Jennifer Diane Reitz (1959 - ) activist, game designer, artist.

Raised in Oregon, Reitz studied biochemistry, but left without a degree. Jennifer had surgery at age 22. Since then she has lived in a polyamorous family that has grown to four persons, three women and a man.

She was out about being a lesbian-oriented bisexual, although pretty much asexual, and being part of a successful polyamory, but until she was 38 kept her gender history a deep secret.

"I have lived my entire life psychologically crippled by the shame of the very thought of anyone discovering my transsexuality. No longer. The best way to destroy embarrassment, is to have nothing one needs to hide. I am finally facing the vile bigot inside my own head that lives to condemn myself."

Since 1981 Jennifer has worked in the games industry, at first with dice-based fantasy games, and then after 1985 on Amiga and IBM computers. She was co-founder and visual designer of the video games site HappyPuppy.com (which was sold for a considerable sum in 1996) and LinkTown.com, (both are now defunct) and helped in the creation of OtakuWorld.com.  She and her spouses run Accursed Toys. Her recent work, mainly webcomics, is on Jenniverse.com.

Jennifer is the author of transsexual.org, Going from what is written on Transsexual.org:

1. Jennifer conflates gender and gender identity, and proclaims that "the difference between sex and gender are at the very core of the issue" but ignores the difference between gender and gender identity.
2. She proclaims that "it is apparent that some fifty percent of transsexuals die by age 30, usually by their own hand. This morbidity is known as the 50% Rule".
3. She does recognize the high success rate of hormones and surgery.
4. She opts for foetal hormonal events as the cause of transsexuality, and unlike many recognizes that the same is posited for homosexuality: "Although transsexuality is not the same thing as homosexuality, the two can sometimes occur in conjunction with each other, and there is evidence that both are created by the similar mechanisms, in utero".
5. She proclaims that transvestity is something quite different: "primarily a sexual fetish that occurs after puberty … the behavior is apparently not rooted in a biological, pre-natal basis, but is learned".
6. She rejects "transgenderism" as an "empty word" whose "primary function is social and political, and not clinical, despite the efforts of some to legitimize this essentially meaningless term".
7. She accepts the 1:30,000 estimate for transsexuals, but argues that because "transsexuality is most commonly caused by stress-related hormonal changes … more transsexuals are born during times during or following war".
8. She claims that "the transsexual is on average two standard deviations in intellect greater than the base population, and one standard deviation higher than those defined as homosexual". 
9. "Every society in history has had some name, role or way of relating to the transsexual, from ancient Canaan and Turkey to India, even to the present day."
10. Her site contains self-administered test to identify m-f transsexuals. She calls it Combined Gender Identity And Transsexuality Inventory (COGIATI).

Jennifer describes herself as a hetaera (the highly educated Greek courtesans).

EN.WIKIPEDIA   Transsexual.org   OtakuWorld   Jenniverse

COGIATI:

• Natalie. "Debunking the COGIATI". Queereka, January 11, 2012. http://queereka.com/2012/01/11/debunking-the-cogiati.
  
• Andrea James. "The COGIATI "gender test"". TSRoadmap. www.tsroadmap.com/mental/cogiati.html.
  
  WikiBin
  

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Transsexual.org appears not to have been updated since 2009.

COGIATI has been much criticized for its reliance on gender stereotyping.  In particular maths ability is regarded as masculine, and admissions of such will result in the person not being identified as transsexual.  I would say that Jennifer's conflation of gender and gender identity damages the COGIATI seriously.

On Transsexual.org Jennifer insists “I care nothing for the politics of gender, nor the politics of sexuality, nor politics at all. Indeed I am reviled by such, gender issues are about survival and identity, and it is despicable to use the agony of anyone as a basis for petty power games.”   Presumably she fails to see the inevitable politics in her attitudes to transvestites and to transgenderism.   In fact we could take her as a pre-cursor of the HBS movement.  At the same time the gender stereotyping of COGIATI makes her position comparable to that of Ray Blanchard and his division of trans women into AGP/HSTS.

I don't see where late-transition transsexuals fit into her scheme, particularly those who have been husbands and fathers.

I simply do not understand her claim that “more transsexuals are born during times during or following war”.  In western Europe and north America, there were a few transsexuals in the 1960s (presumably born in the 1940s) but there are a lot lot more today.

She cites no sources for her claim of 50% dead by age 30.

Not all traditional societies had reverence for trans persons.   It is an interesting question why some did and others did not.   Some think that societies that have institutional inter-generational sex do  not have trans roles.   Some, such as the Celts, seem to have had neither.

We should be very wary of theories that flatter us by claiming that we are more intelligent and creative.  Again Jennifer cites no sources.  Many of the persons whom I have featured on this blog do indeed have intelligence and creativity, but that is one reason why I selected them and not others.   I have also featured trans persons, particularly those now in prison, who seemed rather challenged in terms of intelligence.