There have been many posts saying how much people don't know about Transsexuality. Even some medical professionals have spouted ideas debunked a decade ago.

Without saying what should or should not be done, here's some of the facts detailed at http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2007/10/ts-101.html , which also gives hyperlinks to the medical and scientific articles mentioned.

There are hundreds of different serious Intersex conditions. Some result in ambiguous genitalia or none at all, or partial ones of both kinds. People can be Chimeras (fusion of opposite-sexed twins in the womb), Mosaics, or Kleinfelters, the latter with neither 46xy (male) nor 46xx (female) but 47xxy. Most such people are just normal men with a few anomalies in their bodies (and sterility). A few are normal but infertile men, a very few are normal fertile women.

The most disconcerting ones are the serials - those born looking like one sex, then changing to look like the other from natural causes. 5ARD and 17BHD deficiency are the most common causes, though there are others.

...there are two papers on the subject:

Zhou J.-N, Hofman M.A, Gooren L.J, Swaab D.F (1997)

A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality.

Kruijver F.P.M, Zhou J.-N, Pool C.W., Swaab D.F. (2000)

Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus

Male and Female brains differ, both on the coarse scale (BSTc layer of the hypothalamus) and fine scale (number of neurons - brain cells - in each structure). Autopsies on transsexual women, that is, women with mostly male bodies, have shown they have female pattern brains.

Note that gay men have male pattern brains though.

From ArzteZeitung this year, detailing studies using fMRT - "brain scans" of living people:

"Radiologists can now confirm what transsexuals report - that they feel “trapped in the wrong body” - on the basis of the activation of the brain when presented with erotic stimuli. There is obviously a biological correlation with the subjective feelings."

So to say that a transsexual woman is "male" is at best a half-truth. The visible parts are. The parts that determine her personality, her gender (since we know that neither chromosomes nor external appearance is reliable), are female.

Some other facts, not in the article.

The median income of Trans people in the USA is $15000

The TS fulltime employment rate in California is 25%

70% report having experienced significant job discrimination

50% have been fired at least once for being TS

With the single exception of NJ, where TS-inclusive legislation was passed 10 years after the GLB-version, every T-inclusive act was passed as part of GLBT legislation. Wisconsin has had GLB only legislation for 22 years. The T-exclusive NY SONDA legislation overturned existing caselaw that provided limited protection for GLBTs, in favour of better protection for GLB only. TS people lost existing rights. There is still no sign that TS people in NY will ever be included: their bill still lacks a sponsor 5 years later. In the meantime, several other states have passed GLBT bills, starting from a worse initial position.

NJ is a special case: the judiciary ruled that an act intended to be GLB only was worded sufficiently ambiguously so as to include GLBTs. The legislature confirmed this, but only after 10 years had passed. No other state where GLB only legislation was enacted has made it GLBT - the historical record shows that throwing under the bus is permanent.

I'm a registered nurse, gay male, and have for years questioned the omni-inclusional addition of "Letters" to the LGB appelation. Psychiatric reasons for feeling your in the wrong body seem to me to be an entirely seperate concern to those of us who are certain of who we are and how we got here.

Perhaps you should study the area before commenting from authority, but no-one can keep up with every development in medicine. I recommend "The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality" as a good primer for a medical professional not specialising in the area.

But this "transgendered" stuff is nonsense. A man can be mutilated into looking like a woman and vice versa, but there's still that pesky xx/xy chromosome stuff to deal with. You've either got testes and a prostate, or you've got ovaries and a uterus. You can't change sexes like you can religion. Maybe medical science will one day figure out a way to make a human look like a giraffe. But that person will only *look* like a giraffe.

The "transgendered" are as clinically insane as somebody in the 21st century claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte.

A good friend of mine is 90% xx, 10% xy. But he's a guy. Another is a woman, she has 47xxy chromosomes, breasts, and more M than F genitalia. Some have ovotestes, a gland neither one or the other. Or one of each.

Your Ignorance is excusable though, not many people know this stuff. But blame Reality for being insane, not the people suffering from these congenital conditions. They just get persecuted and called insane by bigots and the ignorant. Some do develop insanity as the result of the constant persecution of course.

So what's really going on here? What nobody seems willing to come out and state is the underlying presumption that "the gays" will dump "the trannies" and go their separate way as soon as they get their version of ENDA passed. This is the real reason for the objection to Barney Frank's maneuver.

Why are the Ts so insecure about this? Surely it's not a rational concern..

Given the historical record, and the many comments on this forum about how GLBT should be GLB, the concern is all too rational. It's happened every other time, this is not new.

Now a disclaimer: I'm Australian, and won't be affected either way. I'm also technically Intersexed, one of the weird "serials", though I identify more as TS. That my transition was mostly from natural causes is just a minor detail.