Looking back it isn’t hard to see why these earliest cases caused deeper confusions. After World War I the idea of feminine men and masculine women became something of an idée fixe for people criticizing the younger generation. One hit song of the 1920s went ‘Masculine women! Feminine men! Which is the rooster? Which is the hen? It’s hard to tell ‘em apart today.’10
At the time homosexuality and transvestitism seemed to be at least very considerably linked: perhaps these were very committed transvestites or especially effeminate gay men. But the first public trans figures bucked any prevailing expectations. Early in his career Cowell had been a fighter pilot, and after that became famous as a motorcar racing driver. If not a knock-out argument, this certainly made the claim of an ultra-wild form of effeminacy harder – though not impossible – to sustain. And then there were the claims made by the individuals themselves. For example, Cowell wanted people to believe that she had been born intersex and that her vaginoplasty and other procedures were merely correcting a glitch of birth. So the more visible that all these categories became – homosexuality, intersex, transvestitism, transsexualism – the more they became intertwined.
It took time, some individual courage and descriptive skill to even begin to extract what we now know as the ‘trans’ element from this mix. Anybody in doubt about whether this category of individual exists should explore the work of the trans people who have not only thought deeply, but expressed themselves deeply, about this issue. One of the most successful attempts to communicate what many trans people claim is incommunicable was by the British writer Jan (formerly James) Morris. Like Roberta Cowell, Morris’s story introduced layers of confusion and curiosity which still preoccupy audiences and interviewers to this day.
Morris had served in the army in the last days of World War II. Afterwards he had worked as a journalist for The Times and The Guardian. Like his war service, Morris’s work as a foreign correspondent across the Middle East, Africa and behind the Iron Curtain did not fit into existing expectations of what a man who wanted to become a woman might be – any more than did the fact that he was happily married to a woman and had fathered five children.
James’s transition into Jan began in the 1960s and culminated in a sex-change operation in 1972. Already renowned as an author, this soon made her one of the most famous trans people in the world. Morris’s memoir of that transition, Conundrum (1974), remains one of the most persuasive and certainly the best-written accounts to date of why some people feel a need to transition across the sexes. Indeed, it is hard to read Morris’s book and come away thinking that something like trans doesn’t exist or is ‘merely’ a trick of the imagination. Morris describes her earliest memory as being a young boy sitting under his mother’s piano – at the age of three or four – and realizing that he had been ‘born in the wrong body’.11 In the years that followed – through the military, marriage and fatherhood – the conviction never left him. It was only on meeting the famous New York-based endocrinologist Dr Harry Benjamin that some solution to the problem presented itself. These were the very earliest stages of trying to understand trans. A few doctors like Benjamin had satisfied themselves from their study that a certain minority of people felt that they were born in the body of the wrong sex. Nevertheless, all questions of what to do about this still lay before them. Some professionals like Benjamin came to the conclusion that something could be done. And as he once put it, ‘I ask myself, in mercy, or in common sense, if we cannot alter the conviction to fit the body, should we not, in certain circumstances, alter the body to fit the conviction?’ To alter the body, or as Morris put it ‘to expunge these superfluities . . . to scour myself of that mistake, to start again’, was not just what he had wanted, but what he had dreamed of and indeed prayed for.12
In Conundrum Morris describes how the desire to become a woman became stronger with every passing year. Each year his male body ‘seemed to grow harder around me’. Morris was on a form of hormone therapy from 1954 until 1972 and describes accurately the strange effects of feeling younger and softer that female hormones have on men when they take them. The hormones not merely stripped away the layers of maleness that Morris had felt accumulating around him but stripped away too the ‘unseen layer of accumulated resilience, which provides a shield for the male of the species, but at the same time deadens the sensations of the body’. The result over time was that Morris became a ‘somewhat equivocal’ figure. Some people thought he was a male homosexual, others something in between the sexes. On occasion, men would open doors for him and otherwise mistake him for a woman. All this was before the surgery.
In those days very few surgeons in Europe or America were willing to carry out procedures which were still at such an experimental stage. But equally nobody was sure of what it was that led some individuals to want to change from one sex to another. Did it represent a form of mental illness? If not always, then might it on occasion? And if so, how could anybody tell the two states of mind apart? How could this urge to remove a part of one’s body be distinguished from a patient telling a doctor that they believed themselves to be Admiral Nelson and in pursuit of this belief wanted their right arm removed? Could somebody wanting their penis removed be any more sane?
In the 1960s and 1970s the few surgeons willing to carry out such procedures needed a number of assurances. One was that the patient must in no way be psychotic. Secondly, by changing sex the patient must not be abandoning anybody who depended on them in the sex they were currently in. Thirdly, the patient should have been undergoing hormone treatment for a length of time. And finally, the patient must have lived in the role of the gender they were adopting for a number of years. These basic principles have not changed much in the decades since.
In the end, after years of hormone treatment, Morris chose to go for his surgery in Morocco with Dr Georges Burou (referred to in Conundrum as ‘Dr B - ’). This doctor had already performed gender reassignment surgery on another famous British male to female transsexual, April Ashley and, though he kept a low profile, by this stage Dr Burou was famous in certain circles. So much so that ‘Visiting Casablanca’ became a fairly well-known euphemism for changing sex. For his patients, visiting Dr Burou in his surgery and recuperation centre in the back streets of Casablanca was – as Morris said – ‘like a visit to a wizard’.13
Anyone who doubts that there are some people completely persuaded of the need to change sex should consider Morris’s description of what he was willing to go through. Two nurses entered his room at Dr Burou’s clinic, one French and one Arab. James is told that he will be operated on later but that they need to shave his privates. Since he has a razor he shaves himself while the two nurses sit on the table swinging their legs. He uses the cold water and the Moroccan soap to shave his pubic region and then goes back to the bed to be injected. The nurses tell him to go to sleep and that the operation will take place later. But Morris gives a moving description of what happens next. After the two nurses have left the room he gets out of bed, rather shakily, because the drug was starting to work, and ‘went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that other self a long last look in the eye and a wink for luck.’14
Morris spent two weeks in the clinic, wrapped and bandaged, and described the feeling after the operation as one of being ‘deliciously clean. The protuberances I had grown increasingly to detest had been scoured from me. I was made, by my own light, normal.’15 Morris described the period following the operation, including after the return home, as the experience of a constant feeling of ‘euphoria’. This went along with an absolute certainty that ‘I had done the right thing.’16 Nor did the feeling of happiness wear off. At the time of writing Conundrum, Morris was aware that what had happened in the process of James becoming Jan was ‘one of the most fascinating experiences that ever befell a human being’. There can be little doubting it.
This Tiresias had a view not only on the movement between the sexes but of the
distinctive ways in which society looks – or at any rate looked – at men and women. The cab driver who sidles up to her and places a not unwanted kiss on her lips. The things people say to men but not to women. The things people say to women but not to men. And also that greater secret: not how the world views men and women, but how men and women differently view the world. Not much of this would satisfy a modern feminist.
For instance, Morris described the fundamentally different viewpoints and attitudes between the sexes. So, as a man, James was far more interested in the ‘great affairs’ of his time, whereas as a woman Jan acquired a new concern ‘for small’ affairs. After becoming a woman Jan writes, ‘my scale of vision seemed to contract, and I looked less for the grand sweep than for the telling detail. The emphasis changed in my writing, from places to people.’17
She is willing to admit what problems it caused. It had been a tragedy in some ways, and it had certainly put severe strains on all those around her. Before her operation in 1972 she had to divorce her wife, Elizabeth, though she subsequently remarried her in 2008 after same-sex civil partnerships had become legal in the UK. The four surviving children who she fathered obviously did not have the easiest time adapting to the change in circumstances, though they seem to have been as adaptive as anyone could be. But by her own admission the whole process caused bewilderment among many, and culminated in a process by which a ‘fine body’ was ‘deformed with chemicals and slashed by the knife in a distant city!’ All this to reach what she sums up as reaching ‘Identity’, with a capital ‘I’.18 As she says, ‘Of course one would not do it for fun, and of course if I had been given the choice of a life without such complications, I would have taken it.’19 Nothing, she says, could have shaken her conviction that the person born as a he was in fact a she. And in search of a fulfilment of that realization there is, she says, absolutely nothing she would not have done. If she were trapped in that cage again, she says at one point, ‘nothing would keep me from my goal . . . I would search the earth for surgeons, I would bribe barbers or abortionists, I would take a knife and do it myself, without fear, without qualms, without a second thought.’20
It is perfectly easy to recognize that there are people who are born intersex. After reading the account of someone like Morris it is possible to understand there may be some people born as one sex who sincerely believe that they should be in the body of the other sex. What is exceptionally hard – and what we currently have few means of knowing – is how to navigate the leap beyond biology into testimony. Intersex is biologically provable. Trans may in the years to come turn out to be psychologically or biologically provable. But we don’t even have much idea which field it might ever come under. And if this seems like a needlessly nit-picking way to look at what is some people’s entire sense of ‘identity’, then consider the difficulty of just one part of this delicate terrain.
Autogynephilia
If we start by recognizing that at one end of the spectrum there are people who are born intersex, and if we acknowledge that this is one of the clearest hardware issues of all, then the rest of the trans issue is clearly on a spectrum going inwards from there – from people who have visible, biological justification for being described as between the sexes to those with no proof of difference other than testimony. Where the provable ‘hardware’ part of trans ends and where the ‘software’ part begins is one of the most dangerous speculative exercises of all. So let’s begin.
Somewhere along the spectrum from people who are born intersex are those who have been born with conventional XX or XY chromosomes, the resulting genitalia and everything else that comes along with it, but who believe – for reasons that we are still almost nowhere near understanding – that they inhabit the wrong body. Their brain tells them they are a man, but their body is that of a woman. Or vice versa. As well as not knowing what, if anything, might cause this, we still have relatively little idea of how common it is. No meaningful physiological differences have been shown to exist between trans and non-trans people. And though there has been some study of differences in brain function, nothing to date has shown that there is a clear hardware reason why some people want to change from the body of one sex into that of another.
Yet there is still a push – as with homosexuality – to move the issue from software to hardware. In the world of trans this move has focused on a number of areas. One of them arises from an obvious reason for anyone to want to change sex: for a sexual thrill. A man may like to dress in ladies’ underwear or even full female attire because it gives him a performative ‘kick’: the stockings; the feel of the lacy material; the transgression; the naughtiness. All of these have long been recognized as a sexual kink that some people yearn after. Among the technical terms for this instinct is the unlovely term ‘autogynephilia’.
Autogynephilia is the arousal that comes from imagining yourself in the role of the opposite sex. But – nobody will be surprised to learn – there are divisions even within this ‘community’ and concerns and disputes over one type of autogynephilia versus another. For the different varieties of autogynephilia may range from a man’s arousal at the idea of wearing an item of women’s clothing all the way to arousal at the idea of actually having the body of a woman.
One of the most striking trends as the trans debate has picked up in recent years is that autogynephilia has come to be severely out of favour. Or to put it another way, the suggestion that people who identify as trans are in actual fact merely going through the ultimate extreme of a sexual kink has become so hateful to many trans individuals that it is one of a number of things now decried as hate speech.
In 2003 J. Michael Bailey, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, published his long-researched book The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. In it Bailey looked at a different idea of transsexualism to the dominant one of a brain of one sex being trapped in the body of another. Specifically he looked at the possibility that trans was propelled by the object and nature of desire. Building on work carried out by Ray Blanchard at Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, he argued that a desire to change sex might be especially prevalent among a certain type of feminine gay man. As biological males attracted to other biological males it made sense for a particular type of gay man who could not attract straight men (due to being a man) or gay men (due to being too feminine) to pass as a woman, thus leading to more opportunities to attract the men who were the real object of desire. Blanchard used the term ‘homosexual transsexuals’ to describe this category of person.
In his book Bailey also explored another type of person who identifies as trans. This is a man who has always been heterosexual and may even have married and had children: men who when they announce that they wish to become a woman shock everyone around them. While they may never have shown any hint of femininity in their outer life, such people have in private found themselves sexually aroused by the idea of presenting as, or actually becoming, a woman. Bailey marshals a considerable amount of evidence to show that, of the two types of transgenderism he identifies, the first is more prevalent around the world. In many cultures it has been some sort of ‘answer’ to the conundrums presented by very feminine – most often gay – men. And although Bailey, like Blanchard, recognizes a difference between this and people propelled by autogynephilic impulses, neither in any way condemns or criticizes either group. Indeed, both argue for absolutely equal human rights, care and support. Nevertheless, Bailey was on top of the landmine.
In the years before his book was published there had been a concerted effort by trans campaigners to desexualize their cause. This had been one reason for the move away from talking about ‘transsex’ to ‘transgender’. As Alice Dreger wrote in her book on this subject, ‘Before Bailey, many trans advocates had spent a long time working to desexualize and depathologize their public representations in an effort to reduce stigma, improve access to care, and establish basic human rights for trans people.’21 Dreger compa
res this with the successful effort by gay rights campaigners to achieve equal rights by taking the focus away from what gay people do in the bedroom and onto what they do in the other rooms of their house.
Bailey’s book risked setting this campaign back, and so a campaign against it ensued, with fellow academics and trans campaigners immediately embarking on an effort not just to critique and dismiss Bailey’s work but to get him sacked from his position at Northwestern University. Among the more extreme of his critics was the Los Angeles-based transgender consultant Andrea James. She chose to retaliate against Bailey by posting pictures of his children (taken when they were in elementary and middle school) on her own website and juxtaposing these with sexually explicit captions.22 Among other seemingly coordinated attacks, several people came forward to claim that they had been misrepresented in the book, only for it to transpire that they did not even feature in it. The book’s nomination for an award from the gay literary organization LAMBDA was swiftly retracted. According to one friend of Bailey’s, he had been so ‘terrorized’ by the extreme response to his book that he almost became a different person after its publication.23
All this happened simply because Bailey had performed detailed research to get to the root of a crucial question and come back with an answer that had just become unpopular. Because for the best part of this century so far the idea that trans is in any way about sexual enjoyment has become an outrage and sexualizing slur.
The correct idea for people to currently hold is that trans people get absolutely no sexual thrill from the idea of being trans. They positively hate it. Nothing could be more boring. So in November 2018 Andrea Long Chu wrote in The New York Times about the next phase of her gender reassignment surgery. As the headline for the piece by the Brooklyn-based ‘essayist and critic’ put it: ‘My new vagina won’t make me happy. And it shouldn’t have to.’ As Chu outlined in the piece: ‘Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it.’24
The Madness of Crowds Page 24
