To A T

… is, to be honest, perhaps a good thing for Purloined Letters, but perhaps on the order of Emperors and new clothes for human beings. People can be taught to lie or to at the very least obfuscate and divert or remain very, very quiet by circumstances, life-preservation, teaching, inclination, fear, a desire for “a greater good,” actually, for any number of reasons. After awhile telling a lie or learning to keep one’s mouth closed can become an art-form.

So, Radha, more “internalized transphobia?” I don’t really think so, simply because I intend to chat today about myself. Once again, the previous dictum holds true: if you think you see yourself here, (unless you happen to be one of the folks I mention by name later on down the page) you are mistaken. This is simply about my observations of my own life. If it applies to others as well … well, sometimes that’s just the nature of things and isn’t meant as an indictment of you should you read this. Let alone does it mean to be an indictment of transsexed or transsexing people. My basic thought about us as a group is that we usually lie more to ourselves than to others.

By the time others hear us speak of our lives or our thoughts, the lying to ourselves has become so deeply ingrained that we believe it to be true. Therefore, if you hear it from us in that regard, you are probably hearing exactly what we believe. Press us and we are likely to give you that … the truth as we know it. Trouble is that the knowing has often been ingrained by our circumstances, by our consistently negative reactions from those we love most growing up. One learns to hide, at some point, what is quite literally unspeakable.

Thus, as time wanders us through our lives most former and current transsexuals I’ve had occasion to hear and read have learned not to give much away about ourselves. When coupled with the historic admonitions of therapists and surgeons and others we have sought for relief and treatment, then the act itself has become ingrained within us that something bad is gonna happen if I tell you that I transsexed. Yes, a rather circular causation perpetuated, likely enough, by the very people we have learned to trust as we reached adulthood after having a rather large dose of that same “never speak of this” attitude ingrained in us by those we loved as children.

We grow up with very decided notions about how much of ourselves we should give others and usually there are people in our adult lives who manage by their reactions to us to press home that very childhood ingraining. The trip through learning to break-down such fortifications to our souls and hearts certainly provides spouses, significant others, even other transsexed or transsexing people we learn to know with many hours of very maddening experience of how tough it can be to love someone whose very attitude to love and relationship may have been based on the fact that love hurts and the beloved requires one to lie about her or himself for others to be able to show her their love. 

Knowing that might be true seems cold comfort at best for those who make attempts to support, encourage, provide guidance and care for their adult transsexing  loved  ones. The ingrained notion that most people of transsexing histories that I know has been “whatever you do don’t let them know.” That way be dragons: fearsome, roaring and terrible dragons. 

The problem of those of us who make lives in the “opposite gender” is often visited on our spouses, children, best friends and relatives. I don’t think the problem is intentional, at least not all the time. But I do believe that the problem is habitual and widespread. The truly hopeful thing about more and more children being heard these days by their parents is that perhaps those confining and mad-making walls are beginning, just a bit, to crumble. 

More and more often the “researches” of practitioners like Dr. Kenneth Zucker are being recognized as not only delaying the inevitable for about 20% of children with gender-dysphoric conditions, but as being possibly unethical or even legal breaches. The following excerpt from a paper published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, (2008) Vol. 5, pp. 1892-1897 (midway through page 1896 during their summary of ethical and legal implications Drs. (PhD) Cohen-Kettenis, Delemarre-van de Waal and Gooren) opines about treatment of dysphoric youth under currently prevailing policies that emanate from places like CAMH (Centre for Addictions and Mental Health) and are publicized by non-professional religious-based organizations such as Focus On The Family. 

… in judging the desirability of hormonal pubertal suppression as a first but reversible phase in the sex reassignment procedure, one should not only take consequences of the intervention into account. Rather, one should also consider the consequences of nontreatment. Nonintervention is not a neutral option, but has clear negative lifelong consequences for the quality of life of those individuals who had to wait for treatment until after puberty. It may lead to irresponsible and risky, unhealthy actions of the patient in order to get access to the desired medication, distrust against professionals, with negative consequences for other aspects of their health care. It may lead to developmental arrest, and a psychological functioning forever hampered by shame about one’s appearance. This implies that “in dubio abstine” may actually be harmful. Not different from other endeavors in medicine, the care for gender dysphoric juveniles must be open to peer review and scientific scrutiny, which has always featured high on the agenda of the Dutch health care for transgendered subjects.

Realizing the potential harmfulness of nonintervention, one may wonder whether not providing treatment may not only be doubtful on ethical grounds, but also have legal implications. … 

Although many parents, as highlighted in the now-famous NPR piece last May that featured Zucker, still remand their children to the care of Dr. Zucker and other “reparative therapists” to quash dysphoria in children, they often do so with the best of intentions. I imagine they do so as well without Dr. Zucker owning his obvious Neo-Conservative politics and the fact that other research gives the lie to his program. This is in spite of the fact that Dr. Zucker himself and, in other research, Dr. Cohen-Kettenis both affirm that GID persists into adulthood in about 20% of the patients examined.

In view of the fact that Dr. Zucker claims adult homosexuality is the primary “positive outcome” of such “reparative” therapies one might ask what, exactly, is the point of pursuing such courses if statistically-speaking the result is nil?  Dr. Cohen-Kettenis’ paper reports that in the children whose dysphoria remitted the general outcome (within 10.5 years on average) was that the adult children became either homosexual or bisexual. (If Dr. Zucker follows the lead of Dr. Ray Blanchard, his mentor at CAMH he would disbelieve that bisexuals actually exist at all, but are another form of homosexual orientation.)

In looking back on my own life I can see where a treatment protocol like that recommended in the Cohen-Kettenis, Delemarre-van de Waal, Gooren paper might have meant a lot less angst and pain for me. It might have meant as well that loved ones would have viewed me with a better sense of “who she really is.” Research today shows more and more signs, hopeful signs, that what we call transsexuality is on the verge of total acceptance within the scientific and clinical community as a biological fact. It also tends to show that current methods of transsexing are efficacious and even more efficacious for transsexual youth.

It seems to me a possibility in about four years that the American Psychiatric Association “bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders might well de-list Gender Dysphoria. Perhaps the APA will in fact recommend that clinicians treat the depressions and personality disorders associated more with the results of the “reparative” therapies employed by parents, teachers, ministers and doctors when we were maturing. Such reparative therapies tend, in my own experience, to undermine the self-esteem and confidence of the transsexing child. Such tactics are I believe the bases of much of the shame, deception, holding and silence we learned as coping mechanisms for childhood to young adult negative and traumatic experiences in the reactions of figures of love and authority in our lives to our very being. 

In the vast majority of current people who transsex one discovers again and again the heightened value of “keeping quiet,” of lying or in other ways deceiving (some of that no doubt caused by experiences such as those of children who pass through CAMH currently for “repair”) others about the reality of our existences. The major results that I read and hear about have been extreme anger and shame, guilt, loss of self-esteem, withdrawal from healthy relationship and intense secrecy. 

To be quite honest about the matter we see the results or have seen the results of programs designed to suppress, change or otherwise de-couple minorities from their heritage, their open and thriving lives in all sorts of places in the world, from the Ainu in Japan, to blacks in USA, Maoris in New Zealand, Aborigines in Australia, Amerinds in USA, Central America, South America and Canada, Aleuts, Inuit and other indigenous peoples in Canada and Russia.

The true actual results of such experimentations have shown again and again the severe depression, loss of relationship, lack of self-esteem and out-right demeaning of other humans to their lowest possible state. Why would we find it somehow unusual that in enacting such regimes of disparagement and “repair” among transsexuals, intersexuals, transgenders, lesbians and homosexuals those results would somehow become positive outcomes for social accomodation within our own children? Those “reparative therapies” are neither therapeutic nor do they repair anything at all that doesn’t heal itself or can be healed with hormonal and surgical interventions in current daily practice. The resultant pain both of individuals so conditioned and their adult loved ones due to “reparative therapies” should come as no surprise to anyone at all. 

Repression has been shown again and again to lend itself not to health, but to abject misery and ingrained subterfuge and self-hate. 

Thus, do we think it an oddity when transsexing people “lie” to us? Is there some nefarious principle at work that makes our own children and their responses to us somehow different than the responses of other suppressed and rejected peoples around the world? Is it odd, for instance, that transsexuals, many battered and demeaned young women or men  and Indian hijras often make their livings in the sex-trade or other negatively-viewed employments? Is it somehow against the grain that transsexing people will “hide ourselves” as we grow up or that in many cases we “wait” to transsex until we are older and have developed careers in lines of endeavor that are “more honorable” and much more monetarily lucrative?

Yet, the J. Michael Baileys, Alice Dregers and other neo-Conservative “thinkers” and “researchers” make grand and vacuous etiologies that basically say something on the order of “younger MTF transsexing people often have jobs in hair-salons, massage parlors, as wait-staff in restaurants or in the sex-trade and tend to be better-looking and more desireable as sexual partners than do older MTF transsexuals who almost always are uglier, have married at some point and have jobs in more lucrative, male-oriented fields.” 

The very indictment itself is an indictment of the socio-political bent of its proponents and would be true if tested in Amerinds, Maoris, Aborgines, Bushmen, Americans of African descent and any other ruthlessly repressed minority you might find across the world. Yet, such “thinkers” then propose that a normal human reaction to unrelenting repression and degradation somehow negates the validity of what the repressed and traumatized person says about herself. (I’ve used MTFs and female pronouns because the above-mentioned “researchers” seldom if ever bother to “research”FTM-spectrum trangender people. Why? Because they immediately ignore and make-believe such folk do not exist because the basis of their “theories” exclude women of any kind from any consideration in their alleged etiologies. (For instance, “women are not sexual” and other jejune Neo-Freudian clap-trap.)

The repression and the degradation become self-fulfilling examples of degraded and repressed individuals. Surprise!

The claims and so-called researches of people like Drs. Zucker, Blamchard, Dreger, Anne Lawrence, J. Michael Bailey and their adherents are based on self-fulfilling researches that make a “law” of the obvious. For instance, do you suppose that if a female-spectrum transsexual began anti-androgens and hormone therapy at age 16 that she would probably better fit the socio-cultural idea of beauty and sexual attractiveness than would a similar female-spectrum transsexual who began anti-androgens and hormone therapy at fifty-five? 

The “evidence” and the surmises of such “researchers” require absolutely no “scientific” refutation for two reasons: their arguments are not based on science to begin with, they are based on cultural and social prejudices that ignore “facts.” Their hypotheses are set-up in such a way that any results showing some divergence from the original thesis of the “researcher” is the result of lying, tampering or some other contaminant. In other words, their “research” is not subject to one of the major premises of the Scientific Method: that the hypothesis can be falsified. The dicta of these gentlemen and ladies cannot be falsified, they have rigged the hypotheses to be that way. Ironically such rigging removes them from any claim to being scientific at all. 

There is no excuse being made in these paragraphs for why you may have experienced having a transsexing person hidden in full view of you. Rather there is the claim: how could it be otherwise? For it to have been in some way otherwise would have been to have any transsexing persons not yet teenagers to have experienced a radically different general way of growing up and being conditioned in their social milieus. 

That only seldom occurred. For proof in similar populations look first to so-called “passing-as-white” persons of color in the United States in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s. How many of those people who had at least one parent of color, yet were viewed as being only products of caucasian unions stepped forth and demanded that they be stricken of the privileges they had accrued by being seen as white? How many chose instead to live under the yoke of national segregation and degradation? Of course, you’re allowed to find people in other cultures than the USA who managed to do the same while their people-of-origin were degraded and shamed in other lands as well. Try Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan. Now that research might be worth doing. But I’d suggest that what you will find is a vanishingly small percentage of such folks who did “the right thing” and owned their subservient birth-rights. 

There are, indeed, transsexed and transsexing people who will lie to you. They have lived lives where they have been conditioned to lie even to themselves about their own knowledges of themselves, their own feelings, hopes and dreams for themselves. They’ve become, sadly, inured to such lives through the conditioning they’ve received from their caregivers, ministers and teachers. They’ve been repeatedly marginalized and held to be as fantastic as gryffons, mermaids and dragons. Is it wondrous in some way that what they, we, have learned at our great cost is not easily done away with, even in the interests of our own health and well-being?

There are your questions for the month, the year. Isn’t it time that we found a new answer and made a new way? Isn’t it time that we stop requiring our children, our relatives, our friends to go into hiding in plain sight?