Washington, DC, USA. We, Lisa and Sharon, have ceased publication at TS-Si, while keeping our hands in as we move toward refined goals for our lives and social responsibilities.


Sightlines



TS-Si Will Remain Online
(for a while)

TS-Si will remain online as a reference site for several months before we take it down. In the meantime, we will answer questions and process any comments received, but will not post any new material.

New materials of varying kinds will appear at our personal sites and enable reader comments.

●  Starpoet.com will collect Lisa's poetry, essays, and fiction. As usual, expect her opinion columns to appear as something catches (or irritates) her fancy.

Lisa will continue to maintain her pages on Facebook and Google+.

●  ss-g dot net will be a platform for Sharon's continuing involvement in the humanities and science, and who knows what else.

Sharon will continue to maintain her pages on Facebook and Google+.Both of us were active in pursuing our dream of a rational and just society long before we started TS-Si in 2004. But we saw then an opening for an approach that went beyond sentimental essays and bitter blogging about the situation facing people born transsexual — we suspected those approaches would result in bad and mindlessly polarized outcomes.

A better option for us was to recognize — and act on — three simple truths:

1. Transsexuality is a medical phenomenon that advents at (really, we would learn, before) the birth of an individual, must be recognized as such, and treated just as one would any other medical reality.
   
   
2. The general public was soaked with ignorant stereotypes and mean-minded disinformation that blocked effective treatment by substituting destructive social activism for rational dialogue.
   
   
3. Science, the path to success, was hampered by poor to non-existent educational standards and outright hostility by adherents of superstition and pseudo-science.

To meet this situation, we recognized that attention must be tightly focused on three important goals.

First — and above all — we would dedicate ourselves to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex and support their transition into society as hormonally reconstituted and surgically corrected citizens.

Second, we would provide the American public, their political leaders, legal scholars and tacticians (as well as religious spokespersons) with an intellectual framework that would enable them to distinguish men and women born transsexual (Transsexuality) from the loud public visibility of transgendered political activists, weekend crossdressers, and gender queers we saw gathering outside the walls.

Third, we would highlight the science and the cutting edge research that steadily forms an ever expanding context that explores (and increasingly explains) the physical, especially neurobiological, basis for Transsexuality. TS-Si has become a library of scientific research.

With the help and collaboration of so many others, we have succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. The world moves and will continue to move in a more rational direction.

Even though our goals have not yet been fully reached in all of their particulars, momentum makes the basic core objectives inevitable, even if the details may vary within the democratic process.

Perspective

TS-Si has reflected the personal interests and intellectual curiosity of the two of us. We have dedicated a large portion of our existence to its constant creation. During that time, our contacts and the demands on our time and energies have multiplied.

We have expanded and cultivated the emerging community of researchers in the sciences and medicine, as well as the caring professions. Our objectives are mostly achieved: the required scientific research has been institutionalized and will continue; the public and the politicians have the means to intelligently discuss Transsexuality; and the legal structures are progressively in place.

This does not mean that progress is uniform and beyond question, but we think it is true that we have passed the tipping point. We now can see that inexorable progress has brought us to a tipping point past which progress is irreversible. We now can look back at the horizon that used to lay so far ahead.

And as circumstances have changed, so must we change to stay abreast of what shall come. Sharon could spend all day every day holding hands with researchers around the world and never write another word. Lisa is in a similar position while holding down a full-time job.

How best then to continue?

We have enthusiastically run TS-Si and will always remember it as a special place and time, but we have to get on with our lives. Both of us deal with recurring health issues of varying severity as we age and there are a number of projects we want to finish before we ourselves are finished.

It has become necessary to tighten our focus further while minding the practical facts of our daily existence. We expect to maintain our involvement while better budgeting the time spent so we can focus on other tasks. We have other interests we have neglected and now must pursue. We have things we must do, roads we must take. Among them, we both must get back to tending our personal websites.

What began as a discussion one night over dinner now comes to an end.

We thank you all for sharing this special time with us. We won’t forget you. In fact, we aren’t going away, but we will be transformed and never never forget who we are and where we came from.

— 30 —