Susan's Place Transgender Resources

after all trans means changing over. i find a lot of post women still using a defining term 'transwoman'  to definie them. do you drop the trans and just live your life as a woman who is done transitioning? or will you stay in transition forever?

We have quite a few topics that touch on the topic, particularly in the Post-Op board in the Transitioning section of the site.

It varies from person to person.

And some people never use the trans part to begin with!

Quote from: Jamie D on September 11, 2013, 01:18:11 AM
We have quite a few topics that touch on the topic, particularly in the Post-Op board in the Transitioning section of the site.

It varies from person to person.

And some people never use the trans part to begin with!

What they said.

The use of the label basically is your choice and some people don't care while some want the trans* label to be between medical providers only as history. Whatever rocks your boat go with it.

Quote from: lovelessheart on September 11, 2013, 01:01:30 AM
after all trans means changing over. i find a lot of post women still using a defining term 'transwoman'  to definie them. do you drop the trans and just live your life as a woman who is done transitioning? or will you stay in transition forever?

After my SRS I will drop 'trans' because I'll be a woman.

Depends on the situation. Publicly certainly I would not use the trans word. Talking to others like me, I probably will. Telling someone about my past, I probably would (if I have to). It just will not go away - life is the sum of all the moments of present that line up in time and I cannot shed the fact that I did have a life that was different in some way - special - like all lives are special - but just as a woman will say that she was a biker or a hippie or a lesbian, referring to the word trans serves as a short for those special experiences which in the biker lady may be that at some point she liked wearing leather and be on the road, for the hippie lady it probably means she liked colorful clothes, open relationships and maybe smoked weed and the lesbian woman had sexual relationships with other women. I think what subsides is the identification with it. Sometimes I go on and say "I WAS trans", but that is not quite right. Actually one should say something like having a TRANS past as TRANS is not who I AM but rather what I experienced. If that makes sense.

I stopped using the term trans when i was asked by a Psychiatrists first words out of her mouth to me do i prostitute myself. Wth... After that i stayed as much to the term for me i suffered from gender identity dysphoria or GID. I also have used i am gender challenged. There is even a part of me that feels GID is a factor or aspect of the intersexed condition.

I know many who are proud of the umbrella term of trans or ->-bleeped-<-.

I have been in GID transition since 1999 and i class myself now as woman since April 2013. For me transition or the trans was only the period when my mind never fit my body, today all is now in harmony. I have never ran down the street yelling i am TG, i have keeped my condition as private as i could, it really is not anyones business other then mine. I planned each step the best i could and stayed true to myself.

I like the fact that they use Gender identity and not transgender in the new laws of discrimination.

Izzy

Well yes, the word "trans" itself has some bad connotations, but I am not a friend of political correctness stuff normally. If you need to say "gender identity disorder" instead of "transsexual" then you have a disorder, if you say "transident", you again have trans in it - its no matter how you call it, it is what it is and for me the question is not how to call it but if I consider myself to BE that - and this I do not - I consider myself however to undeniably have experienced a transition and a life situation that can be described by any of these words. It does not define my identity though. At least it should not - sometimes I must say that at least it defines how I feel. Like that I am happy to be a woman now with the memory behind that feeling that this was in some way different at some point. I know that this is of course not what other women feel when they feel happy to be women, but thats ok - this is MY past and they have theirs, maybe they are happy to be women because of similar reasons even - that they do not have to wear a tie, fight in a war, compete on a football field - or maybe their body was damaged and now it is healed, just like our bodies were damaged before birth and then again in puberty and now have healed (or will be).

I dropped the term the day of SRS. If it becomes necessary I may indicate I was born with a deformity but would only use the term transsexual to a doctor.

Being trans is just another label and for some reason people love their labels. I say call yourself whatever you please it doesn't really matter.
But as far as transitioning goes I think everybody on this planet transitions in a way. From the moment we are born we are constantly changing nobody stays the same.
So really your transition as a person never ends unless you die your not going to be the same person you are today ten years from now or twenty we are constantly changing and evolving. So really transitioning never ends. So your gender transition can end but your transition as a person won't.  ;)

Yes definitely. We constantly undergo a transition in many other ways not related to gender. The whole life is such a process in whcih we learn and change. At some point the whole gender transition also becomes just one of these transitions. At some point it is not about transitioning to a "different" gender anymore, but it is about getting accustomed to that, about learning new things in that new gender and while "transition" as a process never ends, it will more and more look like the transition that every women (or men) goes through in their lives. The transition to becoming an adult, then an over-30 person, then middle aged, then old. The transition from being single to being married and then maybe divorced and remarried. The transition from one job to another. All these life experiences are transitions and will follow up the gender transition and replace it in the importance at a present time, but all of these transitions are always within us as a memory , as an experience. They are what makes us. I would not want to forget the memory of my transition even though I know that in some sense it would be liberating to not know anymore that I am not just another woman. But would that not be a shame? All expereinces are valuable, also the bad ones. And the experience, the memories of having had a gender transition, of having been transsexual at some point - they make us different from those who did not have them, just as to marry a husband makes one different from those who never married or having a child makes one different from those who have not. The distinction between people who have done the gender transition experience (oh gee, sounds like a ride at an amusement park) and those who did not is what I think people want to have a word for. So they use "trans" as such a word to describe that difference, just as they use "married" or "mother" to distinguish between the other examples I mentioned. The downside is, that while marriage and motherhood are catergories that people honor, like, maybe even envy - trans is the opposite for many. And this bugs me and lets me not use that word if I can avoid it. Yet already here in the forums I cannot, as it is just too convenient to use it as a short description of a whole set of experiences.
This is how I see it and what I meant by saying that I AM not trans but that I HAVE had experiences and transitions in my life that were trans (and in some way yes, I still do have some of them now with all the long term post op issues) - but I do not IDENTIFY with trans - it is not "TO BE" which causes identification but it is something like "HAVING" those experiences.
I hope that makes sense. I never know if I write these more complex interpretations in a foreign language ;)