The following exchange took place in soc.women.lesbian-and-bi. Names have been omitted; I'm not interested in who said what, except to point out S. responded well to an earlier post by A. which was in the same mode.

A., I ask you to get to know who we are before you give us advice on how to live our lives according to your imagination.

A. writes:

> S. writes:

>>Hormones do have an effect on one's mind. That's something I've learned from my own experience, as well as talking to other MTFs and FTMs who have been on hormone therapy for a period of years.

>This was my impression, it seems to me that this drug trip could probably make some of the behavior of the other sex clearer.

>Perhaps in the future hormonal voyages into the realm of the other sex will be a "normal" behavior.

Drug trip? Future? This is hormone replacement therapy; it is required prior to surgery; it is medically supervised; it requires a therapist's recommendation. Hormones have been part of transsexuals' lives for decades. The standards of care outlining this treatment have been in place for at least 15 years; see the Standards of Care.

>>I didn't have breast implants, most of the MTFs I know didn't have them, either. Fwiw, the ones that did are almost all het as women. Very few of the lesbian MTFs had implants. My sample size is pretty small, admittedly, so that may not mean anything. Or maybe it does.

>It probably does, it indicates something about the individuals you are dealing with. My personal knowledge is small, but I have seen the sex magazines with these ex-guys with big tits ...

Have you heard of "prostitution?" It happens. The cost of transition is around $30,000, including corrective surgery, but not including any other cosmetic surgery. For most of us, that is entirely out-of-pocket; most insurance companies won't touch any of it. It is financially ruinous for many people, and some do resort to selling their bodies in order to come up with the money. The pictures you've seen are part of the same issue, and I would make no assumptions about them being representative of anything but markets of those magazines.

>There is a wide variety of males who feel the need to shift. I will admit that I'm reacting in large part to those who make me uncomfortable. They seem almost a mockery of the female and play into the most blatant stereotypes.

You're confusing stereotypes here; we're not drag queens or transvestites. There's another point that you're missing as well; in order to break the female stereotypes, we first have to learn to fit those stereotypes. As with any other complex issue, you can only break the rules once you know what the rules are.

As for as "most blatant" stereotypes, transsexuals generally avoid those from the start. I remember going to a gender-community Christmas party and taking my friend Olivia, who was just coming out. She picked out the transsexuals from everyone else, based on the fact that transsexuals were dressed to blend in. Based on that one rule, she classified about 20 people without error.

>>As for experimenting with men, I don't see a reason. I don't feel any attraction to them. The guy in the diet Coke commercial did nothing for me.

>This is your choice, but on this issue and others I start to wonder about "gender" and the composition of experience which creates. I think virtually every women here has had some struggle with the issue of males and most have even experimented. It is a shared experience, a common place of American femininity. One more thing you don't share directly, though you have perhaps seen it from the other side.

I will agree that our experience of life is different. But to link gender with orientation is blatant heterosexism. I had hoped that in a newsgroup based on women's attraction to women, heterosexism would be dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

Please understand that we go through a second puberty, as adults. It does not in any way resemble going through puberty the first time. Some people do alter orientation--it might be more accurate to say that they alter their expression of orientation, as I suspect there are a great many of us with underlying bisexual tendencies--but this does not include all of us. Please give us the courtesy of letting each of us deal with this issue as individuals. And please understand that this is not the issue that drives us; it is an issue that we have to deal with as a result of the other decisions we make.

I've written a lot more on the interaction between orientation and transsexualism.

>I'm not saying that this is wrong, but it does throw some questions on claims like "I wish to experience life as a female." Because there is a bit of pick or chose. A 14 year old girl has a lot less choice, all around her people are saying she should be interested in boys and people are even saying "Don't be too smart (or too strong) because then the boys won't like you."

I'm not "experiencing life as a female," I'm living it. It's not "pick and choose"; we make a fundamental change in our lives, and with live with the results. We don't have a lot of choices, either; we can choose how we deal with the issues, but there is no way we can make the basic issue go away. Believe me, most of us have tried to make it go away.

>So you are coming from a very different formative experience. I'm not saying this is bad. I think potentially it is great. One can get perspective from both sides. And socially if you want to be a "woman" that is a legitimate desire, but when it gets down to theoretical and detailed and deep questions about who you are, then (I think) a lot of stuff comes up.

A lot of this is severe understatement. There are aspects of our lives that are unique and unchangeable. Do a lot of deep issues come up? Yes, and some of us die because we don't learn how to deal with it.

>As I say my experience is very limited, but I did try to engage some "women inside" in dialogue on Usenet. In most (not all) cases it seemed to come down to fancy, frilly clothes (which a lot of women can't afford) and hot submissive sex (which a lot of women have to masturbate to get.)

I don't know where you talked to people on the net, but once again it sounds like you're crossing stereotypes. We are as individual as any other aggregation of human beings. Personally, I haven't worn a skirt of any kind in months. I have no interest in submissive sex, and I found your insinuations insulting.

>"One way of getting a feel for a common female experience is to learn to stare with admiring eyes at another and bring out their brilliance while they talk and talk" the response was incomprehension and rejection. Yet this is what a lot of young women learn to do (and I think it's a great skill though I wish it wasn't so often accompanied by ego loss). A lot fewer young men know how to do this for young women, yet it is nice for everybody to experience this. The example I chose is ambiguous on purpose, it doesn't require any special garb. Yet this "nurturing and nourishing" is something which tends to be more heavily clustered in females. Or at least a certain type is.

You can do this without ego loss; all it requires is accepting that another person's viewpoint is valid for them, and basic active listening skills. Getting to this point is a different journey for men than for women, but that's a separate issue.

>As for m->f who does not want to sample men at least visually, to experiment with feelings, quite bluntly some doubts come to mind. First off is this a suppression of homosexual aspects, a way of escaping that?

If I am a woman, and I am attracted to women, and I act on that attraction, then please explain how I am suppressing homosexuality. As I have stated here before, I live openly with a female partner.

But there is a more fundamental question here. If I am not male, and if I cannot be completely female even with surgery, then I am permanently out in the middle. Could you please explain who the "opposite" sex is? If I were to become homosexual, would that limit me to relationships with other male-to-female transsexuals? (It does happen, by the way.)

I've stopped using the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" when talking about transgendered people of any sort. One is attracted to men, or to women, or to both. It's less confusing that way.

>Second of all is it some ego thing, a closing off of certain aspects to men because women are "safer", less threatening.

I've lived long enough in this world to deal with male behavior. I simply don't like it, and I don't want a relationship that includes that kind of behavior. My partner feels the same way.

>This is a bit jumbled, but what I'm trying to say is that ordinary women don't have a choice. All of this stuff is thrown at them, they react to things in sexually mixed environments, male sexuality and power games are intruding. Confusing, sometime painful stuff that does a lot in shaping the psyche.

Most transsexuals are authorities on confusion. And pain.

>I think also quite frankly there is an issue of acceptance. Like it or not there is a two tier (simplifying things) and all kinds of assumptions are programmed into us. I notice a lot of women being more relaxed and open around gay men and I think a part of is something like "he does something like I do, something that 'real men' don't do." Again I'm fuzzy on the issue and there are so many people and reactions, but I think often this opening is mixed in with things like a mild contempt, he is no longer purely one of "them," one of the rulers, no longer quite a man. Because a somewhat inferior status is this pervasive, subtle social programming all around.

There's not much here to focus on, but I'm well aware of other people's perceptions. If their reaction includes contempt, that's their problem, not mine. And at certain levels, "belongingness" is something we pretty much have to learn to live without.

>The following is going to sound bitchy (but since I don't know you in depth it is not personal, but a reaction to things.) In a way you seem to be saying "I'm going to be a woman, but I'm going to chose the experiences I want, the experiences I'm comfortable with to define it."

This is an accusaction that is commonly heard about crossdressers. Transsexuals cross over that gender-role line, and stay there. The experiences that we can or cannot have at that point are not choices; I cannot choose to get pregnant, and I cannot choose to go back to being a man if an employer discriminates against me as a woman.

>It may not sound like it, but I am actually quite supportive of attempts to define new sexuality and gender, but I want these things to be ruthless in their analysis and their attempt to clarify realities that apply to us all. I think anyone who is sincere in taking this is going to have to expect inquisition, especially because there are so many boys who confuse being feminized with some troubling symbols.

No, you haven't come across as supportive. Ruthless analysis of issues is important to a successful transition, but it follows the basic understanding of who we are. It is necessary in deciding how to deal with our issues. And it must be grounded in reality, just as much as support must be grounded in reality.

>>As for reassignment surgery, I didn't do that for anybody else. I did that so i could feel at ease in my own body. I can't state it any plainer than that.

>It's your body, so I have to agree with your right to do it as a feminist issue. But I have read of men who went all the way and then decided that they were unhappy. So I have mixed feelings.

I gave a reference to the Standards of Care earlier in this post. The standards were put in place because people were going into surgery without adequate preparation for living a new life. Whatever else one may say about the SOC, I believe it has helped in this area. Even so, there are still people who go through transition, have surgery, and suddenly find that they don't know what to do next. It is such an overwhelming issue that it is hard to go through any of this without it becoming the defining issue in your life for a period of time. But life goes on.

>To get down to my root feelings I feel that this whole TS thing is in many ways shoving people into existing classes. OK you don't regard yourself as male which is fine. You feel many aspects shared with women which could be great. But do we put you into the female slot and hope you fit or do we start defining new slots? On one of my few ventures into daytime TV I saw an interview with a surgeon who had just agreed to operate on a married man, she was describing how all these policies were made and so much of it was rule of thumb and response to existing social assumptions.

Whether any of us like it or not, the "in between" role does not exist in our society, although it has been a part of many other cultures over the course of human history. There are limits to how far one person can change that.

>I guess my belief is that there are all kinds of biological experiences that you will never have (some women never have them either (and a lot of them feel lacking because of it)), you won't have that drip once a month, you will never have the fear (or actuality) of pregnancy. And all kinds of social experiences.

All true, and in the end, not relevant. Letting go of these things is important, but it is simply recognition that there is no way to change the past, including the factors that made me who I am.

>Potentially (I think) people like you are of great value. You can experience both sides, you are both male and female and neither. It's as though there needs to be a new slot which allows all these possibilities to emerge. I also think that this could turn out to be more comfortable to you.

It is much more comfortable. As far as roles go, there are times when we have to make our own. But once again, this is an individual decision; some people want to fit into a very standard female role, while others of us are more comfortable being open and different. Overall, I'm happier without a rigid role.

When I was making my decision about whether to have surgery, I spent some time speculating on this issue, and what it means to be a transsexual.

>My doubts are mostly intellectual, some vague feelings of unease, a lot of puzzles, but I know some women who could react bitterly, who would feel intuitively that by claiming to be a woman you are invading their space and their domain. And from there this clicks into "same old male power games." I'm not going to defend those women, it really doesn't matter if they are wrong, they are there, they will be a force if you try to involve yourselves in "women communities".

That hostility does exist; I've seen it. It is such a wall that I can't imagine any way through it, except with a mediator. I can only speculate about the source of this hostility, but my guess is that these women have been abused by men in private spaces, such as women's restrooms. If such is the case, I can empathize strongly; I, too, am an abuse survivor. But it is also true that I am not the person that they fear; I simply have no way to communicate that to them.

You may want to read about my past abuse and my survival. Or you may not want to read it; for other survivors, it may be triggering. But it is also loving; it is a piece of my recovery.

>If somehow a class of "not male" could be created and accepted, if a new niche could be made it would seem to make life easier. This is my sense of things.

The problem with niches and roles is that there are never enough of them. I ask you to let this one go. It's our issue, individually and collectively.

>Now back to your genitals. Your choice of surgery is one thing, but thinking about women that I have met (some with a nasty streak) and your apparent erotic attraction to females, I suspect that many would find sexual organs shrunken by hormones with the penis pulled between the legs more exciting and interesting than surgically crafted imitations of female genitals.

Personally, I find this invasive of my privacy. I have a committed relationship, and it works because we love each other and accept each other as equals. I would not accept a relationship with a woman who feels the way you describe, and the reasons that I would not accept this go far beyond anything sexual.

>Quite frankly in the tradition of gender class, you are a eunuch.

I do not accept this role. Neither is it yours to give.