College essay is a chance to tell your story to a complete stranger. Why some colleges demand it to be included in the application? First of all, amount of people wanting to to be admitted is several times bigger than amount of places Jun 28, · Dear Stranger readers: YOU are an essential part of what we do. The writer and trans woman Julia Serano argues in an essay on Medium that this is due to the shift from the old gatekeeper We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow blogger.com more
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YOU are an essential part of what we do. Simply put, without recurring monthly contributions from readers like you, it's impossible to provide the high quality journalism that protects the marginalized and holds the powerful accountable.
We've all seen what happens to communities when reporting disappears and falsehoods take root. So if you believe our mission is important and necessary, please consider a monthly or one-time contribution to the Strangerand we'll keep working hard for you and those who need it most! Jackie is among an emerging population of people who have transitioned to a different gender and then later transitioned back. This has ignited a contentious debate both in and outside the trans community, with various sides accusing each other of bigotry, harassment, censorship, and damaging the fight for trans rights.
It's such a fraught issue that many people I interviewed requested anonymity. All the names of detransitioners have been changed, the stranger essay. Others refused to speak on the the stranger essay, afraid of the potential fallout. The stranger essay as more people like Jackie come out, the debate is just heating up.
Jackie, now 25 and living in a suburb outside Seattle, has green eyes, short hair, and a hint of facial hair that she shaves off every day.
Born female, Jackie was 17 when she started reading about trans issues online. At the time, it resonated with her deeply. She'd been a tomboy as a kid—what is now referred to as gender nonconforming. Others, however, the stranger essay, contend that a diagnosis is essential for health-care access. Many insurance plans that cover gender reassignment surgery may not if gender dysphoria weren't considered a disorder by the APA.
Jackie describes dysphoria as an unease in the stranger essay body, the stranger essay, one that the stranger essay hoped would be alleviated if the world saw her as male. Jackie found tips online on how to pass as male—what sort of clothes to wear, the stranger essay, how to bind her chest and change her walk.
She cut her waist-length hair, the stranger essay, changed her name, and asked people to start calling her "he" and "him. Previously uninsured, under the ACA she was able to purchase insurance through the Washington Health Benefit Exchange. This covered her testosterone injections, and it likely would have covered her chest reconstruction, the stranger essay called "top surgery," too.
But eight months ago, the stranger essay, right when she was preparing for top surgery, Jackie changed her mind. After five years on testosterone, she was also concerned about her health.
While the the stranger essay effects of hormone therapy are largely unknown, high doses of testosterone can the stranger essay the liver, the stranger essay. Some physicians also recommend hysterectomies for trans men over concerns that their risk of certain cancers and infections may increase.
Hysterectomies, of course, are irreversible, as is genital reconstruction: A penis that has been constructed into a vagina cannot be undone, nor can the reverse. Jackie didn't want to be on hormones anymore, but she didn't know what to expect. Would her voice get higher? Would her facial hair fall out? What did this mean for her identity going forth?
Resources on detransitioning are scarce. Most health-care providers, even those specializing in gender identity, have little experience with detransition. Lara Hayden, program manager at the Seattle Children's Hospital Gender Clinic, told me that while a few patients have stopped transitioning, they've never had a patient fully transition and then transition back. Ami Kaplan, a therapist in New York who has worked with transgender, gender variant, and genderqueer clients for more than 20 years, said that after two decades in practice, she knows of only one client who fully transitioned and then later detransitioned.
Until recently, the "gatekeeper" model of trans care was standard, and it meant that who could or could not change their bodies was ultimately up to therapists. Ray Blanchard, a retired sex researcher and psychologist in Toronto who was among the early clinicians advocating for the stranger essay reassignment surgery now called gender confirmation surgerysaid that when he started in the s, patients had to live as their target gender for two years before medical intervention.
Buck Angel, a human-rights activist and filmmaker, transitioned 23 years ago, when gender reassignment was much more rare. Angel was in therapy for 10 years before he the stranger essay, and, he says, that worked for him. And I've never looked back.
Since day one, it's been nothing but the perfect choice for me. Today, the stranger essay, the standard of care has changed. According to guidelines issued by the World Professional Association for Trans Health, health-care providers should ask for a letter from a therapist before medical intervention, but therapists themselves the stranger essay required to see clients for any particular length of time.
Some doctors don't require a letter at all. Instead of talking to therapists, Jackie found a community online. She's now a moderator of Detransition Infoan online resource for people to ask questions and share their experiences. Jackie and other detrans people I spoke to said their online community is in the hundreds, but no one knows precisely what percentage of the population has detransitioned.
It's not even clear how many people are transgender, the stranger essay. The United States Census Bureau doesn't collect data on gender identity or sexual orientationbut a study from the Williams Institute at UCLA Law estimates that there are 1.
That's double previous estimates. By all accounts, detransitioners make up a tiny percentage of that already small population: A year study out of Sweden found that only 2. There have, the stranger essay, however, been almost a dozen studies of looking at the rate of "desistance," among trans-identified kids—which, in this context, refers to cases in which trans kids eventually identify as their sex at birth.
Canadian sex researcher James Cantor summarized those studies' findings in a blog post : "Despite the differences in country, culture, decade, and follow-up length and method, all the studies have come to a remarkably similar conclusion: Only very few trans-kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks. Some trans activists and academics, however, argue that these studies are flawed, the patients surveyed weren't really transgender, and that mass desistance doesn't exist.
Indeed, some of the studies cited by Cantor had sample sizes as low as 16 people and were more than 40 years old, and one was an unpublished doctoral dissertation. But the most recent study, the stranger essay, published in in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatryfollowed up with adolescent patients at a gender identity clinic in Amsterdam and found that two-thirds ultimately identified as the gender they were assigned at birth.
For the parents of transgender children, this idea of desistance can be problematic, if not outright offensive. It makes it sound like being trans is a choice. For my child, the idea that she could choose to not the stranger essay a girl is like choosing for the sky to be green and the grass to be blue. That's how much of a fixed, unquestionable reality this is for her. Mack says her daughter's identity as female is firm, and it has been since a very young age.
Today, her daughter is in a wide community of trans kids, the stranger essay, her parents are the stranger essay, and it seems unlikely she'll desist. And most trans people—anecdotally, at least—are glad they transition. This includes John Otto, a Seattle man who started transitioning 17 years ago. I was 45 when I started transitioning—I certainly had given it a go being a woman.
That may be true for some detrans people—especially trans women, who generally have a harder time passing and who lose the benefits the stranger essay with appearing male in society—but it wasn't the case for Cass, a year-old detrans lesbian in California. Cass was severely bullied as a gender nonconforming kid and says transitioning actually made life easier, the stranger essay. She started taking testosterone at 20, and her community was largely supportive. She didn't have a hard time finding work or people to date.
Three months before Cass started taking testosterone, her mom committed suicide. And that worked for a while, but over time, the stranger essay, she started to sense that her dysphoria was rooted more in the trauma of her mother's death and her own internalized misogyny than in gender identity.
As an adolescent, she had been masculine, butch. Living as a man provided a kind of refuge until I was ready to dive into all that. When she was ready, Cass, like Jackie, looked online for advice, and she met a woman a few years older who had detransitioned. Her experiences were the same—from childhood bullying and internalized misogyny to the sense the stranger essay transitioning hadn't really solved her dysphoria the stranger essay all.
They became friends, talking over the course of a few months, and then, after nine years living as a man, the stranger essay, Cass came out as a woman. It's been four years since Cass detransitioned. She changed the gender marker on her driver's license back to female and asked her friends and family to call her by her birth name, but she still passes as male, with a deep voice and a shade of hair on her cheeks. She compares it to the process of working through her mom's suicide.
It's not fun, but it's worth it. Cass still hasn't told the health-care providers who helped her through her transition about the change. In some ways, she faults them for enabling her transition, even though it's exactly what she wanted at the time. She writes about her experience online, and in one post, the stranger essay, she says that a favored therapist "helped me hurt myself.
That definitely wasn't her intention but that's still what happened. This contradiction is difficult to face and understand, the stranger essay. In addition the stranger essay her writing, Cass recently started posting videos to YouTube, where there are a growing number of detransitioning confessionals.
In one video, which has been watched nearlytimes, a young man reflects on his decision to detransition after living as a woman.
He's beautiful and androgynous, with long lashes framing bright-blue eyes. There's an offline community of detransitioners as well: In andCass led a workshop on detransitioning at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Michfest, as it was known, had a contentious history with the trans community due to its long-held "women born women" policy. The festival closed after nearly 40 years in existence in Last year, Cass and 15 other detransitioned women got together on the West Coast for a weekend of workshops, meditation, the stranger essay, and shared experience.
Cass thinks it was the first gathering of its kind. In March, the stranger essay, Laurie Higgins, a blogger for the right-wing Illinois Family Institute, referred to Cass in a post. This happens the stranger essay lot: Right-wing groups and media outlets use detrans people to further a transphobic agenda, arguing that their existence invalidates all trans people, the stranger essay.
It's much like the narrative of the "ex-gay," which has been used by the right to argue that being gay is a choice. If it's a choice, the thinking goes, gay people don't need the rights to marry, adopt, or serve in the military—they just need to cut it out.
The same goes for trans folks, as well, the stranger essay. Cass's story has also been repurposed by the alt-right site Breitbart, which likens transitioning to being "mutilated by sex-change surgery.
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College essay is a chance to tell your story to a complete stranger. Why some colleges demand it to be included in the application? First of all, amount of people wanting to to be admitted is several times bigger than amount of places Jun 28, · Dear Stranger readers: YOU are an essential part of what we do. The writer and trans woman Julia Serano argues in an essay on Medium that this is due to the shift from the old gatekeeper We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow blogger.com more
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