Article in the National Geographic on Trans

This article appeared in the National Geographic, which shows how far trans people have come. However, it's far from perfect as an article. While research that confirms the physiological differences in trans people are dismissed as not being conclusive using rather dubious (ie, inaccurate) justifications, the following is included with no references, and no evidence:

"Eric Vilain, a geneticist and pediatrician who directs the UCLA Center for Gender-Based Biology, says that children express many desires and fantasies in passing. What if saying “I wish I were a girl” is a feeling just as fleeting as wishing to be an astronaut, a monkey, a bird? When we spoke by phone last spring, he told me that most studies investigating young children who express discomfort with their birth gender suggest they are more likely to turn out to be cisgender (aligned with their birth-assigned gender) than trans—and relative to the general population, more of these kids will eventually identify as gay or bisexual."

The article seems to have an inconsistent approach to scientific research. Treating research such as this (New Scientist) in a very sceptical way, even though such studies arescientifically valid, albeit with small sample numbers (necessarily). It mentions that the process of transitioning for some subjects might have skewed the results, but every study I've looked at took this into consideration and included suitable controls to check for that. The results of research like this have mostly been clear and unequivocal despite the small sample sizes.

So this - is a very dishonest representation of the research so far carried out on the physiological causes of trans.  
These studies have several problems. They are often small, involving as few as half a dozen transgender individuals. And they sometimes include people who already have started taking hormones to transition to the opposite gender, meaning that observed brain differences might be the result of, rather than the explanation for, a subject’s transgender identity.

As if controls to take the effects of HRT into consideration was something that not one scientist had thought of when designing their study!!   
So I found this from a description of one the studies I identified, which is fairly typical:

None of the transsexual subjects had received any hormone treatment prior to the study. Using an MRI, the researchers found that the transwomen had more cortical thickness than the XY males in three regions of the brain. The transmen showed evidence of masculinization of their grey matter. In all transsexuals studied, the key differences from their biological sex were found in the right hemisphere. (Zubiaurre)

More truthful summaries would be found in the New Scientist article referenced above, or this blog which mentions many and varied studies in this area. There are many, many more studies out there which can be found using Google. And new studies are carried out all the time.

This area clearly needs more work and a lot more money ear-marked for bigger studies, but it is obvious already that physiological differences exist in trans people, and that the studies required to show these differences in a conclusive manner will be carried out and that this is only a matter of time. 


It swallows the line that 75% of "such boys" - ie, those who express a desire to be a girl - turn out to be gay men without challenging it at all. There are no studies referenced. But what we do know is that some rather flawed studies have been carried out that claim to show this - but actually don't. Basically, gender non conforming children were assumed to be trans, and included in the studies. They weren't children who "repeatedly stated desire to be, or insistence that he or she is, the other sex" which would be a far better criteria for identifying trans kids.

From Huffington Post:
 For starters, the most cited study (Steensma) which alleges a 84 percent desistance rate, did not actually differentiate between children with consistent, persistent and insistent gender dysphoria, kids who socially transitioned, and kids who just acted more masculine or feminine than their birth sex and culture allowed for. In other words, it treated gender non-conformance the same as gender dysphoria. Worse, the study could not locate 45.3 percent of the children for follow up, and made the assumption that all of them were desisters. Indeed, other studies used to support this also suffered from similar methodological flaws.

 When Dr. Steensma went back in 2013 and looked at the intensity of dysphoria these children felt as a factor in persistence, it turned out that it was actually a very good predictor of which children would transition.

In other words, the children who actually met the clinical guidelines for gender dysphoria as children generally ended up as transgender adults. Further research has shown that children who meet the clinical guidelines for gender dysphoria are as consistent in their gender identity as the general population.

Also, there is the assumption made, and not challenged,  that it is far worse to allow a gay boy to live for a short time as a girl and then go back to being a boy (way before any medical transtion would occur) than it would be force a trans girl to live as a boy and then have to transtion to be a girl at a later date - after much psychological damage has been done, in most cases.

This blog on Eric Vilain's work and claims...
 Vilain and Bailey then paint the far more complex medical and surgical transition for trans girls in a negative light (“serious” interventions, hormones during puberty — the wrong puberty, by the way — estrogen “for life,” surgery as simply “satisfactory” and with “not uncommon side effects.”) Given the choice between a little psychological pain and the litany of medical despair what parent wouldn’t choose the former?

So, Dr. Vilain and I agree (personal correspondence) that there is no definitive research, a point trans ally Dr. Jack Drescher makes frequently, but a total dependence on research when lives are at stake is unethical. Even if it’s true that 75 percent of gender dysphoric boys turn out to be gay, it is also true that denying the gender dysphoric boys who are actually girls the right to transition is cruel and abusive, and too often life-threatening..... This entire approach is built on a single assumption — that it is worse for a boy to live as a girl for a period of time and then return to live as a boy (desistence) than to deny a trans girl her freedom to determine her life according to her wishes. That denial is cruel and unusual punishment and should be viewed as unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. I wouldn’t be surprised if those parents, who struggled to set their trans (or gay, for that matter) children “straight” before becoming enlightened and letting their children be themselves, wouldn’t wholeheartedly agree.

Being Trans: My journey to raising the Trans Pride Flag at 55 Broadway

When I joined London Underground (LU) in 1988 I knew I was Trans. This for me meant I struggled every day with my personal identity. For years I thought I was the only person who felt this way. 
I’d considered I might be gay, or bisexual, but while that fitted some of the facts, it clearly wasn’t the whole story. I didn’t particularly like doing things that girls were supposed to do – I was really a tomboy – but I wanted to be a girl, often felt myself to be a girl, dreamt about becoming a girl, physically. 
These feelings got stronger and as I grew older I realised just how unacceptable they were. So by the time I joined LU I’d learned to keep it all inside me. I still had the feelings but I managed to suppress them 
I started in signals and was often out on nights in an all male environment working on equipment in dark and dirty places. Sexist jokes abounded as did the occasional joke about ‘trannies’. Guys would be ‘teased’ about being a secret crossdresser. All the time I was thinking if they knew about me, I’d be ripped apart. 
In the next 10 years I went from walking through tunnels to sitting in an office and reporting on performance. The mostly male environment and the dodgy jokes, unfortunately, remained a regular feature. 
I always thought I’d keep my secret to the grave. What I never foresaw was what has happened in the last four years. In 2013, I came out at work and then later that year I transitioned to being a woman. In particular, I never imagined in a million years I would be sitting with Mark Wild, the Managing Director of LU and talking to him about what it is like to be Trans. I probably thought that more likely that I’d eventually bullied out of work or sacked. 
Mark told me that he believed an organization that embraces diversity is a more efficient company, that when people are able to be themselves they work better, and being inclusive
means you get wider choice of people with the right skills.  
Mark asked for one thing he could do for Trans people. To me all the things that have to happen are complex and difficult to achieve; I found it hard to pick one thing. So I asked for more Trans visibility in TfL. But how? So I thought about it, and asked if we could fly the Trans flag during Trans Awareness Week. Mark said yes. I had half expected a no.
So now my journey has been from being the closeted Trans woman too scared to be herself at work to being the woman who persuaded the Mark Wild to fly the Trans flag at 55 Broadway.
I hope that this will be a milestone for Trans visibility in our community, and for TfL too; I hope TfL will be recognised as one of the organisations leading the way on Trans inclusion. For me it’s a long held ambition come true and I’m incredibly proud! 

Respond to lies in the media & support Mermaids

I'll finesse this entry later but this is what you need to write a letter of complaint to the press commission. 

This is the TMW press release pointing out the facts that lie behind the lies being told by the media.  

Text copy version here - if the link doesn't work please let me know via @laughingnoam on Twitter or a comment here.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz6mfiA3rlIadFRrVm1Sdms2ZW8/view

 This explains how to make a complaint at IPSCO - you need to do it within 4 months of the article appearing. That gives you a fair amount of time to make sure you write a good letter, in your words if possible, and make sure you get everything right - unlike the Daily Mail did.
https://www.ipso.co.uk/make-a-complaint/

Here's some words you might like to use - or, better, in your won words but using these points.

I would also suggest that 1. of the editors code - accuracy - would also be grounds for complaining.

If the text below is not clear then please click on it to make it bigger and more readable.  Hoping I can put a cut and pasteable version up here later.

Please also write to your mp - or email - and use the referenced facts in the TMW press release above to make sure your mp is armed with actual facts and not tabloid lies.
Find email address here -> http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/

finally, and most importantly, show your support to mermaids http://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/

Make a donation
send them supportive messages - their Twitter address is   @Mermaids_Gender
use the hashtag on Twitter #standwithMermaids

 

Thankyou. 

 

In order to improve this blog entry I welcome feedback. Please let me know what you think @LaughingNoam or as a comment here.

 

Daily Noam 2

Daily Noam 1

I had a secret

I had a secret and I was always afraid of what people would  think if they found out the truth.

The media made fun of people like me. My friends and family made jokes about people like me. I even joined in at laughing at jokes about people like me.

But keeping a secret like this just makes it worse. Sometimes I almost felt almost that others could see my secret anyway. I was always painfully aware of my inner thoughts, I felt isolated, and ashamed. Like it was written on my forehead. So I mentally beat myself up and tried to avoid other children as much as I could.

And  it didn’t even stop the bullying. I was still bullied for not meeting standards of masculinity expected of me – I wasn’t very good at sport, I was rubbish at chatting up girls, I hated football, and there was something else that I couldn’t hide. Shy in the changing room. Embarrassed about people my body – swimming and changing after sports. I was called gay when I was 11. And ‘Sharon’ for a week while on an organised camping trip.

I kept pinning my hopes on it one day just going away forever. I always thought it would go away eventually, especially if I tried really hard to be a man.

Sometimes I thought I might be gay, but, no, that would be too simple. This was something else. Why did I keep imagining myself as a girl, dreaming I was a girl, waking up and remembering I wasn’t and becoming upset? If I wished enough could I make it happen? Well, yes, but it took me years to realise that.

At 10 I put on a dress and it just felt right. After that the flood gates were open and I that is almost all I thought about for a long time after that.

From age 11 when I saw the boys all going off being happy doing boy things and girls doing girl things, and some boys and girls breaking out of their gender expectations, but I just wanted to be a normal girl, maybe a bit tomboyish at times – anyway I became really unhappy about not finding a place to fit in and not being able to be who I wanted. Nobody had told me I couldn’t but I felt too scared to be myself.

At 13 I told my parents I wanted to die so they brought in a psychiatrist to talk to me to find out why I was so unhappy. I still didn’t tell my secret top anyone.

Go forward 20 years –and I was married to a woman, thinking that marriage would stop me from having these unwanted feelings. But they never went away, they just got stronger and stronger; and I became less and less happy.

Through the years I’d been scared of what my family would say, what my friends would say, what workmates would say; scared of what the neighbours would think. Scared of embarrassing my family.

In a few years I began to have a nagging  feeling that I was living the wrong  life, or not living at all. Those feelings got stronger and stronger and eventually brought me down into deep depression. I couldn’t keep trying to ignore it. Occasionally I would buy girl clothes and go out dressed as a girl and these were some of the few times I was ever happy.

Eventually when most of my friends had gone, my long term relationship was over, I was single again, I still couldn’t stop worrying what people might think. Even after all that was left was me and my feelings it was still a few years before I could tell anyone.

In the end all the things I worried about losing by being out; well, I lost them anyway. Because while I was keeping my secret I was also beginning to lose myself. Because I wasn’t a woman inside a man trying to get out, but I actually was a woman, I identified as a woman, I felt myself to be a woman, and I was living a lie. I was pretending to be a man because to face up to the truth just seemed to scary and too difficult.

Coming out was an accident. But it was a happy accident that gave me the courage to carry on being out.

I had two Twitter accounts, one as Stella and the other as the male version of me that everyone knew. I tweeted a selfie of myself as Stella on the wrong account, and then deleted quickly as soon as I realised. Too late! A friend had seen the pic. He said it was fine. And he said I looked good. Over time lots of people told me I was brave or inspirational or that I deserved to be happy, which is a far cry from how I’d been use to thinking about myself. I started connecting to more women as friends via Twitter, even before I transitioned. Some even expressed surprise because they’d assumed I was a woman anyway. The floodgates had been prised open.

Next I came out to my doctor, I couldn’t even find the words to say who I was or what I wanted. But I managed to get my message across despite that.

Then I told my boss, and it helped that she was a woman. It was spontaneous, I was supposed to be talking to her about something else entirely. But she was extremely supportive in getting me through my transition. It was still a full year before I was to transition and I didn’t even have a plan at that point; I was working from instinct. Coming out gradually got easier – my work colleagues only had to tell a few people and the grapevine did the rest; I felt more secure in myself knowing it had gone so well in the past. It became a habit.

Then my sister. Another accident; this time on Facebook. She phoned me up to find out if it was true.

She became my best ally in telling my parents. I stopped feeling so alone. I never imagined I’d have other people on my side. I’d never been closer to my sister than I have since coming out. And I found out that Stella was the name my mum had in mind for me if I’d been declared female at birth.

Since transitioning all my paranoia, fears and secrets went away. I knew who I was, I was being honest, and everyone else knew too. I could stop pretending. It was a tremendous relief! And it wasn’t taking up my brain space all the time.

Now I feel I am making up for lost time. I try not to think about the 30 years I wasted and instead think about the future.

Whatever happens every day, I never have to think that I’m not living my life, or that I’m the wrong person. And that makes a huge difference.

And now I’m in love. I’ve met my soul mate, a straight man, who I may well have been friends with anyway in the scheme of things, but the intimacy we have now would never have happened if I’d never plucked up the courage to start telling people that I am transgender.

above London

   

   

My thoughts on De-transitioning

Once you've got free of all the things that pull you down and stop you from realising who you really are, the gaslighting, the barriers in the way, people telling you not to transition: 'it's not real', 'you need psychiatric help', etc. Then you start hearing about de-transitioners. If you're unlucky you get pressures on you to de-transition, which interacts with your own self doubts (aren't all newly transitioned trans people wracked with self doubt? Maybe some aren't but I've yet to meet one).

If you aren't sufficiently supported then its all too easy to pay mind to such cries. You may have been disowned by your family, lost your job, lost all your friends and/or enduring daily abuse. So to some it will seem like the answer. They will begin to embrace what had previously been unthinkable because it will seem a lot easier than ploughing on. Sometimes its hard to see for all the trees.

Can you see why I'd never go back?

In the UK you, as an AMAB (assigned male at birth) trans person, are struggling to get through your early days of being transitioned, having to endure a year or more living as a woman without female hormones, without the support of others, without a family, without a job and with no guarantee of ever getting through to the other side, then de-transitioning may well seem like a reasonable option. With de-transitioning comes the prospect of getting support from radical feminists & detrans advocates, the possibility of gaining your family & friends back and maybe even getting back into employment. And the abuse stops there, in theory. Possibly. then you can justify your decision by saying you were never trans in the first place or it wasn't for you, but you were pressured into "being trans" by the trans "political movement" and that you will be happier living gender free or as a feminine or gay man.

What you don't get from detrans advocates are solid facts. You might see "case histories" that you don't know if they're real or not. You don't know if those people were ever really trans or even if they ever really transitioned. And certainly you don't know what their real motivations are. The detrans message usually comes with a heavy dose of trans exclusionary feminism. We quite often don't even know our own motivations for things, so its so easy to lie to ourselves and even easier to put up a false front to others for the reward of vindication.

Why do people de trans? A whole load of reasons, but usually not because of regret about transitioning per se. It's almost always because of lack of support, discrimination, abuse, bullying, loneliness; the same sorts of things that pull you into any kind of cult. So always ask for verifiable statistics and proper scientific research before acting on any of this. And if you're happy anyway just ignore.
Have a read of this that one of my trans followers on Twitter sent to me.

I often wonder how many de-transitioners go on to regret going back. It's not something anyone seems to talk about. I've talked to one trans woman who de-transitioned and regretted it, and went on to transition again. She told me that at the time she was consumed with self hate and felt the need to hurt other trans people. And in the process became a poster girl for the de-transitioners lobby.

De-transitioning advocates put more store in those few transitioners who regret than those who didn't transition or transitioned late and regret. These relatively few lives are imbued with more worth than the vast majority for whom transitioning was a life saver. They elevate these people so much (remembering that many or most of them have not de-transitioned by choice but through abuse or duress, or deceit) that they'd rather make it much harder for those who want to transition than to accept that a few may go on to regret it. 

Also please remember it takes months, usually, to even be able to obtain hormones (in the UK). It took me 3 years. And all that time I lived as a woman and was more certain as time went on that transitioning was right for me. Then after all that time you start to receive HRT, it takes even more months before changes happen. Its hard to imagine anyone not being sure after that, that they want to transition. If they aren't then they can be offered counselling. If after that they decide not to transition then its still completely reversible. 

I think the trans adocates deliberate try to give the impression that all the elements of transitioning happen at once. They don't.

And in my experience there are plenty of trans people who know they are trans, have always known and do not need counselling or any delays in their process. this is easily identified through self selection - I am one. I had to jump through many hoops that in my case weren't wholly necessary, if only the world had been different when i was growing up - i would have consistently self identified and never have to endure "manhood".

There are plenty of things in life to regret that are not so easily reversible as transitioning, like getting into crippling debt, gambling, climbing mountains, getting into trouble in the sea, driving wrecklessly, buying a gun. We can;t always be wrapped in cotton wool to protect us from ourselves - sometimes we need to be treated as an adult.

But my advice would be - Do not rush. I'm certain that unless you have a fair amount of personal wealth this is not going to be a problem. - but even so I made the decision to take a step at a time and stop when i felt uncomfortable. I still haven't stopped.

For those trans people who are steered away from transitioning, things can't be so easily rectified. The longer you live in the wrong gender the harder it is to make the change for all sorts of reasons. I personally regret not doing it sooner. But I was lucky that I eventually did. Many never do because of the stigma attached our because of self doubts, threat of losing what good things they have in life, or they don't really understand what transtioning means and that it really does work for trans people.

The answer to this non-problem then is not so much to make it harder for trans people - it still needs to be made much, much easier - but to make sure that as few people get misdiagnosed as possible. This 'problem', of misdiagnosis though. is not just a problem for trans, but a problem associated with medicine in general. Therefore it is not fair to use these cases, if valid, as a stick to hit the trans community as a whole.

The answer is we talk more about trans - even in schools and workplaces. We remove the stigma. We make trans people into role models. We accept trans identities as valid and normalise them. That way more people will understand us, and trans, and be able to make good decisions. If very young children are taught about trans then those who are trans will recognise it and be able to self identify early enough to ensure they receive appropriate treatment. Those who aren't trans but gender questioning should also be able to work that out in good time too. but sweeping all of this under the carpet because it makes some people feel uncomfortable, or because it goes against particular political agendas, just means we'll keep on having wrecked lives and suicidal trans kids. Late transitioners, should then, within the next 50 years, become a thing of the past.

Let's make it so....

Do not misgender a trans person even if its someone you detest

People don’t seem to be able to get a basic here – that it is not OK to misgender a trans person because you don’t like them or you don’t like something they’ve said or done.

BetteMidler’s gaffe is typical in this regard. She noted that a lot of people don’t like Jenner and decided to put the boot in. this is the tactic of a bully – rallying all the cool kids round them while they pick on the least popular kid.

Regardless of what Jenner has said and done, her gender identity is not something that you can start ripping into. Why? Because once that has been established all of us then have a conditional identity. Which means we may be fine right up until someone doesn’t like us and then when we say the wrong thing – blammo! We get punished in a way that only trans people can.

It’s important because unless you’ve experienced it you might not understand – but fear of being the subject of a transphobic attack is something that silences trans people. And it goes wider than politics. If I intervened in a neighbour dispute because the neighbour needed help then I might find that instead of the issue remaining as it was it would suddenly become about my gender and my transness. Same anywhere really – on the bus I once defended using the disabled seat because I am disabled (I have good days and bad days and this was a bad day) against a woman with a push chair who wanted to sit there (I wasn’t in the way of the push chair and she appeared to be able bodied - didn’t claim otherwise either and much younger than me so I stayed on the seat – if the bus has been less crowded I’d have gone to sit elsewhere but it wasn’t and I didn’t feel able to stand) anyway when she saw how the argument was going, first of all she tried all sorts of different ways to shame me to get up – including mocking my claim to be autistic – finally she resorted to misgendering me and that worked. After outing me to the whole bus, loudly, I got up and got off the bus and waited for the next one, shaking uncontrollably.

As a tactic it works very well at silencing trans people and that’s why we can’t tolerate it, even for people we don’t like very much. I don’t understand why Bette Midler didn’t get that.

Transgender isn’t alone in this respect. No-one says its OK to be misogynist against women we don’t like (though it happens plenty, I've not seen anyone defending it) and no-one says its OK to be ableist against disabled people we don’t like (it happens plenty, but again, I've yet to see anyone argue that some disabled people just deserve it). But I have argued and argued with people who consider themselves to be trans allies who maintained that horrible people lose their rights, and that trans women who go to prison deserve nothing better than to be sent to a men's prison to experience abuse and rape. 

 Some trans women end up in prison and quite often are stripped of their gender and forcibly de-transitioned as if an extra level of punishment is required for trans people. We don’t, eg, send cis women to men’s prisons. People tend to be sympathetic to trans women who have committed minor crimes or may have been subject to a miscarriage of justice, but to any trans woman found guilty of a more serious crime then a ‘throw away the key’ attitude becomes prevalent as if rotting in a men’s prison (and being abused and raped or locked up in solitary) is all they deserve. Funny that this attitude doesn’t carry over to cis women convicted of serious crimes, no one suggests that they should go to a men’s prison if they commit a serious crime. It’s a discriminatory view held by far too many people.

I’ve also been very concerned with trans women who are homeless, because then you become at the mercy of everyone’s trans misogyny. Even services in place to help or rescue them will often amount to abuse or extreme discrimination as trans women will be more likely to be treated as a man, being refused access towomen’s spaces, protection against rape, women’s clothes; even if free servicesare offered they will often not be gender appropriate. It’s difficult to talk about this stuff because everyone has a fixed idea of how homeless people should be treated and that when you’re homeless you shouldn’t expect more than the basic services on offer, or the view: ‘why should trans people get special treatment?’ But I’m not asking for special treatment. I’m asking for trans women to be treated as women and not ignored or abused for asking to be treated as women. I’ve heard horror stories of homeless trans women having already lost their home and presumably any treatment they were undergoing, have been denied access to gender appropriate clothing, the means to shave, or even abused for persisting in identifying as a woman. With such organisations as the salvation army involved in ‘helping’ homeless people I’m really not at all surprised that such abuse goes on.

Another example of where trans people get treated appallingly is among refugees. But this is a subject for another blog. Refugees have always been treated as a lower class of people in many ways and most people seem happy to turn a blind eye to this.

Ultimately, a right is only a right if it applies to the most hated, the most impoverished and the most mocked of all people. If you can be stripped of your gender for being wrong in an argument, being found guilty of a crime or becoming ill or homeless then gender is no longer a right – it remains a privilege that can be stripped from you at the whim of others. But only for trans people. Cis people don’t have this. Cis people don’t lose their gender identity because they’re homeless, because they’re in prison or because they are ill. Cis people do not get misgendered when they have arguments with people. Cis people don’t suddenly have scrutiny directed at their identity and their gender by people they disagree with. This is discrimination and when you do it to wealthy, unpleasant Republicans then you do it to all of us. You make what we consider to be a right conditional, conditional on not annoying other people or finding our lives suddenly in ruins.