My reply to Jake Alley's essay
Ta-Da: A Sci-Fi Transformation! published in
https://www.amazon.com/Trans-anthology-transgender-nonbinary-identity/dp/1543175880
In full
here, (archive
here).
Given that
@Mellorine went to the trouble of bringing us a copy of Jake's essay I though it appropriate to respond to all of it.
Jake Alley wrote:
I was sixteen when I first heard what it meant to be trans. The few trans women I saw on talk shows or as characters in movies were completely obsessed with wearing big frilly dresses and skirts, to the point where a lot of them were apparently willing to run away and live on the streets in cities they'd never been to because parents threatened to burn all their girly clothes, and they couldn't live without them.
I think Jake is confusing MtF transsexuals with drag queens. Also, you still don't understand transsexualism. You haven't come to a clearer understanding as an adult. You have posted numerous times that transsexuals are women with a "glandular disorder". This doesn't concur with any scientific hypotheses about transsexualism.
This explanation was backed up by the most authoritative source I could find at the time: a trans comic artist had set up a website with what she claimed was a copy of the sort of test psychologists use to determine if you're trans. Half the questions on it were written with the assumption that anyone taking it "dressed as a girl" on a regular basis, asking how much it made you feel sexy or comfortable or empowered.
See
@Mellorine 's response to this at
https://kiwifarms.is/threads/secret...wrence-jake-alley.23920/page-442#post-3226961
That wasn't me. I've never worn a skirt—or felt any particular desire to. I've also never been attracted to guys, which a lot of people insisted was part of being trans (with another set of people insisting trans women are "men who dress as women to trick lesbians into dates").
Then you have no gender dysphoria and hence are not a MtF transsexual.
And according to all these people I'd come across, the trans women who were really "serious about it" would get "sex change operations." The way people talked about those surgeries sounded like a combination of getting breast implants and some sort of brutal Dark Ages horror that left a creepy stump or a big scar between your legs.
MtF transsexuals that are serious about living as women do get SRS (Sex Reassignment Surgery), FFS (Facial Feminisation Surgery) and VFS (Voice Feminisation Surgery) if they can afford it. Given that detailed graphic accounts of SRS are available online there is no reason to base your impression of SRS on your juvenile imaginings. But this sort of comment shows you up as not being actually interested in the lived experience of MtF transsexuals.
I didn't want anything at all to do with that.
That is to say, you had/have no interest in living as a woman. And that position is consistent with your bearded slob presentation.
What I did wish for was a sci-fi transformation that would change my chromosomes to XX instead of XY. No playing dress up, no pretending to be someone else, and no kinky sex stuff. Just hanging out in my regular baggy clothes, reading books and playing video games like I always did, but I'd be a girl—XX—under my skin and down to my DNA. Something about that held a certain appeal.
If everything stays the same after your XY-to-XX transformation, after your "sci-fi transformation" what would be the value of this cryptic (pseudo-) transformation. If you genuinely believe that your dress, comportment and phenotype is female
now then of what value is a "chromosomal transformation". You are after all female as far as you are concerned. If wearing an unkempt beard, having a bald head and dressing like you are mentally challenged is consistent with femininity then you have everything you want and need, you are already female.
Nobody ever talked about trans women like that. I never pictured Girl-Me as super feminine, wearing a fancy dress like a Disney princess. My image of Girl-Me was more like Ripley from Alien; the sort of woman who didn't really care about her femininity.
"Super feminine" isn't the only expression of femininity. There is a huge chasm between "obese neckbeard with gnome beard" and "super feminine" and you haven't even touched the edges of femininity.
Ripley from
Alien is nevertheless feminine and judging by her attire and hair-style she does "care about her femininity". Ripley is a tough woman, and women can be tough without (secretly) being men.
I couldn't tell people "I want to be a girl but not be girly at all!" because that would get me weird stares at best.
Not all women are hyper-feminine but they are all to some extent feminine else they wouldn't be considered feminine in social terms, i.e. they wouldn't be treated as women.
I don't think you want to be a woman. You appear to want to continue living as a man but want to attract the social and economic benefits of being an MtF transsexual. And there are benefits, as can be seen in the comparison between Jake Alley and secretgamergrrl with respect to
Twitter,
Patreon and panels at cons.
At worst, I'd seen too many sci-fi stories where people with something weird and unique were sent to research facilities for further study.
This is strange mix of paranoia and stupidity.
So I never told anyone how I felt, but I did keep trying to follow news about trans women.
But you never heard of SRS, FFS and VFS?
If science did come up with some way to change your DNA, they'd be the first to sign up, and I'd be the second.
Here you are implicitly excluding yourself from the category "trans women".
Over the next twenty years or so, I ended up with a lot of trans friends.
You have no friends, you have told us this many times.
Some were really cool people with whom I had a lot in common, and just happened to also be trans women and men.
AFAIK you don't follow any FtM transsexuals and no FtM transsexuals follow you on Twitter.
And no,
Rebecca Gerber-Hernandez isn't a FtM transsexual, she is a fake like you.
Others were old friends I'd known since I was a teenager who, it turned out, had been trans all along—they just didn't realize it then, for the same reasons I didn't.
Given that transsexuals comprise less than 1% of the population this is implausible and improbable.
Turns out a ton of things I grew up hearing were totally wrong. All that stuff about being obsessed with dresses had nothing to do with being trans.
So the stuff you make up turns out to be false. Who would have known?
There are totally some trans women out there, especially from an older generation, with strong feelings about their clothes—but so much of that is due to the fact that, when they were growing up, the only way they could express themselves was through this rigid way of dressing "appropriately."
MtF wear women's clothing because they wish to present and live as women and because it reduces gender dysphoria.
Your slob attire is not an expression of femininity. You seem to be searching for an excuse for dressing like a hobo that isn't pathological laziness and autism.
And the woman who set up that written test? Years later, I found out she made the whole thing up herself, writing down the 'right' answers as the ones she gave. When I met a bunch of trans women with degrees in psychology and gender studies, we discussed those tests, and the concepts behind them, with a good laugh. There are also plenty of trans women who are attracted to women, men, or both—or neither, like me.
Again see
@Mellorine 's response at
https://kiwifarms.is/threads/secret...wrence-jake-alley.23920/page-442#post-3226961
The more I talked with trans people, the more I realized how much I had in common with them. We all daydreamed as kids about changing our DNA, and liked stories with any sort of transformation in them. We pretty much all loved playing RPGs and other games where you could really connect with your character, and liked playing girls in them, or shapeshifters (who could be girls sometimes).
These aren't universal behaviors and experiences of transsexuals. This is caricature of transsexualism.
We also all hit depression in our early teens, had terrible sleeping schedules, massive anxiety about locker rooms, and a few other problems like that which I never thought were connected.
Again, these aren't universal behaviors and experiences of transsexuals.
I didn't think having all of this in common meant I might be trans too. After all, it wasn't only my trans friends who shared these interests and problems.
Indeed. But then in the next sentence you claim otherwise.
At least, I thought so, until one of those friends told me that she realized she was, and she was about to start hormone replacement therapy.
The claim that all your (non-existent) friends turned out to be transsexual is ridiculous.
It was an amazing change to see in her, not because she changed how she dressed or how her face looked, but how all those problems we had in common seemed to disappear almost immediately. She slept more regularly; she wasn't constantly depressed; she stopped being such a shy nerd hiding in her computer and became more sociable, even going on dates.
It is doubtful that androgen blockade and estradiol will achieve all this and it is even more dubious given that you claim it "seemed to disappear almost immediately". MtF transsexuals have a desire to cross-dress before they start androgen blockade and HRT, they want to cross-dress to reduce their gender dysphoria.
... and she wasn't happy now because she had started playing dress-up. This was a real tangible thing. She was taking pills that were really changing her, not just how she looked but how she felt.
Reducing the social transition behavior to "playing dress-up" speaks poorly for your view of transsexuals and flags you as a fake. Wearing (culturally normative) cross-sex clothing and hairstyle reduces feelings of gender dysphoria. Androgen blockade and estradiol further this reduction in gender dysphoria by feminizing the physique and face (through loss of muscle mass and fat redistribution).
Transsvestites and autogynephiles "play...dress-up" and become sexually aroused. Transsexuals do not.
Every sci-fi show and book I ever consumed pushed this idea that if you were somehow able to change all of someone's DNA, they would suddenly start changing to look like another person—or some lizard monster, or something else. Turns out that isn't true at all.
It is true that if you
completely change an organism's
genotype you would also completely change its
phenotype. An organism's phenotype is a result of its
genotype and environment.
After you're born, your DNA sort of sits there in the middle of all your cells, hanging around, not really doing much of anything. It's basically a set of instructions that gets read to work out how to initially configure your cells, then each cell follows its own program depending what kind of cell it is.
No, this is nonsense.
DNA is involved in both cellular reproduction and other protein synthesis. Sex hormones themselves are the product of
gene transcription. Cells have a lifetime, they die and need to be replaced. Cellular production of hormones is also encoded in genes that are comprised of DNA. Every minute nuclear DNA is copied into
RNA and a specific protein is synthesized. DNA is essentially instructions for synthesizing proteins. This is a constant process for multicellular organisms. The "program" that each cell follows originates in its DNA.
Most of that is simply: sit here, process these chemicals, split in half sometimes. There's also special conditional stuff. Any time x happens, do y. And once a cell knows what sort of cell it is, and what instructions to follow, that's it; no more caring what your DNA says because that's always what it's going to say.
The cell gets its instructions for protein synthesis from its DNA and it differentiates itself from other cells (e.g. stomach lining cells versus liver cells versus lung cells) accordingly.
The bad news here is that changing your DNA wouldn't do anything for you.
That is entirely incorrect. Damaging or deliberately changing an organisms DNA will also change the organism.
Knockout mice are produced through deliberate alterations in DNA.
And I also probably just taught you more about basic biology than a bunch of sci-fi writers combined and maybe even more than your elementary school teachers ever knew.
No you didn't. I suggest you at least consult a senior high-school biology textbook before playing authority on genetics and cellular biology.
...and a lot of what you're taught in school is simplified to the point where a lot of it is just plain inaccurate.
That is not my experience of high-school-level biology and it appears that you have failed to understand high-school-level biology.
All the differences you see in boys and girls aren't actually things your DNA gets any sort of say in at all.
This too is entirely incorrect. The
Y-chromosome--which only males have--contains the
SRY gene which is responsible for the development of testis which subsequently produce testosterone which produces a male fetus.
Ninety-nine percent of the differences between men and women are the result of programming your cells follow... Change the code being read, and the outcome is completely different.
Phenotypic differences between males and females are ultimately due to the presence of the Y-chromosome. The "code being read" is DNA.
What all these cells read to work this out is the mix of hormones in your bloodstream—mainly testosterone and estrogens.
And what determines the ratio of androgens to estrogens? The physiology of the organism. What determines the physiology of the organism? Its DNA. Men have elevated levels of testosterone compared to women because they have testicles. Men have testicles because there is a gene on the Y-chromosome that causes them to develop.
Your DNA sets those cells up, but otherwise all the attributes we come to know as boy/girl stuff is the result of cells checking your hormone levels and following their personal instructions.
Hormones are synthesized as a result of instructions that originate in DNA. Hormone production is a type of protein synthesis which is a product of gene transcription. Also, a major way that hormones influence cells is genomically. They also have non-genomic effects but the genomic effects are very important.
Now these hormones, you totally can change—just like my friend did. Just like I did.
There is no evidence that you have commenced taking androgen blocker and estradiol.
Take some medicine that makes you produce less of some, get a 'script for the rest
What?
and eventually, every cell in your body reads the message and goes, Oh! Better switch to girl mode! Fat redistributes. Skin changes. Hair grows—or fades.
Yes but the extent of the effect depends on age. Estrogen and androgen blockade will not cause a bald head to grow hair, nor would it affect the beard growth of a (physiologically) mature male, nor will it alter a mature male's skeletal structure.
Even the skeleton starts to reshape.
No it doesn't. Once you experience closure of the
epiphyseal growth plates--barring disease conditions such as acromegaly, bone cancer, osteoporosis etc--your skeleton doesn't change.
Hormonally transitioned MtFs that are slight were slight to begin with, it is not a result of HRT.
Jake, given that you are a large, obese, bald-headed man(-baby) you won't experience much change from estradiol and androgen blockade. You will not see any fat redistribution because you are fat all over your body and face. All you will experience is a loss of muscle mass which--because of your obesity--will make you look even flabbier. Your facial features are both masculine and ugly and you will be keeping those unless you get FFS.
