Transitioning

Matter, Gender, Thought

EJ Gonzalez-Polledo

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783488469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Transitioning: matter, gender, thought takes the body, its ontologies and temporalities, as a primary ethnographic heuristic to explore transition contexts, relations and life processes. Although in Britain the Gender Recognition Act has, since 2004, provided a framework for identity recognition for those who seek to live as a member of the opposite gender, this book draws on trans men’s experiences to conceptualise transition outside this framework. Thinking through changing materialities, cultures and epistemologies of transition, the book brings together perspectives in anthropology, transgender studies, and social theory to think through how bodies happen, and the scales, assemblages, transmissions and indeterminacies in their process of becoming something other than themselves.

ONE

Transition Inside Out

We have entered a new chapter in transition’s epistemic history. More people than ever transition. Search ‘gender identity’ in Tumblr, one of the fastest-growing social networks, and Tumblr’s search algorithm will return as related searches ‘transgender’, ‘nonbinary’, ‘gender expression’, ‘genderqueer’ and ‘genderfluid’.¹ Entering ‘trans guy’ on YouTube returns award-winning documentaries and short films, transition video diaries and feature films describing a wide range of transition beginning and endpoints, as well as multiple medical and non-medical routes. Legal, health and social organisations, social media platforms, online news groups and advocacy organisation connect a growing global gender diverse community articulated around new issues. For the period 1986–2000, mentions of the term ‘transgender’ in Google’s book database increased 275 percent. In 2016, these figures tripled. Coming out celebrities and new trans visibilities in mainstream media are making ‘transgender’ a household name.² Not only are transgender identities becoming increasingly common, but their ubiquity is on par with the global diversification of non-binary gender roles, as well as redefinitions of kinship, attachment and intimacy enmeshed in the economic, political and technological rhythms of our time (Halberstam 2012). Human rights campaigns have made possible imagining and demanding social inclusion and human rights for gender minorities (Missé and Coll-Planas 2010), and many European member countries have passed legislation that recognises trans identities without the requirement of sterilisation or genital surgery, an option available only to a small minority in Europe only a few years ago.³ New uses of biotechnologies and treatment options make possible multiple embodiment and life projects, as well as more transition rhythms and directions (Girshick 2008). Beemyn and Rankin’s (2011) survey study among 3,474 respondents in the United States suggests that the meaning of being transgender has become widely diversified. Theirs is the first large-scale study to include not only MTF (male-to-female) and FTM (female-to-male) identified respondents, but to specifically recognise many who describe their genders beyond the binary, including gender identifications as ‘genderqueer’, ‘androgyne’, ‘bigender’ and ‘third gender’.⁴

Despite the normalisation of gender idioms and embodiment forms, however, a long road is still ahead in terms of achieving real equality and social justice for gender minorities. As alternatives to pathology frameworks of trans identity are given serious consideration by healthcare practitioners and policymakers, answering long many struggle to gain access to old forms of state-funded healthcare and legal frameworks of gender recognition legislation in the United States, most EU member states and many countries worldwide. A Europe-wide legal survey study conducted by Whittle, Turner, Combs and Rhodes (2008) identified increasing diversity in the number and kind of transitions recorded in the survey. However, access and recognition problems still characterise transitioning in Europe, and many member states do not comply with human rights and anti-discrimination legislation. The majority of survey respondents in Whittle, Turner, Combs and Rhodes’ study had not obtained state funding for hormonal treatment or surgery, and nearly one third were refused treatment because their healthcare practitioner did not approve of gender-affirming treatments. Yet regardless of institutional refusal, the majority of respondents found ways to front paying for healthcare privately, while often living in lower-income brackets (2008, 11). In Europe, the proliferation of self-reported gender identities has not come with greater equality for gender minorities. A recent survey commissioned by the European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA 2014) examined perceptions of equal treatment on grounds of gender identity and sexual orientation, and outlined employment status and living conditions as pervasive grounds where trans respondents felt most often discriminated against. Particularly vulnerable groups, such as trans women, young people and people whose work is not remunerated or regularised, continue to be routinely exposed to violence, and regardless of the availability of state frameworks, levels of violence, discrimination and assault are consistently higher for those presenting non-binary (see Balzer and Hutta 2012).

Transition has become an interdisciplinary object spanning across academic, media, advocacy and cultural production. The interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, at least in some universities in Europe and North America, has brought together a global community of scholars, conferences, publication projects, arts and festivals and advocacy. Yet, so much is changing in the way transition is imagined as an individual embodiment project and theorised critically across disciplines that transition idioms have deeply transformed how we know gender. However, in medical and juridical terms, and very often also analytically, the current model of transition is based on a distinction between sex and gender that draws ontological and political value from the distinction between biology and culture in models of reproductive physiology. The sex/gender distinction can be traced back to nineteenth-century sexual science, to the development of early scientific paradigms of sexual formation.⁵ With the development of the ‘new science of sex’ built on the discovery of a ‘humoral paradigm’ of sexual formation, solidist theories of bodily regulation were displaced. This was a paradigm of malleability with which early sexologists imagined physical agencies and relations linking organs and physical processes far apart, meaning that ‘persons could be born in a wide range of shapes and with clusters of characteristics produced by the constellation of cosmic, climatic, spermatic and humoral conditions at conception and generation’ (Hanawalt and Wallace 1996, 20). This paradigm allowed early sexologists to figure out the elements of the body which manifest masculinity or femininity, a group of elements that produce sexual appearance and function that has since been dubbed ‘the sexual body’ (Sengoopta 2006; Hall 2003). A distinction separated physical and psychosocial dimensions of the sexual body, associating the biological substratum of sex with genetic make-up, gonadal function and hormonal balance, and gender expression with the social performance of gender roles. Fraught as the study of sex ever was, according to Lesley Hall, the determination of facts around the composition of the sexual body led to the development of two schools of thought: the one that determined that gender roles flow naturally out of sexual difference, and those that thought there is nothing natural about this (2003, 266). In practice, the sexualisation of bodies, however, as Hall is fast to highlight, was built on imposing a system of social hierarchy over the sexes, where race and class, as well as other factors external to gender, influenced the way in which particular bodies were sexualised in scientific discourses (2003, 267).

Arguably, from its inception, this model rested on a philosophical bifurcation of nature and culture that draws on philosophical hylomorphism. For Aristotle, the hylomorphic model of nature was predicated upon the becoming together of form (morphe) and matter (hyle), and it accounted for the unity of substance with multiple constituents. For Aristotle, substantial form secured the unity of substance (Marmodoro 2013), in a way uncannily resonant with the workings of gender over sex. Critics of this model argue that it became embedded in the history of western thought through the assumption that form is ‘imposed by an agent with a particular design in mind, while matter, thus rendered passive and inert, became that which was imposed upon’ (Ingold 2011, 210). Esposito (2015) further suggests that the splitting of matter and form had consequences in solidifying distinctions between people and property, and the insistence, particularly in Roman Law, of splitting experience into a binary between thinking substance (res cogitans) and extended substance (res extensa), which acquired political relevance underlying Christian doctrine, for example, distinctions between body and soul. In fact, for Esposito, the privileged relation between the human body and the political is premised on the body not being a thing, ‘a thing is a non-person and a person is a non-thing’ (2015, 17). In fact, in Roman law, the living body was granted no legal status but was understood to be assimilated to the person who embodied it (2015, 28–29). In this context, personam habere (having personhood, literally to have a person) was a faculty that could be achieved and lost, and thus the paradigm of the person produced union rather than separation. Cohen (2008) traces the transfer of this distinction to western political ontology, when the idea of having a body was modelled on the relation of the self as property in seventeenth- century philosophy, at a time when the becoming property of the body sparked by new political and religious conflicts between nations. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan refigured the political terrain from theological to political doctrine, through the sacralisation of the king’s power and the definition of his ‘two bodies’ (Kantorowicz 1957). The split would pervade throughout the history of western philosophy and political theology, allowing only some people to achieve full status as persons: thresholds of personhood, associated with capacities for health, consciousness and self-termination determined the legal status potential persons, semi-persons, non-persons and anti-persons (see also Esposito 2016).

Hylomorphic distinctions also applied to sexual difference, as Gayle Salamon writes, and to capacities to own, or have, a gender. Here hylomorphism’s central tenet is that men and women are not only naturally different but complementary, a model predicated on the assumption that the sexes ‘like matter and form, are necessarily ontologically conjoined and that any one sex cannot find expression or existence without the other’ (2010, 7). As Sengoopta (2006), Oudshoorn (1994) and others have argued, this model arrived with a political agenda of social change, where the need to study the biology and cultural manifestations of sexual formation stemmed not only from a new theoretical interest in the relation between physical and social aspects of sexual identity but also to defend the social right to exist of gender nonconforming bodies. It was led by physicians and biologists inspired by the desire to understand how it became possible that some bodies did not naturally reflect the social order (Meyerowitz 2002; Stryker 2008). These physicians channelled a fin de siècle obsession with sexual ‘inversion’, and this obsession marked late nineteenth-century scientific literature about intersex conditions, understood as ‘intermediate’ states between the taken-for-granted ‘natural’ sexes. One could argue that this obsession laid the foundation to understand transition as the inversion of a given natural order.

The hylomorphic model of the sexual body underpinned the development of the medico-legal model most legal frameworks of trans recognition are based on, where recourse to binary gender citizenship remains the most crucial requisite of basic human rights (Sharpe 2001; Spade 2003). Although it has had multiple iterations over time, attached to scientific paradigms of sexual and gender formation and to clinical and research practices associated with the management of sexuality, in distinguishing physical and social dimensions of sexual formation, this model endows sex and gender with different ontological and political values. The distinction between sex and gender remains a common denominator that medical, legal and social services draw on to understand, recognise and single out the specific health and legal needs of people transitioning.⁶ This model presupposes that ‘successfully’ embodying gender is socially desirable, because it leads not only to enabling social recognition but because it preserves ‘natural’ social differences between the genders. In its bare bones, it assumes that transition begins when sex and gender are misaligned, and defines transition as a passage between genders linked to specific, documented standards of psychosocial and physical transformation, linking the successful expression of femininity and masculinity to measurable, observable traits aligned to socially recognised markers of gender adscription.

This model arguably became the basis of an ‘outside-in’ view of transition which upheld an essentialist view of the sexes based on discrete distinctions, and in relation to which only some forms of transition were legitimised. On the one hand, as an effect of providing a normative framework for trans identities, medico-legal discourses cast a veil of truth around markers of transition, turning these markers into biomedical, legal and social facts. However, biomedical research and clinical practices have also arguably been the most important site where transition’s ontologies and linguistic presentations were most often confounded. Critical approaches within trans studies have tracked pernicious effect of biomedical classifications in clinical relations and the making of trans identities, a position towards these forms of knowledge has informed politics of transgender representation and inclusion (Davy 2011), as well as critical trans politics (Spade 2003). Self-documented early nineteenth century transitions, such as those of Karl Bauer in Germany and Herculine Barbin in France, were written at a time when, as Jay Prosser notes, ‘sexual inversion was transgender’ (1998b, 118, emphasis in original), attesting to how this system was actually imposed in making their narratives translatable to scientific observers, rather than naturally recognised by people. Despite living in notably different contexts, these historical figures wrote autobiographical texts that reflect, only by opposition, the medical terminologies used to describe them. Bauer, as Sander Gilman describes him in a new edition of his autobiography (Body 2006), felt always already male, despite having been persistently misrecognised in his social environment and socialised as a girl. Bauer recounts how through much pain he managed to live behind his ‘bodilessness’ – after all, he signed his memoirs as N.O. Body – and live socially as male. Herculine Barbin, in Foucault’s view (1980), was living a ‘happy limbo’ of genderlessness, and never identified as hermaphrodite, but her doctors at the time, searching for a ‘true’ sexual identity, framed her narrative as one of ‘betweenness’. Her memoirs, however, present a more nuanced story, developed in equal parts by her intentional subversions of narrative identity and narrative form. Recent commentators such as C. J. Gomolka (2012) have identified these strategies as performative of ‘linguistic gender bending’, a stylistic manipulation of psychosomatic markers that could be read as a subversion of the gender grammars of her time, rather than an instantiation of her identity. Gomolka’s reading of Mes Souvenirs, as does Gilman’s introduction to Bauer’s N.O Body, resituates Barbin and Bauer’s stories newly in relation to their autobiographical voices, conjuring up differently the realities of their life conditions by framing how, while their identities became a medical curiosity, they had an altogether medically indifferent perception of their own identities.

LEXICONS OF DIFFERENCE

The sex/gender distinction became increasingly consequential as early sexologists produced a vocabulary of sexual difference in Germany and North America, informing the medical definitions of sex and gender and their legal representation. The etymology of gender as a notion takes us straight into species thinking. Dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary,⁷ place the origins of the word ‘gender’ in the Latin term ‘genus’ (birth, family, nation) and record as the first meaning of gender being that of kind, meaning a type or class of noun. In the fourteenth century, however, gender began to be utilised as to ‘the state of being male or being female’, particularly with reference to classes of things that had certain characteristics in common. In pre-twentieth-century history, gender had other meanings, including ‘that which was engendered’, female or male groups as totalities and analogies through which things could be divided, regardless of their connection to sex. At the end of the nineteenth century, endocrinologists and psychoanalysts shared a common interest in refuting deterministic hypotheses of sex, and worked towards redefining the relations between biology and behaviour in different, yet familiar, ways. Psychoanalysis brought to the fore new possibilities to address the relation between the physical and the social in processes of sexual formation (Fuss 1995; Wilson 2004), privileging interactive models of desire and sexual formation over deterministic hypotheses of sexual identity.⁸ At the same time, the establishment of sexology as an independent discipline within biomedicine in the first decades of the twentieth century was also driven by the aim to understand the ‘vital impulse’ that could account for those areas not fully explained by physiology. Endocrinologists such as Claude Bernard, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, fostered new ideas around the self-sufficiency and partial independence of the body as a self-producing entity, a system in process only partially dependent on its environment, insisting that the endocrine system evinced that ‘the continuity of phenomena, their imperceptible gradation and harmony must be recognised everywhere’ (Bernard quoted in Canguilhem and Delaporte 1994, 72).⁹

The sex/gender distinction, as Cealey Harrison and Hood-Williams (2002) have argued, is grounded in the assumption that ‘men’ and ‘women’ are naturally different, and their difference resides in the definition of their ‘sex’ as biologically fixed, natural and determinative in opposition to a psychosocial, culturally variant and, to a greater or lesser extent, volitional ‘gender’. However, psychoanalysis and endocrinology, with their diverging theories, methods and knowledge practices, were not always compatible in their respective understandings of this distinction. Sexologists tended to frame their practice through a commitment to the scientific demonstration of the causes of sexual variance based on experimental biological research. As Hausman (1995) pointed out, the hypothesis that gender ‘distress’ was caused by unconscious processes of association in individual existential universes became the starting point for a number of refutations of psychoanalytic theories. On the basis of the identification of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ sexual traits, Magnus Hirschfi...