The Riddle of Gender

bumper. It’s not even the back of the bus anymore—it’s the back of the bumper. The bitch on wheels is back.”

She signed her note (dated July 4), “Revolutionary Love.”

Sylvia Rivera remained proud of her participation in the Stonewall riots for all of her life. “I am proud of myself for being there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kinda hurt because that’s when I saw the world change for me and my people. Of course, we still got a long way ahead of us.”

The lack of trust between gays, lesbians, and the various groups generally lumped together today under the adjective “transgendered” became a public rift in 1974 for reasons that were partly political and partly aesthetic. Overtly gender-variant people were viewed with suspicion and distaste by some politically savvy gay men focused on gaining civil rights. For people whose goal was integration, not revolution, men in dresses were a decided handicap to public acceptance. The former advocated a right to privacy in the bedroom and tended to oppose flamboyant public displays of “difference” as counterproductive. They also increasingly rejected the view that gay men were more feminine than the average straight man. Instead, they emphasized their masculinity, a trend that was to become even more pronounced as the androgynous seventies gave way to the muscular eighties. In the nineteenth century “there was this very strong association formed between gender nonconformity and homosexuality,” says Simon LeVay, who sees an “overcorrection” of that association in the late-twentieth-century gay and lesbian communities, where “there’s been an almost excessive denial between homosexuality and gender nonconformity.” This attitude has been particularly acute among gay men, he says. “There’s definitely a femmephobia in the gay male community, generally a dislike of men who seem feminine.”

The political position of lesbians was complicated by their allegiance to feminism; neither gay men nor straight feminists fully understood or shared lesbians’ concerns. But lesbians, too, were incubating a new kind of sexual chauvinism. Lesbian culture in the fifties had been just as wedded to the concept of gender dimorphism as the medical profession, dividing lesbian women into “butches” (masculine lesbians) and “femmes” (feminine lesbians). But a new aesthetic was forged in the late sixties and early seventies as young people of all sexual orientations began to reject the values and behaviors of their parents. “Gender issues stood at the forefront of the radical challenge. Antiwar activists rejected the masculine warrior ideal and feminists led a frontal assault on cultural injunctions that demanded feminine behavior among women,” writes historian Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. The sexual revolution was also a gender revolution, and the two aspects of the upheaval were inextricably entwined. For a brief period, fin de siecle sexual anarchy was reborn.

People began to play with gender, to “bend” gender, in ways that hadn’t been seen before. The elegant female impersonators of Finoc-chio’s, a San Francisco supper club popular in the fifties and early sixties, were a far cry from the Cockettes, a group of singing, dancing, gender-fuck hippies who began performing in San Francisco in 1969. The Cockettes were female impersonators on acid—a psychedelic melange of beards, glitter, and colorful thrift-store robes and dresses— who spun about the stage like dervishes. Led by Hibiscus, a gay mystic who founded a commune of like-minded souls, the Cockettes ignored identity in favor of play and self-expression. Most of the Cockettes were gay men, but some were straight women and men who embraced the gender-fuck aesthetic. “They were people who brought together clashing styles,” says historian Susan Stryker. “Full beards and pink tutus, silver glitter combat boots, fucking with gender, fucking up gender. A lot of glam rock came out of that sensibility, that sense of ‘I’m not trying to pass as something.’ It was a conscious way of manipulating the signifiers of gender to call attention to its constructedness, often in a playful, militant, and politicized way.”

For a time androgyny, a blending of masculine and feminine, became the new ideal. “Many of us believed that the best way to eliminate the male/female divide was for all of us to look as much like one another as possible. Men were encouraged to wear their hair long and to sport jewelry such as beaded necklaces. Facial hair was discouraged,” says Karla Jay. “In contrast, short hair was favored for women, and I was applauded when I finally cut my hair in 1972.… Most of the lesbians favored bell-bottom denims, boots, and flannel shirts with a T-shirt underneath. After all, we were dressing for the revolution, not Vogue.” This new aesthetic posed some problems for those who were, quite literally, “androgynous”—drag queens, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people. On the outside many didn’t appear revolutionary at all. Drag queens and transsexual women wanted to look like girls—and girls wore high heels, makeup, and short skirts or, in the hippie style espoused by folksinger Beth Elliott, granny dresses. Girls flaunted their womanliness. They didn’t try to hide it under layers of flannel. Lesbian women and straight feminists were angry and appalled by what they perceived as the charade of femininity expressed by some drag queens and transsexual women. To them it exhibited a lack of respect, akin to the lack of respect shown African Americans by white actors in blackface. Drag was perceived as a kind of gender minstrel show.

Some lesbians and female-bodied transgendered persons were also having a difficult time adjusting to the new regime. If drag queens were too “feminine,” butch lesbians were too “masculine” for evolving standards of gay gender presentation. In Stone Butch Blues, a novel that reflects hir experience coming of age as a young butch lesbian in Buffalo, New York, Leslie Feinberg poignantly documents the turmoil in hir community that followed Stonewall. The new androgyny affected not only the masculine lesbians who had previously found a measure of comfort and security in the tight-knit lesbian community in the face of society’s hatred. Their femme partners, who were viewed by the new breed of lesbian as puppets of the patriarchy, were also attacked for acting out a kind of femininity that demeaned and oppressed women.One day I came home from work and found Theresa stewing in anger at the kitchen table. Some of the lesbians from a newly formed group on campus had mocked her for being a femme. They told her she was brainwashed. “I’m so mad.” Theresa thumped the table. “They told me that butches were male chauvinist pigs!”

  I knew what male chauvinist meant, but I couldn’t figure out what it had to do with us. “Don’t they know we don’t deal the shit, we get shit on?”

   They don’t care, honey. They’re not going to let us in.”

   “Should Jan and Grant and Edwin and I go to one of these meetings and try to explain?”

   Theresa put her hand on my arm. “It won’t help, honey. They’re very angry at butches.”

   “Why?”

   She thought about the question. “I think it’s because they draw a line—women on one side and men on the other. So women they think look like men are the enemy. And women who look like me are sleeping with the enemy. We’re too feminine for their taste.”   “Wait a minute,” I stopped her. “We’re too masculine and you’re too feminine? Whatdya have to do, put your index fingers in a meter and test in the middle?”

Rejected by the new breed of “woman-identified women” for being too butch, and shunned by society at large for being too androgynous, Feinberg’s character Jess Goldberg, a “he-she,” takes refuge in masculinity. Testosterone masculinizes hir body and deepens hir voice. Bearded and flat-chested after a mastectomy, Jess passes as a man without difficulty, but is consumed by loneliness and a sense of alienation. “As much as I loved my beard as part of my body, I felt trapped behind it,” Feinberg writes. “What I saw reflected in the mirror was not a man, but I couldn’t recognize the he-she. My face no longer revealed the contrasts of my gender. I could see my passing self, but even I could no longer see the more complicated me beneath my surface.”

Jess Goldberg (like hir creator, Leslie Feinberg) chooses to embrace ambiguity and live in the undefined space between the poles of male and female—the space that would eventually be termed “transgen-der.” The choice was not without peril. When sie was a butch lesbian, “strangers had raged at me for being a woman who crossed a forbidden boundary. Now they really didn’t know what my sex was, and that was unimaginable, terrifying to them. Woman or man—the bedrock crumbled beneath their feet as I passed by.” Goldberg relates the comment of a shopkeeper to a fellow customer—“how the hell should I know what it is? The pronoun echoed in my ears. I had gone back to being an it.” As an it, the fictional Goldberg was beaten so badly that hir jaw was wired shut. As an it, the real Feinberg was denied medical treatment and nearly died from an untreated bacterial infection. Though Stone Butch Blues is a novel, the challenges faced by the book’s protagonist remain all too real for visibly transgendered people.

Perhaps for that reason, many choose to disappear into more conventional gender presentations. This has