Good read by Clare Flourish on that terrible confusion: Should you transition? Is the operation right for you?
Clare chose eventually to transition. She says:
“Part of the pain I am feeling right now is that I think emotionally, and I really need that to be valued. It is beautiful! It is!
More here: https://clareflourish.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/orchiectomy-ii/
Debunking Myths of Transgender Health and Well-Being
HRC has a series of four short videos debunking myths of transgender health and wellbeing. You can see them all here.
Myth #1: Surgery is a Top Priority for All Transgender People
- Surgery is an important part of the transition process for many transgender people, but it’s not the top priority for averybody who identifies as transgender.
- Whether people hav surgeries is totally and individual decition and there is no one way or right way to do a transition.
- Reducing people to what surgeries they’ve had and what their genital configuration is, is dehumanizing, objectifying and just impolite.
- There is a need for health providers and insurance companies to take the steps to recognize that everybody doesn’t fit into the neat boxes of male and female, woman and man, and that there are more diverse gender identities out there.
Discussing recent media coverage of transgender people, Emily McAvan asks why transgender children have become the acceptable face of the trans community.
She says:
The answer, in a word, is sex. Media images of trans women, in particular, tend to be extremely sexualised – the trans sex worker of colour is a stock figure in crime fiction, for instance – as was evident in the coverage of Mayang Prasetyo’s death, which featured photos of her wearing a skimpy bikini.
At the same time, trans women are presented as a threat to the sexuality of heterosexual men. Attraction to transgender women is pathologised as ‘tranny chasing,’ as another version of homosexuality. […]As trans theorist Talia Mae Bettcher puts it, transgender adults who cannot afford gender confirmation surgery (that is, most of the community) are a threat to heterosexuality because they ‘mismatch’ the codes of sex (that is, the sexed body) and gender (that is, gender performance, clothing, hair, and so on). Our culture works by organising genitally-determined sexed bodies into those who are potential sex partners and those who are not.
And I see it, what makes this even harder, is the fact that there are MTF transgender people who reinforces this reduction of gender to genitalia, as they insist that only those who have had SRS are “real women.”
Research aims to develop organs to help patients who have injuries or congenital abnormalities….
Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are assessing engineered penises for safety, function and durability. They hope to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and to move to human testing within five years…
The penises would be grown using a patient’s own cells to avoid the high risk of immunological rejection after organ transplantation from another individual. Cells taken from the remainder of the patient’s penis would be grown in culture for four to six weeks.
The article doesn’t say anything about trans men, but I guess it is only a matter of time.
Alta has also developed lab-grown vaginas and bladders. The Scientific American reports that Alta & co have implanted lab-grown vaginas in four teenagers suffering from a congenital deformation called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome.
Photo of Dr. Anthony Antala by Angela Rowlings taken from NY Daily News.
Denmark has become the first European country to allow legal change of gender without a medical expert statement. Why are clinical diagnosis and surgery still insisted upon elsewhere, asks Emine Saner
Probably because too many still think gender ought to be defined by what’s between your legs.
