topcon: The point is, the law isn't really clear, is it? Do you have to "officially" be labeled a woman by a psychiatrist? Or is it enough just to claim you've been living as a woman for ten years or something?

No, the point is there are people who see a penis and freak out and then there are the ones who say you are what you are born with and that's immutable, despite the we

It is perfectly reasonable for the school (or gym or whatever) to require some kind of documentation of being legally female (like a birth certificate or driver's license) or at least medical documentation (a letter from an M.D.). Just saying it? Yeah, that could be a recipe for jokers like the guys in this thread. To get some paperwork backing up that claim is a long and difficult process though. 

Yeah, I had one friend in college who was a male-to-female transsexual, and I saw what she went through.

By the same token, I had another friend (well, acquaintance, was more of a friend-of-a-friend) who was nowhere near as serious about it all. He had his friends call him by a female version of his name, and changed his name on facebook to be that female version. He'd go out dressed up as a woman occasionally, but still went to work as a man. He'd insist he wasn't just a transvestite and he had actual gender identity issues, but he refused to see a therapist for treatment or actually go through normal channels to transition. He even met my MtF friend, and she offered him the name of her therapist and endocrinologist and psychiatrist, but he brushed it off.

The biggest thing he was shut down for was that he had a couple of friends who worked for a womens residential drug treatment facility. For obvious reasons, they wanted female staffers watching the female clients. He applied there for a job. His friends had told the director that he was transgender and it shouldn't be a problem.

Apparently he wasn't female enough. I don't know the details of the interview, but he was apparently told that while they are an open-minded place and wouldn't have problems with a transgendered female employee, he was nowhere near close enough to count. Probably his lack of legal substantiating documents, lack of any evidence he lived as a woman full-time, or was anything other than a guy with a few gender issues who needed a job. He tried to spin it to us about how ignorant and narrow minded the director was. Of course, the fact she was a Psychiatrist AND a Clinical Psychologist (as in an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Psychology) meant that she generally knew what she was talking about in this regard.

Didn't help either that later on they hired an actual transgender employee, but this was one had transitioned and was pre-op. She might have still had male hardware, but she had a much stronger claim on being female thanks to a big pile of clinical documentation.

cassanovascotian: The vast majority of anger in this thread has nothing to do with concern for people in the changeroom. It's because you guys are basically hateful people who don't like transgendered's and want to clutch at any possible excuse you can get to shiat on them.

Social justice movements have the capacity to effect lasting, important changes in society. However, labelling everyone who disagrees with you as a hate-filled bigot is incredibly detrimental to whatever cause you're trying to promote. People are ignorant and love to stereotype (even "good" people). Perceptions and beliefs need to change, but they're not going to change over night. If you choose to attack these people instead of educate them, they're not going to be very open to what you have to say.

Like someone said, all you need it love... that applies to *both* sides of the coin...

The solution is to shut down all change rooms everywhere so that no one ever gets offended.

You wanna swim in a pool? Go build your own farking one.

relcec: so you are saying people ask for your transgender papers when you are a transgender? and you are perfectly fine with tranny's being required to produce them on the spot whenever asked? your fine with papers please? I call bullshiat.

No, I didn't say that one bit.

Frankly, a driver's license or passport saying "female" should be good enough

Now, as someone else said, all that takes is filling out a form and a letter from an M.D., however, an M.D. takes a lot of convincing to issue such a letter (or at least it did in what I saw). Those lengthy steps are what it would take (at least from what I've seen) to issue such papers.

I wasn't saying they had to produce a stack of papers on request, just the same legal documentation anybody else would have to prove, but the standard to change those papers is fairly high.