The Guide to Getting It On (162 page)

“Started-out-gay MTFs
include drag queens and most early-transitioning (say before 30) transsexuals. Their hallmarks are 1) They act like women and were effeminate from the start. 2) They don’t automatically love being women. If they’re well-received en femme, they seek it out. If not, they may be content to live more as drag queens or conventional gay men. 3) Most I’ve met will laugh off the idea of ever being attracted to a woman. 4) They gravitate toward people-oriented or creative careers.”

For plenty of TGs, the two-camp division does not apply. Each person has their own story and each has their own journey in discovering what mix of masculine and feminine works best for them.

Orientation vs. Gender Recap

The vast majority of human males, whether they are gay or straight, are just fine with their gender. They love being guys and they love having a penis and testicles. If they wanted any changes between their legs, it would be to have more and not less. Even the queeniest of bottoms who can’t be done enough each day loves being a man and has no desire to be a woman. So gender has little to do with orientation, and orientation has little to do with gender. One is meat, and one is fish.

This doesn’t mean that a guy might not occasionally wonder what it’s like to be a woman during sex. If some men could, they would become a woman for a few days to see what it was like to have sex. And some women would become men, e.g. a dick for a day, to see what that’s like.

And what about straight couples where the woman pegs the guy in the rear with a dildo? Is this transgenderism? Not really. It’s mostly a reminder that there are degrees. He doesn’t want to have his penis snipped off and she doesn’t want to have her vulva sewn up, and neither wants to take gender-bending hormones. Even though it’s a role reversal, it’s not gender bending.

Gender Benders Who Want To Remain Factory-Equipped

While sex-reassignment surgery is at the top of many transgendered persons’ Christmas lists, it is very expensive and there can be nasty complications. So some TGs do everything but have bottom surgery.

There are some transgendered men who want to look like women, act like women, and be women in every way except that they enjoy their penis and testicles. Some will only take female hormones and have top surgery, opting to become a she-male. Some won’t have bottom surgery because they can’t afford it or they are concerned about how little sensation surgically-constructed genitals can have. You can look at pictures of surgically created vulvas, and think, “It looks like the real thing!” but they don’t necessarily feel like the real thing. As for a surgically-created or “after-market” penis, there is plenty of room for cosmetic improvement. They sometimes lack sensation (Metoidioplasty is a type of surgery that turns the clitoris into a small penis and allows you to pee standing.)

One of the bigger problems with leaving your genitals intact is the law. In most cities, your gender and your crotch are one and the same, no matter how many hormones and cosmetic tortures you have endured. If you’ve still got a penis, you’re a dude according to the law. If you still have a vulva, you are a girl. This can be a real problem when it comes to marriage, real estate, and medical and life insurance.

How Prevalent Is Transsexualism?

Somewhere between one-in-12,000 and one-in-3,600 biologically born males and one-in-27,700 biologically born females are taking hormones to alter or change their sex. So it’s not like every third person in your high-school graduating class was transgender, although you may have had your doubts.

Transsexuals Sometimes Can’t Win for Losing.

Strange events bore strange alliances. For instance, there are a number of liberal academics who are upset by the way that transgendered persons sometimes behave like caricatures of ultra-feminine and ultra-masculine stereotypes. At the same time, there’s nothing that will get the hackles up on a conservative fundamentalist more than a transgendered person. For them, transgenderism is an egregious assault on God’s great plan that we all become breeders. They empathize even less with gender benders than they do with homosexuals, perhaps because there is at least hope that the demon will be exorcised from between the homosexual’s legs and he or she will see the heterosexual light—not so after the surgeon has clipped off your balls.

And then there’s the world of hurt that can be stirred up when M2Fs with newly created vaginas want to join groups of biologically correct lesbians. Even if a former bio-boy’s penis is at the bottom of a land fill, it can be a challenge for lesbians to stop viewing an MtF as anything other than a wolf in women’s underwear.

A Transwoman with Male Genitals & Her He-Male Client

The illustration that follows is of a transwoman with male genitals having sex with a male client.

The transwoman is very attractive and might pass as a model. She has had breast implants and takes female hormones, but still has her bio-born penis and testicles. According to researchers Joan and Dwight Dixon, all of the male clients of the TG sex workers they interviewed are married and identify as straight. None appeared to be homosexual.

Men who have sex with transwomen are not interested in sex with a man. They aren’t turned on by the fantasy of a homosexual experience. Nor do they show up to have sex with a woman. They are turned on by having sex with a transwoman, in these cases, with an attractive-appearing woman who has a working penis. The sex these men have ranges from wanting to suck the transwoman’s penis and being fucked by her to a more traditional encounter where she gives him oral sex or he has anal intercourse with her.

Some clients tell themselves that because they are having sex with a woman, they are not gay. Other clients tell themselves because they are having sex with a man, they are not being unfaithful to their wives. However, most clients are fully aware that they are having sex with a transwoman because they are highly aroused by a woman who has a penis. They know they are physically and psychologically attracted to members of what might be called a third-sex, or a woman with male genitals. (Also see the discussion of male bisexuality in the Chapter 77:
Orientation in Flux
.)

One of the challenges for a she-male can be in getting her female hormone dose high enough to make her look and feel like a girl, but low enough so that her penis can still become erect.

Intersex is Different from Transgendered

Our society does “male” and “female” poorly enough, but imagine if you had to negotiate it when your genitals don’t look obviously male or female
?

Intersex is a general term for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. This differs from the transgendered who are usually born with biologically-correct genitals. A chapter on intersex is next.

Recommended
books on Transgenderism:

Normal–Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitude,
by Amy Bloom, Vintage Books, New York (2002)

How Sex Changed–A History of Transsexualism in the United States,
by Joanne Meyerowitz, Harvard University Press, (2002)

The Man Who Would Be Queen–The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism,
by J. Michael Bailey, National Academies Press (2003)

Alice in Genderland: A Crossdresser Comes of Age
by Richard Novic, iUniverse, Kindle edition (2009)

Online Resources
on Transgenderism: We pride ourselves on having a great list of links for TGs and their families at
www.Guide2Getting.com
. In the links section see: Gender Benders.

A Very Special Thanks
to Alice Dreger, medical humanist and conjointly, a very fine person, and to Kiira and Cloudy. Thanks also to Dr. Ray Blanchard, and to Joan and Dwight Dixon.

CHAPTER

80

Intersex

W
hen we talk about your sex, we’re talking about whether you are male or female. It’s usually based on what’s between your legs and what is in your chromosomes. The interesting thing about a person’s sex is that we think of it as an either-or thing—pull down their pants, and either a penis or a vulva will be staring back at you. But that’s a distinction people make, not nature.

Nature doesn’t feel constricted by pink or blue, “It’s a Boy!” or “It’s a Girl!”. Nature made the sexes on a continuum, with the vast majority of our bodies falling toward one end or the other. However, there are a number of people born with an intersex condition, where their genitals don’t shout a simple “Puss!” or “Penis!”

Sometimes a person has an intersex condition where they look typically male or female on the outside, but inside there may be some blending of the parts we call male and female. What about the girl who is a high-school cheerleader and who feels 100% female? Every straight guy within 100 yards gets a stirring in his pants when she walks by. But she has what’s called androgen insensitivity syndrome. She has XY chromosomes like most men do but a woman’s brain and a woman’s body. While her vulva looks like that of most other girls’, her vagina isn’t quite as deep as that of a woman who is XX and she doesn’t have ovaries. Chances are, she won’t learn about her AIS until she finally goes to see a gynecologist to find out why all her friends have started their periods but she hasn’t. To say that she’s in for a bit of a surprise is to put it mildly, but this doesn’t change the fact that she’s every bit as much a girl as any other female at her school.

Rolling Out Gender

Gender is what it means to be a man or a woman, and it usually lines up with what’s in your pants. You know, masculinity and femininity.

Fortunately, some of the more confining gender role notions have been falling by the wayside: we no longer assume that a doctor is going to be male, or that a nurse is going to be female. We no longer assume that “the wife” does the cooking at home while a master chef in a restaurant is a man. We do, however, still assume that only male soldiers can be on the front lines during combat, which is based on our gender-role idea that only men’s bodies should be shot at and blown up on the battlefield.

Born With It vs. Taught

Until not too long ago, psychologists assumed that we learned our gender roles as we were growing up, as opposed to biology having a strong influence. And since they believed our male and female gender roles were strictly learned, they were sure you could take a baby boy, remove his testicles, make his genitals look female, and raise him as a perfectly happy little girl who would never know the difference.

And that’s what they did to a lot of children who were born with ambiguous genitals. You knew a kid had ambiguous genitals when there was a painfully long silence in the delivery room while the doctor said, “It’s a.…. uh.… hmmm.… Can I get back to you on that?” Then it would only be a matter of time before the doctors would strongly suggest to the parents that they raise the baby to be a Katie instead of a Kyle. That’s because it was easier to cut the gonads out and remove anything else that looked like a penis, and then shoot the kid full of estrogen at puberty.

While that might have worked just fine for doctors and parents, they didn’t bother to check in with Mother Nature. It turns out that our gender roles aren’t as socially constructed as we thought they were. Sure, the part about girls being more helpless than guys and wanting sex less than men do—that’s a big load of hooey. But whether you are sexually attracted to men or women, and whether you feel yourself to be a man or a woman—that’s mostly determined by the time you are born. It’s shaped by whether there was a big wave of androgens in the womb at a certain time during the pregnancy, and the impact that this wave of androgens had on your fetal brain.