Sis & the Shower

I decided with my sister that it’s arguing with her or approaching her in a more assertive fashion just isn’t going to bring the results I want, she’s too entrenched in her worldview. The only way to ever get close to her is just to act as the person I am and let her get to know me as Jennifer, and meanwhile continue with my life without rancor.

So I bought her a $25 Target gift card and today sent her a baby shower card:

Sorry I missed your baby shower.  Hard to believe there’s only one more month — are you excited yet? Love, Jennifer

Honestly, that is “who” I am and how I want to be known. I’ll leave things sit with here, if there are changes to be made to our relationship; otherwise I am going to behave as her sister and not expect anything else from her, and invest just enough to have a pleasant connection to her rather than a deep one.

It’s hard enough as-is, without expectations of mine putting more pressure on the situation.

Getting Carded

My friend L and I went shopping this weekend. She’s going full-time on Friday at work and wanted help making sure she had ‘work clothes’ vs her normal attire. Unfortunately, she seems to be far better at dressing for looking good while out and doesn’t like scaling back a lot for work and general comfort; we spent quite a while arguing over shoes, and finally I convinced her to get a rather plain pair of black, heeled mules on sale, since they’d go with anything.

(If you go plainer on shoes, you won’t need as many shoes to start with and you can accessorize to make up for the lack of bling.)

I wandered off into my area of the store, she found me a short time later… upset. She will not be legally female, name-wise, until December, so she’s stuck using her male ID and credit cards right now. She had finally gotten to the counter with her purchase, and then the male clerk asked her if her husband had given her permission to use his credit card, and in front of everyone she had to basically state that she WAS the owner of the card and show her ID… she takes that pretty hard.

But I did too, for awhile.

“I totally understand it, I feel so bad for you, and it’s rough. At the same time, you only have another month of this. One more month… and this is exactly the problem you WANT to have, if any, in terms of future success. Being perceived as female and thus as yourself isn’t a bad thing, it’s just want you want in the end, having them insist you are a woman is exactly where you want things to be; so this is more a matter of riding things out. You’re almost at the end!”

But… still hard when you’re in the middle of it.

New Disclosures, New Friends

Someone was asking questions about transsexuality and sexual orientation on the general forum, so I talked to them some behind the scenes about my experience. She had no idea I was trans but was cool with it and is very supportive of her m2f friend.

She sent me one little comment that read like this:

no I didn’t know that, but it makes no odds, it seems you are well loved by all on here with except perhaps <edited>

That always kills me when someone tells me that unexpectedly. I don’t often feel loved. when some random person says that, it hits me as new information and is pretty validating. I’m lovable after all, no matter how I feel about me.

Trans Isn’t a Drag

I was watching RuPaul’s Drag Race episodes again last night and again was struck by how, although drag queens and transsexuals are lumped into the T in the LGBT umbrella, the reality is that drag queens have more in common with gay males and m2f’s have more in common with cisgen women.

The queens are very much performers and developing a female persona. They often talk about how people think they want to be women and it’s not true, they’re happy living as gay men. They’re either performing, or acting, or developing a persona that allows them to express things they normally can’t, but they never identify with it as the core self.

M2f’s are different — the female is the core and it is exclusive. There’s no desire to “hop the fence,” the desire is to be oneself… a woman… and get rid of the other part, the male part, that doesn’t feel true. There are no facets. And it’s not about a performance or overdoing the feminine; most transsexuals are pretty low-key and fit within the normal range of female appearance and behavior unless they’ve got some fetishistic behavior.

Hopkins Slop

L and I talked and it turns out she had gone to Hopkins before too. She talked to Chris Kraft while there, the guy I thought was nice, and he was useless to her. He dug in his heels, told her hormones would have no effect on someone her age, and was reluctant to give her any help. Of course, I had that jerk Schmidt who wasn’t even personable and nice, he was just a total creep and lacked perception.

To me, it’s quite clear Hopkins is anti-transsexual, ever since Money got run through the muck for the abominations he practiced in the 70’s there. McHugh came in with his Catholic anti-trans bias and ran the surgeries out of Hopkins and continues to try to debunk positive aspects of transition nowadays using data from 1980, although the demographic has changed immensely and the success rate of properly screened transitioners is in the 90-95% range if not higher… and FAR higher than success for any sort of therapeutic intervention meant to somehow change one’s self-perception.

They also insist on 1-2 years of real-life experience in the target gender before providing hormones, which is just cruel… since the RLE will be severely tainted / not indicative of one’s true outcome in transitioning, if you’re getting read as a man while trying to live as a woman. You’ll lose your job, you’ll create a stir everywhere you go, you’ll freak people out in the bathrooms, it’s just ugly.

They are behavioralists, first and foremost — since you were born male and you have at some point worn women’s clothes, they label you upfront as a crossdressers, which dumps you into the sexual fetish category. Motivation isn’t important to them, only behavior is … which is stupid, because motivation is what matters in terms of who someone is and who they should be; behavior comes from a variety of sources. It’s like treating symptoms and ignoring the cause.

The other issue with Hopkins is that they are running scared. The school is highly reputable (it won 16 top field honors in this past year’s US News survey, it places high every year), and Money really screwed their reputation, and so they are bound and determined to err on the side of extreme caution, with an empirical behavioral approach that can be quantified rather than a more instinctive psychoanalytical/therapeutic one. In the process, they do all their transsexual clients a disservice.

Which leads me to believe they don’t really want transsexuals there anyway. Too much risk for their esteemed name. It’s okay, there are far many other smaller names and orgs that have a handle on things, do proper screening, and help their patients.

L and I were both considering sending a follow-up to them, since we both got screwed by them but are both ’success stories.’ I don’t want to be snarky, but I wonder if I should challenge them just so they realize how clueless they are.