Reply #2: Yes and no

[devinkay]

readmoreoften, in one sense your post is spot on. Gender variation is not a disorder; it's simply a fact of nature that manifests in a small but significant segment of the human population. Intolerance of gender variation is the real disorder; it's but a learned cultural behavior, like racism or homophobia.

While I agree with you that the male/female gender dichotomy is a narrow-minded, culturally-driven, artificial and obviously incorrect construct, I must take issue with your characterization of gender reassignment surgery as abusive. Long-standing international medical consensus holds that GRS for certain forms of gender variation is a highly effective intervention while psychotherapy and drugs are not.

Characterizing reassignment surgery as abusive -- some go so far as to call it mutilation -- serves only to delegitimize its value as an avenue of deliverance for those like me who feel trapped and cheated by the foibles of nature. Dismissing this highly safe and effective procedure (calling it abusive and putting 'corrective' in quotation marks) is potentially more damaging than pathologizing my condition by calling it a disorder. I would much prefer to be called "sick" and have access to a "cure" than called "normal" and have access to surgery denied because some peripheral, unaffected others consider it unnecessary.

In my own case, I sought surgery because a lifetime of personal psychic effort and years of professional counseling could not so much as dent my visceral distaste for the male attributes of my body. I hated those attributes, and by extension myself, because they felt as alien to me as a second head or a third eye, and all the therapy in the world wasn't going to make me like a third eye. Surgery for me equaled salvation. Today I'm healthy, happy, well-adjusted, financially successful and surrounded by loving family, friends, colleagues and neighbors who see me and treat me as the whole person I am. And all that wonderful healing began in a recovery room.

Really, if you think about it, the debate surrounding GRS is kith and kin to the debate surrounding abortion. Whose body is it? Whose mind? Whose life? Who presumes to make this choice for me?

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