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Sniff me hard, babe
Do bottled sex pheromones work? 
By Mary Roach
[08/27/99]

Hepatitis highway
Why is there hepatitis hysteria and a syphilis scare along I-95 in North Carolina?
By Geoff Edgers
[08/26/99]

Urge
Lesbian blind date
Nancy calls upon a mismatched couple and can't decide which lie is the truth.
By Tracy Quan
[08/26/99]

To have and to kill
Sexual serial killers aren't acting out random bursts of depression or anger; they are trying to fill an emptiness in their souls.
By Stephen G. Michaud
[08/25/99]

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Reach out and touch yourself
A phone-sex virgin creates her own private marathon.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[08/24/99]

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Ina and Christian are part of a new generation of transsexuals who are taking their fate into their own hands and changing the face of gender shifting. Transgender pioneers like Renee Richards, whose sex change in 1975 made headlines around the world, had navigated the mental health system for years before transitioning. While those agonizing years (or decades) were full of suffering, they also guaranteed that the decision to transition was not a whim or an act of passing rebellion.

But adolescents are, well, adolescent. Adults often have difficulty interpreting their behavior. A teenage would-be transsexual's anguish and determination may look like standard-issue rebellion in an extreme version. Now that tattooing and piercing have lost their shock value, couldn't transsexualism turn out to be the ultimate way to etch defiance onto one's body? There's the nightmarish prospect of a teenager going through with a sex change and deciding later that it was a mistake. Jayne Jordan knows of one such case -- a biological male who identified as female and had taken estrogen from age 16. He had breast implants and was surgically castrated, then decided he wanted to go back to being male. He had the implants removed -- but since he has no testicles, he'll be taking testosterone for the rest of his life.

So at what age should children wield the power to change their sex? It's one thing to experiment with homosexuality; people can always change their minds later on. But by law a minor cannot undergo any voluntary medical procedure without parental consent, except STD-related care, contraception and (in some states) abortion. There are ways around this; an emancipated minor, or someone who claimed she would be abused if she confronted her parents, can make medical decisions independently. Should there be laws preventing all minors from putting themselves through sex reassignment? Should more be done to stop transgender kids from getting hormones illegally?

Ina acknowledges the potential for mixed-up teenagers to do themselves harm, but she maintains that for the most part, slowing the transition process for minors serves mainly to make the adults involved more comfortable. It is true, after all, that sex-changing hormones have a mood-stabilizing, antidepressant effect on transgender people, who have astronomic suicide rates. Given such high stakes, Ina assails the belief that "there's nothing you can do but endure puberty until you're all grown, and if you don't kill yourself by then, knock wood, many opportunities will magically become available and you'll have a lovely life."

The very turbulence of adolescence should make transitioning a more natural concept, she says. The "normal" life passages from boy to man, girl to woman, she argues, "are also gender transitions, and just as disruptive and traumatic as the transgender experience." Why let puberty run its course knowing that it will require several expensive surgeries, not to mention electrolysis, to undo it?

Ironically, Ina's position faces some unlikely opposition. Gay and lesbian advocates, who have been at the forefront of the transgender rights movement, often find it troubling to think that people may choose transsexualism as an alternative to being gay. As a lesbian, Jayne Jordan says, "it crosses my mind a lot that some of my patients may choose sex changes out of internalized homophobia."

Some gay advocates argue that in a society in which gender roles were not policed with such vehemence, transgender teens would not feel the need to transition at all. These activists seem hopeful that sex changes will become a relic of a less enlightened era, that transgender people -- and everyone else -- will be able to live in the bodies assigned them by nature and inhabit whatever gender feels right at any given moment. Some transgender youth do say they're comfortable in an ambiguous, sliding place in the gender spectrum. Twenty-one-year-old Angelica, for example, only does hormones. "I don't fully identify as female, but rather a feminine androgynous male -- no surgery for me."

Perhaps even more troubling than these ideological issues is the fact that many of the teenagers who show up on the doorsteps of sex-change organizations are street kids. Lost, broke and helpless, they may be looking for a magical escape from their loneliness and poverty as well as their gender alienation. "Some young male-to-female patients actually believe they'll be able to get pregnant," says Jordan. Often, she says, transgender street kids come in thinking all their problems will go away and they'll be accepted as women or men. She has to explain that they'll probably face discrimination their whole lives.

Next page | My own sex transition