Top Ten Transgender Friendly Colleges

Campus Pride has published this list of top ten colleges in the United States on their Campus Climate Index that are particularly trans friendly and have pro-trans policies and programs.

The Top Ten:

Ithaca College – Ithaca, New York
New York University – New York, New York
Princeton University – Princeton, New Jersey
University of California, Los Angeles – Los Angeles, California
University of California, Riverside – Riverside, California
University of Massachusetts, Amherst – Amherst, Massachusetts
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, Michigan
University of Oregon – Eugene, Oregon
University of Pennsylvania – Philadephia, Pennsylvania
University of Vermont – Burlington, Vermont

While I am not at all surprised at the selection or the fact they all are located on the West Coast or in the Northeast, I am surprised that Portland State University and UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley did not make the list.

This list is a good starting point, but by no means a complete list of schools that are trans-friendly. Many schools across the country are making strides in the way of LGBTQ folk and are great places for trans* people to go to school, even if they didn't make the list. Even schools in the south (like my alma mater, University of North Florida) are making strides in terms of creating a safe space for trans* students to go to school and are always open to ideas as to what they can do to accommodate transgender students and make their college experience as pleasant as possible.

In locations like the South and Midwest where one doesn't find the same mind-set of the progressive Northeast and West Coast, institutions of higher education are taking to the transgender movement more quickly than their non-university counterparts.

WPATH - Standards of Care Revised [trans news]

The Standards of Care for trans people has been revised - via the WPATH website:

The SOC is considered the standard document of reference on caring for the transsexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming population. The newly-revised SOC will help health professionals better understand how they can offer the most effective care to these individuals. The SOC focuses on primary care, gynecologic and urologic care, reproductive options, voice and communication therapy, mental health services and hormonal and surgical treatment.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (September 25, 2011)-The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) will release a newly-revised edition of the Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People, on September 25, 2011 at the WPATH conference in Atlanta.

"The latest 2011 revisions to the SOC realize that transgender, transsexual, and gender nonconforming people have unique health care needs to promote their overall health and well-being, and that those needs extend beyond hormonal treatment and surgical intervention," said SOC Committee Chair, Eli Coleman, PhD, Professor and Director at Program in Human Sexuality, University of Minnesota.

This is the seventh version of the Standards of Care. The original SOC were published in 1979. Previous revisions occurred in 1980, 1981, 1990, 1998 and 2001.

"The previous versions of the SOC were always perceived to be about the things that a trans person must do to satisfy clinicians, this version is much more clearly about every aspect of what clinicians ought to do in order to properly serve their clients. That is a truly radical reversal . . . one that serves both parties very well," said Christine Burns, SOC International Advisory Committee Member.

More than any other version, 2011 revisions also recognize that gender nonconformity in and of itself is not a disorder and that many people live comfortable lives without having to seek therapy or medical interventions for gender confusion or unhappiness.

This version provides more detailed clinical guidelines to address the health care needs of children, adolescents, and adults with gender dysphoria who need assistance with psychological, hormonal, or surgical care.

In addition to clearly articulating the collaborative relationship needed between transsexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming individuals and health care providers, the new, 2011 revisions provide for new ways of thinking about how cultural relativity and culture competence.

The document includes a call to advocacy for professionals to promote public policies and legal reforms that promote tolerance and equity for gender and sexual diversity. This document recognizes that well-being is not obtained through quality health care alone but a social climate that eliminates of prejudice, discrimination, and stigma and promotes a positive and tolerant society that embraces sexual and gender diversity.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), formerly known as the (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, HBIGDA), is a professional organization devoted to the understanding and treatment of gender identity disorders. As an international multidisciplinary professional Association the mission of WPATH is to promote evidence based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy and respect in transgender health.

Click here to view the NEW version 7 Standards of Care (pdf file)!

On the Male Side of Middle [documentary]

Check out this awesome short documentary by Paul Neudorf, aka pneudorf on the Tube in collaboration with the Brethren Mennonite Council for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Interests.

The film explores body image, gender identity, masculinity, femininity, relationships, and religion and spirituality. You can check out more of Paul's documentaries here.

The Silent Years [transition gives voice]

Recently, Forest (aka ClosetTransgender on the Tube) made a poignant video entitled "The Silent Years." Forest is transitioning without hormones and is having the experience of being somewhat of a ghost; his male identity is often invisible to those he encounters, which lead to feelings of invalidation.

I'm sure many who are early in transition or not using hormones at all can relate to this feeling at some time or another during their transition.



I can relate to where he is coming from and can only imagine how frustrating it is for him to have his male identity be constantly invalidated/challenged/gone unrecognized.

A main theme in my videos is the idea of "transition giving voice;" I feel this experience has empowered me and allowed me to find my voice in this world and speak from a place of great understanding (having embodied two genders in my lifetime).

Nothing is more frustrating than having this (male) identity I've crafted invalidated, so I empathize with Forest when his true self is "silenced" by others.

Dr. Kelley Winters Keynote Speech.

Here is the keynote speech Dr. Kelley Winters delivered at the Colorado Gold Rush Conference in Denver earlier this year.

A little about Dr. Winters from the TYFA website:

Dr. Kelley Winters is a writer and community advocate on issues of transgender medical policy. She is the founder of GID Reform Advocates, member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and Advisory Board Member for the Matthew Shepard Foundation and TransYouth Family Allies. She has presented papers on the psychiatric classification of gender diversity at annual conventions of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association and the Association of Women in Psychology. Her articles have appeared in a number of psychology and psychiatry journals and in two books.

Kelley assisted in drafting the current human rights ordinances in Boulder and Denver, Colorado. She was instrumental in trans-positive reform of Colorado drivers license policy in 2006 and in adding Gender Identity and Expression to employment policies of the Hewlett-Packard Company. Kelley received the Colorado Pride Award from Equality Colorado in 1999 and the and 2002 Sonja’s Dream Lifetime Achievement Award and 2007 Melissa Chapman Award for Social Change from the Gender Identity Center of Colorado.

Dr. Winters also authors the GID Reform weblog which can be found here.

Gender identities and gender expression that differ from expectation of assigned birth sex remain very much classified as mental disorder and sexual deviance by the American Psychiatric Association. The consequences of this undeserved stigma to our human dignity, social legitimacy in our affirmed roles are enormous and devastating. We lose our jobs, our homes, our families, our children, our civil justice and our access to medical care to defamatory stereotypes that place an unfair burden of proof upon all gender transcendent people to continually demonstrate our sanity, our competence and our human worth.

The current diagnostic criteria of GID and TF describe transition itself as symptomatic of mental illness, especially so for gender nonconforming children and transwomen. This burdens our supportive medical and mental health providers to re-spin, to repackage, this flawed nomenclature as congruent with social and medical transition, when in fact it was written to contradict transition. As a consequence, only a privileged portion of us who need access to hormonal and/or surgical care are afforded access. Worse yet, trans youth and even adults remain subject to psychological gender reparative and cruel aversion "therapies" intended to shame affirmed gender identities into dark and solitary closets.

The Fifth Edition of the DSM is scheduled for publication by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013. It is the first major revision since 1994. Critical decisions for the diagnostic categories and criteria have already been considered, and the DSM-5 work group authoring the sex and gender categories was sadly stacked to favor bias intolerant of gender diversity. After a period of unprecedented secrecy, draft language for proposed gender diagnoses were disclosed on February 10^th for a period of public review and comment through April 20.

This is a pivotal point in the history of our community, as the DSM-5 will likely impact the lives, civil liberties and medical care of all gender-transcendent people through the 2020s.

In spite of the barriers that we face with mental health policymakers, I have hope for positive change in the DSM-5. The proposed Gender Incongruence diagnoses for adults, adolescents and children (formerly called Gender Identity Disorder) represent some forward progress on both issues of stigma and barriers to medical transition care-- the first forward progress that we have seen in 30 years of DSM revision.

Most significant, is a statement of explanation by the subcommittee that for the first time refutes the false myth of "disordered" gender identity:

"We have proposed a change in conceptualization of the defining features by emphasizing the phenomenon of 'gender incongruence' in contrast to cross-gender identification per se"

This clarification that diverse gender identities are not in themselves the focus of mental pathology is historically unprecedented, since the introduction of Transsexualism to the DSM in 1980. This statement alone provides a powerful educational tool to advocates for our community.

Moreover, the proposed Gender Incongruence category for children has been reformed so that children must show dissatisfaction with birth-sex assignment to meet the criteria and can no longer be diagnosed strictly on the basis of gender role nonconformity. Again, this is an unprecedented step forward for kids who transition in their social roles and for gender nonconforming kids who are not trans but were pathologized in the past.

However, much work is needed to clarify these new criteria so that they do not continue to diagnose difference. For example:

* "Incongruence" is not clearly defined to mean incongruence as experienced by the subject. It could still be misrepresented to mean nonconformity to cultural gender stereotypes.

* The new criteria have retreated from clinically significant distress as a focus of diagnosis, which supports the medical necessity of treatment.

* Ambiguous language continues to misrepresent transition and desire for medical transition care as symptomatic of mental illness.

* The offensive term "Disorder of Sex Development" is used to describe people born with intersex conditions.

* For children, nonconformity to anachronistic gender stereotypes is still emphasized as symptomatic of mental disorder.

* These categories are placed in the DSM section of Sexual Disorders, though describing emotions and behaviors that are not necessarily sexual.

In spite of these, I am for the first time optimistic that the DSM subcommittee authoring these Gender Incongruence diagnoses may be willing to listen to our concerns for more positive reform.

I believe that we stand at our own inflection point in the history of an affirming trans movement, one that our youth in this room will look back upon as adults.

As brothers and sisters in the community, as parents and allies, as medical and mental health providers, please lend your attention and your voices to issues of social stigma and transition medical care access that are rooted in these mental health policy decisions.

Hir: Awesome Trans Poem

Here is a really cool performance of a spoken word piece called "Hir."

The "New" Queer Identity: Bois.

Video: A Boi's Life

From the video info:

An intimate look at a slice of the new generation of queer identity: bois. Boi is a term used in the queer community to refer to a person's sexual and gender identity, and it may include: a person who looks and acts like a young, heterosexual male and partakes in casual sex, a transman, an FTM or female to male, a submissive butch, or a bisexual gay with effeminate traits.

Born in the Wrong Body?

Xavier (laidbaqq) did an amazingly honest, raw video about dysphoria and what it feels like to be "born in the wrong body," which is a sentiment many trans people can relate to.

Trans Energy & Sensitivity

I think being trans has made me more sensitive to energy- from the earth, people, animals, etc, or rather I have such a heightened sense of self/existence from being transgender and having to question the most fundamental elements of identity that most people never even have to think about makes me more sensitive, intuitive, and aware of things like this than most people.

What do you think? Has being trans (or if you're not trans, has being educated about the trans community) increased your sensitivity in other situations or manifested itself in other ways/forms besides in terms of gender transition?

snipncody: trans publicity concerns

snipncody (shaun) did an excellent video on being bombarded with questions about his trans status, having to reaffirm his identity, being a constant educator, and assumptions people make about trans people and his frustration with it.

here is shaun's original video:



here is my response:

Trans in the News: Rare Gender Identity Defect Hits Gaza Families

One of the things I would like to do with this blog is keep up to date information on transgender/transsexual happenings in the news. The first post in the "Trans in the News" series is about male pseudohermaphroditism, which is affecting an unusual amount of boys in Gaza. Very interesting, and a fascinating video accompanies the article.

Read the article on CNN.com and watch the video here.

Gaza City (CNN) -- Two Palestinian teenagers stroll amid the mounds of rubble left by last year's Israeli military offensive, listening to the tinny beat of a Turkish pop song playing on a cell phone.

Nadir Mohammed Saleh and Ahmed Fayiz Abed Rabo are cousins and next-door neighbors. With their gelled hair, buttoned-down shirts and jeans, they look much like any other 16-year-old Palestinian boy. But looks, Ahmed says, can be deceiving.

"Only my appearance, my haircut and clothing, makes me look like a boy," Ahmed says, gesturing with his hands across his face. "Inside, I am like a female. I am a girl."

Until last summer, both Nadir and Ahmed were -- for all intents and purposes -- girls. They wore female headscarves, attended girls' school and even answered to the female first names Navin and Ola.

Both Nadir and Ahmed were born with a rare birth defect called male pseudohermaphrodism.

Deficiency of the hormone 17-B-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (17-B-HSD) during pregnancy left their male reproductive organs deformed and buried deep within their abdomens.

At birth, doctors identified Nadir and Ahmed as girls, because they appeared to have female genitalia.

As a result, they spent the first 16 years of their lives dressing and acting like girls. It was a role that grew increasingly difficult to play, as they hit puberty and their bodies began generating testosterone, resulting in facial hair and increasingly masculine features.

"They used to travel by car to girls' school and back," says Nadir's father Mohammed Sadih Ahmed Saleh. "Because of their facial hair, it was difficult for them to go out into the street. Psychologically they were distressed."

Finally, on June 22, with the support of their families, both Nadir and Ahmed transformed themselves into boys.

"They transferred on the same day," Saleh says. "Clothing, they switched to the other [boys'] school on the same day. They cut their hair on the same day. Both of them helped each other get through this crisis."

There are an unusually high number of male pseudohermaphrodite births in the Gaza neighborhood of Jabalya, where Nadir and Ahmed live.

Dr. Jehad Abudaia, a Canadian-Palestinian pediatrician and urologist practicing in Gaza, says he has diagnosed nearly 80 cases like Nadir's and Ahmed's in the last seven years.

"It is astonishing that we have [so] many cases with this defect, which is very rare all over the world," Abudaia says. He attributes the high frequency of this birth defect to "consanguinity," or in-breeding.

"If you want to go to the root of the problem, this problem runs in families in the genes." Abudaia says. "They want to get married to cousins... they don't go to another family. This is a problem."

In Western, more developed countries, doctors typically identify and then operate to correct disorders of sex differentiation at birth. But in war-torn Gaza, which has a lower standard of medical care, the birth defect can go undetected for years.

"Some of them unfortunately will be discovered late, when they are more than 14 years [old]. When they have been living as a female and they don't have menstruation, then they will go to the gynecologist," Abudaia says.

Abudaia's first advice to patients with the disorder is to immediately adopt male clothing and hair cuts, and then to plan for a sex-change operation.

This unusual ritual has been performed several times in the extended family of Nadir and Ahmed, where sex differentiation is a recurring disorder.

Nadir's 21-year-old brother Midyam and his 32-year-old cousin Ameen Abd Hamed share the same condition of male pseudohermaphrodism. As adolescents, they too underwent the gender identity transformation process the family refers to as "the transfer."

The traumatizing experience is all the more difficult because Gaza is a socially-conservative society, where there is a fair amount of segregation between males and females.

"I sat down with Nadir and explained to him how to adapt to the street, how to sit with the guys and talk to them... because at the beginning his mental state was bad, just like what happened to me," Ameen says.

"We did not understand what to do," says Ahmed, one of the 16-year-olds. "It was a new life for us, as if we were born again."

Though Nadir and Ahmed clearly have the love and support of their family, they say that is not enough. They are appealing to the international community to help them get the expensive and complicated sex-change operations they say they need to live normal lives.

"It's the only obstacle and the source of all the problems," Nadir says.

Until the sex-change operation is completed, Palestinian officials won't change the gender on their identity cards to "male," thus restricting their access to higher education.

In addition, Nadir and Ahmed complain of health problems like kidney infections due to complications resulting from the disfigurement of their genitalia.

"This is 100 percent a humanitarian issue," says Nadir's father, Mohammed. "There are four conditions in the same [extended] family. If we propose conducting the same operation on all four of them, the cost would be $30,000. We don't have $30,000 and there is no advanced medicine in Gaza."

Until then, these troubled Palestinians say their genders and their identities will remain in conflict, much like the land around them.