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is dedicated to the acceptance, medical
treatment, and legal
protection of individuals correcting the misalignment
of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition
into society as hormonally reconstituted and surgically corrected citizens.
| To The Gap and Back |
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| Opinion - Global Warning | |||
| Lisa Jain Thompson | |||
| Tuesday, 21 October 2008 22:00 | |||
 Fairfax, VA, USA. There are three small caliber holes in my stomach where my surgeon poked around and ultimately removed my gall bladder, or GB, as we former owners call it). A fourth lurks inside my belly button, hidden from the human eye. I almost died but am still alive to tell you of my hospital adventure and what we found many years post-op. I recently entered the hospital because of a systemic infection that coursed throughout my body. It had a typically routine start: problems with my gall bladder. My GB grew ever fonder of passing stones that would block the duct leading from my liver. By the time I admitted to being in pain, my skin already had a deep yellow cast [Note] and an infection ran rampant inside of me. There is evidence that I had an infection first, followed by yet another attack by my GB.
I almost ran out of time. The infection was just a few hours away from shutting down my
 brain and heart. All bets would have been off as to the outcome. As it was, I’m told my fever peaked at 107°F (41.66°C) before antibiotics broke it up that first night. I don’t remember much of that first night, or several that followed, other than waking up in the hospital bed with Sharon at my side and wondering why my bedclothes were drenched and my body was covered with sweat. I have no memory of ever having a fever. Despite all my best intentions, I could have remained unconscious, slipping away without any clever last words for my future biographers to record.
So it goes. I had my gallbladder removed and life goes on. While writing this, I received word that GB made a getaway and was sighted washing up on a beach in New jersey.
But here, if you are curious, is the official medical gross description of the gallbladder that was removed from a woman born transsexual (e.g., a woman born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome — HBS), a post-op.
Received in formalin is a partially fragmented gallbladder, measuring 7.0 cm in length x 2.5 cm in diameter across the fundus. The systemic duct resection margin is distorted. The serosa is tan-pink and hemorrhagic. The luman contains a minimal amont of hemorrhagic bile and is tagged with numerous and irregular bosselated calculi [gallstones], ranging from 0.2 to 0.5 cm in greatest dimension. The cut surfaces of the calculi show dark brown cores with yellow and friable peripheries. The mucosa is tan-pink, congested and hemorrhagic. The gall bladder wall measures 0.5 cm in average thickness. A lymph node is not identified. Representative sections are submitted in one cassette.
Notice what is missing?
There is no mention of me being post-op. For the couple dozen doctors, nurses, and technicians who worked on me, I was just another woman in need of treatment, no different from the other female patient who shared our hospital room.
My having been born with HBS was not relevant other than in this medical conversation as the hospital techs took down my past history:
Tech: Any previous major operations?
LJ: Does Sex Reassignment Surgery Count?
Tech [startled nonplus look] Yes.
LJ: Then yes, I’ve had sex reassignment surgery.
Tech: [pause] [writes down Sex Reassignment Surgery into my surgical record] Anything else?
End of conversation. The only person who reacted differently was a surgical nurse who said that she wrote her graduate thesis on Transsexuality. She was curious who performed my surgery (Toby Meltzer gets that a lot).
All the medical paperwork and records were clearly labeled:
No footnotes, no explanations, no asterisks. All my treatment started with two facts.
Over a week, I shared the room with two different women. One was a young a young Hispanic woman recovering from a procedure, the other a hemorrhagic alcoholic who had been bleeding for ten days when she arrived at the hospital. Both stayed a couple days, stabilized, and then went home.
We never discussed gender
theory, the fluidity of the sex binary, or what constituted a real woman. We did not debate the intricacies of whether women could have penises. We were three women in the hospital with little time for seminars on the transgender dialectic. The only time my birth condition was a topic of extended discussion was with my surgeon, a Kaiser Permanente doctor who knew my history (it’s in my Kaiser medical record). He has always referred to me as “she” but was curious to see what my musculature and various organs looked like on the inside (male or female).
An explanation: striated muscle occurs in skeletal muscle in which cross-striations occur in the fibers as a result of the regular overlapping of thick and thin myofilaments. Striated muscle gives strength to the body and helps hold the organs in place.
Men have the lead in skeletal or striated muscle that power exercise (obviously). Men do not have more skeletal muscle fibers than women, but they do have fibers that larger and stronger.
My surgeon’s basic question was whether my striated muscle was male or female. If the muscle was male, removal of my gallbladder could be more difficult.
Striated muscle is where the rubber meets the road. Are the transgender theorists right in their assertion that HBS women are merely men with inverted penises or are the post-op HBS women correct that the difference is much more than simply sex reassignment surgery?
At the time of my gallbladder surgery, I had been on female hormones (estradiol) for a dozen years or more. My surgeon would be the first person to look inside and I was as curious as he as to what he would find.
The surgery went off without a hitch. My gallbladder was out and gone to wherever it is that viscera ends up after an operation, perhaps off the deep end of some pier in New Jersey where it now sleeps with the fishes. (For the record, gallstones and gallbladder surgery hurt much worse than any pain I ever felt from my Sex Reassignment Surgery. If you have a choice …)
As for my musculature and internal organs?
Perfectly normal female.
No sign of my birth condition.
Nothing to indicate testosterone had ever been at work in my body.
Not gender theory. Not socio-political doctrine.
Physical reality.
Female.
You can ask my surgeon.
NoteEye witness observation: Lisa said her skin had "... a deep yellow cast ...". Here in the USA, we refer to that color as “School Bus Yellow”. — Ed.
 Ms. Lisa Jain Thompson is a Co-Founder & Principal of TS-Si. She also serves as a Contributing Editor and columnist for the TS-Si website. She maintains another site, StarPoet.com, for her poetry and literary works.Ms. Thompson's signed articles contain her own opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. Lisa welcomes your comments. Use the form below or email via her TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.
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| Last Updated on Saturday, 25 October 2008 22:50 |
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