Why is it so important to undergo surgery ?

To answer your title question, people have sex reassignment surgery because
their sexual identity (not sexuality) includes a sense of what are appropriate
primary and secondary sexual characteristics for themselves. Those that seek
medical/surgical relief generally have gotten to a point in their lives where
they can no longer make any pretense of comfort with their genitals.

You're obviously straight, and most likely a straight male, but from what
you've written you're not at all open-minded. In fact from what you've written
I'd assume you're heavily influenced by an orthodox religious background.

You make one bad assumption after another in your posting. The following are
facts:
99.999% of the people in this world have no idea what the makeup of their DNA
is, including the 23 chromosome pair (which may not be a pair at all). Certainly
gestational hormone exposure is as important if not more important to eventual
sex assignment than DNA.

99.5% of all people are assigned male or female at birth based on a cursory
visual examination of their external genitalia. (one in 200 births involve some
form of ambiguous genitalia (intersex condition).
http://www.healthline.com/galecontent/genitalia-ambiguous

Sexual identity may be hard wired in a person's DNA but as of yet no one can
prove that a factual statement--and there are a large number of folks that have
suffered from transsexualism that speak to the fact that a person's sexual
identity does not necessarily correspond to the sex they are assigned at birth.
A conservative estimate is that 1 in 2000 males in the US will seek sex
reassignment: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html

A woman doesn't need reproductive organs (ovaries and womb) to be a female. (Do
women that have hysterectomies cease to be women?)

Actually a gynecologist may not necessarily be able to easily tell the
difference between a woman with high quality vaginaplasty and a woman that has
undergone a complete hysterectomy:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/hysterectomy/HQ00905
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/SRSlink.html

Many people may have been exclusively heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual
or asexual prior to SRS most often but not always feel attracted to the same
sex after. Post SRS, for people that transition from male to female, about
1/3 are exclusively attracted to males, 1/3 exlusively to females and another
1/3 bisexual or asexual.

Open minded people do not make assumptions based on prejudices masquerading as
religious dogma.

I ride the tempest, tame the waves...I will not resign myself to the usual lot of women

So gyuuyl if a blind person has a cornea transplant are they still blind. (I know this is a little bit of a far reach from a sex change)

First off, thanks for asking politely! So many people get so mean when they don't understand something.

There is a simple answer to this question. I'm assuming you are a male (sorry if I am wrong). Imagine growing up your whole life feeling like a male. However, you didn't have a penis and eventually you started growing breasts. Although it's only cosmetic, SRS (Sexual reassignment surgury) makes you as close as possible to how you feel inside, on the outside.

In Brie's case, she has always felt like a women on the inside, but having a penis was a constant reminder that she was in the wrong body. There have been cases of male to female transexual children attempting to cut their penis off because of how disgusted they are by it.

Transexuals already feel like their ideal gender on the inside, surgery completed the transformation on the outside.

I am a straight female and about as heterosexual as you can get but I'm guessing it has to do with sex.

Bree identifies as a straight woman attracted to men and cannot be with straight men and have sex with them as a woman unless she has female sexual organs.

She can't have somewhat normal relationships unless she has the surgery.

Also, she just plain identifies as a woman. Doesn't want a penis and testicles anymore than I would.

stopjohnofgod.blogspot.com

stopsylvia.com

Most folk who aren't trans have a hard time understanding the motivations around both gender transition and sex reassignment surgery. And it's not some straight guys who have this problem, some feminists get it wrong too. In fact, more often or not, not having such an understanding, such folk tend to make any number of unsupported assumptions, and those assumptions say more about that person than they do about trans people, gender transition or surgery.

The desire to be the gender that a trans person believes themselves to be is really in two different parts - a social and a physical part. The social tends to relate to how they fit into society and relate to other people. The physical is all about body image and the difference between what is initially present and what "ought" to be there. While these two are connected, they're not the same. This is why some transgender people transition but don't have the surgery, and others do.

As to "why couldn't he accept his male body and "just" be gay if that's how he felt?", well where in the film does the main character say or express that they feel 'gay'? Being gay is a way of being a man, and she didn't identify as a man, did she? So what we have here is you definition of what gay is, which is presumably a) male and b) not straight. But where did you get this from - from personal contact/experience, or is it just some assumption that's never been questioned?

When you say 'man' and 'woman', you probably mean 'male' and 'female' and there is a difference. Man and Woman are social roles that we assume males and females will assume, just as we assume that someone is male/female from their appearance and behaviour. But this is where it all falls down. There aren't just male and female only - there is a range of inter-sexed conditions as well, and some of those conditions can't be immediately diagnosed or noticed at birth (and the obvious ones tend to be minimised by corrective surgery). Thing is, that both male and female templates (XY and XX chromosomes) aren't "opposites" but cut from the same source - it's only after a certain number of weeks in the womb that sex differences become apparent.

So when you say "no surgery can turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man" you are entirely correct. Rather, Bree's already done this by changing her appearance and how she relates in society. As far as reproductive ability goes, Bree's no longer directly able to reproduce. Then again, this applies to so many others in society as well, who either due to medical reasons (infertility etc) or social reasons (prison, celibacy etc) can't or don't reproduce. Does that make them any less men or women?

Laura S

You may think you';re open-minded and not judging hon, but you're very wrong.

1) A GOOD srs result CAN fool a gynecologist unless a deep exam is given.

2) Sexual identity isn't physical, it's emotional and psychological. Bree was a woman inside, and wanted her body to match as closely as possible. No strs doesn't give ovaries or a uterus, but it DOES make the body look right, and feel more real to the afflicted person.

3) See 2, identity is psychological, so if Bree feels like a woman, why would she want to just live as a gay man? You're confusing identity with preference. Who you are inside, man or woman, has absolutely nothing to do with who you want to shag.

So SHE couldn't accept the male body and be gay because SHE wasn't a gay man, nor a man period. It's more than cosmetic surgery, it's corrective surgery.

"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain, and most fools do." - Benjamin Franklin.

This maybe beating a dead horse. Though I haven't seen anything recent referenced in this. While Purrrple I agree with much of what you said there needs to be a break on the thought that it isn't physical.

First...this needs to be broken down on a level of society. With the invention of religion (I know that's going to be offensive to some...and I am actually sincerely apologetic for it) we created a system in which we are uncomfortable with saying "You know I don't really know...but I've looked at the information and I just think it's inconclusive as of yet." Meaning as a society when we look at something and don't really have an actual answer for it...we tend to simply come up with something or follow popular thought on the topic.

Secondly...transgender study dates back to the early 1900s...an Austrian philosopher, Otto Weiniger, published a book in 1903 "Sex and Character." This book as even recently been referred to as "the philosophical best seller of the century" and has had influence on Franz Kafka, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and many others.

In 1989 a book was published named "Brain Sex" which used a scientific process to study gender. It's an interesting read...and quite short. Though much of the information today is out of date. There is a similarity here that supports Weiniger's theory on gender. That gender itself is not black and white. Rather gender is a sliding scale in humanity. The book hypothesized there were at least 12 different human genders. Think of gender not so much as a set of naughty bits, but rather a sliding scale between masculine and feminine.

On chromosomes. The thought that XX and XY determine indefinitely the sex (meaning the naughty bits) of a person...is a sophomoric thought. There's plenty of people with the incorrect set out there walking around with the other body parts.

More and more these days we get links to genes actually being a causation. Like this 2008 article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7689007.stm

Now that being said. Gender is separated from sex. Sex is merely considered a physical state these days...not as influential on ones person as it used to be thought. With gender being considered so variant...it comes to a common sense conclusion that some people would feel they are born with the wrong bits and want to change their physical representation to match their mental representation. Why is it such a hard concept for people to grasp that someone could simply be born the wrong sex? Birth defects happen on a daily basis...12 fingers...a tail...really is it that far of a stretch?

Oh and by the by. The first uterus transplant took place in 2002 in Saudi Arabia. It functioned properly for 99 days and then had to be removed. There's currently a hospital in New York planning to offer the transplant surgery.

I feel sorry for them that they suffer from gender dysphoria and have serious mental issues. But they just need to accept there's nothing they can do about it and accept their body. At least they can be a gay man that goes around in drag, if they chop it off no one will want them, not gay men nor normal men. Best just to accept it and keep the piece and go wandering around the outback wearing female Brazilian Carnival outfits or dressing like Lady Gaga. Mutilating themselves with plastic surgery is even worse than what Michael Jackson did to himself.