Kappa Beta Serving the transgendered community since 1988

What’s in a word? Words can be powerful, beautiful, or simply descriptive. All successful movements started with a word; a word that defines the movement. Civil, Black, Gay, Lesbian were words used as adjectives followed by the noun that defined the objective. That noun? "Rights." We, as transgender folk, also talk about wanting the same Rights as the mainstream community. When we tell our friends, our family, our Senators, our Congressional Representatives what we desire, we do a pretty good job of defining those desires. What we fail to do is tell them who we are. We are ‘T’. However, since we – as members of the "T’ community – cannot even agree upon what "T" means (or even the spelling of the word), how can we ever hope to gain respect and acceptance without this ability to define ourselves? Please note that none of the above mentioned movements tried to further define themselves to mainstream America by all the variations that could exist within the movement. We didn’t see, for instance, the "Butch Lesbian Rights Movement", "The Lipstick Lesbian Movement", or "The Lesbian with Bi-Sexual Leanings Movement." We saw a single word: Lesbian. It only serves to confuse and dilute a move toward acceptance when the movement is broken down into sub-groups. A single, unified group has hope; a fractured movement does not. Additionally, once Rights are established, the word Pride can be substituted in the movement’s name.

I was struggling with the term "Gender Dysphoria" because it seems to connote a rare disease. I may have a cold now and then, but I certainly do not have a disease that has lasted since I was six years old. I first came to the conclusion that this was a disease created by the TS community in order that insurance companies would now have an identified disease and thus agree to pay for transition surgery (which I certainly do not object to at all). I still was not satisfied that that I knew what the definition of "Gender Dysphoria" was because it is not only used to describe a condition present in transsexuals, but also to describe the reason crossdressers dress.

I was still not satisfied with the media's definition of Gender Dysphoria, until I finally deduced the correct definition of "Gender Dysphoria":

Let's get the technical stuff out of the way first. Last August I received a shot of Lupron for a medical condition. One use of Lupron medication (usually administered via a shot by a urologist) is to shrink the prostate gland. The shot can be sized for one-month, three-months or four-months in duration. (It also can be administered by mouth on a daily basis.) Lupron works by stopping the production of sex hormones – testosterone for prostate shrinkage. Testosterone is fuel to the prostate, thus when the fuel supply is cut off, the prostate shrinks. Lupron is not like Spironolactone, or other androgen suppressors, which just inhibit the effects of testosterone, not the production of testosterone. Since Lupron stops the production of sex hormones, the production of estrogen is also shut-down. (Males produce small amounts of estrogen, just not as much as females do.) Without sex hormones, the libido goes into hiding.

As an added "bonus," hot flashes and night sweats are a daily (hourly!) occurrence while Lupron is in the system. I am not sure what mechanism causes the hot flashes and night sweats, but to this lay girl's way of thinking, I would go for the lack of estrogen (since it is the lack of estrogen in menopausal women that causes the flashes and sweats). But the medical profession states it is the lack of testosterone (in males) that creates the flashes and sweats. Once the Lupron wears off, the hot flashes and night sweats disappear and the libido returns to normal; or at least to what it was before the shot was administered. (As an aside, Lupron is also used to "chemically castrate" pedophiles.)