Embracing a Eunuch Identity

[JesusA (imported)]

Published today in Tikkun, a popular magazine with a liberal Judaism base, is a revised version of Richard Wassersug’s much more academic article Passing Through the Wall: On Outings, Exodus, Angels, and the Ark, which was originally published in the Journal of Religion and Health (2009 – 48:381-390). The new version does not have the two pages of academic footnotes of the original and has added four excellent color illustrations to the text. It’s also been completely rewritten (and greatly improved, in my estimation).

I think that many of the members and visitors to the Archive will enjoy the revised version. There is also an option to add comments, either on the Tikkun site or on this thread.

I offered copies of the PDF version of the original article to anyone who requested it when it was first published. That offer still stands for anyone who wants the academic, fully-footnoted version after reading the popular one. Just send me a Private Message giving me an email address that accepts attachments.

Richard’s new article Embracing a Eunuch Identity can be found here, complete with color illustrations:

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/embracing ... h-identity

[eunuch2001 (imported)]

Thanks for the link Jesus. Very thought-provoking article, though I have to confess it sent me to the dictionary twice (phenotype and liminal).

[Woggler58 (imported)]

Dr Richard Wassersug's newly rewritten version in Tikkun does read very well. He makes a compelling case for the many dozens of thousands of fellow relapsed, castrated prostate cancer patients to embrace their medically mandated conversion to eunuchs as bringing the opportunity of beneficial role-enabling personality change -- a change into gender in-betweenness that's neither male or female -- as compensation for loss of one's accustomed, testosterone-maintained array of male attributes.

Indeed, Richard's article is itself a perfect example result of the angel-like helpful role that being an involuntary but change-accepting eunuch enabled him to fulfill as its author, and which his researches found the nurturing eunuchs of history tended to excel at.

That's my reaction as a non-eunuch prostate cancer survivor at four-plus years after apparently successful RT curative treatment who's enjoying his (HRT- supplied) highest testosterone levels in many decades, but whose previously steady, low PSA numbers have crept up a little over the last 8 months and may portend that I'll be joining Richard as a eunuch in due course. If I do have to make that change-over, I'm now aware of how to satisfyingly fulfill myself once my hormonal, physical, and emotional makeup comes out of its surgical conversion cocoon in a new, genderwise in-between form.

[janekane (imported)]

Wassersug wrote to the effect that the effects of androgen deprivation surprised him. Given that the effects on my life following my orchiectomy did not surprise me, I wonder whether I was given far more accurate access to thorough understanding of human biology and biological diversity than he was given.

I expected events and effects which would be as though unexpected, and, thereby, did not encounter unexpected effects.

Yeah, that is, in words (connotation) something of a "tongue-twister." And also, in denotation (lived experience as life events eventuated) it was as through trivial and simple. Whaaat?

To me, life is a process of adaptation to events; it is my total life experience that the way I am able to adapt to life events is always good enough, if only for the silly, childlike reason that the events which happen are the events which happen, and the events which do not happen do not happen, and, therefore, if I am to live a life I experience as usefully decent, I will base my life on actual events, and not confabulated fantasies of events which never were.

With me, libido has two intensely contrasting aspects. There is distended-tissue libido, the thing that, absent at least minimally sufficient masturbation, really messed up my sleep more than once a week after I got far enough into puberty. Being of scientific persuasion, I did some simple arithmetic, and discovered that distended-tissue-driven orgasms and ejaculations tool up far more of my time and effort than did a little muscle exercise just often enough to allow me to get a good night's sleep, night after night.

War, with its sadly spinal cord bullet-induced ransections allowed for physiologists to map the location of the spinal ganglia that are the reflex centers for erection and ejaculation in intact males. Distended tissue libido activates those ganglia-based reflex arcs, especially during sleep, when conscious inhibition of the reflex arcs is suppressed by being asleep.

The other form of libido I experience is of conscious awareness form; while I stopped having distended-tissue-driven libido shortly following my bilateral orchiectomy, my conscious awareness libido is not even slightly diminished.

In the opera, "Porgy and Bess," by George and Ira Gershwin and DuBoise Heyward, is a word sequence I recall, from memory now, as something like, "Methuselah lived 900 years, but who calls it livin' when no woman will give in to no man what's 900 years"

It never occurred to me that anyone properly "gives in" to any one else, regardless of situation or circumstances. It never occurred to me that any woman would ever "give in" to me, sexually or othewise; nor has it ever occurred to me that anyone will ever "give in" to me, this being because I choose to never :give in" to anyone else, regardless of circumstances or situation because my doing such would devalue and denigrate my life beyond what I consider in any way decent.

I recall President Carter, in good "Baptist-tradition" form, remarking about having done some form of "adultery of the heart" (whatever that may mean). I take it to mean, as I guess Carter intended, a sense of sexual attraction to a woman to whom he was not married.

My wife and I have a daughter, born to us, who has a form of genetic marker which makes it stunningly obvious that I am her biological father. I have done my duty, in the reproductive sense, and, I believe, done it adequately, though neither more nor less so than anyone else. Not long before our daughter was born to us, my wife and I adopted an eleven year old boy, who was said, by the adoption agency, to be in urgent need of an adequate home. Adopting our son took me on a path toward experiences of intensity of tragedy, grief, and sorrow that is close to, if not at, the limit of anything I ever imagined possible.

I have no way to test whether, with normal testosterone levels, I would have had the capacity to survive such intense grief and sorrow as came into my life; were I to conjecture a wild guess, I would allow that low testosterone was a central factor in my surviving what happened without adopting a stance of intense hatred toward those other people whose actions and inactions were essential aspects of the causal chain of events which took me to the boundary of what I deemed survivable.

I had studied my close-relative family history, and came to the understanding that no close relative of mine who developed cancer had any symptoms until after cancer had become effectively terminal. It was this recognition, in 1986, that led me to find a way to reduce my risk of similar cancer, and there were two tissues which I found, separately or together, posed an unacceptably high cancer risk for me. One such tissue is named "testicles," the other is named, "colon." Both of those types of tissue and I parted company in 1986.

Is there a kitchen table or motel room cutter who can successfully do a total colectomy with ileo-rectal anastomosis, and do so without any serious post-surgical life-threatening complications? I doubt it. I did not have the option of going to a non-doctor for my cancer-preventive surgeries unless my preferred method of cancer prevention was dying before I developed cancer.

Meanwhile, I have "been out" as transgendered all my life, having never, inwardly or socially, accepted the traditional "king, warrior, magician" masculine roles (as in Robert Moore's book, "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover").

I am working on doing a documentary video regarding my bioengineering research. Whether I complete the project or not is somewhat iffy, because the future is always somewhat iffy. In that documentary, as now planned, I will make very, very public, the path that led to my becoming a eunuch.

I am becoming weary of hatred being culturally mandated as the most important guiding principle of human social organization.

[devi (imported)]

Published today in Tikkun, a popular magazine with a liberal Judaism base, is a revised version of Richard Wassersug’s much more academic article Passing Through the Wall: On Outings, Exodus, Angels, and the Ark, which was originally published in the Journal of Religion and Health (2009 – 48:381-390). The new version does not have the two pages of academic footnotes of the original and has added four excellent color illustrations to the text. It’s also been completely rewritten (and greatly improved, in my estimation).

I think that many of the members and visitors to the Archive will enjoy the revised version. There is also an option to add comments, either on the Tikkun site or on this thread.

I offered copies of the PDF version of the original article to anyone who requested it when it was first published. That offer still stands for anyone who wants the academic, fully-footnoted version after reading the popular one. Just send me a Private Message giving me an email address that accepts attachments.

Richard’s new article Embracing a Eunuch Identity can be found here, complete with color illustrations:

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/embracing ... h-identity

This is really a very good article. -About the best I've read so far.

[janekane (imported)]

"Our Jesus" emailed to me the .pdf of the academic version, as

published in the Journal of Religion and Health...

In that version, I found the following words

We hide because it is shameful to be castrated.

Whatever else may be true, I have never experienced my bilateral orchiectomy and its resulting in my being castrated as in any way shameful. Within proper boundaries of human subject research confidentiality, I incorporated as accurate a description of the process of my getting that orchiectomy as I deem ethical.

How could I be ashamed of making the best, biologically-informed practicable decision attainable, in 1986, regarding minimizing my risk of dying from cancer in way similar to the deaths of my dad and brother?

Of course, my decision was based on conjecture, speculation, and guessing. Is there any more accurate way of making decisions that surely will affect a person's future life than conjecture, speculation, and guessing? If there is a more accurate way, I have yet to hear of it, much less be familiar with--or understand--it.

[tomas.toohey (imported)]

I do agree with the rest of you a very well written article but then again it is by Richard Wassersug who I have had the pleasure to speak to, well this is once the article loaded.