Vernon A Rosario. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. Volume 7, Issue 4, Fall 2000.
Transgenderism made a stellar breakthrough this year at the Oscars: Hilary Swank won the Best Actress award for her heart-wrenching portrayal of “Brandon Teena,” a murdered transgendered youth, in Boys Don’t Cry, and the award for Best Foreign Film went to Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother, with its several complex transgendered characters. While transsexuals have become a staple of slug-fest talk shows, these films were unusual for bringing serious and sympathetic portrayals of transgendered individuals to the broad public. It’s about time!
It’s been almost fifty years since Christine Jorgensen became a worldwide media sensation for her “sex change” surgery, which made “transsexualism” a household term. Even in the medical literature, the term was relatively new, having been identified as a distinct phenomenon only in 1949 by psychiatrist David Cauldwell. The mass media and the medical literature of the time tended to conflate transsexualism with transvestitism, homosexuality, and hermaphroditism. Even the Danish doctors who treated Jorgensen diagnosed her with “genuine transvestism.” This unfortunate confusion of phenomena—core gender identity, social gender role, sexual orientation, and anatomical sex—has largely endured in the minds of the lay and professional public. In part, this has been caused by the relative silence of transsexuals due to their erasure by the medical model of treatment: to be “cured” of transsexualism, the patients were expected to undergo behavioral, hormonal, and surgical “sex change,” thereby fully becoming their d esired sex and abandoning—even destroying—any “trans” consciousness.
This began to change rapidly in the 1990’s, as transsexual academics and activists challenged the model of transsexualism as a transitional identity. Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-transsexual Manifesto” (1991) urged transsexuals to “forgo passing” by writing a holistic story of their lives and being visible as transsexuals. Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw (1994) presented a witty, poignant autobiography rendered more complex by the insights of feminist gender theory. “Transgenderism” has emerged as the preferred term, encompassing a variety of identities and behaviors that challenge traditional two-sex norms: transvestitism, pre-op, post-op, and non-transitioning (non-op) transsexualism, “she-males” (with breasts and a penis), and others.
Transgender Studies has taken off in the past ten years and is in many ways on the cutting edge of academic studies. Feminist theory has examined and problematized the workings of gender in society. Queer Studies has destabilized heterosexual normativity by exploring the variety of marginalized sexualities. But both feminist and queer theorists have looked to transgenderism as the most radical subversion of “normal” gender and sexual identity through a postmodern self-fashioning of these categories. Others have accused transsexuals of being dupes of the gender orthodoxy who tragically mutilate their bodies to conform to conventional associations between anatomy and gender roles.
Gender theorists have engaged these problems head on, and further enriched and complicated our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Jay Prosser in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (1998) provides a complex yet engaging critique of feminist and queer analyses of transgenderism, and in the process formulates a specifically transgendered theory of gender and sexuality. Prosser accurately points out the tremendous difficulty some feminist and queer theorists—particularly Judith Butler—have when dealing with the physical body. Their reliance on theories of discourse tends to reduce the body to an idea, a symbol of the workings of power in society. Feminist interpretations of transsexualism have thus gone in two opposite directions, viewing transsexuals as conservative dupes of the sex-gender system or as postmodernist radicals who subvert the system itself. In the first view, transsexuals essentialize gender identity by insisting that it must correspond to a person’s genital sex. In t he second view, transsexuals demonstrate the total plasticity of the body and sex (for all people) through their passing and sex reassignment.
While Prosser is also interested in the narrative transitions in transsexuals’ lives and stories, he emphasizes the bodily transitions and the experience of being in a gendered body. “Transsexuality reveals the extent to which embodiment forms an essential base to subjectivity,” he notes, “but it also reveals that embodiment is as much about feeling one inhabits material flesh as the flesh itself.” In the popular media and the medical press, the tremendous emphasis on (or lurid fascination with) sex reassignment surgery tends to make transsexualism a matter of the body’s surface. This model of somatic-sartorial play or mutilation is wrong, Prosser argues. Sex reassignment surgery is more like reconstructive surgery whereby the transsexual attempts to bring the surface of the body into accord with the internal sense of the gendered body. Prosser also insists that the experience of being in a body is rendered sensible only through narrative.
Stories are essential to our lives. The collected family histories, childhood memories, educational and work histories, and love stories get woven together in a more-or-less coherent fabric that gives us each a sense of who we are—of our enduring identity despite the passage of time. Individual and family histories are also essential to a doctor in arriving at a diagnosis, irrespective of physical exams or blood tests. Case histories and even lengthy autobiographies were especially common in the 19th-century neuropsychiatric literature that first explored “sexual perversions” such as masturbation, fetishism, and sexual inversion.
Prosser relies on some fifty transsexual autobiographies, published between 1954 and 1996, to highlight the special centrality of personal narratives to transsexuals’ subjective transformation. First of all, transsexuals must provide doctors a history consistent with established norms of transsexual development in order to gain access to hormonal and surgical sex reassignment. The current “Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders” formulated by the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (1998) suggests several stages of evaluation by mental health professionals to accurately diagnose gender identity disorder (GID) and determine the individual’s readiness for hormones or surgery. Diagnosis of GID requires a history of “strong and persistent cross gender identification,” typically a childhood history of being a sissy boy or a tomboy girl, and dissatisfaction with biological sex that persists into adulthood. From there, transsexuals can review their lives and present a convincing history for medical approval. In these autobiographies, transsexuals acknowledge medical authority in legitimizing a diagnosis. However, Prosser elucidates how they also assert authorship of their transsexual subjectivity by exploring their lives fully.
These issues of forging an identity by finding narrative continuity in a life marked by a dramatic transition in personal and public subjectivity will also resonate with the experience of all lesbians, gays, and bisexuals who have come Out as such. Indeed, the medical history of homosexuality since the 19th century is closely interwoven with that of gender inversion. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the 19th-century lawyer who campaigned against German anti-sodomy laws, described himself and his kind as having a female soul caught in a male body: “Our character, the manner in which we feel, our entire temperament is not masculine, it is feminine. We only act male. We play the male just as an actress plays a man on stage. … It is impossible for us to transform our female instinct into a male instinct.”
European forensic neuropsychiatrists were perplexed by this “sexual inversion” or “contrary sexual sensation,” and explained it as a form of psychosexual hermaphroditism. While external anatomy of “inverts” was usually found to be normal, their nervous systems (i.e., their psyches) were assumed to have some opposite-sexed conformation. By the turn of the century, diverse forms of non-heterosexuality were lumped together in the medical literature and largely equated with the new diagnosis of “homosexuality.” So, while Sigmund Freud in his seminal Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) only used the word “invert” throughout, he was discussing what we now call homosexuality: people whose “sexual objects are exclusively of their own sex.”
The German homosexual psychiatrist Magnus Hirschfeld coined the terms “transvestite” in 1910 and “transsexual” in 1923 (in an article on “intersexuals”). However, the term transsexual was not widely adopted at that time. Instead, cases of effeminate men or masculine women were regularly diagnosed as sexual inverts or as transvestites if they cross-dressed. Prosser carefully re-examines these early cases (including a few where some form of genital transformation surgery was conducted) to argue that these were really incidences of transsexualism. These early patients share with contemporary transsexuals the feeling of existing in the “wrong body” for their psychological gender.
Prosser also rereads that classic of “lesbian literature,” The Well of Loneliness, to show how Stephen Gordon is a more likely female-to-male (FTM) transsexual than a butch lesbian. However problematic it is to apply our present categories to the past, his revisionist readings are persuasive. They at least render more complex the subjectivities of inverts, viragoes, and other Victorian “contrary sexuals”—who, despite what many gay historians have argued, were not simply “homosexuals.”
Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998) further widens the scope of transgender studies. Like Prosser, Halberstam also argues that Victorian inverts and Radclyffe Hall’s hero(ine) were not simply homosexuals, but exemplars of a far wider phenomenon of female masculinity. Halberstam draws on material from the past two centuries and a variety of media (medical and fictional literature, film, art, and bar performance) to illustrate her concept of female masculinity. First, she argues that we can learn the most about the workings of masculinity in our culture not by studying “dominant masculinity” (that of white, middle-class men), but by examining masculinities on the margins: in people of color, in working-class people, and in women. Second, she tries to demonstrate that the multiple variants of masculinity constructed by women are just as important to our cultural notions of masculinity as those constructed by men. But perhaps her most ambitious claim is that “female masculinity is a specific gender wit h its own cultural history rather than simply a derivative of male masculinity.” In other words, there can be masculinity without men.
Defining and defending this thesis often gets her embroiled in theoretical squabbles with other academicians. General readers will find more interesting her manifold examples of female masculinity: Renaissance tribadism (clitoral rubbing between women), 19th-century “female husbands” and inverts, Radclyffe Hall and Stephen Gordon, and a variety of stone butches in the 20th century. The diversity of material may violate her own demands for historical and cultural specificity, but she amply demonstrates that there have long been gender-atypical women, and they have been widely represented in popular culture (especially in recent times).
The butch lesbian is probably the best known of these, and butch-femme culture has been the subject of many excellent literary, anthropological, and sociological studies by authors such as Leslie Feinberg, Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy, Esther Newton, and Joan Nestle. Halberstam and others have noted that many of the female-to-male transsexuals emerging in the 1990’s had previously identified as butch lesbians. Many had felt alienated by the anti-butch/femme bias of radical lesbian feminism, which viewed this division as a self-hating imitation of heterosexual power dynamics. Third-wave feminism has actively criticized that analysis. However, there remains much hostility towards transsexuals in the lesbian (and gay male) community. Halberstam herself has been one of the most outspoken figures in this border war given her position as a masculine lesbian investigating transsexual culture. (Her two photo portraits in the book handsomely illustrate her play with female masculinity.)
Halberstam’s anthropological expeditions along the butch-FTM border are some of the most fascinating work in her book. She brings us into drag-king bars around the country. At drag king contests women perform as men, but that’s only the most superficial description of the events. Halberstam distinguishes five different types of masculine performance: butch realness (passing as a male); femme pretending (campy masquerading of masculinity); male mimicry (reproducing male masculinity); fag drag (copying gay male looks); and denaturalized masculinity (performances that criticize masculinity). Her analysis just begins to theorize these immensely complex (and funny) performances, which simultaneously parody and reinvent masculinity to mold a distinctive culture of female masculinity.
These and other works in the new genre of Transgender Studies point out that there is still much to be explored in the field of gender. Transsexual people may be a small percent of the population, but their existential struggles with the matters of gender role and identity, and the relation of the body to the sense of one’s self, concern us all. Every gay man who has been called a sissy and every lesbian who has been addressed as “Sir” is familiar with how society polices gender and must share the anxiety that—as happened to Brandon Teena—the gender police may assault us at any moment. We should all be delighted that transgendered people are finally in the limelight—because their struggle is common to all of us.