Musings from my everyday life...

Michelle LeBlanc is a well known and gravelly voiced transsexual woman here in Quebec and her book, chronicling her life and transition, has been on bookstore shelves for almost 2 years now.

Yesterday I was in a store and a woman very politely approached me wearing a friendly smile and said

"Madame may I ask you a question? I just read Michelle Leblanc's book and I loved it!"

I knew where she was going and wasting a perfectly good opportunity to do outreach I responded quicker than my brain could keep up.

"Oh but I'm not a transsexual madame" in a very friendly way so that she would not feel embarassed.

She turned a little red and responded "Oh excuse me madame!"

I returned with "I guess I am a little large for a woman and people do sometimes stare at the mall"

For the record I am 6' 1".

"But I am not the least bit insulted and I think you're a very brave soul for coming up to me as most people would not have do…

I was born in 1962 and certainly was exposed to EDC’s but is there something to this? Thanks to AQV for the heads up…

Transsexualism: An Unacknowledged Endpoint of Developmental Endocrine Disruption by Christine Johnson (her abstract to her thesis) states:

“In recent years, evidence has accumulated demonstrating that endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have the potential to alter sexual development at the organizational and functional level in many species, including humans, indicating that this class of chemicals may play a role in the etiology of transsexualism.

Although transsexualism has historically been attributed to social or psychological causes, little data exists to support these claims, thus requiring a closer examination of the evidence regarding changes in sexual development due to EDCs. Toward that end, this thesis considers data from studies examining hormonal signaling mechanisms and changes in sexual development observed in wildlife, laboratory animals, and humans …

I’ve never had to ban anyone before from my blog and it pains me to do it. But when the discourse gets poisoned by someone’s personal vendetta against the big bad boogieman of the so called “transgender agenda” it just poisons the atmosphere.

For the record, I have no agenda nor do I have any interest in supporting people who expose themselves in women’s locker rooms or want to use their showers if they are biologically male. That is a tangent that I won’t follow because no one would defend that.

I am also not a spokesperson for the transgender umbrella. Whether people call themselves crossdressers, transvestites, transsexuals, gender variant matters not one bit to me as everyone has a right to live in a way that is true to their nature.

But when someone comes here repeatedly with the same axe to grind for a reason that is not entirely clear to me, it breaks down the civility of the discourse.

This blog was started for one reason only: to try and understand myself and hopefully draw f…

This is from Wikipedia but it rather well encapsulates the main arguments against gender disphoria being a mental disorder and instead more steeped in society’s non acceptance of gender variance or conversely as a birth condition.

Gender as a social construction

Gender characteristics are socially constructed and therefore naturally unrelated to biological sex. This perspective often notes that other cultures, particularly historical ones, valued gender roles that would presently suggest homosexuality or transgenderism as normal behavior. Some cultures have three defined genders: male, female, and effeminate male. In Samoa, the fa'afafine, a group of feminine males, are entirely socially accepted. The fa'afafine do not experience any of the stigma or distress typically associated with deviating from a male/female gender role, indicating that the distress that is so frequently associated with GD in a Western context is not caused by the disorder, rather it is a secondary resul…

Henceforth this blog will adhere to dealing exclusively with gender disphoria and how its sufferers deal with said condition.

This disphoria need have caused some degree of distress or impairment at some point in an individual's life and so I necessarily exclude drag queens, people who dress for kicks, or actors playing a role from this description.

I no longer want transgender versus transsexual battles here on this blog.

I am only interested in the concept of gender disphoria and how people deal with theirs. During my sessions with Helene, it was explained to me that in the hospital gender program they no longer use the term transsexual but only talk about gender disphoria and how to treat it.

The reason? Not everyone will ultimately deal with their gender disphoria in the same manner.

In Helene's group there are those well on their way to fully transitioning but there are also people like me who do not identify as full blown transsexual but are nonetheless strongly dis…

I needed to find the joy in my gender variance but it wasn't always there.

Instead, it was rather serious business.

This was something every fibre of my being compelled me to do but because it was taboo I was not to find any joy in it.

Sure it felt wonderful and relaxing but I thought it more a vice than part of my nature. This is why I have been concentrating on finding the joy in my expression of Joanna and, as she blossoms, I see more and more the payoff when I interact with others. I have truly begun to see this as a gift from God instead of a plague or a scourge.

Once you are out of your shell of culpability, people begin to see you differently and you in turn feed off their positive energy.

It's an amazing thing to watch.

I don't care for gender politics and I am not looking for special priviliges either. I don't particularly care if people call me a "man in a dress"; and what of it? That is essentially what I am. The only adjective I would add in…

Here is what brilliant psychiatrist Joseph Berger has to say:

“A prominent Toronto psychiatrist has severely criticized the assumptions underlying what has been dubbed by critics as the Canadian federal government's "bathroom bill," that is, Bill C-279, a private member’s bill that would afford special protection to so-called "transgender" men and women.
Dr. Joseph Berger has issued a statement saying that from a medical and scientific perspective there is no such thing as a "transgendered" person, and that terms such as “gender expression” and “gender identity" used in the bill are at the very least ambiguous, and are more an emotional appeal than a statement of scientific fact.

Berger, who is a consulting psychiatrist in Toronto and whose list of credentials establishes him as an expert in the field of mental illness, stated that people who identify themselves as "transgendered" are mentally ill or simply unhappy, and pointed out that …