and parcel of U. S. culture,” he says, “combined with ignorance/fear of transsexualism,” a media campaign that stokes fears of transsexualism as a way of calling attention to the problem of environmental degradation is almost inevitable. “Stem the rise of transsexualism by cleaning up the environment—given the utter ignorance of science among popular media, I fear such a campaign might arise as a response to legislate/push for environmental clean- up.”
Sennett’s concerns about how the media, public, and health care providers will respond to any linkage between EDCs and transsexualism are connected to the larger issue of how biology intersects with culture in the lives of transgendered people. “Biology remains a strenuous dance partner for transsexual people,” he says. “Sometimes she makes us look really good and other times it takes all we can do to keep from stepping on her feet.” He rues the “fix it” mindset he has encountered from some health care professionals, “with all the concomitant patronizing and condescending attitudes,” that go along with it—yet, he admits that he has also received caring and compassionate treatment. The bottom line, he says, is that as a transman “I cannot live without these ‘biological’ artifacts,” like hormone therapy. “Unless the testosterone becomes available over the counter, I’m living with these people for the rest of my life.”
Sennett is deeply interested in science and technology, and on his blog often discusses provocative issues like the transsexual person as a kind of cyborg, a fusion of nature and technology. Unlike Janice Raymond and other critics of transsexualism, he doesn’t view the technological artifice of the transsexual body as a negative but as something to be celebrated. Even the possibility that EDCs are creating more transsexual and intersex people can be viewed as a “Darwinian positive,” he points out. “Only the most robust humans can continue to survive in the fecal soup that we have made of our environment. Perhaps we represent a positive outcome, or at the very least, we represent one way in which the body responds to its environments.”
He doubts that most will see things that way, though, either within the trans community or without. “I’ll wager that if a positive correlation is found, it will enter my community through statements like ‘it isn’t our fault!’” he says. Research on possible gender-bending effects of EDCs, just like previous research on sex and gender, is a double-edged sword, he points out. “Sometimes biology dismisses our freedom and sometimes it is a source of healing. Really the issue I think is how our society uses biology and science to control and diminish us. There is nothing inherently good or bad about our biology.”
Sennett’s comments echo those I’ve heard from others in the trans community following the publication of the hardcover edition of this book. Like Sennett, many people have written to thank me for writing the book. “This is the most in-depth piece on the subject that I have read in many, many years,” one middle-aged transwoman e- mailed me. “I was not able to stop once I began. I learned so much about the transgender movement that I simply did not know. For all of that, and for the stories you related, I thank you. For so many years, I thought there was hardly anyone else in the world like me,” she added. “It is so comforting to know there are so many others like me out there.” At readings and on radio shows, people seemed particularly intrigued by the science; the great majority of questions put to me have been about the biological basis of sex and gender. Clearly, there is a great deal of interest, both within the trans community and without, on this subject.
I’ve also been cautioned by some trans people about the dangers of biological reductionism, and heard concerns that once again science and medicine are being used to define transgendered people, to pin a label on them, even if the label may ultimately be a less stigmatizing one. “Some folks firmly believe in a biological component while others think their experience remains largely socially constructed,” says Sen-nett. “What is missing from these discussions remains an understanding that scientific ‘facts’ are constructed over time.” This point resonates not only within the trans community, but in the straight community as well, as an acrimonious public debate on sex and gender that broke out the month before the hardcover edition of
In January 2005, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, delivered a lecture that touched on the continued under-representation of women in tenured positions in science and engineering at top research universities. Summers proposed three possible explanations—many women may be either unwilling or unable to put in the long hours requisite for high-level achievement; women in general may have less aptitude for high-end achievement in science and engineering; lingering patterns of passive discrimination and stereotyping may prevent women from achieving their full potential. It was the second speculation that ignited a firestorm of controversy, beginning at the actual presentation when an MIT biology professor, Nancy Hopkins, walked out, telling
I had mixed feelings about the Summers controversy. On the one hand, I know plenty of female researchers who exhibit no less aptitude for the practice of high-level scientific achievement than their male peers, though it seems that they often have to work harder to balance the demands of family life and research. On the other hand, the research for this book has convinced me that there are, in fact, differences in male and female ways of perceiving and responding to the world, and that these cognitive differences
At the same time, I see very clearly the dangers of attributing too much emphasis to biology, of using biological determinism to undermine efforts to keep chipping away at the social and cultural factors that prevent girls and women from pursuing, and succeeding in, careers in science and engineering. Black and Latino men too, are under-represented in science and engineering. I have seen no evidence that they are biologically unsuited to the practice of these disciplines. In fact, it seems self-evident that individuals from various minority groups have the ability to succeed in science, but often lack the educational opportunities to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to pursue a career in science and engineering in the first place. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, scientists and engineers are made, not born. It’s no secret that we are making too few scientists and engineers in the United States these days. Indeed, our long dominance in those fields may be rapidly coming to an end as (among other factors) the supply of foreign-born scientists and engineers dries up in the wake of post—9/11 crackdowns on foreign-born scholars. Our precollegiate educational system is simply not providing American students with the necessary coursework to enable them to succeed in undergraduate and graduate scientific studies. Doesn’t it make more sense at this point to focus on education, rather than biology, as a fix for the problem— and to seek to expand opportunity rather than to limit it to those with a “biological” predisposition for such studies?
I found the Summers controversy frustrating for another, more personal, reason. When this book was published in February 2005, it was almost universally ignored by reviewers and the media—a common complaint of authors. But I felt that part of the reticence in dealing with the book was related to its topic, and that as its author I was in a very real sense cloaked in the same invisibility that continues to blanket its subjects. The experiences of the transgendered and transsexual people who were the sources for this book directly impinge on the issues generated by the Summers controversy—but no one thought to interview a trans neuroscientist like Ben Barres, for instance, for his unique perspective on this subject. No one considered that transgendered, intersex, and/or transsexual people have anything to contribute to the very heated debate that raged for months in the pages of newspapers and magazines. This astonishes me. But it is part and parcel of the dedicated ignorance that continues to characterize the media and public approach to trans people.
The past two years have also been notable for the degree to which homophobia (and its close cousin transphobia) has crept from its dank closet and begun fulminating in the public square. When I began the research for this book in 2001, gay-bashing had begun to seem as embarrassingly antiquated as overt racism and anti-gay bigots were becoming a (thankfully) endangered species. No more! One of the unfortunate effects of 9/11 seems to have been a sudden ratcheting up of public mistrust and loathing for the Other—and gay others have borne the brunt of the hatred and fear. Unscrupulous politicians and preachers have played on free-floating anxiety about difference and have scapegoated gays as exemplars of decadence and the decline of “American” values. What hogwash! I’ve always felt that the value held dearest by most Americans was the right to be left alone. To deny that right to others while claiming it for oneself is the rankest hypocrisy.
I’ve found that the most valuable insight that I’ve taken away from the research and writing of this book is the certain knowledge that when one group’s rights are violated or denied, the rights of all are threatened. For that reason, that struggle by LGBT Americans to gain their civil rights is not just a “gay” issue—like the civil rights struggles of African Americans forty years ago, it affects everyone. I’ve read excerpts from Chapter 1 of this book at
