SRS Wasn’t THAT Brutal, Julie

Today, I was reading an article on Questioning Transphobia about the evil transphobic Julie Bindel and her paranoid delusions about how transsexual women are sick, evil and wrong. You know, extrapolating the things that the religious right community call all queer people upon transsexuals alone. This statement is quite apt, considering that Julie, like most transmisogynistic feminists, cozied up to the religious reich and wrote an article for them against transsexuals. She levied a number of charges against transsexual women, which I guess would be something that a transmisogynist would do but I am only going to address one in particular for now. She assumed that the sex reassignment surgery is brutal and I cannot agree with her on this based on my own experience. Paying for the surgery was brutal, as was saving for it and making a lot of personal sacrifices to get the surgery. The stigma of being a pre-operative transsexual is brutal and while my surgery has mostly taken care of that, the stigma of being a transsexual woman is still there. But the surgery itself was not brutal, Julie.

Let me tell you that while I was in Thailand, I was treated very well by Dr. Pichet’s staff and was made to feel as comfortable as humanly possible. He was very nice to me, discussed the surgery in very big detail and we went to the operating room where I was given a spinal block and put to sleep, where when I immediately woke up, I didn’t really feel a thing. Most of the pain from the operation was during the four days in bed and was due to the packing and stent that they placed inside of me, which made it very difficult to move about or even roll around to feel a little more comfortable before I went to sleep. After that, while my mobility was, of course, limited – I felt comfortable enough to walk up and down Vibhavadi Rangsit road quite a bit and when I got back state side, I felt comfortable enough to make numerous trips to see the people at Naropa about admissions. After returning home to Denver and enjoying a bit of R&R for classes, I was able to really toss my invalid ring and didn’t really need it that much.

The fact of the matter, Julie is that the most painful about SRS is not the procedure itself, it is the cost of it, it is how I felt before the surgery and the stresses and judgements people subjected me to because they were not comfortable with a pre-op transsexual woman. After all, not too many transsexual women are fortunate enough to have supportive family who will contribute to the medical expenses nor $8,000 lying around to get the surgery (honestly, that’s how much I paid for my SRS in Thailand). The surgery itself, I could do again before breakfast. Once I had the surgery, one of the biggest stressors was gone from my life and I became a much more capable, more functional person in society.

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Tags: Julie Bindle, Sex Reassignment Surgery, srs, transmisogynistic feminists, transphobia