Musings from my everyday life...

The old simplistic two-typology transsexual model proposed by Ray Blanchard falls apart under the close scrutiny and I will provide you with 4 very concrete and well-known examples to illustrate this: Kimberly Reed, Zagria, Gigi Gorgeous and Lynn Conway.

For those of you not familiar, the model works roughly like this:

Autogynephilic (woman and/or self-loving)/Androphilic (man-loving)
Not-feminine in childhood/Feminine in childhood
Late-transitioning / Early-transitioning

Now let's examine each case:

Lynn Conway was a patient of Harry Benjamin’s who fathered children before transitioning and eventually marrying her current husband. She is an outspoken critic of the Blanchard work and is a tireless defender of transgender rights. But which typology was she?

Kimberly Reed is a feminine and beautiful woman who transitioned in college, was an all-star high school quarterback and has a female life partner. Hence relatively early transition, gynephilic and not obviously feminine in chil…

Well the dogmatically-driven idiots over at Breibart News are at it again.

Telling us that the facts point to transgenderism being rooted in an ideological movement instead of in science. Well why didn't they tell me that when I was a kid I know it would have made all the difference to me.

Clearly these people are not interested in facts. Also where did they get the "born in the wrong body" line for I haven't heard any trans person I know utter those words.

If these right-wingers had done even some basic homework they would know that gender dysphoria does not respond to psychotherapy and, I don't know about you, but I am not mentally ill.

But this article is about ideology driving fact creation instead of the other way around.

I take it these people would rather have us try conversion therapy on these kids and then witness its utter ineffectiveness. Or perhaps they would prefer we shoot transgender people like horses with a broken leg?

It should be obvious to …

Ava DuVernay's "13th" is an extremely important film for it chronicles the persistent racism in the United States against African Americans. The title refers to the 13th amendment which was a way to facilitate the incarceration of slaves who had now been emancipated.

Beginning with the mass incarceration of freed slaves after 1865 and moving on to segregation and painting of blacks as dangerous and naturally criminal, there has been a consistent effort to marginalize this community.

DW Griffith's famous film “Birth of a Nation” depicted African Americans as rapists and dangerous killers and even glorified the Klu Klux Klan. This film saw the invention of the burning cross which, in an example of life imitating art, saw its adoption by this fringe extremist group as a new way to terrorize.

The US has 5% of the world population and yet currently has 25% of the world’s prisoners; a healthy portion of whom are black. This is a staggering and troubling statistic.

The Repu…

I was watching Camille Paglia being interviewed recently.

I am not a fan and her almost histrionic tone as she stammers her way through a conversation is almost jarring. She knows absolutely nothing about gender dysphoria but of course has lots to say about transgender youth. Remember how I said recently that those least well poised to speak are often the most vocal?

But there was a point made that merited reflection: As we come out from hiding might some of these trans kids be too quickly turning to body modification rather than settling for being authentic transgender people?

What about creating a societal environment where they don’t need to do that.

Make no mistake in that some of these transgender youths are deeply dysphoric and may be prime candidates for full transitions but for others it’s not as clear cut.

Now that our environment is more receptive to transgender people and we are emerging from hiding they may want to take a few deep breaths before hand.

However if I have obs…

I decided to take up Calie’s challenge and write a blog post about why some people stop going out dressed after a while. This issue was brought up in her introduction to a T-Central featured post from the “All About My Lucy” blog. I have no doubt that the answer relates back to the gender spectrum and how some people use crossdressing as fun and are not gender dysphoric. Sometimes the two worlds blend but they aren’t the same thing at all.

This was brought home to me a few years ago when I went out with a crossdresser and his wife. The evening was fun and full of interesting conversation but as time wore on I began to realize that there were major differences between this person and myself. For me this was an issue of identity versus for him a social and perhaps sexual turn on which he shared with his wife. They might go out a few times a year like this and then put “her” back in a suitcase.

I am a borderline transsexual and nothing will ever change that. After 54 years of existence I…

Louise Lawrence was one of Harry Benjamin’s first 10 patients and was called Doris in the original writing to preserve her anonymity. She actually predates Virginia Prince who also corresponded heavily with him over the years.

Both Prince and Lawrence eventually transitioned mostly socially with some level of estrogen ingestion but with no genital surgery.

Louise was a keen student of the subject and wrote under the mom de plume Janet Thompson. She wrote Benjamin many letters over the years no doubt helping him fashion his disorientation scale which in today’s nomenclature we would describe as dysphoria intensity. She met Benjamin via Alfred Kinsey in 1948.

I have written about her before in this blog.

What makes her important besides her keen intellectual interest in the subject was that she straddled the line between what was then termed a transvestite and a transsexual which helped Benjamin see the sometimes blurred edges of dysphoria. As Louise’s life advanced she found it increas…

To anyone who follows this blog or to those who might read this post, I want to wish you all a peaceful and blissful Christmas.

This blog increasingly focuses on the ideals of justice and fairness for all no matter what your creed, sexual orientation, gender identity or social status in life. Let us hope that we work our way to a more peaceful world and that one day all people will be able to thrive through having the minimum requirements in life which are a roof over their heads, access to clean water and a warm meal in their stomach. All this being made possible through some sort of gainful employment.

Social justice for all shouldn't be a luxury but instead a basic human right.

God bless!

In this internet era where faux news has become the norm it is more possible than ever to live in an alternate reality. Some Trump supporters even go as far as disbelieving that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote which she did by almost 3 million votes. Some of his base even thinks that California electoral college votes shouldn't count.

This is beyond surreal.

David Pakman goes through some recent poll data that is frustrating but not that surprising given my opening statement. People believe what they want to and will not be deterred with inconvenient facts.

For this reason, I am not certain that the current state of polarization in the United States is easily reparable because even relatively intelligent people are falling prey to ideology that falls along their political and religious beliefs.

This is like a bad science fiction movie where the people are possessed by alien life forms a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers and if I thought the Bush years were bad this is going t…

Coming from a strict Catholic background I have sought to reconcile religious teachings with my observations and to understand what makes religious conservatives so uptight about recognizing the realities of our modern existence. After all, sexual orientation and now gender identity for example, are becoming clearly understood to be something one does not choose but rather something one is born into.

I think the problem centers around the idea that certain religions adopt as doctrine certain immovable tenets that, when questioned, are akin to removing the thread from the sweater that threatens its whole integrity. In other words, if one accepts these ideas then other parts of the belief system begin to be called into question.

Throughout my life I have had always had the conflict of believer versus my rational observations. However that rationality did not preclude the existence of something beyond our understanding. I simply had to reconcile my understanding of the physical world wit…

Not surprisingly religious conservatives are foaming at the mouth over this but other people are praising the classic magazine for recognizing an obvious reality: that our understanding of gender is evolving. We used to think that plumbing exclusively determined how someone identified which has been found to be a simplification.

Young 9 year old transgender girl Avery graces the cover.

Here is an excerpt:

"She has lived as an openly transgender girl since age 5, and she captured the complexity of the conversation around gender. Today, we're not only talking about gender roles for boys and girls—we're talking about our evolving understanding of people on the gender spectrum.

The portraits of all the children are beautiful. We especially loved the portrait of Avery—strong and proud. We thought that, in a glance, she summed up the concept of "Gender Revolution."

Like her, all of us carry labels applied by others. The complimentary ones—“generous,” “funny,” “smart”—a…