The Riddle of Gender

want to do this. The book on the history of trans-sexuality [How Sex Changed] makes that point. The terms didn’t really exist. There’s this one little group of Jewish doctors in Weimar Germany that were beginning to do this, for the first time ever in the history of civilization. And it’s not easy to go from that, through Nazism and the Holocaust, and then come to America and keep going with it. There’s so much shame in this country; we’re so puritanical. So the people who did it were pioneers, and I’m grateful to them.

But anyway I went down there [to Baltimore]. I left school early and I went down there and I thought, “Let’s do this.” I got an intake form and stuff like that and I filled it out, but I got cold feet. I didn’t feel comfortable. I didn’t feel welcome. I felt dirty. I felt like they were making me feel like a pervert.

Q: How old were you?

I was twenty. I called ahead and made an appointment. I suppose my records are still there somewhere. But I just freaked out. I couldn’t do it. I did not feel welcome. It’s amazing how today, when I go to my electrolysis, my hair stylist, my surgeon, these people bend over backward to make you feel like a human being. And in those days, they did not. No matter how much they felt they were trying, it was so damn paternalistic. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, but they made you feel like a real freak. I couldn’t do it. So I went back to searching the stacks at school libraries, but all I could find were textbooks with the relevant pages ripped out or aversion therapy, putting electrodes on your penis. And I was thinking, “No way!”

But there was no place else to go. I wasn’t going to a shrink. Nobody was out there saying, “We welcome gender-variant patients.”

Q: You never heard of Harry Benjamin?’

No, there was only Creedmore. To me, psychiatry was Creedmore. I didn’t know any different. I wasn’t in medical school at the time. Even when I went to medical school, I found nothing. Nobody talked about sex at all. I took a one-week externship in urology. DES was never mentioned. Of course, I didn’t know about the DES at that point. I didn’t know that till the end of my medical career. I first came across the book To Do No Harm in the eighties. It was only when I saw that, that I thought, “Oh, could this be?” And I asked my mother, and she just came right out and said, “Yes.” I was born in New York in 1952, there were certainly thousands of other Jewish kids exposed. I’m not the only one.

Q: You and your mother must have a very complex relationship as a result of the DES exposure.

She still blames herself. I told her that I’ve gotten over that. I don’t blame her anymore. She’s responsible for it, yes, but I can understand how it happened in the social context of the time. I don’t blame her.

Seven FEAR OF A PINK PLANET

Developments in the last decade have highlighted the reproductive, behavioral, and anatomical effects of endocrine disrupters on animals exposed to these chemicals. Effects due to endocnne-disrupting chemicals are observed at concentrations as low as parts per trillion for animals in the laboratory, indicating that the fetal endocnne system is more sensitive to disruption than any other known body system. These results of toxicology are significantly related to the field of gender identity and indicate a causal relationship between exposure to these chemicals and anomalies in the expression of gender identity and other disorders such as reproductive failure.

CHRISTINE JOHNSON, “ENDOCRINE DISRUPTING CHEMICALS AND TRANSSEXUALISM,” SEATTLE, 2001

Christine Johnson is a petite, blond transwoman, thirty-eight years old. She is an engineer, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Drexel University, in Philadelphia, currently living in Seattle. Her major research interest is systems theory. I sought her out online after she posted “Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals and Transsexualism” on the discussion list of the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC). The list members, most of whom are activists focused on civil rights for transgendered people and the passing of anti-discrimination legislation, didn’t seem interested in Johnson’s article, but it hit me with the force of a depth charge.

In 1995, I had been asked to be a coauthor an article for an environmental magazine called Garbage on the potential effects of endocrinedisrupting chemicals (EDCs). The editors of Garbage (known for tipping the sacred cows of environmentalism) had wondered if the spate of panicky articles then appearing in the popular press—articles that ominously detailed falling human sperm counts, Florida alligators with micro-penises, hermaphroditic birds and fish in the Great Lakes region—were scientifically credible. Soon after my coauthor—a friend who was then a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health—and I signed the contract to write the article, the magazine went under, but by then I had downloaded two years of articles on the topic. I found the information in the newspaper and magazine articles disturbing, but as a feminist I was also deeply suspicious of the subtext, neatly summarized by the title of a BBC documentary on the topic: Assault on the Male. The media coverage of the “environmental estrogen” hypothesis seemed to me a transparent expression of male anxiety about the growing political, economic, and social power of women. All this talk of males being “feminized” and emasculated by exposure to estrogen seemed so clearly an expression of the antifeminist backlash that I was determined to call my article “Fear of a Pink Planet” (a riff on the music industry satire Fear of a Black Planet). However, Garbage sank, and as I wasn’t very far into the project, I abandoned it when the magazine ceased publication.

When I encountered Christine Johnson’s article sketching out a hypothesis between endocrine disrupters and transsexuality, I was two years into the research for this book. I had spoken to literally hundreds of transgendered and transsexual people at meetings and online. By then, it was abundantly clear to me that the people I was meeting were not mentally ill. Like the friend whose decision to transition had caused me to embark on writing this book, they seemed like regular people who had been dealt a tough hand by life, and were dealing with it as best they could. I also rejected the popular notion that gender was entirely “performative”—the newest twist of the social construction theory, most cleverly articulated in the work of the Berkeley scholar Judith Butler. Certainly, I thought, people “perform” gender in various ways, learned from their parents, community, and culture. However, most people also seem to feel comfortable basing their performance on the gender that is consistent with their anatomy. Most do not feel a disconnection between their anatomy and their “most deeply held sense of self,” as Susan Stryker phrased it, and as most of my sources describe it. So if gender-variant people weren’t mentally ill anarchists bent on bringing down the binary gender system through subversive performance, what was the source of gender variance? I searched the scientific literature and was frustrated by the paucity of hard scientific research on transsexuality, transgenderism, and gender variance. Searches on Medline (an online search engine) and PubMed (the National Library of Medicine’s search service) using those keywords brought up very few articles, and most of those were the work of researchers with whom I was already familiar. Then I encountered Christine Johnson and discovered that there was, in fact, a substantial scientific literature on anomalous sexual differentiation, but that I wouldn’t find it in journals of endocrinology or psychiatry. I would find the hard science in the last places I would have thought to look: toxicology and environmental health, the disciplines in which I had been trained as a science writer.

I e-mailed Johnson in November 2001, introduced myself, and shared with her my questions and concerns about the environmental endocrine hypothesis and its possible relationship to our fin de siecle anxiety about masculinity threatened by female power. She responded, “Yes, there seems to be a great deal of discomfort in the media and in our society generally about gender roles and identity. But apart from the media response to these findings, in my opinion, this problem is much more serious than people are generally aware. So while the media may have reacted strongly because of existing social mores, it essentially acted correctly in raising red flags about the