Words, Words, Words: Talking Transgenders

Dickemann, Jeffrey M.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 6, Number 3, 2000, pp. 455-466 (Review)
Published by Duke University Press

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Book Review

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Talking Transgenders
Jeffrey M. Dickemann

Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue Leslie Feinberg Boston: Beacon, 1998. 128 pp. $20.00 FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society Holly Devor Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999 (orig. 1997). xxviii + 695 pp. $27.50 paper Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities Jason Cromwell Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. x + 201 pp. $42.50 cloth, $19.95 paper Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality Jay Prosser New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. x + 270 pp. $50.00 cloth, $17.00 paper

Of the four books under review, three are by transgenders and the fourth is by a
sociologist with a history of research on gender variance. Leslie Feinbergs collection contains adaptations of speeches given in 1997 to a variety of queer audiences, from a transvestite gathering in Texas to a queer studies conference in New York. Interspersed are brief personal accounts by members of the communities

GLQ 6:3 pp. 455-466 Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press

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addressed. Many of Feinbergs assertions are incontrovertible: we must build alliances for civil rights progress; we are all in transition all our lives; the shorthand use of patriarchy is sloppy indeed. Feinbergs critique of popular genetic hypotheses regarding gender identity is reasoned and welcome. And who can disagree with the underlying premise that the mainstream gender dichotomy is too rigid, too all-pervasive? The authors trans-lib movement is for everybodys liberation, even those who are not at all beyond pink or blue. Yet fundamental questions remain. Is a genderless society possible? Does everyone want to be liberated? If not, are those who do not merely victims of false consciousness, or are they perhaps as genderly programmed, and as rmly, as the most childhood-gender-dysphoric of transsexuals? If transgender feelings of being a woman in a mans body and vice versa are validated by support systems, medical interventions, and political organizations, may those who feel like a man in a mans body or a woman in a womans body forgo coerced liberation? Public speeches, especially those with hortatory aims, are not a prime locus of reasoned analysis. So it is no surprise that these talks are replete with the historical howlers that ll the popular GLBT press. Gender variance, we are told, has existed globally throughout human history; ancient societies accorded respect and honor to sex/gender diversity. Gender oppression and homophobia, in the popMarxist doctrine espoused by Feinberg, appear only with class societies and economically motivated ruling classes. To Feinberg, the record, postprimitive, is a long series of progressive workers battles. There are no moments of regression, no excesses of the left. This history is bunk. We also learn of personal experiences, familiar to all trannies, of strangers befuddled by their inability to classify us, of bathroom discomtures, trafc stops, and drivers licenses. Most disturbing is Feinbergs horric experience of rejection by a medical doctor during a life-threatening bout of endocarditis, when hir female body was revealed. While Feinberg insists that s/he does not t prevailing notions of gender attribution, it is clear that the doctor rst read hir as male. But beyond the maltreatment, what disturbs me is Feinbergs inability or unwillingness, in 1995, to locate sympathetic practitioners to obtain regular medical care. It is sensible and medically justiable for transgenders to identify themselves as such at the outset, yet Feinberg resents doing so. Criticisms of the health care establishment are certainly in order, and transgenders, along with many lesbians and gay men, suffer crippling anxieties that weaken their ability to demand services. But Feinbergs position, as hir personal experience demonstrates, risks far more than initial honesty does. I nd it unworthy of a queer icon active in the political arena.1

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Since there is little to learn from Feinbergs exhortations, the readers interest shifts to the authors own protean and perplexing persona. In 1980 Diane Leslie Feinberg authored Journal of a Transsexual.2 Feinberg now presents hirself as someone who would rather not be gender-categorized, who does not t prevailing gender notions. I am a female who is more masculine than those prominently portrayed in mass culture (7)a claim that vast numbers of women could make. But I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine (9). Terms accepted by Feinberg are terms that describe outlaw status (10): butch, bulldagger, drag king, cross-dresser. Why only these outlaw terms? Why not rabble-rouser, Marxist, Jew? Feinbergs public presentations are revelatory. Each self-denition is crafted to elicit acceptance from a specic community, to claim temporary membership in it. Feinberg never speaks of gender identity. I wonder where and what it is. But if we have difculty in understanding Feinbergs labels, s/he has difculty in understanding others: At times when Ive spoken to an audience largely made up of masculine, cross-dressing females, the media describes the audience as predominantly lesbianrather than transgenderalluding only to their presumed sexual desire (97). In fact, the terms used by the media accurately refer to a conception shared with mainstream audiences, of both cross-gendered and same-sexoriented individuals, a conception that has changed very little in the last century. Feinbergs confusion of labels with reality prevents hir from understanding the always contextual meanings of gender, sexual, and indeed all terminologies. At times Feinberg reveals more openly hir ambivalences. I am a visibly identied transperson, s/he claims (135), contradicting the awful doctor. I spend far too much of my precious time and energy trying to nd a safe public toilet, or negotiating my way past groups of hostile people. . . . Most days I feel very isolated marginalized most places I go. Really the only places . . . where I t are the spaces that have been liberated by political struggles (131). Those are pretty narrow spaces. What caused Diane Leslie to interrupt the transsexual process so long ago and return to a status somewhere between the two traditional genders (although Feinberg tells readers on the opening page that s/he does not identify as an intermediate sex)? S/he is not about to inquire. Why do you think you are the way you are? Were you born this way? . . . These questions have no meaning for me (34). But hir status is not strange or unusual. As a female-born transgender or transsexual (depending on usage and on the weight given to bilateral mastectomies), with a woman as spouse, Feinberg belongs, labels aside, to a not insignicant class. What distinguishes Feinberg is hir deep emotional resentment of labels. Yet there is scarcely a human being alive who consents to all of the terms and categories applied to him, her, or hir, whether of gender, sex, age, race, eth-

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nicity, nationality, religion, body type, or personal character. But the anxieties of living as an indeterminate, magnied by proclamation, are apparently the willing price of martyrdom for this shape shifter, while s/he offers the several sides of hir persona to the conferences, meetings, and marches at which s/he appears, at once a member, an ally, and an outsider, in the name of gender progress. Holly Devors sociological study of forty-ve FTMs (female-to-male transgenders/transsexuals), through interviews and questionnaires, stands at the other end of the spectrum of transgender publications. After two chapters on the history of and etiological theories about FTMs, Devor recounts the lives of these individuals, from childhood family and peer interactions through adolescence, relations, and experiences while still female, to the decision to undergo bodily change, the process itself, and life after transition. Generous quotations from the subjects ll the narrative, and percentages of response types are given. The absorbing personal accounts certainly give the reader a feeling for the diversity, as well as the commonalities, of this population. However, this 695-page volume suffers from serious structural and conceptual deciencies. Devor does not control either the historical or the biological literature: her naive use of sources lands her in major controversies of which she is unaware. The names of Boswell, Shorter, Walter Williams (on natives!), Doerner, Hamer, and Levay indicate the dangers. Dozens of hypotheses are summarized without critical analysis of the research quality (and much of it is dismal). The potted surveys of the literatures, useful as bibliographic guides but never referred to again, ultimately serve no purpose. Subsequent chapters, in general, begin with an introduction, followed by sections, each with its own summary and commentary, followed in turn by a chapter summary and commentary. These repetitions become exceedingly tedious. While we learn of percentages of the subject population that experienced or enacted various events, these are almost never compared to data on other populations. For example, how does the level of physical abuse of FTMs by fathers compare with that experienced by lesbians? By heterosexual women? Sexual abuse? Devor offers even fewer comparisons with the prole of other populations, such as lesbians or MTFs (male-to-female transgenders/transsexuals). Without comparisons, we are left not knowing what to understand about FTMs: are they just like everyone else or markedly different, and if the latter, in what ways? There are other puzzling omissions and failures as well. Despite her history of important work on gender variance, Devor never addresses directly the phenomenon of childhood gender dysphoria. Yet her questionnaire does touch on it, and scattered comments by her subjects make clear that many felt male or wished

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to become so (or both) at a very early age. In addition, some subjects were provided only a questionnaire, and for some there were no follow-ups, so that the samples for various topics are uneven. It appears to me that there was no pretest. Because the quotations selected for publication were not submitted to their authors for review, discrepancies have crept in. Two subjects known to me have complained of misrepresentation. Throughout, Devors apparent stance toward gender identity is puzzling. Although strongly supportive of and sympathetic to FTMs, she seems not to have grasped the degree to which we are talking of identity, rather than simple conformity or passing. Thus a basic confusion arises between, on the one hand, the process of acknowledging an identity, a recognition that I am, and, on the other, the decision to undertake a bodily transformation, when medical intervention is sought. I give one example: Of all the medical procedures . . . breast removal seemed to have been the most unequivocally satisfying. This seemed to be true regardless of the fact that many participants experienced disappointments at the quality [of the operation]. The important point for participants was that once this surgery had been performed, no matter how poorly, they were much more able to move through their everyday lives (400). While true, this is not the important point at all. As Devor well knows, breasts are strongly disliked by most FTMs as a salient marker of the rejected sex/gender. To be rid at last of that stigma of femaleness results in a feeling of immense relief, euphoria, and liberation. It is a matter of achieving the bodily form of ones inner self, ones felt gender, far more than of being able to pass. Related to her failure to conceive of identity consistently is Devors tendency to confuse concepts and labels with reality (again!). For example, the development of a new term, transsexual, has many causes, which are not the same as, or even of the same order of reality as, the emergence of the specic psychological state or construction in an individuals identity formation that we today call a transsexual identity. In different times and places, individuals with similar or identical personal identities, whom we would today call transsexuals, choose or have chosen, or were allowed or forced to pursue, different life pathways, which may have resulted in markedly different adult lives, behaviors, values, and fates. The socially enacted, perceived, and labeled end results may be different while the core identities are, or began as, the same. In my view, the disease of reication infects most of the eld of sexology, and it is a pity that Devor has not developed immunity to the virus. Thus this large volume, the result of an immense effort, is ambiguously about, but not about, being FTM. Rather, it is about living and growing in soci-

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ety, as the title rightly states, when already self-identied as male or masculine in a female body. The stories are all here, gripping, horric, heartwarming, admirable, and awesome. They should not be missed. Regardless of its many weaknesses, this book remains a groundbreaking contribution, which future researchers must surely learn from. The remaining books are by transgenders or transsexuals, but they have few other similarities. Readers hoping for an analysis informed by both sociocultural and personal perspectives from anthropologist Jason Cromwell will be disappointed. Cromwells book, a revised doctoral thesis, is ill organized, ill written, and poorly edited, with erratic syntax, careless use of terms (e.g., sex and gender), and inadequately dened foundational terms, although it is essentially a book about terminology. An excess of citations, even for statements of the obvious, reveal the texts prehistory in an academic rite of passage. One longs for the relative syntactic and conceptual clarity of Devor. Using published materials, interviews, and questionnaires lled out by FTMs (mostly recruited through support groups), Cromwell also includes materials from his own experience (e.g., his struggles as a youth to obtain medical services) against the distortions of the medical literature and the shortcomings of support services. He claims to rely on discourse analysis and feminist theory. Would that it were so! It is necessary to evaluate the relationship between selfidentity and the imposition of medico-psychological discourses and their practitioners (8). Indeed, and how is this to be done? What kinds of data are necessary; how are they to be obtained? Cromwell raises crucial questions concerning medical conceptions of gender variants, the early invert conceptions of Hirschfeld and others, current terminologies in the trans community, and notions of body, sex, and gender. But his treatments are brief, shifting, and contradictory. Discourse analysis involves more than identication of key terms: context of usage and sociopolitical and psychological functions must be demonstrated and explicated. These are t subjects for eldwork, but that eldwork has not been done. Citing Judith Butler, Cromwell asserts that no unambiguously proven causal links exist among sex, gender, and gender presentation and that man and woman are empty categories with no transcendent meaning (35). Yet he acknowledges that most societies have some kind of a male/female distinction (37). The anthropologist should be telling readers that all known human societies recognize two primary genders, built on the two major morphogenetic sexes, female and male, with their complementary and discrete reproductive functions. One is reminded of the remark, perhaps apocryphal, made to Margaret Mead in response

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to her exaggerated gender tales of far-off lands: Yes, Dr. Mead, but is there a place where the men have the babies? Cromwells book provides brief historical and cross-cultural summaries of some non-European and historical female-bodied masculine transgenders, with the Balkan sworn virgin appearing in the non-European chapter. Crying out repeatedly against the Eurocentrism of his adversaries, Cromwell does them one better with his Western Eurocentrism, something that Eastern Europeans have protested for decades. The Euro-American chapter contains notes on many women (sic) who either show no signs of cross-gender identity other than contextual crossdressing or are characterized by inadequate data. Cromwell seems to be able to tell intuitively which passing women did so for love, economic gain, or adventure or because of a cross-gendered identity, as though no human was ever moved by mixed motives and no one ever made excuses in order to deceive. The case of Billy Tipton is addressed at length. While there is much to criticize in Diane Wood Middlebrooks biography of the musician, and Cromwell rightly raises questions about Tiptons motives for passing, he misrepresents the facts. After he fully assumed living as a man and had moved from those who had known him, no one in Billy Tiptons life knew him as anything other than a man (Middlebrook 1998) (86). Not so: two musicians wives and one gay musician read Tipton as a passing woman or dyke, while others in his later life remarked that he looked like a woman or referred to him as that little old lady.3 Sloppy reading and sloppy terminology result in a misread history of sexuality. Like many other gleaners in the sex/gender eld, Cromwell assumes that medical and psychological terminology was developed by professionals for the purposes of treatment and control. But the very concept of a deep-seated crossgendered identity was constructed by inverts/homosexuals/transsexuals themselves (for they were, then, one and the same), some of them medical men, to dene and validate themselves. Moving into both lay and specialist domains, these terms underwent separate histories of replacement and changes of meaning in separate arenas. The lesbian-transsexual border wars of which Cromwell speaks cannot be understood apart from this history of unity and divergence.4 Of the many terms that Cromwell addresses in this book of labels, a few stand out as especially galling to him. Gender dysphoria (i.e., gender-identity dysphoria), central to the diagnostic denition of the transsexual, is one. Cromwells treatment of it, scattered throughout the volume, demonstrates the weakness of this work. Coordinate with this term is the colloquial expression trapped in the wrong body, to which he also strongly objects. This notion, he says, has been imposed upon transpeople by those who control access to medical technologies

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(104). Many female-bodied [trans] people do not [feel] and have never felt like a man trapped in a womans body. . . . Nor have they felt gender dysphoric (i.e. disassociated or disconnected from their gender). It is inconsistent to feel trapped in a category woman when one has never felt like the others in that category (25). Of course, it is the very imposition of a socially assigned gender, congruent with the genetic sex of the individuals body but discordant with his or her internal gender identity, that produces the sense of being trapped, the dysphoria, or state of feeling unwell or unhappy. Cromwells own life testies to this point: All my young life I knew I was a boy. . . . But I was wrong my penis never did grow (4). His discovery of the existence of transsexuals at seventeen gave him a word that described how I felt and thought about myself (3). He then underwent bilateral mastectomy, hysterectomy, hormone therapy, and the rst stage of a failed phalloplasty. However, transpeople like myself . . . do not believe they are changing or conrming genders, nor that changing or conrming sex is possible (20). Why, then, all the surgical and hormonal interventions? Socialization and education are doomed when a persons experience of their body does not accord with their sexual body and the symbolic meanings it is supposed to have (42), and transpeople conceive of gender as an internal, persistent identity such that transmen and FTMs have an identity referenced in society as male/masculine/man despite having female bodies and regardless of whether they alter those bodies via hormones and surgery (43). These are comprehensible, if clumsy, denitions of gender dysphoria, although they lack specication of the discomfort engendered, sometimes carrying the subject to self-mutilation or suicide, as Cromwell knows. Yet elsewhere he has contended that both sex and gender are social constructions (33). The readers head spins. Cromwells treatise is not an analysis at all but a cri de coeur from an angry, wounded Sebastian, pierced by labels. It may or may not be testimony to the maltreatment of transsexuals at the hands of professionals. It is, predictably, accompanied by reverse mudslinging. Researchers are all theorists, a dirty word in Cromwells lexicon; feminists are biological determinists; only the few medpsychs who recognize transgenders as opposed to transsexuals escape damnation. This treatise is, however, a clear indication of the decline of much sociocultural anthropology, in which the standards of scholarly rigor, descriptive, analytic, logical, have drowned in a sea of relativism and personalism, antimethod, antiintellect, and antiscience. Jay Prosser terms his honest and innovative study, Second Skins, a displaced autobiographical act and a means of inspecting and introspecting on his

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own transition, as transsexuality is always narrative work (4). But he also wishes to make a contribution to queer cultural theory, emphasizing the bodily and especially the sexed arena in which transgenders/transsexuals live. He does so in part by examining some fty autobiographical narratives of transsexuals, both MTF and FTM, published between 1954 and 1996. As Prosser notes, this is an outpouring compared, say, to the quantity of lesbian and gay accounts, although he fails to remark that the overwhelming majority are by MTFs. Many will be familiar to readers of this journal (Bornstein, Feinberg, Jorgensen, Morris, Richards), but others are less well known. Prosser rst addresses the writings of Butler, and secondarily those of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, especially the apparent equation of transgender with queer and the notion of gender as performativity. In responding to queer theorists (Garber, Halberstam, Hausman, Raymond), Prosser skillfully identies the canonical positions of this literature, as it either charges transsexuals with offering conformist support for a traditional sex/gender system or else denies the relevance, even the existence, of real bodies, sexes, and genitalia. Like the materiality of the body, the transsexual is the very blind spot of these writings on transsexuality (14). Hence the relevance of the body narratives of transsexuals themselves. (The contrast with Cromwell should be already apparent.) The equation camp = queer = performativity = transgender that pervades this literature not only misrepresents reality but ignores the important narrative of becoming a biological man or woman. Lacking a postmodern-as-second-language course, however, I nd Prosser at times heavy going. His extended and useful critique of Butlers Gender Trouble strikes me as unnecessarily reverent. Prosser views the narratives themselves through the lens of French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu and U.S. neurologist Oliver Sacks. Anzieu points to the primary function of the skin as an organ through which early learning about self, others, the external world, and boundaries occurs, and therefore the construction and continuity of the self, while Sackss emphasis on proprioception as fundamental to sensorimotor function is well known. While these insights are useful, as applied especially to the autobiography of British transsexual Raymond Thompson, I wonder what virtue lies in employing secondary sources and popular accounts to arrive at a knowledge of neurology. This method is not unique to Prosser but characterizes much postmodern work: the insights or interpretations of one or two writers, drawing on another discipline, are employed rather than sources in the discipline in question. This approach results in limited and idiosyncratic commentaries rather than solid bridges between elds. In any case, it is not only skin that teaches us who we are, as any transsexual on androgens soon discovers.

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In the mainstream notion of transsexuality, cosmetic sex-reassignment surgery, applied to an otherwise fully functioning normal body, denotes no more than a neurotic demand. But as Prosser demonstrates, the narratives record experiences of wholeness, of bodily integration after surgery. He points to Audre Lordes account of the violation of her self-identity in losing a breast to cancer, an opposite but parallel evidence of the signicance of skin, body, and sexualized body parts to our selves. Not simply costumes for our experience of our bodies, our theoretical conceptions of the body are foundationally formed by and reformative of them (96). In the autobiographies Prosser identies certain recurring topoi, such as the mirror scene, and the common central trope around which they are organized: initial suffering and confusion, self-discovery, corporal transformation, and arrival in a new status as the retrieved/achieved self. (Note the contrast between these self-generated stages and the more traditional, sociologically and socially imposed stages employed by Devor.) The need for medical assistance seems to mandate such a narrative, as, unfortunately, the gatekeepers to medical interventions may require, or are seen to require, distortions in the life history. But as Prosser indicates in regard to the expression a man/boy in a womans body, the organization of experience and the specic tropes are there because they are simply what transsexuality feels like (69). Further, writing an autobiography after reassignment serves an integrative function, demonstrating and validating continuity in discontinuity. The enduring concern with given names and pronouns reveals that transition is about more than just surgery: discovery of previous narratives or even clinical and medical accounts provides understanding and afrmation of ones state. Thus we contribute to the guideposts available for future trannies, while publishers offer our accounts to titillate the general public. The paradox, as Prosser sees it, is that our highest aim is to pass, yet we narrate our lives as transsexual journeys. In another chapter Prosser provides a provocative analysis of Radclyffe Halls Well of Loneliness, which continues to be read as a lesbian text, although Hall specically identies the protagonist as an invert. Prosser relates the novel to the sexologists of the day, who were engaged in the construction of the invert concept. But here he, like Cromwell, engages in presentism. The appearance of large numbers of nontransgendered feminine women (and masculine men) who are involved in same-sex relations, or who identify as other than heterosexual, had simply not yet occurred. In its earliest usage, lesbian usually meant inverted, masculine, cross-dressing, to some degree cross-gendered, preferring relations with heterosexual, feminine women. These individuals became a subset

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of the lesbian community, identied as butches and contrasted with fems, now identied as homosexuals as well. These later butches form the largest source of new female-to-male transsexuals (80 percent of Devors sample). Prosser notes that invert was replaced by homosexual around 1900, but the new term retained the old meaning until 1970 or so, when nontransgendered individuals became the predominant gay population. The old denotation persists to this day in the United States outside the gender elite and cosmopolitan urban centers. Nor can inverts be distinguished from lesbians by their failure to establish satisfactory relations with other women. That aspect of Halls novel rang true for many lesbians down through the 1950s. The masochistic, self-sacricing lesbian in The Well of Loneliness is no different from many lesbians, in real life and in ction, of subsequent decades. Feinbergs quasi-autobiographical Stone Butch Blues leads Prosser to attempt to discriminate transgender from transsexual.5 But he erects barriers that have little basis in fact. Prosser recognizes the recent shift to transgender as an umbrella term, and the binary transgender-versus-transsexual dialogue it has engendered; he wishes to maintain the distinction and defends transsexuals demands for sex reassignment. I am not sure that that access rests on terminological distinctions. Again, more social history would have shed more light. Second Skins concludes with an epilogue on photography of and by transsexuals, paralleling autobiographical narratives in the paradoxical claim of success while insisting on special status. Look at me, say the photographs. Im a real man! . . . Did you know that Im a transsexual?! A long discussion of Roland Barthes follows, but then, so nally does the authors own photograph. Although laden with postmodern diction, this work is nevertheless important and stimulating, full of protable insights; it makes use of an untapped body of materials and provides the stimulus for future work. The eld of FTM scholarship, new though in fact old, awaits serious historical investigation and more extensive sociological and psychological investigations, elucidating and perhaps ending terminological border wars. The last three works reviewed here triangulate FTM work at takeoff. Let us hope for clarity and rigor in the works that build on them.

Notes
1. The FTM Resource Guide, 6th ed. (1999), lists professional caregivers of all kinds, as well as relevant organizations and support groups. It may be obtained for ve dollars from FTM International Inc., 1360 Mission St., Ste. 200, San Francisco, CA 94103. Diane Leslie Feinberg, Journal of a Transsexual (New York: World View, 1980).

2.

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3. 4.

5.

Diane Wood Middlebrook, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1998), 204, 274. For a fruitful discussion of recent border wars see Judith Halberstam and C. Jacob Hale, Butch/FTM Border Wars: A Note on Collaboration, GLQ 4 (1998): 283 85; Judith Halberstam, Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum, GLQ 4 (1998): 287310; and C. Jacob Hale, Consuming the Living, Dis(re)membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM Borderlands, GLQ 4 (1998): 31148. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues: A Novel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1993).