Further Clarifications Surrounding My Gender Identity

While I initially suspected that my gender identity may have played a role in my mistreatment by the officer(s) in question due to the tone I was receiving from them around it, this is a difficult thing to argue in the absence of clear evidence. I am somewhat baffled by the continuation of this tone throughout the continuing investigation, to the point that the consistency really seems incriminating.

I have stated repeatedly that I am openly transgendered, and it has simply fallen upon deaf ears; even after repeated corrections, the review letter from the oiprd still uses masculine pronouns. This is something that I haven’t experienced from any other institution or body, in two cities in Ontario or in the state of Michigan. I initially began hormone therapy in 2002, so I actually have a lot of experience dealing with a wide sector of society; nobody else has insisted on misgendering after being corrected, not even christian laity, which at least have the decency to show respect for a stated preference, even if they believe in something else. This singular insistence by the various branches of the ontario police seems to be reflective of a regressive culture around queer identity that needs some kind of serious exposure; there is clearly something happening in the force, here, that isn’t happening anywhere else in society.

I am consequently in the position where I feel as though I need to prove that I am transgendered, which is rather unbecoming of a process such as this at such a late stage in history. I feel like we’ve been thrust backwards several decades...

So, what does it mean to be “openly transgendered”? As gender is fluid rather than rigid, and the science around it is still largely speculative, there is a great deal of impreciseness regarding the concept of gender identity. When I say that I am “openly transgendered”, what I mean to say is that I am both fully female identifying and presenting and yet not interested in hiding my birth sex - if forced to specify on a form, I would prefer to choose neither M nor F but T. So, I am transgendered, and I want you to know that; I don’t want to mislead you into thinking I have female genitalia, because I don’t.

That said, a transgendered person is a person that actively lives the life and identity of the gender nominally associated with the sex they were not born into. A transgendered person is not a crossdresser or drag queen, and is not a person with a sexual fetish for the opposite gender role - there is an active concept of living attached to it. Nor has any of this been considered a mental illness by western science at any point in my own conscious lifetime, which is a point I will get back to shortly.

A transgendered person undergoes a process called transition that arguably never truly ends but takes anywhere from two to five years to become convincing or “passable”. The central and most important part of this process is the replacement of testosterone with estrogen in the transgendered person’s body (if they are transitioning from male to female; it is the opposite replacement if the transition is the other way around), which both changes their physical and emotional states through the alteration of their body chemistry. If “male” and “female” have meaningful, scientific definitions, it has to do with the dominance of testosterone and estrogen as chemical regulators, rather than any precursor to it (such as chromosomal instructions) or any consequence of it (such as physical sex characteristics). So, if an individual has a body chemistry that is dominated by estrogen, they can be said to be “female”, and if they have a body chemistry dominated by testosterone they can be said to be “male”. Whatever else you’ve heard, that is the actual science of it - it’s all about dominant hormones. Transition may or may not also include plastic surgery, eventually leading up to an operation where one physical genitalia is converted into the other one.

I began my gender transition in March of 2002, and placed it in a paused state from late 2002 to mid 2010. During the pause, I experimented with natural sources of estrogen and testosterone suppression outside of the supervision of a medical professional. The cause of this pause was primarily financial. Since mid-2010, I have been on a medically supervised regimen of estrogen replacement, testosterone suppression and supplemental progesterone. Yearly blood tests since 2014 have consistently confirmed a near zero level of testosterone and levels of estrogen that are actually on the upper spectrum of normal female variability. I currently take 6 mg of estrogen a day, orally; this is roughly the same amount of estrogen as exists in an entire package of birth control pills.

Chemically and hormonally speaking, I am indiscernible from a biological female.

Such a consistent dosage of estrogen has also led to substantive breast growth. I am around a B or C cup; it comes up and down.

I am roughly 5’ 8” and 130 pounds, and of a slender but fit build.

I have not undergone any plastic surgery, be it sexual reassignment or otherwise. The requirements for sexual reassignment in Ontario are expensive and onerous, to the point that I’ve mostly decided against it; I just don’t want to spend my remaining years in and out of hospitals, or travelling between cities. There are years long wait lists and a coerced requirement to relocate to Toronto; it’s really a broken and badly underfunded system that needs to be drastically rethought and radically decentralized. If the process were easier, I would have already had it done by now. At this point I have not been sexually active for many years, and do not expect I would become sexually active again after surgery, so it strikes me as a large waste of time. However, I have made some active attempts to have my testicles removed in order to reduce my dose of testosterone suppressors, in order to alleviate stress on my liver. While I would undergo an orchiectomy immediately if I could, I have been unable to find a doctor willing to perform this procedure in Windsor. I feel that this reflects poorly on the local specialists, as it is putting continuing strain on my liver that could be easily relieved by a routine surgical procedure; it is really against their hippocratic oath to deny this request, in this context, and appeals to religious faith are really beyond lacking but rather specious. Yet, the truth is as it is - I cannot have the procedure performed if nobody is willing to do it and have not had the time to pursue the option further. I mention it only to point out that some effort towards surgery has been made on my behalf, even if full reassignment is too much of a bureaucratic mess for me to seriously contemplate.

As I wasn’t given the opportunity to freshen myself up before I got arrested, and I was living in a disgusting situation that was terrible for both my skin and my hair, the mug shot that exists of me is rather unflattering. I am consequently attaching the following picture of me, taken in mid-2017.

While everybody looks nicer in makeup, that is much closer to what I actually look like and present myself as on a daily basis - openly transgendered, but fully female identifying and fully female presenting as well.

While I haven’t previously presented this kind of argument - and, in 17 years, no other institution in any other sector of society has ever required that I do so -  I have made the point clearly enough, to no apparent response. Why is that, exactly? I actually think that answering this question will get to the root of the mistreatment I received, as I appear to have been essentially treated as a potential sex offender. Worse, the tone of the department seems to be upholding the premise of discrimination on this basis as something that is in the public interest, and this really needs to be corrected and reversed.

If I were to answer the question of “why are they doing this?” precisely, it seems to be that they think their case relies on it. That is, they seem to think that relenting on the point and acknowledging my identity as clearly female by any empirical criteria will act as an admission of guilt to the question of discrimination. Instead, they’re aggressively asserting my identity as masculine, to justify the arrest. Yet, this is exactly the point I’m trying to draw attention to - it is a literal statement of discrimination in policing. The argument - and this is never stated explicitly, but is ever so more clearly between the lines as things unfold - is that the reason I was potentially a threat to this woman was that I was a male presenting myself in a female identity, that is that my transgendered identity was just a front for some kind of latent male criminality, which is just a statement of discrimination directed at trans people. There was absolutely no evidence of any intent to pose any harm to this woman, and absolutely no evidence of any criminality in my past, but there does appear to have been a lot of suspicion around my gender identity being some kind of trojan horse attack method. The justice seems to have instantly recognized this, as it is the first thing she mentioned at my release hearing. Not having much experience at being arrested over trivialities, it took me some time to realize the depth of this intuition. If i were to answer the question of “why were you arrested?” today, i would have to provide the answer “i was arrested for being queer”.

So, it seems like the more I draw attention to the discrimination underlying the arrest, the more the police want to assert my identity as male in order to justify it; all i’m getting in return to my claims of discrimination is more discrimination, to try and justify the already existing discrimination. So, there is apparently a fundamental lack of understanding here. This really speaks to more than corruption, but points to a culture in the force that needs adjustment.

The last thing that I want to point out, and this may not be distinct from the broader narrative, is that I dispute an aspect of the report. I haven’t really had the opportunity to bring this up yet, but I guess I need to, now. It says in the report that I preferred to be patted down or searched by a male officer. In fact, what I stated was that I didn’t have a preference as to how I would be sexually assaulted by the officers, and in context it’s hard to describe the situation using different language. Further, I was in fact patted down and searched by a female officer, not a male one, indicating that I was in fact identified as female by the people involved in the arrest. While occam’s razor initially suggested to me that this was glossed over by the officers due to laziness, I now suspect it may have been a part of the overall insistence on presenting me as male to justify the arrest and advance the case.

I would appreciate it if further communications with me would address this issue accordingly by gendering me properly. Further, after so clear a clarification as this, which i repeat has been unnecessary in any other context, the court that will no doubt eventually receive this case ought to have little recourse but to view any further correspondence from the police that genders me incorrectly as confirmation of a continuing process of discriminatory treatment. This is baffling enough, to me, as it is.