Take a Transgenderist to Lunch

N.B.:  I am not a medical professional.  I am not a mental health professional.  I am not anything much.  The following is a combination of my opinions and my memories and may or may not apply to anyone's situation, diagnoses, or anything.  If you think this post could trigger you then stop now and use your back button.


My first exposure [that I know of] to trans-folk occurred in New Orleans many years before Hurricane Katrina.  New Orleans was a hotbed of activity and I had gotten to know her rather well.  I was familiar with the places that the tourists did not go to as well as the tourist traps.  The French Quarter with Bourbon Street running through it is the part that most people bring up when talking about New Orleans.  This happened at a bar on Bourbon Street.

We were young and drunk on a Saturday night.  It was humid-- it was always humid in New Orleans-- and the street was lit up by the artificial lights from bars with patrons spilling out of them with large glasses of booze in hand and jazz music flowing out into the streets.  There was one bar that was small and rectangular and unassuming in the midst of the wildness around us.  We went in.

There was a mirror and a small rectangular stage directly behind the bar.  We got something to drink and sat down on some old red stools.  I looked up at the stage.

"Those are he-shes," my friend Villary the Cajun told me.  "Watch."

[I have since learned to address folks by the gender they present as.  In this blog post, I will do so.  Back then, I knew nothing other than a couple of very short peculiar articles written about Christine Jorgensen.  That is to say, I knew nothing about gender orientation].

The woman announcer on the stage informed the audience that she and the women behind her "have our mothers' breasts and our fathers' appendages."  In other words, they were all pre-ops.  [Pre-op was another word I didn't know back then].  She admitted that many pre-ops become strippers in order to finance the procedures they needed to have done.

The women behind the announcer were all dressed in sparkly styles and stripped down to fancy bras and undies.  [I don't recall any nudity.  It seems to me now that there was a law against that but I could be wrong].  The women certainly had breasts.  Their penises were not evident to me.

It was hot and I wanted out of there.  "You were getting off on them," Vill teased me as we made our way through the predominantly hetero-coupled patrons and back out into the throngs on Bourbon Street.

I consigned the experience into the category of "strange shit that happens in New Orleans."  I carried on with my active addiction and with my life.



Years later I had figured out that I wasn't straight.  I'd been free from active addictions for quite some time when I began to hang out at a community center for folks who weren't straight.  There was no booze there.  If folks were trading drugs there, I never saw that.  There was a library and 12 step meetings and a coming-out group and a coffee bar and barbecues and presentations.  It was a fairly active place.  I was there the night that some trans-folk were scheduled to do a presentation.  I decided to listen in on it.

The presentation was very informative.  There was a slide show and an opportunity for questions.  The audience this time was not straight.  We were gay and lesbian and bisexual people.  The presenter carefully explained to us that sexual orientation and gender orientation were two different things.  Sexual orientation involved who you were attracted to.  Gender orientation involved how you thought about yourself.  Someone might identify as gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual.  [The words pansexual and polysexual were not in vogue then].  Those words referred to sexual orientation.  Gender orientation words included male, female and androgenous.  Gender orientation is separate from sexual orientation.  All of this was news to me.  I hadn't a clue.  The transgenderists had their own community center.  A general invitation was issued to visit.  So I did.

The following Friday night found me on a second floor surrounded by women who were applying make-up and getting dressed to go out on the town.  There was one man there.  The man had been a lesbian for some amount of time before deciding that he identified as a man and not as a woman.  The man was a convincing man.  The women were not as convincing, even to my untrained eye.

There was a discussion involving discrimination on the job.  One pre-op woman was forced to wear a sort of smock over her clothing so as to hide her budding breasts at her job in the nursing home.  Another woman-- who was quite tall-- had been informed by her boss that as long as she conducted herself as a lady, he had no problem with her presentation as a woman in the office where she worked.  It was in that clubhouse that I learned some of the finer points of transformation surgery.

The surgery is not just one solitary event.  Remove the c.b.a. and boom-- you're a woman-- uh, no.  First off it is several surgeries.  The surgical removal / rearrangement of the testicles and penis is the last step of the process which can take eight years or more.  Pre-ops are required to attend counseling and to live full-time as a woman for a year before anything else.  At some point, the woman is given estrogen pills which develop the breasts.  The woman will also take lessons on walking and talking.  She will replace her male clothing with female clothing.  She is told that she must have either sexual intercourse or masturbate.  The penis is not chopped off.  It is sliced down the middle and some of it is used to construct the labia and clitoris.  If a penis is not used sexually, there may not be enough tissue present for the final reconstructive surgery.

The hormone pills may make a woman moody or break out in acne or even give her heart problems.  At least this is what I remember being told.  There was a feeling that taking hormones had some definite serious medical risks.  This is not something I have verified so I don't know how accurate that info is.

A pre-op man will ask for surgical removal of the breasts-- I am not sure at what stage this occurs.  Before that event, a pre-op man will usually wrap or bound his breasts tightly so as to disguise their existence.  A man given testosterone will bulk out.  He may also experience anger and aggression issues as a direct result of the testosterone.

Pre-op women may also visit an electrolysis studio for concerns related to hair.  Some may elect to get their adam's apple shaved for aesthetic reasons.  And a few have voice lessons. 

We went out after everyone was ready.  Although the cross-dressers in the bunch were all heterosexual men, the gay bars are the places that embrace transgenderists and so that was where we all went. 

Going to the gay bar with the TG crew was fun!  There was one cross-dresser who was into gender-f*cking or genderbending.  He did not shave his legs.  He had a beard.  He wore an ugly dress and used balloons to emulate boobs.  "Feel my tits," was his line.  Some of the TGs camped it up.  Others were more straight in sexual orientation and acted accordingly.  I danced with anyone I wanted to and had a great time.

I got to be friends with a TG woman.  We went backpacking for a week together out in the wilderness.  She brought along her make-up.  Having not visited an electrolysis, she needed to shave daily.  Without the make-up, her male origin was more pronounced.  Out there in primitive lean-tos every morning, she would hang her mirror on a nail and put on her face.  She also brought along a solar shower.  The solar shower was not a comfort I had ever availed myself of [and still don't.  I am a serious back-packer type] and I luxuriated in warm water for the week.  It sure was different than taking cold sponge baths with freezing spring-fed lake water.

We had lots of fun that week.  My dogs took to her right away.  We slept in the lean-tos, cooked camp food, drank hot chocolate and teas, hiked all over, went swimming, and logged I think around eight or ten miles a day. 

I began serious gaming.  I got into Dungeons & Dragons in a big way-- and Mechs.  I attended sessions at a game room twice a week-- Saturday afternoons and Tuesdays.  There was another TG woman there and we also got to be good friends.  She had been in the Army when she found that she could no longer ignore her gender orientation.

And finally there was Annie.  I knew Annie when she was still living as a married man.  One day, Annie disclosed to me that she was TG.  I had no clue.  It was from Annie that I learned that hormones can unexpectedly change sexual orientation for a transgenderist. 

[After Annie, I met and was friends with two A.I.S. women.  Babies born with androgen insufficiency syndrome are genetically male but their bodies do not respond to testosterone.  Thus they are commonly reared as girls and are subjected to operations very young in order to reconstruct penises into female genitalia.  As teens they require estrogen in order to develop breasts.  100% of A.I.S. females are either bisexual or lesbian.  That is what both of them told me.  A.I.S. is sometimes referred to as being intersexed or as pseudo-hermaphroditism].

Annie came to a bad end.  She had major depression and was getting inadequate treatment for that condition.  She suicided.  Annie was free from active addiction for six years and she died clean.  That was not and is not a comfort to me because Annie is dead.  And she didn't have to be.

One of my closest friends for many years was a man who eventually came out as trans-folk.  His first therapist told him, "You have a penis.  Therefore you are a man."  I thought that statement was fairly idiotic and I still do.  Gender is far more complex than the mere presence or absence of specific genitalia.

He went on to gender-competent counseling after that one.  In his investigation, he elected not to do anything about his gender orientation.  He does not even cross-dress.  He decided to remain a male in spite of his self-identification as a female.  His decision was difficult but it is one that I respect.  Shortly after Annie's suicide, our own friendship came to an end.  Through the internet, I am aware that he has continued to remain in his male body and has gone on publically to involve himself in political issues rather than gender issues.

radical sapphoq says:  I support civil rights for all civils.  As a bisexual woman, my issues are more similar to those of transgenderists than they are to mono-sexuals.  I have marched along side my TG brothers and sisters in the Pride marches.  The transgenderist community is at its' best when celebrating.  But there is a darker side to all of this.

Adam's apples can be shaved.  Breasts can be removed.  Genitalia can be surgically reconstructed and rearranged.  Someone can be taught how to speak, how to walk, how to dress.

The size of hands and feet, the narrowness or wideness of hips and shoulders, the feel of the tongue [yes, male tongues feel different than female tongues] are things that no hormones or surgeries can correct to date. 

By anecdote only, I have often wondered if gender identity disorder is more closely related to body dysmorphic disorder than is commonly acknowledged.  Both involve an intense dissatisfaction with one's appearance.  Gender identity disorder adds to this base an intense dissatisfaction with assigned gender identity societal roles.  Both appear to this formally untrained eye to have bits of obsession woven into the psyches of the folks who have said disorders.  Is it possible that some percentage of folks who have been identified as transgenderists [with the label of gender identity disorder] actually have an obsession with surgical mutilation? 

I am aware that it is said by some that the younger transgenderists may have more evidence of a mild intersexed state [without qualifying for a diagnosis of A.I.S. or hermaphroditism of various sorts] than those to whom an awareness of opposite gender orientation comes later in life.  I am also aware of the common supposition that the younger someone is reaching post-op, the more aesthetic the results are said to be.  I don't know how accurate either anecdote is. 

The problem is that-- as least as far as post-op TG females are concerned-- the results are somewhat ugly.  The issue is far more than a transgenderist being taught to "pass."  I'm not saying that cis women are automatically beautiful either.  Specifically, the size of hands and feet along with the size of hips and shoulders detract from the appearance of pre-op and post-op women.  [The male vs. female tongue is a minor issue here I think].  We live in a society where appearance dictates everything.  That is a problem that we all face.

I support civil rights for all civils.  [By civils, you may read the word "civilians."]  I support the right of any civilian adult to determine how that adult shall live, including but not limited to decisions involving gender and sexual orientations-- as long as that adult does not harm children-- yet I also support the right to ask questions.  I have questions which have not been satisfactorily answered yet by science.  Among those questions is the question: Is transformation to match one's perceived gender the best option?  I suspect we do not really know yet. 

When transgenderists look to others for approval-- just like those of us who are cis do the same thing-- transgenderists are bound to be disappointed.  No adult should be focused on the approval of others as justification for existence or lifestyle choices or life decisions.  By all means, continue marching in Pride parades and seek legal protections against discrimination.  But please, do not expect that society owes you kudos for being true to yourself. 

Approval is something that kids need out of necessity before they learn how to develop skills of accurate self-appraisal.  Acceptance may be a bit closer.  Tolerance misses the mark entirely.  I want society as a whole to accept that people exist who are not clones of the majority.  Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, those born into intersexed states, transfolk, non-theists...  We are who we are.  I am not a product to endorse.  I am a human being that deserves the same rights and responsibilities that any other human being deserves.  I accept that people very different than I am-- a bisexual, cis [non-transgendered], non-theist woman-- do exist and have a right to exist without my interference.  I do not have to approve or disapprove of the existence of people different than myself.  I do have to accept that people exist regardless of my personal feeling about them and how they conduct their lives.

P.S. A word to the trans-folks who are involved in heated tweets with conservatives on Twitter:  You are wasting your time and breath.  When you come at someone demanding that they approve of you, it isn't going to happen.  When you come at someone insinuating that they have micro-penises or that their deeply-held convictions are stupid, it should not be a surprise when they snark back at you viciously.

If someone makes a statement in your Twitter stream and you cannot tolerate its' presence, block them.  Do not respond to them. Or respond once, re-tweet them if you want to, and then move on.  Ultimately, it does not matter what anyone thinks about us in social media.  Seeking out people to swipe at makes the seeker a readily available target.  Don't bother.  Pick your battles wisely.  Fighting with conservatives on Twitter to the point where everyone is calling everyone else names does nothing for your cause.  Stop it.  Just stop it.  

It's not about what others say or think about any of us.  It's about what we say and think about ourselves.