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Submitted by Lyssa (9/8/2004)

I'm still frustrated by how much of the medical (particularly mental health) community just 'doesn't get it'. I can only speak for m2f, since I've never had experience with f2m's, and can only assume that their experience is comparable. First off, the exact arguments used for deferring transition until adulthood are the precise reasons why it needs to be initiated prepubescently: specifically, because going through adolescence as a member of the wrong gender is irreversibly traumatic. Second, transsexuality is nearly universally miscategorized as a mental disorder; there is no mental health component to it at all - until being traumatized by being forced to spend the first two decades of our lives as members of the opposite gender, most of us are fairly well-adjusted girls with a PHYSICAL anomaly of having male genitalia. Finally (for this rant, at least), if a doctor were to recommend waiting until adulthood to treat any other physical birth-defect that causes even a fraction of the trauma and discomfort as this one, he'd be run out of the medical profession; yet this is the standard treatment of those of us who just want to get on with our lives as girls and women: we are told that we must wait until severe irreversible damage is done, before being allowed to proceed with treatment.

For the benefit of the clue-impaired, I'll spell it out simply: We are not 'boys who want to be girls'. We are GIRLS who just want to be able to be the girls that we are, despite our physical birth defect.

Anyone who thinks that a transsexual women "used to be a boy" is missing a basic point. We may have spent the first 20 (or more) years of our lives being forced to pretend to be (or roleplay as) guys, but we never *were* male - just girls with one more added burden tossed upon us (maybe to compensate for the lack of menstruation).

Taken with the author's permission from http://www.angelfire.com/rebellion/tepsiar/.

Note: This page was archived and merged from TSSupport.org.

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