Kappa Beta Serving the transgendered community since 1988

Let's take a brief look back over the last century: at the beginning of the 20^th century we had the Women's Suffrage movement; in the mid 20^th century we had Women's Lib (and I won't go onto this any more because I could write a book on it); in the last half of the 20^th century we had the Civil Rights movement; now at the beginning of the 21^st century we have Gay Rights, to which, rightly or wrongly, we transgendered souls are trying to attach. What do they all have in common?

Our Western society, to which people of the USA belong, has a very basic tenet: a basic respect for every one of us as a human being. These movements all have in common reminding people that those who have been oppressed are human beings too. I know some people believe that respect must be earned, but that is not totally true. Western society demands the basic respect for human beings or we would be running around killing each other, as other cultures seem to do. This is not something to be earned; it may only be lost, as mass murders find out.

What’s in a word? Words can be powerful, beautiful, or simply descriptive. All successful movements started with a word; a word that defines the movement. Civil, Black, Gay, Lesbian were words used as adjectives followed by the noun that defined the objective. That noun? "Rights." We, as transgender folk, also talk about wanting the same Rights as the mainstream community. When we tell our friends, our family, our Senators, our Congressional Representatives what we desire, we do a pretty good job of defining those desires. What we fail to do is tell them who we are. We are ‘T’. However, since we – as members of the "T’ community – cannot even agree upon what "T" means (or even the spelling of the word), how can we ever hope to gain respect and acceptance without this ability to define ourselves? Please note that none of the above mentioned movements tried to further define themselves to mainstream America by all the variations that could exist within the movement. We didn’t see, for instance, the "Butch Lesbian Rights Movement", "The Lipstick Lesbian Movement", or "The Lesbian with Bi-Sexual Leanings Movement." We saw a single word: Lesbian. It only serves to confuse and dilute a move toward acceptance when the movement is broken down into sub-groups. A single, unified group has hope; a fractured movement does not. Additionally, once Rights are established, the word Pride can be substituted in the movement’s name.

I was struggling with the term "Gender Dysphoria" because it seems to connote a rare disease. I may have a cold now and then, but I certainly do not have a disease that has lasted since I was six years old. I first came to the conclusion that this was a disease created by the TS community in order that insurance companies would now have an identified disease and thus agree to pay for transition surgery (which I certainly do not object to at all). I still was not satisfied that that I knew what the definition of "Gender Dysphoria" was because it is not only used to describe a condition present in transsexuals, but also to describe the reason crossdressers dress.

I was still not satisfied with the media's definition of Gender Dysphoria, until I finally deduced the correct definition of "Gender Dysphoria":

Reprinted by permission of Crystal from Vanity Club email

I decided to complicate this whole thread. I have agreed individually with some of you that I abhor labels as a poor substitute for reasoned thought. So much for that. Now I'd like to bring up the subject of "Who" is being labeled. To keep this from becoming a thesis, I'm cutting out so much that it may read like a fractured hard drive. Oh well.

You see there are two of us. There is "J" who wanted desperately to be a girl beginning at age 4 and matured into a successful male who had a fanatic fascination with everything female and feminine. He began wearing his sister's undies at that age and, of course, progressed to mother's things. No surprises there. About age 12 or 13 he experienced a quite significant breast development (search on Gynecomastia if you're interested). Hmmmm?

This article is a follow up to one I wrote a few months ago. I wrote about, "What’s in a label?" Well this article adds on to the last one.

When I was at Kari and Marilyn's wedding last month I was asked the question again, "What are you? A TS, TG, TV, or CD?" Well, I didn’t respond to the question as I felt that the individual who asked me came across as being arrogant!