Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.
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Scott Goehring was raised in Indiana and was educated at Purdue University and Indiana University. He was married, as an undergraduate, to a wife whose previous husband had been a Scientologist. They had two children.
In 1991 he founded the Usenet Group alt.religion.scientology, and controversially added a flag.sea.org mail id to the application which implied a Scientology co-sponsor. By 1995 the Usenet group had become a high-volume group with confrontations between skeptics, and believers, cancelbots and law suits.
By then Kelly and Scott were involved in the Agoran Nomic MUD gaming. In 1999 Kelly came out as transgender to the Agoran Nomic MUD community and acknowledged that she and Scott were the same person. In 2001 Scott and his wife were divorced, and Scott legally became Kelly Martin.
In 2004 Kelly joined Wikipedia and quickly rose through sysop to the Arbitration Committee. In 2006 she was forced to resign. She works as a systems developer in Linux and Windows environments.
Note that the Wikipedia page was initially called "Scott Goehring", and then renamed to "alt.religion.scientology".
Religious Freedom Watch, like CCHR, is part of the Church of Scientology. A well-known HBS organizer is a registered CCHR investigator and promotes CCHR on her site. Note that the Religious Freedom Watch includes a photograph of Kelly, refers to her all through as "Scott Goehring", and uses only male pronouns.
Thomas Szasz was born in Budapest. He earned a degree in physics from the University of Cincinnati in 1941, and a medical degree from the same university in 1944. His residency was in psychiatry. He was professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York, and Professor Emeritus after retirement.
He is a prominent theorist in the anti-psychiatry movement and a critic of medicine as social control. His best known books are The Myth of Mental Illness, 1960, and The Manufacture of Madness, 1970.
Szasz has gained a reputation as a libertarian critic of psychiatric practice. He speaks against the coercive psychiatric practice which he calls 'the Therapeutic State', although many critics while not defending the abuses in mental hospitals, regard his attack as on a straw man. While his attack on the state's interference in addiction, suicide and homosexuality can easily be accepted, there is an enormous area of psychiatry which he does not discuss.
Sedgwick says: 'Phobics, depressives, manics, schizophrenics and anxiety neurotics - in short, the general run of psychiatric patients who, in addition to having 'life problems' do happen to feel distinctly unwell, rarely if ever enter Dr Szasz's casebook'.
Szasz’ solution of Contractual Psychotherapy is not available to those of limited means. Nor does he attack those of his colleagues who keep a patient in therapy for decades.
In 1973, the American Humanist Association named Szasz, Humanist of the Year. Note that not even one GLBT person has been so named.
Szasz's attack on psychiatry's invention of homosexuality as a disease was congruent with the rise of gay activism in the 1970s leading to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM III in 1974.
However he has come out strongly against the right of people to change their sex. He refers to trans women as ‘he’ etc; compares the operation to clitorectomy: sees sex change as a fraud, accepts uncritically the study that justified the ending of surgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, ignoring all the methodological problems that have been raised, but does not respect the decision made by the individual transsexual. He embraces Janice Raymond's pretence that sex changes are anti-feminist, and his review of her book is quoted on both its front and back pages. He has said “If a man cuts off his own penis psychiatrists call him a schizophrenic, but it he can persuade a surgeon to cut it off for him, then they call him a transsexual”.
Thomas Szasz, “Male and Female He Created Them: review of The Transsexual Empire: The Making Of The She-Male by Janice G. Raymond”, New York Times Book Review, June 10, 1979: 11, 39. Reprinted in Thomas Szasz. The Therapeutic State. Buffalo: Prometheus Books.. 1984: 327-9.
Thomas Szasz. Sex by Prescription. New York: AnchorPress/Doubleday 198 pp 1980: 86-92.
Peter Sedgwick. Psycho Politics. Pluto Press. 1982: chp 6.
Charlotte Goiar is a member of CCHR, and features a 90 minute CCHR video on her HBS home page. I have yet to find any pro-transsexual or pro-HBS material from CCHR, the Church of Scientology or Thomas Szasz.
Charlotte is a resident of Vigo in Galicia. She was diagnosed
by the school psychologist as a trans child at age 7, and from age 16 was on
hormonal therapy from the Vigo hospital - the first such patient to be so
treated in Vigo. However she met much derision at school from both students and
teachers and was unable to complete high school. Since 1991 she has been in
psychiatric treatment, and living on welfare.
In the early 2000s Goiar proposed the concept of Síndrome de Harry
Benjamin (Harry Benjamin Syndrome). The term had been pioneered by Tom
Reucher in Paris with an inclusivist meaning, but Goiar changed the meaning
to exclude most trans persons. She set up www.shb-info.org in 2005, and while posting
on the Australian WOMAN forum encountered Diane
Kearny in the US, who had similar opinions. They initially worked together,
but then split and in competition both set up web sites, Yahoo forums and
Standards of Care.
In 2004, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) became the government,
and quickly implemented gay marriage, but kept delaying the promised Ley de
Identidad de Género (Gender Identity Law) until prominent trans woman and PSOE
activist Carla
Antonelli threatened a hunger strike and this attracted international press
attention. The law was passed in 2007, and Carla, Charlotte and many others
were able to change their legal name and gender as surgery was not a
requirement.
A decree by the previous government in 1995 had prohibited public health
services from paying for transgender surgery. This was rescinded, also in 2007.
By then, Andalusia had already been performing these operations for eight years,
and this region was later joined by Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country.
Aragon and Extremadura paid to have patients treated elsewhere. However Galicia
and other regions did what they could to avoid offering transgender surgery.
Charlotte described HBS: 1
"Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) is an intersex condition developed in the
very early stages of pregnancy affecting the physical process of differentiation
between male and female. In this patients, the brain develops as a certain sex
but the rest of the body takes on the physical characteristics of the opposite
sex. Genetic aetiology for this condition had been showed also by modern medical
research.
Today, what was previously known as intense True Transsexualism is considered by medical res earch experts in this area as a physiological condition of
birth, which is both neurological and genetic in origin, and therefore an inborn
intersex condition (physiological). That is why by following the medical
naming conventions in regard to physiologically intersexed states or syndromes,
the condition formerly known as intense True Transsexualism (Type VI on the
diagnosis table of Harry Benjamin), must be named Harry Benjamin Syndrome.
Since people with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are conventional in their gender
identity and expression, like most members of society, these people need a
physical rehabilitation of their endocrine system and phenotype in order to
function in society as any other average person.
They are not seeking to defy social norms of gender or sexuality as is the
case of transgender and most who call themselves transsexuals .
People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome as a group are naturally opposed to
ambiguous groups of sex and/or gender such as transgender persons and most who
call themselves transsexuals. People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are not a part
of a supposed continuum with these other states of sexual or gender-related
ambiguity.
Despite the confusion in terminology with the old concept of True
"Transsexualism", persons with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (which in reality is a
type of intersex condition) should not be confused with transgenderism and other
ambiguous sexual states in general.
People born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are persons with a binary gender
orientation of either Man or Woman, as any other average person in society.
Their identity is woman or man, never "transsexual". Therefore they need a
complete physical rehabilitation in order to function sexually and develop
socially as any other average person in our society.
People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome repudiate sexual ambiguity and don't feel
identified with sexually ambiguous labels like "transsexual" or "transgender"
which neither define nor represent them."
Initially Goiar claimed that 1:500 are HBS, but has been reducing the
frequency and on 2009 said that HBS is "an extremely rare condition [1:100,000]"
(which would mean that HBS persons are only a fraction of 1% of transsexuals).
She is further contentious in that she and her movement have become known for
disparaging other trans persons, even post-ops, and GLBT persons in general.
Despite Charlotte’s on-going non-surgical status, the Spanish HBS movement
was critical of the UK and Spanish laws permitting gender change without
surgery, and most well-known transsexual activists have been disparaged on her
forum in that they are not anti-transgender (that is against all trans persons
who are not HBS). Carla Antonelli was criticized for representing Spanish
transsexuals despite being non-op – but Charlotte’s continuing pre-op status was not
mentioned. Charlotte expressed approval of the situation for transsexuals in Iran. She
objected to the term ‘transsexuality’, as opposed to 'transsexualism', as
pejorative in that she took it to imply a choice.
In 2008 Charlotte was assigned a court-appointed counsel, and with his help,
induced a Vigo judge to recognize her problem, and rule that her
"anxious-depressive syndrome" was caused by her discomfort with her body.
However the court ruled against her request for surgery in that such surgery was
not available in Galicia.
Charlotte was antagonistic to the STP 2012 depathologization campaign by
other transsexuals, and emphasized in contrast that HBS want medical
repathologization. A petition sponsored by SHB-Info.org was signed by 500
persons and was sent to the World Health Organization asking that transsexualism
be recognized, not as a psychological disorder, but as a medical one.
The HBS forum was discontinued and closed in 2011.
In 2012, her mother - the one person who had stood with her – died. Charlotte
underwent a religious crisis:
“I had never imagined and I still do not
understand what guilt I have of being born with this pathology, and the hatred
that it awakens in so many people. I felt so vulnerable. … Through a Christian
English friend, little by little I began to study some Christian texts. This was
how, little by little, I found relief in God, as a way to leave the course of
everything in the hands of a force superior to me, so I began to read the Bible
for the first time shortly after turning 40 years old.”
She became a cristiana
metodista (Methodist). 2
Charlotte won a ruling in the Galician High Court that Servizo Galego de
Saúde (SERGAS), the Galician Health Service, should pay for her to have
genital surgery. However the Galician government appealed to the Spanish
Supreme Court, which in turn also found in Goiar's favour in May 2013. By
September, as SERGAS had taken no steps to conform with the ruling, Goiar went
to the press. SERGAS then wasted almost two years sending Charlotte to public
clinics in Málaga and Barcelona that did not do the required type of operation.
In 2015, at age 42, Charlotte finally had surgery in the private Instituto de
Cirurxía Plástica, Barcelona, with Dr Iván
Mañero - the only clinic in Spain to offer colovaginoplasty.
Before the operation she asked for pastoral accompaniment, which led to her
meeting Carlos Osma of Christianos
Gays.
In 2017, Charlotte allied herself with the ultra-Catholic Hazte Oír and its
opposition to sex education and to ‘gender ideology’. She is also claiming that
the new ICD-11 term Gender Incongruence is the same thing as HBS.
According to the Spanish newspapers Charlotte at 41, despite being on female hormones since age 16 and legally female since the Ley de Identidad de Género in 2007, still has no work experience. Surgery will of course make her feel more confident, and the legal precedent she has set does far more good than all the HBS stuff, but as any cis woman would tell her, being a 40+ woman with neither job nor life partner is not an easy road.
What would the actual Harry Benjamin have thought of the HBS movement? He writes with regret of intolerance: “Too many individuals are that way; what they do not like must be forbidden and punished. Then they are satisfied. I have even met transvestites who dislike (or pretend to dislike) transsexualism so much that they are against estrogen treatment and operation (for reasons of self protection?). There are also transsexuals who dislike transvestites as well as homosexuals. Intolerance can be found in strange quarters.” The Transsexual Phenomenon, p114-5 of the Warner Books 1977 edition.
Surely, those who organize in his name, should respect his sentiment.
, 1960, and The Manufacture of Madness
, 1970.
Buffalo: Prometheus Books.. 1984: 327-9.
. Pluto Press. 1982: chp 6.
