Ph.D., a neurobiologist and communications director of It’s Time, Ohio!, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) lobby organization, after the verdict was announced. The drive to express an inborn gender identity must be strong indeed to compel individuals such as Teena, Araujo, Thomas, Davis, and Hunter to face the kind of hatred that led to their deaths. Milton Diamond, professor of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawaii, explains the violence and incomprehension suffered by transgendered people simply: “Nature loves variety. Society hates it.”
The transgendered and transsexual people whom I interviewed for this book were kind enough, and courageous enough, to share their stories with me. Most of the individuals whose stories are contained in these pages are “success stories”—they are primarily well-educated, middle-class white Americans whose privileged socioeconomic status contributed to their positive outcomes. In this arena, as in so many others, race, class, and economics play a huge role. Yet even with all their advantages, the individuals profiled in this book grappled with an enigma that might have consumed them, had they not found the courage and strength to endure the struggle, and the support and assistance they required. Each narrative chapter of the book is followed by the edited transcript of an interview, which provides commentary on the chapter preceding it and context for the chapter that follows. This structure will, I hope, reflect something of my own journey as I undertook my research and will enable the reader to recognize what I soon recognized myself—that the larger historical narrative is in fact composed of many individual narratives, each worthy of the telling. I am only sorry that I wasn’t able to include all of the stories I heard over the past few years, or the full text of every interview.
Like politics and religion, the issue of nature versus nurture with respect to gender is one that invariably gives rise to passionate debate. I do not expect that this book will convert people who believe that gender differences are grounded entirely in social conditioning; nor do I believe that the book will eradicate the bigotry, discrimination, and violence suffered by transgendered, transsexual, and intersexual people. But I do hope that the narrative history and dialogues within its pages will promote greater understanding and acceptance of a group (or groups) of people who typically want nothing more than to live their lives in peace and be able to enjoy the same civil status and protections granted to others.
I also hope to show that the history contained in these pages is, in a very real sense, a
THE HANDS OF GOD
I certify that Chevalier d’Eon lived with me for approximately three years, that I always considered him to be a woman; however, after his death and upon observation of the corpse discovered that he was a man. My wife certifies the same.
I began the research for this book in the way that I approach every scientific subject that interests me, by searching the literature. I soon discovered that far from being a product of the modern world, gender variance has been documented across cultures and in every epoch of history. Male-bodied persons dressing and living as women and female-bodied persons dressing and living as men were known in ancient Greece and Rome, among Native American tribes prior to the arrival of Europeans, on the Indian subcontinent, in Africa, in Siberia, in eastern Europe, and in nearly every other indigenous society studied by anthropologists. According to historian Vern Bullough, “gender crossing is so ubiquitous, that genitalia by itself has never been a universal nor essential insignia of a lifelong gender. “In some of these cultures, cross-gendered persons were considered shamans gifted with extraordinary psychic powers, and they assumed special ceremonial roles. In many religions, the gods themselves can transform their sex at will, cross-dress, or are androgynous. Our Judeo-Christian heritage, founded on a belief in an exclusively male deity, has frowned on such gender fluidity; nonetheless, throughout the Middle Ages and even into the modern era, cross-dressing has been permitted and indeed celebrated at festivals, in clubs, and on the stage.
Moreover, the deathbed discovery of a gender reversal is a far more common occurrence in Western history than one might suspect. Many (though not all) of the persons whose names and stories are known to us today were born female and lived some or all of their lives as men. A few of the better-known individuals in this category include James Barry, British army physician and Inspector-General, died 1865; Charles Durkee Pankhurst, California stagecoach driver, died 1879; Murray Hall, Tammany Hall politician, died 1901; Jack Bee Garland, soldier in the Spanish-American War, died 1936; and Billy Tipton, jazz trumpeter, died 1989. Some of these people were married to women, who publicly expressed shock and amazement when their partners died and were found to be other than what friends and neighbors assumed them to be. It is impossible to know if this shock was real or was feigned for the benefit of a public that was not prepared to accept the alternative explanation—that the widow had lived happily with a female-bodied person who saw himself and was accepted by others (including his wife) as a man. The case of the Chevalier d’Eon, an eighteenth-century aristocrat whose gender was a source of considerable controversy during his lifetime, is a bit more complex, and because it became a public scandal, I will recount it more fully here.
Born in France in 1728, Charles-Genevieve Louis-Auguste-Andre-Timothee d’Eon de Beaumont lived forty- nine years as a man and thirty-four as a woman. Aristocrat, diplomat, soldier, and spy, d’Eon worked for the French government in both male and female roles, exhibiting such a chameleon-like ability to change from man to woman and back again that contemporary historians remain just as baffled as d’Eon’s peers by the chevalier’s metamorphoses. Traditional accounts suggest that d’Eon was dispatched on his first diplomatic mission to Russia in female garb to infiltrate the social circle of the Empress Elizabeth. After successfully carrying out this mission, d’Eon returned to France and assumed an unambiguously male role, becoming a captain of dragoons and fighting valiantly in the Seven Years’ War. Wounded in battle, d’Eon was named a Knight of St. Louis, and in 1762 was offered a diplomatic assignment at the British royal court. In a letter, the French king Louis XV congratulated the chevalier on his new post and wrote, “You have served me just as well in women’s clothing as you have in the clothes you are now wearing.”
While d’Eon was serving as minister plenipotentiary in London, his slight build and pretty features led many to believe that he was in fact a cross-dressed woman. People in England and France began placing wagers on his sex. The London Stock Exchange took bets on his gender, and the amount of money wagered on the chevalier purportedly rose to nearly two hundred thousand pounds in England alone. The fear of kidnapping began to haunt the chevalier, who suspected that those who had wagered large sums of money on the shape of his genitalia might seek to resolve the question by kidnapping and forced exposure. To avert a diplomatic crisis, King Louis XV of France sent a letter to George III of England, stating that d’Eon was a woman. Rather than calming public doubts, this letter created an even greater frenzy. Lawsuits were filed by losing bettors, doctors were called in to testify, and d’Eon was officially declared a woman by an English court. The chevalier responded to this public humiliation with dignity and defiance, writing to a friend, “I am what the hands of God have made me.”
In exchange for d’Eon’s agreement to live quietly as a woman, the French government granted the chevalier a generous pension. Although agreeing to abandon military dress, d’Eon requested permission to continue wearing the Cross of St. Louis, which as he wrote in a letter to the king “has always been a reward for bravery on the battlefield. Many officers have become priests or politicians and have worn this distinction over their new apparel.
