16-01-2012, 11:24 AM
Ok, I get the desire for distinguishing labels, but:
how do you distinguish between someone who likes to dress, wants to grow breasts etc, but has no overwhelming desire to transition, and...
someone who has suffered extreme gender anxiety all their lives, who, before PM came along, would have had counselling, put on hard hormones and wound up transitioning; yet, PM enables them to cope without doing so?
It seems to me that the former falls into the category of TG, and the latter would, had PM not been around, fallen into the category of TS.
It doesn't seem right, somehow, if labels are important, to call the 2nd one TG.
I suspect the latter variety represent a good proportion of people who transitioned, describing themselves as TS because their counsellors told them so. They are distinct from the "successful" cases that you read about, where the subject felt so driven, at such an early age, that they got treatment whilst still young enough to wind up looking female.
I think perhaps I fall between two stools. Vitale describes people who feel "wrong" all their lives, but muddle through. They don't feel female enough to be attracted to men, so they get wives, kids, and wind up transitioning in late middle age.
These are the people I feel sorry for (obviously), and I think they deserve a differing kind of label.
Taking Pansy's definition: "those individuals whose sense of gender dysphoria is so strong that they are driven to full blown gender reassignment surgery."
That could have been me, if I had not discovered PM, because the depression/anxiety was getting more than I could cope with.
It's pretty much the same story as Kate Craig-Wood who nearly wrapped her car around a tree. She went the full monty, but has now wound up as a lesbian.
The point I am making is, yes, there is a category of TS who have spent their entire lives, from childhood, in great distress because of their absolute certainty that they were "born in the wrong body", but gender dysphoria has a greater spectrum than that.
I believe that there is a category of TS whose dysphoria is so great that, before PM, could only get relief via hard Estrogen leading to full transition, and many of them regret it, but are locked in - read the "testosterone toxicity" paper again for details.
I believe these are distinct from people who feel a need to dress, or modify their bodies to satisfy their feminity, but who absolutely cannot function without ingesting estrogen.
I think to classify both of these as TG is at least as wrong as defining me as a sub-class of TS who is alleviated by partial transition.
B.
how do you distinguish between someone who likes to dress, wants to grow breasts etc, but has no overwhelming desire to transition, and...
someone who has suffered extreme gender anxiety all their lives, who, before PM came along, would have had counselling, put on hard hormones and wound up transitioning; yet, PM enables them to cope without doing so?
It seems to me that the former falls into the category of TG, and the latter would, had PM not been around, fallen into the category of TS.
It doesn't seem right, somehow, if labels are important, to call the 2nd one TG.
I suspect the latter variety represent a good proportion of people who transitioned, describing themselves as TS because their counsellors told them so. They are distinct from the "successful" cases that you read about, where the subject felt so driven, at such an early age, that they got treatment whilst still young enough to wind up looking female.
I think perhaps I fall between two stools. Vitale describes people who feel "wrong" all their lives, but muddle through. They don't feel female enough to be attracted to men, so they get wives, kids, and wind up transitioning in late middle age.
These are the people I feel sorry for (obviously), and I think they deserve a differing kind of label.
Taking Pansy's definition: "those individuals whose sense of gender dysphoria is so strong that they are driven to full blown gender reassignment surgery."
That could have been me, if I had not discovered PM, because the depression/anxiety was getting more than I could cope with.
It's pretty much the same story as Kate Craig-Wood who nearly wrapped her car around a tree. She went the full monty, but has now wound up as a lesbian.
The point I am making is, yes, there is a category of TS who have spent their entire lives, from childhood, in great distress because of their absolute certainty that they were "born in the wrong body", but gender dysphoria has a greater spectrum than that.
I believe that there is a category of TS whose dysphoria is so great that, before PM, could only get relief via hard Estrogen leading to full transition, and many of them regret it, but are locked in - read the "testosterone toxicity" paper again for details.
I believe these are distinct from people who feel a need to dress, or modify their bodies to satisfy their feminity, but who absolutely cannot function without ingesting estrogen.
I think to classify both of these as TG is at least as wrong as defining me as a sub-class of TS who is alleviated by partial transition.
B.
