US: Chaz Bono Gives Voice To An Often 'Invisible' Community

[ftmichael]

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=7827428&page=1

Chaz Bono Gives Voice To An Often 'Invisible' Community
Trans Activists Say Chaz Bono Could Be Rare Face for Transgender Issues
By LAUREN COX and RADHA CHITALE
ABC News Medical Unit
June 13, 2009

Transgender men fighting for legal protections say Thursday's announcement by Chastity Bono, child of Cher and the late Sonny Bono, that she will be transitioning from female to a male as Chaz Bono is a welcome break from an all too common "invisible" paradox.

For reasons that are part biology and part society, transgender men say in some ways they have an easier time being accepted and recognized as masculine than transgender women have being perceived as feminine.

Yet at the same time, there has been a virtual black hole in public awareness of female-to-male transgender people.
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US: Chaz, 'Good luck, brother!'

[ftmichael]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/06/12/chastity.bono/index.html

Commentary: Chastity, 'Good luck, brother!'
By Jamison Green
Special to CNN

Jamison Green is an educator, adviser and advocate on transgender issues, and the author of "Becoming a Visible Man" (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).

Welcome, Chaz!

Before the word "transsexual" had been coined in English, an intrepid young person whose family belonged to the British nobility set out to transform herself from female to male. He received a medical school education, obtained hormones -- relatively new substances that were poorly understood at the time -- and independently began living as a man in the early 1940s.

Eventually, he found a plastic surgeon to help him, and his physical changes were complete by 1949, but his family rejected him. The British tabloids hounded him. To escape publicity, he was forced to carve out a life for himself virtually alone. He became a Buddhist monk, and died in Tibet in 1962 at the age of 47.

His name was Michael Dillon, and he one of the Western world's first transsexual people, that is, someone who changes sex and/or gender by medical means. His extensive writings were suppressed and destroyed by his family -- only fragments survive.
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