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Chapter 2 Initiation
- Vanderbilt University Press
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27 2 Initiation Through the decade of the 1990s I directed a great deal of energy toward improving the quality of life for transsexual people around the world. Much of that effort has been very basic: convincing people that female-to-male transgendered and transsexual people actually exist. I’ve also tried to show that our stories and issues are not exactly parallel to those of our male-to-female (MTF) counterparts. Society still has a long way to go to destroy the stereotypes that cause some people to revile and ridicule transsexual and transgendered people, still a long way to go to ensure social safety and equal access to basic human services for all transpeople, and to constructively address the racial and class issues that plague transpeople—and society at large. My own experience as a transsexual man gives me hope that if society can learn to incorporate and value transpeople in all their variation, most if not all of the other social problems that arise from intolerance and misinformation may be manageable. I think we can address multiple prejudicesandfearsintheprocessof dealingwithoneprimalconceptupon which many of our assumptions about the human world are based: the norms attached to sex and gender and the conjunction between them. So much faulty logic emanates from this locus of assumption:e.g.,women are inferior to men; heterosexuality is the only proper or legitimate orientation ; external genital appearance is indicative of reproductive function; you cannot change someone’s sex; transsexual people are always obvious; a person who is different from me has less value than I have; women are womenandmenaremenandthereisnothinginbetween,butif“something” should appear as a freak of nature,“it” must be destroyed. Because it is so Green,BecomingFinal.indd 27 3/24/04 2:35:48 PM Becoming a Visible Man 28 easy to agree with this“logic” many people actually fear utter chaos in the face of change. The paradigm shift that will accompany what I call“trans inclusion” is equivalent to the flat world becoming round, but it is just as real, just as necessary. Coming of Age The year 1991 was a turning point for me. That year I experienced an initiation into manhood, through both completion of surgery and the reissuance of my corrected birth certificate, and through acceptance into a community of men. I also took on a new responsibility that contributed to the initiation of another, very different community: the newly forming transgender community. In March 1991, Lou Sullivan died from complications of HIV, just one week after securing my promise to keep his quarterly FTM Newsletter alive. I had thought producing his typically four- to eight-page collection of news,information,and letters to the editor would be a small task for an experienced writer and publications manager such as myself,but it turned out to demand much more from me—and to give back much more than I expected,too.At the time,though,my perspective was limited by my own inhibitions.Ididn’tconsciouslyknowitthen,buttherewassomesignificant internal work I had to do before I could fully appreciate the significance of my developing role in this new community. At that juncture, I had no intention of doing anything to alter the status quo for myself or anyone else. My only goal was to get through the process of transition that I had laid out for myself, and to ride out whatever repercussions would arise from it. That February I had filed a petition in Superior Court for a change of name and sex. I was born in California, and under California law it has beenpossiblesincethe1970sfortranssexualpeopletohavetheirreassigned sex legally recognized. The process requires public notice of the proposed change for four weeks, and various forms of proof of publication, which take time to accumulate,so it wasApril before this activity was completed. I had a brief hearing at which the judge accepted my petition, including an affidavit from my surgeon, Donald R. Laub, M.D., confirming, under penalty of perjury, that my medical records showed “extensive medical, psychological and psychiatric evaluations were performed . . . relative Green,BecomingFinal.indd 28 3/24/04 2:35:49 PM [54.145.82.104] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:01 GMT) Initiation 29 to [my] true gender,” and that I had “undergone hormonal and surgical therapies which have irreversibly altered genital anatomy from female to male. Surgery was performed on July 24, 1990. [I] accomplished total psychological reorientation as well.Therefore,[my] gender should now be...