by Susan Faludi
Stone called on her sister trans women to reclaim their actual life stories and deploy them as battering rams against the concrete walls of the gender binary. “Transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history, to begin to rearticulate their lives not as a series of erasures, … but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body.” They should define themselves, Stone proposed, as neither “women” nor “men,” but something mongrel, as representatives of indeterminate or multiple genders whose existence poses a threat to the fundamental assumptions of a world restricted to two sexes. In other words, they should embrace “the promises of monsters” (a phrase Stone borrowed from her mentor Donna Haraway, the feminist author of “A Cyborg Manifesto”). The very Frankenstein label that had been hurled at transsexuals might be the source of their liberation. Seeing beyond the gender binary, Stone declared in the 1999 documentary Gendernauts, was “the supreme act … because it is the beginning of the path to discovery of self, of our self, of my self, your self, of deeply and importantly who we are.”
The “promises of monsters” would inspire another founding member of the new discipline of transgender studies, the LGBT historian Susan Stryker. “I will say this as bluntly as I know how,” she wrote in a formative 1994 essay, adopting the epithet that had been hurled at her: “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.” She titled her manifesto “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix,” an allusion to the climactic scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the monster finally confronts his creator on the Mer de Glace glacier above the Chamonix Valley. “Words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by the transgendered,” Stryker wrote. “As we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more, and something other, than the creatures our makers intended us to be.” Like Stone, Stryker believed transsexuals could use their “monstrous” state to expose the artifice of gender dimorphism. By “performing transgender rage” (the subtitle of her 1994 essay), they could lay bare “the constructedness of the natural order,” she wrote. “The stigma itself becomes the source of transformative power.” Or as she once put it to me with more brio: “We’ve been made disposable people and fuck that! I model unrepentance.”
“If the modern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable,” Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote in 1997, “the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open.” A good number of the new transgender theorists would agree with that. They were academics steeped in post-structuralism, in tune with the post-modern gestalt. But had the gender mavericks kept their options open? For all their assertions of the multiplicities of the gendered state (Stone maintained there were “thousands” of genders), the rebels repeatedly confessed a desire to be one sex only, the one that they had an operation to become, which was always the binary opposite of the one they’d been. Reading these testimonials, I kept hearing Mel’s anguished assertion, “People can’t survive without categories.” In Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein, a performance artist and another pioneering transsexual writer of the new generation, called on her readers to topple the binary with a “revolution” of gender fluidity, a revolt that “recognizes no borders or rules of gender.” Yet, even as she declared “I identify as neither male nor female,” Bornstein described the devastation she felt when someone she barely knew accidentally referred to her as “him.” “The world slowed down, like it does in the movies when someone is getting shot and the filmmaker wants you to feel every bullet enter your body,” she wrote. “The words echoed in my ears over and over and over. … All the joy sucked out of my life in that instant.” Or as Laverne Cox, the transgender star of the television series Orange Is the New Black, so adamantly put it, “When a trans woman gets called a man, that is an act of violence.”
In the new millennium, all the way into the age of the hit Amazon series Transparent and the superstar status of former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, the insistence on a gender continuum would grow ever louder, even as the adherence to the binary became all the more entrenched. So often in the era of PGP (or “preferred gender pronoun,” a stipulation popularized on college campuses) and the fluidity supposedly expressed by choosing your “genderqueer” or “demigirl” or “guydyke” designation, an old-style fundamentalism lurked. In a time when the very idea of “woman” was being denounced as essentialist fantasy, the womanhood of male-to-female transsexuals was asserted as an inviolable absolute.
The postmodern transgender theorists who were seeking to “take responsibility for all of their history” weren’t insisting on total womanhood in their writings. They weren’t claiming to be Athenas sprung from the head of a surgical Dr. Zeus. They were intent on embracing even the “monstrous” aspects of their self-avowedly mongrel gender. Yet so many had carefully scrubbed their former identities from the biographical record, changing (à la Erik Erikson) not only their first but their last names. Why, I wondered, were renegades who “recognize no borders or rules of gender” placing barricades before their past selves and submitting to operations that seemed to enforce a sexual dualism? Or was that dualism only a way station?
In the overheated precincts of the Portland public library one winter’s day, I sat fanning myself with my notebook and working my way through the rest of Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw. Bornstein lamented the “cultural pressure” she felt to jettison her penis to be what society deemed a “real woman.” Yet, she went on to say, “Knowing what I know now, I’m real glad I had my surgery, and I’d do it again, just for the comfort I now feel with a constructed vagina.” Her book ended with a long prose poem, penned on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of her surgery. In the final stanzas she wrote of her “thrill” when she encountered a girl instead of a boy in the mirror.
She then divulged:
Girl?
It’s an identity I am working my way out of.
And she argued that, seven years hence, “My girl skin will be lying behind me in the desert,” next to all her other cast-off gender allegiances. She would shed her identities, Bornstein contended and thumb her nose at those who “try to label me now.”
11
A Lady Is a Lady Whatever the Case May Be
If the undeclared war of modern transsexuality is between fluidity and binaries, the battle echoed down the decades of twentieth-century sexology. It especially reverberated through the work of two of sexology’s commanding generals, Harry Benjamin and Magnus Hirschfeld.
In postwar America, Harry Benjamin would be anointed “the father of transsexualism.” He defined the condition’s terms and authored its treatment regimen, which for years was known as the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care, and which still reigns. His take on transsexuality was leveraged on a very public creation story that had titillated the world, a story that provided Benjamin, a German emigré and avuncular endocrinologist with a flagging gerontology practice in Manhattan at the time, with a cause and a template. The story belonged to Christine Jorgensen, the first sex-change celebrity.
On December 1, 1952, Benjamin was sixty-seven years old and about to take down his medical shingle when he saw the 72-point all-caps headline on the front page of the New York Daily News: EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY. The story was accompanied by large before and after photographs: George W. Jorgensen Jr., in his army khakis and garrison cap; and Christine, sporting a pin-curled coif, nutria fur coat, and pearl clip earrings. “A Bronx youth, who served two years in the Army during the war and was honorably discharged,” the story began, “has been transformed by the wizardry of medical science into a beautiful woman.”
The former World War II private had flown to Denmark and, after a series of operations and a legal name change, returned as Christine Jorgensen, alighting at New York’s Idlewild Airport to a media frenzy. The American Weekly, which paid
Jorgensen more than $20,000 for her exclusive account, declared, “The story all America has been waiting for.” Evidently it was. According to Editor & Publisher, Jorgensen’s transformation “received the largest worldwide coverage in the history of newspaper publishing.” As historian Joanne Meyerowitz noted in How Sex Changed, her authoritative and richly detailed history of transsexuality in the United States, the Daily News’s article on Jorgensen was the newspaper’s “number-one story of 1953, outpacing in circulation the number-two story on the execution of atomic spy Julius Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel.”
One of its avid readers was my father, and the story of Jorgensen’s surgery jolted him into a new frame of mind. “It was the first time,” she told me, “when I thought, okay, maybe I could just change my sex.” The news was also pivotal for Harry Benjamin. The doctor dashed off a letter to Jorgensen to offer his professional assistance. “In my many years of practice of sexology and endocrinology,” he wrote, “problems similar to yours have been brought to me frequently.” Benjamin had a longstanding interest in sexology and sexual minorities. Nevertheless, before he wrote his letter to Jorgensen, he’d treated fewer than ten patients complaining of gender confusion. (He was better known for dispensing “rejuvenation” hormone therapy to older patients hoping to reclaim their youth.) An introduction between Benjamin and Jorgensen was quickly arranged, brokered by the pulp-romance and sci-fi writer Tiffany Thayer.
Less than a year later, Benjamin published his first tract on transsexuals in the International Journal of Sexology. In short order, he claimed credit for inventing the term “transsexualism” (already coined by another doctor) and established himself as the condition’s leading authority. With help from a generous donation from a rich patient (who was also seeking a sex-change operation, from female to male), he established the Harry Benjamin Foundation and moved his practice to a larger Park Avenue office. In 1966, Benjamin wrote The Transsexual Phenomenon, the first major text on the subject, which would soon be known as the “transsexual bible.” By the late ’70s, he had treated more than fifteen hundred transsexual clients.
In his first article, Benjamin had described sex as a diverse quality, a “complex variety” that yielded no absolute men and women. But by the time he published the “bible,” his thought had shifted toward a medical model for transsexuality more in tune with postwar America’s twinned preoccupations: gender conformity and the search for a “true identity.”
To determine which transsexuals were eligible for surgery, Benjamin created a classification system, which he called the Sex Orientation Scale, or SOS. He plugged patients into a grid of three “groups” and six “types” of his own devising—from “pseudo transvestite” and “fetishistic transvestite” on one end of the scale to the “true transsexual/moderate intensity” and “true transsexual/high intensity” on the other. According to Benjamin, a preoperative “true” male-to-female transsexual could be identified by several traits: The patient feels he is “trapped in a male body.” He “despises his male sex organs.” He has “a low libido” (that being feminine) and is “often asexual.” He is attracted to men only as a woman (the reverse being homosexual).
Benjamin initially regarded these categories as “approximations, schematized and idealized,” placeholders until “future studies and observations” came along. But his loose taxonomy was transformed by his successors into a gold standard. By the late ’60s, a new generation of university-based clinicians—most notably psychologist John Money and psychiatrists Robert Stoller and Richard Green—were enforcing a more rigid binary and a “preventative” model intended to stamp out early signs of “incongruous gender” in children. Their preoccupation with training patients to express what Money and Green called a “culturally acceptable gender role” befitted the Cold War geopolitics of the time. “The border crossings had become securitized,” Susan Stryker told me. “And it became, what do we do with the ‘problem’ of the non-aligned genders? How do we get them in line?”
By the mid-’70s, more than forty gender identity clinics from Johns Hopkins to the University of Minnesota to Stanford had sprung up to teach “acceptable” gender roles to young children and to diagnose transsexuals and determine whether they should be recommended for surgery. “Some of the doctors,” Meyerowitz observed, “actually required their [transsexual] patients to undergo training in conventional gender stereotypes.” At the Stanford clinic, “the screening process included a ‘rehabilitation’ period with workshops on appropriate grooming.”
The era’s new regimen also gave impetus to the view, which prevails today, that transsexuality has little to do with erotic impulse. The distinction between gender and sex—“Gender is located above, and sex below the belt,” Benjamin postulated—became dictum under the new generation of sexologists, who coined the term “gender identity.” UCLA psychiatrist Stoller drew a firm line between “gender identity”—what gender one believed oneself to be—and “sexual identity,” which was limited to what one did or fantasized doing in bed. By the early ’70s, transsexualism was being described in the clinical literature as “a disorder of gender identity,” separate from and even antithetical to sexuality. “A single episode of cross-dressing in association with sexual arousal is regarded as sufficient to exclude the diagnosis of transsexualism,” Howard J. Baker, a psychiatrist at the UCLA Gender Identity Research Clinic, asserted in 1969 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. “Transsexuals,” he stated flatly, “never become sexually excited as a result of cross-dressing.” Many transsexual advocates guard that border even today. When a 2003 book by a research psychologist suggested that some male-to-female transsexuals were aroused by the idea of themselves as women—a concept known as autogynephilia—the author and his supporters were met with fury.*
As the years passed, Benjamin became increasingly insistent about the need for transsexuals to pass as “normal,” meaning that his male-to-female patients (and he mainly treated male-to-female) who qualified for surgery were expected to embody all the clichés of postwar femininity. He, along with the newer cohort of sexologists, was disinclined to accept clients whose exterior appearance and presentation failed to fit an image of the ideal woman or who balked at traditional sex roles. “This includes not only passing as members of the desired sex,” Benjamin instructed, “but also accepting the social, economic, and familial consequences of the change.” His favored patients were the ones who fulfilled his vision of true womanhood; “my girls,” he called them. Benjamin and a Los Angeles sex-change surgeon he worked with liked to go to lunch surrounded by their particularly beautiful patients. In Benjamin’s case, particularly beautiful meant “Aryan good looks, blond-haired and blue-eyed,” recalled Stryker, who conducted oral histories of Benjamin’s patients when she was director of the GLBT Historical Society. “He liked to show off his trans arm candy. He took a proprietary, look-what-we-made pride in it all. It was very much a Pygmalion kind of thing.”
In Benjamin’s own case histories, he cast his clientele in sugar-plum terms: “Ruth” is a “tall, slender woman,” he wrote, who “crosses her legs and automatically adjusts her fashionable short skirt as any woman would.” “Harriet” is “an attractive young lady” who has “met her Prince Charming” (“a responsible and understanding older man”) and, having relinquished her job for “household duties” and made plans to adopt a child, has achieved “a happy ending.” Benjamin’s descriptions sometimes sounded like they belonged in a ’50s B-movie.
There was, in fact, such a movie: Ed Wood Jr.’s 1953 cult film, Glen or Glenda, in which a Benjamin-like psychiatrist supervising the sex change of a Jorgensen-like former GI (played by Wood, himself a lifelong cross-dresser) instructs his patient on “the duty of a woman,” “the correct styling for her facial contours,” and “the proper walk.” Due to the good doctor’s tutelage—“A lady is a lady whatever the case may be”—and thanks “to the corrections of medical science,” Glenda’s case “has a happy ending.”
Benjam
in’s most famous client was only too glad to play the fairy-tale princess. “It is possible that my attachment to the world of make believe was influenced even before I was born,” Jorgensen wrote on the first page of her memoir, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, “for my paternal grandfather, Charles Gustav Jorgensen, came to this country from Odense, Denmark, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen.” Jorgensen’s allegiance to Andersen startled me, all the more because it wasn’t the only parallel with my father. As a young man, Jorgensen relates, he adored marionettes (“I never seemed to tire of manipulating the tiny figures in their fanciful world”), aspired to photography and set up a darkroom at home, and soon set his sights on a career in film. Those ambitions dead-ended in the 1940s in the “cutting library” of RKO-Pathé News in New York, where George Jr. worked in the newsreel’s back office, splicing bits of film together to create stock footage. I couldn’t help but think of my father’s lifelong propensity to cut and splice, in darkrooms on continent after continent.
