by Amy Bloom
The men I met were, by and large, decent, kind, intelligent, and willing to talk openly; their wives were the same, many under the additional pressure of having to make the best accommodation they can to a marriage they did not envision and do not prefer. But it does seem to me that a passion for a person, or a capacity to love people, is different from a sexual impulse that is directed toward an object or an act and that is greater than the desire for any person. And although one could argue that all desire focused on an object or even an act is a fetish, I don’t think so—any more than I think that gender reassignment surgery (even when it’s known as gender confirmation surgery) is no different from a tummy tuck. The greatest difficulty people have with crossdressers, I think, is that crossdressers wear their fetish, and the gleam in their eyes, however muted by time or habit; the unmistakable presence of a lust being satisfied or a desire being fulfilled in that moment, in your presence, even by your presence, is unnerving. The mix of the crossdressers’ own arousal and anxiety and our responsive anxiety and discomfort is more than most of us can bear. We may not mind foot fetishists, but we may not wish to watch either.
The crossdressers of Tri-Ess insist that crossdressing is not about sexuality, and therefore not about sex. They are right about the first, and we can all stop assuming that any man who wears a dress is gay. But they are not right about the second, and their assertion that crossdressing is their creative expression of both genders is unsettling because it is at such odds with their behavior, their natures, and their marriages. These men are as far from gender warriors and feminists as George W. himself. As one wife said to me, “For twenty years he couldn’t help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can’t help because he’s doing his nails. Is that different?” For these men, the woman within is entirely the Maybelline version, not the Mother Teresa version, not the Liv Ullmann version, and not even the Tracey Ullman version. There is no innate grasp of female friendship, of the female insistence on relatedness, of the female tradition of support and accommodation for one’s partner and of giving precedence to the relationship overall. If you believe that these characteristics are more common to women than to men, these men do not embody them; if you don’t believe it, they would argue with you. If there were that kind of understanding, that kind of empathy and female bonding, rather than accessories and tapes on how to walk in heels, these guys would be unable to ask their wives to go through this crossdressing life with them, and everyone, husbands and wives, knows it. They know that if the women insisted on wearing three-piece suits or baseball uniforms in public, and asked their husbands to accept hairy legs, hairy underarms, and jock-straps as part of their sex life, the husbands would not be rushing off to join spousal support groups while cheerfully spending the family’s money on bespoke suits and expensive glue-on facial hair. The marriages would be over.
As with the Ladies’ Home Journal of the 1950s, or Cosmopolitan in the 1970s (and 1980s and 1990s), when I read Tri-Ess’s advice to wives, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry: It’s probably your fault but you can fix it, he really needs you but he may not show it, your love will overcome his problem, and a good man is hard to find. If Dickens’s devoted, selfless Nancy were alive today—and Bill Sykes, his sadism aside, is exactly the kind of macho, over-compensating, risk-taking guy one might find crossdressing—she would be in a wives’ support group, happy to pick out a lipstick, apologizing if they ran out of Slim-Fast just a week before Fall Harvest.
Is it just delicious irony that makes so many people’s eyes sparkle when I tell them about my Christian Republican crossdressers? Is it something less sophisticated, like schadenfreude, or even less civilized, like homophobia? It is gratifying to yank the covers off hypocrites: the fundamentalist Christian congressman with his handsome young pages, the feminist and her abusive boyfriend, the priest and his porn.
The widespread assumption is that these crossdressers are hypocrites: publicly lambasting deviance of all kinds and dressing up in private like Little Bo-peep. There is still plenty of Little Bo-peep (and Courtney Love and Scarlett O’Hara), but the lambasting has died down considerably over the last thirty years. In the past, crossdressers were eager to dissociate themselves from gay men and about as interested in feminism as Ward Cleaver. But now, as with the end of the Soviet Union, the unimaginable has happened and the landscape has changed. All the crossdressers I spoke to expressed their admiration for the gay civil rights movement and their hope that whatever acceptance gay people have managed to engender would somehow envelop crossdressers as well. Gay men and women turn out to be their role models in terms of self-respect and civil rights, even if the crossdressers are well aware that the gay community offers them tolerance, not a warm welcome. And feminism, of the women-are-nicer-people variety, although not a part of the wives’ lives, adds an unexpected aspect to the men’s self-understanding; in their remarks about the burdens of masculinity and the innate nurturing and graciousness of women, in their attempts to connect with Nature and Spirit, they sound like the softest and most Goddess-worshiping of Second Wave feminists.
Almost everything Tri-Ess has said about its members is true: they are straight and traditional men who love their wives and wear dresses. Just as Tri-Ess says, its Christian, conservative, Republican men have a great deal more in common with other Christian, conservative, Republican men than with anyone else. Their wives are not professional women with their own substantial incomes and career paths, and they are not royalty or Hollywood types who expose their spouses’ peculiarities and let the muck cling to their kids. They try to make their marriages work, and if the price of a good provider and a decent man is not much sex and a certain amount of constant pain, it is not an unfamiliar bargain. The wives are not uniformly overweight, motherly, and devoid of self-esteem (as some mediocre research has suggested they are), or at least no more so than any other group of middle-class women married young to traditional and dominant men, devoted to home and family, and lacking in advanced education. Juggling the limited resources of time, money, and pleasure, balancing dominance and fear, self-deception and love, selfishness and generosity, crossdressers and their wives struggle with one big difference—his compulsion—and otherwise, just as they have told me all along, they are just like everyone else.
HERMAPHRODITES WITH ATTITUDE
THE INTERSEXED
Beautiful, the doctor says. Ten fingers, ten toes, and the mother’s beautiful blond curls. Baby and parents crying with relief, three weary, joyful travelers. They place the baby on the mother’s stomach, clamp the cord, and hand the father a pair of slim scissors to cut it. The parents expect both these things—they’ve seen it done in the Lamaze video, they’ve seen it on the Lifetime channel. The OB nurse cleans and swaddles the baby quickly while the aide washes the mother’s face and changes the bloody sheet under her for a fresh one. They give the baby the Apgar test, a visual assessment taken minutes after birth—a nice experience in most cases, since a baby will get a gratifyingly high score, 8 or 9 out of 10, just by being his or her healthy baby self. It is a high score in this case too, but the doctor shakes his head, in such a small gesture that the father doesn’t even see it. The mother sees it, through the anesthetic, through the sweat, right past the sight of her beautiful baby held tight in the nurse’s arms.
Finally, the baby is in the mother’s arms. The doctor is thinking fast and trying to hide it. As Dr. Richard Hurwitz instructs in Surgical Reconstruction of Ambiguous Genitalia in Female Children, a 1990 training videotape produced by the American College of Surgeons, “The finding of ambiguous genitalia in the newborn is a medical and social emergency.” A hundred years ago, midwives examined babies and assigned gender in doubtful cases, or they brought the babies to priests or doctors and the team consulted and assigned gender, and little was made of it until the occasional married, childless woman went to her doctor for a hernia and discovered she had testes, or the married, childless farmer went to the doctor and discovered he had ovaries
. Today many physicians regard “genital anomaly” as a dire matter. “After stillbirth, genital anomaly is the most serious problem with a baby, as it threatens the whole fabric of the personality and life of the person,” one doctor wrote in 1992; only slightly worse to be dead than intersexed.
The baby is taken to the nursery. The next day the doctor comes in and sits down, and speaks softly. “Your baby will be fine,” he says. The parents brace themselves: a faulty valve, a hole where there should be none, something invisible but terrible. “Somehow your baby’s genitals haven’t finished developing, so we don’t quite know right now what sex it is. We’re going to run a couple of tests and we’ll know very soon. Don’t worry. It may be that some cosmetic surgery is required, but don’t worry,” the doctor tells the parents, who are already well past worrying. “This will all be okay. We can solve this in just a few days. The sooner, the better.” As the doctor leaves, he is already calling a pediatric urologist for a consult, getting a pediatric endocrinologist to come over and take a look, getting a geneticist to come on board, to help assign sex and then do what is medically necessary to have the baby’s genitals resemble the standard form of that sex.
This scene occurs about two thousand times a year in hospitals all over America. Far from being an exceptionally rare problem, babies born with “genitals that are pretty confusing to all the adults in the room,” as medical historian and ethicist Alice Dreger puts it, are more common than babies born with cystic fibrosis. Or, to think of it differently, there are probably at least as many intersexed people in the United States as there are members of the American College of Surgeons.*
Imagine a baby born with an oddly shaped but functional arm. Would one choose an invasive, traumatizing pediatric surgery that almost inevitably produces scarring and loss of sensation, just to make the arm conform more closely to the standard shape? Yet parents believe there must be tests that will show their baby’s true sex, and surgery that will ensure and reinforce their baby’s true sex, and parents want it to happen, quickly. A few days, even a few hours, of having Baby X is too long. One cannot raise a nothing; when people say, “What a beautiful baby! Boy or girl?” one cannot say, “We don’t know.” In a culture that’s still getting used to children who are biracial and adults who are bisexual, the idea of a baby who is neither boy nor girl, or both boy and girl, is unbearable. How do you tell the grandparents? How do you deliver the happy news that you have a healthy It?
The parents hold the baby, still beautiful, still raw but shapely, and they peer at what is under the diaper. Let’s say that what they see is a tiny—even for a baby—tiny penis, technically, a microphallus, both misshapen and far smaller than the standard (less than about two centimeters when stretched out from the body). The prevailing approach for the last fifty years has been to declare that a baby boy with such a small and inadequate penis is better off as a girl. In the straightforward words of surgeons, “Easier to make a hole than build a pole,” and the collective medical wisdom has been that a boy without much of a pole, and even more, a man without much of a pole, is doomed to live ashamed, apart, and alone. In the face of the assumption that suicide is likely and profound depression inevitable, a physician with the best intentions and the support of his peers might well declare the boy a girl, remove the micropenis and the testes, fashion labia and a small vagina, and tell the parents as little as possible so as to spare the entire family further anxiety and troubling questions of gender (parents who don’t know that their little girl was born a boy are less likely to wring their hands over persistent play with trucks and a refusal to wear dresses). This approach owes a great deal to John Money, a psychologist and the founding director of the Psycho-hormonal Research Unit at Johns Hopkins, author of some forty books and four hundred articles, whose once-bright star has been dimmed by the case in which he turned little John into little Joan, and in which “John” insisted, heroically, that he was John all along, and resumed life as a male despite Money’s assertion that gender was all a matter of nurture, not nature.
Or let’s say that what the parents see is a baby girl with a larger than standard clitoris (more than one centimeter in length). You might not think that this is a problem of “doubtful sex” or confusing genitals, but in infants the gap between clitoris and penis is only about half a centimeter, so the large clitoris that doctors fear will worry her parents every time they change the diaper, and will alarm or even dissuade her future husband, also requires the surgical solution, as early as possible. The surgeries include “clitoral reduction,” and if necessary, some enlargement of the vaginal cavity by metal dilators inserted by the parents daily for six months, beginning two weeks postoperatively. Monthly dilation of the seven- or eight-year-old continues into adolescence to prevent narrowing or closure of the vaginal cavity. (The standard for a “good” vagina is one that can be penetrated adequately.) And then, perhaps, following the early vaginoplasty, further molding of delicate and cosmetically pleasing labia may be required.
“Ambiguous genitals,” “doubtful sex,” “intersexed babies,” “male and female pseudohermaphroditism,” “true hermaphroditism”—these phrases sometimes describe the same conditions, sometimes very different conditions. Some conditions require hormonal treatment or surgery or both; some require no treatment at all except counseling and time. Symptoms range from the physical anomaly—an unusual-looking set of genitals—to symptoms that will not become apparent until adolescence, to symptoms that will never be apparent from the outside. Some anomalies are defects in the plumbing; others are simply unusual fixtures.
There is a range of medical conditions that fall under the umbrella term “congenital anomalies of the reproductive and sexual system.” Boys may suffer from hypospadias, meaning in mild cases that the urethral opening (the “pee hole”), which is supposed to be at the tip of the penis, is perhaps in the glans, on the underside of the penis, or in more severe cases is open from mid-shaft out to the glans, or is even entirely absent, with urine exiting the bladder from behind the penis. Hypospadias sometimes results in ambiguity as to sexual organs, as does Klinefelter’s syndrome, which is quite common, occurring in one in five hundred to one in a thousand male births. Most men inherit a single X chromosome from their mother and a single Y chromosome from their father. Men with Klinefelter’s inherit an extra X chromosome from either father or mother, and their testes often produce smaller than average quantities of testosterone, so that they don’t virilize (develop facial and body hair, muscles, deep voice, larger penis and testes) as strongly as other boys at puberty. (Many also develop small breasts, one of Nature’s variations that is often found in those with no intersex conditions at all.) Despite an absence of sperm in their generally small, firm testes, many men with Klinefelter’s are never diagnosed because their genitals are typical in appearance.
In androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), the body of an XY individual lacks a receptor that enables it to decode messages from androgens (virilizing hormones). AIS results in people with male chromosomes and obviously female bodies; although they produce male hormones, their cells are not sensitive to those hormones, and their bodies never masculinize. There is also partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS), which typically results in “ambiguous genitalia.” The clitoris is large or, alternatively, the penis is small and hypospadic (two different ways of labeling the same anatomical structure). PAIS seems to be quite common, and has been suggested as the cause of infertility in many men whose genitals are typically male.
Among the most prevalent causes of intersexuality among XX (usually female) people is congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), in which the adrenal gland produces an excess of androgens but feminizing occurs at puberty because the ovaries function normally. When excess androgens are produced in utero (sometimes not because of CAH but because an unborn XX baby’s metabolism converts hormonal drugs such as progestin, which was frequently administered to prevent miscarriage in the 1950s and 1960s, into an androgen), the female baby ma
y be born with an enlarged clitoris and fused labia that look very much like a scrotum. Sometimes the genitals look typically female, with barely perceptible variations. Sometimes the babies appear to be healthy boys without testes, and it may be that no one in the delivery room thinks anything is amiss. And less often, the babies’ genitals are not just misleading but the hallmark of what has historically been called hermaphroditism: truly ambiguous genitals, both male and female, although not a complete set of either.
Monsters, freaks, prophets, border-crossers, portents of disaster—hermaphrodites have been disturbing people for a long time. Ovid wrote of handsome Hermaphroditos, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, whose beauty so dazzled the nymph Salmacis that she longed—as lovers do—to be joined with him. The gods granted her wish, in their quirky fashion, and two turned into one—one Hermaphrodite, now both man and woman. In another version of the myth, Hermes and Aphrodite’s child is so completely a mix of both parents, both male and female, that they cannot agree on its sex, and name it Hermaphroditos. In the first version, love flowers so fully that one body can contain two sexes and two souls—a happy ending. In the second, the gods are so baffled that they can do no more than name their child and move on; we hear no more of poor Hermaphroditos, not of love, nor power, nor family life.
