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| Global Warning | |
| Written by Administrator | |
| Thursday, 30 March 2006 | |
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When did people born transsexual become so au courant?
Springfield, Virginia, USA. It seems that everyone who is everyone wants a pre-op/post-op written into their film or television show. One Academy Award nomination, and Actresses appear to be stumbling over them to portray a transsexual protagonist.
 We’ve always had The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, one of the first films with a well rounded transsexual lead character (albeit surrounded with cross-dressers and drag queens), but, for the mainstream, however marginally, that was it. One film of substance (and one of the few where an established male actor (Terence Stamp) was willing to portray a woman born transsexual), a handful of situation comedies (e.g., Friends, Ally McBeal) focusing, for the most part, on the reaction of uneasy straight males in the cast, and some early oddities played for laughs like Myra Breckinridge in 1970 -- but, for the most part, people born transsexual were invisible.Take a quantum jump to the Third Millennium: people born transsexual are suddenly this year’s blonde. Felicity Huffman is nominated for a best actress academy award for TransAmerica. Catherine Zeta-Jones has signed for the transsexual lead role in the April Ashley story. This season’s L-Word on Showtime has introduced a rare, young pre-op female to male character in the very early stages of transition. The Sundance Channel broadcast a documentary mini-series following the lives and transitions of four transsexual college students in various stages of transition and sexual direction.
Why the sudden interest?
One reason is that the science is coming together. Research is identifying the underlying physical causes of transsexual birth. {josquote}We are documenting the physical differences between innate gender and outward sexual genitalia{/josquote}. Medicine recognizes that the body’s outward appearance does not necessarily correlate with the mind’s conception of itself. We have come to recognize that gender is hardwired in the brain.
Every week it seems, a new discovery in genetics or biology casts more light on human embryo and fetal development. We now know that genetic biology is not a simple matter of setting a few initial switches and letting nature take its inevitable course. There is a vast variety of possibilities.
A second reason, one that provides a strong conceptual framework to gradual acceptance, is the established medical protocols and course of treatment that govern a person born transsexual’s transition between male and female. Switching sexual organs and identity is not something that can be done as easily as putting on make-up, cutting your hair, or buying a new dress or tuxedo. The medicine has been maturing for over fifty years and the process is governed by a set of guidelines, rules, and procedures.
These procedures serve as a “gatekeeper” to help insure the validity of a person born transsexual and facilitate a successful transition. Transsexuality is not the latest, fly by night scheme to lose weight or make your self rich. The people are real, the medicine is real. The s
 cience exists to back up the diagnosis, providing a growing social and legal legitimacy to people born transsexual.The third reason, obvious to anyone who has seen a movie, watched television, or read a newspaper or magazine, is that the population of people born transsexual is growing and becoming more visible to society.
When I was growing up, I knew of one transsexual person: Christine Jorgensen, who became a media sensation in 1952. She was treated as a sideshow. I knew of no therapists, no support groups, no endocrinologists, no surgeons skilled in sexual reassignment surgery (if the term even existed).
{josquote}An individual born transsexual is no longer an island. No one has to feel he or she is the only one who feels the way they do.{/josquote} In most cases, they no longer need to hide who they are. The science, skilled surgeons, and public information networks are now established to enable the successful treatment of transsexuality.
A fourth reason may be that, opposed to gay guys and cross dressers, people born transsexual are perceived as “safe.” They threaten no one (except perhaps those religions that have a literal faith in the perfection of their gods). They are not attempting to change societal structures or revolutionize legal entities.
For the most part, people born transsexual simply want to fit in and get on with their lives once their sexual genitalia is corrected to fit the gender identity they have had since conception. Because there is no implied or inherent threat, transsexuality is accepted as the diagnosed medical condition it is and the person born transsexual, after receiving the proper treatment, becomes reasonably indistinguishable from the rest of society.
But why now?
Some of it has to do with physics: the number of people born transsexual has reached a visible critical mass. Everyone seems to know someone who, if not born transsexual themselves, knows someone who was. One could argue the number of people born transsexual has not changed, only their visibility has Society is no longer putting people born transsexual into prison or stringing them up on barb wire fences. We have become somewhat more enlightened.
{josquote}People born transsexual are a fact of life. The current public fascination with transsexual people will gradually disappear{/josquote} as society learns more about genetics and developmental biology, and when they come to realize that becoming a boy or a girl is not the easiest thing to do, nor is their a foolproof method that always gets it right the first time.
Until that happens, people born transsexual will be the flavor of the month, at least until some other blonde catches the public fancy.
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