#I am okay now! but some of my health issues being endocrine related

[tj-crochets]

I cannot focus because I just want to work on a puzzle so I am outsourcing this decision lol *when I made the stingray pattern I realized as I was cutting out the fabric the tail was too short and too narrow so I just cut the tail by eyeballing it but I really should fix the paper pattern before I share it **I made a great orange and black halloween-y dress to fit 18" dolls, intending to make a black cat to wear it and give it to my friend. But I messed up a little making the black cat and changed the shape of its face and then put it in a poofy white pirate shirt and space bell bottoms and somehow, despite looking nothing like Howl Moving Castle, it feels exactly like Howl Moving Castle and I cannot bring myself to put it back in the dress ***an experiment in using scrap fabric and scrap batting for plushie filling! He is Very Dense and very cuddly but currently faceless because I originally intended to make him a mothman but I am considering making him a Creature so I can use another pair of embroidered eyes. Probably the green ones.

[pineapplerightsideupcake]

From your debate with transmascpetewentz, you said that you experience dysphoria and alleviated it by not engaging with your physical body and approaching it from a detached, impersonal perspective. Do you think that this is because you find that current transition treatments won't get your body to become what you truly want it to be? Do you find it normal and expected that you do not feel comfortable in your body and that your body is something you must dissociate and detach yourself from?

Hi! This is completely incorrect! My body is not something I have to detach from. My body is my home. I don’t shower in the dark anymore. I can look at me in the mirror. I wear short shorts on really hot days and don’t worry obsessively about the male gaze or a stray body hair. I stopped shaving my arms, armpits, and bush. I mostly stopped shaving my legs. I don’t tweeze my eyebrows or slather on makeup!

Body neutrality is not dissociating, it’s the reframing of a sexualized and/criticized body as neutral.

Some of the exercises I did with my therapist went like this:

Therapist: okay name a part of your body you hate

Me: my legs. I hate them they’re fat and have cellulite and are too hairy for a woman

Therapist: okay but legs don’t exist to look good. What are some things your legs do for you?

Me: well I love going for walks/hikes

Therapist: great, so whenever you think about how much you hate your legs, remember what they do for you. Thank them and be kind to them

This is of course a VERY condensed version of things but we basically went over my body piece by piece and sort of anthropomorphized them. This worked because I am good at being kind to others but not myself and I didn’t want to be ‘mean’ to my legs

And then when I got used to all that, we put me back together. My legs only function because I have blood and skin and bones. I have the energy to move them because I have a digestive system. I have the balance to move because I have an inner ear. I know where to go because I have eyes. Etc.

And then when I got used to THAT, she hit me with- that’s you. It’s not a body you pilot. You are your body. Just like your legs and eyes are all part of a whole, you are not a consciousness apart.

Again I’m condensing years of therapy. Whole periods of time where we just talked about my trauma related to those issues. But it worked.

I don’t say I’m cured of dysphoria for the same reason I don’t say I’m cured of anxiety or depression- mental health is reffered to as “controlled or in remission”.

What radical feminism gave me is equally important. It gave me my anger back. It gave me my trust in my own perception back. It gave me pride in womanhood and a community of like minded women.

And I know this is already an essay but I want to speak to the idea that my main issue with transition is it wouldn’t make me enough of a man.

Every TRA needs to hear just how far into sci-fi territory their ideas are. Right now the best I could hope for is painful scar tissue around my repositioned breasts and a pit dug into my leg or arm to harvest flesh for a micro dick that doesn’t get hard without help.

That’s the BEST CASE. The worst case is I get so many painful and humiliating complications I DIE. One of the blogs I follow on here had exactly this happen to her friend. She got bottom surgery and it killed her.

Let’s say we get to the level of science that’s at least perfected the cosmetic aspects. I’d still have a dick and balls that would never produce sperm. My body would still have ovaries and a uterus to remove. My endocrine system would still be female. My skeletal structure would still be female. My lungs and heart and muscles and blood and hair would all still be female.

Your sex is decided at conception. You are built from a single cell around the absence or presence of an active SRY gene.

Imagine you built me a dresser and I came in and said “actually can you make me a wardrobe instead?” And demanded you only use the same materials you already had. What could you possibly make me when the wood is already cut to size and shaped?

[jaysennettauthor]

New Post has been published on http://www.jaysennett.com/the-truth-about-why-transsexuals-hate-gender-identity-disorder/

The Truth About Why Transsexuals Hate Gender Identity Disorder

The real reason many transsexual and transgender people hate the DSM and GID?

We don’t want to be perceived as crazy.

I am NOT Craazzzyyy!!!

Transsexualism, to be treated legally by the medical establishment, needs a diagnosis. In my case, and most typically for most transsexuals, I think, therapists diagnosed me with gender identity disorder (GID).

GID is a psychological diagnosis, as is another diagnosis I have been given, transsexualism.

When I started hormones in 1996, GID enraged me. I didn’t have a psychological problem, people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia had psychological disorders.

“There is nothing psychologically wrong with wanting to change my gender!”

I had a medical problem and believed my interests as a transsexual female to male would be best served by creating a medical diagnosis, i.e. an endocrine disorder, for example.

A medical diagnosis would surely be better than a psychological one. A medical diagnosis had little social and medical baggage, I thought.

Being lumped together with people with autism or bipolar disorder terrified me.

I wasn’t demented, deranged or unhinged.

A deep seated fear of Crazy bubbled up from somewhere within my socialization. All my middle-class fears about not fitting in and being different was like adding gasoline to a fire.

Not me, nope. Just an ordinary, taller-than-average female to male transsexual in great need of hormones.

The system of gender socialization created the problem, I railed. The problem lay with society, not my mental state or mental health.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Disability Rights Meeting

I possessed no ability to see the flaw in my logic.

If I believed a system of gender socialization created behaviors some people deemed normal and others not-normal, mightn’t that also be true for other psychological diagnosis?

No. I wasn’t crazy, just pursuing a right I believed belonged to every human being, the right to define and express gender as each person desires.

Then I became aware of disability activism and the neurodiversity movement, an approach to disability that sees neurological conditions as a result of variations in the human genome.

Wait. What?

Psychological disorders aren’t disorders at all unless considered by therapists, psychiatrists and the general public.

A person doesn’t need to be cured of their autism or tourette’s or bipolarity, neurological states that carry heavy social approbations, but accepted as part of the diverse human experience.

The striking similarities between this argument and transsexuals argument regarding unencumbered access to hormones free of social controls failed to impact me immediately.

I understood the arguments of the neurodiversity movement, and I’d like to be able to say today how I was struck smart instantly, but I would be lying if I said that.

In truth I bumped around my own internalized ableism.

Our society profoundly hates and loathes people with different-than-normal neurological conditions.

We joke about them, fear them, round them and murder them, corral them in institutions and betray them repeatedly with shock therapies, water treatments and all kinds of tortures more suited to an Inquisition chamber, not a modern medical establishment.

Oh, and if the person is also transsexual and taking hormones, we’ll be sure to take away their hormones, anytime we want.

Just because we can.

When the Corners Don’t Meet

When I learned medical authorities, particularly doctors, men and women sworn to do no harm, confiscated hormones from patients presenting with other issues/problems/concerns related to their neurological condition, my confusion began to lift.

Seizing hormones is a cruel punishment for a transsexual. How does taking them away from someone who feels suicidal make them feel less suicidal?

Around this same time a dear friend with an exceptionally strong form of bipolarity gave permission for several rounds of ECT or shock treatments. Doctors convinced this person of the efficacy of these treatments.

They ultimately went through several rounds, then stopped. We spoke not long after that.

“I’m sorry but there will be entire months, and maybe even years, of our relationship I won’t remember. I’ll probably never remember.”

Then this person said words that changed my life.

“You’re my memory keeper now.”

I couldn’t square this deal anymore.

What that FtM don’t to warrant a death sentence from people who are supposed to help? Or my dear, dear friend?

Why must we fix different neurological states?

When the objective goal is to make a person normal, perhaps we need to change normal.

At this point I had come full circle.

As a transsexual, I hated normal and realized disability and neurodiversity activists did as well.

One or Two Things I’ve Learned

My fear of being diagnosed with a psychological disorder is arbitrary and results from my wrong-headed beliefs.

Now I’ve learned psychiatric treatments often center around making a person productive, which I think codes out as “go earn the system some profits,” or unitary or stable, whatever that means.

Psychiatric treatments seek to make neurologically diverse people their kind of normal.

I can relate.

A therapist once asked me if I had ever tortured animals, all because I needed his professional okay to pursue top surgery.

The questions and tests and interviews facilitated by the diagnosis of gender identity disorder often seem more about the clinicians than me.

Now I’ve learned psychotherapeutic communities want control. They want to mold us into an image in which they see themselves. Whether or not we survive such extrusions, who cares? We’ll get a stamp of “normal” or we should die trying.

But the most important thing I’ve learned is that a diagnosis is a diagnosis.

Whether the diagnosis is medical or psychiatric, I must still navigate through a system of channels and locks controlled by people who may or may not have my interests in mind.

Medical diagnosis don’t offer better solutions. People with diagnosis of cerebral palsy, for example, or dystonia, can, and are, treated like children by clinicians.

I’ve learned that if you are a black man fighting against a system out to kill you, you’ll probably get diagnosed as schizophrenic.

I’ve learned what happens to a white woman fighting against the malaise of confined, middle-class womanhood.

Either way the cure – whether the diagnosis is schizophrenia or severe under stimulation – doesn’t address the problem, which is racism and misogyny.

Now I’ve learned few circumstances exist that warrant denying a person hormones because they have an additional neurological condition.

I’ve learned a person’s gender dysphoria  and another neurological state can follow parallel paths and never intersect. Most therapists I’ve known misunderstand this phenomena, believing that gender can’t be independent of any other diagnosis, even a medical one.

I find it difficult to believe psychiatry a value-neutral proposition. Too many therapists have feed me and my people loads of crap. I’ve had to eat my share of shit sandwiches when it comes to managing my transsexualism, but I’ve always chosen to eat them.

It’s different when someone is shoving it down your throat, while sitting on your chest with their hands around your throat, implying you are abnormal because you struggle to eat the sandwich.

When I really listened to disability activists, sitting with my prejudices and discomforts, I realized a diagnosis is a diagnosis.

Now I’ve learned a medical diagnosis doesn’t make things better for people. A diagnosis of cerebral palsy or dystonia can, and does result, in being treated by like a child by clinicians.

Mostly I’ve learned how desperate middle-class people are for everyone to fit it, get along and keep a low profile.

When I worked at a social work school, a new coworker once called me in a panic.

“A man is sitting in the common area, shouting and biting his fist.”

“He has Tourette’s syndrome,” I told her after walking past the man to her office.

“We know him,” I said.

She smiled, sort of.

The social norming of my employer told her she needed to accept him. He had a right to sit in the common area and shout and bite his fist.

“Oh. Okay.”

Her upbringing, however, suggested a different outcome.

Middle-class people prize quiet and social conformity.

Crazy is a very bad thing among the middle class. Your head is broke.

Now I realize my head is broke, too, when examined through the lens of extreme middle class blandness, gender conformity and the DSM.

Whether a little bit or a lot, a broke head is still broken. I needs  diagnosis to get fixed.

When I fear crazy and rail against gender identity disorder and makes claims that I’m not crazy, I’m not really doing anything to change a system I say I hate.

The problem isn’t people who are neurologically different from me. The problem is the system that wants me to believe they are the problem.

Let’s work on changing the system, a twisted, violent thing that really is broken.