Dr. Rob Garofalo, Lurie Children Hospital of Chicago: “Transgender is really a Pediatric Condition”

Dr. Robert Garofalo. photo credit: WindyCityMediaGroup

Dr. Rob Garofalo is the director of the newly created pediatric transgender medical center at the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

From WBEZ news: “The clinic will offer transgender and gender variant children a range of supportive services including psychology, endocrinology, and pediatrics.”

 

  Garofalo describes what he calls the pathology or “pediatric condition” of sex-role variance and the clinic’s goals:

 SOURCE.

“So the families, I think, came before the clinic. So there was a clear need for this type of multidisciplinary clinic to be formed. I wasn’t even aware of it. I mean really, it started to come in dribs and drabs but then all of a sudden it became clear that Lurie [Children's Hospital of Chicago] or someone had to step forward with this idea of a “One Stop Shop” easy access place for these families who are often in distress or in turmoil about having a child that’s gender variant, which can be very challenging to them. So the idea was really to create a program that was comprehensive and very developmentally appropriate. I mean I think you asked “why pediatric?”. It’s because this is really a pediatric condition.

When we think of gender, and gender formation, it doesn’t happen when you’re an adult. It doesn’t happen when you’re a teenager. Someone’s gender is determined when they’re 3, 4, 5. So oftentimes that’s when these issues begin to become apparent for children and families. So I think a pediatric institution with a range of specialists and services designed to not just treat the child, but to treat the whole system, the whole family, is really critically important for this, and for Lurie.

Sex-role discordant child

So really what we do is we work with families on- you know, basic pediatric things, just within the context of having a gender-variant child. So safety issues at home, making sure that kids don’t get bullied in school, creating an environment which allows the child some freedom to figure out who they are within their family structure, within society. It’s not about us giving a child a label or making any sort of extreme intervention early on. That’s not what happens. It’s really about creating a culture of safety for families that often feel like there isn’t anywhere for them to turn.

People are most comfortable when there’s an obvious answer. People are most comfortable when you can put someone in a box and give someone a label. That’s not always the case here. And sometimes the label that we might want to give someone isn’t the most natural: you know, might be calling someone who is distinctly born, you know, with a biologic sense of a boy: a girl.

Sex-role discordant toy advert

Gender is a social construct. You know, biological sex is about anatomy. You were born with certain anatomy you get called a boy. You were born with different anatomy you get called a girl. Gender is a social construct. So it may relate to their anatomy, but it may not. So it may be concordant with what that anatomy is, but it might not. It might be discordant.

I bet you five years from now that there are going to be programs like this cropping up all over the place. I mean, I think there are new pediatric endocrine society guidelines that speak to this, the World- WPATH- the World Professional Association of Transgender Health Professionals has new guidelines. I think even the AMA has developed policies that are increasingly permissive around transgender conditions. So I think, again, you’re going to see five years from now this will be far more mainstream than it is now.”

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Dr. Garofalo’s clinic will provide endocrinological modifications and medical corrections for children suffering from socially constructed gender variance up to the age of 13.

According to the Chicagoist, Garofalo’s Lurie pediatric transgender medical clinic is funded by The Tawani Foundation,  whose mission according to their website is:

Mission

Tawani Foundation is committed to:

• Enhancing and promoting awareness of the importance of the citizen soldier, through preservation of military history & heritage
• Preserving unique sites of significance to American history
• Improving public spaces and services that enhance quality of life
• Honoring the history and supporting the service of military personnel through recognition of achievement

The Tawani Foundation is also a generous funder of WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, whose guidelines for transgender children were rejected by the American Psychiatric Association last year due to lack of scientific basis. 

Men Support Less Pink for Boys, Purple Too Gay Now Too

Water remains wet, Fire remains hot, Easy Bake Oven cake still tastes like crap.

http://www.change.org/petitions/hasbro-feature-boys-in-the-packaging-of-the-easy-bake-oven

Reasons transgender folks are angry at Gay Male Drag Queen “Skye High” for doing this ad

Drag is offensive to trans people because no one can tell the difference between a man in female drag and a man with a personal internal sense of feeling like what he imagines a reproductively female person feels like.

He should have dressed more flamboyantly, with a giant headdress perhaps, to signify that he is a male who “performs” female for entertainment purposes, as distinguished from a man who “performs” female because he is trying to disguise himself to pass as female for personal lifestyle or sexual fetish reasons.

Drag queens should only model in advertisements that appear in Gay publications, so that the public will know they are gay.

Cocks in Frocks should never ever be portrayed with humor.

Men wearing dresses should not be permitted to use the men’s bathroom and should instead use the women’s.

Some male transgenders prefer to sit to urinate. The ad may lead the public to believe all males who perform female-assigned gender choose to use urinals to void.

The ad implies that the viewer needs to “stay strong” to deal with sharing the men’s restroom with a female impersonator, which implies that female impersonators are not a desirable person to share a restroom with.

Any ad featuring female impersonation should explicitly convey a pro-transgender message.

Photos of Drag Queens should only be used for personal promotion of their entertainment services and never used in advertising campaigns.

Transgender males are victims of hate crimes more frequently than Gay men or Drag Queens.

Drag Queens are “triggering” to lifestyle transgender males, especially the heterosexual ones.

The public may think trans males are gay, when in fact the majority are heterosexual men who want to be “lesbians”.

The fact that he is smiling gives the viewer permission to not take transphobia seriously.

His failure to “pass” as convincingly female makes him a distasteful example of gender failure.

Drag is funny, Trans is tragic.

https://www.facebook.com/wipeouttransphobia

http://www.change.org/petitions/vok-beverages-don-t-publish-your-transphobic-ad

Becoming a Woman: Avoid the Linear Stance

“Feminine Movement for TG women” by “Femininity Coaching From Denae”

STANDING IN A FEMININE WAY

Lets begin with how to STAND, in a feminine, sensual way.  I am most often asked by those who have studied my Vol 1 DVD—to please explain again– how to stand and sit in an S-Curve.  Review Vol 1 but herewith a short review. Most men stand linear, and they generally do not use much hand movement (except shaking hands, waving or crossing their arms) so we want to break out of the linear by using what I created called the  S-Curveto look  casual, sensual, sexy, or really sensual.

Day 1  Study yourself  while in guy mode when you can see your reflection in a mirror or large window. You will probably be like most men, which is standing with both feet flat on the ground and your hands down to your side (and often not swinging them while walking or swinging from the shoulders). This creates the straight l shape.

Day 2 Begin to take the weight off one of your feet, you can do this while in guy mode….the magic comes when your makeup is done and dressed. In the beginning this will be difficult to remember, so don’t beat yourself up, just make the correction. Again, you can do this while in guy mode as it will not “look feminine”. until your dressed.  This is the foundation for your footwork  when creating the Sensual S curve. Place one foot forward  slightly while the other foot stays in the back–and be certain no weight is on the FRONT FOOT, EVER. Next, you will only begin walking on your front foot which does NOT have any weight on it. I tell my clients to repeat FFF. Free Front Foot.

Day 3 Please break these up into days, as I do not want you to go on to the next step, until you have the previous day down; otherwise everything will fall apart –as much as you would like to tell yourself “Oh, I will remember to do that, its easy”. Wrong. I have seen this in my 12 years of  my private coaching for TG women, habit will be hard to break. However, once you feel the difference, you will be on your way to your first curve. Most men will step off on their BACK foot, (again men generally stand with their weight on both feet).

Day 4 After learning to place one foot slightly forward with the back foot solid on the ground –Lift the heel off the ground of the FFF.  In the beginning think of it, like a clock. Your back, base foot will be at 11:00 while your front, feminine foot will be at 1:00 or a slight 2:00. You can also learn, by placing the heel of your front foot into the arch of your base, back foot. Later, we will open this slightly.

Day 5 After lifting the heel up (which a man would never do) slightly tilt your FFF knee inward. BAM you have a major curve, which is the foundation of your S Curve. Try this with no shoes on, then in a heel. Practice this way of standing (it is called a hesitation in modeling) in the shoes with the heel height you most  often wear when you’re out dressed. Get ready, lets create another curve.

Day 6 Always, always begin to walk with your front free feminine foot. Why? Try stepping off with the back foot which has the weight on it. You will be stuck in cement, it never moves. It is your base, foot which holds you up really well, in heels when standing. Try it. When stepping off on your base, back foot did you feel how your entire body came forward, showing larger shoulders, arms and hands? This will be a difficult habit to break…..at first.

Day 7  Now, back to standing. You have your heel up and knee in which closes up any OPEN SPACE. You do not want any open space between your knees and your feet. Once you’re standing with your feet in your hesitation, with your heel up and sexy knee pointed inward, I want you to lift up your diaphram and roll your shoulders up, back, and down which will bring attention to your breast! Now, twist at the waist. You have another curve.

When your shoulders go DOWN, they will not look as large  however your breast will Remember roll them up, back, and down…feel your breast come forward and making your shorter.

Day 8  Next your shoulders. Tilt your shoulders one direction or the other, while you’re in your hesitation. You now have your next curve! You can use either shoulder, so practice tilting your left shoulder forward and then your right shoulder. You will need a mirror to see this. Remember to keep the heel up and the knee in, up at the waist, shoulders up, back and down and one shoulder pointed to the side. This is a really great tilt for photo taking, as only one shoulder will show and your breasts will look larger, oh yes and your stomach will be lifted! Remember the hesitation or this all falls apart later when we begin stairs, cars. Now, try tilting your head to the opposite side, than the shoulder you use. This is another curve. Not so hard, right?There is no right or wrong, just don’t stand in your guy stance.

Day 9 If you want to feel “more casual” take your FFF and slide it over and open away from the base foot about below the same shoulder. This is called an “open hesitation” You simply slide your FFF over onto your big toe, bend that knee in a little more. This is great when you’re wearing jeans for a casual stance. Your closed hesitation is more for a sophisticated look. And, I use it as a way of teachhing everything we do, we start with a closed hesitation.

Summary: You will find one foot more comfortable than the other– for your front foot and the other for your base foot. Your base foot needs to be your stronger foot, as it holds you up. As in Karate…they stand with one foot forward, right? Why? Balance. By placing your FFF forward you can use it to support yourself or to “prop” yourself up. This is very important for girls who are just learning to stand and walk in heels. Plus is gives you a much more feminine appearance than standing with your feet apart with weight on both feet, right?

Please visit my web site, and for more information on standing and walking. Also, email me your comments and questions. I will be happy to answer your questions in this blog, and it will help other girls, so step up and ask me anything on standing, walking, going up and down stairs, getting in and out of cars, putting on a coat, having someone put your coat on, how to carry your handbags, and how to swing your hips by using your back heel! You do not have to have this perfect…I suppose it more about what NOT to do so you don’t  look like a guy in a dress. By standing in an S Curve you will give that first 3 second impression a feminine appearance. Next, we can cover walking, so you have  men jumping out of their chairs to get that second glance, as you walk by! And, have fun with it and please get the basic hesitation down.  How many S Curves can you create!  So, there you go ladies. Have fun creating all the S curves you can, that fits your frame and the individual look you want…but remember to leave the linear at home with your guy clothes! Denae Doyle of www.FemImage.com  denaedoyle@FemImage.com  if you would like to contact me directly. This is also a great area to cover at your next TG support group!

http://femimage.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/feminine-movement-for-tg-women-by-denae-doyle-of-femimage

Infomercial !

Toyota Ad – Japan

The Making of a TransBoy

Parents Claim this drawing displays daughters “battle” with “Gender Identity”

“My son, Aaron, is a seventeen-year-old transboy.  Looking back, I realize that Aaron has never truly changed.  Aaron has always been a boy – a boy that was dressed in girls’ clothes, given girls’ toys, and held to the social expectations of a girl.  When Aaron was three, I registered him for an art camp for four- and five-year-olds.  Aaron demonstrated exceptional artistic talent at a very young age, and I assumed that she would be able to blend in with the group of older children since her artistic talent far surpassed that of most young children.  Upon arriving to pick up Aaron at the end of the first day of camp, the teacher approached me and said that he “needed to have a word with me.”  Being a teacher, I knew exactly what that meant. 

Hi My Name Is Carter

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/trans_teens_turn_to_youtube/singleton/

FEMALE COMMENTS ONLY TO THIS POST.

POST UPDATED 02/29/2012 :

Libra Tampons Commercial

If TYFA is the Transgender Children’s Fund who is playing Sally Struthers?

The above selection is Andrea James’ new video, filmed and narrated by himself. It’s part of his new fundraising drive for TYFA (pronounced “typha”).

“Typha” is the ancient Greek name for Cattails and perhaps refers to the “smoke-like” (“typh” is Greek for “smoke”) mass dispersal of seeds.”

The seeds that TYFA- Trans Youth Family Allies- is mass dispersing are the seeds of Genderism: the belief that sex-roles or “Gender” is biologically based and hard-wired to one’s reproductive sex at birth. Their agenda? Putting children as young as 18 months old into a medical “treatment path” to sterilization, experimental and untested puberty-blocking drug regimes, lifetime synthetic hormone dependence and disabling and mutilating cosmetic surgery. They claim to help families of sex-role non-conforming children get “back to normal” (an exact quote from the organization’s president) by medically and surgically trying to force children into conformity with cultural gender norms. Their official motto is “T.A.C.T. – Trust. Accept. Confidence. Treatment. “

TYFA activist Andrea James’s interest in children first became apparent when he shocked the academic world by stealing photos of a sexologist Michael Bailey’s elementary school-aged children and posting them online with pornographic captions such as “cocksucker” written on their faces in a campaign designed to silence the author and researcher.

Here is Andrea James’s last video production: “Liking Big Dicks” (NSFW):

There are two other videos in the TYFA campaign, one featuring founder Kim Pearson, whose minor child medically transsexualized before maturity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G0MMtR_4LM

In the video Pearson sounds exactly like the old Christian Children’s Fund commercials. Including the promise of a handwritten thank you note from a sponsored child!

Pearson says:

“At this point I think we really need to move or propel the organization to a different level. We’ve been operating on a very tight very minimal budget for quite a while. We don’t charge families for our services, schools really don’t have a lot of money at this point for our services, and so we have been dependent on individual donors, whether it be five dollars or twenty five dollars, a hundred dollars, five hundred dollars. We’ve been very grassroots, and I think it’s time to really professionalize the organization to take it to the next level, to have even larger and more visible national and international presence. We’re very, very certain that right now we’re only reaching the tip of the iceburg. And we need to be able to be more proactive. We need to be able to figure out how to work with kids who DON’T have family support. And there are far, far more children who do not have family support than those that do. And we know from research at the Family Acceptance Project [A survey of 245 white and Latino LGBT youth ages 21-25 “ who were open about their sexual orientation to at least one parent or primary caregiver during adolescence”.  Family acceptance measures “included positive family comments, behaviors and interactions related to their children’s LGBT identity” Nothing to do with drugs and surgeries. PDF here]that the most important piece, for a healthy outcome all the way around, socially, monetarily, emotionally, for these children is to have family support. And we can help that happen if we have the financial backing that we need.

If the school’s not picking up that tab, and the parents aren’t able to pick up that tab- which we don’t require anyway- You know, who picks up that tab? We have to fund that somehow. If we have regular monthly donations coming in we know we can commit ourselves to a number of -a certain number of school trainings every year. And we know that if we have more than we need for that then we can take on bigger and better projects. There are conferences that we attend every year to reach greater numbers of families, and to reach greater numbers of providers. These are very costly. But we reach huge numbers of people in one setting in a few days. So when you give monthly we know that we can meet the demands of those schedules and we don’t have to say wow, we can’t go to that conference. We can’t fill the need. Because there aren’t enough dollars. YOU have an opportunity to make a difference. Just as our trainers make a difference, you can make a difference.

crying for money

You can sponsor a family. You can sponsor a program. You can literally change a child’s life. You can literally save a child’s life [ gets choked up] by donating. Wow! [laughs]. This is something that you can do [tears up like Tammy Faye]. It’s something we do every day at TYFA but you can get involved. You can make a significant difference in the trajectory of one of these children’s lives, or many of these children’s lives. By the signing up for monthly donations [sic]. Making a difference. We’ll have the children write you the thank you note, instead of me. But you can do this. It is an amazing opportunity, and you can come, and you can see the work that we’re doing, and you can feel the same sense of satisfaction that I feel every day when I go to work and when my head hits the pillow at the night [sic]. At the end of the day I know that I’ve made a difference. I know that I have saved lives. And you can have that sort of satisfaction too. “

The third new TYFA fundraising video follows the exact same formula. Co-founder Shannon talks for five minutes about how she realized her son was transsexual at the age of 18 months, how much TYFA needs your money, gets choked up and tears up in the last 90 seconds to drive the fundraising pitch home.

James’s campaign seems designed to appeal to pedomorphic  middle aged white male heterosexual crossdressers and “retirement transitioners”, many of whom are obsessed with the idea of pre-pubertal transgenders, and are also the market for  lush, sexualized pedo-tinged “art photo” books that feature the puberty-blocked children as if in the latest underage Calvin Klein ad campaign.

Incidentally, when TYFA gave a presentation at last month’s WPATH convention where the new international transsexual “treatment guidelines” were unveiled, Kim Pearson and TYFA refused to provide any documentation or research to substantiate the claims they were making about childhood transsexualism, even though such claims go against all established research into childhood gender non-conformity. TYFA also refused to participate in international research studies on transgender children. Pearson claimed they had no right to know where TYFA drew the conclusions of their presentation from, and no cooperation with international data collection/research would be forthcoming, because the researcher’s work did not agree with their childhood transsexuality program and thus made their job harder.

Research shows that over 94% of children who are referred for professional treatment due to gender dysphoria experience spontaneous remission in adulthood if left alone. The other 6% continue to have some form of dysphoria or discomfort  and may or may not request psychological or other treatment. The vast majority of the children , if left untreated grow up to be well adjusted Gay and Lesbian adults. 

Not only does TYFA’s program run in opposition to credible scientific research and the Lesbian and Gay Liberation movement, it also goes against the research and experience of Intersex activists: “In adult life people chose gender expressions, sexuality and roles they never could have anticipated as children. We should not let parents or medicos limit life options for children by offering sterilization and medical dependency as part of package deal to “fix”gender/sex missmatch. The possibility that a child might grow up to be gay, genderqueer, or even a non-op transgender person is denied these children. “

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Saturday Night Double Feature-Eazy Edition

Yes that IS (ex-transsexual and post-op SRS regretter) Walt Heyer, in second vid.

Good One Walt! Marci B. got kicked out of Trinidad btw.

The Transsexual Empire: Time for a Re-Print?

Recent Amazon prices for a used paperback copy of Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.