:: The Road Less Traveled... ::

:: Sunday, July 09, 2006 ::

Well hello there!

Long time no see. It's been a year since I last posted anything in this blog and a lot has happened.

First I've completed my first year of college. During this year I've spoken to various classes about being transgender which means I'm really 'out out' know what I mean? I, also, became a co-founder of a gay/straight alliance at the community college where I attend. It is my intention for fall quarter to run for one of the two co-chair positions in the club so that my last year there will be productive to help make sure the group continues after I leave.

I'll be adding a couple of pix to my trans album of how I look now, which for the most part, is different from a year ago. I now have a full beard and noticeable mustache. Granted I'm still a heavy weight but hopefully that will change as I'm headed back to the Y to start working out again. But I am happier than I've been in a while.

School is good for me and for my living out requirements for being prepared to live as a male for the rest of my life.

With that I'll close. I don't know when I'll post again but I'll try to not let another year's time go by.

:: In My Opinion 12:56 AM [+] ::
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Hey there readers,

I know it's been a while and for that I apologize. It's just that I decided to go back to school and have, until just a few weeks ago, buried under homework. I'm off for 25 more days as of today before I have to go back and thought I'd check in with you.

Transition continues. My body is getting furred which thrills me to no end. I'm not sure why but I really enjoy the fact that I'm turning into what the gay community calls 'a bear'. I have mustache, beard, and body fur though my chest and back are not so furry that my lady has complained. *grins* So far so good because I ain't shavin' this stuff, at least on the non-face parts. The face itself undergoes trims and such but that too is not going to get totally removed.

Other than that, my status is still pre-op and I've come to the conclusion that it will have to remain so until I get out of school and working. Once I'm working I'll be able to afford the surgeries I need (chest removal, lower belly removal, and a medioplasty (sp)). So all that is in the future and I'm not letting myself fret or steam over it as I can't change that reality.

As to my mention of education, I've gone back to school to become a therapist. What that means is that I'm looking at 5yrs of college - 4 to get my B.A. and then one more to get my M.A. My Master's will be a Masters in psychology, not social work. I've done the research and have talked with advisors and the only real difference is that those with MSWs is that they've done a great marketing job. So armed with that I'll get mine in psych thanks.

Fall quarter will be busy and a learning experience. I'm finally getting started in the maths I need to take - Math 50, pre-algebra. I'm also taking two classes that are co-taught - English 102 (which has to do with research so I'm told), and Soc 101 (which has a lot of research to be done). The Soc teacher I'm familiar with, the one for English I've heard conflicting stories about so will make up my own mind after class starts. The only hitch in taking these two classes together is that Soc starts at 8:30 in the morning. Those who know me, know I'm a late night owl so this will present a real challenge. I'm going to start trying to change my schedule week after next to see if I can get into a pattern before term starts. So wish me luck. The last class of my day will be Tone Zone which is a personalized fitness program. I tried taking it this summer but had ultimately had to drop due to meds that make me sensitive to heat and sun. I got overheated and missed three days of classes. Needless to say that ended my workouts for the summer and taught me not to do that again!

Okay folks, I've got stuff I've got to do and with my puter down (I'm at the school's library using theirs) that means ending my puting experience early and heading out to the bus. Take good care and we'll talk again when I've got time and something interesting for you to read.

:: In My Opinion 2:55 PM [+] ::
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Well dear readers, I thought I'd post a bit of a good news tid bit.

I don't know if I've told you but I've gone back to school and am pursuing a college degree in Psychology. It's my intention to get my Master's degree in Psyc and become a therapist to the GBLTQ community, dealing primarily with coming out issues and gbltq related issues. What's cool is that the Dept of Voc Rehab has committed themselves to paying the tab for the 5yrs it will take for me to get the degrees and then get a job.

So anyway, I was studying with a group of people from one of my classes and we got to talking personal stuff where I decided to come out to them. They received the news rather well and told me that if I hadn't told them I was a transgender they would have never guessed. Apparently, according to them, I'm passing really well in looks, voice, mannerisms, and such. To say the least that boosted my ego and made me feel really great. After all these years and getting my T level to where it would do me good, those comments really made my day and made me all the hard work was paying off at last.

I just thought I'd share this bright spot with you and hope it will encourage anyone else who is going through transition themselves.

All my best,

Vaughn

:: In My Opinion 4:26 AM [+] ::
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Isn't it interesting that in big, bad, oppressive, Islamic, fundamentalist Iran that one would find not only freedom but government support for the transgender person? Below is an article that was sent to a trans group I'm a member of and I thought I'd pass it on to you. I encourage you my readers to think about it, tell others - particularly any transgender friends you have, add to your local counseling groups archives or whatever.

What absolutely amazed me is that I live in oppressive fundamentalist America where freedom and rights for all are supposedly supported and yet it is in a fundamentalist Islamic country there actually support people like me. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Btw, I post this as a matter of sharing important information with my readers and take no credit for the article's content, ownership or anything of the like.

Vaughn


January 25, 2005

COLUMN ONE

Changing Their Sex in Iran

'There is no reason why not,' one cleric says of gender reassignment surgery. In fact, Khomeini approved it four decades ago.

'I was born again' (Newsha Tavakolian / Polaris)

TRANSSEXUALSSEX GENDERIRANIRAN TRANSSEXUALS SEX GENDER CULTURE SURGERYSURGERYCULTURE

By Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer

TEHRAN — Whispering like conspirators, the two cousins hook their thumbs in their belt loops, skim cocky eyes over the women and swivel, stiff-legged from their hips, like the men they have become. Across the room, and a few steps away on the gender spectrum, a man with shaggy hair wrinkles a pug nose in the mirror and struggles to drape a silky scarf over his head in the style of Islamic womanhood.

Almost everybody here, in this sterilized waiting room at a clinic in the clanging heart of Tehran, is in the midst of changing their sex. Waiting their turn to see the doctor, they strut about in self-conscious gender rehearsal. Someone has brought cookies, sweet with honey.
"I was married. I had a wife and children," says Maria Pakgohar, a curvaceous former truck driver wearing flower barrettes and fake furs. She claims she's in her 40s but flashes an identification card giving her age as 62. "The cleric came to my house and said to my wife: 'What do you want from him? He's a woman, not a man.' "

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, gay male sex still carries the death penalty and lesbians are lashed, but hundreds of people are having their gender changed legally, bolstered by the blessings of members of the ruling Shiite clergy.

"Approval of gender changes doesn't mean approval of homosexuality. We're against homosexuality," says Mohammed Mahdi Kariminia, a cleric in the holy city of Qom and one of Iran's foremost proponents of using hormones and surgery to change sex. "But we have said that if homosexuals want to change their gender, this way is open to them."

Not that it's easy in Iran. The Islamic Republic remains a fundamentally traditional, conservative society, laced by harsh judgments and strict mores. A blizzard of clerical decrees is unlikely to make a mother eager to see her son become a woman or enlighten leery co-workers who squirm at hearing their colleague's voice drop a few octaves. And the government's response is fractured, with some officials remaining opposed to sex change.

"The people our age, they all know and accept us," says Toumik Martin, a brusque 28-year-old businessman who was born a girl named Anita, leaning in close to be heard over the cacophony of ambiguous tenors bouncing off the waiting room walls. "Our problem is with the parents. They don't know how to differentiate between transsexuals, gays and lesbians."

Like their brethren around the world, these people have complicated, often sorrowful, stories. They have been cast out by their families and fired from their jobs. They have struggled to find love.

Martin, who became a man six years ago, proposed marriage to the woman he'd loved ever since they were classmates.

"She said, 'Yes, I love you, I understand you, but I don't know about my parents,' " says Martin, who has a prospering business importing vitamins from Russia.

When the couple approached the woman's parents, they were flatly rejected. "They think I'm a lesbian," Martin says. "They said, 'We won't give our daughter to a girl.' Especially her mother, she was very hard with me." His heart was broken, and the relationship faded.

When Dr. Bahrom Mir-Djalali first began performing sex-change operations 15 years ago, he endured death threats from scandalized parents. One father, he recalls, showed him a dagger and vowed to slash his throat. But slowly, he says, society has come around. He measures the shift in the fights with the families, which he says have become less drastic.

"This is an Islamic country, and very, very old-fashioned," says Mir-Djalali, a white-haired surgeon who studied sex-change procedures in Paris. "I try to tell people, 'They don't have horns, they are normal people.' But it's hard for society to accept. At least now we have a discussion about it."

Iran isn't the only Muslim society that appears to be growing more accepting of sex changes while still shunning homosexuality. A Kuwaiti court recently decreed that a 29-year-old man who had changed his gender could live legally as a woman. That decision was later overturned by a higher court, but it provoked a startling debate in a country where the subject of homosexuality remains taboo.

In Saudi Arabia, an Islamic judge backed an heir's right to keep the larger share of inheritance given to sons even though the heir had undergone surgery to become a woman. Even Al Azhar, the ancient seat of Sunni Muslim learning in Cairo, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, in the mid-1990s that approved gender changes in some cases.

But no Muslim society has tackled the question with the open-mindedness of Shiite Iran. That's probably because the father of the revolution himself, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, penned the groundbreaking fatwas that approved gender reassignment four decades ago.

Khomeini reasoned that if men or women wished so intensely to change their sex, to the point that they believed they were trapped inside the wrong body, then they should be permitted to transform that body and relieve their misery. His opinion had more to do with what isn't in the Koran than what is. Sex change isn't mentioned, Khomeini's thinking went, so there are no grounds to consider it banned.

"There is no reason why not," says Kariminia, the cleric. "Each human being is the owner of his body, and therefore he can make changes."

Before Khomeini, some Islamic edicts had approved sex changes for hermaphrodites, but nobody had given carte blanche for sex reassignment without medical deformities. To this day, some Shiite clerics argue against operating on healthy bodies.

But in a low stone house in the twisting alleys of Qom, Kariminia is writing his doctoral thesis on transgender law. His writings tease out the work of Khomeini, tackling legal questions such as: If a married woman wishes to become a man, must she first get permission from her husband? Must a man seek permission from his wife?

"Islam has recognized the rights of transgender. We can't say to anybody that they must be a man or a woman," Kariminia says. "But do you think just because they don't have legal or Islamic problems, their problems are solved? I certainly do not."

Iran's acceptance of sex-reassignment operations raises the specter that gays and lesbians may be able to find a place for themselves here only by changing their gender. Some transgender patients complain that lesbians and gays are exploiting the surgery to create a legal way to sleep with their preferred partners.

Mir-Djalali, a kinetic man with an irrepressible enthusiasm for spelling out the more delicate details of the surgeries, says that in 15 years he's transformed about 320 men into women, and 70 women into men.

He is careful to point out that those were only half of the would-be patients who came to his office. He disqualified the others after they were examined by a panel of three psychiatrists.
The psychiatric team tries to sort out homosexuality from gender disorder by asking a series of questions. A man hoping to become a woman, for example, is asked whether he has dreamed of removing his penis. Gay men recoil at the idea, the doctor says — but transgender men are eager at the suggestion.

"They say, 'Yes, yes, yes, I've always dreamed of it,' " Mir-Djalali says.

But the screening is the only restriction in Iran's relatively lax system. In most countries where sex-change operations are performed, doctors urge their patients to live for some time in the guise of their preferred gender before taking any drastic measures.

But in Iran, there's no waiting period. After passing the psychological screening, the patients are hustled into treatment. After all, in the interim they are considered gay, and therefore outlaws.
"By the time they come to me, they've made up their minds," Mir-Djalali says. "They've already worn makeup and women's dresses. They don't need to try."

The 25 years since the revolution have been an era of turmoil and liberation for Iran's transgender community. Despite the tolerance contained in Khomeini's fatwas, many suffered bitterly when he came to power, caught in revolutionary purges meant to turn Iran into a pure Islamic republic.

"Twenty years ago, we were living in secret and with fear," says Maryam Khatoon Molkara, 54, one of the elder stateswomen of the transgender movement. "I wanted to become a woman and also do something for the others."

Today Molkara lives in a second-floor walk-up in a dingy part of Tehran, where she receives her visitors in a cramped sitting room with pink walls and baffling layers of mirrors. There are books of religion and poetry and paintings of Ali — cousin of the prophet Muhammad and a revered figure among Shiites — and his trusty sword, Zulfiqar.

In the chaotic early days of the revolution, Molkara was taunted and harassed by overzealous mobs. So many transgendered people were rounded up by the regime that a special jail wing was built for them. Molkara grew depressed. "I wanted to die," she says, waves of perfume wafting from her muumuu.

Instead, she appealed to the government, working her way up the chain of clerics until she spoke with Khomeini's brother. It was he who took her to see Khomeini himself. That same day, Molkara won the right to live as a woman. On Khomeini's orders, the clerics gave her a chador and registered her as a woman in the government directories.

"It was like heaven," she remembers dreamily. "I was born again."

But it was only the beginning of Molkara's fight. She recently teamed up with sympathetic Iranian officials — including the head of the Special Court of Clergy and the vice president for women's affairs — to form an organization devoted to transgender rights. At her prodding, a government-linked Islamic charity named after Khomeini recently agreed to provide loans to pay for the surgeries.

Still, Molkara is not satisfied. She doesn't like the government-issue identity card that spells out her former life as a man. She doesn't like the hard-liners who've threatened her. One official even sneered that she'd tricked Khomeini, she says. In short, she is hoping to push transgenders even further into the Iranian mainstream.

"Nobody ever asks why a dog is a dog," she says. "And yet they always have to explain that I was once a man."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-transgender25jan25,0,3573806.story?coll=la-home-headlines

:: In My Opinion 3:43 AM [+] ::
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Dear Readers, just thought I'd mention that the new dosage seems to be working. It appears that I'm getting more hair and my sex drive has gone up substantially. Goddess I love being on 200mg I.M. every two weeks! *grin*

:: In My Opinion 3:29 AM [+] ::
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Greetings dear readers!

Once again I'm here to report on my trip to Seattle. My endo is pleased but has upped my T to 200mg I.M. every 2 weeks to help my body maintain it's level while I finish my recoup period for my total knee replacements (had one in Feb and one in June - now both knees are healing well and getting PT... if you need a knee replacement let me highly recommend the process if your doc uses the semi-conscious process). She also told me to get back on my glocophauge as it truly seems I'm becoming insulin resistent. Btw, if you are too and if you are big like me you might want to do some research on how a big panis (your hanging belly) enables you to being insulin resistent! Anyway, back to my trip to Seattle... she also told me that my good cholesterol is low so to start weaning myself off of white bread, white pasta, white potatos, etc. Other than that she said I'm looking good and she'll see me again in January 2005.

So that's the update for now. Check out my webpage to see the new pix of me taken in August 2004. I am actually starting to look really good!!

Take care dear readers and be good to yourselves and be true to your true selves regardless what people say!

:: In My Opinion 11:46 PM [+] ::
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I just read a buddy's journal entry and it triggered some relevant thoughts for here.

I recently got my annual 'script' for my binder. I took it to a local medical supply place rather than dropping by a place in Seattle to take what they had on hand. As a result I've ended up with a very strong and much better binder for my chest. Not only does it depress my chest like I need it to but by Goddess' right hand it actually provides wonderful support for my back!!! And it has arm pit protection webbing so I don't get chafed there. I tell you what, I've learned to never get my binders from off the shelf unless I'm willing to put up with an inferior product.

Also I've noticed of late, especially since my beard and mustache have come in so much better, that I'm actually passing about 99% when I'm out in public. It's a very comfortable feeling and seems to be building my confidence up. Now all I have to do is get rid of my kid looking Harry Potter backpack (I actually love the HP books and movies but the kids 'round here have made snide comments and I've gotten some odd looks in public) and get that leather one in the BudK catalog. I mean I have to work at being a 'real man' so my accessories need to help keep that image strong.

Other than that my new dosage of 175mg I.M. seems to be doing just fine so I'm just thrilled with it.

Thanks for reading and 'listening' dear readers and I hope you're having a good 3 day weekend. Remember to keep safe and don't drink and drive.

:: In My Opinion 6:57 AM [+] ::
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