The Riddle of Gender

woman.

Q: Did you enjoy your life as a starlet?”

I loved everything that went with it. The restaurants, the parties. People treat you with great—they might be snickering behind their hands, but I don’t think they were at that time. I don’t think the word “bimbo” had been invented yet, but we were invited just to decorate the tables. And with some of the Syndicate, the attitude was “just zip it if you’re not going to say something that’s ‘airhead.’” [Affects a breathy, dithery voice] “What’s your name again, I just can’t remember names for the life of me.”

Q: Did you ever have a sense of “they don’t know all of me “?

No. I don’t know whether that is because I have this theatrical mentality, that I can believe whatever. I think I’m a really good actress, because the character becomes very real for me. So I was still being the reflection in the eyes of those that wanted me. So I saw myself as they saw me. And it was very comfortable for me.

Q: When did that start to change for you?

I think that I came into my own when I woke up one day in my late fifties and realized that—it seems like it was overnight—that men have stopped turning around on the street to look. So it gave me the freedom to really deal with me. To see myself. It’s part of this whole gender thing, I think. Now at sixty-three (sixty-four in December), I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom (and I never had to do that) and I’m stumbling down the hall, and as I pass a mirror and see myself, I think, “I’m really happy with this body—it’s sagging, it’s falling, it’s all of that, but it’s me.” And it’s the me that I wanted to be. So maybe the stomach is breaching and maybe the boobs are sagging, but it feels genuine.

Q: So your experience of aging is a woman’s experience of aging?”

Yes. You know, a female friend of mine from the early years, whom I had not talked to in over forty years, called after she read the book and said, “I know you’re writing about a transsexual experience, but you’ve written my story.” And that’s very important to me. And I think that’s also extremely telling. We can label it any way we want to, but the experiences are the same.

Q: One of the questions that I’ve asked everyone whom I’ve interviewed for the book is “What is gender?”

I don’t even know what that means anymore, don’t know that I ever knew what it meant. To me, how you are perceived dictates how you are treated, and I have been treated with the female experience. I’ve had some bad experiences. Part of that too is being raised in different times, not knowing that you have the option to make choices. My sisters, for example, were raised with the “don’ts.” I didn’t have any of those so I really made some serious mistakes. It took me a long time to realize that if the bar is closing and I’m in a really wonderful conversation that I want to continue, it does not mean that I can go to someone’s apartment in the hope of continuing it. I’m a slow learner.

Q: What is it that made you aware from early on that you were female despite what your body was telling you?

For me … well, I’ve alluded earlier to this power structure, and that’s how I explain it. I was very aware from a very early age that I did not want the responsibility that is inherent for the male. All of that: Going off and fighting our wars and being responsible for keeping peace, I suppose. Protecting those you love. I wanted to be protected. Now maybe that’s just weak, but as life has progressed and I recall what I have experienced and survived, I don’t consider that to have been weak at all. It was just another way of viewing your function and your place in the world. I wanted to nurture, but I don’t think that is necessarily transsexual. I think there are a lot of men who are happy being men, who feel the same way. So I have no idea what the gender issue is about.

I thought for a long time that being male had to do with testosterone levels, and I still suspect that it does. But then we also have women who have higher testosterone levels, and I view them generally as expressing male energy. I don’t think it’s about genitalia at all. And that brings us back to those transgendered beings who say, “I don’t want to mutilate my body.” I thought it was being very clever when I said [in the book], “There was nothing wrong with my body, except that it had a penis attached to it.” I like that, but I think there is a lot going on beneath that statement. It didn’t work for me, but that would have been like wearing a green hair ribbon when everything else was blue. It clashed. I think that’s true. But it’s just another bit of baggage. Each one of these choices has its own baggage.

Four MEN AND WOMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS

When I got to the carnival in Stroud, I walked around for a long while just looking at the exhibitions and trying to build up enough courage to ask someone for a job. Finally, I went to the freak sideshow and started a conversation with the barker. I told him that I was looking for a job and he said he’d see what he could do. He went inside the tent to talk with the show’s owner and, after about five minutes, came out. “We’ve got a spot for a half-man, half woman person, “ he said, with a laugh. “Do you think you can do it?”

Hedy Jo Star, My Unique Change, Baltimore, 1958

Two years after Christine Jorgensen became an international celebrity, a Johns Hopkins psychologist named John Money began publishing a series of papers that were to have large consequences for intersexual and transsexual people, and for American society in general. Early in his career, Money’s investigations into the psychology of intersexual patients convinced him that a person’s deeply rooted sense of self as either male or female was largely formed not before but after birth, by a combination of factors, the primary one being “the sex of assignment and rearing”—the way that one is raised. “To use the Pygmalion allegory, one may begin with the same clay and fashion a god or a goddess … if certain conditions are met,” he asserted. This theory was adopted not only by scientists and physicians, who used it to justify extensive surgical and hormonal manipulation of intersexual infants and children, but also by second-wave feminists who saw in Money’s theory proof that women were socialized to be a “second sex,” weaker, more dependent, more emotional. “Femininity” and “masculinity” were defined as roles adopted by essentially androgynous beings. Before we don the socially constructed personae of male and female, advocates of Money’s theory asserted, we are all the same. However, Money himself was no proponent of androgyny—quite the contrary. In Money’s view, psychological health was entirely dependent on the development of an unambiguous identity as either a man or a woman. Money’s research thus combined radicalism (the theory ofpsychosex-ual neutrality at birth) with a profound conservatism (emphasis on sexual dimorphism). We are still grappling with the effects of this paradoxical theory, which so deeply penetrated our culture, today.

The research question that Money began to explore as a graduate student appeared simple, and unlikely to initiate sweeping social changes. What could or should be done to help those individuals born in bodies that defied traditional definitions of sex, such as the long-deceased and forgotten Herculine Barbin? Children born with genital anomalies presented a clinical riddle. To the eighteenth-century doctors who examined Barbin, the presence of undescended testicles was proof that the girl was really a boy. But by the middle of the twentieth century, the medical determination of sex had become decidedly more complex, no longer visible to the eye or the palpating hand of the physician.

In 1948, Murray Llewellyn Barr, a Canadian geneticist, made the discovery for which he would later be nominated for a Nobel Prize. While carrying out experiments on nervous system cells of various mammals, Barr and a graduate student named Ewart George Bertram noticed that some of the cells contained small dark masses.