Sunday, December 18, 2011

The slippery slope

People talk about sliding down the slippery slope until you hit the point of no return. Removal of bodily hair. Wearing certain clothes. Spending time in female-impersonation mode. Hearing someone call you "ma'am." You never know what might act as a "gateway drug."

None of that has to do with changing one's sex in order to fix a birth defect.

A sex change ought to be deliberate. The only sound reason to change anatomical sex is a persistent and overwhelming sense that the body doesn't match the brain. Clarity is essential. You have to know in your mind and in your heart that you have a birth defect and that all you are doing is fixing it. That kind of clarity is probably easier for a young person to achieve, before the corrupting influences of gaslighting and "normal life" have taken hold. The conspiracy works against clear thinking and, perhaps more important, clear feeling.

Even worse, the "gender industry" works against clarity as well. It's all about deconstruction, experimentation, and ambiguity. Of course everything in the world is not black and white. But when there is nothing but ambiguity, then all hope for clarity is lost.

You're either born transsexual or not. You can't slide into it. Sliding down the slippery slope into a sex change seems like a slide from a fascination with femininity through infatuation with femininity into addiction to femininity. Surely there must be better ways to deal with an addiction to femininity than to make irrevocable changes to one's body, one's life, and the lives of others.

13 comments:

Calie said...

I absolutely could not agree more. I have seen crossdressers sliding down the slippery slope and going all the way down. Only time will tell if they're happy in their new bodies.

Anne said...

I have personally met three "later in life, post-op transitioners",(50+). None of them can be described as "happy".

"Super TV's", (those who have slipped off the edge of reason), are simply NOT accepted as women. How COULD they be? They have only their male understanding of how they imagine women feel, think and act.

I have looked into their eyes and into their souls. They KNOW they have made a mistake. They have little choice but to make the best of it. Surely there IS a better way. But it will never be heard so long as we who HAVE "walked the walk" are shouted down and demonized as elitists and worse.

Sagebrush said...

People do all kinds of things that I might think are weird but that they and others are fine with. But making your body female when your brain is not female, or even living as female when your brain is not female, strikes me as a recipe for disaster.

At one time, perhaps access to sex change was too restrictive. It's a tragedy if someone born transsexual is not able to change sex. But has the pendulum swung too far the other way? Medical and mental health professionals should ask themselves whether they are really doing no harm. So should advocates who uncritically encourage sliding down the slope.

Anne said...

Since we have entered into this somewhat odd realm, what might be your thoughts on those myriads of x-dressing men who "feel natural", dressing, acting out and "expressing" their "feminine selves"?

My guess is that these are what Benjamin might have classified as his Types I-III transvestites. I guess I should be clear that I do not understand this behavior any more than I understand "gay" sex, other than to say "different strokes for different folk". Could this be what some researchers refer to as "sexual target error"?

Van Buren said...

Posts like this one are so on point, yet totally disregarded by all BUT those who truly do understand their importance.

Those who are on that slippery slope are too deranged to see what they are doing, and the professionals who are supposed to "help" them, too often, don't understand the repocussions of this treatment, don't understand the actual condition itself, or don't take it seriously.

By all accounts, even my own psychiatrist was himself, a crossdresser. It was/is disheartening to me to find out (and not from the guy himself) that the only suitably qualified psych I could find local to me (and I'd already had to move 380miles to get close to suitable treatment) had a (in my mind) clouded view of the condition itself, and he'd been specializing and signing SRS letters for over ten years before I ever met him.

I've met people approaching him for their own letter, who have "decided" to transition after suffering tremendous life traumas that they haven't fully dealt with, and others who I honestly think have no business what-so-ever getting surgery, yet I'm confident he'll approve them.

Me on the other hand, he wanted little to do with me until he saw me dressed in what he would consider female attire, and at that point, basically told me that "anything" I needed was no problem.

A patient is truly on their own now-a-days which honestly scares me.

What's more, post like this might as well be talking into space. Sadly, I suspect only those who already understand them, will pay them the attention they deserve.

Sagebrush said...

@Anne

Men making themselves anatomically female seems very odd to me, but men expressing stereotypical femininity, not really. I don't know why it happens or what it really means. Is it a sexual kink? There are lots of those that I don't understand either, but many think they are perfectly healthy.

@Unknown

The situation with your psychiatrist really illustrates what I wrote. Not so much that he is a crossdresser, but more that he approves surgery so easily, and seemingly for the wrong reasons.

There can't be that many people as a percentage of the population who do weird things to themselves. I hope not anyway.

Anne said...

I ran across a candid assessment of the consequences VS the benifits of crossdressing, HERE...

http://robyn2801.blogspot.com/

The post is IN TWO PARTS

Anonymous said...

@Callie, what you know about transsexualism could be written on a pinhead. Whenever I read your comments and essays I'm reminded of a fiction writer discussing climbing mount everest by a man who suffers vertigo. You know sweet eff all about transsexualism and it shows.

@ Anne. I usually stay quiet in the face of some of the more crass and stupid things you say but this time you crossed a line and I will say something.

We had an IM conversation about one of the people you referenced (albeit not by name)and I warned you to back off. However in typical fashion you ignored everything I said and continued to berate the woman in question about issues that were none of your friggin business. There is a whole lot more I could say but untill I speak with you again I will hold my tongue. However your behaviour and attitude was outrageous in it's crass stupidity and ignorance. I can tell you that if you saw misery in the latest addition to your "meetings" it was as a direct result of your presence in their living room. Now back off because you have just made the wrong person angry.

@ sagebrush I apologise to you for making such comments on your blog. You have written some sense here but I do not agree with all of it I will comment seperately. Again I apologise for bringing this here but where else could I put it?

C

Elizabeth said...

@Anne

I am sure the three people you just mentioned are happy with you after meeting you. NOT, based on the above comments

It is one of the primary reasons one should never meet with others that want to cross the country to meet them but then I enjoy my privacy and I guess you do not.

Never trust a tranny that is desperate to meet you. First rule of safety for any post-op.

Anne said...

I do not agree, but then perhaps one never knows. Those folks that I am referring to, I met years ago, and I certainly DID NOT travel across the country to meet them.

I find such assumptions about peoples feeings to be irrelavant to what I see as the main issue here, which is that people ARE in fact sliding down the slippery slope to the cheers and profit of the "psycho-social gender babblers".

Sagebrush said...

@C

I would prefer that people comment on the post and not on other comments or to other commenters. That is not, however, why the comment did not show up right away. For some Google reason, it ended up in spam. I rescued it when I realized that.

I don't know what's going on in the last few comments anyway. I think I'm missing some information.

Please do leave a comment on the post itself. I'm curious about where you disagree.

Anonymous said...

There are really only very small points where our opinions differ and those lay in the sources of motivation for what are quite independently existing conditions.
What has happened over the years and since Benjamin's original seminal book is further linking of one condition to the other caused largely by John Money's "theory of gender dysphoria" Though why that has happened is puzzling since much of money's work was discredited by the exposure of David Reimer. There is substantial evidence that John Money was pedophile and abused both boys but my main point is thatit's these historical events that have lead to the current state of affairs. When you bring into the equation the vested interest in clinicians maintaining a lucrative income stream there is little chance of any change in the status quo until a physical and there medical rather than psychological cause for transsexualism is researched accepted and established. Until the I recommend everyone read my essay "Transvestism is a Narcotic Drug" for my version of slippery slope written some time ago for TS Si

I actually feel sorry for those transvestites who have been conned into belief in the "spectrum theory" of transgender it is a cause of great misery not just to those who endure it but to those who are involved in the sufferers life. It is almost exclusively women and children who suffer the most! Ironic wouldn't you say!

CS

Sagebrush said...

For anyone who is interested, this is the essay to which CS refers: http://ts-si.org/guest-columns/28182-transvestism-is-a-narcotic-drug