Archive for the ‘Self-Organizing Men’ Category
Friday, April 22nd, 2005
Link: MEN'S NEWS DAILY: What Is Hip! [1].
Hmmmm...No!
What's Reactionary, Yes!
Misogynist, Check!
If any FtM, or any guy for that matter, wants to know how to not be a man, this site gives great instruction.
[1] http://mensnewsdaily.com/index.htm
Posted in Self-Organizing Men | 4 Comments »
Friday, April 22nd, 2005
Psychology Today [1] latest issue is more of the same, old kindler, gentler misogyny.
The Summary:
"Man is no longer king of his domain. He's now supposed to be an equal partner -- and a good listener, too. Blindsided by the escalating emotional demands of marriage, guys wonder how love became a no-win proposition."
The initial and fundamental premise Sean Elder's article is mind-numbing: men are structurally incapable of being equal partners and good listeners. In Elder's (and presumable PT's) world, men are slugs, literally.
Slug Man is not capable of responsibility, maturity, anything really.
Why? Well, you see, Women have good modern role models - their mothers and grandmothers. But Slug Men don't know where to go for mentoring. Susan Faludi brought this fact to our attention in her groundbreaking book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man [2]. Faludi looked to other men doing the difficult (I say difficult because so much of masculinity is about violence and domination) work of redefining masculinity in positive ways as the solution.
Elder, on the other hand, falls back on Mr. Misogyny as the reason for Slug Man's inability to be mature and behave like an adult.
"Women have so many dramatically different options in their lives. But where are men taking their cues about what it means to be a husband or a father? There is much less discussion in our society about that."
The guidelines for being a good husband used to be simple: provide, protect, maybe trim the hedges now and then. Now wives still want all that in a mate -- and more. Today's wife wants a confidante and soul mate as well.
The requirements changed with no warning, and many husbands feel blindsided. Most men were raised with the idea that making it in the outside world is how you score points at home. For many women that also still holds true.
It's not as though they (women) want men to be less goal-oriented or less interested in money. They're asking for a breadwinner and a best friend. (emphasis mine)
Slug Men also have dramatically different options, but I guess they're too cowardly to option them. Better, though, to blame women for Slug Man's fear. She's just a Vapid Bitch, anyway, right?
"What's so ludicrous about windsurfing?" asks Real [a Slug Man expert]. "It's effete -- which is another way of saying it's feminine." Yet guys are forced to contend with such inane stereotypes. (Have you ever tried windsurfing? It's about as easy as riding a shark.)
Worst of all, women are often complicit in the stereotyping. If a single woman goes to a party, says Farrell [another Slug Man expert], her friends don't push her toward the sensitive schoolteacher -- they urge her to chat up the banker. "People don't say, 'Look at that man, he's really listening to a woman, asking her questions and drawing her out,'" says Farrell. "You don't get introductions like that, even though you would be introducing the woman to the type of man who would be a wonderful husband and father. Instead the host will say, 'That fellow is an intern at Mt. Sinai Hospital.'"
Blah, blah, blah, blah. Nothing new here, Elder. Slug Men get to blame those Vapid Bitchs for all. "See I'm sensitive but they don't like it! Boo - hoo." No, women don't like Slug Men because they are WHINERS and make it ALL ABOUT THEM. Plus they can't keep a hard-on and be emotionally intimate at the same time, but I digress.
Slug Men relate to a word, "Man," some fake notion of masculinity existing in Leave it to Beaver episodes and blubber when women, saddled with the kids, the job, and the entire marriage, ask them to pony up.
To Slug Men and Elder and Psychology Today, I say:
Get a fucking life! Your problems are not the fault of women (even those Vapid Bitchs) expecting too much from you. Your problem is that you expect too damn little from yourself.
[1] http://jaysennett.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/save_this_man_1.jpg
[2] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0380720450/qid=1114186184/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-4944607-6529408?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Posted in Self-Organizing Men | 6 Comments »
Thursday, April 21st, 2005
I don't know if other FtMs are contemplating a gender clinic or obtaining the services of individual plastic surgeons and gynecologists to meet their surgery needs
Either route is problematic.
In sharing some of my experiences perhaps others may learn from them. For the sake of my own sanity, I will leave the name of the clinic off this blog. If any of you wish to know more, please email me. We can discuss things more fully offline.
When I first transitioned in 1995, I refused to see a therapist. Being diagnosed with a mental illness offended every fiber of my soul. It still does.
I do not believe I have a mental illness. A hormonal imbalance, maybe. Genetic disorder, possibly. But I know that I have always wanted to be man. From the time I spoke my first words, my mother says I conceived of myself as a boy. "I had to tell you repeatedly that you were a little girl."
Knowing this lifelong feeling to be the most truest thing in me, I simply refused to debase it with discussions about impulses or reasons or bad mothering with individuals who had no experience with transsexuals. In 1995/1996 in Chicago, the level of knowledge among therapists was nonexistant. But many wanted me as a client. Why wouldn't they? I offered them great financial and intellectual gain for no experience. They got something for nothing.
I said "screw that!"
Because I worked at a small teaching hospital in Chicago I was able to receive care from a very competent gay doctor known to me experienced with treating people living with AIDS/HIV.
He was a great ally and advocated insurance reimbursement for me on my behalf. The hospital where I worked was a Catholic one. His efforts went nowhere. But early on in my transition I had the experience of a medical provider working on my behalf without any letter from a therapist testifying to my mental veracity.
Once I started hormones, I refused to have top surgery. While I told myself I didn't want it, I think now I refused to pursue it for several reasons. I could not afford the out of pocket expense; the thought of recovering in a strange city in a stuffy, tiny hotel room did not appeal to me; and psychically I was not prepared to deal with the surgery.
I've eased into my manhood by fits and starts. The privilege that has accrued to me as a white man is enormous, unimaginable to me before hormones. Do I sound misguided when I say that I could not handle having my tits cut off because I was afraid? Afraid of what it would mean for me as an even closer approximation of man than before. Afraid of losing my already increasingly strenous ties to the so-called lesbian community. Afraid. Afraid. Afraid. My transition can be characterized as a sloughing off of layers of fear to find joy. Maybe I could have been less afraid. But who knows and regret gets me nowhere.
I lived with my decision to pass on surgery for nine years. Then I met a woman and asked her to marry me. She agreed. We both wanted to have a civil, state sponsored wedding. (More on my participation as transsexual in a heterosexist institution at another time.)
In order to legally marry, I had to at least have top surgery. My state of birth, Colorado, changes birth certificates with a letter from a surgeon. I also wanted a full hystorectomy to reduce my hormone intake and m primary care physician believed it medically necessary, too . Now I was at a crossroads.
My two choices were: Do I opt to participate in the gender clinic near my home, a clinic run under the auspices of a an international teaching university and subject myself and my partner to a rigorous set of therapeutic interviews to test my mental capacity, but that would work with my insurance company to pay for the surgeries; or, do I choose to purchase the surgeries I needed through doctors willing to treat me without said therapeutic interviews, but who may practice in Oregon or California or some other place far from my home and who would require payment up front?
I knew either route to be problematic. And boy, did I resent having to make the choice in the first place.
I do not know if I can convey to non-trans people with no experiences with transsexuals (not transgender people, mind you, but, full on, hormone taking, body loving transsexuals) how extremely offensive, stressful and ridiculous the whole medical process is for transsexuals. I am offended that I have to submit myself to stupid mental health questions with people only concerned about liability to have insurance pay for my surgeries. I am equally offended that my only other option is to go out of state for surgeries and recover in a hotel room. A fucking hotel room.
But I am most appalled and disgusted that my condition/state/reality was and is deemed a mental illness. I suffered from body dysmorphia and gender identity troubles. The whole process of being interviewed by a therapist for what amounted to permission to make my body the same as my heart was, in fact, so appalling to me, my future bride and I spent countless hours discussing the pros of heading out to California for surgery with the cons of recovering in a Best Western or Days Inn.
Finally, the possibility of recovery in my town, near my primary care physician, was more attractive than California, even with the mental health dog and pony show I knew I had to endure, so I made that first phone call to the coordinator of the clinic.
(I will continue with this thread in my next post).
Posted in A Bespoke Body, Self-Organizing Men | Comments Off
Tuesday, April 19th, 2005
I begin today's post on Deborah Rudiacille's book, The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism and Transgender Rights [1] by way of a comment posted by Susan Nunes to this blog [2]. She wrote:
Many feminists reject transsexualism because to them it is a blatant instance of self-hatred. Not only that, but it's not particularly ethical for doctors to make a killing mutilating bodies because somebody thinks they really are the other sex, which they can NEVER really be.
Nunes goes on to write that she agrees with this position. But what, precisely, does Nunes mean by "other sex" and "NEVER"?
Child Physiology [3] offers an animated graphic that describes how chromosomal and gonadal and genital sex arises in fetuses. The website also describes how chromosomal variations create intersex babies.
But I doubt a discussion of human physiology will dissuade Ms. Nunes. First, intersexuality is seen in our popular imagination as an innate condition. Transsexuality is a chosen one in this framing of gender variance; one that Ms. Nunes and her pals believe is a consequence of "self hating."
I further doubt that Ms. Nunes will be dissuaded by Deborah Rudacille's book. I will go into depth later this week on Deborah's excellent book. For now, let me whet the appetites of kindred souls by writing that Rudacille offers a compelling case that sex is in many ways determined at birth ("Victory!" I hear Ms. Nunes chiming) and is potentially being altered by the buildup of man made chemicals in our environments.
Rudacille argues that endrocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC):
(have) begun to produce the same kind of effects on human sexual differentiation that have already been observed in wildlife and laboratory animals. In this view, a previously rare collection of endocrine-mediated anomalies is becoming more common as a result of the bioaccumulation of these chemicals, many of which are stored in fat and transmitted to the developing fetus through the placenta of pregnancy.
Who knows how Ms. Nunes will respond to this information? Corporations should stop dumping chemicals and transsexual should get into therapy since I can NEVER be the opposite sex?
Perhaps.
But I can't help thinking of Shakespeare's line from Macbeth. "Methinks the Lady doth protest too much." What does Ms. Nunes get out of maintaining the frame through which she conceives of transsexuality? What does she, and others like her, profit by telling me that I'm simply misguided by my extreme self-loathing? What does Ms. Nunes' lens say about her gender? And why is she and others like her compelled to project that view onto me and my kind? What does she get out of that?
After ten years on hormones, two major surgeries and months and months and months of asking permission from the State to do what I have done, the riddle is not about gender.
The riddle is why people like Nunes are just so damn afraid about what I've done with my body.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375421629/qid=1113922696/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-4944607-6529408?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
[2] http://jaysennett.typepad.com/jay_sennetts_blog/2005/04/speed.html#comments
[3] http://www.sickkids.ca/childphysiology/cpwp/Genital/genitaldevelopment.htm
Posted in A Bespoke Body, Self-Organizing Men | 2 Comments »
Friday, March 25th, 2005
I realize it is easier for me to be transsexual than to be a writer.
Posted in Political Art, Self-Organizing Men | 8 Comments »
Thursday, March 24th, 2005
Anne Fausto Sterling [1] writes in her essay "How To Build a Man" [2]:
Medical managers use the following rule of thumb (when deciding an newborn's gender):
Genetic females should always be raised as females, preserving reproductive potential, regardless of how severely the patients are virilized. In the genetic male, however, the gender of assignment is based on the infant's anatomy, predominantly the size of the phallus.
Further she writes:
Medical practitioners do not permit one (a newborn) born with a penis less than 0.6 inches long to remain a male.
Fausto is unparalleled at describing science as social construction. Her work on intersexed [3] children has implications for transsexuals and transgenders and for our understanding of masculinity.
The marketing message is: size does matter. A message marketed from birth.
Violence [4] is marketed as natural. Why are we then surprised that men are so screwed up?
[1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465077145/qid=1111672970/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i3_xgl14/002-1283261-8943236?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
[2] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415910536/qid=1111673066/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-1283261-8943236?v=glance&s=books
[3] http://www.isna.org
[4] http://www.millarca.com/intersex.html
Posted in Self-Organizing Men | Comments Off
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005
sennett's thought for the day:
Civil rights movements are innovations in ways of being human. Stories in how to build better humans or be better humans.
Therefore, almost everyone is an innovator by definition.
Queers and freaks: Making the human experience more real.
Queers and Freaks: Brought to you by the humans that came before us.
Transsexuals: Technological Innovators
Others anyone?
Posted in A Bespoke Body, Self-Organizing Men | Comments Off
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005
These days it is fashionable for transgender activists to declaim against the medical system and declare that all transsexuals should receive medical access on demand.
Yes. Anyone who wants hormones or surgeries should have access to them. End of discussion.
But if I want my insurance company to pay for these needs, I need a diagnosis.
In the world of insurance companies:
diagnosis = icd9 code=covered benefit=patient gets what they need
Transgender activists screaming they don't need a medical diagnosis are correct. They don't need a diagnosis since they are not seeking medical services.
Transsexuals are. For transsexuals a diagnosis is absolutely necessary for insurance reimbursment. With a diagnosis many, many more transsexuals could access hormones and surgeries via insurance coverage.
Without a diagnosis, transsexuals need to work five jobs to be able to pay for services they need. Sometimes their wages are so low they never receive these services at all.
Is the system flawed? Check.
Is changing genders wrong? No.
Are insurance companies gatekeepers? Yes.
Are are all businesses abot making money? Last time I checked.
Is this cool? No. It isn't cool to make money off people's health.
But that is the REALITY in America. And I am ONLY interested in REALITY.
And the REALITY is, transsexualism is very, very, very, very expensive.
For me here are some costs had I paid out of pocket:
Therapy to receive diagnosis: $1,000
Doctor visits to obtain hormones: $250/visit
Bloodwork: $200-$750
Hormones (I use androgel) for six months: $1300
Top Surgery: $9700
Revisions: $1500
Bottom surgery (includes visits to doctor, tests, and surgeries): $25,000
(Any transgender activists out there with $40,000 for some transsexual in need? Didn't think so.)
But with healthcare coverage and a diagnosis, my total out of pocket expenses were:
doctor visits, blood work: free
hormones (androgel) six months: $28
top surgery: $7700
revisions and other visits: free
bottom surgery: $100
Yes, the therapy I endured was gross. The therapist who rendered the second opinion disgusted me.
But the diagnosis and healthcare coverage saved me about $30,000 (and that doesn't include ongoing doctor visits, blood work and hormones). I was able to have surgeries in my town, not fly off to some destination surgery spot for the priviledge of recovering in a hotel room nowhere near my primary care physician.
The whole process is a game, I know. One I want all transsexuals to win. So:
Remove all transsexual exclusions from all healthcare plans across the country.
Reduce the therapeutic requirements for a diagnosis of transsexualism to the barest minimum needed by insurance companies to assuage their fears of lawsuits.
Thoughts?
Posted in A Bespoke Body, Self-Organizing Men | Comments Off
Monday, March 21st, 2005
I've decided I hate the word transgender. Why?
The number one reason is that it does not include transsexual in an understanding way. By this I mean transgender does not include within itself a recognition of the impact of science, technology and medicine on transsexual lives; it refuses to acknowledge the piercing of injectable hormones, the psychic changes incurred through hormones, the cutting and sewing of flesh; it cannot understand the noose that is bureaucracy.
Transgender is now comfortable. Transsexual remains uncomfortable, a word that creates ambivalence and anxiety in the listener.
Transgender is driven by a political agenda; Transsexual is driven by revelation.
I have watched lesbian and gay communities ask me, "what do you need?" I respond, "better access to health care. Remove transsexual exclusions." Then I watch the same lesbians, bois, butches, gay men, fairies run out and seek to enact anti-discrimination legislation. Then stop there.
Back in the 1990s when I said transgender and transsexual people have things in common, I never said that I was the same as a transgender person. But somehow, the 1990s, when the only people fighting for our rights were other transsexuals, transformed into the 21st century, where now I am Not Really An Activist because I Refuse To Come Out; where I am Not Queer Enough because I Support the Binary Gender System through my choices.....
What an utter lack of imagination! To paraphrase Max Wolf Valerio [1], I'm not queer, I am a Freak. Proudly. With Needlepricks and Warrior Marks and Tears cried from joy and frustration.
Valerio continues in his essay Joker's Wild [2]:
I like to call it [transsexuality] a crime of passion, a moving target for bores and narrow-minded fuss-buckets, a necessary and inevitable subversion of the quotidian law of averages. After all, changing sex is a nearly savage act of body modification occupying a charged realm far beyond our culture's current obsession with "safety."
Like Valerio, I believe my life is one of the most extravagent experiments of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
I am a consequence of science, a living, breathing cyborg, made through my own designs and initiatives, connecting points in our infinite existence.
[1] http://content.gay.com/channels/home/trans_stories/valerio_max.html
[2] http://www.anythingthatmoves.com/ish17/jokers-wild.html
Posted in Self-Organizing Men | 3 Comments »
Friday, March 18th, 2005
If you want to be a man or are becoming one or flirt with masculinity or whatever, here is a partial list of things I've learned after about 12 dedicated years of travelling from F to M.
Being comfortable in your body matters.
Having a penis does not matter.
Treating women badly won't make up for your past or the body you may not like. Discretion is the better part of valor. Especially if you sleep with women.
Transsexuals and former transsexuals cannot pass.
Passing assumes a static body, which exists only in advertising.
People will not understand you.
You've gone to the edge and over.
You must understand yourself now that you're flying over that edge.
Gender is all about the body you want to be perceived in so you can have sex with people as the gender you are.
Sexual orientation may change with gender. Mine did. I went from being lesbian to being a straight man.
No is hot. In our world of voicemail, email, blackberry, mulberry, instant messaging, no is very, very hot. Make it a habit.
Your lover's sexual orientation has nothing to do with your gender.
Men are not the enemy.
More later....
Posted in Self-Organizing Men | 11 Comments »
