The Riddle of Gender Read online

  The Riddle of Gender

  Deborah Rudacille

  When Deborah Rudacille learned that a close friend had decided to transition from female to male, she felt compelled to understand why.

  Coming at the controversial subject of transsexualism from several angles–historical, sociological, psychological, medical–Rudacille discovered that gender variance is anything but new, that changing one’s gender has been met with both acceptance and hostility through the years, and that gender identity, like sexual orientation, appears to be inborn, not learned, though in some people the sex of the body does not match the sex of the brain.

  Informed not only by meticulous research, but also by the author’s interviews with prominent members of the transgender community, The Riddle of Gender is a sympathetic and wise look at a sexual revolution that calls into question many of our most deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being.

  Review

  “Sympathetic and well-researched…. Lively enough to be a good introduction for the educated lay reader and documented enough for the scholar.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Amazing! This is the long-awaited fusion of science, criticism, and compassion that scholars of gender–and everybody else–have been waiting for. The Riddle of Gender is meticulous, funny, brilliant, and readable…. Not just for those interested in the enigmas of sex and gender, but for those interested in the universal mystery of how we become ourselves.”

  —Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders

  Deborah Rudacille

  THE RIDDLE OF GENDER

  Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights

  FOR AIDEN

  Glory be to God for dappled things—

  ........................................

  All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

  With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

  He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change

  —Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”

  INTRODUCTION

  “And what sort of person might you be?” asked the smiling young man behind the registration desk.

  I stared at him for a moment in bafflement and dread, running through a list of potential responses. I was registering for the True Spirit Conference, an annual gathering for transsexual men and their partners and families. It was my first foray into the community, and I was nervous and feeling very much like an outsider; I was sure that people could tell merely by looking at me that I didn’t belong.

  “Well…” I said, preparing to announce that I was a heterosexual woman, a single mother of three, and a science writer, when suddenly I noticed the three options for registration on the page I had just signed: student, low income, and regular.

  “Regular,” I said, with relief.

  “Great,” the young man replied, as I filled out a check for ninety dollars and handed it over, my face burning as I realized how close I had come to looking like an idiot.

  Nonetheless, throughout the next two days, as I attended sessions and introduced myself to people at the conference, I was asked the same question over and over in varying forms. The answer to the question seemed important to everyone I met. What kind of person are you? Why are you here? Why are you interested in our lives? Not far beneath those questions lurked accusations. Are you here to exploit us? To attack us? To make us look like freaks or deviants? “Just what,” one guy said, “is your agenda?” I thought the question fair enough. And since it has been posed, in one form or another, by everyone whom I have interviewed on this subject, I feel that it is right that I begin this book with an answer to it, since it is probably also a question that will be entertained by readers.

  I attended the True Spirit Conference in 2001 because I had recently learned that a friend of mine was transitioning from female to male. This baffled me, as I knew nothing at all about transsexuality, transgenderism, gender-queerness, or gender variance, nothing at all about the motivations that would impel a twenty-two-year-old female-bodied person to inject herself with testosterone or undergo a mastectomy or live as a man. I was concerned and confused and I soon learned that I was not alone. Nearly everyone I spoke with about the subject was as confused as I was, and in some cases far more judgmental. “That’s crazy,” “It’s sick,” and “That’s disgusting” were some of the most extreme comments, together with the pious “It’s against God’s plan to change your sex” and the pseudoscientific “She needs psychiatric help.”

  It’s important to note that these comments were uttered by people who are more or less comfortable with homosexuality. People who had accepted and embraced gay friends, colleagues, and family members seemed bewildered by transsexuality and its close cousin transvestism, or cross-dressing. The adjective “transgendered”—indicating individuals who either cross the great gender divide or live between the poles of male and female—is recognized, but not, it seems, widely understood. I found this to be no less true of my children’s generation than of my own or my parents’. This lack of understanding breeds fear, and fear often gives birth to violence. This was brought home to me most acutely a few months after I learned of my friend’s decision to transition, when a transwoman (male-to-female, or MTF, transsexual) was murdered a few blocks from my home.

  Walking home from a neighborhood bar, Tacy Ranta was shot by a gang of adolescents and young adults who had been on a crime spree, carjacking and mugging twelve people in the neighborhood over a five-hour period. Although the miscreants robbed everyone, the only person they shot was Ranta. The newspaper reports on the murder focused on Ranta’s transsexuality and used the male pronouns of her birth sex when referring to her, even though she had been living as a woman for years and, in the month preceding her murder, had had the sex on her driver’s license altered from M to F.

  The murder of Tacy Ranta mere blocks from my home, coming on the heels of my friend’s announcement, caused me to confront my basic lack of knowledge and understanding of a group of people who I barely knew existed. I wanted to know more about gender variance, and though this desire was born partly of a desire to understand and support my friend, it was also linked to my own lifelong questioning of gender roles.

  I was born in 1958 and grew up in the seventies, when large numbers of women began to challenge the institutions and assumptions that had created their social subordination. I lived through the second wave of feminism and I know that my life has been profoundly affected by the vastly increased opportunities for women and the breakdown of gender stereotypes that were its fruits.

  Yet I, like many women, have also felt ambivalent about some of the results of that revolution. I remember very well the patronizing attitudes I encountered from other women when I chose to remain at home with my preschool children during the eighties. The unspoken assumption seemed to be that only a chump would sacrifice her career advancement to take care of babies. Virtues traditionally gendered female (modesty, gentleness, and emotional generosity) were scorned by those who viewed them as a pathetic accommodation to the patriarchal status quo. The qualities our culture respects and rewards are the traditionally masculine traits of independence, assertiveness, and enlightened self-interest, and feminism has done nothing to change that. We wanted the best of both worlds; instead it seems sometimes that we have the worst of each. Women have been liberated to become rakes and workaholics, and men have won the freedom to drift aimlessly in a kind of perpetual adolescence. This may be a kind of progress, but it is not the equality between the sexes once envisioned by feminists.

  And despite our well-intentioned efforts to melt gender stereotypes wi
th the blowtorch of change, differences remain. As a parent, I have certainly observed what seem to be gender-mediated differences between my daughters and my son throughout their childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. As toddlers, they played equally happily with the Little Tikes play kitchen, a car, and various other gender-neutral toys that I as a feminist parent provided. But at a certain point, my son and his best friend began to develop an interest in dinosaurs and Godzilla, to manufacture guns and swords out of tree branches, and to engage in the kind of semi-serious wrestling and roughhousing that often produced minor injuries. Yet my son’s two trips to the emergency room in early childhood were the result of “accidental” injuries inflicted by his older sister. Clearly, she hadn’t heard the news that girls are less aggressive than boys!

  On the other hand, from a young age my daughters were far more attuned to social nuances than was my son. While her brother could sit in the same classroom for years with various children and still not know their names, my younger daughter could rattle off not only the names but also the familial and social bonds uniting every child in the elementary school. She and her older sister have always possessed a kind of emotional radar that their more analytical brother lacks. Yet my son, unlike his sisters, remains close to his best friends from elementary and middle school, a challenge to the prevailing wisdom that females have a greater gift for forming long-lasting intimate friendships.

  As teenagers, these young men developed an interest in tabletop war games, in which players build and paint fantasy armies and engage in battles based on a complicated set of rules and strategies. I can testify that in my many visits to the Games Workshop, where the armies are purchased and the tournaments played, I have never seen a female player or a female employee—only other mothers like me, anxiously clutching Christmas and birthday lists. Is there a gene for War-Hammer? Doubtful, but there is something—and I don’t think the something is culturally inscribed—that causes males to be drawn to ritualized combat, whether in sport, in games, or on film. Yet, after years of watching violent movies, playing violent video games, and directing the clash of armies on plywood battlefields, my son and his friends eagerly participated in the marches against the war in Iraq and were bitterly and vocally opposed to the conflict.

  My daughters were completely uninterested in the peace movement or the war itself; for them the political was not at all personal. They are intensely interested in the lives of acquaintances and celebrities, however, and have prodigious memories for who has dated, married, and dumped whom and whose career is foundering because of what ill-advised choices. Their baffled brother finds their interest in the personal lives of strangers incomprehensible: “You don’t know these people,” he is apt to snap when subjected to yet another conversation about the latest juicy celebrity gossip. In The Essential Difference, the British psychiatrist Simon Baron-Cohen proposes an explanation for these and other differences in male and female interests and abilities: the average woman has an “empathizing” brain while the average male has a “systematizing” brain. Males are driven to analyze, explore, and construct systems while women tend to identify with other people’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions in an attempt to understand and predict behavior. I’ll have more to say about Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis later, but for now it’s enough to point out that it does provide an explanation for the kinds of everyday differences we notice between men and women—and that the hypothesis is viewed as reactionary by those who deny any essential biological difference between male and female brains.

  I grew up in a time when increasing numbers of people believed that the differences between males and females were socially constructed, and that if children were raised to understand that there were no essential differences between being born in a male body and being born in a female body, we would all be “free to be”—free of all gender-based boundaries and limitations, free of social stereotypes based on genital distinctions. Boys could cry, and girls could compete; boys could be nurses, homemakers, and teachers (the nurturing professions), and girls could be fighter pilots, police officers, and firefighters (the warrior professions). I am happy to live in a society that has struggled to eradicate limiting beliefs and practices that have kept both men and women from realizing their full potential as human beings. But I have largely abandoned the belief that all the differences we note between men and women are purely a matter of social custom. Some differences run much deeper than custom, the primary one being the deeply felt and ineradicable sense that one is male or female—or neither.

  Let’s talk about the distinction between gender and sex.

  Virginia (nee Charles) Prince, founder of Transvestia magazine, famously said that “gender is what’s above the neck and sex is what’s below the neck.” Gender is meta-sex—it’s what we make of the difference in our bodies and their reproductive anatomy and capabilities. My female body is made to give birth and to nurture. Your male body is constructed to seed me and to protect our offspring. From an evolutionary perspective, our common goal is to ensure that our children survive until they can reproduce themselves and thus transmit our genes to the next generation. Gender is the cultural tapestry that we weave from those fundamental facts.

  But gender differences cannot be rooted in culture alone, because my body (what’s below my neck) and my brain (what’s above my neck) are not divided by some kind of biological Berlin Wall. The body and the brain are an open city, built on the constant exchange of information. Just after my mother’s egg and my father’s sperm united, each contributing an X chromosome to my female genotype, skeins of DNA began to uncoil and replicate. Messages traveled between the rapidly multiplying cells that had not yet differentiated into specific organs and tissues, switching genes on and off under instructions from the master template, guiding my development. In the sixth week of pregnancy, the process of sexual differentiation began. The androgynous embryo, which possesses both mullerian and wolffian ducts and thus has the potential to develop either a male or a female reproductive anatomy, accepted its genetic fate, and an exquisitely choreographed dance began, performed by a company of steroid hormones. Because I am an XX person, midway through the second month of pregnancy, the primordial gonad developed into egg-bearing ovaries. My nascent wolffian ducts began to wither away, and the mullerian ducts differentiated into the gothic architecture of the female reproductive system—fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, vagina. Within a few weeks, ultrasound images revealed a recognizably female external anatomy. Evidence suggests that my brain was prenatally “sexed” as well, though the mechanism by which this process is carried out is less clearly understood. Animal research has provided ample evidence of the organizing effects of hormones on the sexual differentiation of the brain, but the extent to which the animal data can be extrapolated to human development remains hotly contested. The sexual differentiation of the brain is completed after birth, as I learn what sorts of attitudes, behavior, and role my culture expects of me as a female.

  In an XY fetus, a different set of chemical messages begins circulating in the second month of pregnancy, based on instructions encoded in the Y chromosome. “Male!” the Y chromosome shouts, and a gene called SRY directs the primitive gonad to form testicles, rather than ovaries. The testicles soon begin to produce androgens, which will masculinize both genitalia and brain. One of the chemical messengers produced by the testicles, mullerian-inhibiting substance (MIS), begins circulating throughout the rapidly dividing cells, barking out orders to arrest the development of a female reproductive anatomy. Testosterone and MIS ensure that the fissure that would otherwise develop into a vagina fuses together to form a scrotum, and that the primary instrument of sexual pleasure (glans penis) develops outside the fleshy mound of the pubis, rather than hidden within it (glans clitoridis). In males, the hormone-driven sexing of the brain is known to continue into the weeks immediately following birth, when the testicles pump out a flood of testosterone at levels that will not be matched until puberty. By that time, the
male child will have learned what behaviors and attitudes his family and culture expect him to display; these are based on the presence of male genitals.

  The process of prenatal sexual differentiation is complex and multi-faceted. An embryo needs more than a Y chromosome to become male; it also needs an androgen receptor gene on the X chromosome to enable it to respond to the androgens its testes are producing. If the androgen receptor gene isn’t functioning, the XY fetus will develop female genitalia. Moreover, testosterone (the so-called male hormone) is transformed into estrogen in the brain by an enzyme called aromatase. As researcher Lindsey Berkson has pointed out, “one cheeky irony of life is that how masculine a man is as an adult may be partly the result of his having had optimal amounts of estrogen in his brain at a certain time during his stay in the womb. Amazingly minute differences—parts per trillion or parts per billion of a few sex hormones—literally affect the making of men or women.” More often than most people suspect, the “script” of sexual differentiation is altered during pregnancy, producing variation.

  Yet we continue to wonder how much of gender performance is cultural and how much is biological. That’s the heart of the riddle, the part that really baffles us. And it’s that part of the riddle that gender-variant people may ultimately help resolve. My conversations with transgendered, transsexual, and intersexual people over the past few years have helped me understand a number of facts that I had not recognized previously. First, despite the social changes initiated by the second wave of feminism, we as a society still maintain some fairly inflexible strategies for policing the boundaries between the sexes. Each time you relieve yourself in a public place, for example, you implicitly accept the idea that Door Number 1 (women) and Door Number 2 (men) are the only options, and that each person will know precisely to which category he or she belongs, and use the “appropriate” toilet. To most of us, the choice may not seem quite as oppressive as that between the “White” and “Colored” bathrooms that were contested by the civil rights movement, but the significance is the same. A ritual boundary is being enforced, as the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment recognized when they claimed that the ERA would result in a promiscuous mingling of the sexes in bathrooms.