Transcending Transsexual Medicine

by norrie mAy welby¹

There was a paper delivered yesterday delivered by Linda Darling² that claimed that the Transgender Lobby Coalition was of the view that "post-ops do not challenge anything". Well, as you might have observed from my opening performance piece, I am a "post-op". The first two spokespersons of T.L.C., including myself were post-op tranys.

We were the main movers behind T.L.C. moving from using the term "transsexual" to using the term "transgender".

"Transsexual" is a medical term that describes a medical disorder with a surgical solution.

We had been through that process and discovered that surgery had not produced any solution for us. We looked back at the medical process we had come out the other end of, and found it wanting. We agreed that the whole notion that we had suffered from a disorder [or conflict] of gender identity was insulting and ultimately, the cause of medically sanctioned genital mutilation.

Am I being harsh?

I lost many nerve connections, including many that while they are not a part of the autonomic system (the ones we are normally consciously aware of) were part of the whole complex process that triggers physically induced orgasm. I asked the surgeon that does most genital realignment operations in Sydney about this.

I first asked him if any follow-up study had been done on the ability to orgasm of "post-op tranys".

He replied that the rate of orgasm in women is low, and that therefore the rate of orgasm in surgically constructed women would be even less. Implicit here is the notion that the reason for low rate of orgasm is physiological.

Well, orgasm may be rare for many women, present company excepted, but this is due not to physiological variations, but to having partners who don't know how (or who simply don't care) to please them, or having been brought up to believe that "only bad girls enjoy sex".

So much for the surgeon's knowledge of how women function sexually. He went on to say that if a post-op trany claims to be orgasmic, he can tell when she's lying. The prostrate gland is still in tact, so according to him, there should be ejaculation. Not of sperm, obviously, the sperm producing testes have been removed, but of spermless semen.

I pointed out that many "pre-op tranys", because of some effect of hormone treatment, have orgasms without ejaculation. I myself experienced this. I knew what orgasms felt like before I'd gone on hormones, and they felt much the same pre-operatively, but there was no ejaculation. Perhaps the semen backfires into the bladder. I honestly don't know why or how this happens.

But the scary thing is, the surgeon didn't know either. He told me he'd never heard of this phenomena.

He claims to know how to make a pre-op trany into an approximation of a woman, yet he has little or no idea of how pre-operative tranys or women function sexually.

This discussion with the surgeon took place at the Gender Centre, on the fifteenth of May this year, at a forum advertised as being for all the trany community³.

None of the tranys who had done academic research into the results of genital realignment surgery were allowed into this forum. They wanted to ask the surgeon how he could keep operating, given that the rate of surgically realigned tranys satisfied with their surgery was only thirty percent⁴. They also wanted to ask him why the cost of this surgery had gone up so many thousands of dollars in so few years.

These tranys were barred by a security guard hired by the Gender Centre Projects Manager Bill Robertson, and under instruction from him. Aidy Griffin, the prominent member of T.L.C. who spoke here earlier, and who worked as a researcher on the AFAO National Needs Survey, slipped past the security grill. She politely and firmly refused to leave, and so Bill called the cops. His action in calling the cops prevented these tranys asking legitimate questions at a forum advertised as being for all of the transgender community.

The questions may have been difficult to answer, but that is all the more reason for asking them. The exclusion of select tranys perceived as trouble makers is akin to ACON calling the police to keep ACT-UP out of community forums. The exclusion of well-behaved and peaceful tranys, and the calling of police to enforce this exclusion, was undeniably a political action, one that Bill may now have to answer for, now that one of the tranys he banned was elected to the Gender Centre Management Committee on Monday this week.

I suspect that Bill has no idea that his actions were politically motivated. He appears to see himself as someone who knows what's best for tranys, better than tranys do themselves. This applies to many people employed to provide services to marginalised people, or those they see as weaker than themselves.

Those service providers who disempower their clients do not do so maliciously. They genuinely believe they know what's best, and that they have more knowledge, experience, and a broader overview than those they are contracted to "help".

Well, I'm afraid I cannot ignore the "well intentioned" way the Christian Missionaries "help" the heathen natives. The only people who know what's best for tranys are tranys.

This is not, as was alleged here yesterday by a supporter⁵ of the current Gender Centre staff and practices, a matter of "identity politics". (T.L.C. was one of the first organisations in Australia to challenge identity politics). It is the simple principle that those that live and acknowledge a particular experience, in this case, living outside of a fixed gender role, are those best equipped to understand others in that situation. The staff at the Gender Centre who have a single, fixed gender role, who see themselves as "real men" or "real women", simply don't qualify. No more than a "real man" is appropriate to run a women's refuge. No more than an exclusively heterosexual man is appropriate to run a service for gays, lesbians or bisexuals.

We have seen the result of inappropriate people running a centre funded for transgenders. We have seen challenges to the dominant way of "treating" tranys quashed. We have seen bureaucrats sliding with the dominant medical professional way of seeing things. We have seen bureaucrats forbidding tranys to ask the difficult questions, and calling the police to prevent this at all costs. (There is also a taboo on criticising individuals or organisations in the Gender Centre magazine Polare⁶, which is ironically described as a community forum).

This way of seeing things does little good for tranys heath and well-being. It does not give them permission to be anything but "women trapped in men's bodies" (or vice versa) and to seek medical help to fix this.

This view has resulted in tranys seeing themselves as victims and having tragically high suicide rates both pre- and post-operatively. This view has resulted in tranys paying surgeons enormous amounts of money to "fix" them, a bit like one "fixes" dogs I suppose.

We don't need "fixing". We're not broken.

Our problems, as transgenders, come from the way we are treated by mainstream society. A society that insists we fit the fixed gender roles prescribed for us at birth. That insists that we we are only acceptable if we are "normal". Yet, we only experience whole health and well-being when we are allowed to be the whole of who we are.

Alice Walker, in her book, "Possessing the secret of joy"⁷, tells of the mythology behind genital mutilation in Africa. We are all born hermaphrodites, female with the male part in the clitoris, and males with the female part in the foreskin. (I had a bit of trouble seeing why foreskins would be seen as female, until I thought of the practice of "docking", which some of you may be familiar with, where the foreskin is used as a receptacle for another male's penis. Of course the foreskin also also produces lubrication to facilitate intercourse, much as the vagina does). Anyway, the theory is that each human must have their natural form altered so as to fit in with the expectations of the society, that everyone must be solely male or solely female. For the sake of this, males lost their foreskin (but not their nipples) and females had their clitoris (and labia) brutally cut out in an operation that left many dead. Humans were routinely mutilated, all to keep the gender roles, and the order of power with the society intact.

This differs little from the surgery performed on tranys with their consent, and on intersexed infants without their consent.

I wonder how many tranys would consent to surgery if that consent was an informal one. If we were informed about the historical and cultural context of sex and gender and power roles. If we were informed of the consequences, of the loss of sexual enjoyment and the consequences of that of the fact that regardless of the shape of our genitals, at some stage we will still have to deal with narrow minds that see us as freaks.

I suppose gender roles came from some time in human development when a rigid division of labour and power was beneficial. I think that time has long gone.

We have anti-discrimination laws on the grounds of sex, homosexuality, disability, race and as of this week, transgender status.

Society has acknowledged, at a legislative level, that irrelevant difference cannot be used to discriminate. From fairer treatment of people, society's major resource. we have happier, healthier people and a healthier, more productive society.

Encouraging tranys to hide who they are, and to reshape themselves, to avoid discrimination, results in unhappier, unhealthier people and an unhealthier, less productive society.

Our health and welfare providers must now realise this, as our parliament has.

Our health and welfare providers have to change the way they are doing things. They have to change the way they sided with conventional modern medical practices and philosophy. They have to think beyond the old "we know what's best for you" idea.

They have to promote options that include⁸ post-modern ideas about gender, sex and power. Ideas that, I believe, allow far more scope for the health and well-being of tranys than the old sickness model⁹ offered.

References:

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.