FTMs and female-bodied men throughout history

A Stir, but No Crisis, From Principal’s Gender Change

By TINA KELLEY
Published: September 10, 2007

PORT EWEN, N.Y., Sept. 5 — Cassandra Laycock, 17, who is studying fashion design, put on shiny red high-heeled boots and black pants with red pinstripes for her first day of school at Ulster County’s Career & Technical Center on Wednesday.

Her principal chose a tasteful pantsuit to match a new identity. Gary Suraci, who had been running the school for the past dozen years, returned this fall as Genna Suraci, causing something of a stir among students, staff and the broader Hudson Valley community surrounding the school. Cassandra met the change with a beneficent shrug but an outdated pronoun. “If he wants to do it, let him do it,” she said. “It’s just his business.”

But Renée McCormick said her daughter Nicole had not returned to the school this year, in part because of the principal. “It’s a horrible influence for the kids,” she said. And Michael Locasio, who owns a tattoo parlor in a neighboring town, complained, “God makes things perfect and people want to screw it all up.”

School officials would not allow a reporter or photographer on campus and told students to refrain from taking pictures for a couple of weeks, lest they turn up on the Internet. They scheduled several meetings on the first days of classes for the 1,150 students — most of them in 11th and 12th grades — to discuss the change with guidance counselors and social workers, having offered similar sessions for parents and teachers the previous week.

In a brief telephone interview, Ms. Suraci said, “My impression was things were normal, like any opening day for me.” She declined to discuss her transformation, referring all questions to the district superintendent, Martin Ruglis.

“My only focus right now is on the kids and my family,” Ms. Suraci said before classes began. “The starting of the school year requires energy, and I want to have a great opening day, so it doesn’t affect them.”. . .

Hopeful future for trans athletes

Keith Langdon / Remember When Images

Kristen Worley has been recognized as a female athlete by international and Canadian cycling groups and hopes to compete in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Canadian cyclist shares her struggle to be recognized as a woman

By Elizabeth Chuck

Reporter

MSNBC
Updated: 9:13 a.m. ET Feb 26, 2006


Kristen Worley, a 2008 Olympic hopeful in cycling, has a secret.

But now, with great anxiety, she’s divulging it.

A few years ago, the Canadian had sex-change surgery to change her gender from male to female. With the help of a steady regimen of estrogen, Worley looks female, sounds female and, to anybody who didn’t know her before, is female.

Worley has told her story to sports organizations across Canada in her quest to get permission to compete in the Olympics, but she spoke for the first time publicly in an interview with MSNBC.com.

“I shouldn’t be worrying about what people are going to do when they find out, but I’m so afraid,” she said. “I'm just like any other girl there.”

Major milestone for Olympics
If Worley competes in the Beijing Games in 2008, it will be a milestone in Olympics history. There have been rumors of transsexual athletes participating in the Games, but none has ever come forward.

The International Olympics Committee officially changed its rules for transsexual people in 2004. To compete, an athlete must wait for two years after sex-reassignment surgery.

People who have had the surgery differ on how they want to be known. Worley refers to herself as a transitioned athlete, while others call themselves transsexuals.

Although the new Olympics rule hasn’t been put to the test yet, the transsexual community says it has already benefited from it. . . .

He’s my daughter

By ELIZABETH TAI

Appalled by how transsexuals are generally mistreated by society and even their families, the third winner of FreedomFilmFest07 hopes to change mindsets by showing how a mother’s love and acceptance can make all the difference.

IT was an assignment that seemed straightforward enough: do a video clip on transsexuals in Malaysia for a news website. But after meeting and interviewing transsexuals and learning about their lives, Indrani Kopal, 28, could not get them out of her mind.

The Cambridge International Dictionary of English defines a transsexual as a person who feels that they should have been born the opposite sex, and therefore behaves and dresses like a member of that sex, or a person who has had a medical operation to change their sex.

Despite enduring daily insults from some inconsiderate people because she’s a transsexual, Sarika, 23, is confident about her femininity.

In real life, that’s much harder to do. The transsexuals Indrani met told her stories of how they were harassed and abused by strangers when they walked down the street. Some were turned out by their loved ones. As a result, many became sex workers because they could not fend for themselves as no one was willing to employ them. And this led to the arrests by the police.

Indrani quickly realised that her short video clip for Malaysiakini was not enough. She kept in touch with the many transsexuals she had come to know and looked for the chance to tell their stories in a bigger and more profound way.

She first thought of highlighting the injustices faced by transsexuals, because “in the Asian region, our country is the worst for transsexuals to live in,” but that angle did not feel right nor new to Indrani.

Then, she got to know Sarika Samalakrishnan, 23, a university graduate who works in a human resource department of a company.

After hearing numerous tales of how transsexuals were turned away by their families, she was astounded to find out that Sarika’s family accepted her for who she was. . . .