from Gender Identity Disorders

"Life in the T Zone: With the Aid of Testosterone, Biological Women Are Expanding the Hold Ideas of Male and Female. But Being Genderqueer Can Involve Health Risks," tells the story of several women who have decided that they do not want to be labeled as male or female. They have chosen a third identity: Genderqueer.

Renata Razza, for example, decided that her internal sense of self and her physical body did not match up. At 33, she doesn't want a sex change operation, but wants to live in between male and female.

According to Lydia Sausa, a trainer at the California STD/HIV Prevention Training Center, "People who identify as genderqueer are blending and blurring and living outside of gender dichotomies."

Luanna Rodgers, a psychotherapist who heads the Transgender Life Care Program at San Francisco's Castro-Mission Health Center says: "In the past there wasn't a place to go with gender except full sex reassignment. The older generation and the medical profession pretty much thought of it as a total crossover process. Now there are a lot of people who are starting to live in between the gender binary boxes."

Sam Davis, who is a graduate student at San Francisco State University studying the effects of testosterone on mood, identifies as a genderqueer. She is saving up for a female-to-male sex change operation, but even after the operation will still view herself as a "butch dyke" or "FTM genderqueer." Says Davis: "I don't want to leave my affiliation with my dyke past behind. And I don't feel that I fit what society considers a traditional man."

Renata Razza says she wants people to see past her "apparent gender to my femininity. ... neither 'he' nor 'she' fits me 100% of the time."

Glbtq, the online "encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender & queer culture," defines genderqueer individuals as those who characterize themselves as "neither female nor male, as both, or as somewhere in between." They "challenge binary constructions of gender and traditional images of transgender people."

According to the glbtq, "Many trans[gender] youth ... do not believe that they need to transition entirely or at all in order to be 'real' men or 'real' women. Refusing the idea that one's genitalia is the defining aspect of one's gender, they may take hormones, but not have any surgeries, or they may have a breast augmentation or reduction procedure, but not genital surgeries, or they reject medical intervention altogether."

Many individuals who consider themselves transgendered, undergo only partial surgeries or hormone treatments and identify as She/Males. Numbers of these individuals become part of the online pornography industry. Sexually explicit She/Male sites number in the hundreds online.