Women who receive implants for breast enhancement are three times more likely to commit suicide, according to a new report that offered a sobering view of an increasingly popular surgery.
Deaths related to mental disorders, including alcohol or drug dependence, also were three times higher among women who had the cosmetic procedure, researchers said.
The report in the Annals of Plastic Surgery's August issue was the most recent to detect a higher suicide rate among women who had their breasts enlarged, providing a gloomy counterpoint to studies that showed women felt better about themselves after getting implants.
Though the study did not look at the reasons behind the suicides, senior author Joseph McLaughlin, a professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said he believed that many had psychological problems before getting implants and that their conditions did not improve afterward.
Previous studies have shown that as many as 15% of plastic surgery patients have body dysmorphic disorder, a condition marked by severe distress over minor physical flaws. People with the disorder have a higher rate of suicidal thoughts and rarely improve after surgery.
Breast augmentation is the most popular cosmetic surgery in the U.S., followed by liposuction and eyelid surgery. Last year, 329,396 enlargements were performed, up 13% from 2005, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. . . .
Meet the cross-dresser professor: he's married, he's straight, and he no longer fits into his tennis skirt. We introduce you to Professor Michael Gilbert, a tenured professor who teaches philosophy and gender studies at York University, and ask: is it really all fun and games when you live as the opposite gender?
I liked the interview with Professor Gilbert. I'm a woman who wears men-styled clothing for outdoor work, but I find it hard to imagine most men being comfortable in women-styled clothes. If it makes Mickey feel good to dress as a woman, more power to him.
As an aside, much of women-styled clothing is miserably uncomfortable, and my only to him question would be: Why wear panty hose and high heels????
Posted by: Meribeth | Apr 22, 07 10:31 AM
Without a doubt we are conditioned by everyone/everything in our society to act in accordance with the role assigned to our gender. As Carol pointed out it is not a problem for women to wear men's clothing. Why? It is my experience that it is empowering. In the reverse, however, there is no empowering component for a man to dress as a woman. The cross-dressing man only realizes how disempowering it is to be a woman. Great segment.
I think most of us are familiar with the sex/gender divide. For those who aren’t, briefly, it’s the idea that we’re all born with a biological sex (eg male or female), and we’re all born with (and/or socialised into) a gender (eg boy or girl), and the two don’t always match. This is where transsexualism comes into play - a biological man may feel like he’s actually a woman, and vice versa.
The idea fascinates me, and I’ve known enough transexual individuals to believe that gender is a very complex thing indeed. I have no problem referring to a biological man who presents herself to the world as a woman with the feminine pronouns “her” and “she”. For all intents and purposes I would consider her a woman. If she was in the restroom with me I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable.
At the same time, though, we’re taught that being Man and Woman is an eternal and essential part of who we are. So what does that mean?
What does it mean to be a woman? I think we can pretty quickly dismiss the “sex” part of the sex/gender divide - breasts, ovaries, fertility, etc. Lots of women don’t have those things. I think we can also dismiss the XX chromosone pairing. There are women who have a Y chromosone who are still considered biological women. But if we confine our discussion to gender, are there any truly “male” or “female” traits?
If being a woman is an essential and eternal part of who we are, what part is essential and eternal to defining woman?
(The same question could be asked about men, and I hope men will chime in with their experiences, but since this is a feminist blog and we’re mostly women, I used the female experience.)
Blurring the lines with Kendra Kuliga and the D.C. Kings
by Sean Bugg Photography by Todd Franson Published on April 22, 2004
"What is a drag king?" muses Kendra Kuliga. "You could say male impersonator, but that's so the tip of the iceberg. I've seen drag kings go between being a woman and being a guy all in the same performance. I'm both a male and a female while I'm performing."
As her well-known alter ego Ken Las Vegas, Kuliga has been blending the masculine and feminine on stages from D.C.'s own Chaos nightclub to venues across the nation and the Atlantic Ocean. As one of the organizing forces behind the D.C. Kings, she's helped shape Washington into one of the hottest spots in the internationally burgeoning drag king scene.
Kuliga
It's an appropriate ethos for a performance art that's based around mutual support and family-like bonding. While a prominent member of the D.C. Kings and one of the most recognizable drag kings in town, Kuliga is adamant that D.C. Kings is a group effort that wouldn't work if it were boiled down to just one person.
That's why this weekend at the Great Big International Drag King Show at D.C.'s 9:30 Club you won't see drag kings competing for a crown -- you'll be seeing a collection of performers doing what they love, entertaining a crowd. In this case, they'll be entertaining as part of the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition annual Conference on Gender.
Kuliga lauds the work that GenderPAC is doing on behalf of everyone who blurs and blends the gender lines society expects, issues of particular importance to GLBT persons, but also to straight men and women who don't conform to traditional roles.
"These are very real people, and they need the respect that they deserve," she says. "G-PAC's got their back."
The daughter of a Brazilian mother whose family was part of the famed Gracie school of jujitsu, Kuliga has had her fair share of exposure to how masculinity and femininity play out in day-to-day lives. The recently-thirty photographer and artist -- and former Metro Weekly employee -- uses those roles and expectations to create a character different than her, but still her own.
METRO WEEKLY:So how does it feel being thirty?
KENDRA KULIGA: I had a rough time turning thirty. I don't feel like that. I feel like a kid, you know? I'm not ready to cash in my chips and be a grown up. I think thirty-one might be easier. But being thirty, I own myself much more than I ever have in how I feel about myself and my body. Women in their thirties are much more okay with themselves than women in their twenties, because you just kind of get over it -- it doesn't matter if I'm thin, it doesn't matter what I do, it's not going to affect the way people treat you at the end of the day. But it's not easy. I'm still working through it.
MW:Were you unhappy with your body and appearance in your twenties? . . .
Scientists have found a way to turn female mice into aggressive, pelvic-thrusting masculine lotharios in an experiment that challenges established dogma.
For years, scientists have searched in vain for the bits of the brain that underpin the dramatic differences between males and females.
The female mouse (right) attempting to mount the male
Now biologist say that all these efforts may have been in vain because such differences may not arise in the brain at all, thanks to a study that could may help provide profound new insights into the differences between the sexes.
The work comes up with the startling suggestion that both male and female brains contain the circuits for male and female behaviour but the ones that are actually used depend on signals from the body, which may turn one circuit on and the other one off.
The focus of sex specific behaviour in many species - though not humans - now shifts to a small sensory organ found in the noses of of most backboned creatures, except higher primates and birds.
The new work of the Harvard University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute team, published in the journal Nature, indicates that defects in this organ, known as the vomeronasal organ, lead female mice to act like males, solicting them, mounting them and thrusting them while abandoning nesting and nursing.
"These results are flabbergasting," says Prof Catherine Dulac. "Nobody had imagined that a simple mutation like this could induce females to behave so thoroughly like males."
It is as dramatic as showing a man could be made to behave like a woman at the flick of a switch, though the results do not apply directly to humans, which lack a vomeronasal organ. . . .
By the time the 23-year-old is ready for breakfast, his skin is soft and shimmery, his hair trimmed, pomaded and bobby-pinned into an elaborate pompadour.
The daily regimen takes an hour and costs more than 10,000 yen ($84), but Sango says it's essential to maintain his style.
Sango may spend more cash on his looks than most, but he is far from unusual among Japanese men his age.
In a society that in many ways remains sharply defined by traditional gender roles and expectations, fashion-conscious young men are one-upping their metrosexual counterparts in the West -- it is not only acceptable for them to obsess over their hair, face and clothes, it's sexy too.
Japan's latest heartthrobs are a far cry from the American masculine ideal of stoic, stubble-cheeked muscle men. Slender, smooth-faced and androgynous stars such as singer-actor Takuya Kimura, or Kimutaku as he's affectionately known, routinely top popularity polls among women, and men in Japan are taking note. . . .
I am a complete gender nerd. Show me a culture that's got some basis in gender, and I wanna know more. Wells College is a lovely liberal arts college in upstate New York's Finger Lakes region. For 136 years, it had been a women-only institution. On October 2, 2004, Wells College announced that it would admit men in autumn 2005. Ms. magazine covered it well. Sociologically speaking, Wells is a goldmine of information and politically speaking. Wells could become the earth-shaking epicenter of a consciously gendered culture. There's never been one of those before, ever
Last February, I spoke at Wells and I learned that a sisterhood had grown up within the college over those 136 years. It wasn't quite family, and it wasn't quite academic community. It was a little corner of the world where patriarchal values didn't hold sway. It was sweet, powerful, and empowering. In response to the co-ed announcement, one student was quoted as saying, "I was crushed. I was crying, and I don't cry very often."
There was an immediate takeover protest at the administration building that lasted over a week and a half. The administration and board of directors claimed they'd done their best to maintain the women-only status of the college. They'd dropped tuition by 30 percent, they'd tried all sorts of new market ploys to get the student enrollment up to the minimum 450 it would take to keep the college from going under completely. Surveys of the day showed that only 3 percent of college-bound women actively sought a women's only institution. Like most things in America these days, money talks. The men were admitted, and here we are a year or so later and there are twenty more students on campus than before, and there are a lot of angry juniors, seniors, and alumna. So, from the focal point of the gendered culture that was and the gendered culture that is now, it remains to be discovered:
1. What's been lost? 2. What's been gained? 3. What can be learned from this? 4. What opportunities exist that would make the most people happier.
Before I presume to address these issues and propose an interesting path for the college to take, you deserve to know who's talking to you. I'm a transsexual femme dyke nerd girl atheist and anarchist. I write books on postmodern gender theory, and I just finished a book of alternatives to suicide for teens, freaks, and other outlaws. I'm also a chronic binge-eater who's been diagnosed with anorexia. I'm 59 years old, a double Pisces with a Taurus Moon. I'm a fan of anything Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, and Shirley Manson. I'm a performance artist, a classical Shakespearean actor and I write award-winning pornography. But for purposes of this blog entry, and all my future posts, what really matters is this:
I am not a man.
I am not a woman.
In the battle of the sexes, I'm neutral territory.
Wells College and I have both gone through a gender change, and I've been a tranny a lot longer than the college has. Weird fuck that I am, I've got some experience, strength and hope to share with them. Wells and I have got a great deal in common at this moment in history: We have a heightened awareness of gender as a factor of identity, desire, and power. What's more, each one of us has grown up encultured by our birth-assigned genders into perpetuating a world that lets people get away with controlling people's lives on the basis of their one of only two genders. It's a self-perpetuating system, and Wells College has the opportunity to blow the bipolar gender system wide open and expose it for the fraud it is. Honestly, each of us has far more control over gender than we'd been led to believe.
Gender impacts our identity, our desires, and our power; and the gender change at Wells College has impacted its identity as well as the identity of all its students, staff, administrators and faculty. Furthermore, the desires, dreams, and goals of everyone at Wells has been impacted by the gender change, as well as the power of everyone on campus. But the gender change of Wells College isn't over yet. It's still happening, just like my gender change is still happening.
A gender change is not genital surgery. They don't just cut it off or stick one on and voila, you're another gender. Just so, the admission of male students after 136 years is not the only factor of the gender change at Wells. Gender norms change with time. What makes a "real man" or a "real woman" gets modified by ideas of race, class, age, sexuality, religion, body type and even legal status as a citizen. So, who's to say that for those 136 years there's only been one gender at Wells College anyway, or even one gender at a time?
Any personal or cultural gender change is constantly in flux, and my gender journey over the last two decades has been a process of throwing out what I don't like about myself and keeping what I do like. And that's what Wells College gets to do. They get to direct the evolution of a new gender identity for Wells College: ne that includes everyone without privileging anyone, under any circumstances, because gender is only one of a number of interlocking hierarchical systems of oppression. This goes way beyond any previous struggle for equal gender rights. This would move gender-based politics beyond genitally-assigned gender as an isolated factor of identity, desire or power. . . .
IT gives Bra Boys a whole new meaning. As foreshadowed in television's Seinfeld, the obesity epidemic is fuelling a storm in a he-cup with the arrival of a compression bra for males suffering the indignity of man boobs.
The creators of the Male Support Vest promise it will flatten the chest, make breasts less noticeable and reduce bounce during physical activity.
It comes at a time when figures show Australian waistbands are expanding at a furious rate, with more than two-thirds of NSW men aged 35 to 64 officially classified as overweight or obese.
The crisis has generated a rise in the number of males with enlarged breast tissue, which are often the subject of ridicule and dubbed "moobs''.
Celebrities observed with wobbly pectorals have included Mark Latham, James Packer and Tom Cruise.
The Male Support Vest is made by bra company Enell and is reminiscent of an episode of the US sitcom Seinfeld, in which Kramer and Frank Costanza try to start a business selling bras for men.
They argue over whether to name the product a "manssiere'' or a "bro''. In an episode of The Simpsons, Marge reveals Homer sometimes wears a sports bra too. . . .
Sydney actor Michael Quicke, 38, road tested the Male Support Vest for The Sunday Telegraph last week. He doubted the average Australian bloke would wear the garment.
Last summer, when my cholesterol count came back high, my wife signed me up with a personal trainer. "You'll like him," she said. "He's got an interesting story."
Off I went to Bodies Under Construction, a fitness studio in Hollywood run by Mark Angelo Cummings and his wife Violet.
Mark was short, balding and had a beard. He had a big smile and a quick wit.
During my first workout, Mark told me he was born with a "birth defect."
"Really," I said. "You look perfectly healthy to me."
He explained that he was, after surgery and years of therapy.
"I was born the wrong sex," he said. "I was born Maritza."
I looked at his hairy arms and chest and did a double-take. He showed me pictures from when he was a little girl and a competitive female body-builder.
Cummings, 43, has taught me a lot about gender dysphoria and transsexuals over the past year. As gender identity has come up in the headlines — a Largo city manager was fired after he announced his transition to Susan, a Los Angeles Times sportswriter I used to drink beers with at the Olympics caused a stir when he became Christine — Mark gave me a first-hand account of the desperation that led them there.
"This is not a choice," he said Friday. "It's something you try to deny and hide, but as time goes on, as you become more miserable in your own skin, you just can't take it anymore."
Cummings said he was 3 when he realized he was born in the wrong body. His parents didn't understand. After they came to South Florida from Cuba, Maritza gravitated to boys' activities, like weightlifting, and she joined the Army. It didn't help. She abused drugs and alcohol, attempted suicide in her 20s.
Then she found out that there was a medical explanation and there was something she could do about it. Maritza became Mark. . . .
A guy needed money to buy a motorbike. He saw a lady boy wore a gold necklace. From behind he thought the lady boy was a girl, then snatched the necklace. The lady in a boy body started chasing him and also screamed for help. The thief guy was caught by a hotel security and patrolled police.
On the 4 August 2007, at 02.30 AM, Pol.Capt. Grieng-Grai-Wut Bua-Gla, Pattaya, was notified that there was a snatch and run case near Pattaya Memorial hospital. The thief was detained at the front of Queen Hotel, Central Pattaya which is about 300 meters from the
Police rushed to the Queen hotel where the thief had been caught. His name is Mr. Sarayut Dejwat (28) from Surathani province. The evidence was 30 gram gold necklace that he snatched from a lady boy, Mr. Sombat Janjam (18), a Cabaret dancer from a beer bar in Central Pattaya.
Mr. Sarayut confessed that he is working at a gay bar in South Pattaya. He needed money to pay the down payment to buy a motorbike to use for work. He saw Mr. Sombat who is a lady boy walking alone. From behind he thought he was a girl. He then snatched his gold necklace and ran. But the girl in a man body was chasing him and also screaming for help. Unfortunately, he was caught by a security of Queen hotel and patrolled police. Mr. Sarayut was charged for snatch and run at night time.
The members-only shopping sessions will be held once a month
A charity shop in Leeds is hosting evening shopping sessions exclusively for cross-dressing men.
The Oxfam store renames itself "Oxtran" when it stocks up on oversized women's wear and open its doors to transsexuals and transvestites once a month.
Sally Stone, who runs the store in the city centre, said: "We felt that there was definitely a gap in the market."
The move has been welcomed by Leeds drag queens Daisy du Pont and Anna Glypta.
Ms Stone said: "Oxfam's always looking for new ways to raise funds for the work that we do and we felt that there was definitely a gap in the market.
It's something that Leeds has been crying out for Daisy du Pont
"So we are opening our doors for one night each month to allow an uncatered-for group of people to come to shop in an uninhibited environment.
"We have quite a lot of oversized things and you'll find in all Oxfam shops that they don't sell very well so those things will be shipped to our central warehouse, sorted out and sent to us specially for these events."
Ms du Pont, who picked out a see-through black blouse and a gold dress, said: "I think it's fantastic. It's something that Leeds has been crying out for.
"The transgender community had nowhere to go and it's great to shop with staff who understand what they are looking for."
Ms Glypta said: "Drag queens like us don't mind going out and buying things and saying it's for ourselves.
"But an awful lot of guys out there can't actually admit that they are buying something that is actually for them, so they can't try things on, they end up taking it home and then bringing it back so it just gets complicated.
"To have somewhere like this where they can go and it's all 'trans-aware' is fabulous."
Our Visible Vote primer on how the Dems see GLBT issues.
by Jennifer Vanasco, 365Gay.com
The historic LOGO/HRC presidential forum on GLBT issues, to be broadcast Aug. 9, will for the first time showcase the Democratic contenders responses to our concerns.
In our comprehensive gay issue round-up, we bullet the issues that are easily quantifiable—a candidate’s stance on marriage, for instance—and then try to sum up in a paragraph or two some of the nuances.
Part One of our series covered GLBT issues as seen by Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Hilary Clinton, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. John Edwards, and Sen. Mike Gravel, in alphabetical order.
However, we left out a crucial candidate: Sen. Joe Biden, the only major Democratic contender not to be represented in the forum, because he had a scheduling conflict. His stance is included below, along with Dennis Kucinich, Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Bill Richardson. . . .
The Gendercator is a short, satirical take on gender and social norms. The story uses the “Rip van Winkle” model to extrapolate from the past into a possible future.
In 1973 a group of hippie women are celebrating Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs. They are partying in the rural woods outside of Bloomington, Indiana. Our heroine Sally is a simple minded, sporty type who overindulges at the party and passes out under a tree. Sally wakes up 75 years later in 2048 to discover (amongst other social changes) that feminism has failed utterly and completely. Sex roles and gender expression are rigidly binary and enforced by law and social custom. When Sally chooses to dress in flannel and jeans, the doctor at the emergency room calls in the “Gendercator”, a government official who informs Sally that butch women and sissy boys are no longer tolerated – gender variants are allowed to chose their gender, but they must choose one and follow its rigid constraints.
Sally is baffled by this brave new world. All she wants is to “do her own thing” – but her own thing is seen as problematic. Sally is a simple-minded stoner, indoctrinated into 70s feminism. She is no poster girl or freedom fighter, just a gentle tomboy dropped into the future with a tendency to respond in slogans such as “sisterhood is powerful”.
Nurse Nancy locates some of Sally’s former friends – they are 100 now, but because of advances in the medical profession they are still healthy and thriving. The friends tell Sally they heard she moved to California and that’s why they never looked for her. One of her friends appears to be a man and tells Sally, “They made me do it. They’ll make you too.” They explain to Sally that in the early 2000s the evangelical Christians took over the government and legislated their strict family values, legally sanctioning only “one man, one woman” couples. Advances in sex reassignment surgery have made it possible to honor an individual’s choice of gender AND government policy. Sally is comfortable in the middle of the genders, an unacceptable choice in 2048.
Director’s Note
The Gendercator is a work of satirical fiction. A satire is not a prediction of the future, it is a commentary on contemporary social trends. A satire takes these trends to their logical extreme to emphasize their underlying logic. The Gendercator is a comment on 1) the rise of religious fundamentalists as a political power all over the world, all of whom declare homosexuality to be a sin, 2) the medical advancements in plastic surgery, and 3) the culture of individuality which posits that individual “choice” is to be celebrated as the highest good, and therefore cannot be criticized. . . .
For the first time in history, the major candidates from a major political party – Democrats, of course – will be gathering in a public forum to discuss gay issues in front of an audience of gay people.
The forum, called “The Visible Vote ‘08" and sponsored by LOGO (which owns 365Gay) and HRC, will be broadcast from Los Angeles on August 9 – already, GLBT’s from around the country are submitting video questions.
A significant amount of information is already out there about the candidate’s take on the issues. Before you send in your questions, do a little prep work: here, in two parts, is a round-up of what the Dems have said they believe.
Part One, below, will focus (in alphabetical order) on Hilary Clinton, Mike Dodd, John Edwards and Mike Gravel; Part Two, next Friday, will put the spotlight on Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson.
We bullet the issues that are easily quantifiable—a candidate’s stance on marriage, for instance—and then try to sum up in a paragraph or two some of the nuances.
What will they say during the forum? Print out our round-up before you watch The Visible Vote '08 and see if they are consistent with their histories, or if on that historic night, they decide to break new ground. . . .
Ng Chun-mei admitted three charges when she appeared at Eastern Magistracy on Friday - using an identity relating to another person, knowingly misleading a police officer and perverting the course of justice.
Ng, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and accompanied by her mother, was remanded in custody.
Acting principal magistrate Douglas Yau Tak-hong adjourned sentencing to August 17, pending community and rehabilitation center reports.
The court heard that Ng had used an identity card belonging to her brother, Ng Chun-wing, 21, to apply for a job as a part-time promoter at Wing On Department Store in Central in June 2005 because she was under 18 at the time.
In December last year, Ng Chun- mei was arrested by police and charged with the theft of nine department store vouchers worth HK$4,500.
She pleaded guilty to the charge in February and was fined HK$500.
Ng Chun-wing, who studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, was shocked when he was interviewed by a school social welfare officer about the theft case in early March.
He denied having committed the offense, and when he was shown a photo of the defendant in a newspaper clipping, he recognized the person was his younger sister.
Pleading for leniency, Ng Chun- mei's lawyer said his client admired her brother and had liked to dress like a boy since 2002.
He said the defendant had been diagnosed with a gender identity disorder and had to visit a therapist every month. . . .
Any reporter who has covered O.C. courts knows what it's like to get The Look from Deputy District Attorney Susan Schroeder. You write something she perceives as unfairly critical of the D.A.'s Office, come out a little too pro-defendant and, Uh-oh, here it comes:
She stands stock still, coal-black hair framing a face that says nothing, yet everything. Lips closed, but not pursed. Dark eyes narrowed slightly, shooting daggers sharp as the heels of her black Manolos. The Look says it all: Were it even remotely legal, I would grind that gelatinous lump you call your spine into the marble hallway floor with my stilettos and scrape the residue off on the curb. Then I'd go to a nice lunch and immediately forget you ever existed.
I got The Look this week.
Not because of anything I wrote. But because I displayed a complete breakdown in metrosexual masculinity (her oxymoronic ideal male archetype) in regard to her other passion: women's shoes. Specifically, she was disgusted I lacked the huevosto buy myself a pair of six-inch pumps for my drag number in this year's Lagunatics. (Tickets on sale Sunday at www.nosquare.org.)
She took me to the second floor and a section called Salon Shoes. Best in the store, she said. She gave me a primer: sling-backs vs. pumps, spike heels vs. wedge-heels, peek-a-boo toes vs. closed toes. I started to covet a black Jimmy Choo pump. $635, roughly double my shoe budget for this century. An open-toed black Prada with silver studs caught my eye. $690.
"OK," she said, leading me to one wall display, "you want to walk over here with reverence." The sign said "Manolo Blahnik." I thought she was going to genuflect. She let me touch a pair of leopard-skin pumps I adored. $695. . . .
Gender variance or nonconformity is found wherever one finds people.
A closer view reveals many variations in gender expression. Note “sex” refers to biology, genes, hormones, body development, whereas “gender” is social role, cultural expectations for appearance and behavior. Gender expression varies over time and throughout cultures and may vary in the lifetimes of individuals. We sometimes hear “male or female”, “masculine or feminine”, as defining “the binary”. Typically, many want males masculine and females feminine, in a world where being androgenous or a hybrid may actually work better. Yet many individuals, for example, parents, teachers, and friends, including some with gender issues, crave the binary. In the case of a significantly gender variant person, gender expression often does not match thesocial or binary gender roleassigned at birth. Nevertheless, the person's expressed gender may feel correct or natural. Thus a gender nonconforming person, maybe someone who even sees themselves as “non-binary”, may feel very uncomfortable with the gender expressionexpected by parents and significant others. Fortunately, there are a growing number of resources to help those interested understand gender, development, changeand adaptation. And there are creative paths one may explore to hopefully find comfort, experience a measure of peace and happiness, and in the process find the gender expression that works best. Here I offer some news, information, resources, opinions and POVs to help you learn more about gender expression and life situations. We now know there are a variety of paths individuals discover that may contribute to positive life changes.
Although I once planned to be an astronomer, my graduate education is in experimental, developmental and clinical psychology. I have doctoral level specialties in experimental and clinical psychology. Before my clinical work I was a college professor. I did my clinical internship in San Francisco in the late seventies. I'm a licensed psychologist in the State of California with a specialty in clinical psychology. I've been in the private practice of clinical and consulting psychology since 1981. In addition to individual, couples and relationship therapy, I also consult with employers and other professionals regarding gender issues and gender role transition.
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I liked the interview with Professor Gilbert. I'm a woman who wears men-styled clothing for outdoor work, but I find it hard to imagine most men being comfortable in women-styled clothes. If it makes Mickey feel good to dress as a woman, more power to him.
As an aside, much of women-styled clothing is miserably uncomfortable, and my only to him question would be: Why wear panty hose and high heels????
Posted by: Meribeth | Apr 22, 07 10:31 AM