for him. He is a counselor in his Elders Quorum, and is worthy of the post. I have another friend who is lovingly supporting his son through a transition, because he would rather see his son at Church in a dress than not in Church at all. He is a counselor in the Bishopric, and has the support of his Stake President.

Why do some people think I can’t or shouldn’t contribute to the world, serve in the church, and/or praise God as a woman?

I think no such thing, and nobody else should. The official position in the Church Handbook is that a post-operative may be baptized if otherwise worthy, but may not receive the Priesthood or Temple ordinances. So if, theoretically, you transitioned but continued to support the Church and those whom the Lord has chosen to be His servants, I personally see no reason you could not be baptized, take the Sacrament, attend Relief Society, and serve. But at what cost would you do it? You have been endowed, so you have already received higher ordinances than baptism. Did you marry in the Temple? If so, you have already received all the ordinances necessary for your exaltation. I can’t tell from your post if your wife actually has left you, or if you’re just going through a rocky period, but either way, the ordinance wouldn’t be dissolved unless and until she remarries. So that means that all that is left for you to do is endure to the end, that your ordinances may be sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise, and if you do, your exaltation is guaranteed. There is no fuzziness about that. The Lord has told us what we must do to receive those blessings in very clear terms.

Are you prepared to sacrifice those covenants for the sake of transitioning, even if you can still hold to a lesser law and covenant? Are you prepared to concede that the least of the three heavens is “good enough” for you? Particularly because I believe that there is a way for those very feminine parts of you to be freed, so to speak, and receive expression and embodiment themselves, but only if you are faithful and enter into your exaltation. I hesitate to say to much on that point, because it is revelation that is personal in nature. But I will say that what the Lord has revealed to me on the point is very comforting to me, because it means that internal feminine expression will not be eternally trapped if I am faithful. And what I have felt is absolutely consistent with what the Lord has revealed through His prophets. I have tested my theories against scripture both ancient and modern, and where any speculation has veered from revealed truth, I have revised it to fit with revealed truth. What I personally believe on the point does not require me to reject the Prophets or their teachings, nor does it make me a “special exception.” Indeed, it requires me to embrace the Gospel and its covenants and ordinances in their fullness, and requires me to endure faithful to the end that all of my covenants may be sealed up unto my exaltation.

And if what the Lord has revealed to me on this point is true, He can reveal it to you. But it must come by the Spirit. I cannot give it to you. If you want, I will tell you what led me to it, and you can try it yourself to see if the Lord teaches you.

Bottom line: Despite my continued yearnings, I have no intention of making myself into a poor facsimile of a woman now, in mortality, because it would be at the cost of a better, holier feminine expression later.

i received an enewsletter from pflag which mentioned last months apa conference in san francisco. i’ve been hearing a lot about the argument to remove gender identity disorder (gid) from the diagnostic and statistical manual (dsm) of diseases and disorders.
here’s a link to an article about the conference.
i attended the transgender health conference in philly two years ago when pauline park was the keynote speaker and i remember that her speech really called me to action about health care and the gid diagnosis.
there are a lot of things wrong with health care in general and there’s a great need for affordable and comprehensive health care for LGBT folks too. but one thing specific to transgender people (if they are seeking physical transition or if they just want psychiatric help in negotiating a really tough space) is the diagnosis of gender identity disorder. [not to mention the vast number of gay folks and differently-gendered folks who have been stigmatized for their gender expression under this diagnosis...]

i don’t think gid should be used as a means of punishment for queer folks. i don’t think being transgender or questioning one’s gender warrants having a disorder. i do think there should be standards for people who wish to transition and i think health professionals should live up to those standards. i do think there are negative psychological symptoms of being a queer or trans person in this world. these symptoms may manifest as anxiety, depression, addiction, etc. these symptoms are possible to treat. sometimes what helps is transition itself. i think we need to see transgender as a valid way of being. i believe it is possible to be transgender and happy.

i’d like to include a longer quote from pauline park borrowed from an interview she did with feministing.com:

Gender identity disorder was introduced into the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1974. At the same time the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the DSM, removed homosexuality. This is not a coincidence.

Gender identity disorder, sometimes called gender dysphoria, is a psychiatric diagnosis which suggests that all transgendered people are mentally ill. As I like to say, I don’t have a gender identity disorder; I think society has a gender identity disorder.

So, my work is informed by a different conception of sex and gender than the one that currently governs society. I think we need to see that transgender is simply a natural variance in gender identity and expression.

I see my work not as being about helping a small number of post-op transsexuals fit more comfortably in existing boxes, but rather, helping all of us break out of these boxes so we can all live lives free of discrimination and violence related to gender identity and expression.

Imagini din filmul documentar Piata Universitatii. in regia lui Stere Gulea:

Postat pe Youtube de bogdan985

** Citiţi şi articolele ziaristului Romulus Cristea despre Piaţa Universităţii :

1. 13 iunie 1990, Piata Universitatii. Lupte de strada cu cockteiluri Molotov

2. Inceputurile Pietei Universitatii