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.
TS-Si is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals in the process of correcting the misalignment of their anatomical sex, and supporting their transition into society.
Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) is a medical condition: the misalignment between an individual’s innate brain sex and physical anatomy.
HBS develops before birth and, for example, results in a person who is neurobiologically female, but exhibits male sexual anatomy. The same is true for neurobiological males with female externals.
HBS is a prior condition for those who have successfully corrected their physical anatomy and brought it into alignment with their brain sex. Following transition, such individuals are no longer HBS.
The designation HBS progressively supersedes the traditional and less precise terminology (e.g., transsexual or transsexuality).
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Washington, DC, USA. "In a time to come, people born HBS shall shake the conscience of our nation. During the Pride season, let us take joy in who we are and embrace the responsibilities imposed on us by that knowledge." [1] We said something like that in our first Pride editorial: the statement holds true. [2]
We are still here in the Washington, D.C. area, on the eve of another Capital Pride, and continue to consider Pride from an American perspective. After all, the search for ways to perfect our liberties, and dissatisfaction when we fail, animates much of our American history.
TS-Si has always been committed to equal rights for all before just laws enacted for all: our position applies without regard to the views or social station of others. We support the inherent rights and dignity of disenfranchised people without regard to race, class, gender, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, transgender presentation, and other distinctions [3].
There is much to be done to fully secure our rights. All of us, HBS or not, live within a society that routinely misplaces just priorities, only to find them again in glorious moments of resolve and triumph.
Whether it be the liberation of black citizens from the evil done by slavery and its consequences, battling Hitler and assorted Lords of War, sealing the compact of equality between the sexes, improving the lot of those less fortunate in an economically unbalanced society, or the many other great works in progress, Americans eventually come round to their core responsibilities.
What makes it work in the end is a culture that rests on a bedrock of fairness and a respect for facts. We go wrong when we allow personal self-indulgence to become the basis for public policy. The necessary correctives start with civility, respect, and plain common sense.
Those of us born HBS have experienced first hand the best and worst of our society. We experience first hand the effects of the miseducated, the bigots, and the know nothing opponents of science and rational discussion. But we also feel joy when fellow citizens, with nothing personal to gain, reach out to us with understanding and respect.
We can die untimely deaths because opponents attempt to erase us from history. Many of us die or live in terror because the uninformed assume we inhabit the fringes of society. They try to leave us dead, crazed, terrorized, left in anonymity or miscategorized as whoever the haters choose to hate at the moment.
Well, we have always been here and we shall not go away. We are among America's daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, and friends. The randomness of our birth condition assures our continuing presence, delivered into society at all levels and circumstances.
We have seen pockets of progress around the world. We have also experienced increased government repression and sly attempts to confuse our birth condition with life style choices and anti-religious attitudes. In a world where superstition and psudoscientific cultural currents take the guise of official government policy, the HBS-born are deemed dangerous to public order. Our casualties continue.
Scattered across society as it is, the true scope of HBS, the number of individual lives and families it impacts, remains unknown to the general public. For every visible HBS person, there are at least ten who are not. For every public face that splashes across the media, perhaps a hundred more move through life unidentified.
Although no one really knows how many of us there are, we can note that so far it appears that people born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) are exceedingly rare. We will not know our true numbers until a safe environment exists, everyone comes out for treatment, and science takes a hand in establishing our true frequency in the human population.
There are HBS people who successfully transitioned and slipped back into the mainstream unnoticed by society at large. Then there are those who have not transitioned and live a life of desperate denial. They do not understand the storms that arise within themselves as innate gender identity comes into conflict with their physical body.
The survivors span all categories of positive human accomplishment and fault, and at all times accumulate knowledge known only to those who have overcome what for many others might be considered an intolerable burden. People born HBS have much to share as we move forward, knowing as we do from experience that partisan positions on all sides often fail to align with our real experiences.
However, we must not confuse increased visibility with acceptance and our attainment of true political and social equality. Genuine public health needs go untended. Those born with HBS who perhaps do not have your advantages can suffer and even die if we do not take action.
The time has come for all people born HBS to confront public ignorance, halt expanding government repression, and bring to an end the cynical manipulations of uncaring elements within society.
However, the political power of the HBS community will remain fragmented and ignored.
Unless we all come out.
Come out from within the Armed Services. Come out from the relative security of the gay community. Come out from corporate America, the universities and athletic teams, the police and fire departments, the everyday jobs of working America and the quiet family homes in suburbia.
Make a difference.
Come out.
Tell our story. Demand acceptance, medical treatment, and just legal protection. Tell your families, friends, caregivers, legal authorities, and the scientific community, as well as all other interested parties.
Let the world know we are here and are not going away. This is not separatism: it is a demand for true inclusion based on mutual respect and recognition of the special needs of people born with HBS.
Come out, come out, wherever you are.
Let us rightfully claim Pride in who we are, and what we have to share. There is much to come as we listen to ourselves, find our voices, and tell our stories.
[1] Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) has emerged as the defining preferred term, instead of the less precise transsexual. Transgender political activists co-opted the latter term to connote a gender spectrum.
HBS is tighty focused on the misalignment between brain sex and anatomical genitalia. While the precise terminology may change with official adoption by medical authorites, the underlying concept will remain the same.
[2] This editorial is focused on contemporary issues, with updates and restatements of earlier TS-Si statements.
[3] Of special note are the uninformed assertions by some critics that TS-Si is somehow biased against those individuals who identfy as transgendered and opt for political action within a coalition that involves gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) activists. HBS is unrelated to questions of sexual orientation and/or transgender presentation.
TS-Si supports research, improved medical practices, and reform of legal and law enforcement policies that pose obstacles to the successful transition of the HBS-born. The advancement of our goals does not imply the imposition of principles and tactics at the expense of others.
However, people born HBS can no longer be an afterthought when confronting public ignorance and government misdeeds. TS-Si enters into alliances with others whenever there are areas of common interest, but always as equal partners.
TS-Si Editorials convey the official positions of our organization. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TS-Si authors, partners, or affiliates. Signed articles by our contributing authors or referenced news sources do not constitute official policy.
We welcome your comments. You can use the public form below or send private correspondence via the TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.
Men wake up aroused in the morning. We can't help it. We just wake up and we want you. And the women are thinking, "How can he want me the way I look in the morning?" It's because we can't see you. We have no blood anywhere near our optic nerve.
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