1 Transgressive bodies and places
Bending binaries
It’s not all about that private 20-week ultrasound anymore! More and more parents are planning gender reveal parties to find out their baby’s sex and share the excitement with family and friends through a big reveal, usually in cake form. So how is it done? Most moms and dads have their ultrasound technician write the child’s sex on a slip of paper that is placed in an envelope. It’s then dropped off at a bakery where a cake is baked in the appropriate color and iced to hide the news. When the parents-to-be cut into the sweet treat, they learn about their future offspring’s sex.
(Gruber 2016, no page number)
I begin with the above excerpt from the popsugar.com website, not to celebrate another commercially driven baby party opportunity, but to highlight the persistent thinking that bodies are born, and remain, either male or female. Gender-reveal parties are trending in western countries where most pregnant women undergo prenatal sonography, of which approximately 50 per cent want to know if they are having a boy or a girl (Shipp et al. 2004). The party centrepiece – a cake – conceals the secret below multicoloured icing. The first slice of the cake reveals sponge (or more icing) that is either pink – to indicate the impending arrival of a girl – or blue for a boy. The many possibilities of sex and gender are absent from these parties as they only take into consideration gender and sex as a binary. Parents-to-be, family and friends at gender-reveal parties all assume that the baby – regardless of its biology – will adopt a gender identity that is socially and culturally prescribed according to normative understandings of sexed bodies. Gender-reveal parties reinforce the notion that gender is synonymous with genitalia, and they assume a narrow understanding of sex and gender, despite:
evolving notions about what it means to be a woman or a man and the meanings of transgender, cisgender, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, agender, or any of the more than 50 terms Facebook offers users for their profiles. At the same time, scientists are uncovering new complexities in the biological understanding of sex. Many of us learned a high school biology that sex chromosomes determine a baby’s sex, full stop: XX means it’s a girl; XY means it’s a boy. But on occasion, XX and XY don’t tell the whole story.
(Henig 2017, 51)
Some people may wish to live gender free. Consider, for example, the decisions of New South Wales (NSW), Australian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. In March 2010 they sent Scottish-born Norrie May-Welby an immigration certificate that states ‘sex not specified’. The Sydney Morning Herald (Gibson 2010, no page number), in an article entitled ‘Sexless in the city: a gender revolution’ wrote:
This Mardi Gras, Norrie received a gift that no other androgynous person in NSW has had before. The night before the parade, the postman [sic] brought a certificate from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages that contained neither the dreaded ‘M’ nor its equally despised cousin, ‘F’. Instead, it said ‘sex not specified’, making the 48-year-old Sydneysider, who identifies as neuter and uses only a first name, the first in the state to be neither man nor woman in the eyes of the NSW government. Because Norrie was born in Scotland (and used the surname May-Welby), it was not a birth certificate but a Recognised Details Certificate – the version given to immigrants who have changed sex and want it recorded.
The decision to allow Norrie May-Welby to immigrate to Australia as ‘sex not specified’ started a legal battle. The Registry backtracked, reversing their decision and claiming they did not have the legal authority to produce a gender neutral certificate. Norrie filed a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Court of the Appeal. The legal battle went on for four years, resulting in a High Court ruling that the law does recognise a person may be neither male nor female. Norrie is delighted, claiming a victory for ‘sex and gender diverse people throughout Australia’ (ABC News 2014, no page number).
A quick glance at other global media tells us more about sex and gender. Media are reporting that a ‘gender revolution’ is taking place in and through screens and in particular places (see National Geographic’s (2017) special issue on ‘The Shifting Landscape of Gender’). Early in 2014, for example, Facebook announced a new list of gender identities, including 51 possible options, allowing users to select transgender, intersex, genderqueer and other possibilities. These options recognise gender identities as fluid, changing and complex (Baldwin 2014). Transgender and gender variant representation on television is hitting new highs with, for example, I Am Cait (2015) featuring Caitlin Jenner – formerly known as Bruce Jenner and a high profile Olympic athlete. I Am Cait is a reality television show that documents Caitlin’s gender transition. Orange is the New Black (2013) may be the first women’s prison drama to include a transgender woman character played by an African American trans actress Laverne Cox. Transparent (2014) centres on the main character – Maura Pfefferman – and her gender transition and includes transgender actors in a variety of transgender and gender variant roles. The teen show Glee (2009) includes a variety of feminine men, masculine women, as well as sexually diverse characters.
From gender-reveal parties to television series that centre on transgender characters, sex and gender are central to bodies, places and spaces. For decades critical scholars – feminists and others – have argued that bodies don’t simply exist, rather they are gendered, sexed, racialised (Davis 1997; Gatens 1988; Rose 1993) and that lived experiences associated with age, size, and class matter (Duncan 1996; Johnston 1997; Longhurst 2014; McDowell and Court 1994; Moss and Dyck 2002). Bodies and space intermingle (Probyn 2003) and may prompt ‘gender trouble’ (Butler 1990). One cannot escape the requirement to ‘check’ either a ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ box when applying for jobs, bank loans, enrolling at school, to name just a few institutional examples where place is imagined as only via a binary gender. Binding legal gender status appears on birth certificates, passports and drivers licences. While across the globe one can see the changing politics of naming race and ethnicity via official census questions (Yanow 2015), the same has not happened to sex and gender. This is because a narrow understanding of biology is commonly understood to dictate a male / female division. The notion, therefore that all bodies fit into either male or female is hotly contested and has been for some time. In a groundbreaking collection on geographies of sex, gender and sexuality, Julia Cream (1995, 35) asks: ‘What is the sexed body?’ Cream (1995, 36) shows that bodies that do not fit a male or female binary – bodies such as those who are transsexual, intersex, have XXY chromosomes – are ‘pioneers placed, often unwillingly, at the frontiers of sex and gender’ (see also Fausto-Sterling 2000; Kessler 1998; Preves 2003). During the mid-1990s Namaste (1996) addressed violence against people whose gender is understood as non-normative, particularly for gay men, lesbians and transgender people. By the end of the 1990s it became well established that bodies and places are mutually constitutive and performative (Nast and Pile 1998), are an important site for understanding power, and that gendered subjectivities are fluid.
In the U.S. transgender people report experiencing employment discrimination (see Chapter 6, and Grant et al. 2011; Lombardi et al. 2002). The 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey (Grant et al. 2011) shows that transgender people in the U.S. are far more likely than cisgender people to live in poverty, be homeless and unemployed. Transgender people are disproportionately represented in HIV statistics and in poor mental health. These disparities increase for transgender people of colour. Transgender people ‘experience vulnerability at the hands of the state and capitalism; this vulnerability is compounded at intersections of marginalisation’ (Herman 2015, 90).
This book argues that bodies, gender, and space are inextricably linked. Transforming Gender, Sex and Place brings together contemporary scholarly debates, original empirical material, and popular culture to consider bodies and spaces that revolve around, and resist, binary gender. While binaries have, for some time, been the subject of critique by human geographers (Cloke and Johnston 2005), they are being dismantled by geographers interested in trans theories and queer geographies (see Browne 2006; Browne and Lim 2010; Doan 2007, 2009, 2010, 2016; Hines 2007, 2010, 2013; Hines and Sanger, 2010; Hines et al. 2010; Hines and Taylor 2012; Johnston 2005a; Johnston and Longhurst 2016; Nash 2010a, 2010b, 2011). The overriding argument is that gender is fluid and dependent on place and space. Petra Doan (2010, 635) reminds us all that ‘transgendered and gender variant people experience the gendered division of space as a special kind of tyranny – the tyranny of gender – that arises when people dare to challenge the hegemonic expectations for appropriately gendered behaviour in western society’. This book examines this tyranny in relation to place and space. I bring to the pages an embodied geography of transphobia and gender binarism. While it is clear that transphobia exists, it is far less evident what transphobia does to people and places. Talia Mae Bettcher (2014, 249) refuses to give a neat definition of transphobia, rather, saying that transphobia is:
directed toward trans people. In doing this, I have tried to avoid smuggling an actual account of the underlying nature of transphobia into the definition. But much depends upon how the expression trans people is itself defined. If it is defined as ‘those who violate gender norms,’ or as ‘those who are problematically positioned with respect to the gender binary,’ then a very general account of the nature of transphobia is immediately forthcoming—namely, transphobia is a hostile response to perceived violations of gender norms and/or to challenges to the gender binary.
I focus on how transphobia is lived, experiences and embodied in the context of the everyday in particular spaces and places, and within interpersonal relationships. The book also celebrates gender diverse bodies, spaces and places. The following questions are addressed: how are place and space transformed by gender variant bodies, and vice versa? Where do some gender variant people feel in and / or out of place? What happens to place and space when binary gender is unravelled and subverted?
Transforming gender and sex
The book’s title reflects a hopeful geography (Lawson 2005) informed by feminist, queer, and trans theories that hold firmly to the notion of materiality (in other words, I am not just interested in representations or social constructions of bodies but also in ‘real’ fleshy bodies). In order to understand how gender variant bodies transform place and space, I turn to queer, feminist and trans theories. Queer theory emerged in the past two decades primarily as a critique of heteronormativity (Warner 1991), and the assumption that bodies are easily divided into ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and that these categories are opposing, natural, and biological. Queer theory allows for the challenging of categories gender and sex, including the idea that ‘sex’ refers only to biological or scientific truth, while ‘gender’ – deemed its binary opposite – is socially constructed. Gender and sex intermingle and the matrix of heteronormativity may be disrupted when the biological diversity of bodies is recognised (Butler 1990). The existence and recognition of socially and culturally marginalised gender identities – transgender, transsexual, intersex, genderqueer, cross-dresser, masculine women, feminine men, and so on – also destabilises heteronormativity.
A defining aspect of trans scholarship is that it developed (mostly) independently from Women’s Studies programmes, feminist studies, and LGBQ studies, despite many overlapping areas of interest. Susan Stryker (2006, 7) notes that trans scholarship has a ‘vexed’ relationship with both feminist and queer theory due, in part, to some feminists’ attitudes towards trans-identified people. A popular and often derogatory expression, TERFs (transgender exclusionary radical feminists), is used to identify anti-trans groups (see Hines 2017; Williams 2016). Certainly, Janice Raymond’s 1974 book The Transsexual Empire illustrates the overt hostility from feminists of this time. This hostile relationship – generated by Raymond’s book and more recently by Sheila Jeffreys’ 2014 book Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism – create further rifts between trans and feminist scholarship. Concerned that Jeffreys’ book would add to antitransgender sentiments, the Transgender Studies Quarterly journal created a special issue on Trans/Feminisms (Stryker and Bettcher 2016). Following this special issue, I too want to ‘expand the discussion beyond the familiar and overly simplistic dichotomy often drawn between an exclusionary transphobic feminism and an inclusive trans-affirming feminism’ (Stryker and Bettcher 2016, 5). I use queer and feminist theories that are trans inclusive in order to affirm gender diversity and experiences. Feminist transphobia is absolutely not a universally held belief and feminist politics are useful for understanding transgender lives. I take an inclusive view, drawing from various trans, feminist, queer and geographical studies, to argue for the recognition of multiple subjectivities, behaviours, politics, and lived experiences.
Paisley Currah, Jamison Green and Susan Stryker (2009, 3), leaders in the field of trans studies, provide critical definitions which this book builds on. They note the term ‘trans’ is:
a sense of persistent identification with, and expression of, gender-coded behaviors not typically associated with one’s sex at birth, and which were reducible neither to erotic gratification, nor psychopathological paraphilia, nor physiological disorder or malady. The self-applied term was meant to convey the sense that one could live non-pathologically in a social gender not typically associated with one’s biological sex, as well as the sense that a single individual should be free to combine elements of different gender styles and presentations, or different sex/gender combinations. At one level, the emergence of the ‘transgender’ category represented a hair-splitting new addition to the panoply of available minority identity labels; at another level, however, it represented a resistance to medicalisation, to pathologisation, and to the many mechanisms whereby the administrative state and its associated medico-legal-psychiatric institutions sought to contain and delimit the socially disruptive potentials of sex/gender non-normativity. Having an intelligible social identity is the means by which an individual body enters into a productive relationship with social power. Thus ‘identity politics,’ the struggle to articulate new categories of socially viable personhood, remains central to the consideration of individual rights in the United States, and to the pursuit of a more just social order. The emergence of ‘transgender’ falls squarely into the identity politics tradition.
Gender categories, then, cross and slip in and around the concepts of ‘trans’ (Stryker et al. 2008): trans-gender; trans-sex; trans-place; trans-space; and I encapsulate these terms within the broad field of gender variant geographies. Gender is the primary category of analysis, and the book advances the ways in which gender variance intersects with sex, place, and space. Transgender, as a term, has become a shorthand concept for multiple, sometimes overlapping, and over contested meanings. It may signal a type of gender crossing, yet it also may signal the multiple ways of embodying genders that muddle or queer the gender binary. The term is useful when advocating for identity-based rights claims and critical explorations of gender based inequalities. There are, however, ever evolving terms to describe embodied identities that are gender nonconforming and that resist the coercive binary system. In this book I use several terms that are used by participants, community and activist groups, plus intersex and transgender scholars. I use the words ‘trans’, ‘transgender’, ‘gender identity’, ‘gender expression’, ‘intersex’ and ‘gender variant’ frequently. I use ‘trans’ as an inclusive and far reaching term to indicate people who identify as transgender, transsexual, or within the transgender spectrum. The term ‘transsexual’ usually refers to a medical expectation or medical transition that may be required by doctors when evaluating who is eligible for gender reassignment procedures. All of these terms are political, and indicate a wide variety of people whose gender identity or expression transgresses binary gender norms. I also use the word ‘gender variant’ because there are many people who may not identify as ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’ yet who experience persistent gender identity discrimination. Masculine women and feminine men, for example, though not trans-identified, experience gender identity discrimination. The term ‘gender variant’, hopefully, captures the way in which bodies and expressions of gender and sex ‘push back’ on the narrow understandings of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ according to the gender assigned to people at birth.
Other terms that are frequently used in this book are ‘identities’ and ‘subjectivities’. Many commentators who address the intersectionality of gender, sex, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and so on, focus on the pitfalls and possibilities of naming and analysing each category as not fixed but dynamic, changeable and interlinked (Hines 2007; Hopkins 2017; Lykke 2010; Probyn 2003; Rose 1995). Some scholars define identity and subjectivity against each other, so that identity tends to mean external social categories that individuals subscribe to, while subjectivity refers to the way people adopt social categories and turn them into lived choices and experiences (Longhurst 2003; Probyn, 2003; Wetherell, 2008). I keep these two concepts in tension throughout the book to show their mutual construction and the complexities of people’s lived experiences.
There are, of course, many non-western gender expressions and identities, particularly in the South Pacific. It is impossible to list all South Pacific Indigenous gender identities and expressions and many of these are contested, depend on place, culture, and ongoing colonisation. In Aotearoa New Zealand ‘taka...
