The Riddle of Gender

male-bodied people around me in their dresses, high heels, and makeup. According to the social standards of 1902, I, too, was “cross-dressed.” Even in 1932 my garb would have been considered suspicious. But because our culture now permits women to wear clothing once thought of as “masculine,” my outfit was unremarkable. Not so for the outfits on the people around me. They are defined (and define themselves) as “transgendered” partially because they yearn to express aspects of femininity denied to male-bodied persons by cultural norms. While most male- bodied persons don’t seem to feel a desire to wear dresses and use cosmetics, the ones who do so encounter extraordinary social ostracism and violence. The great majority of transgendered people who are the victims of hate crimes are male-bodied persons dressing and living as females.

That doesn’t mean that women are free of gender-based limitations and bias. Western women may wear pants, and some may have claimed the right to work, play, and have sex like men, but as any woman of a certain age will be happy to tell you, female cultural power is still largely a function of youth and beauty. Women of all ages spend an inordinate amount of their time and resources maintaining an attractive appearance. Young women are indoctrinated into this feminine cult at a young age, with girls typically beginning to shave, pluck, paint, and perfume at around eleven or twelve years old. Throughout adolescence, girls learn that their perceived value as people is tied to their appearance; they must be fit, fresh-smelling, and fashionably attired in order to lead happy, successful lives. The pressure to maintain a pleasing appearance increases as we age. Few straight men spend as much time on the scale, in the salon, or at the gym as their female counterparts. Why spend so much time, energy, and money to look young, fit, and fertile if being a middle-aged woman is not somehow related to a loss of prestige and power? Middle-aged men seem immune to this pressure. One of my sources—a surgeon transitioning from male to female at age fifty—told me that her spouse simply cannot understand why a successful middle-aged man would surrender his cultural power to assume the lower-caste status of a middle-aged woman. “Who will want you?” she asked, a poignant expression of the creeping sense of invisibility and insignificance many aging women feel.

Male privilege remains a very real phenomenon in our supposedly postfeminist society. Many of the transmen (female-to-male, or FTM, transsexual people) I interviewed noted that, as men, they are treated far more respectfully and deferentially than they were as women. “I get a lot of white male privilege. Oh, my god! I can’t even believe that. When I would go into stores before, they had security guards following me around, because I was this sort of big motorcycle leather dyke. Now, they’re like, ‘Can I help you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?’” says Tom Kennard, a burly, middle-aged transman. “They will give men power, and you just have to take it. I have to figure out how I can use that power responsibly.”

Those who travel in the other direction, from male to female, are conversely aware of the loss of privilege that is an unavoidable consequence of their decision to transition. In giving up their maleness, transwomen often give up high incomes, social status, and, very often, the ability to support themselves in their chosen profession. Trans-women tend to be more visible, and thus less employable, than trans-men. They are more often the victims of violence and discrimination, simply because they are seen or “read” in a way that transmen are not. But they also have surrendered the social protections of maleness. Though men can be sexually violated, they are not usually victims of rape except in all-male environments such as prisons. Transwomen seem to be at high risk for rape, however, both before and after their surgical transition. This may be because, as one source told me, transwomen aren’t raised with the “don’ts” that most natal women absorb from their mothers and other women. These spoken and unspoken prohibitions (don’t go home with strange men, don’t walk down dark streets by yourself, don’t open the door to strangers) circumscribe our lives, but they may also provide some measure of protection. Transwomen learn late the painful lesson most natal women absorb in adolescence: that being a woman automatically confers vulnerability to sexual assault. This is true even if one retains the (hidden) insignia of masculinity, a penis. As a woman, I know intimately the sense of physical vulnerability that transwomen encounter when they assume the social role of women. That sense of shared vulnerability is one of the strongest bonds I have felt with the transwomen I interviewed for this book.

Fear and mistrust of men and masculinity still permeate discussions of gender. Neither women nor individual men appear to trust or think kindly of males as a group, a prejudice that seems justified when one considers the disproportionate propensity of males for committing acts of physical violence and aggression. As I have researched this book, I have learned from transmen just how painful and shocking it is suddenly to be perceived as a threatening figure, purely by virtue of one’s maleness. Women may cross to the other side of the street to avoid sharing the sidewalk with you; they stop looking you in the eye. A wall goes up, and those transmen who have lived as lesbians for years before their transitions find that wall particularly disturbing. “It’s really upsetting to me that men are perceived as bad,” says Tom Kennard. “And I wonder how boys, men who grow up as men, deal with that. How do they internalize that? What does it do to them? Because when I talk to them, they know about this. But they’re just like, ‘Well, what can you do?’”

Like many of the transmen I interviewed, Kennard had to overcome deep-seated negative feelings about masculine identity and behavior in order to proceed with his transition. He didn’t want to be a “man” as manhood is defined in our culture, and yet, he felt that he had no other choice because he was not a woman either. “People say that gender is what’s between your ears and not between your legs, but I don’t know,” he says. “I just didn’t belong in the girls’ pile. It’s sort of an exclusion thing, rather than inclusion. I just felt like I didn’t belong over there. If we have a binary system, and there are only two choices, I belong here. And I like being over here. I’m really comfortable being over here.”

These observations lead me to the most salient fact that my conversations with transsexual people have illuminated: though the way we express gender is clearly influenced by culture, gender identity itself seems far too deeply embedded to be purely an artifact of culture. There are few benefits to adult sex reassignment, other than the feeling that one’s body and social role finally reflect one’s inner sense of self. The process of sex reassignment is physically and emotionally grueling, and hugely expensive in terms of money, time, and lost personal relationships. Most of my transsexual sources knew from a very young age (typically before age five) that there was something different about them. Often they spent decades trying to understand the source of that difference and come to terms with the implications of their process of self-discovery. Those who decide to physically change their sex then spend a number of years committed to the process of transition; the outcome is a series of painful surgeries. No one would undertake this arduous quest unless driven to it by acute misery. I have been told by person after person, “It was this or suicide.”

Transgendered people who do not surgically transition, who live with bodies at odds with their gender presentation, court even greater risks, enduring the constant threat of discovery and exposure. The penalty for such transgression is often brutal. Many people have heard of the murder of Brandon Teena (nee Teena Brandon), the subject of the film Boys Don’t Cry, but few know that such murders are commonplace. In 2002 alone, twenty-three people in the United States were slain in what appear to have been transgender hate crimes. For example, in October 2002, while at a party, seventeen-year-old Gwen Araujo was dragged into a garage, where she was beaten and strangled by three young men who had discovered that she was male-bodied. Her body was then dumped in the desert. It took two weeks for the other young people present at the party to report the murder. Two months before Gwen Araujo’s death, on August 12, 2002, Stephanie Thomas, nineteen, and Ukea Davis, eighteen, were shot to death as they sat in their parked car a block from the apartment they shared in Washington, D.C. Davis and Thomas had lived as women since their early teens, and became close friends after meeting at a support group. Unlike Araujo, whose “secret” was unknown to many of her acquaintances, Thomas and Davis were well known and apparently well liked in the southeast D.C. neighborhood where they grew up. Their openness did not protect them. Each was hit more than ten times in the head and upper body by bullets fired by a passenger in a passing car, which, according to witnesses, turned around and released a second volley of bullets before speeding off. Despite a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of a suspect, the identity of the killer or killers remains unknown.

A vigil for Thomas and Davis was held a few days after their deaths, ironically at the very same intersection where, in 1995, Tyra Hunter, a transgendered hairdresser, had lain bleeding to death after an automobile accident. Paramedics arrived on the scene immediately after the accident, but while stripping Hunter to assess her condition, they discovered her male genitalia, jumped back in shock, and began to ridicule her. As Hunter lay dying (but still conscious), the EMT team continued to mock her; she died shortly afterward in the ER from blood loss. In 1998, her mother was awarded $2.8 million in damages in a wrongful death lawsuit, based on negligence by the D.C. Fire Department and malpractice by an ER physician. “Tyra’s story is surprisingly commonplace and speaks to the fears of most transsexuals [sic] who sometimes feel pressured to undergo expensive sexual reassignment surgery and to alter their legal documents specifically to avoid such nightmares,” wrote Sarah D. Fox,