In her TV series I Am Cait, Jenner has been keen to extend a hand to transsexual women and men who do not enjoy her material privileges. She has made a point of giving space to minority transsexuals such as Zeam Porter who face double discrimination as black and trans – although it is Laverne Cox, in Orange Is the New Black, who has truly taken on the mantle of presenting to the world what it means to be a black, incarcerated, transsexual woman. Cox also insisted that, even now she had the money, she would not undergo surgery to feminise her face – Jenner’s facial surgery lasted ten hours and led to her one panic attack: ‘What did I just do? What did I just do to myself?’54 But when faced with Kate Bornstein exhorting her to ‘accept the freakdom’, Jenner seems nonplussed (as one commentator pointed out, Bornstein used the word ‘freak’ six times in a three-minute interview). This was not a true meeting of minds. Like Stryker, Bornstein believes that it is the strangeness of being transsexual, the threat posed to those watching with or without sympathy, which is the whole point. Compare the impeccable, Hollywood ‘moodboarded’ images of Jenner broadcast across the world – ‘moodboarded’, the word used by the stylist on the shoot, refers to a collage of images used in production to get the right feel or flow55 – with this image of Stryker in 1994, in perhaps her most renowned testament or performance, welcoming monstrosity via the analogy between herself and Frankenstein’s creature: ‘The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.’ Stryker stood at the podium wearing what she calls ‘genderfuck drag’:
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combat boots, threadbare Levi 501s over a black lace body suit, a shredded Transgender Nation T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewellery, and a six inch long marlin hook dangling around my neck on a length of heavy stainless steel chain. I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panellists’ table. The jacket had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rainbow freedom rings on the right side lacings, and Queer Nation-style stickers reading SEX CHANGE, DYKE, and FUCK YOUR TRANSPHOBIA plastered on the back.56
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She was – is – wholly serious. It is the myth of the natural, for all of us, which she has in her sights. This is her justly renowned, exhortatory moment, unsurpassed in anything else I have read:
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Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.57
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For many post-operative transsexual people, the charge of bodily mutilation is a slur arising from pure prejudice. It is true that without medical technology none of this would have been possible. It is also true that the need for, the extent and pain of medical intervention put a strain on the argument that the transsexual woman or man is simply returning to her or his naturally ordained place – with the surgeon as nature’s agent who restores what nature meant to be there in the first place.58 Roz Kaveney’s medical transition, for example, lasted two years, involving twenty-five general anaesthetics, a ten-stone weight gain, thromboses, more than one major haemorrhage, fistula and infections. She barely survived, though none of this has stopped her from going on to lead one of the most effective campaigning lives as a transsexual woman.59
In 1931, Lili Elbe – a successful Danish painter under her former name of Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener – died after a failed uterus transplant (the film The Danish Girl sentimentally changes this to the prior operation to create a vagina, so that she dies having fulfilled her dream). When I met April Ashley in Oxford in the early 1970s – she was in the midst of the legal hearing and Oxford was a kind of retreat – she expressed her sorrow that she would never be a mother. On this, female-to-male transsexuals have gone further. In 2007, Thomas Beatie, having retained his female reproductive organs on transition, became pregnant with triplets through artificial insemination. He lost the pregnancy after life-threatening complications but has since given birth to three children. In 2018, having halted testosterone treatment, Freddy McConnell gave birth after conceiving with donor sperm. A year later he lost his appeal to the Family and Administrative Division of the UK High Court to be registered as the baby’s father. In the first legal definition of a mother in English common law, Sir Andrew McFarlane judged that maternal status, unlike gender identity, derives from the biological and physical process of giving birth and that, regardless of potential harm to the individual and any violation of his right to privacy, McConnell had to be registered as the baby’s mother. (The term ‘parent’ was not an option as it is used in law to refer to the female partner of a biological mother.) McFarlane had reduced motherhood to biology and made it the limit case of trans experience:
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The principal conclusion at the centre of this extensive judgment can be shortly stated. It is that there is a material difference between a person’s gender and their status as a parent. Being a ‘mother’, whilst hitherto always associated with being female, is the status afforded to a person who undergoes the physical and biological process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth. It is now medically and legally possible for an individual, whose gender is recognised in law as male, to become pregnant and give birth to their child. Whilst that person’s gender is ‘male’, their parental status is that of ‘mother’.60
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A previous judgement, cited earlier in the report by McFarlane, had stated that ‘the public interest in having coherent administrative systems was an important consideration.’61 At the other end of the spectrum, the court overturned the decision to refuse a transgender woman any contact with the children she had fathered while living as a man on the grounds that it would cause them to be ostracised by the orthodox Jewish community in which they lived.62
For Stryker, any such attempt to align the trans body with the law would make little sense (I cannot imagine her anywhere near a court of law on these matters). In her vision, mutilation is at once a badge of honour and a counter to the myth of nature in a pure state. There is no body without debilitation and pain. We are all made up of endlessly permuting bits and pieces which sometimes do, mostly do not, align with each other. We are all always adjusting, manipulating, perfecting, sometimes damaging (sometimes perfecting and damaging) ourselves. Today non-trans women, at the mercy of the cosmetic industry, increasingly submit to surgical intervention to make them look like the woman they believe they were meant to be, an image without which they feel worthless (since nature is equated with youth, this also turns the natural process of ageing into some kind of aberration). ‘I’ve seen women mutilate themselves to try to meet that norm,’ says Melissa, mother of Skylar, a sixteen-year-old from New Haven whose story was told by Margaret Talbot for Vanity Fair in 2015. Skylar had ‘top surgery’ (mastectomy) with his parents’ permission at the age of sixteen.63 Shakespeare described man as a thing of ‘shreds and patches’ (the king in Hamlet), Freud as a ‘prosthetic God’, Donna Haraway for our times as a cyborg (Haraway is included in the first Transgender Reader). Rebarbative as it may at first seem, Stryker’s is in fact the most inclusive of visions. Enter my world: ‘I challenge you to risk
abjection and flourish as well as have I.’ What you would most violently repudiate is an inherent and potentially creative part of the self.
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The image of the transsexual world as a type of open church which includes all comers, all variants on the possibilities of sex, is therefore misleading. There are strong disagreements between those who see transition as a means, the only means, to true embodiment and those who see transsexuality as upending all sexual categories. For the first, the aim is a bodily and psychic integrity which has been thwarted since birth: ‘Lili Elbe’s story’, writes Niels Hoyer, ‘is above all a human story and each faltering step she takes is an awakening of her true self … [she] was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to become the person within.’ (Hoyer is the editor of Elbe’s own notes and diaries, not to be confused with the ghastly novel by David Ebershoff on which the recent film is based.)64 Jan Morris defines her transition as a journey to identity: ‘I had reached identity’; Ashley speaks of her desire ‘to be whole’ and of her ‘great sense of purpose to make things right, make everything correct’65; Chelsea Manning writes of ‘physically transitioning to the woman I have always been’.66 Such accounts seem to be the ones that most easily make it into the public eye, as if a shocked world can breathe out and heave something like a collective sigh of relief (‘at least that much is clear, then’).
For those who, on the other hand, see trans as a challenge to any such clarity, the last thing transsexuality should do is claim to be the answer to its own question, or pretend that the world has been, could ever be, put to rights. This is simply a normative delusion hugely exacerbated by a neoliberal order which now more or less covers the earth – rather like Scientology, of which Kate Bornstein was a fully paid-up member in what we might call her formative years. Scientology, Bornstein tells us, ‘is supposed to erase all the pain and suffering you’ve ever felt in this and every other lifetime’.67 It is also a type of surveillance state aimed at world domination which enjoins complete lack of secrecy or privacy on all its members (unflinching eye-to-eye contact obligatory during any conversation), and which of course cast Bornstein into the wilderness as a ‘suppressive person’ as soon as her ambiguous sexuality was revealed. This despite the fact that, according to Scientology, each human contains a thetan – the spirit of the person, which is not separate from the body, as in, say, Christianity, but embedded within it. Crucially, thetans have no gender. Bornstein’s transsexuality is, therefore, as indebted to the Scientologists (something she indeed acknowledges) as it is her escape.
For Bornstein, as for Stryker, transsexuality is an infinite confusion of tongues. Neither of them is arriving anywhere. For Jay Prosser, on the other hand, the transsexual man or woman is enfolded in their new body like a second skin (his 1998 book, one of the most widely circulated and debated on the topic, has the title Second Skins – The Body Narratives of Transsexuality). As he describes on the first page, two weeks after completing a course of massive testosterone treatment, he began living full-time as a man, ‘documents all changed to reflect a new, unambivalent status’. In fact, Prosser is more than attuned to the ambiguities of sexual identity. He knows that transition, however real, is grafted by means of fiction, that it is through the craft of story-making that transsexual people drive towards the resolution they seek (hence the ‘body narratives’ of the title, narratives which in his analysis track nothing if not the complexities of sexual being carried and enacted by the genre). Partly because he is so immersed in psychoanalytic thinking, he grasps how far sexual being – on the skin and in the bloodstream – plunges into the roots of who we are. Transition is testament to the at once alterable and non-negotiable fact of sexual difference: ‘In transsexual accounts,’ he writes, ‘transition does not shift the subject away from the embodiment of sexual difference but more fully into it.’68 This is why, for some, transsexuality, or rather this version of transsexuality, is conservative, reinforcing the binary from which we all – trans and non-trans – suffer. Freud, for example, described the long and circuitous path to so-called normal femininity for the girl – originally bisexual, wildly energised by being all over the place – as nothing short of a catastrophe (admittedly, this is not the version of female sexuality for which he is best known).
Yet for Prosser, to move from A to B is a form of definitive, and conclusive, self-fashioning or it is nothing. In the special issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues on transsexual subjectivities, Melanie Suchet draws on Prosser in her analysis of Raphael, a female-to-male transsexual who explains: ‘Boy has to be written on the body’, an idea she struggles to accept. She has to move from her original stance that sexual ambiguity should be sustainable without any need for bodily change (‘Crossing Over’, the title of her essay, refers as much to her journey as it does to his).69 Prosser talks of ‘restoration’ of the body.70 Note how ‘restoration’ chimes with the ‘born in the wrong body’ mantra which, while deeply felt by many transsexual people, is also partly the child of a medical profession which for a long time would accept nothing less as the basis for hormonal or surgical intervention. In the 1960s, the profiles of candidates for medical transition were found to be strangely in harmony with Harry Benjamin’s then definitive textbook on the subject – strangely, that is, until it was realised that they had all been reading it and brushing up their lines.71
But if the longing is for restoration, arrival, the end of ambivalence, then the infinite variables of transgender identity – which the UK report Transgender Equality admitted it could not keep up with – are a bit of a scam, or at least a smokescreen covering over the materiality of a body in the throes of transition. A year after his book was published, Prosser wrote a palinode criticising his own equation of body, referent and real, and allowing much more space to the irreducible, even unspeakable, agony of transition. But the living flesh of the argument remains, albeit now traumatised and scarred.72 In a move whose rhetorical violence he was more than ready to acknowledge, Prosser suggested in Second Skins that endorsing the performativity of trans, or rather trans as performativity (that is trans as something that exposes gender as a masquerade for everyone), verges on ‘critical perversity’. Judith Butler was the main target, accused of celebrating as transgressive the hovering, unsettled condition which, as Telesford, Jacques and Kaveney testify, places the lives of transsexual people at risk.73 There is another distinction at work here, a type of emotional division of labour between exhilaration and pain, brashness and dread, pleasure or danger (although these last two were combined, i.e. Pleasure and Danger, in the 1984 feminist anthology which made the case for a non-censorious feminist engagement with sex74). Or to put it another way, according to this logic, ‘queers can’t die and transsexuals can’t laugh’ – a formula lifted from a commentary on the work of transgender cabaret artist Nina Arsenault, who, while modelling herself on a Barbie doll, manages to cover all the options by performing herself as both real and fake.75 There are no lengths to which Arsenault has not gone, no procedures she has not suffered, to craft herself as a woman, but she has done this not so much to embody femininity as to expose it, to push it right over the edge. Hence her parody of Pamela Anderson (who is of course already a parody of herself): an ‘imitation of an imitation of an idea of a woman. An image which has never existed in nature.’76
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The question of embodiment therefore brings with it another. Does the transsexual woman or man, in her or his new identity, count as real? I am genuinely baffled as to how anyone can believe themselves qualified to legislate on the reality, or not, of anyone else, without claiming divine authority (or worse). ‘Once you decide that some people’s lives are not real,’ Jacques cites Kaveney, ‘it becomes okay to abuse them.’77 Placing ‘real’ women and men above trans ‘fakers’ is an invitation to violence. In her 2020 article on the gendered politics of pronouns, Amia Srinivasan cites philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher on the ‘reality enforcement’ that can follow: humiliating outings of the ‘true’, n
atal sex, or strip searches and rape.78 In 1979 Janice Raymond pronounced in The Transsexual Empire – The Making of the She-Male that male-to-female transsexuals are frauds (on this issue, female-to-male seem to pose less of a problem even though surgical transition is much harder in their case). They should therefore be outlawed from women-only spaces, since these are spaces which feminists have struggled, after centuries of male oppression, to create for themselves. In today’s parlance, Raymond was the first TERF or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ (the term used by some transsexual people and by those feminists who oppose her position). For Raymond, male-to-female transsexuals are patriarchy writ large, the worst embodiments of a phallic power willing to resort to just about anything to fulfil itself – hence ‘transsexual empire’. Although I am sure this was not the intention, I have always found this argument extremely helpful in explaining to students the difference, indeed gulf, between phallus and penis since, according to this logic, the authority and stature of the former would seem to require the surgical removal of the latter. Or, in the words of Jacques, ‘The simultaneous characterisation of trans women as unthinking supporters of male roles and politically aware enough to convince hardened feminists to admit them is a theoretical clusterfuck, and every critical thinker who let it past them – and plenty did – should be utterly ashamed of themselves.’79
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 10
