Fairfax, VA, USA. Effective today, TS-Si is a closely-held enterprise that directly implements the professional priorities of its founders, Lisa Jain Thompson and Sharon Sinead Gaughan. TS-Si and TS-Si.org still exist, but reorganized to better allocate time and resources to fulfilling our now restated and further clarified mission.

TS-Si 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.

After 10 years of existence, we have moved beyond our organizational origins as a non-profit corporation. Those years, and the many years of individual exertion before that, have been productive, but now we must tighten our focus on the opportunities for further progress and realistically address how we can best contribute in the future.



Personal Considerations. We have both been through serious health crises during the past several years.

Lisa survived a near-death illness a few years ago and Sharon recently, and just barely, avoided total blindness. We have emerged the stronger, remaining spry, and remain quick of step.

But, we are realists and it seems plain that the combination of age and health will bring more challenges.

Lisa will be 63 this year and Sharon will turn 70 in October. So, we prepare for eventualities.

Realism requires we make adjustments to ensure we stay productive, while attending to our many other friend, family, and institutional commitments.

Why we stay in. The two of us live modest lives as the women and females we are and really do not need activism to thrive.

But here we are, still working on the problem.

Just as we thought hard on whether we should start out with a new approach those years ago, and take the criticism and stress it was bound to bring, we carefully reconsidered our situation before starting anew.

We do it now, as we have done since the beginning, precisely because we do not benefit, because this is not about us.

It is about the people born with the transsexual condition who die or walk about wounded from neglect of their needs.

It is a matter of conscience that we help where we can.

This should not be compared to others who give in other ways or in a different measure.

We all do what we can, how we can do it.Professional Perspective. We look out and see the progress achieved so far to secure a space for people of transsexual history to pursue their correction.

TS-Si launched when there were few, if any, places left where people of transsexual history could discuss their common concerns and assist people in transition. Hostile activists had invaded at every opportunity to diminish the independence of the transsexual born. A few mailing lists were still active and that was about it.

The emergence of Yahoo Groups and, especially, blog technology reignited the independence movement. There are TS websites, blogs, and online groups all over the internet now. We welcomed these developments.

These changes also brought differing views on how to achieve genuine transsexual independence from transgender dogma and domination. We welcomed that discussion as well, since a variety of tactics are necessary to make progress. The upshot has been a proliferation of communication options over the years and an increasing awareness by policy makers that there really is a difference between the transsexual medical condition and the transgender lifestyle option.

Likewise, TG activists have amped up their own activities by harnessing the available technology to become even louder than before. They tried to crush the priority for non-partisan availability of treatment for people born transsexual but have not succeeded. If anything, their antics highlight the difference and make for an the easier argument on behalf of the transsexual dispossessed.

The false claims made by transgender activism about our intentions and practices are, of course, nonsense meant to diminish us further and gain favor with the uninformed. However noisy and distracting they are in the meantime, in the end such tactics are bound to fail because they rely on deliberate distortions designed to build up celebrities at the expense of the needy, both transsexual and transgender.

However slowly, policy makers and the public increasingly understand that transsexuals and transgender activists speak from two very different situations. Mass media does not yet truly reflect this fact, but it has become more obvious to the denizens who walk the corridors of backroom power — where the real decisions are made.

Making Refinements. The central fact of TS-Si's existence has been the encouragement of basic research and the reform of medical practice to help bring about legal changes that benefit people in transition and beyond.

This is hard and often slow-going work that is sometimes misread by otherwise sympathetic observers as inaction. We understand that perception but find it an unnecessarily narrow reading. After all, we started TS-Si after emerging from a lengthy engagement with internet precursors and Sharon's scientific and engineering work. We will continue to emphasize science, medicine, and other approaches that lay a strong foundation for a comprehensive approach to a solution.

We have fulfilled many — but certainly not all — of our earlier goals and must concentrate on next steps. So, we pared down and refined our priorities and matched them against the available resources, while planning for some new initiatives. We have completed a process that has these main features:

• We folded the non-profit, replacing it with a closely-held personal enterprise.
  
  
• We discontinued several activities upon completion of their mission or spun them off as wholly independent organizations. Independent funding for certain efforts has been secured to ensure continuation of services.
  
  
• We divested ourselves of our charitable enterprises, particularly the street work that involves finding the time, personnel, and funds for large-scale efforts.

Moving Forward. We will make changes in how we implement our mission; some will be incremental, while others quite sudden.

• We will expand and deepen our science, technology, and cultural involvements to better exploit previous efforts that are approaching the threshold of maturation.
  
  
• We will strengthen our existing relationships with funding and research institutions for the benefit of all transsexuals, people who actively pursue hormonal reconstitution and surgical correction of their anatomical sex.
  
  
• We will upgrade the website with an even sharper focus on protecting people with a transsexual history.
  
  
• We will continually extend our content coverage to better serve life as lived by the post-op population.
  
  
• We will continue our charitable work, depending more on strategy and intercession, while preserving the option for personal support when warranted.
  
  
• We will selectively enter the active arena on specific public issues, selected on a case-by-case basis.

Our support for current initiatives includes reform of the GLAAD Media Reference Guide and Transsexual Independence Day. Others will follow.

There are other aspects to this, of course, but that will do for now. The changes will go largely unnoticed by the audience that visits TS-Si.org, but — freed of restrictions characteristic of non-profit organizations — some things will become obvious.

A Special Note for Readers, Writers, Advisors, and Volunteers. The nature of this site attracts all sorts of people, a profile we see daily in our correspondence.

Most of our visitors never comment, or restrict their comments to private correspondence. In part, this is because of their personal circumstances, but it is also a near-universal characteristic of informational sites across the internet where only the very few are visible. Nonetheless, we cherish our readers, many of whom have been with us since the beginning, with more coming on board every day. Based on the evidence of many years now, we regard our readers as among the most responsible and supportive to be found anywhere on the internet.

Our writers make us go, never more so now that TS-Si.org will be our primary vehicle for action. Whether it be story tips or outright contributions, we value your involvement. We remain thoroughly committed to the protection of dissent, so opinion columns will remain as an important feature. We do not court controversy but accept such if it comes.

This also is the place to acknowledge our many correspondents, friends, volunteers, and quiet associates who continue as trusted advisors. Your interest and support are valued beyond measure.

But however you get here, and wherever you are, and whatever you do, please know how much we appreciate your participation: we are honored to be of service.

We continue our striving to earn and keep your trust.

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