Trans Conventions: Why Should You Go to One?

Each year, there are opportunities to attend one or more trans conferences around the country. As time has gone by, there are more and more conferences available to attend regionally, providing opportunities to learn more about ourselves, meet people like ourselves, have fun and find out about options for medical and aesthetic care. At some conventions there are also continuing education tracks available to educate professionals such as myself. We are taking the responsibility for finding professionals who can educate other professionals who are interested in helping us and providing these important opportunities. I have both given workshops to other professionals and received a substantial amount of continuing education over the past two years. That has allowed me to solely focus on studying sanctioned curricula by my profession and teach to other professionals. Because of these opportunities, I have completed 73 hours of continuing education in the last two years on top of the self directed studies that I have been engaging in over the past 16 years. That is equivalent to 4.5 semester hours in a graduate program.



Since 2009, I have been attending conferences to offer workshops on the history of mental health treatment of transsexualism and what is the present state of the art in transgender care. I do my best to provide education to other professionals and seek out the best education opportunities that I can find, as well as unravel the misconceptions about the WPATH Standard of Care, and myths that abound in the gender community to the members of our community.

I have not been to all the conferences available to go to, but have been going to Southern Comfort Conference each year. Southern Comfort is the largest conference I have attended and is one of the longest running and largest conferences in the U.S. This year will be my fourth time presenting a workshop there. This conference is the most dear to me because Southern Comfort gave me my first opportunity to present a workshop on my area of specialization.



 I have given a workshop at the Trans Philadelphia Health Conference, which is the largest health conference in the world on the topic of transgender care and last year chaired the mental health workshop selection committee for this conference. I have also attended the Keystone Conference in Harrisburg, Pa., TransOhio Conference in Columbus, and Chicago Be- All and I have to say, I have enjoyed them all. Besides the opportunity to give or get these educational opportunities, I have treasured the friendships I have made at the conferences and the opportunity to spend time with many wonderful friends that I have across the nation thanks to the Internet and through the past four years that I have been a member of Pink Essence. I attended five conferences last year.

What can you expect at these conferences? Be prepared to meet all sorts of people from every walk of life and from all over the U.S. It is not unusual to meet people from all over the U.S.



You will have an opportunity to attend workshops on various topics that include counseling, etiquette, how to move in a feminine manner, fashion styling, medical health issues such as hormone regimens, aesthetic and gender reassignment surgeries, voice therapy, how to transition at work, improving family and spousal relationships, sexuality, spirituality, substance abuse, laser and electrolysis hair removal, legal issues in identity management, advocacy and participating in the legislative process. There are many more topics too. If you are a female to male transperson, there are plenty of topics for you too!

Just as importantly there is time for FUN!! Usually there will be organized activities and excursions to see local points of interest, to shop, and get pampered in salons.



The conferences provide special attention to first time attendees, so they will not feel frightened. For some, this will be the first time she will have had to be in public and this can be very overwhelming. Some conferences will offer a "big sister or big brother" to help first time attendees. There are sad stories about people coming for their first time who were too afraid to even come out of their room and hid the whole time they were there. Often there are 12 step meetings available for our recovering brothers and sisters.

An illustration of the important role conferences play in some of our lives can be seen frequently on the last night. You will see many people who stay up all night that last night with friends who they wont get to see for another year. Most poignant is watching those who are sad that they will not have an opportunity to express who they truly are for another full year. They look so forlorn, it is heartbreaking. That is exactly how important these conferences are.

If for no other reason, this is an opportunity to learn more about yourself and sometimes you will learn a little bit about other people, different from yourself, but in some ways the same.

I hope to see those of you who I have met and meet many of you I have only met through the Internet this year!

Do the Gender Police Confront You?

Sheri Berenbaum led a thought-provoking discussion about the often-debated topic of gender differences. An inquisitive crowd kept Berenbaum on her toes as she answered questions concerning whether gender differences are innate or learned. Drawing on over 15 years of research on congenital gender disorders—and using props such as Legos and make-up kits to illustrate her points—Berenbaum challenged the audience to "think outside the box" about the mix of social and biological factors that make us male or female. Sheri can be found on the web and also at her University, Penn State.

The Gender Police have drawn hard lines on people of my experience. We have the extreme Right who would say our very existence is an abomination and we have the extreme left who insist that we must identify as some blend of gender that is neither wholly male or wholly female. I find one as constraining as the other.

I wonder where it came from that if we were free and perfectly healthy individuals that if we identify as women, we are not respected as women or if we identify as men, we are not respected as men. This is the problem of the extreme Right. We simply want to live our lives and be left alone to the right of privacy as any other American Citizen.

The other side of the equation exists from the extreme fringes of Feminism and is solely an extension of Womens' Studies professor Janice Raymond's ideology. Even today as she rewrote a foreward to her book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the SheMale.  Even with her new forward, which is a rather shallow apology to transsexual women, she still sees us as victims of a patriarchy. She was unable to and continues to fail to recognize that we are woman who for many different reasons ended up at odds with our assigned gender. The majority of these do not involve obvious anatomical variations. For this reason being politically coerced into a continuum known as "Gender Spectrum" includes vastly different presentations because of vastly different etiologies, makes us pawns in a political struggle between Left and Right.

Interestingly, the most negative people about the realities of our lives both as individuals and in varying collectives include the extreme Right and the Extreme Left.

For one group, our very existence on the earth is anathamema. For the other group, our very right to a unified gender identity is sacriledge. I find both extremes both nullifying simultaneously.

At this time in our culture, very few who wish to fall under the umbrella  of transgender identify as gender queer. They have every right to that identity. It's not my identity. I do not consider them to have the same orientation of gender or have much in common with me other than a political desire to be left alone and become the best me I can be.

Similiarly people who feel a mix of their genders but have no burning urge to match their physical being to their identity, may be known as transgenders, crossdressers or by other labels that they define themselves by, have every right to be left alone and become the best people they can be.

Simply put, I am a woman. This is not a sociological statement, nor is it a political statement. It is who I am. There are more women who were correctly assigned at birth and individuals such as myself who were not, but sought to correct that error. I do not identify as a third gender or a fourth or a fifth. I'm just a woman.

This is a dual journey that I travel. I am the gender therapist and the gender patient, I bring my experience, professional and personal to the therapeutic alliance. All therapists do that. It is somewhat more unique for my patients as I am also someone who has been going through a legitimate process per the standards of care established by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, a body of which I am proud to me a member.

As many of you know, I have been developing a comprehensive health care system for transgender people in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I have been instrumental in initiating the Speech and Language Department of my health care system to offer voice and communication therapy for transsexuals in order to be able to communicate in a gendered manner that is congruent with our identity.

In announcement to a health care online network, this program was rebuked with a harsh and in my opinion, unwarrented attack. The author of this attack who is a faculty member of a large institution of higher learning, stated that she found it highly offensive that such a program would state that the therapy offered would improve the ability to communicate in a more masculine or feminine style, depending on the preference of the patient. She stated that because of this, she would not wish to refer anyone there for voice therapy.

Personal disclaimer: I was involved in the initiative to develop these services, provided a number of training resources and linked them with other Speech and Language therapy professionals who are members of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health in their field who could be of further help in developing the program that we offer. In my opinion, they have developed a quality program that I myself have participated in and am so more than just comfortable in referring my patients who are interested in these types of services.

What I find to be most outrageous of this experience is the lack of forethought in the reckless condemnation of a service that person has no personal knowlege of, just a blind conviction of an ideology leading to  the same type of rigid results that the extreme right can be accused of (and rightfully so at times).

This is why I always say that I have found as much as bigotry, prejudice and hatred on the far right and the far left.

The issue at hand that I object to is that this person made a judgement that this person knows better for you than you do, therefore would not even grant you the opportunity to decide if this service would be helpful to you or not. Considering the philosophical orientation of this person, I find as much patriarchy in the Third Wave Feminist theory as they railed against in the Second Wave of Feminism. Each wants to control you, just to a different end, but neither will be the one of your own determination.

A pity, isn't it? I've seen absolutely no growth since Janice Raymond.