My Confession
Dr. Dana Bevan
I am a transsexual. However, I am not the type, for good reason, to look down on non-transsexual transgender people. I have seen such transsexuals lecturing about the “silly” things that non-transsexual transgender people do, like hiding in hotel rooms and renting Public Storage lockers. I have been disgusted by such talk and politely suggest a less condescending approach whenever possible. One part of this old woman is tired of confrontation and another sees this rhetoric interfering with the unity we need to get the civil rights we deserve.
I am a transsexual. But I was a non-transsexual transgender person for more than 50 years. I see both transsexualism and transgenderism (TSTG) as parts of the same phenomenon from behavior, public perception, and experience.
My definition of TSTG is that it applies to gender behavior or expressed gender identity that is incongruent with one’s assigned gender behavior category (man, woman) at birth and the performance of gender behavior in a more congruent gender behavior category. Culture establishes gender behavior categories, usually on the basis of assigned sex at birth, man for male, woman for female. TSTG have biological gender predispositions that are incongruent with their assigned gender behavior categories. In the binary gender system, people have only two choices of gender behavior categories.
Transgenderism and transsexualism differ only in the frequency of such behavior and the degree of voluntary body change. Transgender people typically only express their congruent gender behavior on a part time basis and do not engage in radical body change, although there are MtF transgender people who get breast implants and some fulltime crossdressing transgender people.
At this point in time, transgender is an umbrella term that includes both transsexualism and non-transsexualism transgender people. It is important to have a clear definition of transgenderism since it has had numerous meanings over the past 60 years. Sometimes transgender meant going fulltime without transsexual transition; sometimes it was a synonym for transsexualism.
Now that you have gotten your dose of science for today, I will finish telling my story. At the age of 4, I knew that something was wrong and at the age 5, I saw pictures of Christine Jorgensen in the then popular photo magazines at the time, Life and Look. Living in the country in pre-television times, the pictures and stories in the magazines told me what I needed to know, that I wanted to be like Christine. It took me a few years and a few visits to the Encyclopedia Britannica for me to give what I felt a name. The name at the time was transvestite, transsexual having not become popular yet. I knew enough to realize that the connotation of transvestite was not good and later learned less bad terms like crossdressing and transgender.
After asking my mother a few times about Christine and after being caught crossdressing, I knew that what I wanted was taboo. For the next 50 years, I kept my transgender behavior and thoughts a secret. I set my goals to contribute to the resolution of several U.S. wars. What really increased my crossdressing behavior and sent me out of the closet was the end of the cold war with the fall of the Berlin wall. For the first time, I did not have the distractions of warfighting to interfere with crossdressing. I did not care anymore that being transgender was taboo. Once you deal with the threat of thermonuclear war, nothing much can scare you.
My transgender behavior increased in intensity until I was frustrated and depressed most of the time, so my shrink suggested that I should try a low dose of hormone therapy. I walked out of the endocrinologist’s office, right to the pharmacy. I found that hormone therapy allowed me to feel alive and dismissed my depression. I later found out that while I had asked for low dose therapy, my endocrinologist had prescribed a full hormone dosage. I panicked and after a few months, I quit taking my meds. Both my endocrinologist and my shrink were not pleased because of the potential effects of sudden change in medication and tore up my phone with phone calls. After a prolonged negotiation, my endocrinologist relented and I started hormone therapy again; this time starting at lower dosages, and after a year, at full dosages. I am not trying to recruit transgender people to hormone therapy but for me it was right and continues to be right.
Most transsexuals go through a period of non-transsexual transgenderism, but maybe not as long as my period of 50 years. Potential transsexual children now can go through a period of “social transition” in which they gain experience with living in another gender behavior category before making a decision on transsexual transition at age 16. Some of these children take blocking hormones to delay puberty until they can make an informed decision. For adults, WPATH requires a period of real life experience in which the candidate transsexual engages fulltime in transgender behavior.
Scotland and England have come to the realization that they need to forecast how many transsexual people will emerge in order to project the facilities and personnel needed by the National Health Service. Their approach is to estimate the number of non-transsexual transgender people in their countries and treat these groups statistically as “reservoirs” for future emerging transsexuals. These are the only two studies in which they estimated the rate of emergence of transsexuals from the transgender population. They also found that this rate is accelerating.
Rifts in the transgender community have been apparent since the words transgender and transsexual were coined in the mid-20th Century but we are bound together under the transgender umbrella due to our behavior. We are also bound together by our experience. Whether we have similar experience of public presentation, social transition or real life experience in which we have encountered some rejection and some acceptance, we have common experiences.
Transgender people are a diverse lot and we are fiercely independent but, like it or not, we are bound together by our behavior, by public perception and by our experience. As we go forward to try to obtain the civil rights we deserve, disconcerting remarks that inflame our differences are not appropriate.
Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender Opinion
About the Author (Author Profile)
Dana Jennett Bevan holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a Bachelors degree from Dartmouth College both in experimental psychology. She is the author of The Transsexual Scientist which combines biology with autobiography as she came to learn about transgenderism throughout her life. Her second book The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism is a comprehensive analysis of TSTG research and was published in 2014 by Praeger under the pen name Thomas E. Bevan. Her third book Being Transgender was released by Praeger in November 2016. She can be reached at [email protected].Subscribe
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