The Riddle of Gender

let’s rule out Benjamin’s disorder.’ Let’s figure out what’s going on here, rather than telling the parents the kid is crazy, delusional. The assumption is that you are psychotic or have some kind of mental abnormality. That’s the problem with the DSM. If we can make this a congenital anomaly just like cleft palate and cleft lip, or any of the physical intersex conditions, that shifts everybody’s perspective.”

In The Normal and the Pathological, a study that traces the development of the concept of pathology in medicine, the historian of science Georges Canguilhem pointed out that “an anomaly or mutation is not in itself pathological.” Canguilhem carefully delineated the distinction between anomaly and pathology. “An anomaly is a fact of individual variation which prevents two beings from being able to take the place of each other completely,” he writes. “But diversity is not disease; the anomalous is not the pathological.” This concept was articulated in various ways by many of the transgendered people with whom I have spoken over the past three years.

“There’s an idea that people have subconsciously inculcated about how gender and the body work, and when someone says, ‘I’m doing it a little differently,’ it’s like ‘No, you’re wrong.’ But no, we’re just doing it differently than you,” says historian Susan Stryker. “It’s a privilege to not have to think about how you are embodied,” she says, comparing gender privilege to race privilege and pointing out that normatively gendered people don’t have to think about gender “in the same way that white people never have to think about race.” According to Stryker, transgendered people must question basic assumptions about what it means to be male or female, and the relation of gender to the body, in the same way that other minority groups must examine and reject the assumptions that create their oppression. “I didn’t have the privilege of having my body communicate who I am to other people without some kind of interventions. Transsexuals are subject to a double standard. People say, ‘You’re essentializing gender because you think it’s all in the genitals.’ Well, no, I don’t. It’s about my sense of self, and being able to communicate my sense of self to other people the way everybody else does.”

The concept of “gender” as applied to human beings is itself a fairly new concept. Until the middle of the twentieth century, scientists recognized only biological sex, and though a determination of “sex” was usually based on the appearance of the genitals at birth, scientific discoveries complicated this simple picture as early as the eighteenth century. In cases of ambiguous genitalia, the gonads (testicles or ovaries) were used to establish sex until the discovery of Barr bodies (inactivated X chromosomes in female cells) in the mid-twentieth century. Then chromosomes became the new litmus test for sex—but by that point, it had become increasingly clear that there were persons, rare though they might be, whose sense of themselves as men or women was in distinct contrast to the results of chromosome testing. The terms “gender role” and “gender identity” as descriptions of a person’s innate sense of self were born in the 1950s, and very quickly the word “gender” became a synonym for sex, although transgendered people today (and throughout history) have made it clear that this is a misconception. Sometimes, they say, the body lies.

CONVERSATION WITH BEN BARRES, M.D., PH.D.

Dr. Barres is Professor of Neurobiology and Developmental Biology at Stanford University. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, obtained an M.D. from Dartmouth Medical School, completed a neurology residency at Cornell, and obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School. He studies interactions between glia and neurons in the brain, and is internationally known for his work. He is in his late forties, but his bearded baby face makes him look much younger. I interviewed him in his office at Stanford University, which was cluttered in the way a scientist’s office is usually cluttered, with books and papers. He was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes and looked like he had just come from his lab. I asked him to speak from his perspective as both a scientist and a transman.

Q: Do you feel comfortable sharing some of the details of your personal story?”

I think that I have the typical story. All the transsexuals I talk to have exactly the same story. It gets boring after a while. As early as I can remember, I thought that I was a boy. I wanted to play with boys’ toys, play with my brother and my brother’s friends and not my sister. I was always being given girls’ toys, like Barbie. But I never wanted to play with dolls. I wanted to go and beat up on boys. I remember one year my brother got Rock ’Em, Sock ’Em Robots, and I was so jealous. And I remember at Halloween I was dressing up as an army man, or I was a football player. And it just seemed so natural to me, but looking back now I think, “My god, what must my parents have been thinking?”

Q: Did they think that you were a tomboy?’

I guess so. I remember that I beat up the biggest bully in grade school. Came home with broken glasses from fighting the boys in the street. Got mud all over me and played with trucks. I had a great time. It became a problem only when I got to the age where the boys realized that they shouldn’t be playing with girls. It was at some point in grade school, around nine or so, when it became clear that the boys didn’t want to play with girls anymore. And I’d go over to my friend’s house to play and I remember at one point the parents said, “I don’t think that it’s right for you to play with him anymore,” and I was like “Why not?” I didn’t understand it. I was just having a good time playing. You know, if I had been gay, I think that I might have had a lot of hazing from the other boys, about wanting to play with girls, but…

Q: The gender rules were looser for girls?”

Only up to a certain age, though. At that point it did begin to become quite difficult. I can remember that I wanted to be in the Cub Scouts so bad, and Boy Scouts. Instead I was in the Brownies, and I hated that. We were baking cookies, and I wanted to go camping. I wanted to take shop and auto mechanics. There are a lot of girls who might want to do that stuff, too. I can remember feeling strongly about it and really being distressed, particularly when some of the guys were allowed to take cooking classes. But I’ve always been the kind of person who has had a lot of interests and can keep myself busy, so I just decided to be by myself rather than playing with my sister’s friends or the other girls. I was kind of ostracized growing up. I was never in the “in” group. I was always sort of socially rejected. Because I was different. I really was sort of like that boy in a dress, or something.

I was remembering just the other day something that happened in grade school, or maybe it was in junior high. I remember the Girl Scout leader yelling at me, saying, “Why do you always have to be different, Barbara? Why do you always have to be different?” And she was absolutely at her wits’ end. And I remember being shocked by this because I was always the good kid. You know, I always got good grades and I never got in trouble. I wasn’t trying to cause any trouble. And I remember being shocked because obviously I had, without even trying, really pissed this teacher off. And then I remember, because she shocked me so much, I started thinking about it and kind of said to myself, “You know, I guess I am doing something kind of different than the other girls.” Well, I didn’t want to do what they were doing. That was boring.

So that was what it was like growing up, but then you reach puberty. That got really weird, you know, because then you start to get breasts. I really didn’t want them, and they just seemed like foreign objects. I wore really loose T-shirts just like I’m doing now so that they wouldn’t show. I never did the binding thing, I think because I wasn’t that big-chested, and maybe if I had been I would have. Another thing that I noticed in puberty was my incredible discomfort about wearing dresses. I wanted to wear guys’ clothes. Ever since I could choose my own clothes, I would always wear jeans and shorts.

The only way to explain it is that I felt very uncomfortable and I didn’t understand why. Like when it came time to shave my legs. I didn’t want to do that. I felt like a naked chicken or something. And makeup: there was just no way I was going to put on makeup. And jewelry. I was constantly being given jewelry as gifts and being encouraged to, you know, do my hair, but of course I always had my hair cut short. In puberty, it really started to get very weird. I could never dance because that would mean behaving female, and there was no way that I was going to do that. Dating, wearing dresses—guys never asked me out anyway because I think that I was very masculine in my behavior. But, overall, I guess that I had this feeling of just being wrong in my body. I just started to feel very uncomfortable and in fact became uncomfortable for the rest of my life because you have to wear