The Transgender Studies Reader

Susan Stryker, Stephen Whittle, Susan Stryker, Stephen Whittle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135398910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Transgender studies is the latest area of academic inquiry to grow out of the exciting nexus of queer theory, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality. Because transpeople challenge our most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between bodies, desire, and identity, the field is both fascinating and contentious. The Transgender Studies Reade r puts between two covers fifty influential texts with new introductions by the editors that, taken together, document the evolution of transgender studies in the English-speaking world. By bringing together the voices and experience of transgender individuals, doctors, psychologists and academically-based theorists, this volume will be a foundational text for the transgender community, transgender studies, and related queer theory.

IV Selves: Identity and Community

24 Body, Technology, and Gender in Transsexual Autobiographies

Bernice L. Hausman

DOI: 10.4324/9780203955055-24

In Changing Sex, Bernice Hausman historicizes the relationship between the discovery and synthesization of the so-called sex hormones, gender reassignment surgeries, and theories of gender identity. She asks how medical practitioners have justified the physical transformation of the transsexual body, and concludes that the theory of the gendered self originated precisely in the efforts of those practitioners to manipulate the sexed body. Transsexualism, rather than being a very marginalized and esoteric concern, thus is actually central to the development of contemporary Western notions of self, gender, body, and sex.

Hausman clearly believes that greater freedom of gender expression is a social good, yet she takes a remarkably conservative ethical perspective on bodily transformation. Unlike Janice Raymond, whose analysis she follows to a significant degree, Hausman does not presume that transsexual people are in themselves dangerous to women, but she starts from the premise that they reproduce gender stereotypes, which are quintessentialy opposed to personal freedom and feminist progress. Consequently, her explicitly goal is to produce a compelling argument for the discontinuation of medical gender-reassignment procedures. In her advocacy of this position, she assumes that she, as a self-styled feminist scholar, should have greater authority over transsexual embodiment than transsexual people themselves.

In chapter 5, excerpted here, Hausman focuses on transsexual autobiographical narratives. She concludes that transsexual autobiographers construct a narrative space that contains the medical discourse but steps outside it, to claim a gender identity predicated on anatomical bodily difference, but different from the identity normally assigned. Despite her extensive review of the burgeoning literature on physical intersexuality and biological sex diversity, Hausman does not imagine that transsexual people can have anything other than a normatively sexed body. Hence, their autobiographical narratives are merely self-justifications that seek social acceptance for the drastic bodily alterations they desire.

Hausman validates a sense of transsexual agency in a somewhat circuitous manner, by claiming that transsexual autobiographical statements are the mechanisms that secure the acquiescence of physicians, surgeons, and psychiatrists in an ethically suspect practice that violates the integrity of the body. In making this claim, she sets herself in opposition to many transsexuals who feel that their relationships with service providers are often more adversarial than opportunistic. By imagining transsexuals to be peculiarly powerful in achieving their goals, Hausman fails to acknowledge the many forms of vulnerability to violence and discrimination that transsexual people actually face in society.

Thus far, my analysis has concentrated on medical discourses and practices, including the technologies that preceded and facilitated the conceptual production of “gender” as the psychological counterpart to biological sex. In this chapter, I shift gears somewhat and analyze discourses produced by transsexuals themselves about their experiences. My examination of transsexual autobiographies has two purposes: to demonstrate how “gender” discursively operates to mask the material construction of transsexuals through the technologies of medical practice and to show how transsexuals compromise the official understanding of “gender” as divorced from biological sex by their insistent reiteration of the idea that physiological intersexuality is the cause of their cross-sex identification. While the first point will allow us to see how “gender” works to contain transsexual accounts within the conceptual parameters of humanism, the second will make evident the extent to which official pronouncements of the medical establishment are not homologous to the understanding and experience of transsexuals concerning the origins and causes of their condition.

The purpose here is not to pit transsexual discourses against medical discourses in order to determine which most accurately represent the transsexual phenomenon. Rather, I am interested in marking discursive discontinuities in the context of which another story about transsexualism can be fashioned. If the story told in the first four chapters of this book is a subversive retelling of the official medical accounts concerning the emergence of transsexualism and the idea of gender, then the story told in this chapter is an attempt to subvert the official story put forth by transsexual autobiographers. Because I have thus far concentrated on the “official” history of transsexualism within medicine, here I use examples from the autobiographies of “official” transsexuals. All of the texts I examine in this chapter were published as books, many by well-established publishing houses. These texts (for the most part) do not document the stories of transients or sex workers—those marginalized subjects within an already marginalized subject formation—but tell the stories of celebrities or “public transsexuals” (that is, those made famous by their emergence as transsexuals, those who were already famous and had to account for their transformation, or those who chose to live publicly as transsexuals in order to set an example or work toward public acceptance of transsexualism).

This is not an insignificant issue, especially given the current popularity of media representations of the most marginalized transsexuals—Paris Is Burning comes to mind here. My decision to concentrate on the more mainstream accounts of transsexual experience—both within medicine and the transsexual community—is based on a desire to challenge these accounts with critical attention to their internal problematics. That is, instead of countering the official accounts of transsexualism—as well as the official accounts of gender—with evidence from more marginalized transsexual subjects (sex workers, for example), I have chosen to interrogate the official accounts themselves and demonstrate the extent to which they can be reread to tell another story. Ultimately, I believe, this kind of analysis will offer a more serious challenge to the hegemony of these discourses in the public sphere, where the spread of gender ideologies threatens to cover over other significant, and destabilizing, accounts of human subjectivity.¹

The analysis of these “official” transsexual autobiographies is not unproblematic, however. Because most transsexuals do not write their life stories, those autobiographies authored by transsexuals cannot be taken to be representative of the “average transsexual.” Yet books by transsexuals about sex change hold a significant position in contemporary transsexual culture. Mario Martino writes in Emergence that, as Marie, she was the first in her town to buy Christine Jorgensen's autobiography when it came out in 1967. In her autobiography, Conundrum, Jan Morris discusses the emotional significance of finding Lili Elbe's autobiography. Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, in a used-book store. Renée Richards found a copy of the same text at an important point in her life as Richard Raskind. Nancy Hunt writes in Mirror Image, “I can remember only once when my life has been altered by the printed word. That was upon reading an article in the New York Times Magazine on March 17, 1974.…It described the transition from man into woman of an English journalist now known as Jan Morris.”² In addition, organizations such as the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE) sell all manner of books about transsexualism and transvestism, including transsexual autobiographies, as part of their educative outreach.

Thus, while transsexual autobiographies may not be representative of the experiences of many (or even most) transsexual subjects, they are indicative of the establishment of an official discourse (or set of discourses) regulating transsexual self-representations and, therefore, modes of transsexual subjectivity. The autobiographical texts help institute a certain discursive hegemony within a community whose members have a substantial investment in mimicking the enunciative modality of those who have been successful in achieving sex transformation. Collecting the autobiographies of successful transsexuals—either through personal contact or by print media—constitutes an important part of transsexual self-construction, self-education, and self-preparation for encounters with clinic personnel. As Sandy Stone writes in “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”: “[M]any transsexuals keep something they call by the argot term ‘O.T.F.’: The Obligatory Transsexual File.…Transsexuals also collect autobiographical literature.”³

Transsexuals are a notoriously well-read patient population, primarily because their success in obtaining the medical treatments that they seek depends upon their ability to convince doctors that their personal history matches the officially sanctioned etiology.⁴ In a context where telling the right story may confer legitimacy upon one's demand and the wrong story can foil one's chances for sex change, the autobiographies of those transsexuals who have successfully maneuvered within the strict protocols of the gender clinics constitute guide-books of no mean proportion. They also serve to assure would-be transsexual readers that they are members of a group and not as isolated as they may feel. This latter function helps individuals who often perceive themselves to be entirely alone and outside the cultural system to authorize themselves as deserving cultural subjects and is instrumental in their assumption of an identity as a transsexual.

All of this suggests that transsexual autobiographies serve to encourage and enable transsexual subjects to conform to the parameters of an established “transsexual personal history” in order to obtain the desired medical treatment. Certainly, I am not the first to suggest the limitations this tendency imposes on the construction of transsexual subjectivity. Sandy Stone argues that the instantiation of the “official transsexual history” necessary for approval for surgical and hormonal sex change produced a situation in which the potential “intertextuality” of transsexual subjectivity has been erased:

[I]t is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear. The highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase him/herself, to fade into the “normal” population as soon as possible. Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history—learning to lie effectively about one's past. What is gained is acceptability in society. What is lost is the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience.…Instead, authentic experience is replaced by a particular kind of story, one that supports the old constructed positions.⁵

In opposition to this tendency, she calls on transsexuals to resist passing, a behavior she claims is “the essence of transsexualism”:

I could not ask a transsexual for anything more inconceivable than to forgo passing, to be consciously “read,” to read oneself aloud—and by this troubling and productive reading to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written—in effect, then, to become a (look out—dare I say it again?) a posttranssexual.⁶

Stone asks for this in order to alleviate the compromises of silence that she believes regulate transsexual subjectivity and keep an alternative, multifaceted, and potentially subversive story of gender, sex, and the body from surfacing in and through the culture at large. Stone asserts that this silence concerning the “lived experience” of transsexuals has a significant and damaging effect on their relationships with others: “Transsexuals who pass seem able to ignore the fact that by creating totalized, monistic identities, forgoing physical and subjective intertextuality, they have foreclosed the possibility of authentic relationships.”⁷

“The Empire Strikes Back” is a powerful essay, representing the first attempt by a transsexual woman to argue as a lesbian-feminist and as a transsexual for the destabilizing potential of transsexualism within a cultural context that regulates the phenomenon into the relative safety of socially acceptable discourses about gender.⁸ Nevertheless, Stone's argument stops short of recognizing gender as a category that might be fully deconstructed in its historical context. She claims that “the transsexual currently occupies a position which is nowhere, which is outside the binary oppositions of gendered discourse,” and that consequently, “for a transsexual, as a transsexual, to generate a true, effective and representative counterdiscourse is to speak from outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible.”⁹ The production of the concept of gender within research on intersexuality and transsexualism suggests, however, that the transsexual speaks fully within the cultural discourse of/on gender, not only because that discourse was produced precisely to account for intersexual and transsexual subjects‘ experiences, but also because the performance of transsexual subjectivity depends upon the expert manipulation of traditional gender codes. To be a transsexual is perhaps to be “in gender” more fixedly than other subjects whose gender performances are perceived to be “natural.”

Stone suggests that a “true” transsexual discourse would problematize gender by destabilizing the official transsexual history of the “wrong body” and by introducing into discourse “disruptions of the old patterns of desire that the multiple dissonances of the transsexual body imply.”¹⁰ She wants to produce a more authentic history of transsexual...