A recent WSJ article (12/28/07) about transsexuals and morality raised my ire.  The author, Naomi  Riley, said that transsexuals were generally confused about gender and as a consequence she relies on an author, Paul McHugh’s, statement that transsexuals are no happier after surgery than before.

Naomi, Paul you are both full of unmitigated erroneous nonsense.  I worked with pre and post-op transsexuals and I found a dramatically different reality.

In the mid 1970’s, working with the Human Sexuality team at Glide Church, I became interested in the problems, mostly financial, of the pre-op transsexuals.  I decided to organize the post-op transsexual community into a group that would help directly fund and loan money to the pre-ops.

My organizing effort was a 100% failure.  I met and talked with more than two dozen post-op transsexuals (all women in their new lives) who’s names I got from their surgeons.  Every single one, every single one, was so successful and so well acclimated to her new life that she wanted nothing to do with her past life and she wanted no chance for the world to find out about her earlier life.  The post-op transsexuals were all successful in their transitions and they were all delighted with their new lives.

Naomi and Paul, I suggest you do some good research like I did before you propagate your bigoted unfounded nonsense.

Rather the Transsexuals here have the problem that our external sex doesn’t match our mind sex. Those who are TS either Male to Female (MTF) or Female to Male (FTM) go through extreme depression, confusion, suicidal thoughts, horribly low self esteem, hatred and taunts, discrimination of all kinds. Worse yet some suffer violence bad enough to result in serious injury or even death. Our pre-op suicide rate runs 31% from some estimates. Over 50% of TS teens will have had at least one suicide attempt by their 20th birthday. A Gender Therapist claims that the suicide rate is 9 times above the average. No matter who’s right they all agree that its the highest for any group. Most Transsexual people have at least thought of suicide if not actually trying it.

Transsexualism is thought to start at birth and most can tell you that their first concious thought was of being the wrong gender. TS children quickly learn that speaking or acting how they really feel will put them through violence and hatred, estrangement from a parents love and the taunts of all their peers. So most suffer in silence and alone, never growing up as themselves. The trauma of being forced to lead their life as someone other than themselves can lead to some mental disorders separate from Transsexualism. This is still a recognized medical condition and not a life style choice.

Then Puberty strikes and the living nightmare begins. Body parts start growing and changing. MTF”s who feel like girls inside grow body hair, muscle mass and experience nocturnal erections and lower voices that they can’t stop and it will haunt them forever. FTM’s who feel like boys inside grow breasts and curves and start their first monthly reminders of their body’s gender. Every period begins a new depression. Many Transsexual teens start cutting themselves or mutilating their genitals. Who do they tell? Who will listen to them? They are ALONE with their pain til they reach out and seek help.

Laura’s Playground is a Transsexual Support Site. We have peer to peer counseling in forums and our chat rooms. Moderators are certified in Youth suicide prevention. They are extremely busy trying to reduce our high suicide rate. Our users support each other and all can tell you about many of our close calls. Here we offer personal support to help people straighten out their lives no matter what that means or where they end up. I can tell you from experience that many are just plained scared to come out into a homophobic world. Their own families are feared even more.

Our moderators run Transsexual online support group meetings . If you are transsexual come to them online and find out that not only are you not alone but there is hope and help for you. You have a right to exist and be happy. We hope to show you how. Surgery is not the only option available to you.

Being a Transsexual is not a choice it is thought to be inborn. The Hypothalmus in the brain which governs sexuality is female sized in the MTF and Male sized in the FTM. The phenomenon is Physical proof that a problem exists. Newer MRI machines can show the defect.

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Transsexualism is identifying with a sex or gender role other than the one that was set out for an individual at birth. Transsexual women, women who were born into a male role, often use female hormones, or Hormone Replacement Therapy to reduce their testosterone levels and evenually lose the functionality of their reproductive organs. Conversely, transsexual men, men who were born into a female role, use testostrone to aquire male features, such as facial hair and a deeper voice. Both types sometimes undergo Gender Reassignment Surgery to remove their reproductive organs. Unfortunately, many Male to Female transsexuals gain validation for their new gender identity by offering sex to men,thus facilitating sexual hypocrisy and homophobia, as they try to differentiate themselves from the tag ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ and draw a difference between the sex they have with men and that that occurs between two men that identify as men.

In the past no transsexual person would ever be given medicines or surgery until they had lived as the other sex for a while. This was usually for one or two years. It was sometimes called a Real Life Experience (RLE) or Real Life Test (RLT.) The reason for this was to make sure that the person really knew what life would be like after transition. However, many transsexual people hated the RLE. This was partly because they felt that doctors did not respect them enough to make their own decisions. It was also because some transsexual people were placed in terrible danger by the RLE. If a transsexual women had a deep voice, facial hair, and was two meters tall, it would be very dangerous for her to go into a women’s restroom even if she wore a dress and make-up. Today, some doctors will treat people before they have a RLE.

“The sari is the most flattering garment. It disguises manly shoulders, takes attention away from a masculine neck,” he added, as the final touches to makeup were made in the studio dressing room, minutes before cameras started rolling on the first session.

A complex procedure even for experienced hands, sari tying is a particularly fraught process for Rose, formerly Ramesh Venkatesan, whose mother never taught her the skill and refuses to see her wear one. The result was flawless.

When it is broadcast to an audience of up to 64 million people in the southern state of Tamil Nadu this month, “Ippadikku Rose” (Yours, Rose) is expected to cause a sensation, introducing India’s first transsexual celebrity to television.

The show’s director, Anthony Thirunelveli, said the half-hour show was conceived as family viewing but would discuss issues of sex and sexuality, confronting “hush-hush, under the carpet subjects.” The first nine episodes that finish recording this weekend will tackle, among other things, divorce, sex in India’s call centers and sexual harassment.

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The main attraction will be Rose herself, the supremely poised, 28-year-old, U.S.-educated, former Web site designer, with a masters in biomedical engineering, who started wearing women’s clothes full-time four years ago and who is still waiting for acceptance from her family and society at large.

If nothing else, the show will start to propel India’s downtrodden community of transsexuals, or hijras, into the mainstream. Known as the third sex, most are born male but see themselves as women. Hijras appear in positive roles in ancient Indian mythology, but modern society has tended to be less tolerant. The majority are shunned by their families, find it impossible to get conventional jobs, and turn instead to begging and sex work for a living.

“Transgenders in India are seen as immoral and evil. I will break that image by being articulate, intelligent and a bit like the girl next door,” Rose, said, calmly leafing through the script of her first show - an interview with a prostitute about her recently published autobiography.

“This is a radical development. There have been transsexuals in Indian movies, but always as the object of ridicule or as villains. This is the first time in the history of Indian television that a transgender person has been featured as a television anchor.”

Pradeep Milroy Peter, the head of programming at STAR Vijay television, a Tamil-language channel owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., acknowledged feeling nervous about how the show would be received.

“We don’t know how much acceptance there will be. We are crossing our fingers,” he said, straining to make himself heard as builders, electricians and lighting technicians hurried to finish building the set (a white sofa on a female symbol lit up with green neon lights, set against the circular, arrowed male symbol, in pink neon). “The market has a craving for talk shows, but this one comes with a difference. It’s very experimental.”

His anxieties are understandable. In a country where the boundaries of sexual tolerance are shifting daily, there is still much uncertainty and unpredictability about the position of the line between acceptability and offense. Fashion television was briefly banned for showing too much flesh, a film star’s career lay in ruins after comments that appeared to condone pre-marital sex, and fringe political groups like nothing better than to whip up moral outrage.

The channel was not searching for controversy, but executives were so impressed by Rose’s immense screen presence and confidence, and her determination to fight prejudice, that they agreed instantly to allow her to be host of her own show, despite her lack of experience.

“People here will not openly let transsexuals into their homes,” Rose, who now goes by only one name, said, revealing that she had deliberately isolated herself from college friends and neighbors to avoid rejection. Her middle-class parents threw her out when she announced to a group of 40 family members, gathered to agree on a suitable bride for her, that she was not interested in women.

“I’d already grown my hair long and had laser treatment for my facial hair, but they were still hoping I’d act like a boy. There was utter silence when I told them,” she said. For a while she supported herself, working as an American-accent trainer in a call center, but her contract was not renewed when she started dressing as a woman. In the hustling streets of Chennai she is always stared at, sometimes abused.

Copyright @ 2000-2004, Lynn Conway.

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Photo of Lynn by Bill Pugliano, Oct. 11, 2000

 

Thousands of chip designers learned their craft from Lynn’s textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems, which she co-authored with Prof. Carver Mead of Caltech. Thousands more did their first VLSI design projects using the government’s MOSIS prototyping system, which is based directly on Lynn’s work at PARC. Much of the modern silicon chip design revolution is based on her work.

Lynn went on to win many awards and high honors, including election as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional recognition an engineer can receive.

By the 90’s, chips held enough transistors so that entire superscalar computers could be put on single chips. Lynn’s DIS invention suddenly became used in almost all the powerful new PC chips, making them much more powerful than they’d otherwise have been. Lynn’s work thus had yet another big impact on the modern information technology revolution.

Most computer engineers thought DIS was a generalization of decades of work, and had no idea it had been invented in 1965. It caused Lynn great angst to see her wonderful invention so widely used, and described in all the computer architecture textbooks, without anyone knowing it was her idea.

The answer is that women like Lynn have lived, especially in the past, in a holocaust of stigmatization, persecution and violence. They could not reveal their past identities without risking great physical danger to themselves, and great harm to their careers and their personal relationships.

You see, Lynn was born and raised as a boy. It was a terrible mistake, because Lynn had the brain-sex and gender identity of a girl. However, back in the forties and fifties there wasn’t any knowledge about such things, and Lynn was forced to grow up as a boy. She did the best she could at it, but suffered terribly from what was happening to her. She was still a boy and had a boy’s name when she worked at IBM.

After years and years of trying to find help, she finally connected with the pioneering physician Harry Benjamin, M.D. in 1966, shortly after he’d published his seminal textbook The Transsexual Phenomenon. That text was the first to describe the true nature of, and medical solutions for, Lynn’s mis-gendering affliction.

With Dr. Benjamin’s help, Lynn began medical treatments in 1967. She became one of the very early transsexual women to undergo hormonal and surgical sex reassignment to have her body completely changed from that of a boy into that of a woman. Sadly, just before Lynn underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1968, she was fired by IBM for being transsexual and lost all connections to her important work there.

Lynn had managed to put together some fragile bits of support and help from her family and friends. However, when IBM fired her everyone lost confidence in what she was doing and her support system collapsed. Lynn went abroad for her surgery, all alone. She had lost not only her career and professional reputation, but also her family, relatives, friends and colleagues. She faced a frighteningly uncertain future without a soul in the world to help her other than her doctors.

Amazingly, Lynn became so happy, and so full of life and hope after her transformation, that her career took off like a rocket. Moving up through a series of companies, she landed a computer architecture job at Memorex in 1971. In 1973, she was recruited by Xerox’s exciting new Palo Alto Research Center, just as it was forming.

By 1978, just 10 years after her gender transition, Lynn was already on the verge of international fame in her field for her VLSI innovations. By then she was writing the seminal textbook on the subject, and was heading off to M. I. T. to teach the first prototype course on VLSI systems.

Within two years, universities all over the world were adopting her text for similar courses. The Department of Defense started a major new program to sponsor research to build on her work. Scores of startup companies began incubating and forming to commercialize the knowledge. All this happened without people catching on to Lynn’s secret past. She could never have survived and done it if they had.

However, for 31 years after her transition, Lynn carefully remained in “stealth mode”. Only her closest friends knew about her past. Lynn knew of other transsexual women who had been socially ostracized, ghettoized, beaten, gang-raped, murdered or driven to suicide when “read” or otherwise discovered by brutal, hateful people.

For years Lynn lived with an ever-present sense of danger, fearful that exposure of her past could cause her to lose her civil rights, legal rights and employment rights, and to suffer estrangements in her professional and personal relationships.

At the same time, Lynn was dismayed that transsexual women are still treated so inhumanely by parents, relatives, employers, the legal system and society at large. The total rejection of teenage transgender and transsexual girls-to-be by their families is especially tragic, since it often happens just as they first cry out for help, and can doom them to years of marginalized existence.

Lynn began to think that her story might help somehow. Societal views are partly a media problem. Images of transsexualism routinely come from stories of “transition”. That’s a time when media can focus on prurient, somewhat shocking and often embarrassing aspects of someone’s gender change. The stories seem superficially sympathetic, but often convey a sad, dreary image. Readers are left feeling sorry for the “poor things”, and “certainly wouldn’t want it to happen in their family”!

What doesn’t come through is the miracle of release from entrapment in a male body that the transsexual girl experiences, and the happiness she finds as a woman later on. Folks never learn about the tens of thousands of post-operative women living among us who are very successful and fully accepted as regular gals. The public simply never sees these successes.

Why is this? Because almost all these women live in stealth, just as Lynn did, fearing what might happen if their pasts were revealed. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of young pre-operative transsexuals live in fear and doubt about their futures. They are often excommunicated by their families and lose their jobs, as had happened to Lynn, when they identify their problem and seek medical help.

Lynn is the first truly successful case to come out of long-term stealth and tell her story. That story should give hope to young transsexuals. It should help parents see possibilities for happiness for a transsexual daughter-to-be, especially if they were to support their child’s efforts to transform a “boy’s” body and become a woman early enough in life. It should also give employers pause for thought before firing someone - just because of their transsexualism.

The day will come when gender transition is no longer be seen as a sad, somewhat shameful and tragic event, but instead as a wonderful life-giving miracle for those so unfortunate as to have been mis-gendered at birth. Lynn hopes to live to see that day.

Approximately 30,000 to 40,000 postoperative transsexual women live in the United States, and many thousands more are now in the process of gender transition here. These numbers are much larger than commonly assumed by the public because a veil of invisibility hides the true nature and extent of the transsexual condition. Especially hidden are large numbers of highly successful women who have fully transitioned. The reason is that most successful women live in “stealth mode” or are “woodworked”. They leave their pasts behind and hide in plain sight in order to avoid social stigmatization and get on with their new lives. Their personal successes insure that they assimilate and blend right into society.