Your Y Chromosome Ain't Got Nothin On Me

Hey y’all! I’m really looking forward to this year’s Philadelphia Trans Health Conference in June.  I’ve actually never been but have wanted to for the past 3 or 4 years. And now not only do I get to go, but I’ll be involved in a workshop and I’ll be presenting some early findings from the research survey you all so helpfully circulated.

There are a lot of really great presentations that I’m excited about, but I thought I would give you all info on the workshops my research and advocacy/activism lab at University of Louisville is involved in.

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Okay first of all, one of my colleagues and I will be presenting our research at the Graduate Student Research Symposium, which is on June 15 and is divided into two sessions, 8:45-10:10 & 10:25-11:40.

My presentation is based on analyses Dr. Budge and I conducted on the data I collected in January and February, and is titled Transgender Identity Integration as a Factor in the Emotional Well-being of Post-transition Individuals.

My colleague, Kinton Rossman, will be presenting their research in a presentation titled “Just Because I Commanded That Respect - I Got the Privilege”: Qualitative Examination of Privilege in the Trans* Community.

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Workshops are listed below in chronological order:

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I’ve been debating writing and sharing this. I don’t want to politicize the death of someone whom I greatly cared for nor do I want people to misinterpret this as politicizing. But I also think the world needs to know the results of our culture(s) of intolerance.

Last week a young person killed himself. He was 14. He was a boy with a bright smile who happened to have been female assigned at birth and to have lived his first 13 years with a different name and different pronouns. I saw his parents express fear and sadness and anger as they grappled with understanding their son’s gender and the realities of a gender transition and a life post-transition. I sat with them in those emotions and assured them that his struggle and their struggle would be well worth the benefits that would come from living as who he truly was. He didn’t get to see my promise come true, and neither did they.

I could barely contain my joy when I saw pictures of him with his hair cut, when I saw that his Facebook had been updated to his new name, when I saw his big smile in photos with a group of LGBTQ youth and their allies.

I remember the first time he came to the weekly meeting of this group. I think it was the first time he had seen people his age that were able to freely express their wide array of identities, and it was maybe the first time his gender and experience were actually celebrated. He had three hours a week of this acceptance and celebration and freedom. What is three hours a week up against seven days of incorrect pronouns? Against five days a week of bullying? Against media that doesn’t show boys that look like you or men that grew up with your history? Against textbooks that equate your gender with body parts that don’t match yours? Against a future of sports teams you won’t be allowed on? Against adults you respect using language that negates your identity and experiences? Against a religious community you were once a part of telling you that you must choose between hiding who you are and going to hell? Against a lifetime of people trying to tell you how you have to identify, what groups you belong to, and what your gender and history mean about you as a person?

When someone takes their own life there are almost always multiple factors involved. But I one hundred percent believe that this young man would still be living if the world understood him, accepted him, and treated him as normal. Bullying is a problem, but we need to be more critical of the environment that fosters the bullying and allows the bullying to continue. And we need to talk about the difficulties trans* youth face outside of bullying – there is a whole society that is set up in a way that others them.

This should not have happened. He should not be dead. The world will suffer without the contributions he was going to make. Countless people have lost someone they cared about and/or respected. It is a tragedy that cannot be erased. There are lessons to be learned here, and I want everyone to think about this boy and his family and this tragedy and reflect upon the way we each contribute to a society that excludes trans* people, whether that is by allowing only for two genders or by making rules for who gets to identify as those genders. This is far more pervasive a problem than bullying and blatant transphobia. In my experience, the blatant hate is a lot easier to handle than a society that subtly and constantly tells me I don’t belong. Neither are easy, and neither should be anything a young person (or anyone) has to deal with. 

Looking to get the survey request on some community boards there. Shoot me an email: smbarr01@louisville.edu if you want to help! It would be greatly appreciated.

Hello everyone! I successfully survived my first semester as a doctoral student and have already been launched into many research projects!

I’m really excited about a project I’ve developed and am launching right now. I’m using an anonymous online survey to study the identity, body image, and emotional well-being of people who have undergone a gender transition (people who live as a gender that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth). The implications of this study could potentially be huge in the field of counseling psychology and will hopefully impact people’s experiences with therapists and psychologists. You must be 18 to complete the survey. The official recruitment letter and the link for the survey are pasted below. Please spread far and wide. Successful results require a large number of responses.

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Sebastian Barr and I am currently conducting a research project under the supervision of Dr. Stephanie Budge as part of my doctoral program. This project explores well-being in individuals who have undergone a gender transition (including but not limited to people who identify as female, male, genderqueer, transgender female, transgender male, stealth, binary, non-binary). To qualify for the study, participants must have undergone some degree of a social and/or medical gender transition (for many participants this can be phrased as living as a gender different from the sex they were assigned at birth) and be over the age of 18. Participation involves completing an online questionnaire that will take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete.

The information collected may or may not benefit you directly; however, you will have the opportunity to reflect on a range of life experiences and emotions (both seemingly related and unrelated to transition). Some people may find this to be helpful. Additionally, the information learned in this study may be helpful to others in understanding how different approaches to individuals’ identities can result in higher levels of well-being. This could lead to important applications in therapy and counseling.

It is important to us that the research reflects the wide range of identities and experiences of those who have gone through a gender transition, so we strongly encourage the participation of individuals who are often left out of other studies, e.g., those who live stealth or do not identify as transgender and people with non-binary identities.

If you are interested in being a part of this study, you can complete the questionnaire here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TransitionAndIdentityStudy.

If you have any questions, please contact Sebastian Barr at smbarr01@louisville.edu or Stephanie Budge, slbudg01@louisville.edu.

Thank you,

Sebastian Mitchell Barr

Doctoral Student, Counseling Psychology

Educational and Counseling Psychology

University of Louisville

[Trigger Warning for mention and some description of physical and sexual assault against women. There are also three disclaimers at the very end of this post that maybe you should read first..]

Yesterday I spent probably 3 hours obsessively reading about the murder of Yeardley Love. Love was 22, a senior and lacrosse player at University of Virginia, and in May of 2010, her All-American UVA lacrosse-playing boyfriend beat her to death. They looked like the it couple at every sports bar, and in fact many articles reported that they spent more time at their local UVA sports bar than they did in their own living rooms. They were the picture perfect poster image of upper-class educated dude bro culture and were plagued with the dark underside that has become a large part of that culture. Binge drinking, violence against women, blackout sexual encounters, and most terrifying – a perspective that these things are normal and/or inescapable.

I couldn’t tear myself away from the articles. I wanted every fact. I wanted to see pictures of Yeardley. Pictures of George Wesley Huguely V (as in “the fifth”). I wanted to see pictures of them together at frat parties. What high schools did they go to? Were they smart? What were their friends like? What did their friends say about them? And their families?

I have a strange relationship to what I’m calling “dudebro” culture.

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Ways in which the word “female” relates to me:

• I was female assigned at birth
• I lived in a female role before I transitioned to live as my true gender (a man)
• People thought I was female

My body is not female. My sex is not female. There are parts of my anatomy and my chromosomes that people often assume are correlated with the word “female” and that usually accompany people who would describe their bodies as female, but they are parts of me so they’re male, because I’m male.

While I’m not suggesting it’s appropriate to go around talking about my body, I think that often times the term “female-bodied” is used in an attempt to include me in groups that it might be important to differentiate. So to that degree, I/my body fall in to these categories:

• People with two X chromosomes
• People without a Y chromosome
• People with ovaries and a uterus (for now)
• People who were born without a fully developed penis
• People who do not currently have a fully developed penis
• People who were born without testes
• People who do not currently have testes
• People who were born with vulvas
• People who currently have vulvas
• People who were born with vaginas
• People who currently have vaginas
• People whose chests at one point (or currently) had substantial breast tissue
• People who have flat chests
• People who were assigned the sex female at birth
• Men
• Males
• People who are biologically male (yeah I’m biologically male)
• People who live in a male role
• People with high levels of testosterone
• [And as an additional note, I also fall into groups like “people with eyebrows,” “people with blonde hair,” “people who are between five and sex feet tall” …]

Does this make sense? What are other trans* people’s perspectives on the terms male- and female-bodied? I don’t like the terms as they suggest there are only two kinds of bodies and I think they are misused beyond that. If someone made me choose, without thought I’d say I was male-bodied. I’m male so my body is male. Beyond that, biologically, aspects of my brain, my hormones, and my physique and anatomy are even what the mainstream would label as typically male.

Janet Mock is pretty amazing, by the way.

janetmock:

It took Dateline NBC’s Hoda Kotb approximately 13 minutes into her segment - on medical treatments for trans kids - to ask 11-year-old trans girl Josie Romero of Tucson, Arizona: “Do you feel trapped in the wrong body?” 

Whenever this question is posed, I find it to be more of a leading statement rather than a true inquiry or invitation for a trans subject to speak about their life experience or outlook on their relationship with their bodies.

Whenever it’s posed it never sits well with me. And here’s why:

http://janetmock.com/2012/07/09/josie-romero-dateline-transgender-trapped-body/

It will remain up and online forever (I even have it backed up should tumblr ever crash or anything else unthinkable happen) as an archive and a resource, and I will try to keep links active and whatnot, but I will no longer be updating it.

I’ve made this decision for a few reasons.

• First and foremost, I’m moving and starting graduate school. I’ll be entering the doctoral program in counseling psychology at University of Louisville. I chose that program because not only is it a really strong program with wonderful students and faculty, but also because I will be working in the lab of Dr. Stephanie Budge, whose research focuses mainly on trans* and gender non-conforming people and their psychotherapy outcomes. Over the next 4-6 years, I will learn so much about psychology, will be trained in counseling, I will get a PhD, do some real work on understanding gender identity development and the impact of cis-normative messages on the gender identity development of trans youth, as well as work on developing intervention strategies through therapy and community/school-based methods. Additionally, I will emerge from the program with a license to practice therapy.
• Second, I have stopped updating regularly anyway, as my personal life has become decreasingly trans- and gender-focused. Certainly my career and advocacy/activism lives will maintain this focus but I don’t spend my “free” time writing about these issues enough to maintain an active blog.
• Third, there are a number of new(er) bloggers in the trans* community from various spectrums who are doing a great job and I feel totally confident leaving all of you and the many more of you to come in their capable hands.
• Fourth, I’ve become entirely too google-able.

I’ll be working on two final posts for the next week or so about how we can be good allies to trans* people and the responsibility of people on the masculine spectrum (no matter what you were assigned at birth) to challenge our concepts of masculinity and maleness and assigned gender roles. These will be very important messages and are in response to a number of things.

Regarding the masculinity post, it will be my contribution to a mainly-tumblr-based discussion of trans* masculinity and male privilege that began after we learned that a prominent “spokesperson” for the transmasculine community practiced poor consent and had used power over his partners to coerce them into sexual activities (read as: he raped them).

The ally post is one I should have written long ago. I have received a lot of “how can I be  a supportive friend to a trans* person?” and “how can I show that I’m a good trans* ally?” questions and have usually responded in simplistic and far-from-thorough ways. In reality, being a good ally and being a good friend involves actively working against cisgender privilege and following some very specific rules in addition to the more general guidelines of “accepting them as they are and giving them the space to figure everything out.” And unfortunately, I don’t know many cisgender people who are great allies to the trans* community. And I think even most of my friends don’t know or do the work they need to to be active allies. And then I think there are a number of people within the trans* community who practice cissexism on a regular basis and even more of us (I am so guilty of this) of slipping up from time to time. So this will be a crucial post that I hope will be circulated around, added to, commented on, shared, discussed, etc.

Running and writing xxboy has truly changed my life. I think it got me through some very difficult times in transition. I also got to know so many of you and that definitely changed my life for the better. And knowing that I was helping people, that I could help people, gave me the inspiration and motivation I needed to decided to go into Counseling Psychology and focus on working with trans* and gender non-conforming people (particularly youth). Thanks for sharing these experiences with me. I will maintain a twitter (will post the new handle soon) to keep anyone who is interested updated on my professional and advocate/activist life. And at some point in August, I will make a new page with a list of other blogs and online resources that will be active when xxboy becomes an archive. Much love

There is a common theme within trans stories and histories of a person vs. their body narrative. Most obviously, there is the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative. Even for people who do not describe their trans experience as having been born in the wrong body, there is still a duality between person and body almost always present. For many of us, our bodies are the locus of our gender dysphoria. There are specific markers on our body that have made others prescribe us as one gender when we are so clearly (to ourselves at least) another. There are specific changes many of us hope to make to our bodies in order to feel whole, sane, and happy. Until those changes are made (and even after sometimes), there are constant struggles to modify how we present our bodies to the rest of the world. And sometimes there is a deep personal and internal shame about parts of our bodies. There are realities about our bodies that others use against us to fight our claims to whatever gender we truly are.

Our bodies do not define who and what we are. But society often disagrees and tries to give our bodies, or at least specific aspects of our bodies (chromosomes, secondary sex characteristics, genitalia, reproductive anatomy, hormones, etc.) the final say in what our gender and/or sex is. Consequently our bodies are often pitted against us in a battle of who gets to say we are women or men, both, something in between, or something altogether different. Even if we aren’t saying we are trapped in wrong bodies, most trans people are fighting or have fought with their bodies.

Alignment is a common term used in counseling and in making the case for medical transition. Most trans people identify their bodies as not aligned with their senses of self. As a result, I believe, few people with trans histories have positive relationships with our bodies. How can we respect or value something we are fighting against? Our bodies are not our temples. And even if you respect and value yourself, if you are trans, there is a good chance that “yourself” does not equate to or include “your body.”

Many trans people dissociate from their bodies. We avoid them, try to ignore them. At worst, we mutilate and self-harm. Most commonly, we are at least trying to hide them. I work with trans youth who have rejected programming related to physical movement as it draws personal attention to one’s own body. “I don’t like my body, I don’t feel comfortable in it and with it, so I don’t want to do something that involves it.” Consequently, there is a really serious lack of physical self-care among trans people. Particularly for those earlier in transition.

It is a vicious cycle, I think. In order to avoid the pain of the battle against our bodies (which we often interpret as a losing battle), we dissociate; we do not take care of our bodies and in avoiding them, we forfeit agency over them; feeling this increased control of our bodies over our person, we further dissociate, we give up any sort of body/person or body/mind integration, we avoid our bodies even more, we take less care of them, lose even more control over them, etc.

Here is what I propose (without research and only my own case study to present as evidence): If trans* people, particularly trans* youth, put effort into taking care of themselves physically, they would develop a sense of agency over their bodies and would feel less dysphoria and trauma, since much of that stems from the sense that our bodies have control over us.

I started taking care of my body on accident. After years of not. Before I knew I was trans, I cared very little about my body. I think I dissociated from it more then than even after I came out. I had terrible posture, I didn’t care about cleanliness or presentation (beyond pleasing the ppl around me), I had no desire to do anything physical or think about what I ate. I was not proud of my body and not interested in developing any pride in it. When I realized I was a man, or at least a boy, I became ashamed of my body and really wanted nothing to do with it. Testosterone and top surgery helped me feel more aligned and even proud. I began caring more about my presentation the more comfortable I felt with my body. But I still lacked a feeling of integration. My body was something I had shaped to fit my person, but it still wasn’t really part of my self.

Last July I was diagnosed with a gluten allergy. This forced a serious dietary change and required forethought about food. I started eating healthier and became more attuned to the physical feelings of being healthier. My diet quickly became rather healthy and now I take pride in making good decisions about food (even beyond the “hey don’t eat gluten” bit). I eat consciously and consider things like water intake, lean protein, carbs, food groups, caffeine and alcohol consuption, etc.

I have for a while wanted to start a workout plan. Not to be healthy but to bulk up. I wanted a more adult masculine body. I wanted to look like the men of GQ. I’ve started and quit a number of times. For Christmas, my best bud bought me “The Home Workout Bible” which is amazing. Earlier this year I developed a dumbbell-based workout, bought a year-long membership to a gym, and set in at the beginner level. In the beginning my workouts were based solely around gaining mass and I didn’t understand much about muscles and tendons and cardio, etc. As I started enjoying going to the gym, I did more reading, and I learned about how to take care of my muscle fibers and tendons, when cardio is appropriate and safe, and how to work out in a way that benefits my health as well as increasing my muscle mass. For the past three months, I have been going to the gym 3-5 times a week, with very specific and solid workouts and I feel great. I feel the effects. Increased physical stamina. Less general fatigue. Healthier immune system. Oh and I’ve decreased my fat and gained 15 pounds of muscle mass.

Through a healthier diet and very deliberate physical activity, I have increased my health, and started to shape my body myself, naturally. The changes that came from testosterone and surgery were amazing and much needed but there is only so much agency that one can feel from such external procedures. Nutrition and Exercise involve so much will power and agency. So by accident, I started caring about my body. And I developed a sense of agency. These days (or at least 95% of them) I feel great about my body, I am proud of it, proud of the work I’ve done. And I feel more like it is a part of me. The more integrated I feel (that is the more my body is a part of my self), the more comfortable I feel. And the more I want to take care of it. My body is becoming my temple. Or more than that. It’s becoming part of this person I love so much: myself!

thedangerfox:

When people tell other people you’re trans*

That sucks.

The decision to disclose trans status and/or history is solely up to the individual with those experiences. PLEASE DO NOT DISCLOSE A PERSON’S TRANS STATUS OR HISTORY WITHOUT THEIR EXPLICIT PERMISSION TO DO SO.