Struggling for Ordinary

Media and Transgender Belonging in Everyday Life

Andre Cavalcante

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479864584
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

An in-depth look at the role of media in the struggle for transgender inclusion From television shows like Orange is the New Black and Transparent, to the real-life struggles of Caitlyn Jenner splashed across the headlines, transgender visibility is on the rise. But what was it like to live as a transgender person in a media environment before this transgender boom in television? While pop culture imaginations of transgender identity flourish and shape audience’s perceptions of trans identities, what does this new media visibility mean for transgender individuals themselves? Struggling for Ordinary engagingly answers these questions, offering a snapshot of how transgender individuals made their way toward a sense of ordinary life by integrating available media into their everyday experiences. Drawing on in-depth interviews with transgender communities, Andre Cavalcante offers a richly detailed account of how the media impacts the lives and experiences of transgender individuals. He grippingly looks at the emotional toll that media takes on this population along with their resilience in the face of disempowerment. Deeply rooted in the life stories of transgender people, the book uses everyday circumstances to show how media and technology operate as a medium through which transgender individuals are able to cultivate an understanding of their identities, build inhabitable worlds, and achieve the routine affordances of everyday life from which they are often excluded. Expertly researched and eloquently argued, Struggling for Ordinary sheds a fascinating new light of the everyday struggles of individuals and communities, to seek a life in which transgender identity is fully integrated into the ordinary.

1

We Can No Longer Hide in Plain Sight

From the Cultural Margins to the Tipping Point

“The days of that brown wrapper are definitely over,” explained Allyson, a white trans woman in her late fifties from the Midwestern United States. Throughout the 1980s, Allyson received a monthly newsletter published by the local cross-dressing organization. It was mailed to her home wrapped in brown paper to conceal its contents. Each time she saw the newsletter sitting in her mailbox, she shuddered with excitement. Flipping through its pages made her feel part of something bigger than herself, and made her look forward to the organization’s next meeting. To ensure the safety and anonymity of its members, the cross-dressing organization operated under a veil of secrecy. Mailed correspondence was camouflaged, meeting times and locations circulated by word of mouth, and there were rules about how members should and should not communicate outside the walls of group meetings. Given the group’s covert nature, Allyson felt fortunate to have found it. She remembered, “At the time, finding support groups was a major issue for everyone. It took so much effort and many whispers. I found out about the group I went to through word of mouth. It was all very secretive.” She continued to explain her experiences with the group. “It met once a month at a hotel. The manager there was understanding and gave us a room to change in … I was married at the time and had to hide it from my wife. But I think she might have known. When we would have dinner parties and such, I would end up in the kitchen talking to the women. That’s where I fit in the best.”

For Allyson, as well as for many trans people living through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, transgender organizations and their newsletters were some of the only connections they had to a sense of community and their sole source of trans visibility. “There was nothing out there,” Allyson insisted, “an occasional something on TV, but that’s it.” This was, as many of my participants called it, the “pre-Internet age,” the mid- to late twentieth century, the era of the mass media dominated by print, radio, film, and television. This media environment was structured around a broadcasting model, where media texts were produced by a small group of elite creators and imparted to a mass audience. Space was finite. There was only so much radio-frequency spectrum available, only so many books that could stock bookstore shelves. Production costs and barriers to entry were high. Audiences were conceptualized as a “mass” (Nightingale and Ross 2003) and overwhelmingly imagined by the media industries as white, heterosexual, and middle class. Audiences themselves had limited capacity to communicate with producers of media and with each other.

Time and again, the participants in my study explained that the media environment within which they grew up was largely a desert of transgender representation, information, and discourse. In trying to locate resources for exploring their identities, they searched libraries, walked the aisles of bookstores, visited video rental stores, and scanned magazine racks. These hunts were conducted in public spaces, so they had to be careful. Showing too much interest in a taboo topic such as cross-dressing or transsexuality was risky to one’s reputation and safety. For the most part, their searches were fruitless. Yet every now and then, they would come across a jewel, something that resonated with them. This discovery justified the risk.

In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of transgender visibility in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on key moments and decisive historical junctures. I try to show what might have been available to the participants in my study as they perused their media environment. But first, I explore various historical processes that stirred alongside this visibility. These include the construction of gender as a non-binary category, the expansion of transgender discourse and communication networks, and the growing collective consciousness and political mobilization of transgender people throughout the twentieth century.1 These historical developments help account for the nature of transgender visibility in media culture and offer context to the experiences of those who shared their stories with me.

Gender Expansion, Political Mobilization, and Self-Definition

The word “transgender” brings together—sometimes neatly, sometimes not—a diverse set of gender variant practices, expressions, sensibilities, experiences, and modes of embodiment under one umbrella (Davidson 2007; Stryker 1998). On an individual level, it facilitates the construction of identity and feelings of belonging. Socially and politically, it allows those who experience similar oppressions to organize around a shared identity and speak with a collective voice. But the work that the category accomplishes is contingent on it being recognizable and meaningful, on having epistemic legitimacy. This legitimacy has been achieved over time and is the result of converging discourses: elite discourses developed by scientists, medical authorities, social service providers, and academics as well as the everyday discourses that have emerged on the ground from trans subcultures and ordinary people living their lives.

With respect to scientific discourse, the history of the category “transgender” stretches back to the end of the nineteenth century, a time when sex and sexuality entered the purview of European sexologists, a group of psychiatrists and medical professionals interested in non-normative sex and gender. As they investigated what they called “sexual perversion” and “sexual inversion,” their writings increasingly transformed alternative modes of gender and human sexuality into discourse (Foucault 1990). Pioneers in the field of sexology such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld were interested in non-procreative, non-heterosexual sex and forms of gender “deviance.” Starting from a place that considered gender variance to be largely pathological and immoral, the field advanced and its practitioners eventually developed a more sophisticated understanding of gender. Some sexologists became advocates for the trans community. In 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld created the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a social and intellectual nerve center for queer and gender-nonconforming people that developed some of the earliest surgical procedures for altering the body’s sex characteristics. Through the institute, Hirschfeld created a support system for queer and transgender people and arranged surgeries for individuals who wanted sex transformation. His work, as Stryker (2008) notes, “set the stage for the post–World War II transgender movement” (39).

One of the legacies of the early sexological tradition was the complex taxonomy of sex and gender it produced. The field multiplied the categories available to individuals who fell outside the gender binary. For example, Hirschfeld coined the word “transvestite” to describe those who cross-dressed and had cross-gender desires. By the middle of the twentieth century, Harry Benjamin, one of Hirschfeld’s contemporaries and a trailblazing advocate for transgender people, began promoting use of the word “transsexual” to describe individuals who did not just wish to cross-dress but also wanted to change their sexual morphology via surgical procedures. Yet in the 1950s, the word “transsexual” left the medical world and became “a household term” in America (Meyerowitz 2002, 51). This historic turning point was the result of a highly publicized sex change that sparked intrigue and headlines in the popular press across the United States and the globe.

Figure 1.1. Christine Jorgensen, February 1953. The press swarms around Jorgensen as she returns from Denmark. Credit: Photofest.

Christine Jorgensen, a Danish American from the Bronx, was born George Jorgensen and served in World War II as a private. After her service, Jorgensen traveled to Denmark in the early 1950s to privately undergo a series of sexual reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments only available in Europe at the time. When the New York Daily News learned about her procedures, they published the story of her transformation on the cover of the December 1, 1952 issue. The story catapulted Jorgensen into the global limelight and she became an instant celebrity. This attention made her the public face of transsexuality.

Following the global news storm around Christine Jorgensen, transsexuality became part of the American imagination and psychotherapists increasingly saw it as a legitimate object of inquiry (Meyerowitz 2002). As a result, the 1950s witnessed one of the first major professional symposiums on transsexuality led by Harry Benjamin, which was covered in the American Journal of Psychotherapy. Also in the late 1950s, psychologist John Money (a colleague of Benjamin) coined the word “gender identity” to differentiate between genital “sex” and one’s belonging to a social group that expresses masculine or feminine expressions and behaviors.2 Money’s conceptualizations of “gender identity” and also “gender roles,” or what a society expects from its men and women, articulated gender as multiple and unsettled.

By the 1960s, amid the growing social movements of the time—such as the women’s, civil rights, and anti-war movements—and within the burgeoning hippie counterculture, gender itself became a site of political and social contestation. Younger Americans began experimenting with sexuality and challenging gender norms, embracing more unisex, androgynous styles (Meyerowitz 2002). On the ground, as Hill (2013) reminds us, there was a large, loosely connected social formation of gender and sexual misfits including transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens, street queens, radical fairies, butch lesbians, sissy gay men, female impersonators, and clothing fetishists. Representative of the political zeitgeist, the spirit of defiance was in the air in the ’60s as “a wave of increasingly militant resistance on the part of transgender street people” emerged in the cities (Stryker cited in Currah 2008b, 96). For example, during the summer of 1966, an organization of queer, disenfranchised San Francisco youth called “Vanguard” began organizing to improve the social climate of their local community. Vanguard staged public protests, held social functions, and published a magazine featuring poems, essays, and political writing meant to mobilize queer individuals and reach out to young sexual and gender minorities. Members of the group often met at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria—a local hotspot for gays, drag queens, street queens, and transgender sex workers. In August 1966, law enforcement raided Compton’s, yet its patrons banded together and fought back, collectively resisting the recurring pattern of police brutality and oppression that haunted their lives. The incident has since been named the “Compton’s Cafeteria Riot,” an early touchstone of transgender political history.3

Three years later a similar act of resistance occurred in downtown New York City’s Greenwich Village. The now famous 1969 Stonewall riots also brought together disenfranchised queer people in an act of political rebellion, and street queens were again on the vanguard of this uprising.4 Young, poor, trans people of color such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were leading protagonists at Stonewall, and would continue to be throughout the Gay Liberation Movement. Talking about Stonewall and the role transgender individuals played in the gay liberation movement, Sylvia Rivera (2007), a Latina activist, sex worker, and lifelong advocate for trans people, recalled, “We were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose” (118). However, members of the gay community did not always return the favor and advocate on behalf of their trans allies. Trans individuals were not always welcome in gay bars and gay rights organizations, specifically those organized around white, middle-class concerns. Following the Stonewall rebellion, Rivera and Johnson decided to provide structures of support and care for their own community, which led to their founding of STAR, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, in 1970 and creation of STAR House, a refuge for homeless NYC transgender youth.5

Meanwhile, alongside the growing political consciousness and mobilization of transgender people, the 1960s saw another historic development: the publication of Harry Benjamin’s (1966) book The Transsexual Phenomenon. A critical and thoughtful polemic, the book turned conventional wisdom regarding gender on its head. It argued that transsexualism cannot be cured; that transsexuals should seek psychiatric help; that in some cases hormonal therapy and surgery may be necessary; and finally, that medical professionals have a responsibility to help transgender people achieve self-realization. Benjamin (1966) suggested that in a modern, technological, and scientifically advanced society, the male/female gender binary was inadequate. Instead, he argued that what we think of as “sex” actually encompassed numerous entities. He advocated thinking about individuals as exhibiting different kinds of sex, such as “endocrine sex,” “anatomical sex,” “psychological sex,” “social sex,” “sex of rearing in childhood,” and “legal sex” (3–9).

While transgender individuals were not necessarily the target audience for books like Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon, many read them and learned about current scientific developments and discourses (Meyerowitz 2002). For Amanda St. Jaymes, a trans woman living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District during the 1960s, Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon was “a guidebook for us” (Silverman and Stryker 2005). The book delineated a transsexual identity and taught Amanda and her friends about the language of gender variance. Armed with this discourse, they were able to articulate their wishes for identity and transformation to family, friends, and doctors using the language sanctioned by the medical field.

The 1960s also marked the beginning of the first transgender advocacy organizations with national and international reach, and the start of a print culture that spoke directly to trans communities. In 1960, Virginia Prince, a pharmacologist, medical researcher, and transgender advocate, spearheaded the first trans-themed publication, Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. In 1962, she founded the “Society for Second Self” or “Tri-Ess,” a support and social organization for cross-dressers still active today (Stryker 2008). Geared toward heterosexual cross-dressers, the magazine started off small with a mailing list of only 25 people, and was eventually sold via subscription and in adult bookstores (Ekins and King 2005). Published bimonthly from 1960 to 1980, Transvestia featured articles, photos, life stories, fictional narratives, and letters from readers. Within its pages, Prince, along with her writers and readers, theorized cross-dressing and developed various taxonomies for emerging trans identities. Notably, Prince and her staff sought to distinguish more “respectable,” mainly heterosexual “full-time transvestites” from other gender identities. They created distance between themselves and, for example, part-time cross-dressers, transvestites, drag queens, kinky clothing fetishists, and transsexuals who desired sexual reassignment (Hill 2013). To describe herself and her readers, Prince developed the word “femmepersonation” as an alternative and later, in the 1970s, began to use the word “transgenderist,” which she defined as “a third way between transvestism and transsexuality” (Hill 2013, 377). Transgenderists, as Prince wrote, were “people who have adopted the exterior manifestations of the opposite sex on a full-time basis but without surgical intervention” (cited in Hill 2013, 377). The term “tra...