The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [128]
Like many people I interviewed, Rachlin is not convinced that all transgendered people suffer from gender dysphoria. She makes a distinction between body dysmorphia—“discomfort with parts of your body or all of your body”—and gender dysphoria. “For me, gender identity and body dysphoria are related but not the same thing, and people have made an assumption that if you are transsexual or trans-gender, you are unhappy with parts of your body, and that’s not really the case all the time. And it’s certainly not true all of the time, with all of your body, and all of the parts of your body. Some men can live with the genitals that they have; they like them and relate well to them. Others can’t at all. And when you see enough men who are having these feelings you realize that it has nothing to do with gender identity. Body dysmorphia is something else, though it’s related.”
These kinds of distinctions are confusing to those wedded to the classic paradigm of a transsexual as a “man trapped in a woman’s body” or vice versa. But the distinctions are borne out by a largely invisible population of gender-variant people who choose not to alter their bodies in any way, though they live in the social role of the “opposite” gender. “As a therapist in private practice, I see people who refuse, for one reason or another, to meet other transsexuals or enter the community because they are so mainstream-identified, they are more likely to feel that they need a body that physically matches [their gender identity],” Rachlin says. “I also know people who think ‘maybe I’m not transsexual because I don’t mind my penis. It works and I like it. But I’m a woman and I’ve always thought I was a woman, so what’s the matter with me?’ I say that there’s nothing the matter with you and I think they are lucky if they can live with what they have and enjoy it. You have such an advantage over people who need the surgery.”
The lack of research on gender variance makes it impossible to understand or predict why some people are comfortable with their anatomy even though it does not match their gender identity, and others attempt to remove the offending organs themselves if denied surgery. Why is this important, some might ask? If for no other reason than that increasing numbers of young people are identifying as gender-variant, and are transitioning at far younger ages. The True Spirit Conference, for example, is a very young meeting. Most participants appear to be in their twenties and have already begun hormone treatments and had (or are considering having) “top surgery” (mastectomy). A 1991 article published in the online journal Salon quoted staffers at the Callen-Lord Community Health Center, in New York City, who said that in the previous year, the number of transgender people under twenty-two in the gender-reassignment program had tripled. This increase in the number of trans-identified young people has been noted by members of the community as well. “I’m online a lot and I see these eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids coming on and saying, I want to transition,’” says Brad. “And I think, ‘How can you do that?’ But then I think, ‘Wait a minute, when you were five, you knew.’”
Like many older people in the trans community, Brad feels a certain degree of envy and resentment of these young people, who transition at eighteen or twenty or twenty-five, thus avoiding the lifelong misery and struggle that older transsexual men and women like him experienced. “There are a few of them that piss me off,” says Brad. “They come online and say stuff like ‘Oh, I’m twenty-three and I sure am glad to see some young guys