Changing Your Sex

Whether gay, lesbian, or bisexual, those of us united under the GLBT banner are sometimes bewildered by that final letter. We know the T stands for transgendered, but what does it mean? Crossdressers, who can be gay or straight, are often included under the transgendered label, but it’s probably applied more accurately to transsexuals, men and women who undergo sexual reassignment surgery to become the gender they believe nature intended them to be.

The first person to officially change his sex was George Jorgensen, Jr., an ex-GI who shocked the world in 1952 when he officially became Christine Jorgensen. Two decades later, tennis star Renee Richards acknowledged she had once been a man, and inspired debate about a transsexual’s right to compete in female sports.

Jorgensen became famous because of her surgery, and Richards became infamous when her past life became headline news, but musician Wendy Carlos was already widely known as Walter when he made the final transition to womanhood in 1972, a year after winning acclaim and a cult following for his score to Stanley Kubrick’s classic film “Clockwork Orange.” In January 2004, David Palmer, the keyboard player with Jethro Tull, announced that he is now a woman named Dee, and in April, the Chicago Sun Times reported that Larry Wachowski, one half of the brother team responsible for the “Matrix” trilogy, is planning to transition from male to female and begin a new life as Linda (or Lana, according to some sources).

So what is a transsexual?

In Dr. David Reuben’s best-selling classic of naivete, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask), the good doctor consigned transsexuals to his chapter on “Male Homosexuality.” In Reuben’s view, men who become women with the aid of surgery are merely overly enthusiastic queers. The idea caught on with the general public, and to some people, every gay man is a potential candidate for a sex-change operation. In reality, a true transsexual is a person, male or female, born in the wrong body. Their lives are ones of anguish as they struggle to live in a birthday suit that doesn’t fit them.

“I may not have wanted to live,” Jorgensen said when asked what path her life might have taken if she had remained a biological male. In a 1979 Playboy Interview, Carlos said there was a time when she took a razor to her wrists on a daily basis as “the idea of suicide was becoming stronger and stronger in me.”

Life doesn't always get easier for transsexuals following surgery. Transsexuals of both genders struggle for acceptance in a world that regards them as oddities who are neither male nor female. And dating is risky business. A transsexual who hides his/her past life from dating partners isn't likely to be forgiven if the secret gets out. But there are men who prefer to date male to female transsexuals, and actively seek them out for sex and romance. However, if transsexuals wish to marry, the odds are stacked against them. On July 24, 2004, The Los Angeles Times reported that a Florida court refused to recognize a female-to-male transsexual as a male, and considered her union with a woman as a same-sex marriage which is forbidden under the state’s marriage laws.

“The law cannot permit a person to change their sex like one changes clothes,” an attorney for Liberty Counsel, a conservative law group said.

Changing one’s sex is serious business, expensive, too, with a male to female operation costing approximately $40,000. The more complicated female to male equivalent is twice as costly. If you live in San Francisco and work for the city, your employer will pick up most of the tab. The experience begins long before the patient goes under the knife. Candidates must endure psychotherapy, hormone therapy, and live for an extended period of time as a member of the gender one plans to join. Some transsexuals decide to stop short of the actual surgery, and live as men or women without fully abandoning the anatomical parts they were born with. Generally known as “social transitioning,” it’s a course Renee Richards wishes she had chosen.

Now calling herself a “second class woman,” Richards recommends medication for those with a “compulsion to crossdress and the depression that comes from gender confusion.” But many transsexuals and their supporters dismiss Richards as a transvestite who took his fetish too far. Some fetishists, sexually turned on by the idea of a sex change, are not true transsexuals and are disappointed (to say the least) to find that the thrill is gone after taking that final, permanent step.

But sexual reassignment surgery is not about sex. It’s about gender identity. A true transsexual doesn't choose to become a member of the opposite sex. He/she already belongs. It’s the packaging that needs correcting, not the person.

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