Dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, & legal protection of individuals in the process of correcting the misalignment of their anatomical sex, & supporting their transition into society.
Springfield, VA, USA. The internet is filled with lightweight crazies full of anger and arrogance, self-appointed arbitrators of cultural mores and political correctness. If you read the comments to the column...
Springfield, VA, USA. What is a transsexual? Is there such a thing as a non-op transsexual? What is the difference between a non-op transsexual and a full time crossdresser? Are transgender and transsexua...
Springfield, VA, USA. A strong current of post-modern fundamentalism runs deep in the Transgender movement, leading to an outright rejection of science and lubricating a preference for the safe, non-intel...
Springfield, VA, USA. Well we have heard from the Transgenders again. I'm not talking about the rank and file transgenders, but the capital "T" sort who act like they can make a serious li...
Springfield, VA, USA. There was a story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about a pre-op transsexual (an HBS woman) who wanted to use the woman’s locker room, just like any other woman. (What woman wants to u...
Springfield, VA, USA. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV), like The Bible, is a disparate compilation of many different types of books and methods of varying validity and applica...
Springfield, VA, USA. Two graduate students have scored an academic trifecta. They learned how to launch their careers via publish-or-perish principles, google the obvious, and cozy up to transgenders. Th...
Springfield, VA, USA. In an earlier column, I discussed the uproar among the District of Columbia’s transgender community over proposed revisions of the rules and regulations governing gender identity and expr...
Springfield, VA, USA. It has already been a week since 11 July 2008 — a date that shall live in infamy — the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights and the Commission on Human Rights suddenly and del...
Springfield, VA, USA. Our initial problem in life is figuring out who we are and developing an identity that is unique (at least we like to think so).
Identity is our who connecting with the what — the world we observe outside us — to establish a personal space apart from everyone else.
Society — that world around us through which we move, birth to death: the collective We — tacitly assumes that deep down each one of us has but one true identity and that the proper way to resolve questions of rights and responsibilities is to render that identity as unique.
The collective We has an inherent need to get to the bottom of who each person really is. The modern solution most often chosen is an official identity card in one form or another: one legal person, one legal identity. Clean, efficient, and hopefully difficult to counterfeit, the government issued identity card (drivers license, Common Access Card, etc.) has become a more or less reliable way to establish who is attempting to connect with what.
One of the unintended consequences of the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was the decision by the United States Federal Government to develop a federated digital identity system to serve as the root identifier for everyone living within the US. Prior to 9/11 each state had established its own rules and documentation requirements for issuance of state driver’s licenses which, by the late twentieth century, had become the commonplace public medium for personal identification.
The universal migration to a single, widely accepted form of identification occurred by chance, perhaps, but there it is (albeit in over fifty formats in the United States). We are who our Driver’s License says we are.
Official public identities are expected to be invariant and well known with driver’s licenses serving as a beacon emitting identity to the world at large. Universally within the United States, driver’s licenses have become the simple, consistent enabler allowing access to a variety of contexts and multiple operations and technologies.
State driver’s licenses are a federated solution to public identity that is only as strong as it weakest link. Not all drivers' licenses are equal: some are easily counterfeited; some require the applicant to be little more than breathing to receive a state supported public identification. Once received, however, driver’s licenses become an official passport through the collective We, the world around us. Society as a whole has a vested interest that driver’s licenses (or some other form of identity) accurately identify the person who presents it.
So, post 9-11, the newly formed US Department of Homeland Security, realizing that a single Federal Identification Card, was political suicide, determined that in the best of all possible worlds, all the various united States should meet certain minimum documentation standards for the issuance of a driver’s license or state identity card. Among these are the use of birth certificates, passports, and immigration papers to establish a single, consistent and verifiable legal identity. What had randomly developed by chance was now to be a reliable, federally mandated reality. Who we are would be who the various state governments had verified and then validated with a driver’s license or state identification card.
The digital identity systems were to be designed so that both the who (the individual) and the what (the society at large) could establish a trusted relationship, both sides of any interaction sure of exactly who they were dealing with. The central substance or core identity of an individual (as opposed to a person’s attributes) could always be known and verified in any given identity relationship. Both the who and the what would be protected against deception, another 9-11 would be prevented, the terrorists would lose, and the global war against terror (GWOT in defense-speak) would be won.
Enter the transgendered community with their multiplicities of relationships. In many cases they have not one, but many identities depending on who they are at any given time. The transgender who is intrinsically bound up in the transgender where. Society’s need to establish a single basic uber identity that transcends all social contexts and transgender wheres would mean that Transgender “Sue” would be publicly outed as legally official, not-openly transgendered “Oscar.”
At this point I sympathize with the person who has been outed when they wish to stay in the closet. No one deserves to go through life worrying about being needlessly outed.
However, society, the what in which we live, has a legitimate concern that no one entering a legal relationship is doing so under an assumed identity. Mutually beneficial interpersonal and business relationships depend on all parties being who they say they are. We all have a multiple of roles in society (parent, child, boss, employee, spouse, baseball player, scientist, account holder, patient, etc.) but none of them change our core identity. We are who are, independent of where we are: one authentication in multiple roles and authorizations.
In the matter of transgender identity, we seem to have a quandary. Gender theory implies that crossdressers have multiple identities: they are who they say they are when and where they are.
But to what purpose would a second (or, one presumes, a third, and fourth, and …) legal identification be required? The core identity would remain the same.
If there is no intention to deceive, there is no reason that a second legal identity would be required. If there is no intention to deceive, there is no legal reason to hide one’s core identity.
The singular crossdresser identity paradigm is that they are who they say they are at the moment they are asked for identification. Biometric authentication is meaningless, legal documentation pointless. As previously stated, crossdressers are who they say they are when and where they are.
But why hide the fact that crossdressers have multiple identities? Gender theorists are firm that crossdressing falls with the range of normal human behavior and supports the crossdresser’s right to crossdress and go out into society. Who could argue? I concur.
Crossdressers, supported by the gender theorists, publicly state that there is nothing, in itself, wrong with crossdressing. I concur and repeat in bold letters, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with crossdressing.
So, if crossdressing is normal and nothing is wrong with crossdressing, why the need to have a second legal identity? Why can’t crossdressing Oscar just admit he is Oscar when he is dressed as Sue?
Hi, I know I look like Sue, but I am really Oscar, officer. Sir.
When I was in transition and before I could legally change my identification, there were numerous occasions when I had to officially identify myself. I just told them upfront what was going on. Never tried to hide anything. Never encountered a problem in day to day commerce or otherwise.
If a transitioning HBS man or woman doesn’t need dual identification, why would a crossdresser? If there is nothing wrong or illegal about crossdressing, why can’t a crossdresser just admit up front
I’m a crossdresser
and get on with life. Why should they be the exception to the identity rules that all of us live by? What is so special about crossdressers that they cannot weather life’s slings and arrows like everyone else?
Why this insistence on keeping everything in the closet? What is keeping the closet door so firmly shut?
They’re normal, just like the rest of us. They obey the local, state, and federal laws, just like the rest of us.
If all the crossderessers would just come out, the identity problem would go away. Few crossdressing men would be fired: there would be too many vacancies to fill and the economy would never recover.
You keep insisting we are all the same. Come out y'all. So come out.
Ms. Lisa Jain Thompson is the Co-Founder & President of TS-Si, Inc. She also serves as a Contributing Editor and columnist for the TS-Si website. Ms. Thompson's signed articles contain her own opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates.
Lisa welcomes your comments. You can use the public form below or send private correspondence via her TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.
The Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP identified all of the genes in the human genome and mapped their individual sequencing. Basic work began in 1990 and reached completion in 2005, sparking continuous refinements and new projects. Though the HGP is finished, data analyses will continue for many years.
A genome is all the DNA in an organism, including its genes and other materials. Genes carry information for making all the proteins required by all organisms. These proteins determine, among other things, how the organism looks, how well its body metabolizes food or fights infection, and to an extent even how it behaves.
DNA is made up of four similar chemicals (called bases and abbreviated A, T, C, and G) that are repeated millions or billions of times throughout a genome. The human genome, for example, has 3 billion pairs of bases. The particular order of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs is extremely important.
The order underlies all of life's diversity, even dictating whether an organism is human or another species such as yeast, rice, or fruit fly, all of which have their own genomes and are themselves the focus of genome projects. Because all organisms are related through similarities in DNA sequences, insights gained from nonhuman genomes often lead to new knowledge about human biology.
Video:An introduction to the ongoing Human Genome Project, courtesy of the US National Institutes of Health NIH) (18 May 2007). Time: 00:03:33. Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Ms. Lisa Jain Thompson
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