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Chad A. Mirkin, Northwestern University, George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Photo by Bill Arsenault. 

DNA Blueprints Guide The Construction Of Specific Human Structures

Chad Mirkin discusses using DNA to build a three-dimensional structure out of gold, likening the process to building a house. Starting with basic materials such as bricks, wood, siding, stone and shingles, a construction team can build many different types of houses out of the same building blocks.
 
The article includes an audio recording of the full interview. Photo courtesy of the UCSD School of Medicine.
Does WPATH Really Have a Mandate to Speak on Behalf of HBS Transsexuals? Print E-mail
Opinion - Private Matters
Joanne Proctor   
Friday, 28 November 2008 21:00
Bursting the WPATH BubbleAotearoa (New Zealand). In 2001 the organization that would later morph into the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) was still presenting to the world as the International Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association. (HBGDA) In the circumstances its use of Benjamin's name was more than a little ironic. However it was under this name that the organization published its sixth standards of care (SOC). (see below)
 
The 2001 document amounts a public rebuttal of Benjamin's original work. Since the rebuttal lays out the rational for the organization's denial of true or primary transsexualism as a valid diagnosis, an examination of the reasons given, and which apparently lead to that event is worthwhile. If nothing else, the reason why HBS activists treat WPATH with contempt will become apparent.
The Claim: Primary or True Transsexuals Falsify Their Experiences.
Harry Benjamin, MD.
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).
 
TS-Si.
Misalignment At Birth
refers to the birth condition that misaligns innate neurobiological makeup and external genitalia.
 
An increasing number of patients and commentators use terms like Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) and true transsexual, viewing them as more precise than the commonly used transsexual.
 
The latter term has become more loosely applied to include anyone who presents with limited hormone usage and/or alternative social presentation.
 
The Social Purity Canard
 
Some advocates use rhetoric asserting that people born with the misalignment would never get married or have children. This is claimed as the true form of HBS.
 
This quite vocal position is similar to the 110% lesbian extremists who insist that real lesbians would never allow a penis inside them (thus eliminating well over 50 percent — perhaps as much as 90 percent — of the world's lesbians.
 
The social purity test does not take in account the real world outside of the major cities and universities, the pressure of parents and family and a child’s desire to please their parents, a sense of duty, the personal desire to have children, or the fear of being alone. 
 
Nor does it consider that even twenty years ago, transsexuality (as originally understood) was still talked about in quiet circles and only trotted out for amusement on Donohue and the other talk shows.
 
Before the internet, there were slim odds of meeting another transsexual (outside of a handful of centers) or finding a knowledgeable and supportive therapist or doctor. One can only marvel at the persistence and serendipity of the earliest transitioners.
 
Attempts to impose current political and social conditions on the past is a barren exercise in self-satisfied arrogance.  The key identifying descriptive is the desire to bring the genitalia into conformance with the neurobiological wiring in our brains. The neurobiological misalignment discussed here is a birth condition that has been present since the womb.
 
The True Women Canard
 
Some Transgender activists charge that HBS/TS) women claim to be the true women, exhibiting superiority over other people who have not transitioned or do not pursue surgical correction.
 
Despite repeated requests for documented evidence to support this claim, none has been forthcoming. This leaves the accused to assume that the charge is an inference from the critics' own emotional states.
 
The False Conflict Between HBS And Classic Transsexuals
 
The people we often refer to are those whom Harry Benjamin himself described as transsexual. There is an important difference between Dr. Benjamin's very specific use of the term transsexual and the relaxed version used to include transgendered people.
 
This has led some advocates to signal the difference by using the phrase classic, or true, transsexual.
 
For us, the term HBS is built on Benjamin's classic transsexual, but avoids sending an invitation to place HBS in the context of a spurious gender spectrum. The semantics that underly HBS and classic transsexual are the same. The vocabulary terms differ, a reflection of differing tactics. It is not a principled disagreement.
 
— LJT & SSG
 
 
TS-Si.org articles may use the traditional terminology. If so, we annotate the context and usage as warranted to resolve any ambiguities that could affect interpretation.
A useful starting point is Denise Bates' unpublished PhD thesis, Someone Else's Gender (below). Note Bates' use of the word 'appear'. Bates is not accusing this group of lying, so much as acknowledging the possibility that it might seem that way, when she writes:
Transsexuals often appear to "lie" to psycho-medical professionals to gain approval for surgery.” Stoller [N1]1 identifies "lying" as one of the three character manifestations of transsexuals (along with unreliability and inability to form lasting relationships). He claims that this goes further than falsification of personal history to obtain surgery, but to inconsequential fabrications unrelated to presenting as an acceptable transsexual . The "lying" does not usually concern their gender disorder or establishing their right to change sex. Instead, it will be on seemingly minor issues. [N2]
 
And Stone (1991) wrote: When the first clinics were constituted, Benjamin's book was the researchers' standard reference. And when the first transsexuals were evaluated for their suitability for surgery, their behavior matched up gratifyingly with Benjamin's criteria. The researchers produced papers which reported on this, and which were used as bases for funding. It took a surprisingly long time--several years--for the researchers to realize that the they were only too happy to provide the behavior that led to acceptance for surgery. [N3]
The locus of the alleged deception lay in chapter two of The Transsexual Phenomenon, where Benjamin delineated Transsexualism from transvestism.
True transsexuals feel that they belong to the other sex, they want to be and function as members of the opposite sex, not only to appear as such. For them, their sex organs, the primary (testes) as well as the secondary (penis and others) are disgusting deformities that mst be changed by the surgeon’s knife. This attitude appears to be the chief differential diagnostic point between the two syndromes (sets of symptoms) - that is, those of transvestism and transsexualism. [N4].
Benjamin went on to clarify the sex/gender distinction and state the obvious: that whilst transvestism was solely a gender issue, transsexualism was both. [N5]
 
Anybody with experience of Harry Benjamin's Syndrome (primary transsexualism) will easily recognize some significant part of themselves in Benjamin's description. Obviously there were other, more legitimate explanations for the so-called lying. Such as:
  1. There are only so many words in the English language capable of describing the experience. Even without having read Benjamin's book, no-one should have been surprised that they were used repeatedly by candidates during the assessment programs.
     
  2. Transsexuals were reading the book, recognizing their own own experience in Benjamin's articulation, and using the articulation themselves. (In much the same way that individuals in psychotherapy begin to use the language of the therapist.)
     
  3. Transsexuals were feeding back Benjamin's language believing that was the way the gatekeepers expected the situation to be articulated. In this scenario an individual trying to access surgery could easily conclude they stood more chance of communicating their conflict by using language familiar to the gatekeeper.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that it is perfectly possible to use somebody else's description without lying, the allegations stuck.
 
Not unlike the promulgation of an urban legend they percolated for the next ten years. Then, in 2001, The HBIGDA 6th Standards of Care contained this explanation.
During the 1960s and 1970s, clinicians used the term true transsexual. The true transsexual was thought to be a person with a characteristic path of atypical gender identity development that predicted an improved life from a treatment sequence that culminated in genital surgery. True transsexuals were thought to have:

(1) cross-gender identifications that were consistently expressed behaviorally in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood;
(2) minimal or no sexual arousal to cross-dressing; and
(3) no heterosexual interest, relative to their anatomic sex.

True transsexuals could be of either sex. True transsexual males were distinguished from males who arrived at the desire to change sex and gender via a reasonably masculine behavioral developmental pathway. Belief in the true transsexual concept for males dissipated when it was realized that such patients were rarely encountered, and that some of the original true transsexuals had falsified their histories to make their stories match the earliest theories about the disorder. [N5]
Anyone who recognizes themselves in the majority of these criteria will take little comfort from being rare, and less from the accusation that they are “probably falsifying their history.” Shortly after this revised SOC the organization changed its name to WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health.) By then it had abandoned any mandate or authority to offer guidance on the treatment of HBS afflicted individuals. It has done nothing to recover the mandate since, and those HBS activists who treat the organization and its Standards Of Care (SOC's) with disdain have perfectly valid grounds for doing so.
 
But WPATH's dismissal of Benjamin's work went back further than 2002, and has greater ramifications than the attitudes of a few activists.
 
Stoller's accusations of lying had surfaced in 1975. Stone's arguments were publicized in 1991. The beliefs had been around longer than WPATH itself. On their own they could not have been responsible for WPATH's Decision.
 
The International Journal of Transgenderism (IJT) put out a first issue in 1997. Its introductory statement contained the following explanation.
We chose the term Transgenderism as an umbrella term for various aspects and expressions of gender identity. Older terms like transsexualism, gender dysphoria, transvestism, and cross dressing have been found to be limiting in their understanding of gender expressions and identity. Also, many of these terms have assumed a pathological nature of these phenomena. Transgender is a new term which transcends the restricting and extant categories of gender identity, is more neutral regarding etiology, and encompasses the vast complexity of gender manifestations and identities. [N7]
The journal's association with HBGDA (now WPATH) becomes clearer one paragraph down.
The editorial board includes a broad representation of international scholars from a wide variety of disciplines. Many of the editorial board members have been longstanding members in the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. This Association has been committed to the advancement of knowledge in the area of gender dysphoria, the improvement in medical and psychological treatment of transgendered individuals, social and legal acceptance of hormonal and surgical sex reassignment, and professional and public education on the phenomenon of Transgenderism. [N8]
In fact those ties were close. Friedman Pfaifflin, was a founding editor of the IJT. The journal's first edition was arranged to coincide with the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association's 15th symposium in September of 1997, [N9] and Pfaifflin was a member of the HBIGDA board when the 1998 SOC (5th edition) was written.
 
In the light of the arguments coming from the IJT, and given the closeness of their ties, the HBGDA's rejection of Harry Benjamin, his work, and later his name becomes less than surprising. And the rational that most primary (HBS) transsexuals are lying? Or that the ones who are not are too few in number (to constitute a distinct group in their own right?). Bearing in mind the complete abdication of scientific integrity that bedevils Transgenderism, it seems likely that these were merely political face-savers for an already predetermined decision.
 
If that is the case their use was bizarre. Benjamin's claim that primary transsexualism (now self identified as Harry Benjamin's Syndrome to honor his name), was both a sex and a gender issue is becoming increasingly obvious as science unlocks new genetic secrets and reveals the workings of the brain. This process should leave both WPATH and the IJT looking increasingly redundant because they insist on trying to deal with complex sex biologies as gender issues, in direct contradiction to Benjamin's original findings.
 
But if they fail to make the leap from faith to science one thing seems clear. Primary (HBS) transsexuals will still need to substantially amend their personal histories, giving a more transvestite like narrative and withholding information about their brain/body conflict, if they want to access surgery without being considered liars. To date that has not been difficult: all they need to do is read the wealth of Transgender literature that organizations like the IJT make available.
 
That leads to an unfortunate result: the more often primaries repeat the transvestite story the more it is interpreted as a basic 'truth' by the dogma. Thus transgenderism becomes its own self fulfilling prophesy. Ever manufacturing a perceived reality that may have never existed were it not for the denial of biological variations, and society's obsession with gender role performance.
 
To make the situation doubly ironic, primary (Harry Benjamin Syndrome) transsexuals are required to engage in the very practice they were accused of when speaking honestly.
 
WPATH in particular, and transgenderism in general would cause less harm if they stuck to their knitting. They have clearly identified their interest in the gender side of the sex / gender distinction. The practice of taking complex biological variations in human sex formation and trying to treat them as behavioural matters smacks of fundamentalism and denial. 
 
Finally, how can any organization claim to be a legitimate voice on behalf of a minority, having first accused the minority of lying about its lived experience?
 
Notes[N1] Sex and Gender, Volume II: The Transsexual Experiment: 2. Robert J. Stoller. London: The Hogarth Press Ltd (10 Jul 1975). ISBN-10: 0701204001; ISBN-13: 978-0701204006.

[N2] Someone Else's Gender. D. Bates. (Ph.D. diss., Waikato University, 2002), 52. Waikato University Press: Unpublished.

[N3] The Empire Strikes Back: A Post transsexual Manifesto. Sandy Stone. In: Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Epstein, J. & Straub, K. (eds.), New York: Routledge. 1991.

[N4] The transsexual phenomenon. Harry S. Benjamin. New York: Julian Press. 1966.

[N5] Ibid.

[N6] Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association's Standards Of Care For Gender Identity Disorders, Sixth Version. February, 2001.

[N7] Pfaefflin F., Colemann E.. Introduction. IJT I(1). 1997.

[N8] ibid.

[N9] ibid.
Joanne ProctorMs. Proctor is associated with the HBS-NZ website in Aotearoa (New Zealand)  and maintains her own blog with a focus on Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS).  Joanne's signed articles contain her own opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. She welcomes your comments: 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.
TS-Si News ServiceThe TS-Si News Service is a collaborative effort by TS-Si.org editors, contributors, and corresponding institutions. The sources can include the cited individuals and organizations, as well as TS-Si.org staff contributions. Articles and news reports do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. We welcome your comments. Use the form below to leave a public comment 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.
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Yes, I am a researcher and former therapist who finally
30 November 2008     
Thank you, , It is readers like you that inspire us to d
30 November 2008     
A very good read;, Thank you Joanne, your article was a
01 December 2008     
Yes, thank you Joanne., An excellent summation of the wh
01 December 2008     
Discord, I understand the need to re-establish independe
04 December 2008     
Independant V Separatist, I am known around the various
17 December 2008     
Evangelina, you said I am known around the various forum
17 December 2008     

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Last Updated on Friday, 28 November 2008 23:50