Excerpt from Trapped published by Xlibris.

TRAPPED DANIEL C. MERRILL MD Introduction Dr Donald W. Hastings was Professor and Chairman of the Psychiatric Department at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center when the transsexual program began in 1966. This world renowned psychiatrist had spent much of his professional life studying gender identification problems and had become convinced that, irrespective of its cause, which remains unknown to this day, people with transsexualism could not be treated successfully with medication or any form of psychological or psychiatric therapy. He ultimately came to the conclusion that the best, and indeed the only, option for people afflicted with this kind of gender disorder was to grant their wishes and, by surgery, transform them into members of the opposite sex. At the time, these sex-reassignment surgical procedures were called sex-change operations by the lay press. The majority of transsexuals are men who believe they are females who somehow became trapped in a male's body. A few, about one in seven, are females who consider themselves to be males. I do not recall having been involved in any female to male sex-change operations during my tenure at the University from 1996 to 1973. However, my mentor Professor Colin Markland, who led the surgical team that performed the sex-change operations, informs me that he carried out four or five female to male procedures before the program was discontinued in the mid-1970's. Although it doesn't seem so today, the sex-change operations Dr Hastings purposed were considered to be extremely radical in the 1960's. A handful had been performed in Europe over the previous 20 or 30 years, but the operation had been outlawed in most of the civilized world. I doubt that he would have been able to get his research program approved in the culturally conservation state of Minnesota if it were not for the high esteem Dr Hastings was held in the medical community. In those days, there was a significant fear that transsexualism might be some type of temporary mental aberration and many of those who were skeptical of sex-reassignment surgery worried that a transsexual might change his mind after surgery, which was irreversible, and regret having undergone the procedure. Dr Hastings was not one them, since his extensive experience treating patients with gender disorders led him to the opposite conclusion. His experience, to the contrary, suggested that once an child or adult thought they were a male or a female, they never changed their minds. Furthermore, there was nothing he, or anyone else, could do to alter the way they viewed themselves, with respect to their sexual identity. Nonetheless, possibly in part to placate his critics as well as to assure that he didn't make a mistake, Dr Hastings set up an comprehensive program to evaluate prospective candidates for sex-change surgery. Patients who were candidates for sex-reassignment surgery had to be referred to him by someone in the psychiatric community before they were accepted into his research program at the University. Thus, prospective candidates for sex-reassignment surgery had been studied extensively before they walked through the front doors of the University hospital. Once considered a candidate for surgery he, or she, was admitted to the psychiatric ward where they underwent an extensive one month period of observation by a special team of doctors and nurses whose sole purpose was to determine if the candidate was a true transsexual. One can only imagine the chicanery these males were subjected to by the sexy and cunning nurses Dr Hastings had recruited to help him unearth unworthy candidates for his transsexual program. Apparently, one glance at the long legs of one of his attractive nurses was enough to send you packing. As we will see as the this novel unfolds, a person could be rejected as a candidate for surgery simply because an evaluator felt that something just didn't feel right about the situation. Dr. Hastings was taking no chances, his reputation and, indeed, the reputation of the University, depended on him making the right choices every time, no if ands or buts about it. Dr. Donald Creevy, a world renowned figure in Urology and a man in his late 60s, was Professor and Chairman of the Division of Urology at the University in 1966 when his staff performed the second sex-change operation in the United States. Dr. Hastings, a man of the same age, was one of his best friends and closest confidants. I knew Dr Creevy to be an extremely conservative individual and one can only speculate as to his reaction to Dr Hastings's request that the Urologists on his staff perform the mutilating procedures inherent in the sex-change operations. In the end, however, he agreed to allow the members of his staff perform the procedures. Dr Creevy was at the end of his long and distinguished surgical career at the time and no longer performed open surgical procedures, confining himself primarily to transurethral resections of the prostate, a procedure he had pioneered years before. He delegated the performance of the sex-change operations to his junior partner Colin Markland an Englishman who had immigrated to the United States several years before. Dr. Markland, who is now in his early 80s, tells me that Dr. Creevy had no interest in transsexuals or, more to the point, sex-change operations. In 1966 Dr Markland was rapidly establishing himself as a leading American Urologic Surgeon. As I recall, he had more innovative ideas each day than most stray dogs have flees. I can safely say, now some 46 years later, that Dr Markland could hardly wait to sink his teeth into the challenges inherent in the surgical transformation of a man into a woman. I came to the University as a first year resident in Urology in 1966. I was a third assistant in Shalimar's surgery in the fall of that year. It was one of the most exiting days of my young life. Six years later, as a junior member of the University's Urology staff, I was performing the procedures myself with the assistance of our residents and under the ever watchful eye of my mentor Dr. Markland. I have selected three of the fifteen or so transsexuals I met and cared for at the University as the main characters of this novel. These people were real and I have made every attempt to portray them as accurately as possible. Unfortunately, at this point in time, all these years later, I do not recall, with the exception of the Cuban dancer Shalimar's stage name, their actual names. I never did know much about their lives before, or for that matter after surgery, with the exception of one person, the truck driver. This person, and her husband, subsequently moved to California in the 1980's and I met her again when she resurfaced at the Martinez Veterans Administration Medical Center Hospital in Martinez California where I spent the last years of my career as Chief of Urology. I selected these three individuals because I felt that they each had a unique story to tell with respect to their lives as transsexuals before, and in one instance, after sex-reassignment surgery. Hopefully, the lives I created for these people reflects what they endured to become normal in the way that each of us considers ourselves to be either a normal male or a female. Finally, my experience strongly supports the hypothesis that Dr. Hastings championed nearly 50 years ago, once a transsexual always a transsexual. He was right, it's futile to try to talk them out of it!

The Last Days of Saint Nicholas Daniel C. Merrill MD

"I'm definitely getting too old for this," Nicholas said to his best friend and lead reindeer Rudolf. "How long have I been Santa Claus do you think?" "I don't know that I can rightly recall," replied Rudolf, "but it must be close to 300 years, give or take a decade or two." Nicholas' sainted father, the first Santa Claus, had learned to communicate with reindeer years before Nicholas was born. His father taught Nicholas the reindeer language shortly before he was killed by an errant meteorite that hit his sleigh while he and his reindeer were making their rounds on that fateful Christmas eve night in the year 1842. Nicholas had inherited his father's job and, with the help of his faithful reindeer, had been navigating through the cold Christmas Eve nights ever since. With the exception of a few times when the weather was so bad that mail could not be delivered to the north pole, Nicholas and his reindeer never failed to deliver the books, toys and dolls that the good boys and girls of the world had requested in their letters to Santa. Nicholas also made sure that he never ran out of lumps of coal for the stockings of children who had not been so good. But Nicholas was getting old and Rudolph was also beginning to feel the ravages of age."You know Rudolph," Nicholas said, " my eye sight isn't what it used to be and I'm having a fair amount of difficulty navigating by the stars now days." "I'm a little afraid that we might not be able to find our way home this year." "I'm not feeling so great myself," replied Rudolph, "My poor old nose isn't as bright as it used to be and the arthritis in my right rear hoof won't let me fly nearly as fast as I could when you first asked me to lead your sleigh." "In truth, I just don't know how much longer I can go on. I know Vixen and Prancer aren't feeling very well either. Vixen was saying just the other day, when the elves were packing the toys in the back of the sleigh, that his arthritis was so bad that he could barely walk. Our Prancer can't exercise anymore and has gained so much weight during the off season that it will be difficult for him to get into his harness, let alone fly any great distance." "Obviously, it's time to call it quits," Nicholas said, "in fact, it's long past time that we retired." Rudolph placed both of his front hoofs on Nickolas' shoulders, looked sadly into his old friends eyes and began to cry as he shook his stately antlered head in agreement. It was only a month before Christmas and that left Nicholas very little time. He had to make certain that those presents were delivered on Christmas Eve night, just as they had been for almost three centuries. Nicholas called his friend, billionaire Bill Gates, and asked for help. "Bill," he said, "we're in big trouble up here at the North Pole. My reindeer and I are too old and infirm to make the Christmas run this year. An awful lot of children are going to be very disappointed if we don't deliver their Christmas presents on time." "I've made a tentative deal with UPS They have agreed to deliver the presents on Christmas Eve night as has always been the case. Our friend Scott Davis at UPS has even agreed to dress their drivers up in Santa Clause suits if we are willing to pay a little extra for the deliveries. Unfortunately, Mrs. Nicholas and I do not have the resources to finance an operation of this size, could you help?" "Of course, I can," Mr. Gates Replied without hesitation. "Look Nicholas, I'm a little tied up right at the moment with some pressing problems involving the famine in the Congo. Just have Scott send me the bill, If he wants to, he can call me." So it came to pass. The children's Christmas presents were delivered on time and no one was the wiser. Nicholas gave his toy factory at the North Pole to his grandson Max who wanted to become the next Santa Claus. He packed up all of his possessions, including the sleigh, and moved to an island in the Caribbean. He and his beloved reindeer spent their last days swimming in the warm ocean water and building sand castles with their newfound monkey friends on the beautiful black sand beaches under the shade of the magnificent palm trees which lined the island's shore.

What would be the best Christmas present ever for our children? Arm their teachers!

The resent Newtown massacre of innocent children and their helpless teachers was a blow to all of us and a indelible stain on what little is left of our degenerate society. I expect most of you have spent a sleepless night or two struggling with the implications of this senseless slaughter, as I have. We all can agree that something should be done to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy but there is no consensus of what that something should be. As usual, the politicians have turned this catastrophe into a political tug of war between the uninformed liberals (think stupid) who never saw a gun they did not dislike and the conservatives who will not give an inch on the gun rights issue, come hell or high water. A pox on both their houses! Let me say up front, that I have nothing against reasonable gun control, whatever that is, because, it will not make a lick of difference how many AK 47s or machine pistols you have hidden away in your house when the Feds come up your driveway with that humongous Sherman Tank, none at all! Furthermore, I would be willing give up all of my firearms if it would prevent future Newtown like massacres. Unfortunately, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that gun control laws, no matter how strict, reduce the crime rate one iota or increase the safety of our children while they are attending their pathetically ineffective socialist schools. In the first place, the most horrendous massacres ever on American soil were carried out by malcontents who used dynamite (1927 Bath school house massacre in which 34 children and 6 adults were killed) and a fertilizer bomb (Timothy McVeigh the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 160 adults and children with ingredients he bought at the local feed store) to carry out their evil deeds. Second, cities like Chicago, which have the highest murder rates, not surprisingly have the strictest gun laws in the United States. Similarly, countries which have the toughest gun laws (Brazil, Russia and Mexico) also have the highest murder rates in the world. Finally, one more example to nail this thing down once and for all! Norway has extremely strict gun laws yet Anders Britvic was able to mow down 69 individuals, mostly youngsters, with an automatic rifle. No Mable, strict gun laws do not prevent crimes of any type and most assuredly they do not prevent mass murders! Along these same lines, as John Lott points out in More Guns Less Crime, that states with the fewest guns have the most crime and the states that have the most guns have the least crime. This is particularly the case in states that allow their citizens to carry concealed weapons, these states have the lowest crime rate of all. By the way, remember the Los Angles riots of 1992? Watts was literally destroyed except for the businesses ran by the Korean shop owners who protected their property from the roof tops with automatic weapons. The fact is that guns do not kill anyone any more than does an SUV. No, bad guys kill people, especially mentally ill bad guys. There are not enough mental hospitals in all the world to lockup all these walking time bombs. So what do we do? Fortunately, for our most precious treasure, our children and grand children, the answerer is quite simple. We arm our teachers! Yes, I am proposing the only solution to the school massacre crisis that makes any sense. Not only should we encourage our teachers to learn how to shoot a gun and carry firearms, but we should pay them an extra bonus to do it. I also suggest that any school employee who kills one of these evil crazies who threaten our children should be rewarded handsomely, say immediate retirement at full salary and free medical care for life. Maybe even a onetime gift of $500,000 as a show of appreciation for preventing a school ground massacre would be appropriate. No locked doors, no hiding under the desks or in the closet, no razor wire fences, no metal detectors, no well meaning unarmed fools standing around in camouflage fatigues twiddling their fingers, none of that expensive and meaningless BS. Just teachers that will shoot your sorry ass if you look cross-eyed at one of our children. There I've said it and I feel much better for having done so! Happy Christmas!

Read what others have said about Trapped.

"I think the author is right, people with gender identification and sexual preference abnormalities are born with their wires crossed and there is nothing we can do about it, so we might as well accept them for what they are and get on with life." - Jim Bell "I had no real idea of what it might be like to be a transsexual before reading Trapped. Dr. Merrill's book should be required reading in every high school in America, in the world for that matter. Maybe Secretary of State Clinton should take a copy or two along with her the next time she visits one of those Middle Eastern countries where they stone gays and lesbians." - Cecil Hardgrave "The material in this book is amazing! I had no real understanding of the condition called transsexualism before reading Trapped or to what lengths a person would go to change their sexual identity. The author paints a bigger than life picture of the characters in his story. Reading about their attempts to escape the bodies in which they were born changed my whole perspective on the issue of gender identification and made me take another look at the plight of homosexuals and the issue of gay and lesbian marriage." - Jim Hipkins "As Dr. Merrill points out, there is a lot we don't know about gender identification problems. The author makes a compelling case for those of us who were somehow born with the wrong genitalia or sexual orientation. I hope this book leads to a better understanding of what it means to be a transsexual, gay or lesbian person. Hopefully, society will accept us for what we are and forget about trying to change us into something that we aren't." - Philip Hillier

Lets Pay Them Not To Have Babies!

Lyndon Baines Johnson, that shining star of liberal logic who gave us the great society, did more to destroy America than any person in the twentieth century. You recall this is the guy who picked up his beagle dogs by the ears and told us they liked it. This buffoon didn't know much about dogs and knew even less about human behavior One of the lessons to be learned from Johnson's failed social experiments is this, it doesn't pay to reward single women for having children, especially if they are women of color. There simply are not enough black grandmothers to raise all of these unwanted children and not enough prisons to house them when they get into trouble with the law as teenagers and young adults. Now here's a thought. Paying women to have kids does not work, but what if we paid them not to have children? To test my theory, that it would be cost effective to pay single women not to have babies, let's begin by paying the 13.7 million single moms in the country not to have additional children. All of the monies now provided to them to support their broods will be continued, but we will give them an additional $5000 if they agree to have a Norplant injection to prevent them from becoming pregnant again for the next five years. At the end of the five years we will give them an additional $5000 if they agree to have a second Norplant injection. This voluntary birth control program would be continued for a total of 20 years at a cost of $20,000 per participant; thus, assuring that the vast majority of single mothers who participated in the study would not conceive again during their child bearing years. I think you will agree that this is one social policy that we all can get behind. Lots of free stuff and far fewer unwanted children to feed, cloth, and educate. The total cost of the program, assuming full participation by all single mothers, would be around $27.5 billion dollars annually. Admittedly, that's a lot of money to spend on a trial balloon of this kind. But maybe cheap at twice the price given the alternative, which is to continue the status quo. Consider this statistic for a moment. Benjamin Scafidi PhD, a Georgia State University economist, has shown that single mothers cost the tax payers of this country a whopping $112 billion a year. These expenditures in tax, or more correctly debt monies, does not begin to reflect the burden of single motherhood on society, because you can't measure the pain and suffering of rape and murder victims in dollars and cents. Now you may be thinking, after all these years we should have learned our lesson, why not just stop paying single mothers to have endless numbers of children? Sure would be a hell of a lot cheaper, wouldn't it? Well, sure it would, but you are never going to be able to sell such a change in social policy to our gimme-gimme twenty-first century society, not in a million years you won't! But, for the most part, we are dealing with a greedy bunch of low-lives here and I'll bet my last dollar that if you pay them enough they will end up doing the right thing, despite their natural tendencies to reproduce like rabbits. Yes, Mable, not having kids you can't afford out of wedlock is the right thing to do, no matter what the liberal meatheads tell you! Now, if this trial policy to reduce the numbers of children born to unwed mothers is successful, as it certainly will be, we can expand the program to include all unmarried females of child bearing age. The Sandra Fluke's of the world are going to love this one. Just imagine, not only are we going to pay for their birth control pills, or in this case shots in the arm, but we are going to give them $5000 to spend on drugs, booze, and other fun things every five years for the next 20 years. Sounds like a sure winner to me. Now, one last thing. If you are a single mom with a good job who can afford to raise and educate your own kids, go for it. I don't care how many children you have out of wedlock or, for that matter, in wedlock or how much you spend on a new Mercedes or your next trip to Vegas. Its really none of my business, as long as my tax dollars are not used to pay for it! This should get me the meanie award of the year from the National League of Women Voters, if there is such a thing.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform

People from third world countries like Mexico come to the United States primarily for two reasons. First, the illegal's come here to take advantage our ever expanding welfare state. Subsidized housing, free medical care, free education free everything is here for the taking if they can simply get here. Which is not that big a deal considering the porosity of our borders. The second reason illiterate minorities from south America come to America is to work at the low paying and menial jobs that Americans refuse to take under any circumstances. Such employment is everywhere and includes jobs in agriculture, yard maintenance, construction and numerous other commercial endeavors that require a serious amount of manual labor. Recognizing the problem, that unskilled illiterate minorities come here for the free stuff and to fill low paying jobs that American low-lives will not take, is the key to implementing the comprehensive immigration reform that members on both sides of the isle are always yapping about. The solution to the illegal and costly immigration problem we have faced in America for the past 50 years requires only three simple steps. First, we must have some type of national identification card that can be used to readily identify every single legal citizen of the United States. Second, we must insist that all social programs, from education to health care, be restricted to legal citizens and that not a dime of government money be spent on illegal's, except possibly to deport them. Finally, we should do everything possible to make sure that illegal's are not hired for any job in our country irrespective of how menial it is or how little it pays. Now, if draconian policies like this are implemented, who will pick the grapes and who will cut my lawn you may be asking yourself. Again the answer is quite simple, Americans must be put back to work whether they like it or not! Just think of it, there are nearly 50 million unemployed people in this country. The monies we pay these people in unemployment benefits threaten to bankrupt the country. Why are they not required to work? Similarly, our prisons are bulging at the seams with men and women who sit on their fat asses day after day, week after week and year after year watching television on the flat screen TVs that the taxpayers provide for them at great expense. Why are these people not required to make some contribution to their upkeep by working in the fields and filling the jobs that Americans won't take? In this respect, the prisons should be moved to areas that need workers to produce the food that working Americans eat. I'm not talking about chain gangs here; rather I am talking about a forced work program that will provide meaning employment for huge segment of our population that reside in our prisons. In the same vein, I am not suggesting that the inner-city blacks be returned to slavery or that low-live whites be forced at gun point to work. I am purposing that these individuals be given a choice, either take the jobs that are readily available to them or they starve! No more free stuff, no more slaps on the wrists when you burglarize the local 7-eleven store. No, if you go to jail you are going to sentenced to prison and that means that you also are being sentenced to work whether you like it or not. Similarly, if you are unemployed and fit to work, you are going to work or you are going to starve, no one is going to bail you out with a never ending series of unemployment checks ! It will be clear to the reader that by employing the tactics I suggest to solve our immigration problems we also will have gone a long way towards dealing with the chronic unemployment problem in this country. These two social issues are joined at the hip and require a joint solution based on our resolve to restrict jobs and social benefits to legal citizens while requiring the unemployed and incarcerated members of our society to get off their duffs and go to work. There, problem solved, we have killed two birds with one stone! Wasn't that clever of us?