There are many thousands of transsexual people of both genders in the United Kingdom. The three thousand post operative transsexual women and one or two thousand transsexual men are just the ones who've made it through. Behind them it is impossible to estimate the numbers grappling with denial, guilt and shame, because they're invisible. So too, of course, is their agony. The transsexual men are a particularly interesting group to examine.
Society has fewer pet stereotypes with which to confuse the issues surrounding their lives.
It's easier to see the innateness of the men's masculine gender identities, uncluttered by associations with transvestism, fetishism, and the subjective minefield which defines a woman in terms of her attractiveness rather than her personality. It's much harder to examine transsexual women without tripping over the wires laid by feminist theory, and without being cognitively confused by the sad fact that some transsexual women will never fit society's narrow aesthetic definition of acceptable womanhood. Like the aversion therapist, trying not to have seen what he'd seen, it seems that in some quarters society is still not quite ready to digest the evidence that robs us of those convenient simplifications we've all been taught about gender and sex, but which would liberate so many. It leaves me wondering what we'll see in another quarter century, looking back on the 27 years of our struggle to get people seeing and thinking about medical knowledge that wasn't even new in 1970. For nothing in this discussion is news to modern medicine.