TED Talk

Do you all know what TED Talks are? They are short fifteen minute lectures on many topics and there have been some very good talk on gender and transgender issues, I just found this one by Dr. Norman Spack. If you are in the trans community you probably have heard of him, if not he is a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children's Hospital and he treats many trans children and is probably the foremost expert on the topic. His talk was “How I help transgender teens become who they want to be”

In the transcript of his talk he says,

But I want you to think about what it is that leads to that statement on the third word, because the third word is a description of your sex. And by that I mean, made by a description of your genitals. Now, as a pediatric endocrinologist, I used to be very, very involved and still somewhat am, in cases in which there are mismatches in the externals or between the externals and the internals, and we literally have to figure out what is the description of your sex. But there is nothing that is definable at the time of birth that would define you. And when I talk about definition, I'm talking about your sexual orientation. We don't say, "It's a ... gay boy!" "A lesbian girl!" Those situations don't really define themselves more until the second decade of life. Nor do they define your gender, which, as different from your anatomic sex, describes your self-concept:

Do you see yourself as a male or female, or somewhere in the spectrum in between? That sometimes shows up in the first decade of life, but it can be very confusing for parents, because it is quite normative for children to act in a cross-gender play and way, and, in fact, there are studies that show that even 80 percent of children who act in that fashion will not persist in wanting to be the opposite gender at the time when puberty begins.

He goes on to say,

And I was confused -- "Does this make so-and-so gay? Does this make so-and-so straight?" I was getting sexual orientation confused with gender identity. And my patient said to me, "Look, look, look. If you just think of the following, you'll get it right: Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with. Gender identity is who you go to bed as."

I remember one time when the Rev. Canon Clinton Jones was talking about a group that he formed of gay men and was originally called the Homosexuality Committee but soon changed its name to Project H. (He told the story of why the name was changed, it had to do with the YMCA and for the meeting they put up a sign that said “Homosexuality Committee” and the staff at the Y was nervous about the sign so they changed the name to “Project H”). Anyhow, from that committee he was getting men who felt that should have been women at the time (late sixties, early seventies) was unheard of and he created a sub-group in 1973 and called the Twenty Club after the XX chromosomes one of the first trans support groups in the country.

He ended his talk with,

So where do we go from here? Well, we still have a ways to go in terms of anti-discrimination. There are only 17 states that have an anti-discrimination law against discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodation -- only 17 states, and five of them are in New England. We need less expensive drugs. They cost a fortune. And we need to get this condition out of the DSM. It is as much a psychiatric disease as being gay and lesbian, and that went out the window in 1973, and the whole world changed.

And this isn't going to break anybody's budget. This is not that common. But the risks of not doing anything for them not only puts all of them at risk of losing their lives to suicide, but it also says something about whether we are a truly inclusive society.

So sit back and watch the video…