The Riddle of Gender

advocated for David Reimer— and more generally wrong in his view that the sex of assignment and rearing is the most significant variable in the development of gender identity. Milton Diamond believes that Money would “have gotten more credit, not less credit” by admitting his mistake. “It takes a lot to admit that you are wrong,” he says, but ultimately “he would have gotten more credit for it.” However, reluctance to report negative results, data that conflict with a pet theory, as Ben Barres of Stanford points out, is not confined to John Money: “Well, now we’re talking about the psychopathology of science … and that’s not something that’s unique to him.”

Today, the pendulum in gender research is slowly swinging back to biology. Hormones acting under the influence of genes are now thought to be the primary architects of gender identity, and the hypothesis proposed and vehemently defended by John Money—that gender is a mostly social construct—has been superseded by the biological school represented by Milton Diamond. However, the exact mechanisms by which a core gender identity (or sexual orientation) is developed remain unclear. Studies that seem to point to structural anomalies in the brains of gay men (like the studies carried out by Simon LeVay) or transsexuals (like those of Dick Swaab and other researchers) have produced tantalizing findings, but no definitive answers. Most of these brain studies have not been replicated. “People who look for things in the brain right now are shooting buckshot,” says Milton Diamond. “They don’t know where they are going to find the target and they look in a hundred places and they find one or two that are different and they say, ‘This must be it!’” The truth is, Diamond says, “we don’t know where to look. It might be in the biochemistry. It might be somewhere else.” Diamond thinks that the seat of gender identity will eventually be located in the brain, “but it doesn’t have to be something that’s morphologically obvious,” he says. “We’d like to see a little penis or a little vagina, so that we could say, ‘That’s it!’ But I don’t think we’re gonna see that. What they’re talking about now is bigger versus smaller, more cells versus fewer. Okay, so we may have to settle for that.”

Of course, the very idea that the brain is sexed, that there are differences between male and female brains, makes some people suspicious. One doesn’t need to be a radical feminist to fear the social implications of such a theory, the way that it could be used to justify regressive views about the “lesser” spatial and mathematical capabilities of women, and the “natural” violence of men. That may be one reason why John Money’s theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth attracted so many people in the first place, because it seemed to offer a release from the limitations of biology and social norms. The work of John Money struck a chord with those who came of age in the sixties and seventies because, like the research of Magnus Hirschfeld half a century earlier, it provided scientific support for sweeping social changes then underway. “Like it or not, we are living in a sexual revolution and it is changing our lives,” Money writes in Sexual Signatures, published in 1975. “We dare not depend on old answers, nor can we afford to cut off the pioneers who are exploring for new ways to meet these un-precendented challenges.” The old order, which had imprisoned so many behind stone walls of racism, sexism, and homophobia, was crumbling. As they surged out into the streets to proclaim their liberation, their anger was exceeded only by their optimism. The revolution had arrived—and it would be televised, penetrating every home in America. The sexual anarchy of the fin de siecle had been a dress rehearsal; the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies was the main event, one in which the boundary between performers and audience, like so many other boundaries, melted into a rainbow-colored pool of candle wax.

CONVERSATION WITH CHELSEA GOODWIN AND RUSTY MAE MOORE, PH.D.

Chelsea Goodwin is an activist and was a founding member of Queer Nation. She worked at the Strand bookstore in New York City for many years and has also been a commercial sex worker. She currently works as a tele-marketer. Rusty Mae Moore is a soft-spoken college professor and a parent of three children, with whom she remains close. Goodwin is an extrovert, who says that her childhood ambition was to be a Catskills comic. Moore is quiet and thoughtful. They have lived together for over a decade. Goodwin and Moore underwent genital surgery together in Belgium in 2005. Together they operate Transy House, ashelterfor trans gendered and transsexual people in Brooklyn, New York.

Q: You don’t like the word “trans gender”?

CHELSEA: What I don’t like is that it’s based on a false premise. There is a transsexual community. There is a cross-dresser community. There is a community of people like Jasmine here, or like Sylvia, or like Melissa, which pretty much involves that kind of underground, prostitution-based thing. Those are three different communities, with three different languages, three different sets of mores and values and folkways—all those groovy anthropology words they taught me to use in college. If I were an anthropologist from another planet coming to study trans earth people, I would say that those are three different tribes that are unrelated.

Q: So you don’t see any value, political or social, in all those groups working together as a single entity?’

CHELSEA: Frankly I don’t, and I’ll tell you why. One, cross-dressers insist that transsexuals are somehow just extremist cross-dressers. They don’t understand. “You’re a kumquat and we’re avocados.” We’re not even in the same food group. You’ve got transsexuals. We’re a pretty diverse bunch, but there’s a commonality. A common language and culture which, yes, goes back to Benjamin and Christine Jorgensen and all that. And then you’ve got the street community, where there is a culture of trans street prostitute types. You’ve got the same thing in Brazil, in the Philippines, in Mexico. You’ve got it all over the world. It’s a real phenomenon. But it’s different than transsexuals like Rusty or me. I came out of the working class. Rusty came out of the middle class. But we’re still transsexuals.

Q: I’m confused about the distinction between street queens and non-operative transsexuals. Isn’t the distinction based purely on access to surgery?

CHELSEA: No, I think it’s a different community. It’s a different world. See Paris Is Burning. That is a different culture than you’ll see with people who have had or are about to have surgery. That’s a different track. A whole different world. And that’s totally different from people who like to wear a dress on weekends and go to conventions with their wives. It’s a whole different culture.

Q: Does age play a part in this? It seems like older folks tend to prefer to identify as transsexual, whereas younger folks prefer transgender.

RUSTY: I think that it’s an age thing in part because some of those people who say transgender are going to evolve [into transsexuals] and some are not going to evolve.

CHELSEA: I think it’s an age thing in that you have a generation— and some of them are still left, people like April Ashley and Christine Jorgensen, even Renee Richards—that pretty much came out of a pre-Stonewall mentality and they were the people who first went through the Benjamin Standards of Care.

Q: And they had a fairly hetero-normative view of gender? RUSTY: Right. CHELSEA: Right. And then you have a whole generation of trippies.

I’m a trippie. Trippies are people that are of the right age that we were hippies and yippies and freaks in the sixties and seventies.

Q: Testing all kinds of boundaries and gender was just one of those boundaries?”

CHELSEA: Right. Transsexual is the least weird thing about me. I happen to be a transsexual. Aside from that, I’m way the fuck out there. So you’ve got that generation and then you’ve got the generation that Riki Wilchins represents, a generation that coincided in time, and then had a reaction to, that lesbian feminist crap from the seventies and eighties.

Q: What about the whole feminist attack on transwomen in the seventies?’ What was that all about?

CHELSEA: We met Janice Raymond. The short story is that Rusty came out to her minister in the Methodist