- The Little Boy Book
Transitioning female-to-male in Australia
Stand by your Man (and stay sane in the process!)
Explaining It 102
SOME people feel uncomfortable with the gender role they are expected to play based on their sex. For example, not all women like to wear dresses, put on makeup or marry men. Not all men like sport, the great outdoors or want a woman as their sexual partner.
Other people are uncomfortable with certain aspects of their physical body so they undertake cosmetic treatments. These include facelifts, hair transplants, breast augmentation, tummy-tucks and a range of different male and female body shaping procedures, both surgical and non-surgical. This group of people are basically comfortable with their sex. All they want is to improve or emphasise certain aspects of their body.
For another group of people, it’s much more than social expression, words or labels. These people, have a very strong sense of they are actually the opposite sex. They feel like their body has developed in the opposite direction to what it should have developed and this causes them intense discomfort. Many of these people talk about their body ‘betraying’ them.
The discomfort, or ‘dysphoria’, these people experience is so strong that they turn to medical professionals to find answers. When this person gets the medical assistance they need and they are recognised physically, socially and legally as the sex they really are, they find this strong discomfort disappears.
When this person makes the decision to medically correct their physical-sex as best they can, this decision is based on two needs:
- to feel more comfortable in their physical body; and
- to live in their society and culture in the sex they know themselves to be.
When a person uses medical assistance to correct their physical sexual characteristics (to reduce their intense discomfort) we call this medical condition transsexualism or TS.
A man affected by TS knows he is male even though his sex was registered female when he was born. The stereotypical concept of a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ is a fairly accurate way of describing how it feels.
Some people don’t have this very strong sense they are actually the opposite sex, yet they also feel some level of ‘gender discomfort’ (‘gender dysphoria) about their body. This group of people feel they are transgender in some way or they might be experiencing transgenderism. Transgender people often seek out medical assistance to feel more comfortable in their own skin.
Further Reading
page updated 19 June 2011
