and their own emotional well-being. One of her sources says: “I think some of us are swinging to a place where we enjoy, and can admit we enjoy, the stereotypical role of female/mother/caregiver…. I think we were born with those feelings.” Belkin notes that “when these women blame biology, they do so apologetically, and I find this tone as interesting as the words…. We accept that humans are born with certain traits, and we accept that other species have innate differences between the sexes. What we are loath to do is to extend that acceptance to humans. Partly that’s because absolute scientific evidence one way or another is impossible to collect. But mostly it’s because so much of recent history (the civil rights movement, the women’s movement) is an attempt to prove that biology is not destiny.”
Like it or not, we seem to be reaching the point (again) at which we are willing to entertain the possibility that there may in fact be “essential” differences between the average man and the average woman, differences grounded in biology, not culture. In our attempts to sort out what those differences might be, and how they are formed, and how vulnerable the human reproductive anatomy is to environmental assault, intersexual, transgendered, and transsexual people are a hugely important and almost completely ignored source of information. Not everyone will want to participate in research studies or discuss personal struggles with strangers, of course, but in the three years that I spent researching this book, I found among many transgendered people a real hunger to be heard and understood. There is some fear, however, that if a cause for gender variance is found, the search for a “cure” will inevitably begin. “Once the source is found, the drive to cure or eradicate our particular form of biological variation is probable, based on current medical mentalities. Isn’t it better not to address this issue at all?” says one of the trans friends I asked to review this chapter. Dylan Scholinski also voiced this concern. “I have a real problem with this being conceptualized as a birth defect,” he said. “I am not ‘defective.’”
Many gay people express the same reservations about the search for a gay “gene,” or organic etiology for homosexuality. Neuroscientist Simon LeVay acknowledges that studies like his, which identified structural difference in the brains of gay and straight men, are perceived by some as an attempt to “re-pathologize homosexuality and take us back to a time when it was considered some sort of disease. In all my writings and lectures I don’t present it that way. I’m gay myself. I’m happy to be gay. I think the world would be a better place if gay people were more accepted. But of course you can never know how other people will use material like this. There could always be somebody to say, ‘This shows that there are cells missing in the brain. Let’s go and put some in.’ If gene tests become available to test babies or fetuses, I’m sure there will be some people who would want to abort or have their baby genetically altered. I think myself what we should strive for is to create a world where that won’t happen. I think that’s a kind of urgent task to accomplish, and I think that’s not only in the area of sexual orientation but basically across the board. There’s so much human diversity that is controversial in terms of ‘is this good, is this acceptable, is this something that we don’t want?’ People are really going to have to debate these issues and decide what is acceptable and not acceptable, what is within the parents’ right to decide.”
LeVay also points out that studies have shown that people who believe that homosexuality is an inborn trait, as opposed to a freely chosen lifestyle, tend to have more positive views about gay people in general. “There have been studies where the researchers get a whole bunch of college students together and give them some reading material. One group of students will read material suggesting that sexual orientation is an inborn trait, referring to papers like my own kind of studies; another group of students read material suggesting a lack of biological differences. There was nothing in what they read that was a value judgment—they are just summaries of research. Then afterward they gave these kids a test—the homophobia index or something like that—and they found that the kids who read the ‘born that way’ kind of material were more favorable than the kids who read the other stuff. So to some extent it looks like there is a connection between beliefs about causation and attitudes about how gay people should be treated. In that sense, it [research on etiology] is not merely a scientific enterprise—though I think that it is a perfectly worthy scientific enterprise to understand basic aspects of human nature like sexual orientation and gender identity—but it really is embedded in this kind of social controversy about gay rights.”
Thirty-five years after Stonewall, and ninety years after Magnus Hirschfeld’s advocacy of gay and gender- variant people in Weimar Germany, transgendered people remain, in Christine Johnson’s phrase, “the invisible ones.” For some, that invisibility seems a kind of protective cloak, but for others it is a dark closet that prevents them from being known and accepted as they are. The community itself is riven with conflict about the pros and cons of assimilation, and the value of difference. Many young trans people especially question why they should be forced to choose a “box”—male or female—given that making such a choice feels like self-betrayal. “In a world that separates gender, I have found the ability to balance the blending of supposed opposites. In a world that demonizes non-conformity, I have found the purest spiritual expression in celebrating my otherness. In a world that exterminates the heretic, I have embraced the danger inherent in holding a belief not shared by the majority of people in my society,” writes Alexander John Goodrum, an African-American transman, in an essay published in the program for the True Spirit Conference in 2002.
Goodrum, who served as director of TGNet Arizona, a transgender advocacy and education organization, committed suicide in 2002 while being treated for depression. He was a gentle soul, who conceived of his transgenderness as “a spiritual act, an offering of the highest kind. It is a sacrifice of the pre-defined self created by societal doctrine. It is the act of laying that pre-defined self upon the altar, ready to be sacri-fied in a supreme act of faith. And it is that act of faith, to whomever or whatever one perceives as god, in which lies the ability to express the infinite.”
Some might call Alexander Goodrum a victim—of society’s prejudices or of his own conflicted nature. I prefer to think of him as a prophet. If the stories contained in this book teach us anything it is that gender variance is neither a fad nor a revolution. It is a biological fact. Our continuing failure to acknowledge this fact virtually ensures that there will be more Alexanders and Tacys and Gwens, individuals whose pain cannot be assuaged by a syringe or a scalpel and who die violent and premature deaths. Whether dying by their own hands or at the hands of uncomprehending others, these individuals have been sacrificed to an illusion, the belief that the spectrum of gender contains only two colors, black and white, and nothing in between.
CONVERSATION WITH JOANNA CLARK
The navy discharged me in ’74 and I had my surgery in ‘75. Then in the last part of ‘75 an army recruiter came through the building and wanted to put posters up, and I said, “Sure you can put ‘em up,” and he says, “Why don’t you join the Reserves?” And I said, “I’d love to but I don’t think I’m eligible.” He said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I was a chief petty officer in the navy, and the navy discharged me because of what I was going through.” He said, “What was that?” and I said, “I had sex reassignment.” And he says, “Well, it [sex reassignment] wouldn’t keep you from doing your job, would it?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “Why don’t you send me your D2-14 and your resume, and I’ll see what I can find out?” So I sent it. Well, Congress had gotten my records changed to show that I had served in the navy as a female (at my request) through the late Senator Phil Hart, who was chair of the Armed Services Committee and who my dad knew from when he was a city councilman. We were told later that when Senator Hart went to the navy and said, “I want the records changed and it’s been done in the past,” the navy’s argument was “Well, it’s never been done for a chief petty officer who had a long career of seventeen years in the military.” It had been done for people who had been in the service for three to four years.
