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What if you "succeed" in completing a TS transition,
but did it for the wrong reasons?
Yep, you get the idea!
This is one place you do NOT want to go!
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Renée Richards
First consider the case of Renée Richards, who transitioned and had SRS in 1975 at age 40, and who was widely outed the next year as the "transsexual tennis player". Renee's story was widely reported in the media, and her story initially did a lot of good by announcing to a new generation of young TS girls that "sex change was possible", just as Christine Jorgensen's case had done in the mid-1950's. In 1983, she went on to write an autobiography about her transition entitled "Second Serve", which stimulated further notoriety about her situation and about transsexualism in general, especially regarding whether postop women should be allowed to participate as women in competitive sports.
Unfortunately, the extensive publicity about Renée's "sex
change", publicity which she largely brought on herself, generated a widespread public image of her as a "transsexual"
rather than a woman. The mystique surrounding her case widely
propagated the image that postop women are not women after all,
but are instead whatever "Renée Richards" is.
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Dani Bunten Berry
Don't do it! That's my advice. This is the most awful, most expensive, most painful, most disruptive thing you could ever do. Don't do it unless there is no other alternative. You may think your life is tough but unless it's a choice between suicide and a sex-change it will only get worse. And the costs keep coming. You lose control over most aspects of your life, become a second class citizen and all so you can wear women's clothes and feel cuter than you do now. Don't do it is all I've got to say. That's advice I wish someone had given me. I had the sex change, I "pass" fine, my career is good but you can't imagine the number of times I've wished I could go back and see if there was another way. Despite following the rules and being as honest as I could with the medical folks at each stage, nobody stopped me and said "Are you honest to God absolutely sure this is the ONLY path for you?!" To the contrary, the voices were all cheerfully supportive of my decision. I was fortunate that the web didn't exist then - there are too damn many cheerleaders ready to reassure themselves of their own decision by parading their "successful" surgeries and encouraging others. I can speak the transgender party line that I was a female trapped in a male body and I remember feeling this way since I was 4. But, it's never that easy if you look at it sincerely and without preconception. There's little question that a mid-life crisis, a divorce and a cancer scare were involved in at least the timing of my sex-change decision. To be completely honest at this point (3 yrs post-op) is not easy, however, I'm not sure I would do it again. I'm now concerned that much of what I took as a gender dysfunction might have been nothing more than a neurotic sexual obsession. I was a cross-dresser for all of my sexual life and had always fantasized going fem as an ultimate turn-on. Ironically, when I began hormone treatment my libido went away. However, I mistook that relief from sexual obsession for validation of my gender change. Then in the final bit of irony, after surgery my new genitals were non-orgasmic (like 80% of my TG sisters). So, needless to say, my life as a woman is not an ultimate turn-on. And what did it all cost? Over $30,000 and the loss of most of my relationships to family and friends. And the costs don't end. Every relationship I make now and in the future has to come to terms with the sex-change. And I'm not the only one who suffers. I hate the impact this will have on my kids and their future. Anyway, I'm making it sound awful and it's not. There are some perks but the important things like being comfortable with myself and having a true love in my life don't seem like they were contingent on the change. Being my "real self" could have included having a penis and including more femininity in whatever forms made sense. I didn't know that until too late and now I have to make the best of the life I've stumbled into. I just wish I would have tried more options before I jumped off the precipice. I miss my easy access to my kids (unlike many TS's I didn't completely lose access to them though), I miss my family and old friends (I know they "shouldn't" have abandoned me but lots of folks aren't as open minded as they "should" be ... I still miss them) and finally, I hate the disconnect with my past (there's just no way to integrate the two unrelated lives). There's any number of ways to express your gender and sexuality and the only one I tried was the big one. I'll never know if I could have found a compromise that might have worked a lot better than the "one size fits all" sex-change. Please, check it out yourself before you do likewise." |
Sandra MacDougall
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"The former member of the
Scots Guards says she has suffered verbal and physical abuse since
her sex swap operation almost four years ago, and wishes it could be
reversed. |
Samantha Kane
Then we have those who "change sex" on a whim and have the financial means to do so, then afterwards have regrets and sue everyone in sight who "did this to them" - while not taking any responsibility whatsoever for their own actions.
For example, consider the case of "Samantha Kane", and then think about the damage that this impulsive person has done to himself and about the harm he is now doing to trans women everywhere by his irresponsible actions - both in transitioning and then in lashing out as those who tried to help him in the first place.
(Sam Hashimi => Samantha Kane => Charles Kane)
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"Sam, as he was"
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"Samantha, as he erm was?" |
"Charles, as he is today!!!" |
| "Samantha Kane was, by anyone's
standards, a hugely successful woman. She ran her own interior
design company; was independent, modern and extraordinarily
beautiful. She had a top of-the-range Mercedes, homes in West London
and Spain and accounts at Knightsbridge's most exclusive boutiques.
Her name made her sound like a character in Dynasty - and her feline
looks would certainly have qualified her to be one. She rubbed shoulders with the likes of the Crown Prince of Dubai, ran with the international set in Monte Carlo and Cannes and shared her bed with a number of fabulously wealthy men. But something inside Samantha hated being a woman. She found the conversation superficial and the sex second rate. She loathed shopping, disliked gossip and fretted over the endless maintenance of her face and figure. In short, Samantha Kane desperately missed being one of the boys. For Samantha used to be Sam, a millionaire with a property empire and a husband with two children. As Iraqi-born Sam Hashimi, he brokered million-dollar deals for Middle Eastern businessmen and flared briefly in newspapers when he launched an unsuccessful takeover bid for Sheffield United FC. Following the first Gulf War, Sam's business empire collapsed and his marriage ended. At 37, seemingly out of the blue, he decided to become a woman. He had a sex change operation in December 1997 and spent close to £60,000 on surgery - including £10,000 on genital surgery and £3,000 on breast implants. Within four years of the operation, Sam realised 'he'd' made a dreadful mistake and has begun the painful process of having more surgery to return to being a man again!. He was in the headlines again, claiming his sex change was 'an act against nature'. He has reported his doctor, consultant psychiatrist Russell Reid ... to the General Medical Council alleging he had a `cavalier attitude' in recommending him for the gender realignment surgery. He registered officially as Charles a month ago, wanting to put as much distance as he could between Sam and Samantha. He cuts a poignant figure of a man. Charles is dressed in a pin-stripe suit and pink tie - an amalgam of man and woman. His hands are soft with clean, shaped nails. He walks and sits in the manner of a woman, but uses the men's lavatories. He has no facial growth and little male muscle. He says it took four years of hormone treatment and surgery to feminise his body completely. It will take as much time again to return it to manhood. But Charles will never be as Sam was. His genitals will be re-constructed by plastic surgery. His body will never naturally produce testosterone and he will never again grow a beard. Charles cannot give a convincing reason for becoming a woman. He says he was suffering from a nervous breakdown when gender change was recommended and that he should have been referred for counselling not surgery. 'I was a traditional male. I was strong and tough in business and the provider for my family. My wife Trudi had never worked a day of her life. I shouldered the complete financial responsibility for her and the children,' he says. 'She'd think nothing of going shopping and spending a few thousand pounds on a dress. I always used to wonder what it would be like to be a woman, to have none of the responsibility I had, to have doors opened for me and have all the privileges a woman seems to have.' Until his breakdown, he was thoroughly heterosexual; a conventional, grey-suited businessman with short dark hair and a moustache. Born in Baghdad to middle-class parents, he moved to England at 17 where he secured an HND in engineering and married Trudi, a former beauty queen, at 23. He built a property empire, negotiated deals for wealthy Arabs and ran a club in Mayfair. At one time, he says, he had £2 million in the bank. 'I was like any other man,' he says. 'I worked hard and did pretty much what I liked. I enjoyed spending time with men talking about football, the stock market and, of course, girls. I think my sex drive was above average. I had one or two affairs during my marriage..."
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| ================================= BBC1, Tuesday 19th October 2004 1035pm ================================= After the failure of his business and departure of his wife and children, Sam Hashimi took the drastic decision to undergo surgery to become a woman. It was only later that the ex-millionaire realised he had made a terrible mistake. As he prepares for the final stage of a sex-change reversal, Hashimi wonders if he will be accepted as a fully fledged male. Documentaries about people undergoing sex-reassignment are extremely common these days. But this one is quite extraordinary. It follows Samantha, a wealthy 44 year old property developer who was born a man (and as Sam was married for ten years and had two children), but who seven years ago had a sex-change operation. Now - and here's the twist - Samantha wants to become Charles and is on the brink of having another sex-change operation to turn her back into a male again. "I was robbed of my manhood for so many years" explains Sam/Samantha/Charles, ignoring the fact that it was his/her decision to undergo surgery. While Charles waits for the final bit of reconstructive surgery, we see him getting into an hysterical state about an expensive yacht he's buying (and which he hopes may help him find a girlfriend). In a way it's yet another example of how he rushes into things without thinking about the consequences. It's obvious that he's a complex person who's extremely confused about what he wants, but you'll still sit open-mouthed that anyone can make radical life-changing decisions like this on a whim. ==================================== |
For more information on this case, see:
http://www.transgenderzone.com/features/changemeback.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/tv_and_radio/onelife_prog3.shtml
For a more extensive discussion about cases of "regrets", and also about groups of religious zealots and anti-gay ideologues who sometimes prey on these cases - smothering them with attention to get them to suddenly de-transition and then sue everyone in sight - see Christine Beatty's page entitled Transsexualism, Regrets and "Reparative Therapy":
http://www.glamazon.net/transsexual-regrets.html
See also Joanne Herman's article "Transsexual Regret", The Advocate, March 13, 2007:
http://www.joanneherman.com/Trans_101_regret.html
Furthermore, those at risk for very difficult social transitions should realize that SRS will not in and of itself somehow miraculously "make them a woman in other people's eyes". After all, the only people who see your genitalia are those whom you are intimate with (and your physicians, etc.) and thus SRS by itself will not affect the general reactions of those around you. In cases where serious difficulties are expected in social transition, it might be wise to give FFS priority over SRS, because FFS has a much more profound effect on the reactions of others to one's transition.
Suddenly transitioning and then undergoing SRS on a whim is an especially bad idea, no matter how much money, influence, or power one has with which to make it happen. Seek counseling instead. Learn about the alternatives. Slow it down. Listen to the advice of Dani Berry and reflect on the case of Samantha Kane above.
Lynn Conway
["SRS Warning" Version of 4-09-05; update of 3-16-07]
See Lynn "TS Women's Successes Page"
