Hormones will do hell to one’s emotions, shifting where one stands in the fight vs. flight spectrum and changing how easily one cries. To me this would be sufficient reason to require anyone undergoing hormone therapy and/or SRS — if you want to eliminate currently-required sequence — that they see a shrink during transition. This *would* make sense, except that no matter what happens legally it’ll be damned hard to find a good psychologist in Georgia… the natives don’t even know what to do with a depressed person there, for Ghu’s sake.

The physical implications vary more depending on what the transition being made is. An MtF can easily have sperm stored for later use; an FtM can store eggs but it requires extra surgery, and if they won’t be dating women they’ll have to find a third-party gestational mother. I’m more vague on how hormones affect MtF’s sexually and how SRS affects anyone sexually, but that seems to be an iffy area as well — penis options for FtM’s seem pretty weak at present. This to me is the best explanation for checking and double-checking that the patient knows what they’re going into and wants to do it… the question is when artificial wombs and stem-cell-grown penises will become available to make this (and so many other things…) a moot point. I mean, assuming certain groups don’t halt all biological engineering and decree that sperm are teeny-tiny people before we get that far.

 My political agenda has been mentioned at Sixteen Volts and Sufficent Scruples.  Sixteen Volts is decidedly anti-feminist.  Sufficient Scruples is not and does an excellent job describing why the Benjamin Standards might be offensive to…

First, I have never said I don’t believe gender exists. It does. I just think it’s constructed within myself, through medicine, states, societies and science.

It is a paradox: gender is both constructed and real.

Second, luddite feminists refers to the unstinting practice of these particular feminists of refusing to acknowledge the scientific complexity of gender. They fear both science and technology. Plus they abhor the treatment of women based on their biology but hate transsexuals for our…biology!

Third, transsexual healthcare rests on a diagnosis. You know this. Receiving a psychiatric diagnosis for a condition that has existed since humans have existed, well, no. Do I have an endrocine disorder? Maybe. Recent scientific evidence points to endrocrine disrupting chemicals as one possible cause of transsexualism. Thalidomide babies seem to be dispropriately represented among MtFs in the U.S. I believe my grandmother may have been prescribed Thalidomide, too. But often doctors prescribed without telling the mother. So who knows.

Ultimately my preference is to be able to access hormones with no diagnosis. Sort of like botox. I get that that positions seems radical. I see it as practical.

And Harry Benjamin is considered the father of transsexual healthcare. He created his standards after watching unscrupulous physicians in this country cheat transsexuals out of money and provide shodding healthcare, which sometimes resulted in death. What he did in the fifties was absolutely necessary and radical.

For a good primer of TS/TG rights and the history of the science behind TS, read The Riddle of Gender. Or you can go to my blog, type in deborah rudacille in the search box and read some entries I did on her.