In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  He was also lonely. He yearned to be reunited with his longtime Thai girlfriend, who worked as a cocktail waitress in Phuket. She had planned to move to the United States so they could live together. But she couldn’t stay in the country without a green card—or a marriage certificate to an American man. Mel wanted to marry her, but his operation had foreclosed that possibility, or at least it did in 2004. Besides, he said, “The whole dressing-up-as-a-woman thrill, I just don’t have the same interest in it anymore. It wasn’t real. I was just buying approval.” In the last several months, Mel had begun looking into “getting the papers to change back to a man.”

  “But it’s what you felt you were?” I asked. “A woman?”

  “I don’t want to get into that.” Mel gave me a sidelong look. He’d checked into me online, he said. He knew I was a feminist. Which evidently suggested to him that I didn’t believe in gender distinctions. “But there are differences between males and females,” he said. “There is a feminine nature.”

  “And do you have a feminine nature?”

  Mel slowly clicked through another set of pictures on his Palm Pilot. Melanie in a tube top. Melanie in a miniskirt and stiletto heels. Melanie in a strapless evening gown. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I used to think so. Now I think there’s a spectrum. And I’m right at the midpoint, a five. I feel that I’m androgynous. …” He paused on a shot of Melanie in shorts, arm in arm with her girlfriend under some palm trees in Phuket.

  “I feel I’m androgynous, but I don’t want to be,” he continued. His gaze was stricken. “People can’t survive without categories. Even people on the fringes need categories, so they can be on the fringes. You have to have an identity.”

  ————

  Portland had been something of a transsexual destination since the early 1990s, when Dr. Toby Meltzer, a local plastic surgeon, was one of only twenty physicians in the country performing sex reassignment surgery. He operated on thousands of patients until, in 2003, conservative owners took over the hospital where he had admitting privileges and Meltzer decamped to Scottsdale, Arizona. When I moved to Portland in the early aughts, I often saw transitioning patients nursing coffee after hormone treatments outside my neighborhood supermarket. Several bars nearby were transsexual redoubts, and the Portland public library’s shelves contained an unusual number of volumes dedicated to the transsexual phenomenon. When I returned from my first trip to Budapest, I logged many hours in the library’s wood-paneled reading room, under the oil paintings of the city’s stern founding fathers, working my way through the collection—305.3. 306.76. 617.520592—the Dewey Decimal classifications where books on gender identity “disorders” and sex reassignment surgery were filed. After a few days prowling the stacks, I had the numbers memorized.

  The Portland library’s selection of books on male-to-female transsexuals (and there were few then on their female-to-male counterparts) were overwhelmingly autobiographical. That was no anomaly: memoir is the preferred genre of transsexual literature, a particular version of memoir, in which the memories that predate the operation are often cast as belonging to someone else, a person who no longer exists.

  That erasure was established in the very first modern transsexual memoir, Man into Woman, the 1933 account of Danish artist Einar Wegener’s transformation into Lili Elbe: “There could be no past for her. Everything in the past belonged to a person who had vanished, who was dead.” Two decades later, Roberta Cowell, a formerly “aggressive male” Spitfire pilot and race-car driver, was erecting the same firewall: “My personality was now entirely a new one,” she wrote in Roberta Cowell’s Story, a recollection that closed with these words: “The past is forgotten, the future doesn’t matter, and the glowingly happy present is even better than I had hoped.” In Conundrum, Jan Morris’s classic 1974 chronicle of her transformation from rugged mountaineer and cavalry officer to modest matron, the author pays her last respects before surgery to the soon-to-be-former James: “[I] went to say good-bye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again.” In Second Serve, celebrated tennis player Renée Richards (formerly Richard Raskind) said of her 1975 operation, “Dick was turned off.” The pain that she felt upon coming to on the surgical table “was Richard Henry Raskind’s death throe.” The postoperative state was, as so many of these memoirists put it, a “second life,” a reboot that reset and replaced the original birth.

  The before and after states in the books I read often seemed cast in hell and heaven terms: the before an inferno of self-loathing, self-mutilation, shame, and suicide attempts. “I was trapped, buried alive,” decorated soldier and Chicago Tribune correspondent Nancy Hunt wrote of her former male physique in her 1978 memoir, Mirror Image. “I was condemned to perpetual imprisonment in that loathsome frame.” In Roberta Cowell’s account, the decades before surgery—a time of “black depression” and “abject misery” when she “envied the insane”—gave way, post-op, to romantic evenings spent in “a perfect dream” with “attentive” gentlemen (who held doors for her and retrieved her gloves) and genteel afternoons chatting with the gentler sex at “an all-woman tea-party.” In so many cases, the “after” in these stories appeared to be a blissful round of dinner dates and just-us-girls pajama parties. “I was like a school girl all excited about my first date,” Rhonda Hoyman wrote of being “born again” as female in her 1999 memoir, Rhonda: The Woman in Me. “Just like the bride getting ready for her wedding (hopefully I will experience this soon).”

  These presto-chango transformations put me in mind of the conversion stories that used to circulate among my evangelical classmates in high school, the Cross and the Switchblade formula applied to gender redemption—a rebirth from sinner to saved—or, in gender terms, from deviant lascivious male to demure Angel of the House. “It was obscene, ludicrous, disgusting,” Hunt said of herself as a cross-dressing male, an obscenity from which her surgery would spell “deliverance.” “I grieved for the others and felt guilty that I should be saved while they were damned,” she wrote of her preoperative fellows. “But I rejoiced in my salvation.”

  Rebirth, especially in the early generation of memoirs, frequently meant coming back to life not just as a woman but as a woman who fit every hoary trope of the Cult of True Womanhood—submissive, chaste, flighty, passive, helpless. In Man into Woman, Lili Elbe described herself after the operation as “a completely defenseless creature” who only feels “safe” under the ministrations of her surgeon, “where the strong will of another stands between me and the outside world, as my protector and defender.” Genital surgeries and hormone treatments evidently produced not only a new physiology but a new and girlish personality—or rather, an old, old stereotype. Roberta Cowell reported that she was suddenly prone to blushing, wept over schmaltzy films and novels, and developed a “strong maternal instinct,” “a new and strong interest in domestic work,” handwriting that was “rounder and neater,” and a craving for “chocolate creams.” Not only that, her “mental processes” slowed and she “found it difficult to summon up will-power when required.” A newly acquired incapacity also afflicted Jan Morris, who found herself entranced by male chivalry—and flummoxed by the challenge of screwing in a lightbulb. The former Jim Morris, who had assayed Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary and spent five years in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, acted as if she had trouble putting a car in reverse and opening bottles, and claimed to be “distinctly less forceful,” “more retiring, more ready to be led, more passive,” and eager to shop for clothes.

  I was even more emotional now. I cried very easily, and was ludicrously susceptible to sadness or flattery. Finding myself rather less interested in great affairs (which are placed in a new perspective, I do assure you, by a change of sex), I acquired a new concern for small ones. My scale of vision seemed to contract. …

  It is, I think, a simpler vision that I now possess. Perhaps it is nearer a child’s.

  The women they had always known they were seemed to be the exact sort of
girl I’d always thought of as false. I cringed when I discovered, in the appendix to Rhonda Hoyman’s 1999 memoir, a section titled “Rhonda’s Top 10 Tips!” (“Tip #3: Quit using soap on your face. Start using a skin care cleansing system and moisturizer every day.” “Tip #4: Try to match your nail color with the lipstick shade you most often wear, and when possible, coordinate in threes, like your shoes, belt and purse. The key word is: accessorize, accessorize, accessorize.”)

  I knew some, and would hear more, about the supposed enmity between transsexuals and feminists—or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs), a derogation adopted in the aughts by trans advocates. As far as I could tell, the label fit a few veteran separatists who still wanted to bar transsexuals from the (now defunct) Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival or the fans of Janice Raymond’s 1978 manifesto, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, a book that, in the course of advancing some more subtle thoughts, cast male-to-female transsexuals as surgically engineered monsters threatening to invade female spaces, “supplant the role of women in mothering,” and metaphorically “rape” women by appropriating their bodies. I didn’t want to fit the mold of cliché feminist decrying cliché transsexuality. But the repeated swipes at feminism in the memoirs I was reading didn’t make my nonaligned status any easier. “Liberation from what?” Nancy Hunt wrote of the women’s liberation movement in Mirror Image. “From the grace and freedom and beauty and emotional spontaneity of womanhood?” It was a verdict that would only crescendo with the years. “This scapegoating of femininity has become the Achilles’ heel of the feminist movement,” Julia Serano wrote in her popular 2007 manifesto, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (issued by Seal Press, a feminist publishing house). Serano found “the feminist assumption that ‘femininity is artificial’ ” to be “narcissistic,” “arrogant,” “blatantly misogynistic,” and “patronizing toward those for whom femininity simply feels right.” Serano cast her femininity defense in liberationist terms, but the bullets oddly ricocheted. She attributed feminist antagonism toward traditional femininity to “the fact that many of the women who have most strongly gravitated toward feminism are those who have found traditional feminine gender roles constraining or unnatural. In many cases, this is due to their own inclinations toward exceptional forms of gender expression.” Or, put less politely, the old male-chauvinist canard that feminist are feminist because they’re unfeminine.

  The more I prowled the library stacks that year, and other stacks in the years to come, the more I bridled at these volumes with their Girls-Confidential tone, their cover images of junior-prom ingénues in sweater sets, their chapter titles set in the dainty looping script of old feminine-hygiene ads. The gender identity so many of these chronicles championed was aggressively wholesome, childlike, often prissy, and oddly desexualized. The former man, the authors reported, stalked the exotic lingerie aisles in spasms of shame and agony at his prurience, while the new girl was an innocent maiden of fastidious propriety, grateful to take a man’s arm, flustered when a “dirty joke” was told, mortified if her shoes didn’t match her purse. I thought of my father and all those “flamboyant” bordello get-ups she’d stowed away in the hallway locker in favor of “sedate” ladies’ wear, all those FictionMania sex fantasies she’d printed out and then stashed on closet shelves. Was it really that easy to divorce ego and id, identity and desire? In memoir after memoir, the psychosexual and psychological complexities of an adult had been vanquished; the vamp had become a virgin, with the pre-sexual innocence of a child. (That second childhood, I noticed, was also a staple of so many trans fantasy websites I’d perused. One of FictionMania’s largest categories of stories was “Age Regression.”) In the 2006 memoir, Wrapped in Blue: A Journey of Discovery (cover shot: a profile of a pale blonde, her shoulders draped in blue velvet, clutching a single rose), Donna Rose recalled how thrilled she was with the gifts her mother brought to the hospital to celebrate her transformation: “a pink teddy bear” and “a box of pink bubble gum cigars that said, ‘It’s a Girl!’ ” Rose was forty-one at the time.

  And my father seventy-six. If I had imagined my library research might bring me closer to an appreciation of her decision, these books were having the opposite effect.

  Deirdre McCloskey’s 1999 memoir, Crossing, began more promisingly: “In contrasting how men and women ‘are’ I do not mean to recruit sterotypes or essentialisms that have been used to the disadvantage of other women. Women are not always more loving, or less interested in career.” And a trans woman with a career, she noted, “tries to keep it and does not in practice dissolve into a 1950s heaven of full-time cookie baking and teatime gossip.” Yet even McCloskey, an economics and history professor, went on to truck in stereotypical tropes about male boorishness and ladies “sipping Chablis,” “playing house intently,” and enjoying cozy “girl-to-girl” talk. She itemized her new womanly ways: hates war stories, bored by sports, reads “women novelists,” likes to cook, is eager to make her bed every morning, “dotes on every child she meets,” and “loves, just loves, the little favors of womankind, getting a card for someone, making meatloaf for Charles up the street.” And loves to shop: “She was just able to resist a beautiful pair of Italian flats full priced at $100.” (She told her tale in third person.) One chapter was devoted to makeup: “Eyeliner: L’Oréal liquid, the most evocative of her cosmetics. She lines her eyes in 1950s style. …”

  Was I wrong to flinch? “You have to think about when in their life course they were writing their autobiography,” Susan Stryker, an LGBT history professor and male-to-female transsexual, told me when I expressed my discomfort with these sugar-and-spice accounts. “When you are transitioning, it’s kind of an adolescence. And things other people dealt with when they were twelve—like, ‘Does that eye shadow make me look pretty?’ or ‘What’s my look?’—they are dealing with now. It’s almost like being a convert to a new religion.” Fair enough: proselyte prose. I remembered my own misadventures with Maybelline. And I also remembered how my ardent adolescent experiments in makeup and affectation were employed as concealer as much as glitter.

  Surely there was a more complex drama beneath the crinoline and cinched waists, a narrative involving a particular set of needs, desires, aspirations, fears. If so, it was impossible to divine from these accounts. The one plotline of I-have-always-been-a-woman seemed to be trumping all the other motivations that might reflect the crosscurrents of the human psyche, motivations that weren’t exclusively about gender. Where were the memoirs that engaged in some degree of self-inspection? I looked in vain for an account where the author asked, “Could I also be seeking womanhood to reclaim my innocence, be exonerated from the sins of my male past?” Or: “Could I be craving the moral stature that comes with being oppressed?” Or: “Do I want to be a woman to feel special? Celebrated? Loved?” Could that whole nest of an individual’s history, all the idiosyncratic struggles, disappointments, and yearnings of a life, really be stuffed so tidily into the bottle labeled Identity? Since Freud, the art of psychotherapy has been dedicated to teasing apart the many aspects of character that seem, on the surface, unitary. Since the Erikson era, much of the quest for identity appears to have been dedicated to the opposite, to the discounting of psychological complications, to the search for that single broad stroke that explains everything, that will collapse one’s entire life story into an identity brand. But what happens when “identity” is used to disown “psychology”? What keeps that brand from becoming the “totalism” that Erikson warned against?

  “Each of these adventurers passes directly from one pole of sexual experience to the other,” Sandy Stone wrote in her 1991 cri de coeur, “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” “If there is any intervening space in the continuum of sexuality, it is invisible. … No wonder feminist theorists have been suspicious. Hell, I’m suspicious.” Stone, a media theorist and male-to-female transsexual, had worked her way through s
ome of the same early trans autobiographies that I had and was similarly dismayed. “All these authors replicate the stereotypical male account of the constitution of woman: Dress, makeup, and delicate fainting at the sight of blood,” she wrote. All were “similar in their description of ‘woman’ as male fetish, as replicating a socially enforced role,” and eager to cast themselves as the heroines of a “frogs into princesses” storybook tale. None seemed willing to envision a state of being between hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine. Stone’s inquiry would open the door for a new set of transgender writers who challenged the limitations of the literature and who proclaimed themselves “gender outlaws.”

  “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back” was originally intended as a rebuttal to The Transsexual Empire (in which Raymond drubbed Stone for having worked at an all-female recording collective in the ’70s without revealing that she was once male) and, more broadly, to the handful of ’70s feminist separatists who regarded transsexuality (in the words of feminist theologian Mary Daly) as a “Frankenstein phenomenon.” In the course of preparing her riposte, Stone countenanced a lot of the questions ignored in the memoirs I’d been reading, questions that had bedeviled me in Budapest and that my father had been intent on evading. What should transsexuals’ relationships be to their “former” selves, and what did it mean to erase your past? By altering your body to “look” like the sex you believed yourself to be, were you conforming to hidebound and sexist conceptions of femininity and masculinity, or could you use those alterations to suggest that biology was not destiny, that “trans” could mean not just crossing the gender line but transcending gender altogether? As long as the currency of transsexuality was “passing,” Stone concluded, transsexuals would be denying themselves “the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience.” The phrase recalled to me Erikson’s formulation, “the diverse and conflicting stages and aspects of life” that, when renounced or repressed, led to totalism.