Tony Sullivan's List: Culture and society

• The DSM-5 change to "gender dysphoria" was endorsed by transgender activists and allies as a way to lessen stigma but maintain a diagnostic route to trans-specific medical care.^[47] However, Lev states that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria continues to pathologize transgender experiences.^[10]

• This paper examines the diagnostic category of Gender Identity Disorder in Children (GIDC) and its evolution. It also critiques the continued use of GIDC on conceptual, psychometric, and ethical grounds. Gender atypicality is a social construction that varies over time according to culture and social class and therefore should not be pathologized.

• Gays and lesbians have long known that such diatribes are not merely "offensive," but dangerous – as is transphobic writing like Bindel's, and for the same reason: they support social attitudes that have often proven deadly for trans people.

• Bindel is, in effect, being banned. Airing the complications and troubles of transgender politics is being traduced as "transphobia". Transgender people who used to live as men and now live as women persuaded the May 2009 NUS women's conference to mandate its officers to share no platform with Julie Bindel. Proponents say they are offended by Bindel's critique – aired in the Guardian since 2004 – of "trannies"' perceived cultural conservatism and anatomical violence.

   

  The NUS women's campaign shows no solidarity with women who are offended by the presence in their safe spaces of people who used to be men telling them which women they may listen to and who qualifies as queer. This month, her enemies mustered a picket outside Queer Question Time in a London pub. They're not censoring her, they say, you can read her, they say, just don't go to hear her. That renders her "audience" passive consumers but not engaged debaters.
• They're offended? So what? Offensiveness is a discourse shared by both politics and comedy. "Offendedness" is a privileged, protected category in the NUS against, specifically, rightwing extremists, racists and Julie Bindel. The women's officer Olivia Bailey insists this is "not no platform" for Bindel. "The expression of transphobic views directly discriminates" against "valued members of our campaign." It's just that, "We welcome our trans sisters" and a group of them "had been made to feel uncomfortable". Again, so what? This solidarity does not extend to women who feel unsettled by the presence of people who used to be men in women-only spaces and services.

• What a disgrace, therefore, that our legacy amounts to this: if you are unhappy with the constraints of your gender, don't challenge them. If you are tired of being stared at for snogging your same-sex partner in the street, have a sex change. Where are those who go berserk about the ethics of genetic engineering yet seem not to worry about major, irreversible surgery on healthy bodies? Also, those who "transition" seem to become stereotypical in their appearance - fuck-me shoes and birds'-nest hair for the boys; beards, muscles and tattoos for the girls. Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.

• Unlike most of my contemporaries, I had reason to question gender stereotypes. Aged 10, I saw two men cross-dressing on television (I'd love to say it was these two, but it wasn't), and I felt an irresistible urge to copy them.

  • Stereotype is framed as sticking to formal sex roles, cf crossdressing
• I turned my rage on myself, and my inability to feel comfortable in my body, let alone fit in with my peers.

• ELINOR BURKETT

• Do women and men have different brains?

  Back when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld donations.

  But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.

  “My brain is much more female than it is male,” he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.
• This was the prelude to a new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair that offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup. Ms. Jenner was greeted with even more thunderous applause.
• ESPN announced it would give Ms. Jenner an award for courage. President Obama also praised her.
• I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.
• They haven’t suffered through business meetings with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before. They haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the middle of a crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering that their male work partners’ checks were far larger than theirs, or the fear of being too weak to ward off rapists.
• For me and many women, feminist and otherwise, one of the difficult parts of witnessing and wanting to rally behind the movement for transgender rights is the language that a growing number of trans individuals insist on, the notions of femininity that they’re articulating, and their disregard for the fact that being a woman means having accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.
• THE drip, drip, drip of Ms. Jenner’s experience
• By defining womanhood the way he did to Ms. Sawyer, Mr. Jenner and the many advocates for transgender rights who take a similar tack ignore those realities. In the process, they undermine almost a century of hard-fought arguments that the very definition of female is a social construct that has subordinated us. And they undercut our efforts to change the circumstances we grew up with.
• The insult and outright fear that trans men and women live with is all too familiar to us, and a cruelly marginalized group’s battle for justice is something we instinctively want to rally behind.
• Imagine the reaction if a young white man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.
• the trans movement isn’t simply echoing African-Americans, Chicanos, gays or women by demanding an end to the violence and discrimination, and to be treated with a full measure of respect. It’s demanding that women reconceptualize ourselves.
• In January, Project: Theatre at Mount Holyoke College, a self-described liberal arts college for women, canceled a performance of Eve Ensler’s iconic feminist play “The Vagina Monologues” because it offered an “extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” explained Erin Murphy, the student group’s chairwoman.
• Even the word “woman” has come under assault by some of the very people who claim the right to be considered women. The hashtags #StandWithTexasWomen, popularized after Wendy Davis, then a state senator, attempted to filibuster the Texas Legislature to prevent passage of a draconian anti-abortion law, and #WeTrustWomen, are also under attack since they, too, are exclusionary.

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• HE equivalent of one WA schoolchild a fortnight is being referred to the state’s clinic for transgender young people.

• About one in five children continue to identify as transgender into adolescence, with the rest “coming to terms with their gender”, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service clinical services director Caroline Goossens said.

  Mental Health Commissioner Tim Marney said he was looking at financial support for the centre, which provides vital services for children experiencing gender dysphoria and other related conditions.
• The schoolgirl has been receiving puberty-blocking injections since she was aged 11 and will start stage two – irreversible hormone replacement therapy – soon.

• Dr Goossens, who oversees the team running the PMH gender diversity clinic, which started in 2010, said the experiences of patients were vastly different to those of children who liked to play “dress-ups”.

  “Lots of kids go through that,” she said. “This is something really quite different where kids have a really profound sense of distress about their biological gender.”

  She said deciding to start medical treatment at eight years old was “very unusual”, but puberty-blocking treatments could prevent extreme distress in transgender children for whom the onset of puberty was terrifying.

• Until recently, WA children wanting puberty-blocking drugs needed permission from the Family Court, but going to court is now only required when not all parties agree the medications are in the best interests of the child.

  The minimum age for stage two treatments is 16.

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• THE leading Queensland psychiatric expert on children with gender identity disorder says the number of transgender children is increasing.  <!-- google_ad_section_end(name=story_introduction) --> 

   

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  Dr Stephen Stathis said he expected parents of two children would apply to the Family Court for permission for them to be given feminine hormones within the next year and more would follow as others reached puberty.

  But he said some desperate parents who were unaware of the professional help available for their anxious transgender children were getting unregulated, unregistered hormones from overseas via the internet.

• Dr Stathis, Director of Child and Youth Mental Health Services at Brisbane's Royal Children's Hospital, has seen more than 20 children with GID in the last four years, including some as young as four.

  "The numbers are rising and now we're looking at developing a gender clinic," Dr Stathis said. Half his gender identity patients are boys who identify as girls - the other half are girls who identify as boys.

       

  But Dr Stathis says research shows that about 50 per cent of children with significant transgender behaviour will desist, or grow out of it, by the time they reach puberty.

• The US state is home to Le Femme, one of the premiere finishing schools for transgender and cross-dressing clients who are hoping to make a convincing transition from male to female.

  Le Femme offers lessons in everything from covering stubble with makeup, walking in high heels, dressing for your shape and how to walk and talk like a woman — with costs ranging from $US44 to $US400 a session.
• Le Femme also offers group sessions, in which clients will undergo a full transformation with clothes, hair, makeup and nails, then spend a few hours on the town together to test their new-found walking and talking skills.

• “Hello, my name is Milla. It’s not easy being me.”  <!-- google_ad_section_end(name=story_introduction) --> 

   

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  These are the words of an incredibly brave nine-year-old transgender boy, who has struck a chord with millions of people in a video announcing to the world that he has decided to live as a boy.