well, in publicizing the fact that certain options are available. At least in modern Western European culture, there are many people who feel like “my body isn’t shaped right” and it’s not an aesthetic question, really, so much as a question about how we internalize ideas about gender, historically and culturally. To develop a gender identity and feel like my body does not communicate my sense of self to my audience—and then to know that there are techniques for body manipulation that are available because I’ve read about them.
Even before Jorgensen, people who were looking for help would turn to science and medicine and say, “Look, I know you can do this, I’m reading about Eugen Steinach in Vienna, and he’s doing these gonad transplant things and these hormone injection things; sign me up.” And then they were perceived as crazy because they wanted to do that. So there’s been an awareness on the part of people seeking services that some techniques were available, and they could see an application of that technique to their situation, and then they would have to persuade a service provider that it was a legitimate thing to do.
So there was always that tension, and there have been some service providers like Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin who have been like, “Oh, okay, there’s no reason we shouldn’t do that.” They get it, at some level, for whatever reason. And then there were many other people who were like, “No, get out of here.”
Even with Jorgensen—though she certainly spoke well of her surgeons—there was more tension behind the scenes. She didn’t know of any other way to get what she wanted. There really wasn’t any other way at that point. So she volunteered to be an experiment. And her en-docrinologist decided, “Yes, this is a rare thing, and this person is more female than male. This is the most advanced case of intersex we have ever seen—the most truly feminine balanced with the most obvious male.” They wrote among themselves, evaluating. “Is this an effeminate homosexual? Is this a transvestite?” They knew those categories, but the prevailing belief at the time was there could be glandular imbalances, that she might have some female germ cells, and so the surgery was justified. It wasn’t really that long ago either: this was in the fifties, in the lifetime of people who are alive and well and running marathons today. And when you look back and read the medical discourses around it, the belief in what endocrinology meant and how the gender system worked, it’s so clear how ideologically constructed the relationship between gender and the body is.
That’s not to say that there aren’t real physical differences between bodies, but we have this cultural belief about the relationship between someone’s sense of self and how they interact with other human subjects, and how that relates to their physical embodiment, and we materialize gender through the body in accordance with certain cultural assumptions. That’s part of the radicalness about transgender politics in the later part of the twentieth century—that it just flies in the face of that construction. Part of why we (as transpeople) are so marginalized is that we offer this very radical critique of a very pervasive set of assumptions about gender.
Admittedly my position is a minority position, but I see that whole “transsexuals are essentializing gender because they are so concerned with the body” as an artifact of Cartesian dualism, the mind/body split. You don’t ever not have a body; your body is that through which you interact with other people. There is a language of the body. There is an appearance of the body. We’re never disembodied people. My own sense of what I did is that I had this sense of self, whatever story you want tell about how that came about. There was that sense for me that it was more appropriate for me to answer to the pronoun “she” than “he”—it goes way back—and there was a perception growing up that “I’m in a situation that I can’t control, and that I can’t get out of,” and there was affect around that. I was really sad about it. I would try to put it aside and go about my business in life, but it proved to be really intractable and unshakable, and when at some point I figured, “Oh, I can do these things,” it was like a paradigm shift in my own head.
It’s not that these procedures make me a different person. It’s more like “if you cut on the dotted line, and I sign this piece of paper, I can legally be a different person. I can pay you these monies, and you’ll stick a little electrified needle in my face, and I won’t have hair there anymore. I’ll take this pill and it will make my breasts grow.” It’s that recognition that the body is malleable, and that it is how we present to people. There’s something very fundamental about being two bodies in communication with each other. Just the thought that I could use my body to communicate my sense of self to other people the way that everybody else does, instead of having to verbalize it or feel invisible. The idea that I could go to a beach, like I did yesterday, and lie around in the sun and drink beer and watch my kids play, and people would say “she” … Cool.
I think our language is not really sufficient for talking about it. The words are too blunt. Gender means “kind” or “genre,” it means “what kind of person are you?” But you can’t divorce the question of gender from the larger question of how the human organism needs to live in culture. Humans are social animals. You can’t take a baby human and throw it out in the wild and expect it to learn how to forage. We have to be in society. Unlike a kitten, human babies don’t lick the gunk off and stand up on all twos and run about. They are born very young in a developmental sense. As soon as the lungs can work, the baby comes out. So the evolutionary pressure is for situations that provide care of the newborn. That, I really think, is the basis of culture, what we really physiologically need to reproduce the species—this familial economic social structure—and that has evolved with the human form, and the capacity for language has come along with that. We are creatures who live in language and we’re creatures who have exploited the cultural sphere.
The exploitation of the cultural sphere, and the symbolic manipulation of the world, is the ecological niche that humans have developed; just like beavers cut down the trees to make their environment, we turn the world into language. That’s what humans do, and I really think that gender is about how the cultural system interfaces with the organism. Part of how you are as a being, part of what we are evolved to be, part of our neurobiological capacity that evolved words is that capacity to self-reflexively place oneself in a cultural context.
For me, gender is both the cultural system through which you internalize as a subjective being, as an identification, how you situate yourself in language; and how other people situate you in language. And it’s done through these very complex mechanisms that no one discipline in the sciences or the humanities is able to fully address. There needs to be an interdisciplinary gender studies. Because, so far, all of the theory and the research has come from a body of knowledge that has never had to be critical of its own foundational assumptions. And so it just becomes another vector for naturalizing particular kinds of ideological agendas. So I think that critically conscious transsexual or transgen-dered people, who can reveal the ideological constructions of the sex/gender systems, have this tremendous work in front of us. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to get funding to do that work.
You know, in the orisha religion, there is a being whose name means “the destroyer of patterns through whom the shape of the cosmos is revealed.” There is that sense of disruption that the trans figure brings, that rupture through the social construction of gender, and the revelation of the new, the different, the other. I once wrote a piece called “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamonix.” It’s about speaking as a monster, and that sense of disruption that we transsexual people stage for other people. It’s about trying to speak from this embodied place, that is technologically constructed—but is it human or is it not? There are many things about me that are very different from you. And I need to be able to speak the truth of my own process of embodiment.
