OMG! Indiana is filled with crazies...

[Happy Monkey]

A child "may have" freckles, as well.

[Ibby]

Originally Posted by classicman

That definitive enough for you to start injecting drugs or medicating?


Damn ... shoulda listened to IM... (shrug)

Who's injecting drugs or medicating? All these parents are doing is letting the kid dress, act, and use whatever pronouns they are comfortable with.

[Sundae]

Ah well, the Hate Mail have restored my faith in the British Press.

Pity poor Zach, a five-year-old victim of the politically correct gender identity industry

Because it is an industry you know, chewing up young men and women and turning them into the opposite gender for profit.

[BrianR]

Ibby, I hear you and I don't like the pshrinks positioning themselves as "gatekeepers" either. I bristle at the notion that I need anyone's "permission" to do exactly what I want and need.

On the other hand, I do believe they have a place and need to be an intrinsic part of ANY transition, no matter how slight. Even if the person in question only wants to cross dress and have no surgery or hormone therapy at all.

May I direct you to exercise your Googling skillz and look up the following people:

Renée Richards

Dani Bunten Berry

Sandra MacDougall

Samantha Kane

Dani especially should be familiar to computer gaming enthusiasts. She was a major part of Ozark Softscape, the company that produced M.U.L.E. and other classic multiplayer games back in the day. Salon article here.

Those four names, and others that are unknown but still there are why a therapist needs to be a part of any transsexual's life.

[BrianR]

Originally Posted by wolf

Yeah, she kinda got annoyed when I asked if she was going to lose the ability to parallel park and if that was an acceptable trade-off for the willingness to stop and ask for directions.

I still love you wolf.

I had an old Navy buddy ask me what part of transition was the worst. He guessed the surgeries. I told him that those were the easiest part since I sleep through them. The hardest part is when they come along with a big needle and suck out half my brains. And my friend Rita chimed in "No no. The hardest part is when you return to work after the surgery and they pay you 40% less than before.

I knew there was a reason I hang around with her

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by BrianR

On the other hand, I do believe they have a place and need to be an intrinsic part of ANY transition, no matter how slight. Even if the person in question only wants to cross dress and have no surgery or hormone therapy at all.

I should think if one cross dresses without surgery, and uses public restrooms, it would be good to be a patient of an reputable therapist when making a defense in court.

[BrianR]

By the time one is presenting as their target gender, one has a therapist write a "carry letter", a note ontheir letterhead which states that the person is a patient undergoing therapy and that dressing and presenting as [female] is a part of their therapy and transition, invites the reader to call the office for verification and generally outs the carrier to the reader.

I have one.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Sundae

Because it is an industry you know, chewing up young men and women and turning them into the opposite gender for profit.

Partially true, anyway ... all services, medications, and surgeries are private pay, done by for-profit physicians. It is an industry.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by BrianR

I have one.

So you're a card carrying member.

[ZenGum]

Well if you'd just sew that damn pink triangle on your shirt the initial confusion would never arise!

[Griff]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Well if you'd just sew that damn pink triangle on your shirt sweater vest the initial confusion would never arise!

ftfy

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Well if you'd just sew that damn pink triangle on your shirt the initial confusion would never arise!

Don't bother doing it yourself. If Santorum wins, the government will do it for you.

[Ibby]

My friend Shay has just written a fantastic article on the state of trans* health care for Campus Progress.

http://campusprogress.org/articles/s...med_consent_m/

In Kai Devlin’s first year on testosterone, he saw five doctors—including one who insisted on manually examining his genitals before renewing his prescription, and another who refused to treat transgender patients because he “didn’t agree with it.” Devlin initially sought hormones using the conventional route, asking a long-term therapist for a recommendation letter which he then gave to an endocrinologist; every new doctor required another long attempt to “prove” his transgender identification.
Finally, the 24-year-old trans man visited Chicago’s Howard Brown Clinic. Instead of requiring a lengthy qualification process, Devlin was processed in Howard Brown’s two-year-old Transgender Hormone Informed Consent program:* After a full physical, a meeting with an advocate, and an overview of the side effects of taking hormones, Devlin was given a prescription.
“If a person is walked through the positive and negative effects with a counselor and/or physician, then they have a right to make their own medical decisions,” Devlin wrote in an e-mail. “I think informed consent is one of the best things available.”
Devlin is one of many transgender patients using alternative clinics to access hormone therapy, a common step in medical transition.
While much media attention is paid to gender confirmation surgery, it’s hormone replacement therapy that often makes the largest difference in the lives of transpeople. Patients frequently report that hormone therapy makes their body feel more comfortable or more like home—more importantly to many, hormones masculinize or feminize the body, helping trans people be read correctly as their gender.
But accessing these hormones can be very difficult, even for patients who are assertive and aware of what they want. Doctors often follow outdated standards, requiring a pathological diagnosis, extended counseling, or even a dangerous “real life experience” period in which non-passing individuals must live in their preferred gender role. Rather than jump through these seemingly endless and expensive hoops, trans people sometimes turn to dangerous black-market alternatives.
Fortunately, there’s an increasingly popular alternative: clinics like* Howard Brown, which offer transgender patients hormone prescriptions using an “informed consent” model that centers a patient’s autonomous choice.
Clients at more than six of these clinics can acquire a prescription for hormones after basic laboratory tests, a consultation about hormonal effects, and signing a waiver stating that they know the risks of treatment.
“When we're working with clients as therapists, the goal is to help people self-realize. We want to allow space for that when it comes to people realizing themselves in the context of their gender,” Talcott Broadhead, a licensed social worker in Olympia, Wash., told Campus Progress.
Broadhead works under an umbrella called Informed Consent for Access to Transgender Health, and educates both patients and medical professionals, including those who don’t have access to a clinic.
Today, transgender patients are often forced to receive a diagnosis of “Gender Identity Disorder” in order to receive care.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental DisordersFourth Edition lists the criteria as, “a stated desire to be the other sex, frequent passing as the other sex, desire to live or be treated as the other sex, or the conviction that he or she has the typical feelings and reactions of the other sex,” along with “preoccupation with getting rid of primary and secondary sex characteristics (e.g., request for hormones, surgery, or other procedures to physically alter sexual characteristics to simulate the other sex) or belief that he or she was born the wrong sex.”
But a Gender Identity Disorder diagnosis can be considered a pre-existing condition, raising health care premiums for transgender people who go the old-fashioned route.
Worse, the criteria don’t fit everyone—and represent a seriously outdated view of transgender identity, which the medical interpretation has struggled with over the last five decades.
As transgender advocate Julia Serano describes in her book Whipping Girl, transgender women were initially required to conform to very specific gender roles—or even judged as candidates for surgery based on their heteronormative attractiveness.
With the pathologizing of transgender identities came a very strict protocol for healthcare providers serving transgender patients, one that centered a gatekeeper model that often included hefty amounts of transphobia.
“Many trans people had to formulate a story to tell the doctors at that time to get their needs met,” said A. Canelli, a Seattle-based counselor who works with Broadhead. “They found that if you go to a surgeon and say, ‘I was born in the wrong body,’ you would get the care you needed.”
Even today, Canelli sees people in self-advocacy workshops who try to force themselves into that narrative—even though it doesn’t fit many, or even most, people who seek transition-related care.
This mischaracterization of the transgender experience has had far-reaching consequences. As the myth took on a life of its own, transgender people desperately tried to conform to it in order to access necessary care. This often included lying about their preferences or feelings, Canelli said, earning trans patients a reputation for untruthfulness or difficulty.*
The informed consent model offers an alternative to all that: A healthcare model that allows patients to make decisions about their care, starting with the assumptions that being transgender is not a mental illness and that a person’s experience of their identity should guide their transition.*
While informed consent clinics don’t force patients into extensive therapy before prescribing hormones, they frequently require basic medical testing and a consultation. Laboratory tests establish a patient’s hormonal baseline, but also check for liver function and other physiological factors that can be affected by hormone therapy—going over all the possible effects and side effects of the hormones give patients the chance to make decisions about their own health care.
Transgender people who choose to take hormones take either testosterone or estrogen combined with an anti-androgen, depending on the changes they desire.
Female-assigned people who take testosterone can have facial and body hair growth, a deepening of the voice, and a redistribution of fat, among other effects. Male-assigned people who take estrogen experience breast growth, a softening of face shape and features, and a reconfiguring of body fat into a “female” distribution, along with other changes. Many of these sets of changes are fully desired and welcomed by transitioning people; others take lower doses of hormones or stop them completely after a short period of time, finding comfort in simply looking more androgynous.
In other words, it’s all about autonomy and patient-directed care—and about treating transgender patients like any other patients.
“Informed consent is implied in every medical procedure anyway,” Canelli said. “Any time you go to a doctor, you're already giving informed consent when you walk in the door. Trans people have that extra barrier—which I'm going to call transphobia.”
The definitive World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care were revised last year to explicitly include the informed consent model.
“The difference between the Informed Consent Model and [the new standards of care] is that the [new standards of care put] greater emphasis on the important role that mental health professionals can play in alleviating gender dysphoria and facilitating changes in gender role and psychosocial adjustment,” the new standards read.
But not all transgender people want to pursue long-term counseling. Many simply can’t afford it: A National Center for Transgender Equality study from 2009 [PDF] found that the percentage of trans people living in poverty is twice as high as the national average.
While most insurance companies won’t cover transgender medicine, some transgender patients report that informed consent clinics are willing to work around these limitations. The Howard Brown clinic, for instance, provides a diagnosis of “Endocrine Disorder” on patients’ medical charts, which de-pathologizes trans identity and skirts insurers’ refusal to cover transition-related expenses.
That’s what informed consent comes down to: A model of care that avoids forcing patients into long, unnecessary therapy, and instead sees a transgender identity as an individual experience.
“One of the foundations of ICATH is that we're starting to not only strip the medical community of [the standard] narrative, but give room for people's true experience of transgender identity to emerge honestly for the good of all, to reject the idea that we need to fit into one of the clever pathologies,” Broadhead said.
It is this honest identity that charts the transition journey for each transgender person. In rejecting inflexible standards of care, trans people are claiming their ability to navigate their personal journey on their own, without having to prove their identity to any gatekeepers. * *

Sorry to post the entire article but it's just that good.

[Spexxvet]

From Wiki

Intersex is a broadly defined term that usually denotes the presence of discordance of the biological aspects of sex: at least some aspect of the genitalia, internal organs, gonadal tissue, or chromosomes is more typical of the other sex, or incompletely differentiated. When the external genitalia appear to be "in between", they are described as ambiguous.[6]
In approximately 1 in 5,000 infants there is enough variation in the appearance of the external genitalia to give rise to hesitation about appropriate assignment by the physician involved. Typical examples would be an unusually prominent clitoris in an otherwise apparently normal girl, or complete cryptorchidism or mild hypospadias in an otherwise apparently normal boy. In most of these cases, a sex is tentatively assigned and the parents told that tests will be performed to quickly confirm the apparent sex. Typical tests in this situation might include a pelvic ultrasound to detect a uterus, a testosterone or 17-hydroxyprogesterone level, and/or a karyotype. In some of these cases a pediatric endocrinologist is consulted to confirm the tentative sex assignment. The expected assignment is usually confirmed within hours to a couple of days in these cases.
In a much smaller proportion of cases, the process of assignment is more complex, and involves both determining what the biological levels of sex may be as well as choosing the best sex assignment. Approximately 1 in 20,000 infants is born with enough ambiguity that assignment becomes a more drawn-out process of multiple tests and intensive education of the parents about sexual differentiation. In some of these cases, it is clear that the child will face major discordances or abnormalities of anatomy or function as he or she grows up, and deciding upon the sex of assignment is a matter of weighing the advantages and disadvantages of either assignment.

[Sundae]

The League of Gentlemen's Dt Carlton skech is based on a doctor in the 80s documentary "A Change of Sex". I can't find it anywhere, but the GP is appalling.

The man was George Roberts and became Julia Grant.
I wish I could point you to a clip, but I haven't been able to find any.
Directly lifted from the documentary are these lines which Carlton uses:

- Go out, would you?
- No! We'll do things properly if you don't mind.
- He makes his own problems
- You cannot buy my opinion as you would buy a used motor car. That is not the way we practice medicine in this country.