T=mc²

The most difficult part of the transgender experience is arguably getting other people to understand how it could be that someone born with a male reproductive system could insist she's a woman, or someone born with a female reproductive system insisting he's a man... full essay: T=mc²

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Get Your Kicks on Route 66

There is a perennial debate among people who come from the trans communities over whether "trans" or "transgender" are labels that should remain with you through your entire life, and whether you should "wear it with pride" or not. There are lots of different viewpoints and rationales used to support one side or another. In my definitions page it is clear how I see the issue with the definitions I present for transgender and cisgender. Through those definitions I make a case that follows my underlying belief that gender and sex are two separate things, and gender is all about how you interact with other people throughout your life.

Going through the transition process is a journey. Usually a very long and slow journey with plenty of twists and bumps along the way. Perhaps a good metaphor is going on a cross-country road trip—from New York to Los Angeles—and taking Route 66 to get there. It is a route with lots twist and turns, bumps, detours, and stop lights along the way. You visit places you didn't know existed and make lots of different friends, many of whom you will never see again when you pull out of town. While driving down the road I may have the top down, put my arms in the air and shout WooHoo! I'm on Route 66! But when I get to California, I'm not staying on Route 66—I'm going to Disneyland! I may keep in touch with some of the amazing people I met along the way, and maybe we'll even get together for drinks to reminisce about the journey, but when I set up my home in California and get my ID changed over, I'm a Californian now. I'm no longer a traveler on some obscure route through Oklahoma. Yes, I traveled on Route 66 once, but not anymore—that's just a part of my history.

Personally, I feel that the Trans community, and the larger community as well, needs to understand and be ok with the idea that, for many people, "Trans" is a journey, not a destination. While some people insists that you can never shed the trans identity, others, like me, feel that it is only a meaningful part of your life while the people in your life experience your gender as different than you know it to be.

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Hormones and the Boundary Between Self and Others

I recently had a nice chat with someone that included my experience with changing hormonal balance. In September 2006 I had my first injection of estrogen to change the balance of hormones in my body, hopefully forever. I had found my experience that day very profound, and at the end of the day realized I needed to write about what I was experiencing before the memory of it faded away. Here is what I wrote:

2006-09-26, Tuesday
I got my first injection of estradiol this morning around 9:30. Aside from the thorough lesson I received from the medical assistant on how to do it myself, it was uneventful. After she pulled the needle from my skin I didn't have much of an outward reaction (I was mostly surprised at how painless it was), but simply thought to myself, 'Wow, I have finally, finally done it.' I had been taking spironolactone since Friday, but hadn't yet noticed any changes from the induced interruption of testosterone. When I took that first tablet on Friday evening, I stood on my balcony and watched the sun set into the ocean while I thought about that as a metaphor marking the end of the inner turmoil that has plagued me every day of my life. After the injection I went off to work. Coincidentally, I was verbally harassed about my appearance for the very first time on my way to work by two fat teenage morons with skateboards and absurdly baggy clothes, but I don't think the estrogen injection twenty minutes earlier had anything to do with that.
For the whole day at work I don't think I noticed anything different. I was busy on various projects and spent most of the day working on my computer. It was on my way home this evening that I began to notice something. I had started to feel a bit lightheaded on the bus, and I remember thinking, 'Wow. Here it comes. . . . Just what the doctor said would happen.' I got off to do a little shopping on the way home, and was beginning to feel even more lightheaded as I was walking down the crowded sidewalk. It wasn't dizziness and I didn't feel like I was about to faint, but I definitely felt . . .well, lighter. Not just in my head. My arms actually felt lighter; as if half their weight suddenly disappeared.
I walked around like this for a while. Going in and out of stores, and buying a couple of things. Walking down the sidewalk again I noticed another change that may have just been due to the lightheadedness. I'm finding it difficult to describe, but the tension in my muscles began to change. There was something softer about how my muscles made their presence know to me. I spent some time earlier in my life as a woodworker making furniture, cabinets, and other things, and quickly found a comparison from that experience: before, my normal muscle tension was sharp and coarse, like a sharply-cut square edge of wood before sanding, being pressed against the skin; but now that tension felt more like the wood had all its surfaces rounded into a curved sinuous form and sanded smooth. Everything about the sensation was much smoother and gentler. I even felt this in my voice—my vocal chords felt more relaxed when I spoke and the sounds they made seemed more fluid. I also noticed what I can only describe as a heightened awareness of the outer surface of my body. It was like I was suddenly becoming more aware of the boundary between my body and the immediate surrounding space.
Now, as I sit here writing this, I am noticing this heightened sensitivity throughout my body. Even the taste buds on my tongue seem somehow gentler while at the same time more sensitive. The lights in my living room even seem brighter to my eyes tonight—another good metaphor, as my future seems much brighter tonight as well.
Wow!"

The single most profound thing I had noticed was that by the end of that day I had much more sensitivity where my body interfaced with the external world. My skin sensitivity increased (I noticed more subtle touch or changes in temperature), my eyes were more sensitive to light, and the flavors of food were stronger. So, based on my experience, I decided that these hormones don't directly affect your emotions (as pop culture would want us to believe), but, if they change your raw sensitivity to external stimuli, then that will in turn affect your emotions: If your taste buds become more sensitive, then the way you enjoy flavors will change; If your skin becomes more sensitive, the way you respond to touch will change and you may also more easily detect pheromones given off by others—making you more aware of their emotional changes. So, with cyclic or life changes to your hormonal balance, your sensitivities to stimuli change—creating an emotional stress through the strength of those signals being different that what you're used to them being. Think of how your emotions change if you're listening to music softly and someone suddenly turns the volume way up.

I have been told by several people who have introduced testosterone as part of hormonal therapy that they found themselves becoming more focused inward on goal setting or analyzing abstract ideas. If the interplay of estrogen and testosterone levels changes your sensitivity to external stimuli, then it seems plausible that if shifting the balance to higher levels of testosterone decreases sensitivity to external stimuli, that would let your brain spend more energy focusing on internalized analytical thought, since you're not processing as much stimuli from the world around you. If your testosterone levels are lower and estrogen levels higher, then you will spend more mental energy focusing on the greater external stimuli, and processing what that means instead.

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There Comes a Time

It's been a year since the announcement by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that the Diagnostic and Stastical Manual of Mental Illness (DSM) revision team for "Gender Identity Disorder" would be headed by people who have expressed nothing but hostility to the reality that gender and sėx are separate things that don't necessarily mean the same thing within a person, and a year since that disturbing announcement prompted me to write a declaration for a fledgling activist group. Since the APA is meeting this week in San Francisco for it's annual conference where there is lots of discussion about the condition of gender and the inclusion of Gender Identity Disorder in the DSM by those very same people, I would like to post the declaration I wrote last year:

There comes a time in history when a class of people who have been misunderstood, oppressed, vilified, ostracized, ridiculed, and abused by the institutions of society—due to profound misunderstanding of the reality that humanity is much more rich, diverse, and vibrant than the traditions of those institutions lead people to believe—must rise up in unity against that oppression and proclaim that they are very much a part of the beautiful normal diversity of humanity, and must be recognized as such in order for the institutions of society to sustain and advance humanity as a compassionate and soulful thing.

Those institutions must recognize that this class of people has special and unique needs, partly as a result of the condition of their birth and partly as a result of the systematic oppression imposed on them by society, that are medical and social in nature, and need supported access to medical treatments and remedies to give them an opportunity to function in life as the people they truly are.

So, WE, a coalition of people who identify as Trans or Intersex people (including people who are also known as transgender, transsexual, intersex, and several other terms used to classify people based on being born with a condition where the gender of their mind, psyche, or soul differs from their anatomical sex at birth, or, their anatomical sex at birth was ambiguous) hereby proclaim this resolution: 

Whereas, gender variation has been recognized and often celebrated throughout human history, in diverse cultures around the world, and we as a human race are at a crossroads in properly acknowledging and respecting the existence of inherent genders that are unique and separate from reproductive anatomical conditions of the body;

Whereas, it is almost universally acknowledged in all other arenas of humanity, that people's self identity, expression, character, intellect, ability to achieve, heart, and soul take precedence over their bodies, and that the condition of their bodies should not be used to limit or define them against their will;

Whereas, virtually all supposedly scientific data used to categorize trans people as mentally disordered, is based on foundational assumptions which stem from purely biased cultural attitudes rooted in ignorance, tradition, and religious dogma that gender should solely be determined by reproductive capacity, rather than from true objective and scientific inquiry, based on unbiased and humane perspectives, that make no such preconceived false assumptions;

Whereas, the existence of untold millions of Trans people around the world, in every culture throughout human history, provides compelling evidence that the above biased assumption is prima facie untrue;

Whereas, ending debate about whether Trans people are mentally disordered will properly shift scientific focus away from the distraction of assigning false mental illness, and toward objective research into how Trans people can be successfully identified in early childhood so that compassionate and effective medical care, including social therapy and hormonal treatment regimens, can be established and implemented in order to facilitate the assimilation of Trans people into social roles that are suitable to their natural inherent genders prior to adolescence and puberty, and lead to improvements in medical interventions for Trans people during later life stages so that their bodies can be better aligned with their inherent genders, thus allowing for healthier and stable lives;

Whereas, Trans people must be recognized as having a physiological condition rather than psychological disorder, thus requiring medical intervention through surgical and endocrinological means, and Trans people must have the right to determine what is needed to correct their own bodies, to be consistent with their inherent genders, so that they can live comfortable and meaningful lives, and socialize as they naturally need to;

Whereas, surgical alteration of ambiguous birth sex (intersex) performed on children without their consent, is unethical and must be abandoned in favor of waiting for them to communicate for themselves what gender they are;

Whereas, anyone seen by the vast majority of the Trans community as working against the truth of what we know about inherent gender identity, cannot be placed in a position of defining the nature of gender identities with any level of trust from the people who's lives they are so profoundly impacting;

Whereas, we are a coalition of doctors, lawyers, therapists, scientists, educators, artists, other professionals, and community advocates, who have lived our lives under extreme social stigma due to being trans, and have unique perspectives and understandings of life as a result;

Therefore, we, the members of this coalition, declare that:

1. The classification of Trans people as mentally disordered within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as well as the International Classification of Disease (ICD) of the World Health Organization (WHO), resulting in medical and social stigmatization, must immediately end; we will accept nothing less: Trans people are representative of natural human diversity.

2. The World Health Organization must remove all entries in the International Classification of Disease that define gender identity as groups of disorders from the mental illness sections of the ICD, AND reclassify them as physiological conditions, within appropriate locations of the ICD, that will allow them to be recognized and medically treated as such.

3. The DSM and ICD must have entries that acknowledge forms of anxiety and stress that stem from living in a society that tends to reject, stigmatize, and ostracize Trans people, which includes the ever-present threat of violence. Social stressors such as these, require compassionate therapeutic treatment that respects the rights of Trans people to receive competent surgical and hormonal treatment to correct their body conditions.

4. Involuntary surgery performed on intersex children to force gender upon them, without understanding how they identify themselves, must immediately end, and be replaced with care that waits for them to be able to communicate what gender they are, and allows them to chose what kind of surgery, if any, they should have, when they are ready to do so.

5. The qualifications and motivations of anyone placed in a position to outline the care of Trans individuals, must be closely examined. Their participation in any committee commissioned to determine the classification of gender identity must be founded on the trust of the Trans community: if their openly expressed beliefs are seen by the majority of the Trans community as hostile to the reality that Trans people are a natural part of humanity and not mentally disordered, they can not be trusted to act in the best interests of the Trans community.

6. The Trans community, numbering in the millions throughout the world, is competent enough to effectively communicate to the medical and psychological communities who we are in regards to our true genders, and therefore, what medical diagnoses and treatments are appropriate, in order to correct physical conditions we are born with, according to those inherent genders.

7. These changes must be realized during this current revision process so that Trans people are not made to suffer indignantly for another 15-20 years before the next opportunity arises to comprehensively do so.

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Karmic String Theory and Tossing Coins

As a spiritual person not tied to an entrenched religious doctrine, I generally find Buddhist philosophy to be the truest and best explanation for the condition of life. Particularly, that all things in life and the universe follow cyclic paths in a repeating pattern: Birth - Life - Death - Renewal - Birth - Life . . . The Hindu/Buddhist principle of karma, that your motives, actions, and experiences in this life affect future lives and are affected by past lives, provides a compelling explanation for the existence of transgenderness.

Your karma is the energy of your spirit that transcends any one life and is carried into the next lives. What you experience in this life, within yourself and with others, changes your karmic energy as if it were a string threading through your lives past, present, and future. Each thought, motivation, action, interaction, and experience in your life pulls, bends, and twists your karmic string to change it's shape and direction and steer your spirit into the next life. Karma is often talked about as a judgmental energy where you earn "bad" karma or "good" karma, consciously judged by a god. I don't see it that way. Theoretical quantum physics understands that, while we talk about "matter" and "energy", everything in the universe is composed of varying states of pure energy that are interacting with and influencing each other, creating an illusion of matter. Karma is just a part of that complex soup of energy, but is what energizes our spirits into existence. Throughout our lives, we pull, bend, and twist our own and each other's karmic strings, steering our own spirits and the spirits of others. I don't see Karma as a conscious judgment, but rather as a simple cause and effect of interacting energies.

We are humans—we are animals that reproduce through sexual intercourse. And so most of us are born with a body suited to provide either a sperm, or an egg and womb. Our gender is a part of the mix steering our karmic string. It is probably one of the most significant parts, as it shapes and directs most of the interactions and experiences we have in our lives. With each life we have a random 50/50 coin toss chance of getting a male body or female body. Each life cycle energizes our souls in a masculine or feminine way, based on our experiences in that life in that body, and that energy gets carried into future lives.

Often, the 50/50 (Male/Female) randomness balances out in successive lives so people don't have a strong current of particularly feminine or masculine karmic energy in their spirit, and are content in the body they are born into in this life. But, if your past few lives happen (by random chance) to have been in a female body (like flipping a coin and it coming up heads 3 or 4 times in a row), then you have a strong current of femaleness in your soul that is carried into this life from the experiences of those past several lives. If you are then born into this life again with a female body, you will have a very strong female energy in a female body, but if you are then born into this life in a male body, you will have a strong female energy in a male body, causing transgenderness. The number of past lives that were successively female will determine the strength of the female current you have in this life, which is why there are so many shades of transness. The same is true for male karmic energy placed into a female body. Your karmic string is steering your spirit in one direction, while your body is forcing your life interactions in a different direction, creating a lot of tension in the string.

How you respond to that tension in your life is not something to be "judged" good or bad in your karma, and your choice between changing your gender or not doesn't (in and of itself) steer your karma in "good" or "bad" ways, but the tension caused by the opposing forces acting on your karmic string creates an adversity in your spirit that can lead to thoughts, motivations, and actions with "negative" karmic consequences. So choosing to transition your gender can be seen as a way to release the karmic tension before it can tear your spirit apart, or steer it off a cliff.

It can be said that choosing an ascetic meditative life can release that tension and steer your spirit back toward the middle path, making gender transition unnecessary, but without devoting to such a life, your gender (as expressed by you or as perceived by others) influences most of the interactions you have, and if your karmic tension caused by transness is creating motivations and actions that are steering your string in a negative way, then transitioning the way others experience your gender can also be a way to steer your karma back toward the middle path.

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Perfect Flowers


So I was talking to a friend the other day. I have in my home some tomato plants by a large window that my child is helping cultivate (and looking forward to harvesting!). I was talking about how my little one and I help pollinate the flowers by pretending to be bumblebees, using a q-tip. I mentioned that tomato plants have what biologists call "perfect" flowers, meaning that a single flower has both male (stamen) and female (pistil) parts. She commented on what a great metaphor that is.
That got me thinking: The way science, in the absence of cultural bias and social stigma, views it, if you cross gender boundaries within yourself, then you are PERFECT. That is the way truly unbiased science sees it: you are not disordered or ill, you are perfect.

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Mind Over Body, or Body Over Mind

A few days ago National Public Radio's All Things Considered featured a two-part story about transgender children (Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Preferences). and the decision by the parents on whether to allow them to live in their true natural gender or not, and what steps parent can take when confronted with the reality of having a transgender child. The first part portrayed two young girls going in opposite directions with their true gender. One, through the guidance of psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, was being allowed to be true to herself and everyone else, and be the girl she clearly is. She is apparently thriving emotionally and socially as a result. The other was being forced to reject her natural gender through the hostile, harmful, and primitive direction of Ken Zucker at the University of Toronto. This innocent child is having her favorite toys taken away from her, forced to socialize in ways that are unnatural to her, and even being told what colors she should and shouldn't like. She is deeply suffering emotionally as a result of Ken Zucker's guidance, and is apparently getting worse.

Ken Zucker, like too many people today, seems to think that the shape of the tissue found between a person's legs should determine absolutely the direction that person can or cannot go in life, and how they should think, even in spite of their own clear ability to tell other people who they are.

This confused and backward attitude represents a fundamental hypocrisy in Western culture that leads to a widespread incredulity for, and rejection of, the transgender reality. The hypocrisy lies in our perceptions of how peoples' thoughts, deeds, emotions, and intellect are dominant over, or, subservient to the condition of their bodies.

When a person is injured by accident or disease, we celebrate heroic efforts to preserve their mind and consciousness, even if it means removing vital organs. Likewise, if someone has become brain-dead, we usually decide that it's best to not artificially sustain the body and just let the person complete the dying process. Even in cases where family members fight to keep the body alive, they don't do it for the sake of the body, they do it for the hope that the mind will return to life some day. In all cases, it is most important that a person's consciousness, thoughts, and feelings take precedence over their body. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, in his celebrated I Have a Dream speech, told us that he looked forward to the day when people are judged not by their skin, but by the content of their character. In essence, that our heart, our mind, our feelings, and our intellect make up who we really are, instead of the composition of our outer skin.

In virtually all cases, humanity recognizes that the form and condition of our bodies does not, or should not, determine who we are, and what we can achieve. But in the one single case of gender, we throw all of that out the window and say, no, it is your body that rules over your mind, and your body determines what you should do, how you can act, how you must associate with other people, how you can love, who you can love, what colors you should like, and what toys you should play with.

Why do we make this one single exception to the idea that our minds determine who we are? Why in this one case do we want to pathologize anyone who asserts that their mind rules over their body?

What does it feel like?

So I was recently asked what it's like to be transgender. It must be really difficult for someone who isn't to comprehend what it's like to be. A close friend once told me (before I transitioned) that, while she can intellectually sympathize with me, she really can't comprehend what it feels like to be so at odds with your body because she's never felt that way. That made me think, and I told her that I had no idea what it feels like to NOT be at odds with my body, since I was never able to feel that way (this was at the beginning of my transition). Things are different now, of course, but it still seems to be a struggle for any trans person to describe what it's like to be so fundamentally different from your body.
As a single mom who tends to think about children's stories a lot, I have found a comparison in a classic children's tale that seems to be helpful in understanding—The Frog Prince:


So here you are—a fully realized human being with all your current awareness and intellect. But by some twist of nature (or evil spell), you were made to look like a little frog. When you try to speak, all you do is croak. You can sit on a lily pad in a pond and watch people go by: talking about life, having fun together, falling in love, finding friendship and family. Maybe you want to just scream out to them that you're a person too, and want to have friends, family, and love—but people just look at you and say Eww! put that frog back in the pond; or Aww what a cute little frog, but don't touch it, it's all slimy! You can laugh and say ok, for an hour or a day that might actually be fun. But what if you had to live that for days, weeks, months, and years. Every hour of every day always knowing exactly who you are, but no one else knowing or accepting that. They would only look at you and say "You're not a person, you're a frog. Go back to your pond and catch flies with your tongue." Or the mean ones would kick you and say "Get out of here you slimy creature!". How long could you endure that way? How badly would you want someone to come along and kiss you and break the spell—so that you can simply be the human being you know you are, and find happiness and love the way you need to have it?

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