A Letter To Would-Be Transsexuals

[tinkerbell]

This letter was introduced to us by Blanche, one of our newest members.  I think that everyone considering transition should read this letter, for it is one of the most honest ones that I have ever read.  Thanks very much Blanche.  Also thanks to Kristi for the idea.

A Letter To Would-Be Transsexuals

It's not easy to be transsexual. If you're questioning whether or not sex reassignment is right for you, here's a test. Below we've listed all the worst-case scenarios, the awful things that might happen to you if you go down this path. It's not that there aren't good things about being transsexual; there are, but it's important to know what pitfalls may lie ahead.

Not all transsexuals will suffer from everything on this list. Some might be lucky enough to have only experienced a few of these hardships. We're willing to concede that there might actually be some transsexuals out there who have never been troubled by anything on this list, because we suppose that anything is possible, but it's not likely. More likely you will be meeting and battling at least some of these demons, although everyone's experience is different.

Being transsexual is not "fun". It's not "cool". It's not all that erotic, either. You do it because you could not do anything else and still be as happy. It's an incredible relief, and there are many joys associated with that relief from pain, but it is a hard and difficult road. Many - but not all - of the problems you will face are the result of a bigoted and unfair society. That isn't fair or just, but it is the reality of the situation.

Here's the test: If you can read everything on this list and say, "I don't care. I'd put up with every single thing, every day for the rest of my life, if I can only buy my body back, if I can only just make myself happier with my physical gender, it'll be worth all of it," then it's probably right for you. If all these worst-case scenarios are just buzzing flies compared with the real pain of your daily dealings with your body dysphoria, then go with our blessings.....but go prepared.

If You Get A Sex Change:

1. Educating people about transgender issues will be a part-time job for you, for the rest of your life. It's worthy work, but it can be boring and wearing and exhausting. Start putting together your spiel now - it will have to cover things like why you did this, when you knew, what your feelings were, etc. Start practicing it now, on supportive friends and family, if you have any. Get used to it.

2. You will be discriminated against. Not everywhere, not by everyone, but you will run into a lot of discrimination. It will be worse if you don't pass and you don't stay in the closet. If you do pass, you may worry about your cover being blown. If you don't pass, you may be ridiculed or assaulted. If you stay in the closet, you have to constantly fear being outed, and this restricts your pool of friends and acquaintances. If you are out, you might as well not pass.

3. Passing itself can be hard on your spirit. People that you meet for the first time don't really know who you are and what kind of experiences you come from. Imagine knowing that every new person you meet has to have their assumptions about you not only shattered but completely trashed if they are to really know you at all. Depending on how genetically lucky you are, passing may be a constant drain on your energy from the endless worry about whether you're moving or speaking or dressing right.

4. You may have difficulty finding employment. It's not unusual to be fired from most jobs where you transition, unless you're in a really liberal environment. If you don't pass, or you're out, you will find it hard to find work. Social mobility among transsexuals is mostly downward. Your resume has someone else's work history on it, and you may have to choose between leaving on the prior experience that may out you in the interview, or leaving it off and maybe not getting the job. The best option, of course, is to find a job that will be fine with your transition first, before you do it, but not everyone is that lucky.

5. If you found cross-dressing erotic before transition, that will probably go away when it's not cross-dressing any more, it's just normalcy. It's not erotic when it's what's for breakfast for the rest of your life. You'll have to find a new fetish.

6. You won't ever have a normal body of a member of the opposite sex. You may have a decent replication, depending on your genetics, surgery and hormone results, and luck, but it won't be "normal". Hopefully it will be "good enough" for complete psychological well-being, but it might not be.

7. There's no guarantee that your body dysphoria will ever go away entirely. It will certainly improve as you take hormones and change your appearance, but it may not ever go away completely. If you choose not to get genital surgery - it may cost too much, or you may not be satisfied with the results - you may still get attacks of dysphoria, especially when you try to have sex.

8. If you do get surgery, it may be less than ideal. It will hurt. It will certainly cost a lot. Although surgical techniques are better than they were, there's still no guarantee that it won't cost you your nerve endings. This goes for MTF and FTMs are well. We know some of both who had genital surgery within the last year and lost the ability to orgasm with the moved-around tissue. It may develop complications. It may leave huge scars. In the case of phalloplasties, it may rot off. No surgeon has a perfect rate; it may have more to do with good genetics and pure luck than anything else. If you have bad results, it can painfully remind you of your trans status every time you look at it.

9. If you enjoyed being naked in front of people before (we're assuming that it was in appropriate places), that will change once your anatomy is gender-mixed. It will be hard to be naked in front of strangers without it becoming an Education Campaign. Even if you educate them, they may not see you as anything but a freak show.

10. Your dating pool will shrink drastically. This is especially true if you are FTM. That doesn't mean that you can't ever find someone - we did - but it means that you'll have to look a whole lot harder, put up with a lot of rejection on the grounds of your anatomy, and deal with Educating nearly everyone you date. The vast majority of people will not want you sexually. When you do get in bed with a new person, you'll probably have to go through a long explanation of what works and what doesn't, what you want touched and what you want left alone, what you want things called and what sex acts you can't stand. This will, of course, vary with the dysphoria level of each individual person, but with even a medium amount of dysphoria, explaining your sexual habits and functioning bears more resemblance to what disabled people have to do when explaining about their bodies and sexual difficulties.

11. You may lose your family. The majority of the transfolk we know do not have good relationships with their blood kin. It takes very special people to accept their child's sex change, and not everyone is up to it.

12. You may lose many or even all of your friends. You can, of course, make new ones, but losing friends over a sex change is not a fun thing.

13. You may lose your children. Older, grown ones may refuse to speak to you because you've robbed them of having a normal mom or dad. Younger ones can be taken away from you with comparative ease. This varies from state to state, but in general, being transsexual can be a near-fatal strike against you in a custody battle. After complete sex reassignment, you are sterile, and being trans will also be a strike against any attempts to adopt.

14. You may lose your religious community. This depends strongly on your faith of choice - some are fine with us, some think that we are dangerous and evil. Since religion is one of those subjects where people become extremely irrational at times, it will be exceptionally difficult for you to win acceptance in the latter sort of spiritual structure.

15. People will ask you rude questions about your genitalia.....for the rest of your life.

16. Statistically, you will be much more likely to be assaulted and/or killed by hatemongers. This is more likely to happen if you don't pass or are out of the closet, but remember that you can always be outed. Remember Brandon Teena. You will be more vulnerable to assault, rape, and murder, and the authorities will be less likely to believe your story, come to your aid, investigate your murder, or jail your murderer.

17. If you do go to jail, you have a higher likelihood of being killed while in prison. If you do not have genital surgery, you will be placed in a prison with people of your birth gender, unless your state is one of the rare ones with a separate wing for transgendered people. Regardless, you will be denied your hormones while in prison. No state is currently required to provide them, and so far all court cases by ->-bleeped-<-s to get hormones while in prison have not been successful.

18. You will have trouble finding medical care. Every doctor must be educated, and many will turn you away on the grounds of being transsexual. You may have to endure someone giving you an exam with a revolted look on their face. The emergency room can become a nightmare. Even well-meaning doctors may not know how to deal with your different anatomy and endocrinology well enough to effectively help you. Even surgically constructed genitals need different medical care from ones grown at birth, so there's no way to pretend that you're just like everyone else medically. If you are in an accident and unconscious, your nonstandard body may well affect the quality of the medical care that you get from emergency personnel.

19. Being on hormones usually means being dependent on a substance created by large, corrupt pharmaceutical companies for the rest of your life, especially if you've had your reproductive organs removed. It's expensive, and if you stop your body will suffer. It means having to deal with occasional shortages, price fluctuations, insurance plans that don't always cover it, and (for those on testosterone, which is a controlled substance) pharmacies that sometimes treat you like some steroid abusing bodybuilder.

20. There are certain parts of the globe that you can absolutely never visit because of the very real possibility of being jailed or worse at customs. In certain countries, our very existence is illegal. It's harder for us to get passports, especially if we have not had genital surgery.

If you're reading this list and you're thinking, "Well, maybe this isn't quite worth it," then don't do it. If all this is no more than annoying mosquito bites to the very real and present pain of daily dysphoria, then go ahead, but you'd better learn quickly how to survive.

tink

[tinkerbell]

I've run across this letter quite a while ago and, while I think it has some valuable cautions in it, it's also the kind of thing that can scare people sh*tless who might actually have better lives if they would transition. The majority of people who transition don't have the worst case scenario or the 'easy-peasy' scenario... it's somewhere in the vast middle ground. I know that for someone like myself, who spent a lot of my life feeling as if transitioning would be impossible, reading a list like this would not have helped me. It would have driven me deeper into my hole and made me feel even more hopeless. What I found far more valuable is hearing stories from people who have transition histories that are somewhat similar to your own. Trying to intuitively feel what seems similar between your stories and what's different. Seeing how they solved  problems, how they got through the tough times, what traps they might have gotten themselves into.

I don't think there are too many people who would read some of those doom and gloom situations in the list and think, "oh, this is a mosquito bite compared to gender dysphoria." What I know I heard myself say was, "I can't go on the way I am, that's not possible, the people who love me will lose me unless I get out of this hole. I need to transition and I need to know that I can deal with whatever comes up and make the best of a terribly tough 'rock and a hard place' situation. And that even if I don't get to a perfect place, I can go way farther than I think I can and I might surprise myself with what I find."

It's very important to know that so many of the issues this person mentions can be solved and you can get past them. And when you get past them, you can have an immeasurably richer life than if you read the list and went nowhere. So, what I'm saying is, I would like to see an annotated version of the list where you can click a link or two for each of the listings, and read an account of how someone dealt with the issues that came up and what they learned by going through it. I would have learned a lot more that way.

ciao,
Gina M.

Aha!  good point Gina.   Perhaps I should provide the link of the thread where Blanche introduced this letter so that everyone has an idea of what this is all
about:

Reference Thread: 

https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,18601.msg144753/boardseen.html#new


I agree with you Gina, this letter is not a step by step process of what every TS person could experience.  Indeed, the author of this letter says so very clearly:

Below we've listed all the worst-case scenarios, the awful things that might happen to you if you go down this path. It's not that there aren't good things about being transsexual; there are, but it's important to know what pitfalls may lie ahead.

Not all transsexuals will suffer from everything on this list. Some might be lucky enough to have only experienced a few of these hardships. We're willing to concede that there might actually be some transsexuals out there who have never been troubled by anything on this list, because we suppose that anything is possible, but it's not likely. More likely you will be meeting and battling at least some of these demons, although everyone's experience is different.

Yes indeed, this letter is as scary as the following statements:

It's not something for somebody in their 40s to do, someone who's had a life as a man, - - - If you're 18 or 20 and never had the kind of (advantages) I had, and you're oriented in that direction, sure, go ahead and make right what nature didn't. But if you're a 45-year-old man and you're an airline pilot and you have an ex-wife and three adolescent kids, you better get on Thorazine or Zoloft or Prozac or get locked up or do whatever it takes to keep you from being allowed to do something like this.  I wish that there could have been an alternative way, but there wasn't in 1975. If there was a drug that I could have taken that would have reduced the pressure, I would have been better off staying the way I was -- a totally intact person. I know deep down that I'm a second-class woman. I get a lot of inquiries from would-be transsexuals, but I don't want anyone to hold me out as an example to follow. Today there are better choices, including medication, for dealing with the compulsion to crossdress and the depression that comes from gender confusion. As far as being fulfilled as a woman, I'm not as fulfilled as I dreamed of being. I get a lot of letters from people who are considering having this operation...and I discourage them all."

or:

Don't do it! That's my advice. This is the most awful, most expensive, most painful, most disruptive thing you could ever do. Don't do it unless there is no other alternative. You may think your life is tough but unless it's a choice between suicide and a sex-change it will only get worse. And the costs keep coming. You lose control over most aspects of your life, become a second class citizen and all so you can wear women's clothes and feel cuter than you do now. Don't do it is all I've got to say.

That's advice I wish someone had given me. I had the sex change, I "pass" fine, my career is good but you can't imagine the number of times I've wished I could go back and see if there was another way. Despite following the rules and being as honest as I could with the medical folks at each stage, nobody stopped me and said "Are you honest to God absolutely sure this is the ONLY path for you?!" To the contrary, the voices were all cheerfully supportive of my decision. I was fortunate that the web didn't exist then - there are too damn many cheerleaders ready to reassure themselves of their own decision by parading their "successful" surgeries and encouraging others.

Or many of the other frightening statements found here:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Warning.html#Renee


This letter seems to be intended for those people who are questioning whether or not they are transsexual.  Especially for those who think that transsexuality is "fun", "cool", or an "erotic" experience:

Being transsexual is not "fun". It's not "cool". It's not all that erotic

Obviously for someone who is sure about their gender identity or transsexual status, going through the worst scenarios of this letter WILL NOT be a matter of "choice".  As you well stated Gina, if someone is TS, they will hear what you did at one point in time:

What I know I heard myself say was, "I can't go on the way I am, that's not possible, the people who love me will lose me unless I get out of this hole. I need to transition and I need to know that I can deal with whatever comes up and make the best of a terribly tough 'rock and a hard place' situation. And that even if I don't get to a perfect place, I can go way farther than I think I can and I might surprise myself with what I find."

This letter seems to discourage transition as do the rest of the statements I have quoted; however, they can only discourage those people who are NOT really TS.  At least that is the way I see it.

Additionally, yes, it would be nice to have links as you suggested but there aren't.  But I have an idea, why not use this letter and compare it with what we have experienced.  I believe we can answer to each of these 20 potential situations.  I know that some of you may not have completed SRS yet, but still, you can aswer, at least part of those situations, can't you?

If you want to give it a go and be the first member to enlighten us with your experiences, please be my guest.  I will also be posting my own experiences.

tink

[Sheila]

I have read all these statements before. It is kind of a catch 22 in that they are very true but most of us don't go through a lot of these statements. If someone were to read this and they were very unstable they will think no way can I pass or I don't want to lose all my rights or friends, etc. They may just think what is the use and then suicide is the best method. I think that they should know all about what they are going to go through but need to be talking with their therapist so they can talk them through all of this and rationalize it so that maybe one or two thing might happen but not all of them. This is fodder for the patient and therapist. To pile it all in one internet post can just over whelm someone.
Sheila

[Nero]

I've seen this before as well. While I feel most points are relevant and should be considered by all who would transition, it's important to note that this is one man's perspective. Just as the cisgendered don't lead the same lives, we have all different experiences and consequences of transition.
Outcomes depend on so many factors - one's area, one's passability, one's personality, etc.

10. Your dating pool will shrink drastically. This is especially true if you are FTM. That doesn't mean that you can't ever find someone - we did - but it means that you'll have to look a whole lot harder, put up with a lot of rejection on the grounds of your anatomy, and deal with Educating nearly everyone you date. The vast majority of people will not want you sexually. When you do get in bed with a new person, you'll probably have to go through a long explanation of what works and what doesn't, what you want touched and what you want left alone, what you want things called and what sex acts you can't stand. This will, of course, vary with the dysphoria level of each individual person, but with even a medium amount of dysphoria, explaining your sexual habits and functioning bears more resemblance to what disabled people have to do when explaining about their bodies and sexual difficulties.

I'm as pessimistic as you can get, but this dude takes the cake. He's projecting his own failures unto other transmen.  Plenty of transmen have straight female partners. Of course we face challenges natal men don't have, but just because no one wants HIM, doesn't mean all transmen are destined to be alone. Maybe the dude just doesn't know what the hell he's doing when it comes to women? I'm sure that never crossed his mind. Everybody's got to be a victim.

[tinkerbell]

Everybody's got to be a victim.

LOL    the victim...umm...what should we call it?  .......syndrome?

tink

P.S.  Based on what I have heard from a few FTM's, their dating pool actually increases...I don't know how accurate this is, but it does seem so.

[TheBattler]

A Letter To Would-Be Transsexuals

hmm - this is refering to me. I thought you where either TS or you where not - are you saying I have a choice?

Would-be sounds like I choose to be TS - can I run from this place as far as possibe.

Transistion or die - Hmm I do not choose transistion at this stage

I have always said I want a choice in this decision - in the end if I find I am TS then the details would be irrelavent. I do what I have to do to survive and be happy.

For the moment the decision as to when I stop resisting and go down the path layed out for me is more important then  any details.

Alice

[tinkerbell]

Good catch, Alice.  No one "becomes" transsexual; you either are or aren't.


tink

[candifla]

1. Educating people about transgender issues will be a part-time job for you.
I'm a hermit.

2. You will be discriminated against.
See above.

3. Passing itself can be hard on your spirit.
I find it fulfilling and wonderful. You lie.

4. You may have difficulty finding employment.
Umm.. ever heard of escorting?

5. If you found cross-dressing erotic before transition, that will probably go away when it's not cross-dressing any more.
Finally, now males clothes will be a turn on!

6. You won't ever have a normal body of a member of the opposite sex.
Since the opposite sex is now technically FTM in my case, I never won't boo-hoo.

7. There's no guarantee that your body dysphoria will ever go away entirely.
There's no guarantee you'll ever find happiness either... what's the point again?

8. If you do get surgery, it may be less than ideal. It will hurt.
Can't be worse than Michael's.

9. If you enjoyed being naked in front of people before.
Dang, my streakin' days are over.

10. Your dating pool will shrink drastically.
Actually, the dating pool has INCREASED, the one-night fling is the one that's reduced.

11. You may lose your family.
I gain me. Ouch that's good.

12. You may lose many or even all of your friends.
Got no friends. Backstabbing' bastards.

13. You may lose your children.
I'll be infertile soon.

14. You may lose your religious community.
Praise Jebus.

15. People will ask you rude questions about your genitalia.
$20 to touch, $100 to play.

17. If you do go to jail, you have a higher likelihood of being killed while in prison.
I stay at home a lot.

19. Being on hormones usually means being dependent on a substance
umm.. like the food i don't grow?

20. There are certain parts of the globe that you can absolutely never visit
i ain't leavin' the states

well.. i guess i get a green light for SRS!

[tinkerbell]

OMG Candi, I'm choking on my dinner.  LOL 

tink

P.S.  I guess I should change my mood icon to "happy" now. 

[Elizabeth]

The thing is, most transsexuals are deeply troubled people already and I have never met a transsexual that enjoyed being naked. That is absurd. This is more elitist crap. I had the fortitude to do it, and look at all this horror I had to do through, certainly you could never do it. And why is that? (All together now) "because you're not a true transsexual".

I started my transition because there was nothing else to do. It was that or kill myself. I already tried being the forty-something year old man, it didn't work out. No one really knew who I was, so I didn't have any real friends. Everyone I knew only knew "him". The truth is, I was not real crushed by the relationships I lost because they were not with me anyway. They were all based on pretense. Guess what? I hate fishing and I hate working on cars and I hate going to bars and drinking beer and I hate all the things I did as a male to have friends.

If anyone was ever swayed by such a letter, I would like to know who they are? No transsexuals I know would consider any of those things to be any harsher than what they have already been through. And if you luck out and have supportive friends and family, and don't get fired and your wife don't leave you? More power to you. Personally I don't feel these letters serve any purpose other than to say "whoa is me, look how rough I had it, no one had it as bad as me".

Love always,
Elizabeth

[Kate]

I see it mostly as transphobic propaganda in the guise of "helpful warnings."

My only problem with transitioning... the only REAL challenge... has been overcoming my own internalized shame and transphobia. Shame and fears I unfairly and naively projected upon Everyone Else. Fears which are constantly reinforced by a particular segment of the trans community... or maybe I should say THE "trans community." Fear mongering seems to be the glue which defines the "community" and binds it together.

I'll keep saying it until I can't anymore, but FOR ALL YOU LURKERS AND NEWBIES: Do NOT give up hope just because you read stuff like this. PLEASE understand that GID really makes a mess of people's insides, and the horror "warnings" you constantly read about on TS forums might be more projections of people's unresolved issues than actual realities you'll have to face. Ask yourself WHY people might want to constantly make transition sound like some death sentence that only strong people/victims like themselves could handle. If you need to transition, than just bloody DO IT. Get over yourself, work through your shame, and stop making your gender issue into some all-consuming issue, or it WILL consume you.

~Kate~

[tinkerbell]

According to what I have read on this very site, there are those TS's who are not (and never have been) troubled by their nudity (so it isn't as unheard of as it may seem, apparently); I don't know if this has changed over time but this is what I have read.  If you search the site, under the sexuality forums or the personal blogs, or under the transsexual talk, you will find those posts.

tink

[Elizabeth]

According to what I have read on this very site, there are those TS's who are not (and never have been) troubled by their nudity (so it isn't as unheard of as it may seem, apparently); I don't know if this has changed over time but this is what I have read.  If you search the site, under the sexuality forums or some of the personal blogs, or under the MTF talk, you will find those posts.

tink

I believe you. It's surprising to me, though. I guess I just assumed everyone hated being nude because I do. My bad.

Love always,
Elizabeth

[tinkerbell]

Just keep the dragons coming kitty cats; that's why this thread is here, to agree and disagree with it.

tink

P.S.  Elizabeth, I hated it too. 

[TheBattler]

I'll keep saying it until I can't anymore, but FOR ALL YOU LURKERS AND NEWBIES: Do NOT give up hope just because you read stuff like this. PLEASE understand that GID really makes a mess of people's insides, and the horror "warnings" you constantly read about on TS forums might be more projections of people's unresolved issues than actual realities you'll have to face. Ask yourself WHY people might want to constantly make transition sound like some death sentence that only strong people/victims like themselves could handle. If you need to transition, than just bloody DO IT. Get over yourself, work through your shame, and stop making your gender issue into some all-consuming issue, or it WILL consume you.

~Kate~

Ohh Kate - When will you understand I just not want to bloody do it. Remember the amount of whining you did before you did it - everyone needs to go throught that. It is the human experience to not want to go into the unknown - be safe with what they know. They only just do it when they relise the there own death is a distinct possibility if they do not wish to go through the pain.

I know I am getting closer to doing it then I think about what is best - transistion or suicide. I am still looking for a third option where I can be happy.

Alice

[Suzy]

According to what I have read on this very site, there are those TS's who are not (and never have been) troubled by their nudity (so it isn't as unheard of as it may seem, apparently); I don't know if this has changed over time but this is what I have read.  If you search the site, under the sexuality forums or the personal blogs, or under the transsexual talk, you will find those posts.

tink

Indeed some do, Tink.  I won't name anyone like that and I take the 5th.

And I do agree with Kate that nobody should ever give up hope.  Thanks, wonderful lady, for that reminder and for your inspirational example.

I do hope some of the attitudes are changing, and that many of these points are getting better.  But let's face it, there's scarcely anyone who has transitioned that will not face at least some of these.  The point is not to scare anyone away from following her heart.  Rather, it is a reality check.  It is a big cruel world out there, at least the one I live in.  I'd rather know the challenges ahead of time so I can prepare myself to face them.  If I can talk someone out of transitioning I doubt they really needed to in the first place.  But to those who know the challenges and say: Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, these points will serve as a valuable warning. 

Despite knowing the obstacles in my path, my journey to this point has been a fulfilling one of awe and wonder and joy.  I would not trade it for the world.

Peace,
Kristi

[Nero]

According to what I have read on this very site, there are those TS's who are not (and never have been) troubled by their nudity (so it isn't as unheard of as it may seem, apparently); I don't know if this has changed over time but this is what I have read.  If you search the site, under the sexuality forums or the personal blogs, or under the transsexual talk, you will find those posts.

tink

I understand that some people with various degrees of gender dysphoria, may feel the need to dress or present as the opposite gender. Maybe even full-time. Maybe even seek bodily alterations (as evidenced by androgynes who also seek this).
Some transsexuals are more bothered by certain physical features more than others. But I don't believe any female-born man or male-born woman is comfortable nude prior to SRS.
There is no way being a man with female parts, or a woman with male parts is not extremely painful. I've worn bathing suits or shirts in the shower, and dressed in the dark since age 11.
This is a severe body/soul mismatch. Not a game. Not a fantasy. You don't wake up one morning and say 'Hey, I always thought it'd be cool to be the opposite gender.'
Sorry, I just don't believe anyone without body dysphoria - translation: anyone perfectly comfortable buck naked prior to transition, is transsexual.

[seldom]

We all know what we risks we face going into this.  I shaped my education and career choices around this.  My friends are highly progressive and accepting.  One can seek out good friends and choose career paths they are less likely to face discrimination. 
But one cannot pick ones family, that is my loss. 

I knew the risks, but its not like I had much of a choice to begin with, and I was born this way.
I have enough physical scaring from choices not my own made shortly after my childbirth, THAT was a mutilation.  What I am doing now is a correction.   

[cindianna_jones]

1. Educating people about transgender issues will be a part-time job for you.
... and the pay is lousy.

2. You will be discriminated against.
So what else is new?

3. Passing itself can be hard on your spirit.
You know, I was really really sick last night.  I thought that I had passed everything. I'll have to watch for an itself in the toilet

4. You may have difficulty finding employment.
Finding it has never been a problem. Getting the job can be tough though. 

5. If you found cross-dressing erotic before transition, that will probably go away when it's not cross-dressing any more.
Hmm... lessee... I can imagine how cutting off your erotica can diminish any feelings for it!

6. You won't ever have a normal body of a member of the opposite sex.
Opposite whom?  

7. There's no guarantee that your body dysphoria will ever go away entirely.
And you don't have any guarantees in the first place. Who is born with guarantees?

8. If you do get surgery, it may be less than ideal. It will hurt.
Oh please, make it stop!  It did hurt.  Big freakin deal.

9. If you enjoyed being naked in front of people before.
Huh?  Never did I enjoy being naked in front of anyone.  Duh?

10. Your dating pool will shrink drastically.
That's only if you don't add water to it occassionally.  Follow the directions carefully.

11. You may lose your family.
Regardless what they think, I know exactly where they are.

12. You may lose many or even all of your friends.
Yes, that was a deliberate choice.  Good ridance!

13. You may lose your children.
Sad but true.

14. You may lose your religious community.
I really wish that they would lose me! I still know where they are.

15. People will ask you rude questions about your genitalia.
Huh?  Never!  But I don't frequent the bath houses. I really wonder where this writer hangs out during his off time hours where they sit around talking about genitalia.

17. If you do go to jail, you have a higher likelihood of being killed while in prison.
And if you don't go to jail you can write warning letters like these

18. Being on hormones usually means being dependent on a substance
Oh ye of little faith.  Don't get sick.

19. There are certain parts of the globe that you can absolutely never visit
That's why there's the internet and HD TV.

Listen folks, the intent here is to be sure about what you are doing.  Don't be scared by these people who are trying to make you think..... just think. Don't do this because someone tells you do do it.  By the same token, don't rely too much on passionate religious figures to help you figure out your life.  They'll do more harm than good.

Cindi

[Autumn]

The thing is, most transsexuals are deeply troubled people already and I have never met a transsexual that enjoyed being naked. That is absurd.

For me personally, the only time i'm relatively happy with my body is staring at the curvy waistline i work so incredibly hard to maintain. Sometimes I feel it's sick, since i'm slightly underweight, but it looks right.

edit: The thighs/rear/stomach, when shaven, have the right look too. Sometimes when I have to go a few weeks from not having time to pamper myself I forget what it looks like til I get the chance to break out the razor.