The Riddle of Gender

professional standing and distinguish themselves from ‘chop shop’ doctors like John Brown.”

The Benjamin Standards of Care were put into place by researchers associated with the Erickson Foundation, and carried over many of the practices (for example, the “real-life” test and the role of psychotherapists as gatekeepers) that had first evolved in the university clinics. “The first version of the Standards of Care was very similar to the guidelines that came out of the EEF-based research of Benjamin and the Hopkins clinic,” says Aaron Devor, who is working on a biography of Erickson. “I have to infer that Erickson was comfortable with the model as it was developing,” says Devor. “In the context in which the model was created and the opposing view—that anyone contemplating taking these steps was out of their mind—this is understandable.” Nonetheless, the Standards of Care and the medical model of trans-sexuality that they represented stood in direct contrast to the activist approach born in the seventies. Many transsexual people did not want to be “medicalized” and they did not want to be “pathologized.” They wanted access to surgery and/or hormones on demand without having to jump through a series of Standards of Care hoops. Their most radical claim, and the one that was to create a nearly unbridgeable chasm between proponents of the Benjamin model and an increasingly vocal and active transgender movement in the early nineties, was that American society, not transgender or transsexual people, had a “gender problem.”

CONVERSATION WITH TOM KENNARD

Kennard and his partner, Marianne, have been together for four years. Kennard was fifty-one at the time of this interview and spent many years in the lesbian community prior to his transition. Marianne is forty- three; she identifies as bisexual and has had relationships with both men and women. Soon after Kennard completed transition, Marianne discovered that she was losing her sight. On the morning I visited them in their home in San Francisco, Marianne was out with her mentor in a local support group, learning how to navigate the city alone. After her return, we went out for breakfast. I was impressed by the great tenderness Kennard displayed toward Marianne and by the way that they were working together to ease Marianne’s transition into a challenging new world.

Q: Tom, could you speak about your experience crossing over from the lesbian-feminist community to living as a transman?

It was really hard. I was big feminist, a white lesbian feminist, and I was kind of a separatist. I didn’t like men, I didn’t like the patriarchy, and I never wanted to grow up to be a straight white guy. I fought it for a long time.

Growing up, I didn’t identify as anything, really. When you are little … I knew I was kind of different but I don’t really know how I knew that. I knew that there was a difference between boys and girls, because in school everything is segregated by gender, so I would have to get in the girls’ line, but I was like, “Why am I in the girls’ line?” [Laughs’] What is it about me that makes me a girl? So it’s all kind of murky. I know this is the stereotype, but I always wanted to do what the boys wanted to do. When I reached puberty I liked girls, and I told somebody in Girl Scouts that I really liked this woman and if I was a boy I would marry her. And all through high school we had to wear dresses all the time, and that was incredibly horrible for me. I felt like I was cross-dressed all the time.

But then I went away to college and started reading books and I found out that “Well, okay, you can be a lesbian.” So I did that for a long time, but I always felt like a spy. In the bathroom especially, in gym, I always felt like a spy. “I’m not supposed to be in here.” So it wasn’t until I was forty-seven that I started taking hormones. There’s an FTM support group here [in San Francisco]. I went there in 1990, and there was this whole roomful of men. Oh my God! I didn’t go back for six years. It freaked me out so much. I’m like, “There’s a bunch of men in there. I don’t like men. Men are the patriarchy. Men are bad.” But finally, I just got really angry. I’d go to the store or something and give people my driver’s license to write a check and they’d read the female name and call me “ma’am.” And I would feel really angry because I’m not that person. Don’t call me “ma’am.” And I was a butch lesbian, so people would a lot of time call me “sir” but then when I would talk, because I had a female voice, they’d say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and maybe they would be nice to me or maybe they wouldn’t.

Q: Did people mostly read you as female at that time?

Here in San Francisco, because there are so many lesbians, and a butch lesbian is identifiable, people would identify me as a butch. So then of course there was all the homophobia.

Q: In San Francisco? [interviewer feigns shock]

Yes. And gay men don’t like women very well either, so you go down to the Castro, and gay men weren’t really happy to see you. I went in to get my hair cut one time, and they just left me sitting there for an hour. I kept waiting and waiting.

Q: Sounds like you couldn’t really find a home in any community—in the lesbian community or the larger gay community. When did you begin to think that you might be transgendered?

I always wore men’s clothes. I got rid of women’s clothes sometime in the early seventies. I remember taking them all to the dump. You know those big Dumpsters? I left them all draped over it. So I always wore men’s clothes. And I always felt like transgendered people were my family, but I didn’t really know why. I always kind of gravitated toward drag queens, people who were on the edge of gender somehow. Those were always the people I liked. In queer bars these people were often on the outside of things. So one night I’m at the lesbian bar, and I see a man dressed to the nines, and he’s a transvestite, and he’s with his wife who is a transvestite the other way. So we become friends, and I start hanging out with them. She tells me about a television show that wants to talk to female-to-male transvestites. It’s not a category that anybody talks about. Women can wear men’s clothes, and nobody looks at them. So that’s when I go, “Oh, there’s a transgender community.” I was about thirty-five at the time.

So I sat with that for a while. I was a cross-dresser for a while. As I met more and more people in my community, and I heard FTM transsexuals talk, I’m like, “Gee, that sounds really familiar.” I spent a long time going, “Well, we’re kind of the same, but I go up to this line but I don’t go over, and they do.” Finally, I decided to go to that meeting in 1990 when I was about forty. And I got so freaked out. I was like, “No, I don’t want to be a straight white guy.” But by ?96 or 97, I said to myself, “This isn’t working out at all.” And I thought, “Who can you live your life for but you? I’m in my forties.” So I started hormones in October of ‘97. And I met Marianne right before I started hormones. So she’s seen me as a girl, and now I’m a boy. [Laughs] She’s seen the whole physical thing happen, and it’s a really intensive personal time, so she’s had to live through all my adolescent male stuff. All I talked about was transition for years. I’m just now getting out of it.

Q: How wouldyou define whereyou are now?

I fully recognize that I am not born male. I did not have that experience. I never will. I am transgendered. I am a transman. I live in the world as male, and that’s fine. But I still feel sort of like a spy. I’m not like everybody else.

Q: Because you’ve lived in both worlds, lived as both a woman and a man? Yeah, and I’m still struggling with a lot of things that come with being male. Like being perceived as a threat. I can’t talk to kids, and women are like this. [Holds his hands far apart] I’m really sad about the whole distance between women and me. I understand why that’s there, but I would never hurt a woman.

Q: What are some of the other liabilities of being a man?

Back hair. [Laughs] I’m not really sure I’m happy about that.

But I love Halloween and there’s a whole bunch of children in the neighborhood. And I just love it when the kids come, but now when they come I have to take Marianne to the door with me. Because the parents are like,