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Patterns of Gender: Tales from the Support Centre (2 of 3) Print E-mail
Opinion - Guest Columns
Evangelina Carters   
Tuesday, 26 August 2008 17:30
Patterns Of Gender
Somewhere, Planet Earth. At this stage in my work at the call centre it was my policy to refer the individual on to one of the city’s two gender clinics.
 
The group had a good relationship with both and we made it a policy to support their work and not get involved with psychiatric issues for which we had not been trained or qualified.
 
Although, we did assist with helping the client or member to identify what their issues were and become at peace with themselves and with those around them.

Issues Behind The Patterns

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The pattern became clearer as time went by: virtually all of the men had additional issues to the presented conflict of what sex they felt themselves to be. There were a few members of the group who called themselves transsexual and were undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), etc. under medical supervision whom I never counseled as such but with whom I talked at length. These people had additional issues to the presented sex conflict. The issues fit into a narrow range and are quite difficult as a counselor to have to deal with.
 
A large percentage of them were solitary single men who found relationships with anyone difficult and hard to come by.
  • Relationships with women were almost nonexistent except for their mothers or siblings.
     
  • Dyslexia seemed quite common and there appeared to be a statistical link, though from a psychological standpoint I am not convinced that sex conflict and dyslexia have any relationship.
     
  • The members of this group were difficult to handle and many continued to ask for counseling even after I had referred them through to the gender clinic.
In all the time I was counseling I never once refused to introduce anyone to more specialist practitioner if that was indeed what they wished. I saw it as my function to help these people achieve what they wanted and not stand in their way. A great many were at times suicidal and my experience at Samaritans was invaluable when attempting to help them. [N2-1] 
 
The easiest group to deal with was the loud, brash, and downright fetish-based transvestites simply confused about the implications of their needs. In most cases all they needed was to embrace their desires and to find space in their lives away from partners if indeed their partners were unable to share or participate in their need. Transvestism is only a problem if the affected person cannot find release or if it is allowed to take over their life. When that happens, that is when I watched a large percentage progress right through the gender clinics programme of treatment.
 
During the ongoing sessions I had with this group the life narrative gradually changed and bore no relationship to the original one I had initially noted down. When I’d had enough of the discrepancies I calmly brought these differences up in our conversations and the requests for counseling sessions usually ceased! Much to my relief, I could not help anyone if they were not being honest with me; usually the individual concerned would get as far as starting the Real Life Test (RLT) and then go back to simple cross dressing. [N2-2] Tragically their home life, marriage, family life and social life was usually destroyed forever.
 
There was however precious little I or anyone else could do to prevent the inevitable from happening. I always tried to persuade them to at least be honest with themselves and take their decisions for the right reasons and not through some fantasy or misguided desire.

A New Pattern

Every now and then someone quite different walked into the office. A few were already full time as female but many presented to me initially in male clothes. A small number would at first ask to come to terms with what they assumed was their transvestism. Without exception this group had somehow married and fathered children. Their distress however was intense and at first they were difficult to handle.
 
I ended up crying with a great many of these people.Their narratives were markedly similar and never differed from my initial consultation to the time they left me. A small number are still in contact with me and are counted as friends.
 
I never once argued with any of my clients as to what they saw as their issue or what they presented as their problems.
 
I asked questions of them and suggested they examine a particular aspect of their feelings and their reactions to different situations. Whether it was an event that troubled them or made them happy, I did not see it as my function to tell them what their problem was but rather to assist them in finding out for themselves by getting them to ask themselves the right questions.
 
The smallest group of all — and I only ever saw a handful in the two years I was involved — always came presenting as fully female. One girl aged 16 came with her Mother. Ages varied from around 16 (who came with Mum) to one who was in her early 20’s. For convenience I’ll refer to her as Jackie. Their family had treated her as a gay male and it was true Jackie had been in an essentially gay relationship for several years. She was difficult to help as she had already gotten on to a psychiatrist who was basically trying to guide her back into a gay relationship and holding her on a very low dose HRT course. It took me a year to get her along to a more open minded doctor. She is one of my more spectacular success stories. Now married and a successful photographer. I still hear from her occasionally and I will talk about Jackie more, later in this article.
 
These two groups have something in common that I have not noticed anyone else talk about. I never took on a female to male case preferring others in the group to take that issue on. I did however talk at length with many of these guys and over several years. What I noticed was that the male to female of my last two groups started out in appearance pretty much where the guys ended up. (I will talk about this in detail later).
 
It was at that point of realisation that I began to look back over the notes I had taken on the many I had counseled over the previous year and a half or so. A further realisation hit me and answered some questions I had about myself. I found I could identify and relate to only a very few of any of those I had counselled over the years. What I had been doing was putting all of their issues into a compartment and dealing with the issues at arm’s length. The last two groups were much more difficult for me to keep my distance.
 
My final two groups are in many ways really one group and I later reduced my groupings to three and not four in the light of experience. They were similar in that their recollections of feeling totally wrong went back deep into childhood and usually around the age of three. The other two groups did not feel any problems until at least 11 or 12 years old, a few later still. There appeared to be a fundamental difference in that there was a powerful motivation to correct physical sex and then move on. And it is upon this motivation that I began to focus my attention.

Overcome By Irony

It’s ironic that over 18 months into my involvement with the issue I found Dr. Harry Benjamin’s book. [N2-3] My copy became tattered and thumbed as I wrote all over it and read and re-read what he had to say. [C2-1] I checked my statistics against his and my own system of grouping my clients and I was so close to Harry Benjamin’s that it served to confirm that I was indeed on the right track.
 
Finding out about myself was the main reason I had taken on the task of counseling in the first place and here I was now finally getting to the base of not just my own conflict but perhaps at something more far reaching, the transsexual phenomenon itself.
 
There were two, possibly three, groups of “sex confused” The term Transgender had recently been introduced to us by a visit from Virginia (Charles) Prince [N2-4] and I’d had many quite heated debates with colleagues over the term and their use of the word to cover anything and everything that was sex or gender variant and the concept that all were varying degrees of the same thing. It did not match with my own observations of my clients.
 
Added to which I saw and still see sex and gender as quite different one from the other.
 
— Continued in Part 3 of this series, Patterns of Gender: Ending the Confusion.
Citation[C2-1] The Transsexual Phenomenon. Harry Benjamin. The Julian Press and Ace Pub. Co. 1966. ASIN: B0007HXA76. The book is out of print, but the text is available online.
Notes[N2-1] Samaritans is a confidential emotional support service for anyone in the UK and Ireland. The 24-hour service is affiliated with Befrienders Worldwide.

[N2-2] The Real Life Test (RLT), also known as the Real life experience (RLE), sometimes called Real Life Test (RLT), is a period when people live within a particular gender presentation to demonstrate their readiness for medical treatment, most often including surgical correction. The original intent was to provide a learning experience, with time to grasp the consequences of transition, adapt to the social environment, make any available legal changes (such as name change).

Historically, this process was a prerequisite to receive permission for hormonal treatment and surgery. However, the Standards of Care (SOC) promulagatd by the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (now WPATH) have modified the requirements for hormonal therapy. Three months of RLE or specified time in psychotherapy (usually three months) can suffice. The specic rquirement for RLT, hormone treatments, and sugery can vary widely from country to country.

The original intent of the RLT requirement was to provide a learning xperience, with time to grasp the consequences of transition, adapt to their social environment, make any available legal changes (such as name change).

Some critics argue that the entire process is an unnecessary gatekeeper function and demeaning to adults capable of making decisions on their own without interference. From this point of view, transition and all attendant medical procedures are equivalent to other elective behaviors and procedures.

[N2-3] Harry S. Benjamin, M.D. Harry Benjamin (12 Jan 1885 — 24 Aug 1986), a German-born sexologist is best known for pioneering work on the identification and treatment of transsexualism.While in San Francisco (1948), fellow sexologist Alfred Kinsey asked Benjamin to see a child who, despite being born male "wanted to become a girl". The child's mother had sought assistance to enable the child. Neither Kinsey nor Benjamin had seen anything like it before. Benjamin came to regard the condition as different condition from transvestism.

In the United States and many other countries of the time, publicly wearing items of clothing associated with the opposite sex was often illegal, as was male castration, and any behavior classified as homosexuality was often subject to social persecution and/or legal sanctions.

[N2-4] Virginia Prince (1912 -) was a pharmacologist, grooming products retailer, and poularizer of transvestitite ideology. He is sometimes known as Charles Prince, but was born Arnold Lowman. Prince and a collaborator coined the term transgenderist to indicate a heterosexual transvestite who lives full time as a woman. While the current term transgender is widely attributed to Prince, the two terms differ in structure and by meaning. Prince was quite clear in his desire to separate transvestism from  transsexualism, considering transsexuals as mentally ill.

Starting in 1962, Virginia Prince met twice a month with Robert Stoller of the UCLA Medical School for 29 years. Stoller was doing research into transvestism and taped the sessions, many of which were transcribed. Stoller’s wife forwarded the tapes and transcription's to Prince after her husband's death in a 1991 traffic accident. Prince had downplayed the erotic aspects of cross-dressing in his magazine Transvestia. However, Prince affirms those aspects in the Stoller conversations, denying that men are attractive, while enjoying being attractive to, and flirting with, men.
 

Ms. Evangelina Carters.

Ms. Evangelina Carters was corrected in 1984. She has been happily married for over 12 years. All of Ms. Carters' signed articles contain her own personal opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. You can see a complete listing of her work at TS-Si.org by following this link.

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Patterns of Gender: Tales from the Support Centre (2 of 3)
Tuesday, 26 August 2008

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 February 2009 07:49