The New Adventures of Old Christine

LA Times male sportswriter Mike Penner announces his transexuality: "“Today I leave for a few weeks' vacation, and when I return, I will come back in yet another incarnation. As Christine.”

I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words. I realize many readers and colleagues and friends will be shocked to read them.

For more years than I care to count, I was scared to death over the prospect of writing a story such as this one. It was the most frightening of all the towering mountains of fear I somehow had to confront and struggle to scale.

Transsexualism is a complicated and widely misunderstood medical condition.

How do you go about sharing your most important truth, one you spent a lifetime trying to keep deeply buried, to a world that has grown familiar and comfortable with your façade?

To a world whose knowledge of transsexuals usually begins and ends with Jerry Springer's exploitation circus?

This last sentence really puts the nail in the head. The only thing people see on TV about transexuals are the "freaks" and the crazies. Hardly the majority I would argue. There are no documentaries, no 60 minute special educating people about a population of people who DO exist. We were lucky just to get TransAmerica recently. Still though, one movie can not reverse the severity of the discrimination and oppression this population faces because deep down people view transexuals in sub-human contexts.

And I am still concerned about why the DSM lists transexualism, AKA gender identity, a mental issue. The DSM lists mental illnesses and I completely disgaree that this in any way is an illness. Funny, but heterosexualism is not an illness. Could it be because the assess who decided these illnesses are basing their beliefs from the viewpoint that heterosexualism is the "normal" and "healthy" standard?

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