Sunday, May 07, 2017

Breaking The Trans Model (Part 1)

If you look back twenty years ago you will see the start of breaking up the classic trans model. I remember reading about the requirements for transitioning back in the 90s and thinking I can’t be trans because I am not attracted to men.

If you read early trans standards you had to be attracted to men, able to integrate in to society as a woman, cutoff your past, and you had to have Gender Confirming Surgery. As for trans men, well they didn’t exist.

With the changing standards we see that for many trans women and men they are not getting bottom surgery.
Most trans patients don't undergo gender-affirming
The study looked at 99 transgender patients who were undergoing hormone therapy at BMC, the majority transwomen.
DNA
7 May 2017

Turns out, transgender patients don?t opt for gender-affirming surgeries as much as many believe.

The researchers from Boston Medical Center (BMC) conducted the first study in the U.S. to determine the prevalence of gender-affirming surgeries among a defined group of transgender patients and found that most patients did not elect to have surgery.

The study looked at 99 transgender patients who were undergoing hormone therapy at BMC, the majority transwomen. Data was collected from years prior to 2015, before Massachusetts required all insurers to cover medically necessary care related to gender transition, like gender affirming surgeries.

Only 35 percent of patients chose to undergo any form of gender affirming surgery, with only 15 percent undergoing genital surgery. Transmen were twice as likely to have surgery as transwomen, with more than half of transmen choosing to have chest surgery and far fewer choosing genital surgery. Transwomen were equally or less likely to undergo genital surgery than facial feminization or chest surgery.
Well when you consider that it is major surgery and the outcome is not guaranteed and even with insurance it is expensive. While some trans people have medical condition that increases the risks of having GCS and can make it life threatening. The article also points out that there is a long wait to have surgery up to six months.

Also the gender dysphoria medical model now also looks at the quality of life and if surgery does not improves the quality of life for some trans people why force them to have surgery.



Breaking the gender binary.

Another area where we are blazing new ground is the gender binary.
This Non-Binary Writer Is Sick Of Those "Girl Became A Boy!" Stories
So they wrote their own.
Buzzfeed
By Lane Sainty
Posted on May 6, 2017

It's inspired by a slightly unlikely person: pop star Pink, who has a similar tattoo. Zisin is a huge fan, but the button is not meant to be an homage to Pink herself. It's about the way she inspired Zisin to be their own hero.

"The 'help' button is in my handwriting because I don't need her or anyone else to help me, I need to help myself," Zisin told BuzzFeed News over a coffee in Sydney.

"I have to be my own saviour, my own hero, and my own role model... Whenever I'm having a bit of an anxiety attack, I can press that button, remember that, catch my breath."

Right now, Zisin is riding high – if a little tired. The 21-year-old Melburnian, who is non-binary and uses the gender neutral pronoun "they", is in the midst of a whirlwind book tour for their memoir, Finding Nevo.
[…]
"I was interviewed so many times where people manipulated my story, to something that was not the way it was. So much 'Girl became a boy!' sensationalised media. And I thought, screw this, I've got a story to tell, I've got my own words, I'm going to write it."
We as a society is just starting to realize that nature doesn’t  do anything binary that natural is always experimenting .
"You do such a disservice to yourself to say I'm a woman, or I'm a man. What does that mean? The way you identify with your gender is going to be so different to everyone else in the world. There are seven and a half billion genders, and I want to know what makes your gender yours," they said.

Being outside of the gender binary leaves Zisin feeling great on some days, but on others, awful.
Society pushes back and anything other than the “normal” people just don’t or want to understand anything complicated, they just want things simple black and white, or in this case the gender binary. 
As a result it places strong pressure on us to conform.
"I've struggled with depression all my life, but that really flung me into a pit, because I was like, I am fighting everyone. No one is on my side. The government's not on my side, the public aren't on my side, no one is on my side," they said.

"It was everywhere. I couldn't escape it. And I didn't want to talk about it, I didn't want to read about it, I didn't want to go to rallies. I just wanted to lie in bed and cry and never get up again."
I think anyone who crosses the gender boundaries know strongly about.

No comments:

Post a Comment