Moving Eunuch History Forward

[Cainanite (imported)]

Jesus and I just spent an amazing weekend at the "Moving Trans* History Forward" Conference in Victoria, BC. (If you don't know where that is, it is in Canada, AKA USA's Hat.) Jesus very kindly listed me as a co-author on a presentation he made there (though I added almost nothing of consequence to it) but that allowed me to attend all the various different talks and get to meet some really awesome people I wouldn't otherwise have met. It was a real eye opener for me.

Firstly, despite my not having any letters before or after my name, people there seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say and what I had to contribute. I found myself filling the role of "resident eunuch" so to speak. It seems that the eunuch experience has a LOT of parallels to the Trans* experience. It is only that we are many years behind the rest of the Trans community in gaining the same level of acceptance.

Much of what was talked about was the early days of Trans* peoples, and their struggle to gain acceptance. How they hid their status from the rest of the world. How they communicated with each other. How little information there was about other Trans people. How at threat they were from society at large. The conference was largely about how to preserve that struggle for future generations as well as looking at current difficulties, acceptance, and the future of where Trans* people are going. I found I had a lot that I saw in myself coming from the early days of Trans* history.

The thing I felt throughout the conference though was a sort of grudging acceptance of me there, representing the eunuch community. I got the impression from some that MtE probably isn't a real thing. I mean we're not really transitioning from one thing to another. We just don't fit into our cisgender, and want to opt out. It was fortuitous that Jesus' presentation came at the end of the conference. People that had met and spoken with Jesus and I over the two days had formed opinions of what "Eunuchs" were, and what they are not. Jesus' presentation changed all of that.

Immediately after, though there were three other presenters on the panel, the questions started, almost all of them for Jesus. You could tell there was a real curiosity about what we eunuchs are.

Where I came in, was when the questions started about the Fiction Archive. What kinds of stories are in the archive? How many are about minors? Are we supposed to take this seriously if most of the stories are about forced or coerced castration? Doesn't that prove that this is just a fetish?

And so, I was forced to speak at a conference full of academics, activists, and people with such high IQ's I felt like a chimpanzee trying to explain quantum physics to Stephen Hawking. Flying Spaghetti Monster, I did my best. I could only tell them about my own motivations for writing, and what I had learned here on the archives, and from my correspondence with other Fiction Archive authors.

I told them that many authors write children into their stories not because they want to do that to a child, but because they wish they could themselves return to a pre-sexual state.

I told them that forced and coerced castrations are in so many of the stories because the idea of openly seeking castration for ourselves is so beyond the limits of accepted society that it would be better if we were victims of a forced castration, than a voluntary one. When they challenged me on that, I found myself telling them my own story, before I was a full time EA member, of speaking with a psychologist about my anger issues, and admitting those very feelings to her. I told them of the speech she gave me, threatening to have me locked up if she thought for a second that I was a serious threat to myself or someone else. Yes, I could be locked up, and my entire world destroyed, just for talking about a desire to lose my own testicles.

Suddenly the penny dropped. You could feel the change in the room. Between Jesus' beautifully researched and delivered presentation, and my own clumsy confession, you could see the eyes suddenly open.

In the early days of Trans* history if you admitted a desire to change your gender, you could be locked up or institutionalized. It is no longer that way for trans people, but it still is for someone seeking castration.

In the early days Trans* people had to hide what they were from everyone. It was a shame that couldn't be lived down. Eunuchs still have to hide.

In the early days of Trans* history, the only way for Trans* people to communicate was through underground magazines filled with stories of forced feminization. Stories where little boys were magically, or physically forced to change into little girls. It was just such a horrible notion that anyone would want to change sex, it was better to express the story as it being something forced upon them. We are doing that today with the Fiction Archive. It is one of the only ways we can know we are not alone with our deepest darkest feelings. One of the attendants who collected and preserved those stories claimed she could top our 11,000 eunuch stories by a factor of 80. Probably 90% of which featured children, and forced feminizations.

In the early days it was impossible for a trans person to find a doctor willing to help them transform. To this day it is almost impossible for a MtE person to find a doctor to perform a simple orchidectomy.

The parallels are astounding. The Eunuch community is just 20 to 50 years behind the rest of the Trans* community. We are the red headed step child of the Trans* movement.

I feel like we made some real progress over this weekend. I have to thank Jesus for allowing me to be a part of it. I learned a lot, and I was present when progress for the Eunuch community was made.

I do see some challenges ahead for us though. Much of Trans* acceptance was made through titillation. By that I mean Broadway shows, novelty strippers, Vegas reviews, and more. There was a sexual curiosity in the public to see a "Man that looks like a woman." That curiosity for the titillating put a lot of brave Trans* people into the public eye, and eventually the novelty wore off, and more mainstream acceptance began. (This is NOT, repeat NOT to say there isn't a huge distance more that the Trans* community needs to go for complete acceptance. They are not there yet. Instead this is in comparison to how far the Eunuch community needs to go before a man will be able to walk into his doctor's office, and request a castration, or even admit to himself or his community that this is what he really wants.)

We don't have that titillation factor for a curious public. They already know what a set of male genitals look like. Ours look just like that, but with a few more bits missing than usual. Instead we won't be able to rely on popular media to do any of the work for us. We must instead rely on people like Jesus to present our case academically as it was this weekend.

We CAN get there. It is just going to take time, and an awful lot more work.

[cheetaking243 (imported)]

*claps*

And yeah, the part about stories was spot-on. That's why I got so into writing... I felt like I couldn't talk to anyone about it, and thus writing was my outlet. And it was almost always about minors because I was indeed trying to go back and "correct" what I couldn't in real life, in a way using that to re-write my history to turn my present life situation into a hypothetical happy one.

[tugon (imported)]

I am always pleased to read that minds continue to be opened by the work Jesus and supporting cast do during these presentations. Thank you Cainanite for sharing your personal story. I am sure you presented us well.

Becoming a eunuch I always felt it was a transition. I do think of myself as a trans person. I am not the person I was before but outwardly I am recognized as the person I was before. I do respect the greater struggle involved in having to present as the opposite. I could easily slip away have my procedure and come back to my old role in my world. Oh how was your weekend away? Great I feel like a new person. Or I will after most of the T is gone.

Having said that I missed having any support as I was deciding why I was different and what I needed to do to fix me. I was castrated several years before finding the EA. Prior to castration good knowledge came from working in healthcare and learning about someone actually wanting to be castrated came from stories in porn mags and books. I knew the mechanics but not whom I was to become. The fiction I read got most of it wrong. Going it alone has made me so appreciative of the work done by staff and members of the EA.

Once I found the EA as always it is great to know there are others like me. I began to define myself and my place in the world. Wow people understand and may not share my motivation but are on the same path. I now had a community. I even went to two Meetings of Members and met the people behind the screen names and avatars. Maybe one day when people are more accepting we could have local monthly meetings of eunuchs. There are three voluntary eunuchs no more than an hour drive from me.

[tugon (imported)]

*claps*

And yeah, the part about stories was spot-on. That's why I got so into writing... I felt like I couldn't talk to anyone about it, and thus writing was my outlet. And it was almost always about minors because I was indeed trying to go back and "correct" what I couldn't in real life, in a way using that to re-write my history to turn my present life situation into a hypothetical happy one.

Sorry off topic but when I saw your Avatar as I was scrolling down I thought what is a picture of my friend Amber doing on the EA?

[JesusA (imported)]

Cainanite is far too modest. He and I had both email and telephone exchanges as the Powerpoint presentation was being created. His contributions to it were important and were at the center of the questions and comments from the audience at the end of the session. At the end of the session of four presentations, one of the important trans spokespeople present stood to proclaim our session to be the most valuable of the entire conference. This was the same person who had asked several questions of both Cainanite and me. Cainainite was able to add considerably to the conversation and was surrounded by members of the audience after the session concluded.

Cainanite was an active participant in every session that he attended and engaged other members of the conference during the coffee breaks and over the lunches and dinner that were in the conference facility. In the sessions where both of us were in attendance, I watched Cainanite effectively promote eunuch identity as not only real, but very much worthy of study and support. He effectively expanded their idea of what "trans*" ought to include.

I think that, if any progress was made during the Moving Trans* History Forward conference, much of the credit should be given to Cainanite for his articulate description of the current situation and of what still needs to be done.

[janekane (imported)]

From time to time, my life gets busy, sometimes to and beyond overload. My wife and I live out in the country, about ten miles from the nearest city. That was never my intended plan; an automobile disaster (a Mercury Sable that exploded, in part, as I observed, as an engineer, as a result of many non-fully fused spot welds) in which my wife's and my son and daughter-in-law were killed and our then dead son's mother-in-law sued us, and the court system dispatched my wife and me into Chapter 7 bankruptcy (because we did not have a couple million dollars around to give to lawyers who would only have made us bankrupt faster?) put us in a house of marginal quality in some important respects, including underground water system wiring that failed after the ground froze, with the court system having guaranteed that we could not hire a contractor with stuff to dig up and replace the failed wires, and I have been as busy as a master electrician can be putting out and removing temporary wiring so my wife and I are not driven from our home because of its having become unlawful for us to occupy it.

Life, I seem to notice, takes upon itself the forms and function life needs to exist. Meanwhile, I have been sadly scarce here, recently, due to overload from other stuff. A few more months, and I hope to remedy the overload mess, and be somewhat back to normal for me.

So, apologies done, I am much grateful for those who assert the right to be honest and truthful with themselves and to seek ways of being accepted, tolerated, and, had I my druthers, resoundingly affirmed by other people (aka, society)>

Back in 1986, I found myself in a moral and ethical dilemma, as it had become clear to me, using Bayesian statistical methods and decades of learning about biology, including the biology of rare forms of cancer, that, if I kept some tissues, I was asking for a 50% chance of willfully committing suicide from cancer at a comparatively young age. So, I set out to part company with the tissues (testicles and colon) that I deemed to be threatening the rest of my tissues. Between my orchiectomy and colectomy, my brother, three years older than me, was found to have the form of terminal cancer I sought to prevent, for him as for me, through proper medical care. For him, no such luck. For me, when I am not too overloaded by other stuff, I am able to post comments on the Archive Forums.

In my studying of the scientific literature of criminology as an aspect of the sociology of personal and social disorganization, I keep finding two approaches to the structure of human societies, one being conflict-based and the other being consensus-based.

I am aware that the Archive has a wonderful resident anthropologist, and I seek to not steal the anthropologist's thunder. Indeed, I am very grateful for it.

However, I am also interested in moving eunuch history into the realm of appropriate-in-context human behavior.

I got my orchiectomy and colectomy because I understood enough about biology and my family history to realize that I might die from "testosterone toxicity" at about the age prostate disease nearly did my dad in, when he was 51. Cancer did my brother in when he was 50. In the last 15 or so years, it has become clear that I do have a form of familial adenomatous polyposis, a form not in the medical literature when I was 47 and got my main cancer-risk-intended reduction surgeries.

It may be that, were I not of some variation of the two-spirit transgender realm, I might have preferred to die a manly prostate cancer death, but I kind-of doubt it. For people with one X and one Y chromosome and very high inherited cancer risk for whom surgery is the most effective preventive approach, stigma about not having macho testosterone may be a serious cause of early death. While, during my grade school and high school days, being gender diverse led to considerable bullying and other social stigma related maltreatment, once I understood my cancer risk accurately, my gender diverse situation became quite a nifty way to be. Testicles? They did their duty, now they are not only obsolete, they were likely on the way to killing me.

So, I got them killed in self-defense? Is removing cancerous or precancerous tissue the killing in self-defense of said tissue? When is killing in self-defense morally and ethically mandatory? That is a simple question for me, as I regarded dying from surgically preventable cancer to be an unconscionable form of willful suicide. The difficulty for me was to find an affordable way to get the orchiectomy, as I got it before anyone did the final and accurate diagnosis of my inherited cancer risk.

I had also known men, older than me, who developed prostate cancer which metastasized into bone marrow and became lethal, who rejected orchiectomy risk reduction surgery until the effect of their orchiectomies was likely only another week or so of severe cancer pain.

The medical establishment proclivity to leave testicles in men with serious prostate cancer risk for the sake of masculinity is, to me, a form of atrocity no less undesirable than castrating young boys (who are not at notable cancer risk) against their best self-interests.

There is an alternative to societies structured on conflict and societies structured on consensus, for both of those tend to de-personalize and de-individuate folks. The alternative, which validates individuality within community is collaboration based on dialogue (dialogue as, for example, in the work of the late David Bohm).

There is that "bell curve" that become a favored way to ration grades in school many decades ago. The "bell curve" (the normal density function) is the slope of the normal distribution. An area of the normal density function that is plus and minus one standard deviation from the arithmetic mean of the curve will contain about 63.3 percent of the area under the normal density function. The mean of the normal density function? The folks who make up that area are clearly a majority, and, in a society ruled by majority opinion, people like me seem to get no meaningful vote. So, years go, it came to me, as a form of life-saving humor, that the majority of people, in a society based on conflict and consensus, have become too mean and too dense to usefully understand or accept the actual biological diversity of humanity.

Inter-species and intra-species diversity both appear to me to be necessary for life to live.