(2014-06-09) The Transgender Tipping Point

The Transgender Tipping Point. Almost one year after the Supreme Court ruled that Americans were free to marry the person they loved, no matter their sex, another civil rights movement is poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs. Transgender people–those who identify with a gender other than the sex they were “assigned at birth,” to use the preferred phrase among trans activists–are emerging from the margins to fight for an equal place in society.

The transgender revolution still has a long way to go. Trans people are significantly more likely to be impoverished, unemployed and suicidal than other Americans. They represent a sliver of the population–an estimated 0.5%–which can make it harder for them to gain acceptance

In many places, they are unwelcome in the men’s bathroom and the women’s. The effect is a constant reminder that they don’t belong.

History is filled with people who did not fit society’s definition of gender, but modern America’s journey begins after World War II with a woman named Christine Jorgensen

today, those who seek medical interventions are commonly known as transsexuals

In 1980, seven years after homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a classification bible published by the American Psychiatric Association, transsexualism was added.

Eventually that entry was replaced by what psychiatrists called gender identity disorder, and in 2013 that diagnosis was superseded by gender dysphoria, a change applauded by many in the trans community.

Understanding why someone would feel that way requires viewing sex and gender as two separate concepts–sex is biological, determined by a baby’s birth anatomy; gender is cultural, a set of behaviors learned through human interaction.

Sexual preferences, meanwhile, are a separate matter altogether. There is no concrete correlation between a person’s gender identity and sexual interests; a heterosexual woman, for instance, might start living as a man and still be attracted to men.

That complexity is one reason some trans people reject all labels, seeing gender as a spectrum rather than a two-option multiple-choice question. The word transgender, which came into wider use in the 1990s after public health officials adopted it, is often used as an umbrella term for all rejections of the norm, from cross-dressers who are generally happy in their assigned gender to transsexuals like Jorgensen.

Many trans people choose to use hormones and puberty blockers that can result in beards on biological females and breasts on biological males. Some go so far as to get facial feminization surgery or speech therapy, training a tenor voice to spring alto. According to one study, about two-thirds seek some form of medical treatment and about one-third seek surgery

Even in the trans community, male-to-female transitions are thought to be more common than female-to-male, though experts caution that exact figures are unknown.

The Personal Is Political

right to use the boys’ bathroom and play on the boys’ sports teams

fired or refused service at a restaurant or otherwise mistreated

bathroom access

locker rooms

change in a private area before practice

At women’s colleges, administrators are struggling with how to handle applications from trans women

military

basic challenge: how to get gender markers changed on official documents like driver’s licenses, birth certificates and passports.

Many health insurance plans have explicit exclusions for treatments related to gender transitions. Five states–California, Oregon, Connecticut, Vermont, Colorado–as well as Washington, D.C., have prohibited such clauses.