Sports reporter to undergo sex change

Christine has an amazing amount of courage. More so than most people I've known. If you want a deep and accurate understanding of what it is like to deal with being transsexual, I highly recommend you read Annah Moore's book Right Side Out: In-Tune Within, To Be In Harmony With The World. It's an excellent read. You can find it on Amazon.com or at her site http://annah.rightsideout.net

 

Would have been pretty easy to say "we're getting divorced" in the column (and certainly the news story). If it's that cut-and-dried, then that's pretty bad.

I may now be back to my original opinion.

 

You'll excuse me for not reading any of the postings. I'm sure some are excellent while others reveal a basic lack of compassion and/or humanity (the usual redneck suspects, I'm sure). I'm also positive more than most go off on a tangent and are unrelated to the subject. I just don't need to read that crap.

Christine, you have my support. Be happy and continue to prosper at whatever you'd like to do with the rest of your life. I won't pretend to know exactly what you have gone through, but as a gay man in the sports biz, I understand better than most.

You take editing to the extreme.

 

Good questions! Thank you

The difference is that gay men know and are proud of being men. Their being male is part and parcel of who they are, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and so forth. Their *gender identity* is male. The first person's gender identity is female. They are, in all the ways that matter in terms of their self perception of themselves and they way they seek to function in daily life as a member of society, female -- emotionally, spiritually, and so forth, except not physically.

Its akin to asking the difference between a straight woman and a gay man, in terms of everything except genitalia.

As for why I have an issue with being lumped in with gays, its multiple.

For one, my first encounter with all out hate for transpeople was with a gay man, and it still burns.

The other is that aside from certain commonalites of persecution on the basis of heteronormative differences, we have little in common with them as ts in and of itself.

Since I'm androphilic (which is the social equivalent of heterosexual for an FTM), and I've had to deal with literally everyone in my world space assuming I was gay (including parents and spouse, lol) I'm a tad sensitive to those differences.

Lastly, its becuase of the high degree of persecution of gays going on by certain segments of society. Being perceived as gay puts us in the same overall sterotype, and we have entirely different issues and problems to deal with.

Gay people can get medical care and not be told tht that cold they have is becuase of being gay.

Gay people don't die because the hospital staff is too busy laughing and cracking jokes about their anatomy.

We get slurred the same way gay people do -- and, well, if you are straight, how would you feel if someone always called you gay in pretty much every reference to you your whole life?

Then there's the fact that in every single major piece of legislation prior to roughly 2002 dealing with LGBT people, the T part was sorta used as a bargaining chip. Protections for us would be dropped because it made it too difficult to pass the bill -- but if we were dropped, it would fly through.

TS folks can marry. Many do. In fact, right now, every single state in the United States has a same sex marriage, often with biological children, and its legal, becuase of the complexities involved. So we benefit the gay community becuase our presence negates a lot of the arguments used against them.

They benefit us by providing numbers.

There are probably around a million and a half TS in the United States, compared to 20 Million gays. Most of us avoid trouble or exposure like this at all costs, and disappear into the woodwork, and often people don't even realize we're ts if we pass reasonably well.

So, I resent it on the basis of truth, history, and personal sentiment.

 

I see this as pointless. The wife is certainly media-savvy. If she had wanted to say something, no doubt they'd have let her.

As a married person I know that there are many things about each of us that are shared between the two of us, but some parts of us are ours individually. It is a choice that can be made by only one person; it will affect the other person, and the effect on the other person ought to be considered, but in the end it is the decision of one person. Whether to remain pregnant. Whether to continue fighting a terminal illness or go to a hospice and stop fighting. Whether to continue to lead a hugely unsatisfying life out of politeness or to make a change that will cause some pain for someone else. A good person weighs another person's feelings and wants in deciding what to do, but in the end he or she understands that this is the only life they have and the decision belongs to one person. And so should dealing with any fallout -- perhaps Christine wants to shoulder as much of this as she can. It is not our place to insist Lisa be asked to comment on a decision that really wasn't hers to make.

Finally, we in the media have a choice in how the public will perceive us, as scavengers with no moral sense of what kind of raw meat we sink our fangs into, or as sentient beings with a sense of decency. We cannot force all "the media" to behave as we'd want them to, but we can make individual decisions to treat people with dignity when we have that choice.

 

It's possible that one or both people don't necessarily want that and don't want to put it in writing, hoping things can work out.

 

Thanks for providing the unique viewpoint.

 

if they are cross dressers, they wouldn't think they are women. Cross dressers have no gender identity issue.

Knowing that, and given what you just stated, I'l agree. A person suffering from GID that cross dresses is acting irrationally. Why go to all the trouble to change your physical body jsut so you can dress as what was causing you all that pain in the first place?

that would be like me wearing mens clothing again. uh uh

 

Excellent links -- thank you.

 

Sorry, anything posted by Sports by Brooks is lost in a sea of T&A.

 

I don't know anything about sports by brooks, but he managed in one sentence to fill a big void in a story written by a reporter who I am assuming is compensated very well to work in LA

 

So if I had told you that an hour ago, would you have been less of a dickhead here?