The Riddle of Gender Page 2

  Similarly, many people pay lip service to the idea that males and females have both a “feminine” and a “masculine” side, and as I finish the final draft of this book, a great deal of attention is being devoted to the rise of the “metrosexual,” an urban feminized man. Yet a male-bodied person who expresses his femininity by wearing dresses quickly discovers the limits of social tolerance. Women have more freedom to dress as they please, as I discovered on a rainy night in Washington, D.C., when I attended a support group meeting for cross-dressers. As I sat in the meeting in my sweatshirt and jeans—the only female-bodied person in the room and the only person wearing pants—I realized that little more than a century ago, I would have been just as freakishly attired as the male-bodied people around me in their dresses, high heels, and makeup. According to the social standards of 1902, I, too, was “cross-dressed.” Even in 1932 my garb would have been considered suspicious. But because our culture now permits women to wear clothing once thought of as “masculine,” my outfit was unremarkable. Not so for the outfits on the people around me. They are defined (and define themselves) as “transgendered” partially because they yearn to express aspects of femininity denied to male-bodied persons by cultural norms. While most male-bodied persons don’t seem to feel a desire to wear dresses and use cosmetics, the ones who do so encounter extraordinary social ostracism and violence. The great majority of transgendered people who are the victims of hate crimes are male-bodied persons dressing and living as females.

  That doesn’t mean that women are free of gender-based limitations and bias. Western women may wear pants, and some may have claimed the right to work, play, and have sex like men, but as any woman of a certain age will be happy to tell you, female cultural power is still largely a function of youth and beauty. Women of all ages spend an inordinate amount of their time and resources maintaining an attractive appearance. Young women are indoctrinated into this feminine cult at a young age, with girls typically beginning to shave, pluck, paint, and perfume at around eleven or twelve years old. Throughout adolescence, girls learn that their perceived value as people is tied to their appearance; they must be fit, fresh-smelling, and fashionably attired in order to lead happy, successful lives. The pressure to maintain a pleasing appearance increases as we age. Few straight men spend as much time on the scale, in the salon, or at the gym as their female counterparts. Why spend so much time, energy, and money to look young, fit, and fertile if being a middle-aged woman is not somehow related to a loss of prestige and power? Middle-aged men seem immune to this pressure. One of my sources—a surgeon transitioning from male to female at age fifty—told me that her spouse simply cannot understand why a successful middle-aged man would surrender his cultural power to assume the lower-caste status of a middle-aged woman. “Who will want you?” she asked, a poignant expression of the creeping sense of invisibility and insignificance many aging women feel.

  Male privilege remains a very real phenomenon in our supposedly postfeminist society. Many of the transmen (female-to-male, or FTM, transsexual people) I interviewed noted that, as men, they are treated far more respectfully and deferentially than they were as women. “I get a lot of white male privilege. Oh, my god! I can’t even believe that. When I would go into stores before, they had security guards following me around, because I was this sort of big motorcycle leather dyke. Now, they’re like, ‘Can I help you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?’” says Tom Kennard, a burly, middle-aged transman. “They will give men power, and you just have to take it. I have to figure out how I can use that power responsibly.”

  Those who travel in the other direction, from male to female, are conversely aware of the loss of privilege that is an unavoidable consequence of their decision to transition. In giving up their maleness, transwomen often give up high incomes, social status, and, very often, the ability to support themselves in their chosen profession. Trans-women tend to be more visible, and thus less employable, than trans-men. They are more often the victims of violence and discrimination, simply because they are seen or “read” in a way that transmen are not. But they also have surrendered the social protections of maleness. Though men can be sexually violated, they are not usually victims of rape except in all-male environments such as prisons. Transwomen seem to be at high risk for rape, however, both before and after their surgical transition. This may be because, as one source told me, transwomen aren’t raised with the “don’ts” that most natal women absorb from their mothers and other women. These spoken and unspoken prohibitions (don’t go home with strange men, don’t walk down dark streets by yourself, don’t open the door to strangers) circumscribe our lives, but they may also provide some measure of protection. Transwomen learn late the painful lesson most natal women absorb in adolescence: that being a woman automatically confers vulnerability to sexual assault. This is true even if one retains the (hidden) insignia of masculinity, a penis. As a woman, I know intimately the sense of physical vulnerability that transwomen encounter when they assume the social role of women. That sense of shared vulnerability is one of the strongest bonds I have felt with the transwomen I interviewed for this book.

  Fear and mistrust of men and masculinity still permeate discussions of gender. Neither women nor individual men appear to trust or think kindly of males as a group, a prejudice that seems justified when one considers the disproportionate propensity of males for committing acts of physical violence and aggression. As I have researched this book, I have learned from transmen just how painful and shocking it is suddenly to be perceived as a threatening figure, purely by virtue of one’s maleness. Women may cross to the other side of the street to avoid sharing the sidewalk with you; they stop looking you in the eye. A wall goes up, and those transmen who have lived as lesbians for years before their transitions find that wall particularly disturbing. “It’s really upsetting to me that men are perceived as bad,” says Tom Kennard. “And I wonder how boys, men who grow up as men, deal with that. How do they internalize that? What does it do to them? Because when I talk to them, they know about this. But they’re just like, ‘Well, what can you do?’”

  Like many of the transmen I interviewed, Kennard had to overcome deep-seated negative feelings about masculine identity and behavior in order to proceed with his transition. He didn’t want to be a “man” as manhood is defined in our culture, and yet, he felt that he had no other choice because he was not a woman either. “People say that gender is what’s between your ears and not between your legs, but I don’t know,” he says. “I just didn’t belong in the girls’ pile. It’s sort of an exclusion thing, rather than inclusion. I just felt like I didn’t belong over there. If we have a binary system, and there are only two choices, I belong here. And I like being over here. I’m really comfortable being over here.”

  These observations lead me to the most salient fact that my conversations with transsexual people have illuminated: though the way we express gender is clearly influenced by culture, gender identity itself seems far too deeply embedded to be purely an artifact of culture. There are few benefits to adult sex reassignment, other than the feeling that one’s body and social role finally reflect one’s inner sense of self. The process of sex reassignment is physically and emotionally grueling, and hugely expensive in terms of money, time, and lost personal relationships. Most of my transsexual sources knew from a very young age (typically before age five) that there was something different about them. Often they spent decades trying to understand the source of that difference and come to terms with the implications of their process of self-discovery. Those who decide to physically change their sex then spend a number of years committed to the process of transition; the outcome is a series of painful surgeries. No one would undertake this arduous quest unless driven to it by acute misery. I have been told by person after person, “It was this or suicide.”

  Transgendered people who do not surgically transition, who live with bodies at odds with their gender presentation, court even greater risks, endur
ing the constant threat of discovery and exposure. The penalty for such transgression is often brutal. Many people have heard of the murder of Brandon Teena (nee Teena Brandon), the subject of the film Boys Don’t Cry, but few know that such murders are commonplace. In 2002 alone, twenty-three people in the United States were slain in what appear to have been transgender hate crimes. For example, in October 2002, while at a party, seventeen-year-old Gwen Araujo was dragged into a garage, where she was beaten and strangled by three young men who had discovered that she was male-bodied. Her body was then dumped in the desert. It took two weeks for the other young people present at the party to report the murder. Two months before Gwen Araujo’s death, on August 12, 2002, Stephanie Thomas, nineteen, and Ukea Davis, eighteen, were shot to death as they sat in their parked car a block from the apartment they shared in Washington, D.C. Davis and Thomas had lived as women since their early teens, and became close friends after meeting at a support group. Unlike Araujo, whose “secret” was unknown to many of her acquaintances, Thomas and Davis were well known and apparently well liked in the southeast D.C. neighborhood where they grew up. Their openness did not protect them. Each was hit more than ten times in the head and upper body by bullets fired by a passenger in a passing car, which, according to witnesses, turned around and released a second volley of bullets before speeding off. Despite a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of a suspect, the identity of the killer or killers remains unknown.

  A vigil for Thomas and Davis was held a few days after their deaths, ironically at the very same intersection where, in 1995, Tyra Hunter, a transgendered hairdresser, had lain bleeding to death after an automobile accident. Paramedics arrived on the scene immediately after the accident, but while stripping Hunter to assess her condition, they discovered her male genitalia, jumped back in shock, and began to ridicule her. As Hunter lay dying (but still conscious), the EMT team continued to mock her; she died shortly afterward in the ER from blood loss. In 1998, her mother was awarded $2.8 million in damages in a wrongful death lawsuit, based on negligence by the D.C. Fire Department and malpractice by an ER physician. “Tyra’s story is surprisingly commonplace and speaks to the fears of most transsexuals [sic] who sometimes feel pressured to undergo expensive sexual reassignment surgery and to alter their legal documents specifically to avoid such nightmares,” wrote Sarah D. Fox, Ph.D., a neurobiologist and communications director of It’s Time, Ohio!, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) lobby organization, after the verdict was announced. The drive to express an inborn gender identity must be strong indeed to compel individuals such as Teena, Araujo, Thomas, Davis, and Hunter to face the kind of hatred that led to their deaths. Milton Diamond, professor of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawaii, explains the violence and incomprehension suffered by transgendered people simply: “Nature loves variety. Society hates it.”

  The transgendered and transsexual people whom I interviewed for this book were kind enough, and courageous enough, to share their stories with me. Most of the individuals whose stories are contained in these pages are “success stories”—they are primarily well-educated, middle-class white Americans whose privileged socioeconomic status contributed to their positive outcomes. In this arena, as in so many others, race, class, and economics play a huge role. Yet even with all their advantages, the individuals profiled in this book grappled with an enigma that might have consumed them, had they not found the courage and strength to endure the struggle, and the support and assistance they required. Each narrative chapter of the book is followed by the edited transcript of an interview, which provides commentary on the chapter preceding it and context for the chapter that follows. This structure will, I hope, reflect something of my own journey as I undertook my research and will enable the reader to recognize what I soon recognized myself—that the larger historical narrative is in fact composed of many individual narratives, each worthy of the telling. I am only sorry that I wasn’t able to include all of the stories I heard over the past few years, or the full text of every interview.

  Like politics and religion, the issue of nature versus nurture with respect to gender is one that invariably gives rise to passionate debate. I do not expect that this book will convert people who believe that gender differences are grounded entirely in social conditioning; nor do I believe that the book will eradicate the bigotry, discrimination, and violence suffered by transgendered, transsexual, and intersexual people. But I do hope that the narrative history and dialogues within its pages will promote greater understanding and acceptance of a group (or groups) of people who typically want nothing more than to live their lives in peace and be able to enjoy the same civil status and protections granted to others.

  I also hope to show that the history contained in these pages is, in a very real sense, a shared history. The growing visibility of transsexual, transgendered, and intersexual people has coincided with a radical questioning and reshuffling of traditional sex roles among people who consider themselves normatively gendered. The boundaries of gender were once very clearly drawn in our culture; we are not as far removed from the rigidity and repression of traditional sex roles as we sometimes like to pretend. At the same time we remain baffled by the still unfolding gender revolution; what does it mean to be a man or a woman, and how can we best achieve fulfillment of our identities as man or woman? I entered into the research for this book partly to help myself resolve that ongoing internal debate. Along the way I discovered that each of us has been profoundly affected by the questions posed by the individuals described here, and by the answers that science has provided, and will continue to provide, to the riddle of gender.

  One

  THE HANDS OF GOD

  I certify that Chevalier d’Eon lived with me for approximately three years, that I always considered him to be a woman; however, after his death and upon observation of the corpse discovered that he was a man. My wife certifies the same.

  WILLIAM BOUNING, LONDON, 1810

  I began the research for this book in the way that I approach every scientific subject that interests me, by searching the literature. I soon discovered that far from being a product of the modern world, gender variance has been documented across cultures and in every epoch of history. Male-bodied persons dressing and living as women and female-bodied persons dressing and living as men were known in ancient Greece and Rome, among Native American tribes prior to the arrival of Europeans, on the Indian subcontinent, in Africa, in Siberia, in eastern Europe, and in nearly every other indigenous society studied by anthropologists. According to historian Vern Bullough, “gender crossing is so ubiquitous, that genitalia by itself has never been a universal nor essential insignia of a lifelong gender. “In some of these cultures, cross-gendered persons were considered shamans gifted with extraordinary psychic powers, and they assumed special ceremonial roles. In many religions, the gods themselves can transform their sex at will, cross-dress, or are androgynous. Our Judeo-Christian heritage, founded on a belief in an exclusively male deity, has frowned on such gender fluidity; nonetheless, throughout the Middle Ages and even into the modern era, cross-dressing has been permitted and indeed celebrated at festivals, in clubs, and on the stage.

  Moreover, the deathbed discovery of a gender reversal is a far more common occurrence in Western history than one might suspect. Many (though not all) of the persons whose names and stories are known to us today were born female and lived some or all of their lives as men. A few of the better-known individuals in this category include James Barry, British army physician and Inspector-General, died 1865; Charles Durkee Pankhurst, California stagecoach driver, died 1879; Murray Hall, Tammany Hall politician, died 1901; Jack Bee Garland, soldier in the Spanish-American War, died 1936; and Billy Tipton, jazz trumpeter, died 1989. Some of these people were married to women, who publicly expressed shock and amazement when their partners died and were found to be other than what friends and neighbors assumed them to be. It is impossibl
e to know if this shock was real or was feigned for the benefit of a public that was not prepared to accept the alternative explanation—that the widow had lived happily with a female-bodied person who saw himself and was accepted by others (including his wife) as a man. The case of the Chevalier d’Eon, an eighteenth-century aristocrat whose gender was a source of considerable controversy during his lifetime, is a bit more complex, and because it became a public scandal, I will recount it more fully here.

  Born in France in 1728, Charles-Genevieve Louis-Auguste-Andre-Timothee d’Eon de Beaumont lived forty-nine years as a man and thirty-four as a woman. Aristocrat, diplomat, soldier, and spy, d’Eon worked for the French government in both male and female roles, exhibiting such a chameleon-like ability to change from man to woman and back again that contemporary historians remain just as baffled as d’Eon’s peers by the chevalier’s metamorphoses. Traditional accounts suggest that d’Eon was dispatched on his first diplomatic mission to Russia in female garb to infiltrate the social circle of the Empress Elizabeth. After successfully carrying out this mission, d’Eon returned to France and assumed an unambiguously male role, becoming a captain of dragoons and fighting valiantly in the Seven Years’ War. Wounded in battle, d’Eon was named a Knight of St. Louis, and in 1762 was offered a diplomatic assignment at the British royal court. In a letter, the French king Louis XV congratulated the chevalier on his new post and wrote, “You have served me just as well in women’s clothing as you have in the clothes you are now wearing.”