In a blog post about transsexuals in the workplace, Anonymous brings up the issue of how education and class privilege thwarts the search for good statistics. In other words, two things are wrong here (and it’s not social justice or anything like that, at least in this post). First, the statistics about various transsexual procedures that we have are not representative of the larger transsexual population, as these procedures are only affordable by those with jobs or disposable income and thus we don’t know anything about transsexuals without jobs or who are poor or uneducated. Second, available role models of successful transsexuals are limited because educated, affluent post-operative transsexuals are not generally willing to participate in surveys or to be trans* their whole lives.
What does this mean? I’m sure socialists would say that this is expected from a free-market medical system and that centralized health care for all would generate not only good healthcare for all transsexuals, but also really solid data. Activists might say that it’s a shame that successful transsexuals tend to fade into society and out of the dual eyes of statistics and role models, thereby depriving society in two ways. I myself do not feel guilty for having the resources to make this transsexual transition, but I feel incredibly lucky to have the funds and the job and the education to make sense of it all. I would probably argue that more information, more education, and more general social acceptance of transness is called for, and we do that best by living well and serving as good, stable role models for others. What do you think, dear readers?
Factually, the majority of the 20,000 to 30,000 women who have received vaginoplasties, costing $10,000 (Thailand) to $25,000 (Toby Meltzer), are college educated and have maintained long term good employment to get there. Many of these same women have maintained excellent long-term employment enough to obtain bony facial feminization surgery costing between $20,000 and $50,000 (Ousterhout, Spiegel, Meltzer, Zukowski, Alter). The archetypal model for these women includes women like Andrea James (tsroadmap.com – masters in English, phi beta kappa) and the young Gabby from the documentary Transgeneration who is one of many college students who receive financial assistance from their parents and who sometimes even use portions of their college loans to pay for their surgeries!
The populations of people who from the starts of their lives deprive themselves with lack of education and years of time wasting self-destructive prostitution and sex-work are not representative of the 20,000 to 30,000 women who have received vaginoplasties. The social dropouts whose socioeconomic deprivation leads to life in ‘tranny bars’ and sex-work, most often end up hopelessly poor middle age psychosocially ravaged people, without vaginoplasties or much hope of ever getting one. Their socioeconomic status is generally associated with drug use, prostitution, risk for HIV, and desperately dangerous, often lethal, use of injected liquid silicone. Their ill-conceived educational choices, and social strata experiences are what doom their lives, not their gender dysphoria.
Women likely to obtain vaginoplasties, or who have received them, rarely if ever respond to the distorted and misrepresentative surveys that most often form the basis for the misguided notion that post-vaginoplasty women are either marginalized, or under employed. Such successful women blend into and assimilate with their social and employment surroundings. They don’t respond to surveys because they don’t need to and generally aren’t living within the purview of such social work, public health oriented, government associated, systems. The visible tip of the iceberg of such successful women includes people like professor emeritus Lynn Conway (lynnconway.com) , Marci Bowers, MD (gynecologist and vaginoplasty surgeon – marcibowers.com), physician Christine McGinn D.O. (assistant to Dr. Bowers), cardiologist Becky Allison, MD (drbecky.com) , attorney Amy Preston (amynews.com), college student Jessica Anderson (translife.net), Gina Venolia one of dozens of women, post vaginoplasty software engineers at Microsoft, and others like her at countless other high technology companies, Air France flight attendant Andréa Colliaux, petite NASCAR driver Terri O’Connell, bass player Jennifer Leitham – with the Doc Severinson jazz orchestra, Donna Rosen – another high technology employee, and Raytheon engineer Amanda Simpson who ran for congress in Arizona. It is probably notable that she appears to have requested that Lynn Conway remove her from the list of post vaginoplasty women successes so that she might recoup some of the anonymity and invisibility that generally accompanies employment success and success with other aspects of life for such women. Observers need to better understand that the success of such women generally results in their invisibility and unavailability to contribute to the generally distorted and misrepresentative picture that so called professionals and the media would like to portray about the tens of thousands of post-vaginoplasty women who have successfully blended into the very same mainstream society where they achieved the educational and professional success that enabled them to afford the $20,000 to $100,000 of surgical interventions that gave them their freedom.
