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Oh, Crap.

zuzu

While looking around to see if any of the local news outlets had anything on the giant clouds of black smoke* rising up from near Grand Central (I could see where they’re coming from from my boss’s office — but my boss is in his office, and he’s so tetchy about people going in there), I ran across a headline about the New York City Board of Health’s approval of a ban on trans fats in NYC restaurants.**

Knowing that the Board of Health was also set to make a decision today about off-leash rules in city parks, I decided to see if the article mentioned that. And it did — the board unanimously approved off-leash hours. But then I noticed they rejected another proposed rule change:

Another measure that would have allowed transgender people to amend their birth certificates without having undergone surgery was voted down.

The board unanimously backed up the current policy that requires proof of sex reassignment surgery.

Transgender advocates say tens of thousands of New Yorkers face severe and pervasive discrimination as a result of their inability to obtain identification matching the gender in which they live.

They say simple things like entering buildings can be difficult because their ID’s don’t match their looks, and that many cannot afford the expensive surgical procedures needed. Advocates are vowing to continue their fight to change the policy.

It’s not clear from any of the articles I’ve seen what exactly was going on, but if the process was anything like what was going on with the dog rules, the board likely held a public hearing and had a period of public comment. I would imagine that the image of the transsexual in the public mind is of someone who’s been surgically altered. In any event, no bold step forward at this time.

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* A car fire, apparently. The sirens have stopped, at least.

** I’ll try to give this one a good going-over when more details come out.

23 thoughts on Oh, Crap.

  2. Piny, Zuzu, is there any segment of the transgendered rights movement whose primary mission is to make sex change operations more easily available – say, by getting HMOs to cover them?

  3. Alon- there’s also the fact that many transgendered individuals do not desire genital reassignment surgery. However, their gender identity and the manner in which they live their life does not match their birth certificates.

  4. Piny, Zuzu, is there any segment of the transgendered rights movement whose primary mission is to make sex change operations more easily available – say, by getting HMOs to cover them?

    Of course; lobbying for an end to healthcare discrimination is big. It’s one of the single greatest barriers to feasible transition (although it’s important to point out that getting HMOs to cover transition would still leave a great many of us completely in the cold). There’s been some success there, too–some health plans cover some transition-related treatments. For example, my HMO covers hormones. It varies, generally on the side of exclusion.

    That having been said, one of the things that the NYBoH would do better to respect more is individual preferences wrt surgery. It’s not always desired even when it is financially feasible, and I don’t think anyone should be pressured into surgical intervention they don’t need or want.

  5. I think that the prejudice against respecting gender change that has not been reflected by surgery is simple to understand. No less wrong for it, but simple enough. It’s rooted in the fact that until surgery, trans people could always change their minds.

    And if you genuinely don’t get that trans people did not just wake up one morning saying, I’d rather be a girl, but instead believe that a person would assert a new gender like a new hair color–for shock value, essentially–from that perspective, it’s hard to understand why surgery is not always or even usually a component of The Switch. And tempting to conclude that if you haven’t been made anew by a doctor, you’re basically playing dress-up.

    (Forgive me if everyone else already figured that out.)

  6. I dunno. You can change your mind about undergoing GRS. You can’t change your mind about transition, necessarily. A few years on hormones causes some pretty irrevocable physical changes that can make it very difficult to pass as your pre-transition gender.

  7. Yeah, my point was that if you’re fairly not-so-knowledgable (‘ignorant’ is so hurtful to the experiencially and educationally impaired community that I’m avoiding it) you’d assume that the kinfe is the last stop and the onyl one that is not handily reversible.

    Reminds me of the question that has been nagging at me: you, OTOH, are quite knowledgable, so you have the skinny on hormonal changes. Should you care to share that knowledge…

    The article in yesterday’s NYT about the kids whose parents are postponing puberty, among other things, to support their trans identities piqued my interest. Aren’t the hormones that cause puberty related to a whole lot more changes in body size and morphology? So is postponing puberty the value-neutral approach for a parent, as the reporter implied, or is it making a set of choices about what gender the child’s future adult self will present as?

  8. Yeah, my point was that if you’re fairly not-so-knowledgable (’ignorant’ is so hurtful to the experiencially and educationally impaired community that I’m avoiding it) you’d assume that the kinfe is the last stop and the onyl one that is not handily reversible.

    That’s true.

    Reminds me of the question that has been nagging at me: you, OTOH, are quite knowledgable, so you have the skinny on hormonal changes. Should you care to share that knowledge…

    Not much more than what I need to navigate my own transition, which took place well after puberty, so:

    The article in yesterday’s NYT about the kids whose parents are postponing puberty, among other things, to support their trans identities piqued my interest. Aren’t the hormones that cause puberty related to a whole lot more changes in body size and morphology? So is postponing puberty the value-neutral approach for a parent, as the reporter implied, or is it making a set of choices about what gender the child’s future adult self will present as?

    I’m not sure, and will have to look around.

  9. But I think that it’s meant not to be quite value-neutral, but the closest possible thing–I mean, obviously, postponing adolescence is a significant decision to make, and not only from a physiological standpoint. However, the alternatives are allowing your child to start transitioning at a young age, or allowing them to grow into the body they don’t want in a way that would complicate transition later.

  10. It’s a tough thing to put into proper context, given that the mainstream tends to see transsexuality as horribly dangerous and negative but also treat surgical intervention as wholly uncomplicated for the transsexual person, such that there’s nothing burdensome about requiring genital surgery and/or sterilization. Add into that the fact that our bodies are disposable precisely because our identities are anathema, and it’s thorny.

  11. Transgender advocates say tens of thousands of New Yorkers face severe and pervasive discrimination as a result of their inability to obtain identification matching the gender in which they live.

    Why can’t they obtain such identification?

  12. The problem I see with requiring surgery is that gender reassignment surgery is most often a placebo, or worse. Carving up a phallus to turn it into a vagina-like patch of scar tissue and nerve damage isn’t what every transwoman needs to feel at home in her body, and the F2M surgery is even less appealing.

    Until it’s possible to clone and graft working organs, I would consider surgery “optional”.

  13. Why can’t they obtain such identification?

    Because their birth certificates don’t match their current gender, and that’s the basis for all other forms of ID.

  15. The problem I see with requiring surgery is that gender reassignment surgery is most often a placebo, or worse. Carving up a phallus to turn it into a vagina-like patch of scar tissue and nerve damage isn’t what every transwoman needs to feel at home in her body, and the F2M surgery is even less appealing.

    It’s absolutely true that some of us have different needs wrt surgery, and that some of us rationally reject current options as inadequate to our needs. That doesn’t mean that the available options are objectively undesirable. They are satisfactory to many of us. It’s very important to separate patient-centered critiques of invasive legal requirements from transphobic stereotypes about our ability to have and enjoy sex, and attitudes towards our bodies as inferior and mutilated.

  16. It’s rooted in the fact that until surgery, trans people could always change their minds.

    People have been known to change their minds after surgery as well. See the case currently being brought against Dr Russell Reid for some examples.

  17. I don’t like the subtext about “changing minds”. To me, it implies that gender identity is, or should be, fixed, and more importantly, fixed in such a way as to be understandable by other people. I’ve got a pretty clear of my identity, at the moment, and it doesn’t fit the standard definitions, but you know what? That’s not always been the case, and I can’t say for sure that it will always be the case. Does this acknowledgement of contingency in my own life somehow remove from me the rights other people? Should it?

  18. Carving up a phallus to turn it into a vagina-like patch of scar tissue and nerve damage isn’t what every transwoman needs to feel at home in her body…

    nor does every transwoman see bottom surgery as “carving up a phallus”. some of us see it as corrective surgery. i’ll add too that my vagina is hardly a “patch of scar tissue and nerve damage”. rather, it’s a source of pleasure, especially when i’m intimate with my husband, and is quite pleasing to the eye, for those who enjoy those types of body parts.

    suggesting that current surgical techniques for transwomen result in organs that aren’t “working”, is totally inaccurate in most of the cases that i’m aware of, including my own.

    if you disapprove of bottom surgery as a solution for trans people, i’m fine with your uninformed opinions. but realize that a vast majority of m2f bottom surgeries are considered successful by the medical community, not to mention the transwomen themselves. and most of them see that surgery as an effective treatment, placebo or no.

  19. I don’t like the subtext about “changing minds”. To me, it implies that gender identity is, or should be, fixed, and more importantly, fixed in such a way as to be understandable by other people. I’ve got a pretty clear of my identity, at the moment, and it doesn’t fit the standard definitions, but you know what? That’s not always been the case, and I can’t say for sure that it will always be the case. Does this acknowledgement of contingency in my own life somehow remove from me the rights other people? Should it?

    This is a very good point, and I’m sorry I hadn’t considered the question from this angle so much myself. I understand the need for some sort of standardization of forms from a legal standpoint, but it gets very messy when you attempt to reduce categories that don’t really resolve. A transwoman who cannot get congruent identification is in deep trouble, but someone whose presentation doesn’t conform to either options isn’t really helped by the proposed legislation.

  20. to piny:

    Honestly, I’m not sure how useful sex/gender is in legal identity forms. Historically speaking, other markers which were once seen as indispensable in government ID have been removed as public opinion (consciousness?) moved. I can’t help but think standardization can be accomplished pretty easily without it, but sex/gender is such a naturalized category that it seems to be a kneejerk response by many to say, “But of course you have to include it!”.

  21. I wouldn’t be opposed to a proposal that dropped these markers from ID cards and drivers’ licenses altogether, honestly, although there’s no way I’d accept a proposal that deleted them only from transsexual identification.

  22. Right, because that would be a case of being dangerously marked by absence of an otherwise normalized marker. Unfortunately, it seems a case of pragmatic all or nothing, and those rarely go down well.

  23. I wouldn’t be opposed to a proposal that dropped these markers from ID cards and drivers’ licenses altogether, honestly, although there’s no way I’d accept a proposal that deleted them only from transsexual identification.

    my current amended nyc birth cert has no gender marker, specifically because i’m trans. i wasn’t very happy with it, but i’m not so sure i’ll go to the trouble of having it amended again. the first time around, it took over three years and the intervention of the new york city ombudsman from the public advocate’s office.

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