been particularly true of female-to-male transsexual people (FTMs), who for the most part have far less difficulty “passing” in their chosen gender, as Jess Goldberg discovered. In contrast to the many memoirs and autobiographies published by male-to-female transsexual people (MTFs) in the sixties, the seventies, and beyond, the number of books by FTMs remains slim, reflecting the relative invisibility of transmen. Even today, there is no one FTM figure with the name recognition of a Christine Jorgensen, even though the first international “outing” of a female-to-male transsexual person occurred a few years after Jorgensen’s media baptism. In May 1958, the
Like Dillon, many transmen avoid notoriety, and their stories remain largely untold. However, although fewer FTMs have written memoirs or spoken out about their feelings during the immediate post-Stonewall era, the ones who have acknowledge that they were just as uncomfortable with the new “androgyny” as the drag queens, stone butches, and MTFs. For one thing, most transmen adamantly maintain that they are
“Proud of being a woman, she [the lesbian] responds to another woman who responds to her as a female. The lesbian’s satisfaction is the woman-to-woman contact,” writes Martino. “Unlike the lesbian, I did not want to be a woman and I felt I should never have been one, that I could be content only in the male gender. I have always wanted, will always want, only the male to female relationship.” Martino’s feelings are echoed in nearly every FTM memoir published to date, including
That said, it is also true that many FTMs today may have spent years and even decades in the lesbian community before transitioning. The decision to transition presents a terrible conundrum to many transmen, who feel loved and accepted in the lesbian community even if they never feel that the label “lesbian” really applies to them. “For me, some of the hardest people to come out to about being trans are some of my older lesbian friends. Some of them have been great about it, but some definitely had to struggle, feeling a sense of betrayal as butch lesbians,” says Ali Cannon, a thirty-seven-year-old transman I interviewed in 2001. “A friend of mine has talked about the way that the lesbians from that generation, my generation and older, have become the parents that the younger lesbians who identify as trans have to come out to. Their feeling of loss, and ‘you’re not growing up to be what we wanted you to be’ is very similar to that of straight parents first confronted with a child’s homosexuality,” he says. This is particularly true for those who came of age during the seventies, when lesbianism became almost synonymous with a deep and abiding mistrust of men and male power. “It was really hard,” says Tom Kennard, a San Francisco computer programmer, about his decision to transition in the 1990s. “I’m fifty-one, so when I was coming up I was a big feminist, a white lesbian feminist and I was kind of a separatist. You know, there’s all this stuff in feminism, like women are the highest of all, women are good. Women, good. Men, bad.”
The woman, good/man, bad dichotomy that Kennard describes was forged in the feminist movement’s rejection of patriarchy and its mandates for gender-coded behavior. Women as a group, gay or straight, revolted en masse against the limitations implicit in traditional definitions of womanhood. Few burned their bras, but many began to question why it was that a woman could not be a mechanic or a doctor, why women were expected to be demure and accommodating, why women were always expected to place their own needs and desires after those of men. Why were women raised to be second-class citizens? In this struggle for self-definition, men, both as a group and as individuals, became Man, the tyrant and oppressor. A collective howl of rage was heard across the land, as activist women in particular noticed that their male counterparts were no more progressive in their attitudes toward and treatment of women than the system they were attempting to overthrow. The New Woman was back, but this time she was loud, proud, and overtly political.
Robin Morgan—a feminist writer whose essay “Goodbye to All That” served notice to leftist men that their days of mouthing platitudes about liberation while expecting secretarial, sexual, and housekeeping services from leftist women was at an end—articulated the new ideology. Morgan encouraged women to claim the shadow side of femininity —to be “bitchy, catty, dykey, frustrated, crazy, Solanisque, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating.” Like the Black Power movement that succeeded the more high-minded civil rights movement, women’s liberation was about taking stereotypes and turning them on their heads. As Morgan noted in capital letters: WE ARE THE WOMEN THAT MEN HAVE WARNED US ABOUT.
Gay or straight, women began to name and resist male privilege and to reject a subservient role based on male definitions of femaleness. In
In New York City, a group of lesbian women active in the Gay Liberation Front began meeting separately from the men within a year after Stonewall. Equally disgusted by the misogyny and arrogance of gay men and the homophobia of heterosexual feminists, this group wrote and distributed a passionate manifesto called “The Woman-Identified Woman” at the Second Congress to Unite Women, in May 1970. Calling themselves the Lavender Menace, a barbed response to Betty Friedan’s characterization of lesbians as a “lavender menace” that would derail the blossoming feminist movement, the authors of “The Woman-Identified Woman” described lesbians as “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” This ten-paragraph manifesto, Clendenin and Nagourney note, “called on feminists to cut their ties with men and the male culture, to redefine their own role in society by bonding with women—ideally lesbians, since they best understood the oppression women suffered in a male-dominated society.” As Clendenin and Nagourney note, the document was “a road map to a separate political movement,” lesbian separatism.
Karla Jay, one of the instigators of the Lavender Menace action and a founder of the Radicalesbians, a group formed in its wake, says that “for lesbians, the best thing that emerged from the Lavender Menace action was the group of protesters itself—the first post-Stonewall group to focus on lesbian issues. Only weeks earlier we had been a random group of women associated primarily with gay liberation and women’s liberation. For the moment at least, we emerged a victorious organization with a sense of solidarity, common purpose and sisterhood. We knew we would no longer accept second-class status in the women’s movement or the gay movement. We would be equal partners, or we would leave the straight women and gay men behind.”
Nothing infuriated these “woman-identified women” more than biological males “masquerading” as women, particularly when these “women born men” claimed to be lesbian feminists themselves. At the West Coast Lesbian Conference held in Los Angeles in 1973 (three months before Jean O’Leary confronted Sylvia Rivera at the Pride rally in New York City), the keynote speaker, Robin Morgan, spoke for those who objected to Beth Elliott, a male- to-female transsexual folk singer performing at the meeting. Like Jean O’Leary and other lesbian feminists, Morgan characterized transvestites and transsexuals as men who flagrantly mocked and parodied women. “Man-hating,” she proclaimed, “is an honorable and viable political act”—and in her view and in the view of many members of the lesbian-feminist community, male-to-female transsexuals remained men, despite their transformed genitalia.
The hostility of lesbian feminism toward transsexuals reached its peak in Janice Raymond’s
