New Standards of Care

WPATH Announces New Standards of Care for Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People

This article came out today, and I couldn’t be more excited.

First of all, WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Second, the standards of care are very important to transgender people who want to transition. Transitioning can mean any combination of hormonal treatment, voice therapy, or one or several surgeries – or none of these things. Transitioning usually (I say usually because I don’t know everyone’s personal experiences) has the end goal of living full-time as the trans* person’s true gender rather than the sex they were assigned at birth.

The Harry Benjamin Standards of Care were the ones most often used, at least before these new ones (titled “Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People”) were announced. The HBSoC are called “The Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorder”, and while a good idea in theory, often made it too difficult for one to transition. They required a minimum amount of psychotherapy before any surgery or hormones, and a year of living as the target gender (along with psychotherapy) before getting a hysterectomy or the testicles removed. Unfortunately, I’ve heard that the therapy often asked the trans* person to “prove” their trans-ness before the therapist would (or could, I’m not sure) do anything to help. The article gives me hope that this will no longer be the case:

“There is no one way of being transgender and it doesn’t have to mirror the idea of a change of their sex,” Bockting explained.

This same quotation also implies that these standards of care will not discriminate against non-binary genders. The article goes on to confirm that:

Another major change, Bockting explained, is that the standards “allow for a broader spectrum of identities – they are no longer so binary.” …

“These standards allow for a gender queer person to have breasts removed without ever taking hormones,” he said.

This is extremely important.

The HBSoC do not recognize non-binary genders, only binary ones – trans women and trans men. I have heard cases of non-binary people pretending to be binary so that they could transition, only to be forced to transition entirely to the “opposite” gender and experience just as many, if not more, problems. But now, a trans* person no longer is required to take hormones to have surgery, which means that if I wanted, I could begin transitioning to a body more in line with my gender identity without having to take testosterone.

Taking T (a common abbreviation used for testosterone) would not help me feel more comfortable in my body at all, it would just give me different things to feel uncomfortable about. But if I wanted top surgery (surgery to get my breasts removed), then that would have been a requirement. Not any more. And since this was a major item in the con column for me every considering transitioning, it might now be possible for me to get my “female” genitalia removed without being forced to transition to male. But that’s a thought for the future, not for right now, when I’m a poor college student. But it’s hopeful. And that’s really what matters right now.

For me, educating is one of the most important things I can do to “help the cause”. I like explaining gender and sexuality (particularly as they pertain to me, but also the basic Non-Heterosexual/Non-Cisgender 101), I don’t get offended when people ask me questions, and I just really enjoy teaching people about this stuff.

I attended a Gender Identity workshop and a Safe Zones workshop the other day, and having somebody else educate people (and me) was almost surreal. She was a cool person, funny and engaging, and I liked her a lot. She is gay, and the perspective she had on LGB issues was interesting and insightful.

She is also cisgender, however, and that makes it difficult for her to fully understand trans* concepts. I’m not saying that cisgender people can’t be good allies or can’t really get the lives of trans* people – actually, I am kind of saying the latter. Cis people can’t really get the lives of trans* people, just as the opposite holds true. And that makes it harder to teach other (mostly cis) people.

She didn’t do a bad job. I rather enjoyed the Gender Identity workshop. However, there were a few problems with the way she set it up. Firstly, she didn’t introduce the word “cisgender”,  just “transgender” and “transsexual”. This seemed very othering to me; though I’m sure she didn’t do it on purpose, it reeked of, “These people need a label because they’re different, and we don’t need a label because we’re normal.” That didn’t really sit well with me.

She also never mentioned that trans men are real men and that trans women are real women. This may seem trivial, but to a room of people who haven’t thought much about trans* people, stating this clearly would be really helpful.

The other main thing I had a problem with was how the matter of cis privilege was handled. She only mentioned briefly the horrors of being trans* in a cis privileged world – however, we spent quite a while on how privilege negatively affects the privileged.

This really bothered me. Discussing how privilege negatively affects everyone, even the privileged, is fine. But to focus almost completely on that? No. Privilege exists, and it puts other people at an extreme disadvantage. Being unprivileged in terms of gender identity is not something to gloss over, especially while talking to a room of mostly cisgender people who don’t really know what trans* people live through because of their lack of privilege.

I did like the woman who ran the workshops. She was nice, funny, knowledgeable, and a good ally. She explained things well and was engaging. Those two things just didn’t sit well with me, and it seemed to me that her being cisgender had a lot to do with it.

I think that if someone wants to educate people like this, that’s fantastic. But they should also ensure that they are fair to all people being represented, and aren’t inadvertently exerting any privilege.

Lobsterfest

Juniata College has this tradition called Lobsterfest each fall in which every club on campus can get a table and sign people up. A few friends and I put together a club called Trans* Parachute United, and this was our first Lobsterfest. Basically, this meant that I got to sit on the quad at a table by myself for three hours in the hot sun while people walked past and gave me weird looks.

Now I had wanted to look as androgynous as possible, which would normally mean wearing my binder (a shirt-type-thing that kind of squishes the developed breast tissue and pushes it away from normal boob area to achieve a flatter/more “masculine” chest) along with a button-down shirt. It was, unfortunately, far too hot for that. It was way too hot even for the t-shirt and jeans I was wearing. And, since you may not know, wearing a binder when you’re sweaty results in prolonged feelings of stickiness and grossness and general discomfort.

But while I was sitting in gross discomfort at the T*PU table, I had a paper in front of me with the Gender Diamond on it.

On the top of the paper, I wrote “Where are you on the gender diamond?” (I had also replaced “Polygender” with “Other Gender” and “Genderless” with “Agender” in fitting with my personal definitions) and had a Sharpie next to it. I labeled my own gender right at the very bottom point and encouraged everyone who came up to me to label theirs as well. I am friends with many of the people that put themselves on the diamond, and have had gender-related conversations with most of them, but there were still some really interesting things I noticed.

1. Almost everyone hesitated at putting down a point, often changing their mind at the last minute before placing a dot
2. Even people who said, “I am definitely cis” didn’t place themselves at the extreme point of their birth-assigned gender (except for one)

Point two is especially interesting to me. These people did place their dots, for the most part, within the circle I would consider cisgender, but several fell closer to the purple center than I expected. This isn’t to say that I doubt that such people aren’t cisgender – if they say they’re cis, and that’s what they identify as, then that’s their decision. I was just a little intrigued by the cisgender people placing themselves closer to the purple than I would have initially guessed. I certainly expected more dots on the feminine and masculine corners than were there.

I also thought it was interesting that people who never seemed to question their gender before hesitated greatly before finally placing their dot.

Overall, it was a good day. A bunch of people came over to the table for information. Most of them wandered off giving me strange looks, but a few people looked honestly interested. I’m glad that we’re around to get the word out and help educate people. If we want to get anything accomplished, we need to make sure everyone knows we exist.

(Eventually people will know what neutrois means… Eventually. XD)