Based on the information in the post, I'm with Zucker.
I don't see how it can damage kids for their parents to support them, even if it *does* turn out to be just a "phase." I mean, it would be heinous to, say, discourage a kid from pretending to be a pirate because "you're not *really* a pirate." You go along with it, because you know that that's how you build a relationship of trust with your child. Whether the "I'm a girl" thing is "just" a phase, or whether its "real," I'd go with better for the kid to trust mom and dad than not.
Plus, Tim, believe me: they get PLENTY of gender pressure from their peers. Ogged's right: chances that the well-intentiond parent is going to warp the kid by forcing them into some freaky misidentification are pretty fucking slim.
I think I go with don't worry to much, but avoid the dresses.
but avoid the dresses.
Word. For Christ's sakes do not let your little boys do this. Talk about sending them into the lions den.
Be sure you get all the way up to northern California. If you don't go far enough north, you'll get stuck in the central/southern San Joaquin Valley, also known as California's Bible Belt. Anyone looking for that sort of tolerance here is sure to be surprised.
Wow, I never knew what had drawn me to Nor Cal before, but it's all been made clear now...
My sample size is too small to make any large generalizations from it, but the transgendered people I've known were just about the unhappiest people I've ever met. It's an unbelievably difficult road to travel.
Oakland rules, baby!
/she says a little too enthusiastically after a heady night out of Art Murmurring, milk shaking, and related celebrations.
How does one murmur Art? (Well I suppose if one were shaking milk...)
(Have a nice Saturday everybody! I am off to pursue my pursuits.)
This is one of the things I hesitate to talk about, but the MTF surgical transsexuals I've known of (3) all seemed terribly messed up. I suppose it's wrong to say it this way, but they were horribly unfeminine. It's hard for me to understand what they were trying for, because they didn't get fertility (a good thing about being a woman, if that's what you want), and they really didn't get the feminine role and image either.
I've read of successful changes (Deirdre McCloskey, Jan Morris, and Wendy Carlos) but my face-to-face experience was depressing. Maybe all the time I knew these guys I also knew some successful cases, whose transsexuality would have been invisible to me.
"Go where no man has gone before" sounds like a good MTF slogan, BTW. Googling doesn't find it used that way, except maybe here.
12: I have the impression that even some TGs have similar experiences.
Wendy Carlos seems to me to be a deeply screwy person. I'm not sure I'd count her as an MTF success. Buffy & comics scholar Roz Kaveney seems well adjusted, but interestingly doesn't make much of an effort to be feminine.
The bit about delaying puberty seems extra-weird. It seems like it goes well beyond "supporting" and into being a hazardous intervention in its own right.
Plus, Tim, believe me: they get PLENTY of gender pressure from their peers. Ogged's right: chances that the well-intentiond parent is going to warp the kid by forcing them into some freaky misidentification are pretty fucking slim.
Dunno. Zucker appears to be indicating that "pretty fucking slim" is a mischaracterization. Maybe he's a bad person, maybe he's wrong, but absent evidence to that effect, I wouldn't just assume the risk away because it would be pretty to do so. (This seems like a variant of the issue at work in About a Boy.)
Living in area in which it's clear that it's not just OK to be transexual, but that there are various models for such a lifestyle, seems like a good idea, though.
I had a dream about a transgendered army last night. A bunch of 5'7"-5'10", slightly stocky, gender unclear people marching on city streets. What the fuck is that?
There was an interesting line in a NYer Sedaris story last week where he says he met a teenaged neighbor of his father's who is openly gay, supported by his parents, and apparently well-liked and happy. Sedaris says he feels like a guy with a ten-pound leg brace meeting one of the first recipients of the polio vaccine.
It strikes me that the radical changes in (some) parental behavior toward gender-queer stuff is going to result (and is already resulting in) deep rifts between generations. As it is, a 28-year-old MTF of my acquaintance (a suicidal, alcoholic cutter) has been pretty deeply embittered by meeting a 20-year-old FTM student of mine who is popular, loved by his family, embraced by the community, and, despite some bumps in the road, is doing fine.
And this student of mine, when he used to identify as a gay woman, laughed at women who called themselves "lesbians" and wanted "togetherness." We've talked about it a lot, and I've tried to explain how easy he's had it, socially, compared to a lot of the older generation.
...which is not to say he hasn't had the shit beat out of him in Manhattan. Things still suck a LOT for transgendered people no matter where you are. But while he feels anger and indignation about these episodes, my older MTF friend merely takes beatings and sexual assault as "what she deserves."
but absent evidence to that effect
Fascist
I have to admit that it seems bizarre for me for anyone to want to adopt the traits particular to the opposite sex (gender / role yada yada), while I can easily understand someone wanting to get rid of the traits particular to either sex. It's like someone having problems something extremely difficult and problematic decided that the solution would be to trade it for a different difficult and problematic thing which only works about half the time for people who already have it.
"...while I can easily understand someone wanting to get rid of the traits particular to their own sex. It's as if someone burdened with something difficult and problematic decided that the solution would be to trade it in for a different difficult and problematic thing which only works less than half the time for the people who already have it."
Sorry, posted in midst of edit.
19: deep rifts between generations.
I think that's exactly right. Those rifts are easily visible everywhere else where an earlier group had to break down barricades that later became somewhat invisible because of that group's efforts.
Is it important? My kids went to school without trudging ten miles uphill both ways in the snow while the weaker kids were pulled down by wolves and eaten before our eyes. I don't hold that against them. Much.
Fascinating Times article about kids who identify
I'd really like it if there were a publication called Fascinating Times.
Another city I'd think would be pretty okay for transgendered kids would be Seattle.
As to transgendered people being fucked up: the only tg person I've known personally (that I've known of) was the ob who delivered PK. I had no idea she'd had a sex change until late in the pregnancy; she was an absolutely beautiful woman with two little girls, one of whom looked *exactly* like her. And she had a successful medical practice. She may have been miserable in her personal life, for all I know, but superficial apperances seemed a-ok.
Even though we didn't keep in touch after college, I recently found out my freshman year roommate is a pre-op MTF. While back then he didn't seem any more messed up than any other freshman, I guess he did have some issues. Now she works on transgender issues and writes under her own name, and from the sounds of it doesn't sound overwhelmingly happy. The one quote of hers that stuck with me from her writing is: "Although I dislike my body and its sexualized and gendered parts, I still want to have sex - on my own terms."
that was me, sorry
It's okay, mike. It's common for people to introduce potentially sensitive or embarrassing information about themselves by saying that it's actually about "a friend" or "a former roommate".
I've met several TGs, some successful, some less so [male pattern baldness ≠ female appearance], some for whom the switch was a blessed relief and some for whom it didn't solve the basic problems in their lives. [My favourite couple has to be Pat Califia-Rice and his partner Matt, who both went from being GG lesbians to TG gays.] One of the teachers at my Offspring's high school was FTM, as well; it didn't seem to faze anyone. [Yay, SoCal...]
Some parents panic when kids start testing gender roles, especially in the more conservative areas; IMNSHO, that not only send the message to the kid that love is very conditional, but reinforces the most negative of the gender stereotypes: "girl toys" v. "boy toys", "feminine" behaviour v. "masculine" behaviour. Exploring those acculturated differences and deciding which, if any, are applicable to one's own life is probably more the norm in 21st century society than it was when gender roles were more rigidly defined.
Hell, I spent much of 3rd grade demanding to have very short hair and be called by a boy's name for no other reason than it seemed to me that boys had more fun. I didn't actually want to be a boy; I just wanted "boy" privileges. My parents went along with it until I decided to revert to girlitude. If they had objected or insisted that I wear long golden curls and lacy frills, the message would have been clear: Girls don't get to have fun, girls are second class, etc. What I got out of it was "if I pretend to be a boy, I can have fun, but I'm really a girl, therefore girls can have fun". I suspect more than a few of the transgendering 5-year-olds are experimenting with subverting social expectations they deem unfair.
I went though a bit of a phase were I was inordinately interested in girls clothes. Tried them on a few times. I must have been 8 or so? Still don't know what it was about. It was long gone well before puberty.
It's just as well because I would not work as a female. John Malkovich in a dress basically.
I've gotta admit that deep down I'm rather conflicted on trans-gender issues. On the one hand, I'm totally supportive of people dressing using any clothing they would like (regardless of the clothings "gender) or whatnot, on the other hand, things that involve hating your own body are unhealthy disorders. Anorexia is a disorder; wanting to amputate your own limbs is a disorder. Why is wanting sexual reassignment surgery any different?
I have a nagging feeling that my intuition on this might be totally wrong. And certainly, one should be kind and supportive of aquaintences and not pry into the personal business of strangers. However, if I had a son who wanted to wear dresses, I'd think I'd want to be supportive of that, but also do my best to help him learn to love his own body the way that it is.
What am I missing here?
I met Joan Roughgarden, the Standord evolutionary biologist, who is pretty cool and appears to be pretty happy. She had come to speak to my church about two of her books. One is about metaphors of evolution that appear in the bible, and the other, Evolution's Rainbow is about evidence homosexuality in the animal kingdom.
She also presented some of her own efforts at amateur anthropology. Transgenedered practices do not seem to be limited to the modern West. There does seem to be a breakdown between cultrues where you have actual operations, e.g., India, and those where people feel that they are what they dress.
wanting to amputate your own limbs is a disorder. Why is wanting sexual reassignment surgery any different?
Yeah, maybe a couple wires crossed if you're hellbent on having your genitals hacked off.
BTW, those of you who have never chekced out the galleries of BM ezine are missing out. (venture into the genital galleries at your own risk)
1.) I also wonder whether, as children, the transgendered boys shouldn't have separate locker rooms. As a girl (10-16), I wouldn't have been comfortable having a "boy in my locker room.
2.) How do girls--who are too young to have had an operation--act in a cross-gendered way? What I mean is that teh tom boy seems to be a pretty well-accepted role, but it doesn't generally mean that the girl thinks of herself as a boy, just as someone who likes to do boy things. It's also the case that most girls where pants now, so it seems as though there are fewer ways for a girl to mark herself out as a boy.
33 -- I would not claim to understand such kinks, but I think I have been told that transvestitism and transgenderism are not two points on a continuum of the same condition -- that they are two distinct phenomena.
37: Here they are, but how roles are divided is different in different cultures. I've talked about Samoan fa'afafine here, and they place people who who I would variously consider straight boys doing girl chores, gay men, transvestites (in the sort of theatrical dressup 'drag queen' sense) and transgendered (men quietly living as women, although without surgery or hormones due to lack of availablity) in the same box, or as points along the same scale. It's not clear to me that our mode of sorting people is cross culturally more valid than theirs.
Gender reassignment surgery is one of those (precious few) areas where I'm hesitant to spout off my probably-ignorant first impression. But I am pretty curious about its success rate, as measured by its capacity to make the subject happier. My understanding is that the process by which surgical procedures become available is much different (and less rigorous) than the one used for drugs (I'd link to the recent article on stents, but I'm writing this from my phone).
I know that there's a very thorough screening process used before folks are allowed to proceed with this sort of surgery, and you'd think they'd need to develop criteria based on outcomes in order to come up with that process. So maybe the success rate is high -- I have no idea.
I also wonder what the future holds for people who feel compelled to have a limb amputated -- the condition does exist, although I'm sure it's pretty rare. My instinct is to say that there's something fundamentally different about it, but I can't really say what that difference is, other than the fact that a lot more people spend a lot more time discussing and studying sexuality.
transvestitism and transgenderism are not two points on a continuum of the same condition
Indeed, they are not.
if you're hellbent on having your genitals hacked off.
Which is also distinct from transgenderism. (not safe for lunch)
10: Art Murmur is the first friday of every month, and a bunch of Oakland galleries stay open a little later than usual, and people can go wandering about. I suppose it's a hipstery thing, but I'm so thoroughly clueless and unfashionable I don't think I qualify as a true hipster, and I was just happy to hang out with my friends and look at pretty and amazing things. Also, the south end of it, at 23rd street, is right by the all night milkshake stand, and that is pretty awesome. I mean, they're not the world's best milkshakes, but they are nice. One of these days I'm going to remember to leave room for pie.
More relevantly: I'm totally biased, b/c I really do just love the bay area. But while it's definitely not perfect on the tolerance side--we had a hate murder not so long ago!--I think people do work really hard at it, and get ever better. There are certainly lots of safe places here, and massive resources and networks, and that can only help. I went to a private school that also had a boarding component, which has been known to sort of shelter transgender youth as they sort of adjusted to being able to express their desired identity. I remember my junior year some freshmen were watching a senior rehearsing, and they referred to the senior, quite innocently and credulously, as a "she". I was surprised to realize that this person, had, in fact, become a she, so slowly I hadn't noticed the transformation, and that the freshmen had never known her otherwise. In retrospect, I have to say, we all handled it pretty damn maturely and respectfully. We were sometimes a little flabbergasted at her fashion choices, but I don't think she got any *special* grief--just the same grief we all gave each other. There were a few logistical issues about bathrooms and dorm rooms and the like, but it was all worked out pretty smoothly. In as much as my school is very throughly a product of Bay Area culture--both in its preppiness and its cooperativity--I'd say that is a concentrated reflection of how this can be a good part of the world to raise kids.