I wanted to let you know something that might not come through in my posts. I have a tremendous respect for you. Yours has been a very tough road that most of us cannot even fathom. The fact that you’ve come through it with the strength of character that you portray amazes me! We’re likely to disagree on a number of issues but I’m one of those people that tend to respect people who disagree with me more than those who do. Total agreement is BORING! Telling me things I already know is BORING! You never bore me….you challenge me and my notions…in short, you rock!!!

Shows like this actually do more of a disservice to the general public, I think, rather than a service–edited clips, participants who realize they will only get so much time to make their points, a host who may or may not ask the right questions or allow enough time for discussion.

My heart was with the child, and I found myself disliking the mother as much as I distrusted Nicolosi.

She “wasn’t close to her son.” Any mother would ask, “Why the hell not, lady?”

Maybe some of her child’s behavior was related to her not being close to him and maybe not, but I found her defensive and sarcastic and sense that she was concerned about herself, not about her son who was now her daughter. I have a feeling she was concerned more about herself from the get-go.

Thus, we’re pretty darn hard to track down. The latest ‘crop’ of transsexuals, those a little older than me and down on through younger seem to be incredibly more variable in appearance as well as sexual attraction. I don’t know if this is just my own observations and my own personal hangout space that’s biasing this, but it’s best described as everyone is getting a little more queer. Gender walls are being less rigid. Many more people are partially transitioning, or literally living a bigendered life. IE: I know someone who works as a fairly effeminate man, but on the weekends he’s a she, yet he/she’s not a drag performer or anything like that. It’s just a life style.

I’m sure a study COULD be done, but it would cost so much and there’s simply not enough of us to bother with the funding. Even the most generous estimates give us about 1/10,000 of the population. And when you do do a study, you have the problem of doing what Bailey did. He observed transsexuals, but only one particular kind in one particular part of the country. There’s no way of telling if the community is that uniform etc.

The conventional definition of ‘bisexuality’ is ‘sexual attraction to both genders’. Is that how you’re using it? I’ve heard people use the term incorrectly applying it to people who are intersexed…figuring ‘bi’ means ‘both’. But I presume you’re talking about sexual attraction to both genders.

I appreciate your insights re transsexuals who don’t fit the typical definition of ‘gay’. Born with a man’s body, identified as a transsexual, becomes a woman–but is sexually attracted to women. By birth gender, they wouldn’t be gay but by their re-assigned gender they are. And the opposite. Again with my limitations–I really have been a bit of a hermit–but I knew of two or three such people back in the 1970′s, early 1980′s. I thought of it as a fluke. Do you have any idea as to percentages? How many (of either gender) become either a man attracted to men or a woman attracted to women? Are there any studies that we know of?
I’m guessing statistics and studies are scarce to non-existent but thought you might know.

If everyone is caught up in facilitating the thing, then there may be a hell of a lot of pressure to remain that way, regardless of how strongly the kid still feels gender-dysphoric.

Funny how that worked out for many transsexuals. There was a ‘hell of alot of pressure’ for me to remain male. But guess what? We still did. Nothing anyone would say would ever change our feelings. We had that screamed at us for years, but we never changed.

I would suspect it goes the other way too. A kid who figures out he or she is gay or lesbian, is not somehow going to decide that ‘oh well I might as well go with the flow’ and have drastic irreversible surgery, change everything about one’s self and life ambitions, just because some people encourage it.

Kids, particularly teenagers, are going to do what they want to do, regardless of parental influence. Are parents powerless? Of course not, but I think it’s overstated. I don’t think there’s anything my parents could have done to stop me from doing what I did.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/transgender-children

Green expected most of the boys in the study to end up as transsexuals, but nothing like that happened. Three-fourths of the 44 boys turned out to be gay or bisexual (Green says a few more have since contacted him and told him they too were gay). Only one became a transsexual. “We can’t tell a pre-gay from a pre-transsexual at 8,” says Green, who recently retired from running the adult gender-identity clinic in England. “Are you helping or hurting a kid by allowing them to live as the other gender? If everyone is caught up in facilitating the thing, then there may be a hell of a lot of pressure to remain that way, regardless of how strongly the kid still feels gender-dysphoric. Who knows? That’s a study that hasn’t found its investigator yet.”

Plenty of other people who are already have psycho-degrees think Bailey’s full of it. His main work on Autogynephilia is in a pulp science book, with no real science. His ‘science’ was observing transsexual hookers in a few gay bars where he lived. No control group, no blinding, no nothing. Just casual observation of a very specific community of individuals.

Why not go to a inner city gay bar and observe the circuit scene, and then declare all gays have this lifestyle? It would make just as much sense.