Caitrin

Pointless exercise, there are only two genders male and female. A man who dresses as a chicken doesn't magically become a chicken does he, he's still just a man dressed as a chicken.

I would try to enlighten you but stupid ignorant is always stupid ignorant no matter how you try to educate it. Your ignorance is breathtakingly stupid. You clearly have never met anyone who was born one gender but is not at all comfortable with that gender. You clearly have no compassion. You are part of the reason why people feel compelled to legally define the rights of the third gender.

Yes someone is not comfortable with the gender he/she was born and want to be the other gender. Or maybe want to be no gender at all.

But that still makes it 2 gender and not three. If a man get to be operated to look like a woman, you can either say now he is a woman or you can say he is still a man up to your political view. But there is no magical 3rd gender.

Wrong. Genderqueer people are not women or men. They're both, or neither, or they fluctuate. See Native American two-spirit people, or see the Hidjra, or plenty of possibilities in Thailand who are non-binary. Third gender recognises these non-binary possibilities.

A binary trans woman (whose proper pronoun is she not he) is not a third gender. She's a woman. She fits in the binary. To properly respect her means having an administrative means of allowing her to change her assigned gender marker from M to F.

Don't confuse binary folks with non-binary folks. Most folks are binary, that's cisgender and transgender. Third gender is a valid but different conceptualisation.

Get off yer soapbox, whoever said life was going to be fair? Interesting that you don't think I live as a minority in Thailand, I have lived as a minority all my adult life! I don't wish people to make special dispensations for me, just to treat me the same as everyone else (not that it generally happens). I don't know if you are a transwhatever, so these operations are of some relevance to you, but as I quite like my sausage (although wouldn't mind a couple extra inches, just like every other man) so the hows and wherefore's are both of no consequence or interest to me. Yes it would be " great if we just magically didn't have to put up with discrimination because of equal rights for all humans" but its unlikely to pan out that way, so just deal with it without the need to add to natures gender numbers.

No. I get paid for being on this soapbox. I also happen to, you know, believe in what I say while on it. I didn't say you aren't a minority, I said your comments reminded me of people who aren't. I don't know that you aren't, but if you are a minority (and again, I mean globally, and white people are not a minority globally in terms of colonialist history, current wealth, or current political power), then it becomes harder for me to understand why you would not extend your own experience as a marginalised individual to other marginalised individuals.

Whether I am trans or not is really irrelevant to this discussion. If I was, and it made a difference to you, that just proves everything I've already written about cisgender people (you) being shitty. I made it clear that I am a journalist and academic who specialises in LGBT topics. That includes the T. That includes knowledge of these procedures. Whether I am cis or trans, my job would still require me to know this stuff in detail. And even then, obviously, I have the job because I believe in seeking equality for LGBT people, of which I happen to be one, so even without a job, a whole bunch of details on all sorts of LGBT topics would be personally important to me.

Gender and sex are not the same thing, although they do interact as was already repeatedly explained to you. The recognition of a third gender is recognising that individuals who are totally dimorphic (and many people are not, as mentioned, about 1 in 1000) can disagree with their designation at birth. Furthermore, if you are talking about nature's sex numbers, go back to that 1 in 1000, because there sure as heck are a lot more possibilities than cursory textbook definitions of "male" and "female." Nature loves diversity, that's how we get evolution. Nature won't just try everything once, it'll keep trying things. Yay for genetic and developmental variation. Welcome to the human condition.

I may be ignorant in Ladyboy issues but I'm met a lot and they all seem pretty screwed up to me. And why do they all think that foreign men in Thailand are interested in them?

But I am honest - I think that's terrible if what you say is true about what the American Psychiatric Association are doing to rip off the insurance companies.

So it is a mental condition and not a disorder and is treatable by a variety of methods, including Psychologists and Psychiatrists.?

The term "ladyboy" actually encompasses quite a number of different Thai gender identities. That's just the preferred English word for them. It's an umbrella term, but one limited to Thais. It would be deeply inappropriate to refer to non-Thai transgender individuals using that term. As for "why do they all think foreign men in Thailand are interested in them," uh, because there is a customer base for prostitution, and in large part, it's foreign men who are interested in them? Same as cisgender women in Thailand who work in similar locations or establishments. Not all transgender individuals in Thailand work in entertainment and/or sex work. Those with the financial means probably stay far away from such areas and go on with their lives. The sad truth of being transgender in a cisgender world is that often times such work is the only way one can afford medical intervention, especially for trans individuals from very income depressed backgrounds. Which leads to your next comment:

No, see the insurance companies are trying to rip off their customers. They want to maximise premium payments and minimise payouts. They're a business. The problem is, healthcare isn't a commodity. Or at least, it shouldn't be. The APA and other such groups of medical professionals are making it clear: this is a medical issue, these are the necessary, non-elective treatments, you should pay for them, because that's what people have insurance for in the first place. With the incestuous nature of the insurance industry (hardly better than a trust, honestly), it can be like pulling teeth to get them to pay for anything (recall how they like to drop people for pre-existing conditions, etc, etc, which is now illegal in many countries, most recently the US, under the ACA). This isn't about the medical profession ripping off the insurance industry, this is the industry being greedy to the point of actively harming the very people giving them money.

And I suppose you could term dysphoria as a mental condition, but you're using verbal sleight of hand to distract from why and how dysphoria develops into a potential mal-adjustment: shitty treatment by cis people. Dysphoria is a reaction to individuals being constrained in their full range of expression, in this case, specifically gender expression. That restraint isn't healthy, but it isn't restraint placed on trans people by trans people themselves (although transphobia can be internalised, it's only after external situations are presented). Let's consider two situations:

30 years ago, there is a transgender teen. She doesn't have access to resources. The internet exists, but it's not well developed. Searching for a description of her feelings, the way she relates to her body, etc, doesn't come up with much. If she goes to a library, she might find works by Janice Raymond or other transgender exclusionary radical feminists, or even older works by psychiatrists describing transgender women as deluded homosexual men or similarly deluded "male lesbian" men. These won't exactly be supportive (understatement of the century, and we now know these ideas are total trash). Her parents won't understand her, and they will demand she "man up." At school she is regularly beaten up for her femininity. She may not even be attracted to boys, she may not even be attracted to anyone, but she'll still be labeled as gay. Meanwhile her body is getting further and further away from the way her internal perception of it, the physiological mapping, says it should be. When she reaches adulthood, she might be pretty screwed up. If she finally transitions now, she's probably got a lot of shit to work through, not because she is transgender, but because her entire life was full of traumatic experiences with zero support.

Now, a different scenario. Present day, a transgender teen was a transgender child. She found support from her parents who took her to see a child psychiatrist who affirmed she had gender dysphoria, but was still a bright, well-adjusted, happy child--as long as her gender identity was respected. So her parents do so, they allow her to choose gendered activities if she wants (or if she doesn't, maybe she's just as interested in playing with GI Joes as she is with My Little Ponies, or maybe she likes them both, she still insists she's a girl, because girls are not defined by activities), they allow her to choose her clothes, whatever they may be (within reason, of course), they enroll her at school as a girl and strenuously defend her right to self-expression against other parents or administration figures. As she reaches puberty, it becomes obvious that her gender identity is not going to change, so with careful decision making in consultation with a pediatrician, an endocrinologist, and a psychiatrist, she goes on puberty blockers at 12, so she remains somewhat behind her peers to allow her brain to mature without suffering the effects of a "male" puberty. At 16, she goes on hormone replacement therapy, and after one or two years, she has sex reassignment surgery. In general, for her entire life, her dysphoria was mitigated by a cast of supporting characters: her parents, her doctors, her peers, her teachers, her friends. By 18 she is happy, well-adjusted, her body matches her internal physiological mapping, and although she may have to have a difficult explanation down the road about her inability to conceive children, the vast majority of people she interacts with daily have no idea she was assigned male at birth.

Do you see the difference? The difference is cisgender people doing shitty things, not a trans person's gender identity.

I'm glad you asked, because I'm a journalist and academic with my primary focus on LGBT and women's issues. It's literally my job to know about this stuff in detail. Plenty of my work applies to me directly, since, you know, I'm a queer woman.

"Suffers" is a word which is very loaded, and there is a specific political reason for the continued inclusion of gender dysphoria in the DSM: insurance coverage. There has been a debate for years about completely removing gender identity from the DSM just as homosexuality was removed (you might remember that, right?), but the problem is many insurers that provide coverage for medical intervention (hormone replacement therapy, sex reassignment surgery, blood tests, etc etc) only provided that insurance because the DSM gave medical doctors, including but not limited to psychiatrists, something to point to saying, "this is necessary medical treatment, it is not extraneous nor cosmetic." I've always been of the opinion gender identity should be removed, but there are an awful lot of trans people in dire financial situations, and there was a lot of justified fear that the insurance companies would put their own profit margins ahead of the medical needs of their transgender customers. So, ultimately, in it has stayed, with the modification to de-pathologise it.

In many cases, you CAN go to a general practitioner first. There are even "informed consent" clinics in some areas. In some cases, to change a gender marker, you don't even need to go to a medical doctor. A social worker can confirm your gender identity is valid. And when you are required to see a psychiatrist for paperwork reasons, it's often less about "oh my, you poor dear, you're suffering so much" and more to determine that you are well adjusted and ready to proceed with transition, or surgery, or whatever. Dysphoria is not the issue if a trans person is stressed out, depressed, etc. It's usually because people are harming them, they're suffering from discrimination, etc, etc. Those are external factors. And sure, they need to be worked through, but plenty of cisgender people go through the same things, and not all transgender people do. I know plenty of people who have walked into a psychiatrist's office, had their evaluation, were rated as well adjusted, had the paperwork signed off, and never went back to counseling again because it wasn't necessary.

I'm not calling these experts ignorant. I'm calling you ignorant of what the experts are actually saying and doing in practice.

Not exactly, no. You're talking about the penile inversion technique, and it's far more complicated than you're making it out to be. For one thing, the spongy muscle material that develops for purposes of erection is, to be blunt, absolutely unnecessary for arousal and orgasm. In general, the shaft has one biological purpose. And regardless of whether a trans woman is straight, bisexual, or lesbian, you can bet that in the vast majority of cases, she's very much not into that. The nerve endings are clustered in the head (to be honest, mostly in the glans) which is placed where it originally developed from anyway; as the clitoris. Sexual function (arousal and orgasm) are maintained in the vast majority of cases.

By its very name, penile inversion, it can't possibly be "chopped off" because if you chopped it off, you would lose everything, not just the irrelevant spongy muscle material. If you knew this, why be a transphobic jerk about it, spouting misinformation about the technique?

And some people are a third gender. Or agender. Anyhow, wouldn't it be great if we just magically didn't have to put up with discrimination because of equal rights for all humans. How's that working out for us? Sounds like the kind of claptrap people who don't live as a minority (globally speaking) usually say. "I don't even see race," "I don't have an issue with gay people, but they shouldn't stick their orientations in other people's faces" etc.

Pointless exercise, there are only two genders male and female. A man who dresses as a chicken doesn't magically become a chicken does he, he's still just a man dressed as a chicken.

It's more about what is in the brain of transgender persons than how they dress really. Some people strongly feel they were born into the wrong sex and can never be fulfilled as human beings until they do all they can to fix what they see as a mistake. Merely dressing in drag is not the same thing. That activity is sometimes enjoyed by both gay and straight men who have no gender identity issues at all.

It is my understanding that Thailand is the leading country in the world in gender reassignment surgical procedures (BOTH ways) with Iran being the number two spot.

Yup, well I met a fella once who believed in his own brain that he was Genghis Khan (turns out he had just done way too much acid). Just because the brain believes something, I'm not sure that makes it so......

You can grow up and chop off your wedding tackle if you like, it doesn't move you to a third gender, it simply makes a step closer to the other gender.

+ 1. Agreed. Chopping the tackle off doesn't give the person ovaries nor the ability to give birth which is a primary female function. That and multi-tasking I keep getting told...

First off, for commenters on a Thai website, and Thailand being responsible for a number of modern sex reassignment surgical techniques, you guys appear to know nothing about how SRS works. You don't "chop" things off. Guess what: vaginas, penises, ovaries, testes? They're made from the same stuff! They respond via receptors to hormones both in utero and during puberty, but it's still the same stuff. SRS "reconfigures" that stuff, to put it overly simplistically. You have Google, the wonder of the modern age, use it, before you insert your digital foot directly into your digital mouth.

Edit: Also, eeeeeewwwww at the idea of "giving birth" as a primary female function. We're talking about humans here, not animals, and female humans, as individuals, have no need to give birth. Some even have their reproductive organs removed, they're that opposed to baby making.

Sweet baby Jesus there's a lot of ignorance about being trans in this thread. Well, that, and blatant transphobia. I'll work my way backwards.

Gender dysphoria is not a mental disorder according to the experts. That's precisely why the DSM designation was changed. The designation change is so that dysphoria, which comes from external sources can be successfully dealt with. It's not that there is anything inherently disordered about the transgender person's gender identity, but rather it's the fact that being transgender in a cisgender (that's most of you folks, if not all of you folks in this discussion) world causes stress. Why? Because as this thread proves, most cisgender people, and certainly cisgender institutions which is, you know, most institutions in every nation on the planet, tend to react badly to transgender people. You're proving it right now! The change was made because GID (D being for disorder) unfairly and incorrectly pathologised the natural reaction of trans people to a cis world: y'all stress trans people out, and you should really be better about that. It's not them, cis people; it's you.

Now, to physicality, as was pointed out, there are a number of potential chromosomal variances. But even more than that, sex and how we tie to the concept of gender (and gender is a social construction, a give and take between an internal identity and an externally recognised identity, not a biological fact) is made up of way more than chromosomes. There's genitalia, sure, but there is also hormone levels, brain structure, environmental factors affecting both, etc, etc. Truth is, there are a lot of "mutants" when you consider the widest possible definition of non-dimorphism. At least 1 in 1000. That's an awful lot of people when you consider absolute numbers. Some may have mild non-dimorphism, others may have very obvious non-dimorphism (intersex children with ambiguous genitalia at birth for example), but how these differences in "sex" affect an individual's understanding of their "gender," we're only starting to scratch the surface of the reality of their lived experiences. What we do know is that these lived experiences are real and they have some biological and physiological facets.

Now, as gender is a social construction, an identity which is a balance between internal identification and external identification, they idea of a third gender or a third sex is one which has long been recognised in many cultures, including Western European ones (although not so much after modern Christianity swept through). This is not new. Not new for Thailand, not new for the West, not new for humanity. As most people tend to look and act according to their society's binary gendering, some cultures have attempted to accommodate these individuals (individuals we might label as transgender or intersex or both in our modern Western terminology) by providing them with a third space. In truth, we probably need something more like a spectrum of human gender variance, or even a sphere, accounting for multiple axes of identification, recognition, expression, and presentation.

tl;dr Humans are complicated. Complicated isn't bad. Trans people are uncommon, but uncommon doesn't mean abnormal. Certainly not disordered.

On topic: this is a step in the right direction, but Thailand, which was rightly pointed out as one of the premiere countries for sex reassignment surgery both in technique and in numbers performed (not to mention in terms of affordability), needs to provide a way for individuals to change their gender marker. Right now binary trans people in Thailand (that is they do not see themselves as a third sex or third gender, but rather wholly male or wholly female, regardless of the original assignment at birth) cannot change their gender markers. Having the option of a third box is a good step, but it shouldn't be the only one.

NYCJoe:

I've lived my entire post-university life in the East, the vast majority of it in Japan. Japan has a lesbian scene, and some of it is bar-based, but regardless, there are still lesbian hangouts. I know plenty of Japanese and expat lesbians. The issue clearly isn't a westerncentric one. There are some similarities throughout Asia, but there are also clearly big differences from culture to culture. You making this about the west means you're the one in the western headspace.

Paagai:

I'm one of those "united we stand, divided we fall" types when it comes to activism, and you know, also not being an <deleted>. And I enjoy mixed queer spaces, and plenty of cisgender gay male friends of mine do too. Does that mean each letter in the alphabet soup doesn't sometimes require their own spaces? Of course not, but to cisgender heterosexual individuals, we're all queer. If you think they make much distinction between us, or at least enough to justify some sort of broken up separate civil rights movements, I would say that you're giving them far too much credit.

You've underlined something very important when considering inter-queer dynamics though: that of repeated hierarchies. You rail against gay marriage because of marriage as some sort of problematic heteronormative institution and then you turn right around and engage in bi-erasure (yes, Virgina, bisexuals do exist and bisexuality is real, even if neither you nor I share that orientation) and transphobia. Or at the very least, a really shitty way of describing hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery. Breasts are both gender signifier and part of female puberty, both of which are usually very important to trans women--and deeply problematic for trans men. And as for SRS, it's far from accurate to talk about cutting off bits. That's not how it works. It'd be far more accurate to talk about reconfiguring genitalia. Trans women and trans men can be straight, bisexual, or gay. You can have lesbian trans women or gay trans men, trans women who are romantically and sexually attracted to men are not some kind of extremely femme gay man, they're straight women, likewise it's not uncommon for young straight trans men to look at butch lesbians and at first attempt to place their masculinity within that framework only to realise: they're men, and butch lesbians are women, and a fundamental gender disconnect exists there.

Trying to separate the T from the LGB is impossible unless all trans people were straight, and that's simply not true. Trying to erase bisexual people from the group because you chose not to believe in their orientation is no less harmful that straight people not believing in yours. Not cool at all.

As for the marriage issue, I believe there should only be government recognised civil unions (a legal contract), and "marriage" as a word should only be used for religious ceremonies which I may or not may consider silly or sacred depending. However, as long as legal marriage as a legislative and judicial concept exists, it must be applied equally to all people regardless of gender/orientation. I see giving everyone marriage as a step towards moving to a universal civil union conceptualisation for everyone.

As to the topic: we did not find the space we were looking for, but we did enjoy Chiang Mai and will definitely go back. I'll be back in a few months. The topic was simply a sort of "we'd like to if possible," the enjoyment of our time in Chiang Mai did not rest upon it.