This voice suggests that, although gender is an identity we are born with, an identity that no amount of social influence can sway, it is too great and varied a force to shoehorn into those ubiquitous boxes marked F and M.

Within the transgender community, the word “transition” has become a verb to describe what used to be called a “sex change.”īuoyed by the success of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, freed from enforced isolation by changes in the medical and psychiatric establishment, and brought together by the Internet, the transgender community has emerged in the last five years as a new voice in social activism. In fact, transsexual, with its historical implications of surgery, is being replaced by the broader term “transgender,” which includes cross-dressers, people who identify themselves as stone butch lesbians or flaming queens and anyone who feels or acts outside the traditional gender norms. Many have sexual reassignment surgery, many do not many take hormones to change their secondary sex characteristics, some do not many dress and live as close to the traditional definition of male and female as possible others are androgynous. Some have children before they make the change, some have children after. Some transsexuals are straight, some are gay and some are bisexual. There are as many female-to-male transsexuals as male-to-female, and they come from every race, religion and cultural background. Numbers are hard to come by in a still-mostly closeted population, but those who are “out” make up an exceedingly diverse group. Gender identity disorder, as defined in medical manuals, is characterized by a “persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex.” It has no known cause. After years of denial and mental torture, he has a sex change operation and goes on to live life as a traditional heterosexual woman, revealing her past only as the result of a medical emergency or as a guest on “Jerry Springer.”īut in 2001, that scenario is outdated, if not obsolete. Since the story of Christine Jorgenson hit the New York tabloids in 1952, transsexuals have hovered on the edge of public imagination, stock characters in a myth that went something like this: Due to a mistake in nature or biology, a woman is born trapped in a man’s body. A year ago, their son was born, into a family of two male parents and a world that 10 years ago did not even exist.

Sex Changes by Patrick Califia-Rice