Normal Transsexual Ceos, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude

THE BODY LIES FEMALE-TO-MALE TRANSSEXUALS What would you go through not to have to live the life of Kafka's Gregor Samsa? Not to realize, early in childhood, that other people perceive a slight, unmistakable bugginess about you, which you find horrifying but they claim to find unremarkable? That glimpses of yourself in the mirror are upsetting and puzzling and to be avoided, since they show a self that is not you? That although you can ignore your shell much of the time and your playmates often seem to see you and not your cockroach exterior, teachers and relatives pluck playfully at your antennae with increasing frequency and suggest, not unkindly, that you might be more comfortable with the other insects? And when you say, or cry, that you are not a cockroach, your parents are sad, or concerned, or annoyed, but unwavering in their convictionhow could it be otherwise?that you are a cockroach, and are becoming more cockroachlike every day. Would you hesitate to pay thirty thousand dollars and experience some sharp but passing physical misery in order to be returned to your own dear, soft, skin-covered self? Approximately two people in every hundred thousand are diagnosedfirst by themselves, then by endocrinologists, family doctors, psychiatrists, or psychologistsas high-intensity transsexuals, meaning that they will be motivated, whether or not they succeed, to have surgery that will bring their bodies into accord with the gender to which they have known themselves, since toddlerhood, to belong. Until a decade or so ago the clinical literature and the unreliable statistics suggested that for every four men seeking to become anatomically female, there was one woman seeking the opposite change. Now clinical evaluation centers report that the ratio is almost one to one. In twenty years of practice as a clinical social worker, I met men who liked to wear women's clothing, women who preferred sex in public conveyances to sex at home, men who were more attracted to shoes than to the people in them; I didn't meet any transsexuals. I encountered transsexuals only the way most people do: in Renee Richards's story, in Jan Morris's Conundrum, in Kate Bornstein's books, and on afternoon talk shows, where transsexuals are usually represented by startlingly pretty young women, sometimes holding hands with their engagingly shy, love-struck fiances, sometimes accompanied by defensive, supportive wives turned best friends. I wondered, in the middle of the afternoon, where the female-to-male transsexuals were. Even if there were four times as many male-to-female transsexuals, there still had to be a few thousand of the other kind somewhere. But not in mainstream bookstores, not in magazines, not in front of talk-show audiences of middle-aged women standing up to applaud the guests' ability to "look just like the real thing." I thought there must be a reason female-to-male transsexuals were invisible. I wondered if their physical transformations were so pitiful that no one could bear to interview them, if women who wished to be men were less interesting, less interview-worthy than men who wished to be women, or if these people were so floridly disturbed that even the talk-show hosts were ashamed to be seen with them. Much of the early psychiatric literature about transsexu- als, from the preChristine Jorgensen 1940s until the late 1970s, leaned heavily toward psychoanalytic explanations and toward clinical descriptions that, however sympathetic to the unhappy patient, emphasized the bizarreness not of the biological condition but of the conviction that there was a biological condition. The next psychiatric wave emphasized "personality disorders" as the root of transsexuality, specifically the popularized borderline persoBloom, Amy is the author of 'Normal Transsexual Ceos, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude' with ISBN 9780679456520 and ISBN 067945652X.