Sex and Gender in Sports - Part Two

In my previous article I considered the distinction between male and female athletes competing in top competitions such as the Olympic games. Right at the nub of the issue is whether women with naturally high levels of testosterone have an unfair advantage against women with lower, or "normal" levels of testosterone.

But what about transgender or transsexual athletes? Those born in an apparently ordinary male body, who legitimately transition to the female sex? What happens to them?

Renee Richards

Renee Richards is the first example I have to offer. Born Richard Raskind, the child of two doctors, Richards was a successful male athlete, and also obtained a medical degree. In 1975 (which puts her age at 41), she pursued a career as a professional woman tennis player. However, in 1976 the US Tennis Association had introduced Barr body testing (a type of genetic testing) that year. Richards refused to take the test, and was therefore banned from top tennis tournaments, the US Open, Wimbledon and the Italian Open that year.

Richards took the US Tennis Association to court, alleging discrimination by gender in violation of her human rights. She won her case, and was allowed to play in the 1977 US Open tournament.

Richards' tennis career was quite short-lived, and she retired from professional tennis in 1981, just 4 years later, and returned to medical practice in ophthalmology.

Richards' case provoked considerable discussion. Official sports governing bodies were very uncomfortable. According to Wikipedia, the US Olympic Committee stated:

IOC: There is competitive advantage for a male who has undergone a sex change surgery as a result of physical training and development as a male.

And indeed, it's hard to argue with that viewpoint. But in addition to official perplexity, Richards faced consternation from the general public too. My correspondent Rhonda wrote "I recall it being said that Renee had an advantage because she competed in a new category, unique to her: 'Mixed Singles'." And even her own fellow athletes were unhappy: when Richards was allowed to play as a woman, 25 of 32 competitors promptly withdrew in protest from the Tennis Week Open.

In this article describing her life and career, written by Emily Bazelon, Richards herself comments on her status as a transsexual athlete. I quote the final paragraph in its entirety:

Bazelon: The science of distinguishing men from women in sports remains unsettled. And Richards has come to believe that her past as a man did provide her advantages over competitors. “Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.” She adds, “There is one thing that a transsexual woman unfortunately cannot expect to be allowed to do, and that is to play professional sports in her chosen field. She can get married, live as woman, do all of those other things, and no one should ever be allowed to take them away from her. But this limitation—that’s just life. I know because I lived it.”

Michelle Dumaresq

Wikipedia has a list of transgender athletes, both female-to-male and male-to-female. There are, unsurprisingly, few Olympic type events, though there are cyclists, such as Canadian mountain biker Michelle Dumaresq, and fighters, such as American mixed martial artist Fallon Fox. Caitlyn Jenner is of course mentioned.

In 2003, the International Olympic Committee drew up regulations to cover transsexual athletes. To me, at first glance, they seem pretty reasonable:

1. The athlete must have undergone sexual reassignment surgery, including changes to the external genitalia and gonads.
2. The athlete must be legally recognised in their desired sex.
3. The athlete must undergo hormone therapy for at least two years.

These guidelines were modified in 2015, due to recognition that it might not be acceptable to require surgery in otherwise healthy people, and that some countries refuse to grant legal recognition to people who change sex. Therefore, the regulations were changed. The requirement for surgery was dropped, and the only stipulation now requires that the athlete's testosterone level be under 10 nmol/l. (See my previous article for why this might be problematic).

Chris Mosier

As for these games, the UK Daily Mail reported that two unnamed male-to-female athletes were considered for inclusion in Team GB to compete in Rio, but the Internet has been silent about whether they managed it. Meanwhile, Chris Mosier competed as a triathlete for team USA. As a female-to-male, Mosier needs to take testosterone, though a Therapeutic Use Exemption means it's acceptable. The Wikipedia article states that "two closeted transgender athletes competed" at Rio.

The first transgendered sportsperson I recall ever hearing about was Mianne Bagger, a professional golfer from Denmark. According to Wikipedia, Bagger was only the second high-profile transgendered athlete who won recognition from sports' governing bodies to compete in their desired sex, after Renee Richards. A 2004 article from the Guardian newspaper reports that Bagger experienced a slightly warmer welcome from her fellow professionals than Richards did. Subsequently, Lana Lawless sued the Ladies' Professional Golf Association in 2010, which at that time was clinging to a rule that women golfers were required to have been born female. In 2014 another doctor, Bobbi Lancaster, was permitted to play in an LPGA tournament, and this article describes her as the first transgender woman golfer to compete in such a tournament.

So much for the professional athletes. What about those lower down? Una over at TransasCity has produced a couple of relevant articles, and you can read them here and here.

Judit Polgar

I want to close this double article with a shout out to one of my heroes, Judit Polgar. Polgar, 40, is the strongest female chess player in history. The youngest of three sisters, the Polgar girls were intensively coached in chess by their polymath father, Laszlo Polgar, who believed that "geniuses are made, not born".

Everybody "knows" girls aren't as good at chess as boys. Even FIDE, the world chess governing body, awards separate women's titles. The Woman Grandmaster (WGM) title is easier to attain than the Grandmaster (GM) title. But try telling that to the Polgar sisters. They refused to compete in woman-only tournaments, from the beginning, bringing them into some conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation. However, the Polgars persisted. Laszlo wrote:

Laszlo Polgar: Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men. Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect.

And his daughters went on to prove him right. Judit achieved an astonishing series of accomplishments: she achieved the rank of full Grandmaster (not WGM) at the age of 15, then the youngest person ever to have done so. She was ranked 55th best player in the world at age 12. She is the first ever (and so far, only) woman to achieve an Elo rating of greater than 2700, and she peaked at number 8 in the world in 2005. Now, of course, FIDE allows players of both sexes to compete in tournaments, but of 1441 GMs in the world, only 31 are currently women, so the women do have some catching up to do. And I bet nobody even bothers about their testosterone levels.

I wonder how much chess is like golf. In most Olympic sports, muscle mass, lung capacity and other physical measures of fitness really matter. In that circumstance, one could say that the extra physical size of someone born male could offer an advantage if they transitioned. However, in golf, this is less obvious, and Mianne Bagger has insisted that she has no physical advantage from being born male.

In chess, of course, physical fitness is irrelevant, provided you can deal with the stress of the games and tournaments. I believe that the low number of female grandmasters is not a reflection of women's ability to play chess, but a reflection of how few women take up chess seriously. I did a quick Google search for transgender chess players, but didn't turn anything up. As always, comments are welcome. Meanwhile, whether it's golf, chess, cycling or whatever, keep doing your thing.

Sex and Gender in Sports - Part One

It's just been Olympic time again, and that means we are overdue for a topic which I have been considering for a long time: how do you separate male and female athletes? This article was prompted by the Olympics, but has relevance to sporting competition in all spheres.

The modern Olympic games has been going for more than a century. Revived by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1896, the modern games started to allow women to compete in the 1900 games, held in Paris. But it took until 2012 (the London games) before every competing nation sent women athletes to the games, and the 2012 games were also the first to have women competing in every sport in the programme.

It turns out that men do better, in general, than women at sporting events. As just one example, the four-minute mile has been routinely broken by men, since it was first achieved by Roger Bannister in 1956, but no woman has ever achieved it; the fastest woman is still 12 seconds away. So it makes sense to segregate male and female athletes, so that the competition is fair.



Dora Ratjen

This throws up some problems. First, how do we actually decide who is a man and who is a woman? It hasn't ever been easy. Dora Ratjen was an intersex individual, born with ambiguous genitalia, assigned female at birth and raised as a girl. Ratjen competed for Germany in the women's High Jump in the 1936 Summer Olympic games, and finished fourth. In 1938, Ratjen competed in the European Athletics Championship, and won a gold medal in the high jump. The following year, Ratjen broke the World Record for the High Jump. After an official investigation (following a complaint from another athlete), Ratjen was, at that time, discovered to be working as a male waiter under the name Hermann. He was stripped of his title. Ultimately Ratjen chose the name Heinrich, and lived out the rest of his life as a man.

Wikipedia mentions two other athletes from this period, Zdenek Koubek, and Mary Weston, with similar biographies. These were intersex people with ambiguous genitalia, raised as girls, who competed as women. In common with Ratjen, Koubek and Weston each later transitioned to male.

US Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage called in 1936 for a system to be set up to examine female athletes to make sure they were actually female. Unfortunately, physical examination was the only way to do this. I do not doubt that those examinations were undignified, uncomfortable, and unreliable.

It took another 30 years for chromosome testing to be adopted, in 1968. Surely this would sort everything out, using hard science. Everyone knows that human males have the chromosome pattern 46XY, and females have the chromosome pattern 46XX. So there's your answer.

Maria Jose Martinez-Patino

Except that it isn't. Most individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome have the chromosome pattern of a male, 46XY, and produce testosterone. However, their bodies are not sensitive to the testosterone, which means they develop as women. Such women are infertile, and lack a uterus, but are externally indistinguishable from 46XX women. Spanish athlete Maria Jose Martinez-Patino was disqualified from competition in the 1988 Summer Olympic games because she failed such a chromosome test, though she was reinstated for competition in the 1992 games. She has since become an academic, and has written about her experience here in the Lancet.

Likewise, some people have the chromosome pattern 47XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), or are mosaics (in other words, not all their cells have the same chromosome pattern).

So, once again, the testing lets us down. The problem is that, even at the chromosome level, the actual level of the DNA itself, humans don't fall neatly into male and female categories.

In 2011, the IAAF came up with yet another idea: that athletes should be separated according to how much testosterone they have. There is a good discussion of this ruling here. The focus on testosterone is because it's considered that a high level of testosterone is what provides men with their athletic advantage. The IAAF ruled (among other things):

Athletic competition will continue to be divided into men’s and women’s categories

A female with hyperandrogenism who is recognised as a female in law shall be eligible to compete in women’s competition in athletics provided that she has androgen levels below the male range (my italics)

The new testosterone limit was set at 10 nanomoles per litre of blood. This level was chosen because it's three times higher than the upper limit of normal for women, and it was reasoned that very few women would naturally have a testosterone level this high. It's at the very bottom of the normal range of testosterone for men under 50.

This does solve some problems. It does away with examining physical characteristics and chromosomes (though not the indignity of subjecting someone's identity to detailed scrutiny). It even allows for athletes to potentially change sex and still compete as their new sex, provided their hormonal profile fits.

Caster Semenya

But once again, there are different problems. Enter Caster Semenya. This South African athlete became the centre of another humiliating sex-testing furore in 2009 aged 18, when she won the 800m gold medal. She was cleared by the IAAF to compete as a woman in 2010, and has, most recently, won Olympic gold in Rio in the 800m event.

Details of Semenya's medical profile are somewhat sketchy, because she her test results have (rightly) been ruled confidential. The BBC reports that she has hyperandrogenism, which means her testosterone level is much higher than an ordinary woman, and even higher than many ordinary men. Indian athlete Dutee Chand has hyperandrogenism too.

The pressure on athletes to succeed at the top level, where the difference between success and failure can be measured in milliseconds or millimetres, is enormous. Therefore, it's understandable that athletes want to take every possible step to maximise their performance (and understandable--but not forgivable--when some resort to cheating to make this happen). And it's understandable that their opponents may be angered by what they perceive as an athlete with an unfair advantage being allowed to compete against them.

Because of the 2011 ruling, female athletes with hyperandrogenism were sometimes required to take medication to lower their testosterone to the "normal" female range. But it gets worse still. In 2016, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on health reported that "a number of athletes have undergone gonadectomy (removal of reproductive organs) and partial clitoridectomy (a form of female genital mutilation) in the absence of symptoms or health issues warranting those procedures". In other words, some athletes have been having surgery they don't need in order to ensure they don't fail a sex test. The UN is outspoken in its condemnation of this, and there are some more details here.

The testosterone restriction was removed for the 2016 Rio Olympics, allowing Semenya (and other hyperandrogenic women) to compete, free of testosterone suppression, because the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled that the limit should be abandoned for two years to study whether testosterone provides an unfair advantage to athletes. But the debate continues, and there is a powerful article here.

All of the athletes we have discussed have been competing as women. There seems to be no restriction on anyone who wants to compete as a man. The IOC released a statement in 2012 which said this:

IOC: In the event that the athlete has been declared ineligible to compete in the female category, the athlete may be eligible to compete as a male athlete, if the athlete qualifies for the male event of the sport.

Faster than Caster: Usain Bolt

The next point I want to make is that nobody here is cheating. Dora Ratjen was raised a girl through no fault of her own, and competed as a woman at a time when intersex conditions were poorly recognised or understood. Maria Jose Martinez-Patino has androgen-insensitivity syndrome. And Caster Semenya has hyperandrogenism. None of those people has deliberately done anything to improve their performance other than training. The notion that Semenya and other hyperandrogenic women should have their testosterone levels deliberately suppressed seems no more "fair" to me than the notion that Usain Bolt should have some of his thigh muscles removed, or his legs shortened, to make his performance "fairer". Intersex people have a long history of being "normalised" by medical treatments.

But Joanna Harper, herself a transgender athlete and medical physicist, argues differently. My quotes come from Sarah Barker's excellent article here:

Barker: ...success in sports is one of the greatest advancements in women’s lives. If we value women’s equality, it is imperative that we protect the ability of all women to succeed in sports. I believe that billions of potential female athletes deserve the right to compete with some semblance of a level playing field, and that requiring all women to compete within a given testosterone range is the best way we currently have to create such a playing field.

Is testosterone everything? Surely not; otherwise Caster Semenya would surely be able to run a four-minute mile. The exact role of testosterone remains unclear; there is even a 2014 paper which analyses testosterone levels in 693 elite athletes. It discovered that 16.5% of men (and remember, we are talking about elite athletes) had low testosterone levels, while 13.7% of women had high levels, overlapping with the men. The papers authors concluded:

Healy, et al: Hormone profiles from elite athletes differ from usual reference ranges. Individual results are dependent on a number of factors including age, gender and physique. Differences in profiles between sports suggest that an individual's profile may contribute to his/her proficiency in a particular sport. The IOC definition of a woman as one who has a ‘normal’ testosterone level is untenable.

So the debate clearly has a way to go. I think my bottom line is this. If you are going to separate men and women in athletic competition, you need to draw the line somewhere. This will--inevitably--provide advantage to some people and disadvantage to others. If you draw that line as the body you were born with, then hyperandrogenic women like Caster Semenya will surely come to dominate women's sports. If you draw it at an arbitrary level of testosterone, then you will force some athletes to take medications (and in extreme cases, to have surgery) in order to compete.

No easy answer. I had planned to include transgender athletes in this article, but, as usual, I have found too much material, so I will split this article into chapters. In the next section, I shall consider transgender (rather than intersex) athletes.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in my article about Female Bodybuilding.

The Man from Venus

This post follows on from my previous post about how society at large considers that there are only two gender categories.

Pop psychology agrees. For example, the famous book by John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. (There are others too, such as the two books The Male Brain, and The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine. My wife bought me a copy of the former. I think she was trying to tell me something).

In any case, I thought it was worth unpacking some of the detail around that.

Mars

The Roman god Mars was the god of war. The planet Mars has been known since antiquity (the Greeks called him Ares). It was named by the ancients because of its obvious red colour; clearly associated with blood and therefore violence. In association with Mars, we have words like martial, meaning "to do with fighting", such as in martial arts, martial law and court martial.

I had never appreciated that the planet Mars has a different colour, until I moved to the Southern Hemisphere. Using an app for my iPhone, I can easily find Mars in the night sky, and it's amazingly red (actually more like orange). In the Northern Hemisphere, I struggled to see anything of the night sky at all; down here you can see the Milky Way and other celestial objects very clearly.

The astronomical symbol for Mars is a stylised depiction of Mars' circular shield, with his spear behind it. This symbol is very familiar to us; not only is it used to depict Mars in astronomical shorthand (with which few of us have any real association), but it has also been borrowed to represent the male gender. Wikipedia says the symbol can also represent iron.

So there we have it. Mars: red and bloody; iron; warlike; spear and shield. That's obviously what men are supposed to be all about.

Everyone knows that Venus was the Roman goddess of love and beauty, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite. The planet Venus is one of the brightest objects in the sky, and has long been recognised as the Morning Star and the Evening Star.

Venus

The astronomical symbol for Venus is a stylised depiction of Venus' hand mirror. When you are the goddess of love and beauty, you have a reputation to live up to, so you have to make sure you are always looking good.

Wikipedia says this symbol is associated with copper, as well as being borrowed for use to depict the female gender.

Adjectives to do with Venus are less well-known, and come from the Roman genitive form veneris. The obsolete term for sexually transmitted disease is venereal disease, and my dictionary says that venereal refers only to sexual intercourse. In anatomy, the pubic mound is known as the mons veneris; the mound of Venus.

So there we have it again. Venus: beautiful; luminous; sex; hand mirror. That's obviously what women are supposed to be all about.

Society tells me I should identify with Mars, when instead I feel much more affinity with Venus. The title of this post suggests a cheap B-movie, with a hideous villain (believe me, I feel like one sometimes).

But the truth is this: men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Humans are all from Earth, all of us. And that means we need to recognise that, instead of being two separate groups, we are all one group, with considerable overlap between male and female. We don't do ourselves any favours (or any justice) if we pretend otherwise.

Women with Beards

My recent article on Conchita Wurst (and all of the discussion she has provoked) got me thinking in a more general way about women with beards. In fact there are many variations on this notion, which I hope to explore briefly below, and round up with a discussion at the end.

The History Books

La Mujer Barbuda

There are two bearded women which I am aware of from the history books. First, the semi-legendary Saint Wilgefortis, dating from the 14th century. I've actually written about Wilgefortis before in this blog. According to Wikipedia, no precise details of Wilgefortis' life can be verified. The legend is that, as a beautiful teenager, she was promised in marriage to a cruel nobleman. She prayed to God to deliver her from this fate, and promptly sprouted a beard. This angered her father and he had her crucified, and her traditional depiction is a crucified woman, with a beard (often with one shoe missing).

A more pragmatic (and to me, plausible) explanation is that some statues of the crucified Jesus were created, wearing a robe instead of the expected loincloth, and the legend of a crucified, bearded woman was cooked up to explain this away.

The next figure from history has been immortalised by the artist Jusepe de Ribera, in his 1631 portrait entitled La Mujer Barbuda (The Bearded Woman). Take a look at the painting. To me, it looks exactly like a portrait of a man; there is nothing feminine at all about the face, including the male pattern of hair at the forehead.

My first impression of this portrait was that Ribera had deliberately painted a man, dressed in a gown and suckling an infant. Then I started to read more. It turns out that the story of the figure in the painting is well-known and corroborated. She actually was a bearded woman; the miserable-looking guy in the background is her husband. Her name was Magdalena Ventura from Abruzzi, and at the time of the portrait, she was 52 years old. She bore her husband three sons before growing a beard at the age of 37. Some aspects of her life are recorded in Latin on the stone tablet at the bottom right of the picture.

Annie Jones

Some aspects of the painting are allegorical: at 52, she would be too old to bear a child or breast-feed, but Ribera has included this aspect to deliberately underline the female sex of the subject of the portrait. Ribera also had a reputation for deliberately painting accurate but cruel depictions of people with disfigurements, such as The Club-Footed Boy. What this says to me is that Ribera's depiction was probably reasonably accurate. Did he go out of his way to enhance the apparent masculinity of the image? It's hard to say for sure; I think probably not. It's clear, however, that he didn't make any effort to flatter the subject.

The Circus Freak

The next, and most widely-known, archetype of the bearded woman is the Circus Freak.

Freak shows entered their heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries, exhibiting malformed, and disfigured humans as objects of scorn, ridicule and sometimes loathing. Dwarves, giants, conjoined twins and other rare anomalies (such as Joseph Merrick, the "Elephant Man") were staples of this form of popular entertainment. In this environment, bearded women were right at home, as this example Annie Jones, shows. I can't imagine what those performers were forced to do, in order to prove that they were actually women (and not simply men in frocks), but I suspect it was degrading and unpleasant in the extreme.

Jennifer Miller

A debate continues to this day over the role of such shows. Some showmen, such as Tom Norman, argued that his shows allowed people who were unable to work normally to provide a living for themselves. (Indeed, some people continue to deliberately exhibit themselves in this manner even today, such as the performer Black Scorpion). Critics argued that the shows were cruel, exploitative and inhuman. Eventually, of course, they were banned, but I see their echoes today in documentaries about conjoined twins, or people with morbid obesity. I think the public appetite for gawping at unfortunate people has not, in general, gone away.

Modern Examples

This brings me on to some modern examples. The first one I came across was Jennifer Miller, whom I saw in a TV documentary. Miller's beard started to slowly grow in in her early twenties. According to this interview, she has had an ambivalent relationship with it ever since.

Miller: I embraced the idea of it right away, and then had on-and-off relationships with it over the years. I basically believed that it was a good idea to keep it, but that it wasn’t always easy. I felt stronger and weaker about wearing it depending on what was happening. If at some point I were just feeling more vulnerable in general, that would make it harder. If I was worried about getting a job, I might feel some doubt about my commitment to keeping it.



Mariam with Harnam Kaur

Miller has worked as a circus performer, but also a writer and a university lecturer.

And then, more recently, a woman identified only as Mariam was interviewed on British television. Born in Germany, Mariam's beard started to grow after the birth of her son, 28 years ago. According to this article, she used to pluck out each hair every day with tweezers, but eventually decided to let it grow out.

Mariam keeps a blog of her own. She is quite open about how difficult it is to live as a woman with a beard. She writes:

Mariam: I remember, that when I was a child, I always wanted to be a boy. Boys had more freedom than girls. Could be more wild and climb on trees and do all these handycraft things that I liked.

In our family it was better to be a male, because then everybody believed in the success and intelligence of this person.

Meanwhile I appreciate myself as a woman and I see what I can do as a woman, and that I am not better or worse than a man. And I must say I am not all the time aware about being a woman. I feel like a being. And I would say some of my abilities you can name male others female. I do not like this labeling with male and female. I would wish we could just be ourselves and not to be fixed on any gender or sex.

Alex Drummond

Mariam describes unpleasant incidents in public places, such as people taking pictures or video of her on their phones, without permission. As a result, she (naturally) avoids very public places.

Genderqueer

Until now, I have considered only genetic women with beards. But I can't help finding an overlap with genderqueer: an expression of gender which is neither male nor female, but both, neither, or any variation you like. Is a woman who deliberately sports a beard genderqueer? Maybe, I guess.

Conchita Wurst has, without perhaps being genderqueer herself, driven that aesthetic into the public eye. But what about people who live that life all the time, and will continue to do so once Conchita's star has faded?

Photographer Alex Drummond is one such person.

Drummond: Being transgender gives me a unique perspective on my work. Born as ‘male’ but having always identified as female I nowadays embrace genderqueer as a way of living authentically as a trans-female.

Some people will live in a full time presentation of their preferred gender, others will live part-time. And a whole new movement is emerging of people who are living between genders, embracing the potentials of gender-queer and gender-fluidity.

Azis

Part of Drummond's website is given over to a blog, but as you could expect from a photographer, it's quite image-heavy. I wonder to myself whether Drummond experiences the same public reaction as Mariam? And is it a problem?

Some people seem to just like the deliberate androgyny, the deliberate mixture of male and female, that you get by combining an essentially feminine aesthetic, with an undeniable statement of masculinity: a beard. One example seems to be Bulgarian singer Azis, pictured here. Azis is apparently another Eurovision alumnus, having co-performed Bulgaria's entry in the 2006 competition, which finished a resounding 17th.

And I guess finally there is farce, the deliberate use of the beard with female costume as an instrument of amusement or comedy. As I have frequently mentioned on this blog, I don't think crossdressing as a vehicle for comedy is funny. Likewise, I find deliberate farce to do with crossdressing to be, at best, in poor taste, and at worst, hurtful.

Richard Branson: seriously?

Nonetheless, it's hard to get too steamed up by Richard Branson's performance. After losing a bet with Air Asia chief executive Tony Fernandez, Branson had himself made over as a Virgin stewardess, complete with uniform, high heels and fishnet stockings, and served drinks on a 6-hour flight from Australia to Kuala Lumpur. I can't say that he looks especially gorgeous, but I admire his courage and his sense of humour in agreeing to honour the bet (and no-one could accuse him of somehow not fulfilling his end of the bargain).

What do I think about all this?

My first thought, on seeing photographs of Jennifer Miller, Mariam and Harnam Kaur, is that they look very strange. Without doubt, the juxtaposition of a beard-- that most masculine characteristic-- on a woman, causes a slight jolt of surprise, which makes you look again. For whatever reasons: hormonal, or genetic or just plain bad luck, it is clear that women can also grow beards.

I am certain that the women who keep the beard represent the tip of the iceberg. (On Mariam's blog, some of the commentators admire her courage, while admitting that they rid themselves of their own heavy facial hair). I think therefore there are probably many hundreds of women out there who deal with the facial hair with wax, or electrolysis, or laborious plucking. I can completely understand this: the societal pressure must be huge.

That makes me think that for those women who embrace their beards, there must be something different that makes them willing to resist that societal pressure. Unlike Annie Jones a century or more ago, women in the 21st century have a choice about whether to have a beard. Having it permanently removed would be reasonably expensive, and reasonably uncomfortable, but certainly doable.

For bearded women, it must come to be their defining characteristic. It reminds me of the old joke about the two men in the pub overlooking the little village in Scotland. One laments to the other that, despite his lifetime of contribution to the life of the village, they still haven't honoured him with a decent nickname. "Do they call me Hamish the boat builder? Or Hamish the roofer? No! But you shag one sheep...!"

The same is true of bearded women. Do we know these women for their other accomplishments or qualities? No. The reason they are here for me to write about is their outlandishness. Is that what they like? The notoriety? Does that make up for the whispers and the stares and the rude picture-taking? Is that why they keep their beards?

And yet, Mariam speaks on her blog of simply wanting to live as herself. Isn't that exactly what I want? What other trans people want? Doesn't it bother us when people focus on why we cross-dress? Isn't it enough that we say that the why doesn't matter?

What Alex Drummond and other genderqueer people do is (from my perspective) a also bit weird-looking and a bit inexplicable. And yet, is what I do not a bit weird-looking and a bit inexplicable from someone else's perspective? How can I plead for sympathy and acceptance while not granting it (automatically!) to someone else?

Comments welcome, whether you are bearded or unbearded. If you are interested in women with big muscles, why not read my article about Female Bodybuilding? You might also be interested in the related, but different topics, Men in Skirts, and Men with Long Nails.

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Addendum 17th July 2014

If you're going to Saaaan Francisco...

A local news website has reported that men with flowers in their beards are "the latest hipster trend".

Apparently "spreading like wildfire" across image-sharing websites, the website gives 10 examples, captioned with more than a hint of mockery.

Though it doesn't especially do it for me, I don't really see what the fuss is about.

Meanwhile, I have been discovering that one of the reasons Harnam Kaur (above) does not remove her beard is that her particular religion, Sikhism, mandates complete acceptance of the body in the way it was born, and forbids the cutting of hair for both men and women. I think that helps to explain her motivation. For some people, that must be a pretty tough commandment to live up to, and I salute Harnam Kaur for her adherence to it.

Homosexuality and Crossdressing

During the Second World War, Benito Mussolini's fascist government rounded up "degenerate" people, particularly homosexuals, and confined them in a series of camps around the country. One of the largest was on the island of San Domino, in the Tremiti chain, in the Mediterranean Sea northeast of Italy.

Mussolini was attempting to weed out these undesirable people, to keep the society pure and virile. And conditions for the prisoners were intentionally harsh. However, Mussolini unwittingly created a homosexual paradise, doing the prisoners the favour of confining a large group of them to a beautiful island together for the duration of the war.

Hello, sailor!

This episode is not widely known. I had never heard of it until I read about it on the BBC, and you can read the article here written by Alan Johnson. In turn, the article comes from a book, The Island and the City, by Gianfranco Goretti and Tomasso Giartosi. I have searched for the book and it doesn't seem to exist in English. I assume this is a translation of the Italian title. In any case, what follows is all quoted from Johnson's BBC article:

"We were curious because they were called 'the girls'," says Carmela Santoro, an islander who was just a child when the gay exiles began to arrive. "We would go and watch them get off the boat... all dressed up in the summer with white pants - with hats. And we would watch in awe - 'Look at that one, how she moves!' But we had no contact with them."

What this meant to the exiles was explained in a rare interview with a San Domino veteran, named only as Giuseppe B - published many years ago in the gay magazine, Babilonia - who said that in a way the men were better off on the island.

"In those days if you were a femminella [a slang Italian word for a gay man] you couldn't even leave your home, or make yourself noticed - the police would arrest you," he said of his home town near Naples. "On the island, on the other hand, we would celebrate our Saint's days or the arrival of someone new... We did theatre, and we could dress as women there and no-one would say anything."

And he said that of course, there was romance, and even fights over lovers. Some prisoners wept, Giuseppe said, when the outbreak of World War II in 1939 led to the end of the internal exile regime on San Domino, and the men were returned to a kind of house arrest in the places where they came from.

What struck me about this article is how miserable and difficult it must have been for anyone, during the War, who found themselves considered "degenerate" by society. The Brits were no better or more enlightened in their treatment of gay people. As long as he was cracking the Enigma cypher (and keeping his mouth shut), Alan Turing (one of my heroes) was allowed to work for the British intelligence services, and a blind eye was turned. However, after the War, Turing was persecuted for his homosexuality, forced to take huge doses of female hormones (as if that would cure him!) and eventually he took his own life, depriving us of his gargantuan intellect.

Vaudeville drag

But this article throws up some other interesting points. First, the Italians used the word femminella ("little girl") to describe gay men. Carmela Santoro uses female pronouns when describing the men ("How she moves!"). That's all very well. Our society uses the word sissy (a diminutive of "sister") and also uses feminine pronouns in a scornful, offensive manner when a man's masculinity seemingly fails to measure up. So we can tell little about the San Domino internees from what other people thought or said about them.

So what did they say about themselves? None of the San Domino internees are believed to still be alive, and the interview with Giuseppe B is very old. Giuseppe B says "We did theatre, and we could dress as women there and no-one would say anything". Gay men loving the theatre? What are the chances? (And Italians fighting over love? Who would have thought?)

The reason for this post is that I have been puzzling over the relationship between homosexuality and crossdressing for a few weeks now. I have lurked for some years on an academic LGBT forum. What I find surprising is how few T people there are. When I post comments about crossdressing (as I did this week, attempting to stimulate a debate on this subject) I am treated with polite tolerance, but no real engagement. On most of the topics (relationships, coming out at work, discrimination) I seem to have very little in common with the things which trouble or preoccupy them. On the other hand, I feel sure if I sat down among them with a glass of wine we would soon all be laughing and finding all sorts of common ground.

My question to them (and also to you) is this: what is the relationship between homosexuality and crossdressing? Is there one? Are they completely separate, or is there some sort of correlation?

Sister Act

I believe that, in past times, gay and lesbian people might have crossdressed as a means of making it more "acceptable" to have a same-sex partner. I could see how a gay man, brought up to believe that homosexuality was an abomination, might not be comfortable being affectionate towards another man, but might find it a lot easier if that man were fabulously dressed as a woman. In other words, for some of those people (as was the case for Billy Tipton and others), the crossdressing may have been the means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

As just one example,  Molly houses were establishments in 18th-century Britain where gay and crossdressing men would meet up for sex. Wikipedia writes:

Patrons of Molly houses formed a distinct subculture in Georgian England. They would take on a female persona, have a female name, and affect feminine mannerisms and speech. Marriage ceremonies between a Molly and his male lover were enacted to symbolise their partnership and commitment.

As a second example, let's return to Giuseppe B. In his words, the internees of San Domino sometimes expressed themselves by "dressing as women". Is that because some of them were not "ordinary" gays, but what we might recognise as transvestites, who were all lumped in together by the authorities? Or is it because the connection between gay men and crossdressing is closer than we think?


John Leguizamo as Chi Chi Rodriguez

It certainly seems to be true that the popular media lump crossdressing and homosexuality together. To take some examples, the Sean Bean drama Tracie's Story features a gay crossdresser who falls in love with a man; the romantic film Sweet November features two gay transvestites living together, who are the supportive best friends of the quirky female lead, Charlize Theron; the iconic road movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, features gay men in drag virtually all the way through, as does its remarkably similar counterpart To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. All these works feature gay men who are portrayed as powerful, subtle, interesting characters (not simply shrieking and pouting and prancing about), but crossdressing, or drag, is a central theme in each.

In modern Western society, surrounded as we are by openly homosexual politicians and clerics and academics and entertainers (even sportspeople), surely it is no longer necessary to crossdress to attract a same-sex partner? Therefore if gay and lesbian people want to crossdress, surely now they are doing it because they like it? This may be for the performance (as in gay drag), or it may be because they enjoy it for other reasons; perhaps the same reasons that I enjoy it.

In his documentary, Grayson Perry insists in front of the schoolboys that most transvestites are straight men. In this interview on the Huffington Post, journalist and academic Marcie Bianco states the same thing:

Bianco: The largest population of crossdressers that we see in the United States is that of the heterosexual male. Drag is almost a protic performance. They are very different, and to then map on lesbian and gay onto drag, that takes it elsewhere entirely. I don't view crossdressing as a kind of protic performance. I view it as a personal aesthetic that people do to please themselves, to please the person that they are with, I mean it could be a fetish, right? Those are different concepts, different ways of being, that I think need to be distinct.

Gay comedian Julian Clary

So what, if anything, has changed in the last couple of centuries? What does everyone else think? Here are a few perspectives from people who have been kind enough to put up with my pestering questions on the subject. Let's start with Helen Boyd, taken from my interview with her:

Boyd: There have always been gay men who have crossdressed, and it’s not always drag when they do. I assume it’s for similar reasons crossdressers do – some combination of scratching an itch, connecting to a feminine self, fabulousness, and sexuality.

Another one of my correspondents, a gay doctor, writes:

Having thought about it I think the question why do men (or men and women rather) cross-dress is almost as useful as asking why are some people gay? I'm sure there are multiple reasons, different reasons for different people, and it's all a spectrum anyway.

There are serious cross-dressers and occasional or faddy "passing phase" cross-dressers. There are gay cross-dressers and straight cross-dressers. There are those certain of their sexuality and those thrown into doubt by a passing experience of it. I'm not convinced by the autogynephilia theory. It may explain some guys I've no doubt, but it doesn't explain why a gay house music club in London I went to a couple of years ago had some sensational looking cross-dressed dancers gyrating on a podium in the middle of the dance floor full of sweaty gay men. I don't think many of those men were there to get turned on by someone in women's underwear, but they were there to be entertained and have fun.

I think the answer lies in a sense of otherness - of the exotic, outre and titillating. It's different - the opposite of straight and conservative and an expression of the ultra different and liberal. I'm reminded of Cabaret and inter-war Berlin. And it's fabric on the skin that to a man is unusual, strange and soft feeling. And a bit of a laugh. It's naughty. And not to be over-analysed.

I'm sorry if I sound like I'm belittling the topic. I'm not meaning to, but all I'm trying to say is that I don't think it's easily analysable. I think it's often just done for a bit of fun, to prove you're not mainstream, to mess around. But I'm sure different people do it for different reasons, and I'm sure there's a transsexual overlap. But it seems a bit like trying to analyse why gay people are gay!!

Molly, a transgendered woman, writes:

I don't know any gay men who used cross dressing as an entry path to being gay.  I do know a few gay men who have cross dressed from time to time, usually on Hallowe'en or a special event, more for a lark, usually more drag than realistically, and in any event not as part of the social life or their primary relationships.  Doesn't rule it out, just not something I have heard of. It just isn't what it means to be gay.  Gay is about sexual attraction and most gay men are very secure in their gender.  I do know at least one gay man who discovered over time he was trans but it was a very slow, evolutionary process and he was ostracized by his gay friends for a time because of it.  Gay men can be as gender binary as female spouses.

And Janice, another transgendered woman, writes:

About a year ago I was testing the waters, so to speak, and was talking to a gay friend of mine at work about cross-dressing. He got very angry and told me he just couldn't understand why any man would want to put on a dress. I thought, mistakenly, that since he was gay that he would be more understanding and since we are good friends that he would be someone I could come out to.  I was wrong and I dropped it right there.

I must say that I am not really much further forward. I have asked a lot of people what they think, and they seem to think it's not really important. Perhaps it isn't! Perhaps I am just over-thinking it. Comments and perspectives are welcome!

===

My thanks to Tasi Zuriack of Sister House for drawing my attention to the Huffington Post interview.
My further thanks to Janice for reminding me about The Birdcage, another wonderful movie which reinforces the stereotype of the crossdressing gay man.

Detransitioning

Detransitioning is the process whereby someone, post sex-reassignment surgery, living as the opposite sex, regrets their decision, and returns to their original sex. It's hard to know how common it is for sure, since reports vary widely. Wikipedia reports a 2009 review article reporting it may be as high as 8%. For some in the trans world, it's an uncomfortable subject.

The oldest example may be Tiresias, a mythical blind Greek prophet. The story goes that he was changed into a woman by Hera as punishment for striking two copulating snakes with his staff. Tiresias's powers of prophecy were unaffected, and she lived successfully as a woman, including marrying and having children, before being turned back into a man after the (mythologically significant) seven years.

But mythology is all very well. What about reality?

Samantha Kane

Born in 1960 in Iraq, Sam Hashimi was always different as a boy. When he could, he dressed in girls' clothes, and even had sex with other boys. He moved to the UK at the age of 16, and grew up to become very successful. He married a woman in 1984 and had two children. His business thrived and he became a millionaire.

He announced his gender dysphoria to his wife, and she soon divorced him. He went on to spent £100,000 on a series of operations to make him into Samantha Kane, culminating in sex-reassignment surgery in 1987. Samantha Kane was glamorous and attractive (the "ultimate male fantasy"), and enoyed a jet-set lifestyle as an interior designer in London and Spain.

However, after a few years Samantha began to regret her decision to transition. She disliked the way oestrogen made her feel emotional and moody. No matter how feminine she looked, she felt she was merely playing a role.

Kane: In fact, I found being a woman rather shallow and limiting. So much depends on your appearance, at the expense of everything else. I wasn't interested in shopping. My female friends would spend hours shopping for clothes, trying on different outfits. But having been a man I knew exactly what would suit me and appeal to men. I could walk into a shop and be out again in five minutes with the right dress. Nor have I ever been interested in celebrity magazines or the things that interest other women, but when I tried to talk to men about blokey things they didn't take me seriously.

Samantha Kane was engaged to a wealthy property owner, but the relationship collapsed, ostensibly because he did not consider her to be a "real woman".

So in 2004, Kane spent a large sum of money on further surgery, and returned to being a male, Charles Kane. He has reconciled with his son, and has found a new, female partner, Victoria. You can read a 2010 interview with the couple here.

Kane: I feel very philosophical, rather than bitter about what happened to me. Based on my own experiences, I believe sex-change operations should not be allowed, and certainly not on the NHS. People who think they are a woman trapped in a male body are, in my opinion, completely deluded. I certainly was. I needed counselling, not a sex-change operation. In many ways I see myself a victim of the medical profession.

Ria Cooper in 2011

Kane's story is not unique (and nor is it finished! See below). Ria Cooper, the UK's youngest sex-change patient, was accepted for transition at the age of 17, but after less than a year, it was reported that she came to regret the decision. She stopped the hormone treatment, and cancelled the sex-reassignment surgery. She said she suffered such torment living as a woman that she tried to take her own life twice. At that time, Cooper saw her identity as a "trendy gay man". (On more recent checking, Cooper has remained a transwoman, and the most recent article in the newspapers says that Cooper (now 25) is protesting about transphobia when she was rejected by a glamour photographer for "having a cock").

Here is an articulate and powerful account of one person's detransition. The author is himself a doctor.

If I could only go back to the day before my surgery in March of 2005 -- I would run from that surgeon’s knife. I have lived and worked as a surgically altered man trying to play the part of a woman for six years. I spared no expense at trying to make it work. In fact, I spent an estimated $250,000 on various surgeries, and probably at least that amount in clothing and accessories. I took estrogen in every conceivable form. In return, I lost my lucrative job, my family, my social standing, and vital body parts. All for the sake of being true to myself—how tragically laughable.

It's well worth reading that essay all the way through; the bitterness is palpable. (Unfortunately you cannot. The link to Walt Heyer's website is broken--see update below).

When I started researching this article, I found much more than I expected to on this subject. As sometimes happens, this subject was intended to be a footnote to a different post, and has become a whole post by itself.

Many people who have detransitioned are vocal and angry, such as the author of this blog. There are support groups out there, such as this one. What strikes me about Kane is that, although he admits transitioning was a mistake, and asserts he is not bitter, he has come to think that surgical transitioning should never be permitted; that instead people should be counselled. What further strikes me is that he did not change back from Samantha Kane to Sam Hashimi, but instead into somebody new, Charles Kane, keeping that surname. Does this imply that his original dysphoria wasn't with his gender, but perhaps with his persona? I cannot possibly say. It seems ironic that Kane considers himself "a victim of the medical profession" because he got the transition he wanted, while so many trans people consider themselves victims of the medical profession because they can't get the transition they want!

Some commentators on the blogosphere have suggested that Kane did not spend enough time getting to know what it means to be a woman; that if he had, he would have found real contentment, instead of seeking to detransition. And it is absolutely certain that transition is an enormous life event; a rebirth, a renewal of you as a person, which must create enormous emotional, as well as physical, stress. I completely understand people who think: have I really done the right thing? Am I going to regret this? (I felt the same the last two times I bought a house!) On the other hand, I have it in their own words, and I believe that both of these people think that transitioning was ultimately wrong for them, and it looks to me like both of them gave it their very best shot.

Walt Heyer

Some of the links and articles I have found have come from this website, SexChangeRegret, which is maintained by Walt Heyer, a man who transitioned and later detransitioned. Heyer has written books about this subject, and has become an advocate against sex reassignment surgery, and argues against it on television and in print.

On the other hand, there is a wonderfully balanced discussion here on this blog, Third Sex. I commend you to read the whole article, which is sensible, insightful and sympathetic. Diana writes:

Detransition is not bad, or inherently negative. If someone is detransitioning because they made a terrible mistake, that is obviously horrible, and I wish that person the best for their mental, physical, and spiritual health. But it seems to me that many others experience detransition as a more fluid change in their gender identity. Perhaps it is not common, but I do believe that gender is varied and that as people we are constantly changing. The idea that one transitions to the other sex today, never to traverse the bounds of gender again - is absurd.

The reality is that some people detransition. And I think a lot of us are scared that we could do that one day, and that this decision is wrong for us, too. The easiest way to combat that insecurity is to look at it in the face, and answer the question yourself, today. Personally, I had to address where that insecurity came from. Was it indeed from a part of myself that knew the real truth about who/what I was? Rather than denying the existance of detransition and writing those who detransition off as anything negative - we ought to acknowledge and accept this experience. Our own realities are not validated or invalidated by that of someone else. My transition is not harmed or hindered by anyone. I am in control of where I take my body, and why.

For me, I think what this subject boils down to is this: what did Sam Hashimi, and Walt Heyer, and the anonymous doctor above, tell their own doctors before the surgery? And how could those doctors be expected to differentiate them (educated, articulate, informed) from others, for whom transition is the right choice?

I believe surgical and hormonal transition is the right choice for some people. But I don't believe it is for everyone.

If we take a group of people assigned male who request sex change surgery, a line needs to be drawn across that group, into some people who are suitable to have it, and some who are not. If we draw that line strictly, fewer operations will be performed. Only those who are absolutely suitable will have the surgery, and detransitions will be fewer, but some people who yearn for transition (and might be fine afterwards) will be denied it.

If we draw that line more permissively, more operations will be performed. Fewer people will be denied transition, but here is the most important point. Inevitably, some people will transition who will come to regret that decision.

There is a very important discussion to be had on exactly where that line should be drawn, and what criteria are used to judge who falls on either side of it; including how old you need to be to make the decision rationally about whether or not to try to cross it. See this article for a more detailed discussion of one way this might be handled.

I wish you all a wonderful 2014.

===

Addendum: 26th January 2014

My thanks to Laura who drew my attention to Don Ennis, who transitioned and detransitioned within a very short time, citing a case of transient global amnesia as his reason. Ennis' case has not been widely reported in the media, perhaps because he is himself a senior figure at ABC News. However, there is no shortage of scornful articles about him out there, and I must admit his excuse sounds pretty flimsy to me.

===

Addendum: 25th September 2020

If you've tried following any of the links above to Walt Heyer's website, you will find they have been taken down. The one from the doctor has disappeared. I wrote to Walt Heyer to ask why, and this was his reply:

Vivienne, thank you for you note. 

We remove and rotate stories and that one was old and we get new stories frequently so the site is being changed to accommodate new stories. It will not return to the site.

I have worked with hundreds of regretful transgender people he was just one.

Walt Heyer.

I persisted in asking for details. I wrote "I am sorry that the personal account of the detransitioned doctor has been removed from your website, and won't be coming back. It was a powerful story, and I would very much like to repost it on my own website, with the author's permission, of course."

So, the individual was pleased it was not on the website as he wanted his privacy. It did not come down from the website for that reason but he is living a quiet life now and is happy not to be taking about it anymore.

Cheers to you 

Walt

Walt did not give me the full text, nor pass my email along to the original author. I have to say this made me a bit suspicious. It was a very powerful story, and the author being himself a doctor could have added significantly to the message of Heyer's website. Why should it have been removed? Is it because there are so many other new stories to replace it? Or is it because the story isn't real?

I wrote back to Walt as follows: "Thanks again for your reply. It's naturally disappointing that your previous acquaintance has decided not to allow his story to be told. What reassurance can you offer your readers that the stories and views featured on your website are genuine cases of transition regret, and not simply made up to suit your agenda?" Unfortunately Heyer has not replied.

If Walt does indeed have all those stories, it ought to be easy to refute my criticism, without violating the privacy of anyone involved. The fact that he has chosen not to respond makes me very suspicious that the stories (many of which seem to have come from one or other of Heyer's books), or at least some of them, are fabricated.

However, I did come across this article from the BBC, about Ellie (21) from Belgium and Nele (24) from Germany (on the left of this image). They were both born female, but transitioned to male (both had double mastectomies). But now both have detransitioned back to female. And they have been a couple throughout. The detailed article describes their story in detail, and contains many before, during and after pictures, as well as detailed explorations of their feelings and motivations. It's all done in a very neutral, non-judgmental way.

It's a fascinating story, made all the more remarkable by the situation that most of the detransition stories are male-to-female regret, and by the fact that the two people are a couple.

===

Addendum: 30th January 2021

A recent Quora post has brought me back for another update on this article. The article about Charles Kane and his fiancée Victoria is 10 years old, so I thought I would do a quick internet search for Kane and the latest information.

Third time's a charm: Kane

And I must say I'm quite astonished to discover that Kane has re-transitioned back to being a woman.

This article from the New Zealand Herald is by journalist Helen Weathers, who wrote the Daily Mail article which is quoted above. Weathers wanted to do a followup piece on Kane, and wrote this updated article in 2017.

So where did it all go wrong for Charles Kane? And does she have any regrets?

The fiancée went long ago," she says, adding with a slightly wicked smile, "but I kept the ring." Aged 57, she is happy to be single. She is a very different woman from her sexy younger self, Samantha.

"With the exception of Victoria, I was rejected by both men and women. The original surgery was effectively irreversible. You can't turn back into a man because whatever defines the male has been completely removed, so how can you bring it back?"

"I discovered to my detriment that there is only so far medical science can go."

"As Charles, I still sometimes wanted to wear a blouse or a pretty ring, and wear my hair long." [This is something that Weathers picked up on in her 2010 interview; that Kane still dressed and looked somewhat feminine}.

"Having become Samantha, I should have stayed Samantha [my italics for emphasis]. When I told Victoria how I was feeling, it effectively ended the relationship. She said she preferred men and did not want to live with a woman, but we are still friends."

Last month, Sam registered her new name - Sam Kane - with the Bar Council. She is undecided about further surgery. She is not sure she needs it.

"I don't need another operation to feel that I am a woman," she says. "Does it really matter what's 'down there?' What's in your head, heart and soul only matters. Not only am I a real woman; I would go even further to say that a transgender woman has more claim to womanhood than a 'biological' woman."

"Charles Kane did not really serve me in any way. People were less accepting of him than Samantha," says Sam, whose parents died soon after the reversal back to being a man. "People just thought me odd because I didn't want to give up my feminine features, my style, the way I dressed or acted. Sometimes, I still wanted to wear a blouse or a pretty ring."

"I am a real woman. Of course there are regrets about the course I have taken. If I had a magic wand, I'd choose to have been born a biological female, but I am a woman just the same."

What's interesting from my perspective is how Kane has doubled down on her gender identity; not only a woman, but with "more claim to womanhood" than a biological woman, despite having been born a male, then having detransitioned back into one, albeit temporarily. So many of her current statements seem to contradict what she has said before, it seems impossible to know what her mind actually is.

I wonder what Kane's detransition has in common with the purges that crossdressers (such as me) sometimes go through. A deliberate renunciation of our feminine selves; a resolution to be male going forward. And of course, it seldom lasts. Kane's detransition definitely has some features which resemble a good-going purge.

Do stories like Kane's shed any light on transition, or detransition? I personally think Kane's story is pretty unique, and therefore very atypical. Though I naturally wish Sam Kane well, her journey seems to indicate that there are some people who don't feel at home in either gender, and may struggle to try to belong to one or the other, while the truth may be that there is no "home" in either.