era in which women acquired reproductive freedom and were liberated from menarche-to-menopause childbearing. The biological basis of gender is being reasserted during an era of resurgent social conservatism, when many people are feeling disenchanted with the excesses of feminist rhetoric, and seeking a way to be both pro-woman and pro-family.
The belief that gender is a social construct enables us to diminish the limitations assigned to the female sex in most cultures, but it also penalizes women in subtle ways. Like it or not, women remain the bearers of children and their primary caretakers. Any theory of gender that ignores this elementary fact, and the economic and social impact of childbearing and child rearing on women, is bound to fail because it ignores not only social reality but biological reality. Yet not all women choose to bear children these days, and even many who do, do not not wish to be perceived primarily as mothers. In this realm, as in so many others, a middle-ground perspective that acknowledges women’s unique biological responsibilities and yet does not seek to define women solely in terms of biology seems most appealing.
And who can speak more authoritatively of what it is like to inhabit the middle ground between biology and culture than gender-variant people? An individual who has inhabited the social roles of both man and woman, with all the cultural baggage that accrues to both states— or to neither—acquires a kind of gender gnosis: a secret knowledge denied the rest of us who live in our assigned boxes, M or F, without really probing the boundaries. Yet rather than letting these individuals be themselves, or even soliciting their insights, society in general continues to try to force gender-variant people (whether transgendered, transsexual, or intersexual) into one of the two socially acceptable boxes. This seems not only cruel but also foolish. In certain cultures, transgendered or “two spirit” people were considered wise counselors, shamans in fact. There are traces of this belief in our cultural tradition. Tiresias, the ancient Greek sage—who transformed into a woman after seeing two snakes mating, and then back into a man many years later—was wise because of, not in spite of, his metamorphoses. The religions of the world are replete with androgynous deities, or deities able to transgender themselves at will. Even Christianity and Judaism, together with Islam, the most androcentric of religions, retain traces of an ambigendered deity. Shekinah is the feminine face of God in Judaism, just as Wisdom in Christianity is gendered female. Neither Shekinah nor Wisdom is a separate being; both are a part of God, who is perhaps just as omnigendered as the embryo, and as potent with possibility.
These philosophical and theological musings are, of course, of little interest or value to many gender-variant people, who are focused on the battle to achieve civil rights as they remain the most vulnerable minority group in our culture, and the target of the most virulent discrimination. What can one say about the case of Peter Oiler, the truck driver who was fired by the Winn-Dixie supermarket chain after twenty years of exemplary employment when his supervisor discovered that he occasionally dressed in women’s clothing? Oiler was not wearing dresses to work, nor was he negligent in his duties in any way. However, he did make the mistake of being honest when his supervisor called him into his office to discuss rumors that Oiler was gay. The married Oiler said that he wasn’t gay but that he cross-dressed occasionally and had attended support group meetings, dined in restaurants, gone shopping, and occasionally attended church services while dressed in women’s clothing. He was asked to resign shortly thereafter, and when he refused to do so, was fired, with his health care coverage and other benefits terminated.
Oiler, backed by a number of trans advocacy groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, appealed to the courts of the state of Louisiana, which denied his claim of discrimination and request for damages. Cross-dressers, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people are not covered by existing federal civil rights legislation, so people like Peter Oiler have little legal recourse when they are fired from their jobs or refused an apartment or a loan or harassed in the workplace or in a restaurant or store. Another book could be, and I hope will be, written about the legal travails of gender-variant people and the manner in which they are consistently denied the most basic liberties that most Americans take for granted.
At the fifth annual symposium sponsored by the
“In 1989, I became aware that even though transgenders began the Stonewall Riots in 1969, we were not welcome in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights. And as the other speakers here today know, beginning in 1989, we of the transgender community began a decade-plus-long fight for that reincorporation…. Today, we are an almost completely reincorporated LGBT community. Unfortunately, transgenders plus gender-variant lesbians and gays and bisexuals remain excluded from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) before the U.S. Congress.” ENDA, first introduced in Congress in 1994 and resubmitted each year since then, would provide federal protection for gays and lesbians—but as Frye notes, “each year since then, ENDA has been introduced with sometimes different language, but always with a deliberate and intentional exclusion of transgenders and gender variants.” At the 2001 Gender and the Law Conference, Professor Chai R. Feldblum of Georgetown University, one of the original drafters of ENDA, said that she had since come to believe that it was crucial to include protection for gender-variant people in any proposed legislation. Many of the legislators who support ENDA maintain that the act cannot be passed with such a clause, however, even though a number of cities and towns have passed laws protecting the civil rights of transgendered Americans over the past two years.
At the Georgetown conference, Phyllis Frye noted that much progress had been achieved in recent years, notably that “more and more transgenders are coming out of their closets” and that “although rampant employment discrimination still exists … more and more companies, some that used to fire transitioning transgenders in upper management,… are now giving transgenders a try.” Still, challenges remain, legal and other, she said. One of the most important of these is a matter of language, which reflects outdated perceptions. “A very important change that has yet to be made is the time we transgenders are no longer called ‘sex changes.’ After all, consider this: we are NOT CHANGING anything! Indeed, we are merely CORRECTING pronouns, names, manner of dress, hormones and flesh to MATCH what has always been in our brains…. The law must learn to assimilate the advances of medical science in a quicker manner and not remain legally stuck in the medical thinking of thirty years ago.”
Frye is right about the tendency of the law to lag behind science, and yet science and medicine, too, are inherently conservative endeavors that tend to cleave to old paradigms until forced to do otherwise. Harry Benjamin acknowledged this fact in the introduction to
In researching this book, I have been greatly impressed by the courage exhibited not only by the “true scientists, surgeons, and doctors” who sought to help their gender-variant patients find greater happiness and fulfillment, but also by the incredible bravery of gender-variant people themselves. Presented with a seeming dilemma, they have struggled to create a solution in the face of nearly universal incomprehension and condemnation. “I made a decision a long time ago that when I successfully pushed through a door, metaphorically speaking, that I would never let the door swing shut to block the way of other people, but that I would instead remove the door from its hinges,” Phyllis Frye said at the Georgetown Law School. The same might be said of Christine Jorgensen, Reed Erickson, Sylvia Rivera, and the many other activists, scholars, and citizens who have labored to find an answer to their own personal “riddle of gender,” and in doing so, have opened the door to greater freedom and authenticity for all. In an era in which scientists are being cautioned not to use hot-button words and phrases such as “gay,” “men who sleep with men,” or “transgender” in AIDS grant applications, that may seem a naive conclusion. However, as the history cataloged in this book illustrates, the pendulum of policy may swing from left to right, but it always swings back to the other side eventually, and each time it does, the arc of understanding widens. Will we ever find a definitive solution to the riddle of gender? Maybe not—but as this history indicates, the questions we ask about gender tend to be more liberating than the answers. I would prefer to live in a society that gave me the freedom to ask those questions, rather than one that enforced autocratic conclusions.
As I neared the end of the research for this book, the friend whose journey inspired it asked me if my own
