Male trapped in a female body

Heres one.

How about this: your a doctor and you have a patient that is female who you have to give a check up to. Now the female is a male in side the female body. What on earth does a doctor do? Do they carry on as though they are just a female or proceed with cautions? What would a male feel inside the female body at a gyn exam?

There are a few people around that suffer with Gender Identity Disorder or oppers it a female trapped inside a male body.

I was reading about this about a kid. A girl who new she was a boy inside her own body. The parent was going nuts about it because the kid would not wear girls clothing at all or use the girls toilet at school. She wanted to be known as Billy instead of Julia. This started when the kid was 4 years old.

So how would a doctor deal with this, I'm trying to figure this out but can only come up with one answer.

Treat as a female or a male.

Hey! When you come into this lifetime it's always a craps shoot. Sometimes you're a girl and sometimes you're a boy. Maybe you were a boy several lifetimes in a row and now you're a girl and you don't like it or vice versa. Maybe you made a decision last lifetime that you will always be a boy and then you end up with a girl body. It all depends on your viewpoint. So, you either make a new decision to BE the girl/boy that you were born into and go on from there or change the girl/boy body that you have into the girl/boy body that you want to have.

. . . . The parent was going nuts about it because the kid would not wear girls clothing at all or use the girls toilet at school. She wanted to be known as Billy instead of Julia. This started when the kid was 4 years old. So how would a doctor deal with this, I'm trying to figure this out but can only come up with one answer. Treat as a female or a male.

For the most part, I agree with nornew who said to treat the person as a male or female as they request. I also agree with AuLait in that the person should either be what they were born as or change into what they want to be. I agree with Chester's statement that a doctor would simply treat them as a person and treat any pathology in an appropriate manner.

Having gotten that out of the way, the public toilet you use is to be determined by your one choice of two options: (1) your chromosomes, which inextricably say what you are. Have any number of X chromosomes and one Y and you are male and you get to use the men's room, (2) you have undergone sex reassignment surgery and you get to use the bathroom of your reassigned sex. The boy who thinks he should be a girl DOES NOT get to choose the women's toilet because he doesn't feel like a boy, nor does the girl who thinks she is a boy get to use the men's toilet. Permissiveness in public has to stop somewhere. Discipline is necessary. I will get my sjambok out if it necessary.

Note: I am not talking about emergency situations or extenuating circumstances which may force a member of one sex to use the other's bathroom in public.

The person the doctor is dealing with is possibly a transsexual. These days the situation is quite open. Chastity Bono, is now Chaz Bono after having had surgery.

In the situation we have in this post I would assume the patient is under 18, and probably in the ‘kid’ stage. The patient is still in the female body, so for the physical, one simply would treat the body as a female one. Psychologically the family practice or pediatrician would probably have to refer the patient so someone who understands children in this situation. Either s/he is going to reverse course and turn out normal male, do the sex change route, or stay male outwardly with a lot of internal conflict. Either way, it seems to me that a child’s brain isn’t set in stone and development and time will reveal much. Only a specialist could advise the parents on whether to continue treating the child as Julia or enabling the child and enable the child’s desire to be Billy.

I know that my friend James, before he "became" male through surgery, absolutely hated annual gyn exams and would try to avoid them even because they made him feel so disgusted with himself because he was born female. But once you got him to go, he was completely normal and dealt with it....so I'm not sure.

I don't care one way or the other whether or not someone puts on a dress in the morning or uses make-up or wears high heels regardless of what sex the Maker made them. Whatever floats your boat is fine with me.

But this whole business of "gender re-assignment" or being a "transsexual" is just more meaningless feel good political correctness BS. You can mutilate your body any way you want and carve up your penis to make it look like a vagina or vise-versa but at the end of the day you are what you are and you is what you is even if you change your name. And there's still that damn pesky y chromosome issue. As for me, when a tranny male impregnates a tranny female who experiences natural child birth I'll start to re-evaluate things.

Doctors can't really do much unless the patient approaches them about their feelings. If it were me I'd treat the patient as their biological gender and let them come to me. I may have a butchy patient but unless she tells me she feels a certain way be it mentally or physically I have no grounds to act.

Now if I give her an exam and I see something wrong (infection, unusual lump etc...) I do have probable cause to act and give treatment as well as advise the patient on what we can do to help her recover. That is the one exception to the rule.

Dear Curious 44

The transsexual surgery in my opinion isn’t about political correctness. It’s about the needs of the individual getting the surgery.

The transsexuals (TS) with whom I’m, felt they were the wrong sex at a very young age, and suffered until adulthood. Only recently has it become acceptable, through law changes for trans gender children (more often males) to come out in school. That part is political correctness.

While one can change sex roles, and clothing with the opposite sex without surgery, the body image is important to TS. Male to female TS strongly desire real breasts, rather than wearing prostheses, hate their genitalia & consistent with their sexual orientation desire ‘normal’ sex (penis to vagina). So they have the surgery. In addition, there are numerous cosmetic enhancements that may be had: Adam’s Apple removal, jaw remodeling, lip, nose changes, etc.

Female to Male TS hate their breasts and have mastectomies. A new penis is extremely expensive, and difficult. Hormones to grow facial hair, and hopefully help the voice are commonly taken.

One should also differentiate TS from cross-dressers, who do not have a sexual identity problem (they know their sex is the right one) and are usually heterosexual.

Bratwurst,

The surgery itself is not about political correctness but the terminology is. I can sympathize with anyone who is so uncomfortable with themselves that they are willing to go through such radical surgery to do something about it. The fact remains that extreme body modification, a different hair style and a name change don't alter who we were born as.

Wow! Great discussion everyone!! Really enjoyed reading about your thought and experiences .. Most of the time life is just not so black and white.

If I was the doctor then if the patient asked me to treat her or him as the opposite sex then I wouldn't mind I guess, as long as the patient actually knew what needs to be done as far as health concerns go. Just because someone either thinks or wants to think they are the opposite sex doesn't mean there is a psychological issue there. Honestly there are a lot of different reasons why someone would want to be the opposite sex. I would have to agree with nornew, switch, curious, owen, and brat. Again the patient would have to come to me so that way I was aware of the situation. Also if the patient is having some kind of problems physically and gender specific then I can't just refuse to tell them that they got this from their life style choices.

No one is perfect. It is sad that the parents of the child were going nuts. I think especially in today's society, that people need to know who they are and what they want to do in life. I know myself I have always known who I am, but at the same time not knowing what I wanted to do in life. So to answer the question, I think that the doctor should treat as the gender they are but when talking to the patient refer to what they want to be called and treat them like they want to be treated. There's no reason the doctor cannot be respectful to peoples opinions and life style choices. It is there choice.

Warning: rant ahead from an angry trans man who has not had the best experiences with medical professionals.

To answer the original question, if you're dealing with an adult then you deal with them in the same way you would deal with another patient. Some trans men find gyn exams extremely stressful or are too scared to go at all, others aren't so anxious but will most likely feel awkward. I found a lump on my cervix and got it checked out, I was not worried about the physical exam itself but more the reaction I would get from the doctor. Both my then GP and the doctor at the hospital dealt with it brilliantly - they made me feel at ease, discussed everything with me before doing anything and didn't ask any unrelated questions about my body or specifically about my GID. It turned out to just be a nabothian cyst so everything was fine and I would be happy to see those doctors again (though unfortunately I now live in a different area).

You would be amazed how some medical professionals treat trans people (I'm not even going to start on how they are treated by the gender identity specialists). I had a friend who got to the pap test age in the UK and booked an exam because if your gender marker is male then obviously you don't get a reminder letter sent out, the nurse accused him of lying about having a vagina (surely a quick glance at the medical records would confirm this?) and refused to do the exam without a letter from his GP - who was in the same building.

If you're a woman, imagine that every doctor you have ever seen about anything has asked you how big your vagina is and what your favourite sexual position is. Every time I see a new doctor I think oh God, what are they going to say? Are they going to treat me like a human being or interrogate me to satisfy their own curiosity? Are they going to have actually read my notes or am I going to have to explain my life story for the 200th time because otherwise they'll try to take me off my hormones because they're worried about cancer of the prostate I don't have? If I have a blood test are they going to use the correct assays for the results, and if they don't will my health suffer as a result?

Maybe it's easier to point out what NOT to do:

- You do not ask unnecessary or medically irrelevant questions about someone's gender identity or sex life (such as asking someone about the size of their clitoris during a psych evaluation).

- You do not try to look at or touch someone's chest or genitals without their permission and/or when it is not necessary (I was hospitalised for an OD and a doctor put his hands down my pants on the pretext of examining my stomach - I have a feeling that if it was for a legitimate reason he would have told me he was going to do it).

- You do not offer your unsolicited opinions on completely irrelevant topics (I had a GP who refused to give me the hormones prescribed by the hospital and told me it was because if I transitioned I'd never find a sexual partner).

- You do not insist on using the wrong pronouns (a doctor referring to me on a letter as a 'lady') - if you are not sure which pronoun to use, ask which they prefer.

There are very few circumstances in which you need to know someone's name at birth. If, say, you're having trouble finding medical records then it may be appropriate to ask what someone's previous name or birth name was, not what their 'real' name is. Don't ask just because you're curious, or start using that name if you do know it.

Be aware that sex reassignment surgery costs a lot of money and can be very difficult to fund - a lot of insurers in the US won't pay for it, the NHS may refuse to depending where you live in the UK. If you have to find the cash yourself you're talking about thousands or tens of thousands of pounds/dollars, plus the cost of appointments and travel, hormones, changing documentation, specialist clothing (e.g. chest binders, which are lycra vests which flatten your chest) and no doubt other things I've forgotten. Because of this it is not appropriate to make a judgement on someone's identity purely based on what surgery they have had. I haven't had any surgery yet because the NHS in my area refuses to fund it and because my GP believes I should just be happy with being on hormones so I don't really "need" surgery. I am no longer seeing a specialist because my father's funeral was on the same day as an appointment - I rang to rearrange it but wasn't allowed to because the specialist said that wasn't a good enough reason to miss it - and I can't get surgery without a re-referral which my GP refuses to do.

As for public toilets, I was once dragged out of a toilet cubicle, pants around my knees, in a student bar by security staff because they claimed I was using the wrong toilet and when I produced my student ID with my photo on they said it wasn't enough so I had to empty the contents of my wallet into their hands to show them my debit card, my credit card, my library card and whatever else was in there to prove that it was actually mine. I don't know what would have happened if any of that documentation had had a different name on it. In the same toilet on another occasion I was threatened by a group of 7 very drunk, very large men who also claimed I shouldn't be there. In desperation I pulled out my ID card and they claimed I'd forged it so I could use the men's toilets - an interesting concept I feel but they seemed to think it made sense at the time. Thankfully 2 friends got me out unscathed but if I had been alone I could have been in trouble. Interestingly when I was physically threatened the security staff were nowhere to be seen.

Thanks for the great response shadowavenger! I know that it was really enlightening for me and I hope it was for others as well. I know that it is a subject that outisiders have a hard time understanding, but I really felt like you gave us all a good idea of what it is like for you and other transgender people. In place of actually walking a mile in your shoes, this is the next best thing. Karma to you!