Excerpt from "True Selves"
The Transsexual Dilemma

What would you do if your daughter came to visit one day and confided her deepest, darkest secret: “All my life, I’ve felt like I was a boy instead of a girl.”

Or imagine your reaction if your best friend, a twice-married ex-football player, announced over lunch one afternoon: “I have something to tell you. I’m planning to have sex reassignment surgery to become a woman.”

And how would you respond if someone you had worked with for several years sent the following memo to everyone in the company: “Dear friends and colleagues:… This is to let you know that I am a transsexual.”

When transsexuals summon up the courage and reveal their secret, most people are shocked by the revelation. Typically, they are caught off-guard and don’t know how to react or what to say. The news is especially hard for family members and close friends to accept - they are usually profoundly confused and distressed when they find out, or may even get angry. Someone they care about and think they know intimately has dramatically changed, or so it seems. The old rules no longer apply. Long established expectations and patters of relating are challenged. Often they feel that their trust in the transsexual has been threatened, and the whole relationship may be view differently. “How could something like this happy all of a sudden?” they are likely to ask.

… Transsexualism is a complex and confusing phenomenon. Frequently, the general public’s perception of transsexualism comes from movies or talk shows and contains only fragments of truth. People may harbour the false notion that transsexualism is a mental illness or a sexual perversion. Or they may confuse transsexuals with homosexuals, lesbians, transvestites, drag queens, she-males, female impersonators, and gender benders, even though there are significant differences among them.

Sometimes, even therapists and counsellors may not have a clear understanding of the transsexual condition, especially if they have never had a transsexual patient. They may be uncertain of the best way to offer professional guidance.