Friday, August 31, 2007
"Whoever he becomes, that's OK because that's who he is"
Special to The Seattle Times
Zach likes his fancy gloves with a ruffled trim. He first asked his mother if he could have a dress last summer, when he was 4½. "After the third request, I thought, 'I'm not going to put him off anymore,' " says his mother, Rebecca.
Information on the Web
Children's National Medical Center: www.dcchildrens.com
Gender Odyssey Family: www.genderodysseyfamily.com
Gender Spectrum Education and Training: www.genderspectrum.org
Starts today
Gender Odyssey Family, through Monday at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, 800 Convention Place, Seattle. Admission at the door is $150-$200 for adults, $100 for teens 13-17, free for children
12 and under. Childcare is provided on-site. (www.genderodysseyfamily.com)
Five-year-old Zach stands barefoot in the middle of his bedroom, faced with a dilemma: Should he wear the pink dress or the powder blue? Both are long princess-style affairs, the first displayed on a hanger held by his mother, Rebecca, the second, slightly wrinkled, pulled from the top of a dresser by Zach himself.
"Or would you rather wear your witch's outfit?" his mother asks him, nodding at a black polyester costume in the closet, its neckline trimmed in orange.
"No," Zach says. "I think I want the blue one." He dashes out of the room with dress in hand, returning half a minute later, his pink T-shirt replaced by a tight crushed-velvet bodice. Zach bounds around the room, smiling, wisps of blond hair breaking free from the French braid that trails down his back.
It's that playful exuberance that Rebecca and her husband, John, hope their son never loses. "But we're concerned that this piece of him will get lost, if other children aren't able to respond to him well," says Rebecca, 39, who asked that her family's real names not be used.
Of course, most parents dream of the best for their children. But Rebecca and her husband are a certain kind of parent: They're raising a boy who wants to dress in girls' clothes. And that places them in largely uncharted territory. Is this a passing phase or something central to Zach's identity?
A compass of sorts may await the family this weekend, when mother and son participate in a local conference called Gender Odyssey Family. The event at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center will be Seattle's first conference for parents raising "gender-variant" kids, or those children who fall outside what's traditionally defined as "boy" or "girl."
The conference will offer 23 sessions over the course of the weekend, some geared toward entire families and others focused specifically on gender-variant teens.
One family workshop, titled "A Dad's Place," will provide a forum for fathers to discuss the feelings brought about by raising such children. Another family workshop will help parents determine how — and when — to disclose their child's gender variance to others.
Experts in such fields as pediatrics, endocrinology, psychotherapy, gender studies and communications, and parents of gender-variant children will lead workshops. . . .
Trans week in Seattle
Trans tax trial concludes
ejacobs@baywindows.com
The United States Tax Court resumed hearing testimony Aug. 23 in Rhiannon O’Donnabhain’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for denying her a medical deduction for the cost of her sex reassignment surgery. The IRS’s expert witness, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, testified that he does not believe Gender Identity Disorder (GID) meets the medical definition of a disease and that IRS regulations only permit medical deductions for treatments related to diseases or injuries; he argued that taking a medical deduction for sex reassignment surgery to treat GID violates IRS regulations. Dietz defined a disease as a pathology that has a biological basis. He was the final witness to testify in the trial, and prior to his appearance the court heard three days of testimony from witnesses July 24-26 (see “Experts at tax trial explain gender identity disorder,” July 26, and “Tussle over tax deduction continues,” Aug. 2).
Dietz, who has consulted on a number of high profile court cases including the trials of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and the Unabomber, told Judge Joseph H. Gale that GID is “a serious personal problem. Whether it would best be understood as a psychological problem or a social psychological problem or a social problem remains to be seen.” He said it is appropriate for people with GID to seek medical treatment for the disorder, but he said differences in gender identity are “one of the variations in the human condition” and that people who fall outside the conventional labels of male and female should not be viewed as diseased.
Dietz attempted to link the GID diagnosis to the treatment of homosexuality as a disorder prior to its removal from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973. He claimed that at one time in history it was useful to the gay community to have homosexuality classified as a disorder because it took homosexuality out of the criminal arena. Contrary to Dietz’s reading of gay history, the laws in many states criminalized homosexual acts long after homosexuality was removed from the DSM; the U.S. Supreme Court waited until 2003 to strike down the nation’s sodomy laws. Dietz said eventually the classification of homosexuality as a disorder outlived its usefulness, and he said that while the GID diagnosis allows transgender people access to medical treatment, it also stigmatizes them.
“Only by shedding that illness metaphor was it possible to look at gay people as full humans and not impaired. And ultimately I think transgender people deserve the same consideration,” Dietz told the court.
On cross-examination Ben Klein, a member of O’Donnabhain’s legal team and an attorney for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), pressed Dietz on whether GID should be viewed as a legitimate mental disorder and emphasized the psychological trauma experienced by people with GID. He asked Dietz if GID is associated with suicidality, auto-castration or penectomy, which means the removal of the penis. On the first day of the trial O’Donnabhain testified that prior to her sex reassignment surgery there was an incident where she stood in her kitchen gripping a knife and contemplating cutting off her own penis.
Dietz responded that GID is associated with all three conditions or acts described by Klein but that there is less of an association than mental health officials once believed. . . .
Private School Keeps Transgender Teacher On Staff
(08/30/07 -- DURHAM) - For 12-years a band and music teacher named Leslie Webster has taught at the Duke School for Children - a private kindergarten through eighth grade school near the Duke University campus. Now Ms. Webster has become Mr. Webster and at least one parent of 9-year-old is very concerned.
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"It should not be a topic of discussion, especially something as harsh as a gender change," concerned parent Jim Gossett said.
But this week, the school sent a letter home to parents saying teachers would discuss the sex change with students who were taught by Webster last year.
"Every so often a community has the opportunity to test its core values," school officials stated in the letter, "Duke School is now facing such a test."
"I'm a parent of two children at the school. I think the school handled it exactly right." Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke usually comments on the U.S. Constitution. Now he's speaking up for his children's transgender teacher.
"It used to be that schools made teachers leave the classroom when their pregnancy began to show. And it used to be said that children couldn't deal with gay and lesbian teachers. We look back at those things and it seems so anachronistic. Likewise, students and children can deal fine with transgender teachers. It's the person that matters in the classroom. Not the gender of the teacher," Chemerinsky said.
Trans Filmmaker Reinvents the Teen Comedy
Published: August 30, 2007
Actress-Filmmaker M.C. Brennan has exciting news. After her transgender teen comedy, Dramatis Personae, won an Outfest Screenwriting Lab fellowship and was given a staged reading—with Exes and Oh’s auteur Lee Friedlander directing Nip/Tuck’s Willam Belli in the lead role—things are really heating up.
“The Outfest experience led to a lot of interest from producers and now I’m in the process of preparing to direct the script as my first feature! There are some really exciting folks who’ve expressed an interest in being a part of it, and hopefully over the next couple of months…those pieces will fall into place.”
The Arizona native, who’s lived in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles, began making short films while still in high school, while she was acting in local theatrical productions, commercials and 1985’s gender bending flick Just One of The Guys. The multi-talented trans woman has covered sports for Phoenix’s LGBT Echo magazine, designed posters for Dr. Demento, written over 150 songs and recorded five full-length albums.
Lately, Brennan has been experiencing a cinematic career revival. Her first full-length screenplay, The People’s Choice, won several awards, she appears in 2007’s lesbian Itty Bitty Titty Committee and Jana Marcus’s acclaimed photographic celebration of trans lives, Transfigurations (currently showing at Seattle’s Gender Odyssey Conference).
Brennen says she’s particularly thrilled with the reception her latest screenplay, Dramatis Personae, received at Outfest. “It’s very exciting and very flattering. [The Outfest Screenwriting Lab] was, by far, the most knowledgeable, most supportive environment I’ve ever experienced.”
Based loosely on Brennan’s own experiences, Dramatis Personae—which Brennan describes as “Pretty In Pink meets Hedwig and the Angry Inch”—revolves around a transgender high schooler from the wrong side of the tracks, and her riches-to-rags, new kid in town love interest.
Disappointed with “what passes for teen comedies today,” Brennan reminisces, “We had...the great John Hughes movies like Sixteen Candles…[that] spoke to the real truth of growing up and finding yourself…[and] had at least some queer subtext. I wanted to write a very funny, borderline filthy teen comedy that put the queer characters front and center.”
The screenwriter—who once wrote a four-book series spoofing secret agent archetypes, then co-founded the satirical Loon News and contributed to Comic News—finds inspiration in her own life. “From an early age I recognized the cosmic absurdity of my situation, and I think the ability to laugh at myself and at life’s little ironies is one of the reasons I’m still on this nutty planet.” . . .
Ten Money Questions for Jamison Green
Filed under Ten Money Questions
Jamison Green
Queercents strives to represent diversity in the LGBT community and in my opinion the trans voice and view is one where we have come up short. So when I asked Helen Boyd if she could introduce me to a few thought leaders in the trans community, she put me in touch with Jamison Green. I was thrilled when he responded and graciously accepted our request for an interview.
Jamison is an internationally respected leader within the transgender movement and has written books, won awards and appeared in numerous documentaries. I asked him to get personal about money and share his thoughts about the financial issues that impact the trans community at large. I enjoyed this thoughtful conversation. I’m sure you will too.
1. There has been much debate in the press about Who Pays for Sex Reassignment Surgery. What’s your opinion on the topic?
It’s easy for people to get all bent out of shape about the idea of paying for someone else’s stuff, no matter what it is. The issue, as I see it, is not about whether taxpayers should cover particular medical expenses for prisoners, or whether we should advocate an “I did it on my own, so others should do it on their own, too” social philosophy. The issue is whether we as a society include sex reassignment as a covered medical expense (in insurance or government-funded contexts) because it is a human need, or whether we exclude it because we have a moral objection to it. I think our current medical insurance system in this country is seriously broken and truly serves only the affluent, but that is a different topic.
Given the current system, the way insurance works (whether it is taxpayer-funded Medicare or private insurance schemes) is that it purports to reduce costs by spreading them throughout an insured pool of individuals. Looked at in this way, the cost of surgical sex reassignment is much less than many other less rare and more expensive treatments that are routinely provided, such as open heart surgery or spinal disc repair, etc.
We have no difficulty justifying these expenses, but we have a lot of resistance to paying for someone’s sex change. Why is that? When we advocated for insurance coverage for transgendered and transsexual city and county employees in San Francisco, the amount that every covered person in the plan had to pay for trans treatments was less than one fifth of the cost that every covered person had to pay to provide substance abuse treatments for subscribers. It is just as easy to get angry about paying for someone else’s substance abuse treatment, but no one complains about that. So, without belaboring the point, it seems to me the issue is less one of “how do we divide the finite resource pie?” than it is one of “which people matter?” So long as trans people are regarded as exotic, perverted, or disposable, it will be easy to complain about sharing our scarce resources with them. My goal is to shift this social paradigm so that no one has to suffer from this kind of prejudice.
2. What is your most significant memory about money?
When I was in my early 30s, my partner, Samantha, and I saved for two years to have a month-long trip to Europe, which we took in 1982. My parents had always said that it was extremely expensive to go to Europe, and I had this idea that I’d be extremely lucky to get ever get there, but once we’d made up our collective mind that the trip was a priority, Samantha and I were able to commit to the sacrifices saving that much money required. We weren’t making much money then, and it was a struggle to save $5,000.00, enough to cover our trip and maintain our apartment, car payment, etc., while we were away. We had a wonderful time, managed our daily expenses well, and came back with $1000.00 in hand. It was then that I realized that I had much more capacity than I had previously imagined, and that I really could do things that I wanted to do if I committed myself to my goals.
3. What is your worst habit around finances?
In spite of what I just said above, my worst habit is spending money too easily. I’m quite good at it, actually. I am generous to a fault, and somewhat self-indulgent, too, and I am inclined to spend money when I have it, even though I know I should be saving, especially as I am getting closer to retirement age.
4. In your book, Becoming a Visible Man, you discuss many of the challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience. Can you share thoughts about how this personally impacted your financial status?
Becoming a Visible Man When I undertook all the medical expense of transition and surgical sex reassignment, in the years 1988 through 1991, I was very fortunate to have a management position at a leading computer technology design and manufacturing firm. I managed to have some of the minor costs (psychological counseling and hormones) covered by insurance, though on claim forms I did not describe my condition as anything having to do with transsexualism, which was excluded from treatment.
Fortunately, most of what transsexual people need in the way of medical care is not unusual, and is available to non-transsexual people (a fact that underlies one of the main arguments I have made for years about the discriminatory exclusion statements that prevent transsexual people from openly receiving medical care), so it never raised a flag.
When it came to my genital reconstruction surgery and medically necessary hysterectomy, I needed to borrow $10,000.00 from my mother to cover the $22,000.00 payment that I was required to make at the hospital the morning of my surgery (”cashier’s check only, if you please — we don’t want any deadbeat transsexuals stiffing us for their expenses!”).
Of course I worried about potential job discrimination, but, again, I was lucky. I approached the matter as if it was nothing out of the ordinary, generally a private matter, but nothing to be ashamed of, and besides, I was at work to do a job, one at which I was capable and competent, so I just made sure that I focused on the job, believing that if I did I would not be subject to dismissal.
As it happened, I did become downwardly mobile, but that was my own choice as I opted in 1992 to take on more of an activist role, and became a part-time freelance writer to finance myself as I built up the educational organization FTM International through 1999. . . .
Cross dressing pupil allowed to attend school
03:23 PM CDT on Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Intersex: Case studies
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| 1932 Olympic gold medallist Stella Walsh had both male and female characteristics. Image: Bettyman/Corbis The Western world defines gender in two distinct categories. But in reality, gender is a spectrum. Why does society, and even science, struggle to understand and accept those who are somewhere between male and female? This article is a boxout that goes with our feature – Intersex: The space between the genders, read the full article here. The writer HERCULINE BARBARIN was a 19th century French hermaphrodite who was treated as a female at birth but later redesignated a man after a scandalous affair and a medical examination. A hermaphrodite, she started her life as a pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, growing into a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, and becoming a passionate lover of a schoolmistress. After the affair was revealed she was reclassified as a man. . . . |
Crowds cause sex change
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| A school of bluehead wrasse containing a mix of females and 'sneaky' males that look identical to females. Image: James Cook University SYDNEY, 11 September 2006: Sex changes are common among coral reef fish - but gender can depend on who's around, according to a recent study by a team of Australian and American scientists. Philip Munday of James Cook University and colleagues from the University of California Santa Barbara have found that juvenile bluehead wrasse choose their sex according to the crowd they grow up with. "It turns out that social effects are really important to whether a bluehead wrasse becomes a male or a female when it is young," says Munday. "These fish are very sensitive to their social surroundings which ultimately determine whether they will become male or female." . . . |
