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NYT Op-Ed: "My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy" - It's bad.

Tsukasa Buddha

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Tsukasa Buddha
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Sep 10, 2006
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It's really bad.

Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it.
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Linky.

It only gets worse from here, but I want to get this out of the way. A neovagina is not like an open wound. The body isn't going to heal it shut. It's a bizarre piece of misinformation.

I think the point of the essay, and why the NYT published it, was to counter "medical gatekeeping". She is rejecting what she describes as the conservative narrative that trans people are mentally ill and should be prevented from transitioning, but also the liberal narrative that trans people are helped by transitioning so as to alleviate gender dysphoria.

But then things go off the rails:

Buried under all of this, like a sober tuber, lies an assumption so sensible you’ll think me silly for digging it up. It’s this: People transition because they think it will make them feel better. The thing is, this is wrong.

I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones. One reason is that, absent the levees of the closet, years of repressed longing for the girlhood I never had have flooded my consciousness. I am a marshland of regret. Another reason is that I take estrogen — effectively, delayed-release sadness, a little aquamarine pill that more or less guarantees a good weep within six to eight hours.

Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers — enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.
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Then she circles back to her main argument:

The medical maxim “First, do no harm” assumes that health care providers possess both the means and the authority to decide what counts as harm. When doctors and patients disagree, the exercise of this prerogative can, itself, be harmful. Nonmaleficence is a principle violated in its very observation. Its true purpose is not to shield patients from injury but to install the medical professional as a little king of someone else’s body.

Let me be clear: I believe that surgeries of all kinds can and do make an enormous difference in the lives of trans people.

But I also believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.

Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman. I will live with this, or I won’t. That’s fine. The negative passions — grief, self-loathing, shame, regret — are as much a human right as universal health care, or food. There are no good outcomes in transition. There are only people, begging to be taken seriously.
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If anything, I am coming away from this essay worried that there isn't enough medical gatekeeping.

A lot of people in trans spaces are questioning if she is even trans, which is usually not acceptable at all.

For a deeper dive, we can look at her other writings. It is immediately clear that there are two main things she talks about when it comes to being trans, and they yet again are things that give ammo to her opposition.

First, the fetish angle. She wrote an essay entitled Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans? VICE interviewed six trans people and while the rest generally described feeling free to be themselves, she gives this answer:

I didn’t transition to “be” a girl; I transitioned because I wanted all the cool **** girls were getting that I wasn’t—like the girls’ sleepover, which in my mind was this exciting, intimate, erotic affair that involved lots of secrets and touching. Sometimes very well-meaning cis women tell me, “Well, those sleepovers weren’t all they were cracked up to be,” and I say, “You’re missing the point: I don’t want the thing you think I think you had but which you actually didn’t have, I want the way in which you didn’t have it."
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Linky.

Next, the political angle. We have from her Twitter:

this is important bc i would bet good money that not only are there plenty of trans women who experienced male privilege before transition, but also many of them, esp those exposed to feminism, transitioned as a way to *atone* for that privilege
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Linky.

Someone replied: Uhh I really don’t think anyone is reading Judith Butler and then being like “I’m so complicit in patriarchy, better take estrogen”

To which she responded:

lol i literally did

the only sane response tbh
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Linky.

For both angles in one, we have this article:

The truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them.

...

It was in my junior year of college that I first read the SCUM Manifesto, crossing over the East River in a lonely subway car. It exhilarated me: the grandeur, the brutal polemics, the raw, succulent style of the whole thing. Solanas was cool. Rereading SCUM, I realized this was no accident.

...

This line took my breath away. This was a vision of transsexuality as separatism, an image of how male-to-female gender transition might express not just disidentification with maleness but disaffiliation with men. Here, transition, like revolution, was recast in aesthetic terms, as if transsexual women decided to transition, not to “confirm” some kind of innate gender identity, but because being a man is stupid and boring.
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Tsukasa Buddha said:
A lot of people in trans spaces are questioning if she is even trans, which is usually not acceptable at all.

For a deeper dive, we can look at her other writings.
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You obviously put time and effort into this post and I read most of the linked essays. It's hard to come up with a response.

I wouldn't want to be her surgeon.
 
I'd love for them to find a physical cause for LGBT, it would put the debate to rest.

But it ain't going to happen. Meantime, I figure it is a mental disorder on a par with being a chronic over achiever or autism. Surgery does not help them either.
 
casebro said:
I'd love for them to find a physical cause for LGBT, it would put the debate to rest.

But it ain't going to happen. Meantime, I figure it is a mental disorder on a par with being a chronic over achiever or autism. Surgery does not help them either.
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Uh, you might want to edit your post. Do you seriously not know what "LGBT" stands for?

(Hint: This thread is about the "T", not the "LGB".) Learn some **** before you start spewing nonsense.
 
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I also was a bit taken aback at the description of autism as a mental disorder.

Or of being gay as a mental disorder.

Or of believing surgery has ever been claimed to be effective on overachievers.
 
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Minoosh said:
I also was a bit taken aback at the description of autism as a mental disorder.

Or of being gay as a mental disorder.

Or of believing surgery has ever been claimed to be effective on overachievers.
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Yeah, that was kinda weird. To say the least.
 
She seems to think of surgery and hormones as self-harm, almost as penance to atone for her having benefited from male privilege in the past.
 
Minoosh said:
I also was a bit taken aback at the description of autism as a mental disorder.
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Why? It's in the The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I get that a lot of people don't like categorizing it as a disorder, but that's not exactly a new or fringe position.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
I think the point of the essay, and why the NYT published it, was to counter "medical gatekeeping". She is rejecting what she describes as the conservative narrative that trans people are mentally ill and should be prevented from transitioning, but also the liberal narrative that trans people are helped by transitioning so as to alleviate gender dysphoria.
Click to expand...

I think the best description I can come up with for the vibe I'm getting is this:
cartman-whatever-i-do-what-i-want.jpg
 
casebro said:
I'd love for them to find a physical cause for LGBT, it would put the debate to rest.

But it ain't going to happen. Meantime, I figure it is a mental disorder on a par with being a chronic over achiever or autism. Surgery does not help them either.
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Wow, that's an echo of science in the 60s.

You have some reading to do to catch up to the science of the 21st century.
 
From the quotes in the OP;
Next Thursday, I will get a vagina.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.
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I think perhaps there should not be any surgery until this person no longer feels suicidal.

Ranb
 
Ziggurat said:
Why? It's in the The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I get that a lot of people don't like categorizing it as a disorder, but that's not exactly a new or fringe position.
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It's a neurological issue. Maybe all "mental disorders" are.
 
Ranb said:
From the quotes in the OP;

I think perhaps there should not be any surgery until this person no longer feels suicidal.

Ranb
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I agree.

Mental illness can affect anyone, even people with other issues like gender identity.
 
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