"Our separate struggles are really one.
A struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity."
- MLK
Radom thoughts of Cecilia Chung and her fairy tales in San Francisco's Tenderloin.
While news of this year's election and the conflict in Iraq has dominated the media, anti-transgender violence has continued to occur at the same levels set more than a decade ago. To recognize this problem, the 6th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance will be honored in San Francisco on November 20th, 2004, to honor those who might otherwise have been missed by the media, as well as to draw attention to this continuing problem.
Scheduled to speak at this year's event are members of the families of Gwen Araujo and Toni "Delicious" Green, both victims of anti-transgender violence.
The event will kick off with a candlelight march down Market Street, starting at 6:30 p.m. at Harvey Milk Plaza, at 16th and Castro. Marchers will reach the LGBT Community Center around 7:30 p.m. for an event marking the Transgender Day of Remembrance, to be held in the Rainbow Room.
Joining an already lengthy list of sponsors this year is the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade Committee, which has shown an increasing interest in the local transgender community. Also playing an important part in the event this year is Youth Gender Project, which is hosting its annual conference, Genderblast, earlier on the same day.
San Francisco will be one of hundreds of cities across the world participating in the event. Other prominent locations this year include Tel Aviv, Israel, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C.
The event is right around the corner, and we need *you* to help make it the best event it can be.
We are looking for volunteers to assist with this year's march in San Francisco.
You would be required to meet at Castro and Market at 6:00 p.m. in advance of the march, and would need to be able to march the full mile to the LGBT Center, and be in charge of a number of other marchers.
If you are willing and able to assist with the march, and would like to
volunteer, please check in at http://www.rememberingourdead.org/day/sfvol.html and let us know!
The Remembering Our Dead project
TRANSSEXUALS IN THE WORK PLACE
-- A GUIDE FOR EMPLOYERS
By Barbara L. Chambers, contributing editor (WEST COAST)
To the employer:
Possibly you were presented this material by one of your employees,
quit likely soon after learning that the employee was undergoing or
had already undergone a "sex change." Much information and
misinformation abounds in the media, but little of it is helpful to
the employer in comprehending the new status of their employee.
Also, small or new companies are likely to have never encountered
such a change in status before; hopefully the text that follows will
be useful and informative. This article is written in respect to the
case of the male-to-female employee; however, most of the
information applies identically to the female-to-male employee if
the sense of the pronouns and gender-specific statements is
reversed. The remainder of the text is presented in question/answer
format.
What IS a transsexual?
The answer to this question is best given in rather technical
medical terms. Strictly speaking, a transsexual is a person with the
condition known as Gender Dysphoria Syndrome, a psychiatric term
which means "feelings of conflict and discomfort felt by a person
due to the anatomical gender of their body". Research indicates that
Gender Dysphoria Syndrome is the psychological condition which
results from a birth defect in the matching of brain and body,
similar and perhaps related to the condition known as intersex, in
which a child's body at birth has genitalia which are not clearly
ether male or female or has the characteristic of both male and
female.
In other words, transsexuals are persons born with a
perfectly normal and healthy brain of one gender, but in a body with
a perfectly healthy and normal anatomy of the opposite gender. The
affected person lives with a struggle to reconcile their natural
personality, gender identity, and body image with their physical
body and social status until a time in their life when the conflict
becomes too great to bear and they seek medical help to change their
anatomy and social role. No effective psychotherapeutic treatment
for transsexualism exists, since the only defect is the mismatch of
body and brain, and a healthy gender identity (even a mismatched
one) cannot be changed; therefore the only effective treatment is to
surgically change the gender of the body to align with the person's
natural gender identity, a "sex change." Such treatment is effective
in relieving the secondary problems of depression, low self esteem,
and anxiety which often accompanies gender dysphoria, and the
patient is then able to pursue a normal life in their new gender.
Today, transsexuals are potentially valuable research subjects in
the new studies of pre-birth programming of gender identity and
personality into the brain during fetal development, though the
rarity and desire for privacy of transsexual persons often makes the
gathering of data difficult. At present there is little agreement in
the medical community as to the cause of a person being born
transsexual; researchers and physicians today are largely divided
into groups advancing theories of ethergenetic cause or
fetal-development causes. Environmental conditions seen to have an
effect on how long the individual isable to adapt to their
reversed-gender life situation before seeking medical help to
correct it. Transsexualism is rare occurring at a rate of one in
every ten thousand births. Currently no method capable of detecting
the condition at birth is known.
Why aren't there female to male transsexual person?
There certainly are: about 45% of all transsexuals are female to
male. Male to female transsexuals receive the largest amount of
exposure thought the media of TV and print, apparently because they
are considered more "newsworthy" in our traditionally male-oriented
society.
Are Transsexual persons homosexual?
No, transsexualism has nothing directly to do with sexuality at all;
the "sex" root of the word refers to gender rather than sexual
preference. This misconception, largely disappearing today,
apparently resulted from public confusion of transsexuals with two
much larger groups: effeminate homosexuals (gay males imitating
feminine mannerisms or dress as an expression of their sexuality)
and transvestites (males, usually heterosexual, who find enjoyment
in wearing female clothing); neither of these two groups has the
body-identity gender conflicts which are experienced by transsexuals
and lead to an eventual change of physical gender. Transvestites out
number transsexuals by at least 50 to 1; gay males out number
transsexuals by about 900 to 1. in addition, these other two groups
are composed entirely of males only; transsexuals are nearly evenly
divided between male-to-female cases and female-to-male cases.
Transsexual, both before and following surgery, may be heterosexual,
bisexual, Lesbian, or celibate, with the proportion of celibacy
being some what higher than with the general population of women.
Transsexuals are NOT members of any known AIDS high-risk group.
Does this effect our company's medical insurance?
Many group insurance policies have specific exclusions which limit
or eliminate payments for transsexual surgery; if your policy has no
such exclusions, your employee may seek coverage for medical
expenses under your current plan. Insurance companies with exclusion
provisions do so only because the surgical costs are
expensive--surgical and hormonal treatment for transsexuals has been
legally established as medical necessary treatment, and not cosmetic
in nature. An insurance company might, for instance, have similar
exclusion for liver transplants, another vary expensive procedure.
Whether or not your insurance company provides coverage, it should
not affect your rates.
Will this affect the productivity of my employee?
Often, the employee in their new gender role is more productive and
produces higher quality work than in the past, due to improvement in
their own self-esteem and motivation. Time off from work to recover
from surgery procedures may be necessary, however--but it should be
noted that your employee will have no need for maternity leave in
the future since she will not be able to bear children, so net time
lost from work may prove to be less than in the case of your other
female employees. The process of changing gender usually takes
several years to complete, with surgical, hormonal, and social
changes progressing at different rates with different individuals;
you can expect a dramatic change in her appearance and in expression
of her personality. Your employee may already have completed much or
most of the transition before advising you. Transsexuals are often
conservative individuals and frequently set high standards on their
appearance and performance following their gender change. If your
employee is doing heavy physical work, bear in mind that her entire
muscular structure will change to female norms. and she may not
handle task requiring physical strength as easily as she did before.
[The opposite applies to the female-to-male, of course.]
How do other companies handle this?
With the increased public awareness of transsexuals today, the major
problem which remains is that the employee is an object of curiosity
among co-workers for several days following her appearance in her
new gender role. Vary large corporations with large numbers of
employees may encounter a transsexual employee every few years, and
often set up internal guidelines. in nearly all cases. a memo is
circulated among co-workers informing them simply that the employee
will return to work at a certain date as a female employee. Some
companies call a short meeting of co-workers at which management and
the employee is present to inform them of the change and to answer
questions which may appear; this technique is particularly effective
in keeping the transition smooth. One company (IBM) also transfer
the employee laterally for several months to a different department;
at the end of than time she is given the option of ether returning
to her original department or staying in her new position. If the
employee is new to the company sometimes no action at all is
necessary, since her former gender status may be undetectable to
others, or even to management itself.
What is my employee's legal status?
Upon completion of her surgery, under state law in every state she
is considered to be female, and entitled to all the considerations
applying to that gender. There are differences in detail of how
administrative law handles such cases from state to state -- your
employee will take care of any needed legal matters concerning state
and federal identification papers, tax status, social security, and
legal name change herself. Please note that for employers
participating in a state-subsidized equal- employment plan, your
employee may now be a "double bones" person, fitting into both the
female and handicapped categories, and entitling the company to a
substantial subsidy (details vary from state to state.)
Gender Expressions Magazine grants permission for this material to be freely copied and distributed provided that the article is reproduced in its entirety and this notice is retained intact.
Subscribe to
Posts [Atom]
