On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  Raymond was not without influence. In 1980 she was commissioned by the US National Center for Health Care Technology to write a paper on the social and ethical aspects of transsexual surgery, which was followed by the elimination of federal and state aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexual women and men (Raymond has denied her paper played any part in that decision).80 A year later, Medicare stopped its coverage for sex reassignment, a rule only overturned in May 2014. That didn’t stop the South Dakota State Senate from passing their bill in February 2016 requiring transgender students to use locker rooms and toilets that correspond to their birth-assigned gender, on the grounds that male-to-female transsexuals sneaking into women’s toilets were a danger to women. This completely ignores the fact that it is the trans woman forced to use men’s toilets and locker rooms who is likely to be subject to sexual assault. Similar legislation – known as the ‘Bathroom Bill’ – has been proposed in Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. In a partial victory against the trend, North Carolina reached a settlement in which transgender people could not be prevented from using facilities that corresponded to their gender.

  In the UK, Germaine Greer has been perhaps the best-known advocate of this position, or a version of it. She notoriously described male-to-female transsexuals as ‘pantomime dames’, had to resign from Newnham College, Cambridge, more or less as a consequence (after opposing the appointment of transgender Rachael Padman to a fellowship at the all-women college) and is now the object of a no-platforming campaign.81 ‘What they are saying’, Greer responded when the issue arose again in November 2015, ‘is that because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere.’82 She is being disingenuous. This is Greer in 1989, the quotation courtesy of Paris Lees, one of the most vocal trans activists in the UK today:

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  On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy, be-ringed paw that clutched it […] I should have said, ‘You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.’ The transvestite [sic] held me in a rapist’s grip.83

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  ‘All transsexuals’, Raymond stated, ‘rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact.’84 With the exception of incitement, of which this could be read as an instance, I tend to be opposed to no-platforming: better to have the worst that can be said out in the open in order to take it down. I also owe Greer a personal debt. Hearing her as an undergraduate in Oxford in 1970 was a key moment in setting me on the path of feminism. But reading this, I am pretty sure that, were I transsexual, I wouldn’t want Greer on any platform of mine.85

  Apart from being hateful, Raymond, Greer and their ilk show the scantest disregard for what many transsexual people have had to say on this very topic. However fervently desired, however much the fulfilment of a hitherto thwarted destiny, transition rarely seems to give to the transsexual woman or man an unassailable confidence in who they are (and not just because of the risk of ‘detection and ruin’). Rather it would seem from their own comments that the process opens up a question about sexual being to which it is more often than not impossible to offer a definitive reply. This is of course true for all human subjects. The bar of sexual difference is ruthless but that does not mean that those who believe they subscribe to its law have the slightest idea of what is going on beneath the surface, any more than the one who submits less willingly. For psychoanalysis, it is axiomatic, however clear you may be in your own mind that you are a man or a woman, that the unconscious knows better. ‘To the extent that someone insists at the level of their consciousness that they are heterosexual,’ stated French-Egyptian psychoanalyst Moustapha Safouan, ‘you can be sure that the absolute opposite is being asserted in the unconscious’ (hence the 2007 case of Republican senator Larry Craig, who went from endorsing anti-gay legislation to being arrested for cruising in an airport).86 Freud once stated that, given a primary universal bisexuality, sex is an act involving at least four people. The ‘cis’ – i.e. non-trans – woman or man is a decoy, the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams. From the Latin root meaning ‘on this side of’, as opposed to ‘across from’, cis is generally conflated with normativity, implying ‘comfortable in your skin’, as if that were the beginning and end of the matter.87

  ‘If transsexuality marks a response to the dream of changing sex,’ writes psychoanalyst Catherine Millot in her 1983 Horsexe – Essai sur le transsexualisme, ‘it is clearly the object of dream-making, and phantasizing in non-transsexuals’ (remember Arthur Corbett). Millot has been criticised for pathologising transsexuality, reading it as a doomed attempt to thwart the fact of sexual difference (Bornstein cites her alongside Raymond as one of the worst offenders). Certainly, as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, she believes that it is the role of the phallus to bring the world sexually to heel. But she also knows that it cannot possibly succeed. This patriarchal dispensation is delusional: ‘At another level, the phallus is the symbol of the non-sense of desire […] The fundamental reason for the unreason, the derangement, of desire’ (although these lines tend not to be quoted).88 Desire is aberrant, by definition, and heterosexuality is never what it seems to be. If the phallus rules the world, it is also, without knowing it, a bit of a clown (like the emperor with no clothes).

  Who, exactly, we might therefore ask – trans or non-trans – is fooling whom? Who do you think you are? – the question anyone hostile to transsexual people should surely be asking of themselves. This is not the same as saying that gender is always a performance since – as anyone will know who has read Judith Butler on abjection and melancholia, that is, post Gender Trouble – we are talking about a far more agonising and radical self-deceit. ‘The endorsement of heterosexuality’, writes Juliet Mitchell, ‘can hide the dangers in some of its practices.’ So-called normality can be the cover for a multitude of ‘sins’. She is recounting the famous psychoanalytic case of the ‘vagina man’, the subject of an earlier case study by psychoanalyst Adam Limentani, who during intercourse fantasised that he was himself being penetrated, which meant that to have sex was to be unfaithful to himself (he was fucking another woman), and that he could never, psychically, be father to his own child (whose child would it be?). Women can share the same syndrome – a fantasy that their vagina is not really their own but belongs to somebody else – although since they appear to be ‘normal’, to be fulfilling their biological and lawful destiny, no one would ever guess.89 Even with the apparently straightest man or woman, there is no telling.

  This is a selection of quotes from transsexual narratives, suggesting that as often as not the writers both know and don’t know who they are, or even – in some cases – who precisely they want to be:

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  Some transsexuals are no happier after surgery, and there are many suicides. Their dream is to become a normal man or woman. This is not possible, can never be possible, through surgery. Transsexuals should not delude themselves on this score. If they do, they are setting themselves up for a big, probably lethal, disappointment. It is important that they learn to understand themselves as transsexuals.

  April Ashley, First Lady90

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  The ‘trans’ prefix implies that one moves across from one sex to another. That is impossible […] I was not reared as a boy or as a young man. My experience can include neither normal heterosexual relations with a woman nor fatherhood. I have not shared the psychological experience of being a woman or the physical one of being a man.

  Mark Rees, Dear Sir or Madam91

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  ‘I live as a woman every day.’

  ‘Do you consider yourself to be a woman?’

  ‘I consider … Yes, yes, but I know what I – I know what I am … I do everything like a woman. I act like a woman, I move like a woman … I know I’m gay and I know I’m a man.’

  Anita, Puerto Rican transgender sex worker interviewed by David Valentine92

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  My body can’t do that [give birth]; I can’t even bleed without a wound, and yet I claim to be a woman […] I can never be a woman like other women, but I could never be a man.

  Susan Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein’93

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  I certainly wouldn’t be happy with the idea of being a man, and I don’t consider myself a man, but I’m not going to try and convince anyone that I’m really a woman.

  Jayne County, Man Enough to Be a Woman94

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  It had been such a relief for me when I could stop pretending to be a man. Well it was a similar relief not to have to pretend that I was a woman […] I was now a lesbian with a boyfriend, but I wasn’t a real lesbian and he wasn’t a real boy […] no matter what I bought – I’d look in the mirror and see myself as a man in a dress. Sure, I knew I wasn’t a man. But I also knew I wasn’t a woman.

  Kate Bornstein, A Queer and Pleasant Danger95

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  I have a male and female side […] I don’t know how they relate […] I had to ask myself: how trans did I want to be?

  Juliet Jacques, Trans96

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  As the oestrogen started to change her body, Jacques felt for the first time ‘unburdened by that disconnect between body and mind’. She even wondered whether one day the original disconnect might be ‘hard to recall’. But this did not stop her from asking in the same moment: ‘What kind of woman have I become?’97 Soft-spoken and deep-voiced, understated and urgent, Jacques comes across as a woman carrying an ambiguity she does not seem to want, or feel able fully to shed. She is also as keen to talk about Norwich City and the underground music and counterculture scene as she is to tell her tale of transition – why indeed is it assumed that transition is all transsexual people ever have to talk about? No performance (except to the extent that anyone appearing in public is of necessity performing); no exhilaration (she is one of the few transsexual people I have read or heard willing to explore their own depression); no definitive arrival anywhere. Affirmed and subdued by her own experience, she confounds the distinction, not just between male and female, but also between the emotional atmospheres which the various transsexual identities are meant – instructed might be the right word – to personify. On this matter, the argument, the insistence on playing it one way or another, can be virulent.

  The statements I quote are not therefore uncontroversial. Bornstein has been labelled ‘transphobic’ and picketed by some in the transgender community for refusing to claim male or female gender and for her stance on the issue of women-only spaces: ‘I thought every private space has the right to admit whomever they want – I told them it was their responsibility to define the word woman. And I told the transwomen to stop acting like men with a sense of entitlement.’ ‘I give great sound bites on sex,’ she apologises to a furious Riki Ann Wilchins, who had invited her to speak, ‘but I always fuck up politics.’98 In a wondrous twist, Paris Lees credits Germaine Greer for guiding her to insight on this matter:

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  Greer caused me to question my identity, and form a more complex one. She was right: I am not a woman in the way my mother is; I haven’t experienced female childhood; I don’t menstruate. I won’t give birth. Yes, I have no idea what it feels like to be another woman – but nor do I know what it feels like to be another man. How can anyone know what it feels like to be anyone but themselves?99

  Not all transsexual people take this position. At the feminist conference ‘In Conversation with the Women’s Liberation Movement’, held in London in September 2013, I sat behind two trans women who objected when the historian Sue O’Sullivan described how 1970s feminism had allowed young women for the first time to explore, to claim as intimate companion, their own vagina. Her account was seen by them as transphobic for excluding trans women, who most likely will not have had that experience in their youth but who are ‘no less women’ for that. There are trans women for whom, on similar grounds, the words ‘vagina’ and ‘vulva’ should not even be used. Trans women have also objected to lines of intellectual enquiry which, they feel, unjustly put their lives under the microscope (in October 2018, fifty academics wrote to the Guardian describing how they felt obstructed in their research by transgender activists).100 But this is not the whole story – nor even half of it. I have become weary of those feminists who leap at such moments to discredit the voices of trans women, without so much as a nod to the historic prejudice and violence against them. That trans people might feel defensive about available vocabularies and what is said about them needs to be understood in context. As Susan Stryker has pointed out, things are said about trans people which, if said about many other minorities, would see print only in the most hate-riddled, white supremacist, Christian fascist rags.101

  In fact, I would say it is because trans women prise apart the question ‘Who is a real woman?’ with such pain, because they have been on their very particular journey, that they should be listened to. And not just because it is so manifestly self-defeating for feminism and transgender, two movements fighting oppression, not to talk to each other. For me, trans women have earned their place at the banquet of feminism. They should be welcome at the Ladies’ Pond on London’s Hampstead Heath, where the decision to allow them entry in May 2019 – after a consultation involving twenty-one thousand people – was met with intense opposition. With strong echoes of Janice Raymond, those who objected repeated the language of violation, characterising trans women as men enacting a charade – pretending to be women, to put it at its most simple – in order to invade women’s space.102 Why, we might ask, are the rare instances when this might occur seized on, as if representative, as if the only story to be told? Excluding transgender women from women-only spaces merely adds to the world’s quotient of hatred, which is surely rife enough. Today, the atmosphere surrounding these debates can fairly be described as toxic, as the fundamental aim, which must surely be to see acceptance of trans people, women and men, as an issue of basic rights and freedom, blurs almost beyond recognition. This is writer So Mayer, who remembers visits to the Pond as a little girl, at a time when the shame, pain and complications of her body made her uneasy at being assigned female:

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  It feels, these days, that even the mallards and moorhens seem to police gender with the beady gaze of their Jesuitical authority. External protestors disrupting a recent Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association meeting about allowing transwomen swimmers to continue using the Ladies’ Pond (as they long have) wore the WOMEN ONLY sign from the pond gate around their necks, a gross invocation of slave auctions […] It gives me reservations about the pond as a community; it gives me, literally, a sinking feeling, heavy as lead.103

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  Another reason why trans and feminism should be natural bedfellows is that male-to-female transsexuals expose, and then reject, masculinity in its darkest guise. This side of the argument is missed by Greer et al., who tend to overlook the fact that if you want more than anything in the world to become a woman, then chances are there is somewhere a man who, just as passionately, you do not want to be. ‘I stopped my life living as a man,’ Bornstein writes of her father in the prologue to A Queer and Pleasant Danger, ‘in large part because I never wanted to be a man like him’ (coming to terms with his ghost is one of her motives in writing the memoir).104 One of Nina Arsenault’s earliest memories is of boys knifing magazine images of women. ‘I
know this is exactly what I will be when I grow up.’105

  In the first half of Conundrum, Morris offers the reader a paean to maleness: the feeling of being a man ‘springs specifically from the body’, a body which, ‘when it is working properly’, she recalls, is ‘a marvellous thing to inhabit […] Nothing sags in him’ (never?). But this self-same masculinity, epitomised by an assault on Everest timed to coincide with the Queen’s coronation, is ‘snatching at air’, a ‘nothingness’, which leaves Morris dissatisfied ‘as I think’, she concludes, ‘it would leave most women’. ‘Even now I dislike that emptiness at its climax, that perfect uselessness’ (as good a diagnosis of the vacuity of phallic power as you might hope to find). If you are a man, you can spend a lifetime striving for this version of masculinity, never to discover the emptiness and fraudulence at its core. Despite a relatively lowly upbringing in the Welsh countryside, somewhere Morris is, or rather was, an upper-class English gent imbued with the values of his sex and class – the family on the mother’s side descends from ‘modest English squires’. When Morris sheds maleness, it is therefore a patriotic, militarist identity, with its accompanying imperial prejudice, that she leaves, at least partly, behind: ‘I still would not want to be ruled by Africans, but then they did not want to rule me’ (though even this does not quite make it to the question of who Africans might want, and not want, to be ruled by). This legacy is hard to relinquish. Released from her ‘last remnants of maleness’, she returns from Morocco, where she underwent her transition, ‘like a princess emancipated from her degrading disguise, or something new out of Africa.’106 Morris was operated on by Dr Georges Burou, the same surgeon who had carried out the surgery on Ashley in 1960 and one of the first to undertake the procedure. By 1972, the operation was available in the UK, but Morris chose to go abroad when it was made a legal condition that she first divorce her wife, with whom she had fathered five children.