Funny!Originally Posted by Kaitlyn Michele
Since we're in comedy mode, let me point out that the value of CD participation in-toto wouldn't come from the numbers, it would come from the entertainment value of the prominent names that would appear on the list.
Lea
Lea
There are so many things to be done -- job discrimination, health insurance exclusion clauses, basic civil rights for starters. Gender identity on official documents is important, especially for driver's license, passport, etc. The biggest problem we have is not the divisions among our selves but that our reputation in society is so awful that our closest loved ones beg us to keep our transgenderedness a deep secret (if they even know about it!) to spare us and our friends and family humiliation and embarrassment.
I don't know about government health plans, but my employer's insurance has very few restrictions except for those involving transgender issues (what the policy calls "sex change.") This can be interpreted by the insurance underwriters to mean not only surgery and aftercare but also hormones, psychiatry and therapy for terrified people who seek help for overwhelming gender dysphoria. (None of it is covered, while every other mental health and physical health issue is.)
Meanwhile, virtually every week someone posts on the forum about a transgender person being beaten or murdered for her appearance. In my two cents we have to stand together, to help each other educate this ignorant world, so that coming out won't be life threatening and having a transgendered member of one's family or circle of friends or work colleagues won't be embarrassing and ashaming. If we do that, my guess is that basic civl rights will follow, and after that we can have a (um) catfight over who deserves special treatment.
p.s. While I write this I'm listening to Thich Nhat Hahn describe his former lives -- he was a tree and a rock, among other things. All we want is to say we had a former life in another gender!
elizabethamy
One more thought -- why would we want to alter birth certificates? You were born who and how you were. I know that adoption results in the opportunity to alter the adopted child's birth certificate so that the parents won't have to explain it every time they want to take him or her on an airplane, but I hope (as parent of an adoptee) that somewhere deep in the reservoir of the county health office there is information about who the actual birth parents were, just as there should be information about the original gender, somewhere...
You really don't buy that do you? Have you even been listening to the politicians recently? The denial of care isn't because of being transgendered it is from being poor and/or female. Especially the poor part in this case. If you had money this would be a moot point. SRS would be as easy as paying a doctor. Health care is denied based on income level more than anything else. Rich gays, transsexuals, egotists and morons don't have trouble getting care. Do you believe taht if the TS people were an entity on their own that health care, housing, civil rights, would be easier to get?
The earth is the mother of all people and all people should have equal rights upon it.
Chief Joseph
Nez Perce
“Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” - Fred Rogers,
There are a lot of reasons but one big one would be marriage.
And - privacy, your going along living your life and someone digs a little bit about you and pulls that - could create all sorts of problems your life.
Why? What purpose does it serve?just as there should be information about the original gender, somewhere...
Speaking from a strictly legal perspective, I think a large portion of society would take it a bit further and say that a birth certificate should record the state of the person at birth. As such, yours would still say male, as I assume you had testicles back then. Having SRS 20-50 years later doesn't change what parts were there at birth, which is what a birth certificate actually certifies. So when viewed from that perspective, you having yours changed after SRS is probably as wrong to most people out there as somebody having theirs changed pre-SRS.
I understand you have your personal point of view, you have stated it quite firmly. That's fine, I have no problem with that. I even publicly agree with you from time to time. I also understand that I may be flamed for jumping into this as I am. That's OK, too. I put big girl panties on when I got dressed this morning. For me, this is all arbitrary. I'm not transitioning right now, and if I decide to later, I live in California. As such, I have a LOT of latitude with regard to options. Personally, I wouldn't try to get any of my documents changed until I started transition and could actually pass fairly well. It would just make dealing with society easier, which is where most of the pain in the butt for Trans people comes from in the first place.
Anna
"If you're going through Hell, keep going."
-Winston Churchill
In many provinces in Canada, the birth certificate has to be changed first to able to change the gender marker on other documents, and it cannot be changed without SRS.
Last edited by Frances; 05-02-2012 at 02:56 PM.
It's Frances with an E, like Frances Farmer. Francis is a man's name.
Your original information doesn't just disappear. While the state or the fed may allow your female status .. you will always be "Joe" to them. Marriage for a TS is a slippery slope even with the proper documents. Sure if you have a b/c that says you are a female.. you can get a marriage license and get married, but if the state that you marry in does not recognize "same sex marriage" it could come back later to bite you in the butt. Should the occasion arise your marriage won't be recognized as valid.
I am not sure how many TS people know this but.. in the case of a TS marriage... A couple may not file a "Joint" tax return, because according to DOMA a valid marriage occurs between one man and on woman. In a transsexual marriage your only options are to file separately or head of household, and only one can claim any dependents. If you marry in a same sex state you may enjoy all the bells and whistles as any other couple, but as the name implies.. it's still considered "same sex" Joe.
As far as privacy goes, it's not your b/c that will give one away it's your social security number, tax number, tax id.. call it what you will. You are stuck with that number for life and behind that number lies your information.
i stand corrected on birth certificates -- if you need them for use in the present day, then they should reflect who you are right now. Perhaps I'm going off the deep end with my fondness for the precision of words, but why do they call them birth certificates if they don't match who you were when you were born, who your birth parents were, etc? They should call them status certificates or something like that. And in terms of record keeping, perhaps it's the academic side of me that would want to be able to track and therefore study (with due confidentiality protocols as most universities and hospitals have) populations. For example you can't study the behavior of adoptees and how they differ from "biological" children in the same household if you can/'t reliably identify the adopted ones. Similarly, somewhere there will be $$ and interest for a massive panel study of the health and lives of thousands of transgendered people, but that could only be valid if the birth records were available to the researchers...
....i'm sorry, what was this thread about? sorry...
Trans exclusions in insurance and gov't plans are due to two primary things: the perception that the medical procedures are cosmetic, and the belief that denying them is cheaper than covering them.
Procedures like SRS, trach shaves, etc. are cosmetic for non-TS. Grouping CD and TG with TS has weakened their medical necessity case. The exclusion policies started becoming widespread when the transgender movement started. Yes, I believe that exclusions have social and political support because of anti-trans bias.
I think the best way to get insurance coverage for transsexuals is to continue pressing medical necessity in conjunction with anti-discrimination efforts. Both are needed with private insurance in particular because it is permissible to arbitrarily exclude all kinds of coverages in private contracts - but not if you discriminate against a protected group. Things like the recent EEOC ruling help in this regard.
I see no advantage whatsoever in coalition politics on the insurance issue - that is unless the coalition would support coverage for TS only. That's unlikely (compare the identity issue) and, as a result TS lose.
I agree that access to care itself has a rich/poor aspect. I disagree that exclusionary policies in insurance plans are a rich/poor issue.
The cost issue has been analyzed by the Human Rights Campaign and the data suggests the concerns are unfounded.
Each of the other issues you mentioned are separate discussions on their own merits.
Lea
Lea
The problem with insurance and neat categories is -- as is my situation and that of so, so many on this site and everywhere in the world -- that waking up and knowing you need SRS is not the typical path. If insurance denies therapy to the crossdresser who walks into the counselor's office to ask why he is doing this and what's it mean, denies it again as he realizes his problems are much deeper than a little dressing, denies it again when he wants his hormones checked, denies it again, when HRT is sought to confirm a gender dysphoria diagnosis, and so on and so on...leaving a person with no care for what feels like madness 24 hours a day...whereas anything else (schizophrenia? brain tumor? thyroid gone haywire?) that "feels like madness" is completely covered. That's why I think we should be one big coalition on this, because the denial of care happens at all levels to all kinds of us. Both my therapist and my endo have told me that they use a veritable wizardry of codes that have nothing to do with gender -- even though that's why I'm in their offices -- because otherwise my care would be denied.
e.
But the myriad codes approach is perfectly legitimate during discovery. And even with a GID diagnosis, co-morbidity makes alternate codes permissible and ethical anyway. The only real coverage issues are for HRT, SRS, and (maybe) plastics, all for transsexuals.
Lea
B/C's reflect who you are when you are born, and one can amend them to reflect who you are right now, but the bottom line is along with the information of who you are right now sits the the information of who you once were. If the information of who you once were just disappeared anyone could could just change their identity and become someone else in order to escape things such as crimes for one. My husband and I have 2 adopted children and while we have amended b/c's for them that show us as their parents, their adoptive status is still a matter of record with the county and state. ( although sealed because they are minors) Does a "study" of adopted children or transgendered people for the basis of information gathering or making money trump the the person's right to privacy? Do the protocols you mention have a guarantee that the information WON"T GET OUT? Are adopted or transgendered people obligated to have their information given out in order that studies be fueled by their information?
Last edited by kellycan27; 05-02-2012 at 03:09 PM.
That's the thing, isn't it? They don't match who you were in the case of transsexuals.
The truth is that they aren't accurate in a lot of other cases, either. Intersex in particular, but by no means limited to them.
Corrections should be distinguished from other kinds of amendments. I see no reason to keep a historical record of an incorrect BC gender marker decision based solely on a superficial exam of genitals.
Take another case - one of a cissexual child. Suppose the doctor mismarks the form and notices it a couple of days later. Should he not be able to correct it? What's the utility of an amendment trail?
A correction is either legitimate or it is not.
Lea
Lea
kelly,
as i prepare to move back to a town where i am well known and where i have a new job among colleagues I've worked with in some cases for 20 years, it's obvious that my need for privacy and secrecy at this moment is absolute. So I'm sensitive to the confidentiality issues. I can say that having worked in the offices that certify research projects (they're called IRB's, or Institutional Research Boards), the penalties for violating the kind of confidentiality we are talking about are monstrous. These penalties have been enacted from time to time, and it's possible to have all the research of an entire university shut down over such an issue -- it's not just a problem for individual scholars. For something like birth records, by the time all the coding was done, even the primary researcher would have no idea who these people were originally. It's safe. And it's necessary. Because while there are some interesting studies about CD/TG/TS people, what we don't know vastly outweighs what we do, and a lot of work is going to need doing so that we can ujltimately find the answers to all our faborite questions, such as: what causes it? is it a progression or static? how many of us are there? what cuases late in life discovery (or early in life failure to discover)? what are the outcomes of the various treatments (accepted ones from SOC7 as well as others) and nontreatments? what really is the suicide rate? and so on and so on.
Reserachers have asked all these questions, but usually of non-random or tiny samples, due to lack of funding for large-scale studies. If we want to get answers, we'll have to trust the process, and I can honestly say that it's very safe.
elizabethamy
Non-ops for me are persons who prefer to maintain male genitals while presenting as female for instance. In the case of FtM persons medical science is not as advanced as with MtF persons, they would fall for me under the medically not attainable group. But there is a clear distinction. Keeping your sex at birth status because you prefer to do so (and not for medical reasons) is clearly a statement of fact. Society can legislatively protect those that fall into this category. Those that cannot be fully transformed because of medical reasons need health care options that meet their need to maximize closest approximation to their actual gender experience.You would have non-ops "gender-variant". From a public understanding and concern perspective, that may make some sense.
Again the operative concept is "closest approximation". Medical science is not advanced enough to reconfigure male anatomy to a female anatomy. To a degree, none of us can ever be full women because we cannot create female reproductive organs. Identity of transsexual persons is never the real issue even though often it is masked for years by the need to conform and meet societal expectations to survive.But the obvious should be stated also:
1) This approach ignores other aspects of male anatomy. Does that trivialize identity (or at least official identity) into bathroom concerns and similar? Strictly speaking, from a physical standpoint a post-op is also gender variant.
2) There is no gender variant category for official documents, unless that is part of what you would propose in legislation.
Society trivializes the needs of transsexuals into a bathroom concern. It likewise trivializes the security of women and children as well as gender variant persons into a bathroom concern. It is a complete wedge approach to suppress anyone dealing with the real issue which is health care and need for legislative action.
I am not sure that there really needs to be a gender marker on official documents at all. Considering that from the day of my birth, someone looked at my crotch to determine who I, was reveals a patriarchal, privileged male dominated approach to all things gender. These things were conceived as part of the social contract at a time when no one but male property owners had the right to vote. If you didn't have a penis you were a chattel. Understanding the abhorrence against persons who wanted to have theirs removed gives you a historical context to what we are fighting against every day of our lives. It is a male dominated social contract, but no real marker of identity. The argument in the Ontario case that generated these threads went that gender markers are part of "foundation documents to determine identity". Nowhere is this more apparent than with intersex persons. In their case, there is no identifying relationship between sex and identity. So for "social and emotional concerns" some idiot will decide who they are, based on which of their reproductive organ systems is more prominent.
Gender variant persons must be protected by laws and regulation not by gender markers. If you are a male who expresses his femininity in your appearance you must be protected to ensure you are treated like everyone else.
Do we rally need "designations?Would you be satisfied with a gender variant designation yourself were you not to get SRS? You are clearly, completely a woman now. I understand the difficulties in weeding out those who arguably should be denied a female marker (take your least favorite category pick) - but it should be possible.
Last edited by Kathryn Martin; 05-04-2012 at 05:30 AM. Reason: typographical error
"Never forget the many ways there are to be human" (The Transsexual Taboo)
Is it absolutely safe? Sorry but i just don't agree that in the name of research people should be able to pry into the private lives of others, no matter how good that they feel that their intentions are. People should have the right to participate or not in these studies. To me this smacks of the "greater good" something like Homeland Securities having been granted sweeping powers for the "safety" or "good" of all. I may agree that the information gathered in your studies may very well be helpful but at what cost to the rights and liberties of those who's lives are being invaded? Let's just say that the information is kept a secret, here again I have to ask what "right" do researchers have to my or my adopted children's personal information if gathered without my express knowledge or permission?
I am editing this because of something that you said earlier: I used to be a ticket agent for a major airline and people would often ask me if the airplanes were "safe". I'd give them my biggest most pleasant smile and say.. why these planes are absolutely safe. I would put my sainted mother on one in a heartbeat!. ( and to further subdue their fears I would add) You know.. the FAA has some very stringent rules on maintenance and safety and if we are found in violation we could he heavily fined or even have our aircraft grounded!
Last edited by kellycan27; 05-02-2012 at 05:25 PM.
its the government, what could possibly go wrong?!
OMG what a lovely new avatar.its the government, what could possibly go wrong?!
Three things:its the government, what could possibly go wrong?!
1. I love your new avatar!
2. I love your top.
3. I work for local government, your sarcasm is well founded.
Anna
"If you're going through Hell, keep going."
-Winston Churchill
Thank you Anna and Misty! its a dress and its no longer too short since i altered it
Wow. What an avatar! Beautiful!
Lea
Lea
After I second the praise for April's fab avatar -- you look fantastic! let me apologize for creating a monster here.
No studies of living people can be done without their consent. Birth records -- I don't honestly know what the policy is for research access to them, but if such access were to be granted, the researcher would not even be allowed to copy, photocopy, transcribe, scan, type or otherwise preserve the original information beyond the purpose of establishing a baseline of aggregated (not individual) data. If, in such a hypothetical study, an adult were to be asked if he/she were transgendered, he/she would have to consent to answer the question, even to take the survey, and could individually demand confidentiality, and shut down the entire medical school and win enough money for SRS for everyone on this forum via lawsuit. Same with adoption. We don't keep it a secret that our son is adopted, but if people want to think he looks a lot like one or both of us (and he does), then we just let them keep their belief. If we wanted to keep it a secret, we could easily do that. So really, it's safe as an airplane that is sitting on the tarmac, to use kelly's analogy.
My overall point is that almost all we know about cd/tg/ts people is taken from studies of people who present themselves to the medical sector seeking some kind of treatment. Which means that until we can do some kind of study of those who haven't sought treatment, we really can't generalize very effectively about the situation of people like us. But even those closeted-nontreated people would have to agree to be interviewed under promises of confidentiality...for whatever you think those promises are worth.
I find myself increasingly wondering why we have to state our gender on every form under the sun. I agree that there seems no point in so assiduously tracking it when it's irrelevant to 99% of every activity that requires a form. And ther'es never a box to check "Other!"
I have nothing to add right now, except YOU LOOK FABULOUS APRIL!
It's Frances with an E, like Frances Farmer. Francis is a man's name.
April,
You look fantastic!!!
Julia
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