CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi has urged prime minister Manmohan Singh to ensure that the transgender community is also enumerated in the Census 2011.

Describing the massive exercise as a milestone since the first ever National Population Registry was going to be prepared, Karunanidhi, in a letter to the prime minister on Saturday, sought that necessary provision be made in the census format to enumerate trangenders. “There are a number of persons in the country, who are called transgenders. I suggest that they may also be enumerated and necessary provision may be made in the format,” he said.

The move is seen as yet another initiative of the state government to draw transgenders into the social mainstream. Tamil Nadu has taken several pioneering initiatives for the welfare of this community in recent months. Tamil Nadu was the first state to form a welfare board for transgenders in 2008, headed by the social welfare minister. The state government also issued separate ration cards to transgenders. Tamil Nadu government also added the option of third gender in the application forms of state-run schools and colleges for unhindered admission of transsexuals in educational institutions.

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France has become the first country in the world to remove transsexualism from its list of recognised mental illnesses.

The decision was announced by France’s Minister of Health, Roselyne Bachelot, on the eve of last year’s International Day Against Homophobia, but did not come into effect until last month.

Bachelot made the announcement parallel to the launch of a campaign petitioning the World Health Organisation to do the same. The campaign was endorsed by some of the country’s leading minds who put their names to a letter published in French newspapers.

In France, hormone treatments and gender reassignment surgery are funded by the state.

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We, the undersigned, support the members of the Organisation Intersex International, in their demands that:

• The International Olympic Committee (IOC) reject demands that female athletes with intersex variations have their variations diagnosed and treated.

• The IOC allow the above mentioned athletes, known as intersex women, to compete as females without having to undergo diagnosis or  “treatment.”

• The IOC, its press, and medical practitioners refer to females with intersex variations as “women with intersex variations” and not “women with disorders of sex development.”

People with atypical internal and/or external sex anatomy are commonly and historically known as “intersex men” or “intersex women.” OII is the largest intersex organisation in the world, with over three thousand members on all continents except Antarctica, and all our members reject the term “disorders of sex development” which the IOC is using to describe us.  This term pathologizes our differences, which none of our other labels throughout history has done, and was imposed on us in 2006 by a group consisting primarily of physicians, without taking our views into account.

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Iran’s military will no longer classify transgender people as “mentally disturbed,” said Hasan Mousavi Chelk, who heads the Socially Vulnerable Groups section of the State Agency for National Well-Being.

Chelk said Jan. 6 that putting such a determination on transgender people’s military discharge papers creates problems for them.

From now on, transgender people being separated from the military will be labeled as “diabetics” or “people with a hormonal imbalance,” he said.

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Dumic M, Lin-Su K, Leibel NI, Ciglar S, Vinci G, Lasan R, Nimkarn S, Wilson JD, McElreavey K, New MI.
Department of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes, University Hospital Rebro, Zagreb, Croatia 41000.

Erratum in: J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2008 Mar;93(3):1083.

CONTEXT: We report herein a remarkable family in which the mother of a woman with 46,XY complete gonadal dysgenesis was found to have a 46,XY karyotype in peripheral lymphocytes, mosaicism in cultured skin fibroblasts (80% 46,XY and 20% 45,X) and a predominantly 46,XY karyotype in the ovary (93% 46,XY and 6% 45,X).

PATIENTS: A 46,XY mother who developed as a normal woman underwent spontaneous puberty, reached menarche, menstruated regularly, experienced two unassisted pregnancies, and gave birth to a 46,XY daughter with complete gonadal dysgenesis.

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MANAMA, Oct 31, 2009 (IPS) - Transsexuals in the Gulf call Bahraini lawyer Fawziya Janahi “guardian angel”. She is the Arab world’s only female lawyer who takes up cases on behalf of clients who want to change their sex.

Janahi’s clients want legal permission to undergo sex change operations. While the law is quite straightforward on this in Bahrain, the lawyer says it is more difficult in other countries in the region.

“But that wouldn’t stop me from helping transgendered trapped in their bodies,” she says. “I’m ready to challenge the odds!”

Janahi, 47, spoke with IPS about her unusual practice, her future and hopes of greater acceptance of transgendered/transsexuals in Gulf societies. Excerpts from the interview.

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A campaign that aims to end the classification of transsexuals as individuals who suffer an ‘illness’ as well as educating the general population that sexual diversity not limited to the male and female genre was launched in Lisbon this week. Identical events were held simultaneously in 38 cities in Europe, Latin America, the USA and Asia, to promote the Stop Trans Pathologisation 2012 movement that has been organized by more than 180 international associations.

Transsexualism is a condition in which an individual identifies with a physical sex different from the one they were born with. A medical diagnosis can be made if a person experiences discomfort as a result of a desire to be a member of the opposite sex, or if a person experiences impaired functioning or distress as a result of that gender identification. “The aim is to demand an end to the classification of non-conforming gender identities, like transsexual and intersexual [hermaphrodites] individuals, as mentally ill on reference documents belonging to the World Health Organisation’s American Association of Psychiatry (AAP), which will be reviewed in 2012 and 2014”, said Sérgio Vitorino of Portugal’s Pink Panther Association, which is promoting the event in this country.

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For fifteen years, Fatima Abed Rabbo lived as a girl in Jabalya, Gaza. She wore girl’s clothing, and went to an all-girl’s school.
But shortly after turning 12, Fatima, now renamed Odai, recalls undergoing changes.
“I was normal. I used to be a girl and my name was Fatima. Before my father found out and the doctors checked me, I felt like a girl. But after I turned 12 years old, I began feeling more like a boy than a girl,” Odai Abed Rabbo told Reuters Television.
Majd Abed Rabbo, Odai’s father, said that following several medical tests, a hormonal imbalance was detected in Odai. The results showed that Odai had high levels of testosterone and needed a sex-change operation.
He is not the only transgendered person in his family. Odai’s cousin was once a female named, “Ola”. Now he is a male named, “Nader”.

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Baba T, Endo T, Honnma H, Kitajima Y, Hayashi T, Ikeda H, Masumori N, Kamiya H, Moriwaka O, Saito T.

Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Sapporo Medical University, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. tbaba@sapmed.ac.jp

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study is to understand the relationship between polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), altered hormonal characteristics and insulin resistance in female-to-male (FTM) transsexual patients. METHODS: We studied 69 Japanese FTM cases, aged 17-47 years, who were seen in the Gender Identity Disorder Clinic of Sapporo Medical University Hospital between December 2003 and May 2006. The subjects had never received hormonal treatment or sex re-assignment surgery. Prior to treatment, they received physical examinations entailing measurement of anthropometric, metabolic and endocrine parameters, after which we compared the values obtained according to the presence or absence of PCOS and/or obesity. Insulin resistance was determined using the homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR).

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Garcia-Falgueras A, Swaab DF.

Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Transsexuality is an individual’s unshakable conviction of belonging to the opposite sex, resulting in a request for sex-reassignment surgery. We have shown previously that the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) is female in size and neuron number in male-to-female transsexual people. In the present study we investigated the hypothalamic uncinate nucleus, which is composed of two subnuclei, namely interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH) 3 and 4. Post-mortem brain material was used from 42 subjects: 14 control males, 11 control females, 11 male-to-female transsexual people, 1 female-to-male transsexual subject and 5 non-transsexual subjects who were castrated because of prostate cancer. To identify and delineate the nuclei and determine their volume and shape we used three different stainings throughout the nuclei in every 15th section, i.e. thionin, neuropeptide Y and synaptophysin, using an image analysis system.

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