After the transition

After+the+transition+

Jessica Janiuk, a self-declared nerd and a male to female transsexual, shared her experiences transitioning while at UW-Eau Claire.

She shared her experiences transitioning in a presentation titled “Recipe for a Vagina.”

Janiuk’s presentation was part of Trans*Mission week, which took place from Nov. 11 to 14 and included a mix of local and national acts.

“I wanted to make it diverse, I wanted to have both performers or presenters that had both national recognition, but also had local recognition,” said Christopher Jorgenson, the UW-Eau Claire Women’s and LGBTQ Resource Center Coordinator. “Harvey gives the national appeal and Jessica, being a former student at UW-Eau Claire, has that direct connection because she hasn’t graduated so long ago that students still can’t see themselves in her.”

“Trans* seeks to be inclusive to all identities that exist in the trans community beyond a cisgender identity.

Jorgenson presented on the difference between sex and gender because he says people often use the terms interchangeably.

“It provides the foundation of the difference between sex and gender,” Jorgenson said. “If you don’t know what gender is then you don’t know what transgender is, and the vast majority of people conflate the two terms.”

According to the Williams Institute, a national think tank at UCLA law, in 2011 there were nearly 700,000 transgender individuals in the United States.

“From the week people will take away a better understanding of what it means to be trans, at least from a couple different viewpoints,” Jorgenson said. “Which I think is an improvement because I think the T in LGBTQ is the least known about identity spectrum.”

At the start of her presentation Janiuk set some ground rules to encourage a safe space. She then introduced some terms that fall under the trans* umbrella, such as cross-dresser, agendered and No-Op-No-Ho.

According to the Gender Equity Resource Center a cross-dresser is a person who likes to wear the clothes of another gender; Agendered means a person who is internally ungendered or does not have a felt sense of gender identity; No-Op-No-Ho stands for no operation, no hormones; Transsexual, which Janiuk identifies with, is defined as someone who identifies so strongly with the gender different than the one they were assigned at birth that they seek out physical change through surgery or hormones. Cisgender, which is someone who identifies with the biology that they were born with, was also introduced.

In August 2004, Janiuk underwent sex reassignment surgery, which is sometimes called gender confirmation surgery, a breast augmentation, and a trachea shave. Due to hormones making “all that stuff grow,” not all trans women need a breast augmentation. Janiuk chose to undergo the procedure because she said she got her father’s side of the “booby genes” and wanted to fit in better with her mother’s side of the family. A trachea shave is a procedure in which the cartilage of the Adam’s apple is shaved down to achieve a smoother, more feminine appearance. The package deal cost her $27,500.

Eligibility for surgery is not a given. According to the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care, a potential candidate for surgery must undergo 12 months of continuous hormonal therapy and also complete 12 months of continuous, full-time, real-life experience.

The University of Minnesota helped create the Standards of Care, which meant that as a patient there, Janiuk had to jump through a lot of hoops. To be approved for hormones, she was involved in group therapy sessions with those close to her to show that she had a support system. She then had to go in front of a board of doctors that gave her the “yay or nay.” She was given the “yay” and began taking hormones in the spring of 2003.

“At one point they had me on something like 10 times the average estrogen of a female my age, and at that period and time you would not want to get on my bad side,” Janiuk said.

UW-Eau Claire professor Audrey Fessler first instructed Janiuk in her writing for transfer students course. Matthew Janiuk was the name on her roster, but Janiuk knew that she did not identify as male. Part way through the semester Janiuk confided in Fessler, and she became a listening ear for Janiuk.

“I remember Jess’s ambivalence about needing, in essence, to be diagnosed as having what psychologists regard as a mental illness, gender dysphoric disorder, in order to qualify and her delight that she qualified but her concern at that status,” Fessler said.

Janiuk was diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, which is a mental disorder that includes individuals whose gender at birth is contrary to the one that they identify with.

While at UW-Eau Claire, Janiuk played an active role in educating others about trans issues. She spoke in several of Fessler’s women’s studies classes, eventually taking a class herself.

Being a transgender woman and also a lesbian, Janiuk had to choose when she wanted to disclose her life and her past experiences.

“My understanding is that (coming out) is never a finished process because with every new person you meet and every new social situation in which you find yourself, you always have those decisions to make all over again,” Fessler said. “’Is this context important enough for me to put the effort and energy in and take those risks or not?’”

UW-Eau Claire student Tabitha Moran attended The Athens Boys Choir performance on Nov. 11 and Janiuk’s presentation.

Moran was intrigued by the requirement that Janiuk had to be diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder in order to be eligible for hormone treatment. Having feelings that don’t fit the norm has become a medical condition rather than a normal human experience, Moran said.

“She had to prove she was who she thought she was,” Moran said.

Since Janiuk declared the presentation a safe space at the beginning, there was a time for open and honest questions.

“She made it feel safe for people to ask questions that they wouldn’t normally feel comfortable asking, and I think that is important because I know I had a lot of questions about what it was like for her,” Moran said. “I’m glad that it was a space where we could explore those questions. We are conditioned to think that its inappropriate to ask people questions about their gender and feeling that you are not being socially inappropriate is good.”

Moran said she was impressed with the turnout for Janiuk’s presentation. The main goal of Trans*Mission week was to both educate people on the trans community and also to celebrate the community and she thinks it achieved that mission.

“I think like most things when you don’t know anything about a community, you tend to generalize, you tend to foster an us versus them mentality, whereas with Jessica if you see someone who could have been, and was a Blugold classmate,” Jorgenson said. “You can give all the definitions you want, you can read all the theory, but to me what really makes the biggest difference is one person talking to another.”