The New Haven Register’s former entertainment editor/music writer Fran Fried talks about her sex change operation in today’s paper.
When I left seven years ago, I was a miserable, depressed, way-overweight, out-of-shape guy with low self-esteem. I’m now good-looking, confident, assured, still overweight but in much better shape and, save for the nagging unemployment, happier than ever. And, in the eyes of California, legally female.
Hi Duby … It’s funny that this whole cycle began with me correcting a Register reader’s comment about my gender thang — and now I have to correct you, too.
I don’t know how you extrapolated that I had a “sex change” out of my tale of gender transition. That’s totally wrong, and nowhere in my story did I say that I did have the full monty. So — just as with the Register piece — in the interest of accuracy and education and enlightenment, here goes:
The transgender spectrum, both male-to-female and female-to-male, is pretty broad. “Transgender” (a word I dislike because it sounds so clinical) is an umbrella term that encompasses everyone who feels that their wiring is somewhat different than their plumbing — from people who’ve had the full sexual reassignment surgery (aka the “sex change”); to non-op and pre-op transpeople (who live their lives as the gender opposite their birth but have had either no or some degree of physical modification); to crossdressers (a term much more preferable than the old “transvestite” — people who dress in the opposite gender part-time for various reasons, from stage performance to sexual fetish to people who, for one reason or another, can’t come out as full-time trans).
I fall somewhere in between non-op and pre-op. I live full-time as a woman (the only time I’m in boy drag is on the bicycle), but I’m not getting SRS — or planning on it — and I haven’t had any surgical enhancements (i.e. a boob job or facial reconstruction). However, I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for more than a year. As a result, my breasts are growing, my body is reproportioning, my facial hair growth has slowed down, my features and skin are softer — but the most important and wonderful change is that the hormones cleared up nearly 35 years of chronic depression.I still don’t know how 1) I didn’t kill myself at some point; and 2) I was able to function as highly as I did, period. But there was most definitely a chemical imbalance that the HRT was able to correct.
I’m lucky to live in one of the few states (California) where residents are allowed to change their gender on their driver’s license. (People can also change gender on their birth certificates here, too — something I can’t do because I was born in New York.) All that’s needed for the gender change on the license here is a DMV form filled out by a doctor, attesting that the person has had some sort of physical modification. And since the trans spectrum is so broad, hormone therapy counts as a physical mod. Hence, in California’s eyes, I’m now legally female. And if I decide to renew my long-expired passport, the State Department, which relaxed its rules regarding gender a year ago, will also recognize me as female. And I flew home for the holidays as female for the first time last December. I hope that will be the next step for Connecticut’s DMV — to follow California’s lead and make it easier for a person to change gender on a license.
So anyway, to sum up: Some transpeople do, indeed, have the full sexual reassignment surgery, but many don’t. And I haven’t. And that concludes Gender Identity 101 for today …
Fran Fried
Fresno