My Gifted Life

You hear this term a lot from people who are making a change in their presentation to the world. I think there’s a tendency for the unfamiliar to think of transition as just one goal and just one endpoint. The truth is that people transition to find a comfortable existence.

There are several terms that are used for transition. A social transition is usually just changing things like your name and how you’re dressed. Not everyone needs more than this. You might only be socially transitioned when you’re in your private life, and thereby avoid many issues that crop up with more extensive changes. For some people this is enough. They can even do some more minor things that relieve their feelings of gender dysphoria.

The typical next step taken is often hormone therapy. Putting the bodies hormones in concert with the person’s view of themselves can go a very long way to relieve feelings of dysphoria. Hormone therapy can largely be reversed although you can become sterile. A good thing to keep in mind, especially for young transitioners. This change in hormones is the first step in a medical transition. There are a number of different paths that can be taken, but usually HRT (hormone therapy) is the first. This is often very effective by itself in reducing dysphoria.

You’ll note that nowhere am I saying the changes or treatments are meant to actually change anything about the sex of the individual. Everyone understands this, trans people are not delusional, but these changes do provide relief from the dysphoria.

Some people are happy with this. They might live a life in duality where they are Sam at work and Samantha at home. If that’s enough for them then they can stop making changes and concentrate on life.

Then there are some who feel they want to be more congruent with the sex they feel they should have been born as and for those people there’s often a surgical transition to try and reconfigure the genitalia into an approximation of what they would have had. Meanwhile there are other surgeries undertaken to deal with issues like a transman’s breasts, facial reconstruction to make the person more passable, minimizing a transwoman’s adam’s apple and more.

Reassignment surgery for transwomen is relatively successful from an appearance viewpoint. Functionally there are problems having enough material to create a workable vagina plus the physical limitations of the patient may not really allow enough room for penetrative sex to be a comfortable option. Even in the case of Jazz Jennings, who had surgery from one of the top transgender surgeons, Marcie Bowers, has had a slew of problems because having not gone through male puberty there wasn’t much material to construct the vagina.

It is perfectly possible that advancements in technique and materials will take care of these issues, but in the meantime it would be good if therapists were better educated on the real state of the art and success rates of the surgery. Surgeons ought to be under stricter guidelines to limit reassignment surgeries to those who are unlikely to run into complications and problems. Perhaps better yet it would be good if the community would organize to make sure people understand the limitations of what’s now available.

Despite there being limitations, the current ability to make these changes, minor or major, has been successful at reducing or eliminating my gender dysphoria. It is a blessing to not have the tortuous thoughts anymore.