Trans voices and trans lives are gaining increasing exposure in the mainstream media, and to many they feel new. As with all newness there is ignorance, and with ignorance comes recurring offence and damage.
To help avoid this, Kaya Wilson has put together a foolproof guide for journalists and publishers to follow:
- Mention Caitlyn Jenner and the “transgender tipping point” in your intro.
- Being trans is a full-time job. Never mention any occupation or enterprise of a trans person other than being trans.
- Trans people are never well-adjusted or have healthy relationships with their families. Reflect this fact.
- Whenever you mention trans children, be sure to mention surgery and hormones in the same sentence and include the phrase “children as young as” somewhere in the mix.
- Pronouns are hard. What even are pronouns. Get confused over pronouns. If you’re feeling extra clever use them as a literary device …”he”, “he”, “he” and then for the great reveal “he” becomes “she” and everything falls nicely into place. If you’re still struggling give up completely and use “it”.
- Don’t forget Caitlyn Jenner.
- Trans people are never mediocre or dull or pay taxes. They are BRAVE and INSPIRING.
- Use the phrase “authentic self” a lot and wistfully.
- If you are reporting on an unrelated newsworthy item and someone involved is trans, be sure to mention this, preferably in the headline.
- Throw in some tragedy.
- Never do your research. Research is for topics people already know about.
- As you may be aware, The Danish Girl is a documentary. Use it as a source.
- Trans women are men until they have The Surgery and then they become women. The Surgery is a treated as a proper noun and is commonly used for surgery between the legs. Surgery not preceded by “The” refers to other, more boring surgeries.
- Incessantly ask about their junk.
- As an absolute last resort pay a trans person to write the article. Here’s a list of writers for you.
- Caitlyn Jenner.
You left out the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs. Photograph must include putting on makeup.
Also you should totally ignore the existence of trans men.
Yep, essential to ignore transgender men as they shatter the many Trans Myths(tm).
I am glad this was labelled as humour as I was uncertain upon scanning through it.
What you forget to cover in your Walkley winning witty writing is the extraordinary confusion experienced by what I am blushing to call “un-confusedly oriented personkind” when told that a) a “man” who has “fathered children” as a “man” ie his “man” junk was working is now a “woman” because “he/she” feels that way and had said “junk” removed….
and
b) a “woman’ who felt like a “man” and had “his/her” chesty “junk” cut off, is now a “man” and happily (good for “him/her”) carrying a real child with “his/her” unmodified, genetically XX and externally totally “female” female partner.
I really believe we are passing through a time of bizarre social experimentation wherein the loudmouthed advocates of anything goes have taken over the asylum and are preventing those who really do know what they are doing from being able to do so.
ie These people clearly suffer from a most severe case of body dysmorphism, for a number of reasons some good, some not so. Surgery (noting it is almost always carried out in expensive (very expensive) private facilities .. rather like those mad post menopausal women of 60 + having IVF (FFS!!) ) is not the answer.
One day we will wake up to this and this sort of bloody (literally) nonsense will be seen for the physical and mental mutilation that it is.
Wow. This is how not to write about transpeople.
To précis what you just said.
I don’t understand how someone can be transexual therefore I believe it is a modern disease that will be seen in the future as a mutilation of the body and mind.
Enclosed tropes:
This is a recent trend.
Actually it isn’t. Transexuals have been around forever in multiple cultures. It is only recent medical advances that have allowed us to lead more fulfilling lives.
People who really know what they are doing are being silenced.
Those people presumably would be the medical and psychological fraternity who regard transexuality as something about as straight forward as being gay. There is simply medical solutions that allow trans people to live worthwhile and fulfilling lives. In the past trans people lived on the margins or simply suicided.
The actual experts who know what they are doing are not being silenced.
There seems to be an implication that trans people suddenly change from one gender to another.
I can understand the confusion because to the observer this is what seems to have happened.
For the trans person they have had opposite gender leanings their entire life. It is only at the point of self acceptance that the transition takes place. Not a sudden decision, nor is it an instant change. Trans people often go through a renewed pudescence, you know, raging hormones, trying to work out where you fit in, relearning socialisation.
I quite understand the confusion. How can anyone who has not experience this understand it. Logically however what you are saying is that you don’t understand it therefore it can’t happen; There must be something to ‘cure’. Moreover you don’t understand it and therefore you have a strong opinion on it,
Thank You for the considered reply.
I am not denying anybody’s feelings at all, how could I?
Long overdue openness and acceptance of homosexuality have likely given the trans issues a boost into the mainstream media, particularly the self promoting Mx Jenner.
However, I have not seen anything about the genesis of the current “gender confusion” and I am aware that intrauterine exposure to the “wrong” androgen/progesterone/oestrogen milieu can producing results (in rats, the par excellence model for much human biology etc) apparently not too dissimilar to what we see in some confused humans. So perhaps I understand what could be the genesis of the problem far better than you might think.
After all, if somebody really feels/yearns to be a biological gender that their genes are not, there is clearly a real biological problem. Not something that can be made nice simply by “making changes” or even increasing such feelings by helpfully administering even more of the imagined appropriate but exactly incorrect hormones.
I can’t find anything in the literature (medical) on using hormones appropriate to the real genotype, only for the hoped for genotype. After all, this is a very new area of recently developed/developing therapies for those engaged in it and as I alluded to earlier, sometimes the motives of early therapists should be carefully examined.
This sounds to me very much as if people are being made nervous about saying “Sorry, you have possibly experienced in appropriate hormones in-utero which explain why your brain has been cross wired”. This therapy might help you feel better.
Because people must be allowed to be what they “feel” and that can never be “wrong”. It isn’t “wrong”, it is possibly explicable and possible ameliorate-able..
What is so wrong with that?
On being confused: We are not confused. We know who we are. It’s other people who get confused over that. I refer here to transexuals, who are still in the binary. Trans = cross and that’s what we do. There are others who declare their gender to be either/ both/ none and all I can do is take their word for that because I have not experienced that. To not take their word for it is to say “I know more about you than you do yourself” which given the degree of self examination and self reflection that most gender diverse people go through can only be considered to be the height of arrogance.
On the issue of the application of genome appropriate hormones in search for a solution, it has been tried and was a disaster as have all other solutions. Only the support of the trans person to transition has been overwhelmingly positive, with only a rare case of regret.
Regarding cross hormone support it has been literally a lifesaver for me as it has been for many others. I cannot even describe what it feels like to have the appropriate ( for me) hormonal system running in my body. I feel fabulous is such an understatement.
As to cause, there is just too much evidence to suggest a biological issue that it is almost impossible to deny.
Too many people develop theories about us and I am heartily sick of them all. We just are who we say we are. A man, who for example, says they are a man and loses their genitalia, remains a man. He will identify as a man. He will not change gender.
Trans people who undergo surgery are simply rearranging their body to the exquisite pleasure of the recipient. People refer to “chopping off” ignoring that everything is simply rearranged. It is not mutilation. It is indeed amelioration.
Richard you are doing what many cis people so often do…talking about us rather than with us. There is a wealth of scientific studies that show internal (what your brain feels) gender identity is all too real, and that for some people it is the opposite to their birth assigned gender (and for some a mix).
As Gwen has stated transgender people are a natural part of human variation and have long been known and often accepted in many cultures throughout history. Evidence of this goes back literally thousands of years, such as in many Asian and Native North American cultures. This includes Aboriginal culture here as well (sistergirls or brotherboys).
Typically internal gender identity forms around 3-5 years old at about the same time as kids can pick others gender, for the majority this aligns with their physical birth gender, for for about 0.6% to 1% it doesn’t. My first memories of being ‘different’ were at about 6, though a lot of my behaviour was quite different earlier than that. At 7 I tried to cut my penis off and longed to have a vagina (even though I didn’t even know what one really was) and thought it would ‘grow in’ as I got older.
It is very hard wired, like sexual orientation it never goes away and there is no ‘cure’ except transitioning. It has all been tried throughout history, all the many forms of ‘conversion therapy’ totally failed: drugs, ECT, electroshock therapy, behavioural therapy, incarceration, psychotherapy, etc.
When a transgender person is not accepted and cannot transition then they suffer gender dysphoria (GD), symptoms of which include things like extreme depression and so on. As someone who suffered it for decades until I transitioned let me tell you …it is horrible. And it is a killer, non accepted transgender people have the highest rate of suicide of any group in society.. however (and multiple studies going right back to the 1980s show this) those who can transition quickly lose that and their mental health stats improve to match the average. This is even more the case for transgender adolescents, the latest studies show those who are accepted(especially by their family) and can transition have identical stats (including suicide rates) as the average…an incredible improvement.
Your chromosomes have little to do with this as the many people (about 1.7% of the population) with a physical intersex condition show. There are XY women who have children and XX men who do the same. There are XY CAIS women and all so many other variations.
Gender is actually very complex and is most probably a mosaic of multiple things. See this article from Nature https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943
“A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby’s chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine — but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother’s womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male”.
“In 1990, researchers made headlines when they uncovered the identity of this gene, which they called SRY. Just by itself, this gene can switch the gonad from ovarian to testicular development. For example, XX individuals who carry a fragment of the Y chromosome that contains SRY develop as males.”
“So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.”
The US Endocrine Society summarises the scientific evidence:
“There is a durable biological underpinning to gender identity that should be considered in policy determinations.
Medical intervention for transgender individuals (including both hormone therapy and medically indicated surgery) is effective, relatively safe (when appropriately monitored), and has been established ”
“Although the specific mechanisms guiding the biological underpinnings of gender identity are not entirely understood, there is evolving consensus that being transgender is not a mental health disorder. Such evidence stems from scientific studies suggesting that: 1) attempts to change gender identity in intersex patients to match external genitalia or chromosomes are typically unsuccessful;
2) identical twins (who share the exact same genetic background) are more likely to both experience transgender identity as compared to fraternal (non-identical) twins5;
3) among individuals with female chromosomes (XX), rates of male gender identity are higher for those exposed to higher levels of androgens in utero relative to those without such exposure, and male (XY)-chromosome individuals with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome typically have female gender identity;
4) there are associations of certain brain scan or staining patterns with gender identity rather than external genitalia or chromosomes”
All the major medical and psych organisations in the world state the same.
https://www.endocrine.org/advocacy/priorities-and-positions/transgender-health
Wish we’d stop writing about it, it’s been done over and done over.
Let them be.
Wish we’d stop writing about it, it’s been done over and done over.
Let them be.