On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  The issue of masculinity is in some ways more present for female-to-male transsexuals. After Brandon Teena was murdered in Nebraska in 1993 along with Lisa Lambert, in whose house Teena was living, and Phillip DeVine, a disabled African American (the basis for the 1999 award-winning film Boys Don’t Cry), it became a topic for debate whether Teena should be seen as a female-to-male transsexual without access to sex reassignment surgery or a transgender butch who had chosen not to transition.107 We will never know. What we do know is that he was raped shortly before he was murdered by the same young local boys who, intent on returning him to the body which in their eyes he denied, were also enraged at the success he was having with local girls. ‘This case itself hinges on the production of a “counterfeit” masculinity,’ Jack Halberstam writes in his in-depth reading of Teena’s murder in In a Queer Time and Place, ‘that even though it depends on deceit and illegality, turns out to be more compelling, seductive, and convincing than so-called real masculinities with which it competes.’ For this reason, he continues, ‘the contradiction of his body signified no obstacle at all as far as Brandon’s girlfriends were concerned.’108 Indeed it might have been the draw. In the small-town rural America where Teena lived, male crime passed effortlessly down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn observed to the journalist John Gregory Dunne. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders.’109 He was talking about husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him on the same charges during his sixteen years on the bench. Teena offered the girls ‘sex without pregnancy or fisticuffs’.110 Skylar, the teenager profiled in Vanity Fair in 2015, decided not to go for genital reconstruction, not feeling the need to be, in his words, a ‘macho bro’.111 In her attempt to be the man she was born as, Ann Black had served in the Black Watch Regiment for twelve years in Berlin: ‘If I didn’t join the army, I probably would have gone down the road that would have seen me in jail.’ (Black was speaking on the 2015 BBC documentary Transsexual Stories.)112

  What are you letting yourself in for if you choose to become a man? What is the deal? At a key stage of his transition, Raphael says to his analyst Melanie Suchet, ‘If I want them to treat me like a guy, I have to be a guy.’ ‘He is quiet. We are both quiet,’ Suchet observes. ‘There is a growing sense of unease in the space between us. I sense my body tensing up. Who am I going to end up sitting in the room with?’ ‘You really think you have to be a misogynist to be recognized as a guy?’ she asks him. ‘I am afraid that I am going to become a complete asshole,’ Raphael replies. ‘What if I am this sexist bastard?’113

  In fact, it turns out that it is only as a man that Raphael can allow himself a form of passivity and surrender which was too dangerous for him as a girl. Slowly over the years the analysis uncovers that as a female child he had been the receptacle of vicious maternal projections and may have been abused by his mother. Becoming a man therefore, amongst other things, allows him to become the girl which, as long as he was lodged in a female body, he could never dare to be. ‘I want my body to say, “Here this is Raphael. He’s a guy, but he’s not only a guy. He’s a female guy, who sometimes wants to be able to be a girl.”’114 (Raphael is the patient Virginia Goldner describes as ‘the girl who has to be a boy to be a girl’.115)

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  Raphael does not welcome the link Suchet proposes between being a transsexual and his childhood abuse, and complains that she is delegitimising and invalidating his experience by analysing it as the disturbed outcome of a traumatic past (although, as should not need stating, trauma is not pathology but history). He is not alone in making this case. Although it is recognised that the incidence of mental disturbance among transsexual people is no greater than among the population at large, transsexual people have to fight the stigma of psychopathology, not least because any sign of it during medical consultation is likely to disqualify them from surgery, where the only narrative that passes is the one that confidently asserts that they have always known who they really are.116 In 1980, transsexualism (in adolescents and adults) and Gender Identity Disorder (in children) entered the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III) – homosexuality had been officially removed from the registry in 1973. The struggle to have these categories dropped in turn, precisely as delegitimising, then runs up against the problem of seeming to imply that all other disorders in the manual legitimately belong there.117 Gender Identity Disorder was subsequently replaced with Gender Dysphoria, intended to be less pathologising. (Being included in the manual has the ‘advantage’ of allowing some insurance companies to cover the transition process.)

  In Imagining Transgender, one of David Valentine’s key informants, Cindy, suffers from depression. ‘Her history’, he comments, ‘– of child abuse, rape, drug addiction, alcoholism, suppression of feelings – is one that is all too common among transgender-identified people.’118 And, of course, among many non-transsexual people (the class issue here is glaring). It is the link, balance or causal relation between inner distress and the world’s cruelty that is so hard, if not impossible, to gauge. ‘How’, Goldner asks in her introduction to Transsexual Subjectivities, ‘are we to distinguish “psychodynamic” suffering from the trans-phobic “cultural suffering” caused by stigma, fear, hatred?’119 ‘I know’, writes Jacques, ‘there will be difficulties both with things inside my head, and with intolerant people in the outside world.’120 In response to this ambiguity, and to the misuse of intimate, personal history to run the transsexual person to ground, like the homosexual before, some argue that aetiology or the search for causes should simply be dropped. ‘[When] it comes to the origin of sexual identity,’ New York psychoanalyst Ken Corbett (no relation to Arthur) wrote in 1997, ‘I am willing to live with not knowing. Indeed, I believe in not knowing … [I am not interested in] the ill-conceived etiological question of “Why”, I am interested in how someone is homosexual.’121 For me, however, this is a false alternative. Why, in an ideal world – which of course none of us are living in – should the ethical question of how we live be severed from knowledge of how we have come to be who we are? What, we might ask instead, is the psychic repertoire, the available registers of admissible feelings, for the oppressed and ostracised? It is a paradox of political emancipation, which the struggle for transsexual freedom brings starkly into focus, that oppression must be met with self-affirmation and nothing less, as in: ‘I have dignity. You will not overlook me.’ To vacillate is political death. No second thoughts. There is no room for doubt or the day-to-day aberrations of being human. Jacques describes the intense pressure she felt herself under ‘to depict my life as blissful’.122 At moments I felt I have been watching the range of permitted utterances for the transsexual person narrow into a stranglehold: ‘I am discriminated against.’ ‘I suffer.’ ‘I am perfectly fine.’ ‘There is nothing wrong with me.’

  I think this might be why, reading transsexual narratives, I often get the sense of a psychic beat missed, of there being parts of the story which do, and do not, want to be told, moments which reach the surface, only to be forgotten or brushed aside in the forward march of narrative time. As though the personal could be a front for the personal, covering over what it ostensibly, even generously, displays (or as Jacques puts it in relation to ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs, having ‘the strange effect of masking the process of change as they seem to reveal it’).123 For example, Mark Rees, registered as a girl at birth, was one of twins; his twin sister died at five days old. His parents tried to hide their disappointment when three years later another girl was born – they had wanted a boy – who then turned out, compared with Mark, to be the ‘perfect’ female child. A male-to-female transsexual who prefers not to be named was identified as dyspraxic as a young male child, born to a mother who had earlier suffered an ectopic pregnancy and who subsequently gave birth to a daughter with no trace of disability who at last fulfilled the pare
nts’ dreams. There can be no ‘wild’ analysis of these histories, but it is hard not to see the shadow of death and an intolerable burden of idealisation fall, along the rigid, relentless axis of sexual difference, across these young bodies and minds. These moments are coercive, but once given their due place, they also increase the options for understanding. They show transsexuality, like all psychic identities, as an exit strategy as much as a journey home.

  There is a rage against the original body in many of these stories, especially in the male-to-female narratives I have read. April Ashley, Mark Rees, Juliet Jacques all write of the hatred, revulsion, abhorrence (their words) with which they view their male genitals before surgery – Jacques: ‘I just want this fucking thing off my body right now.’ After her surgery, she wakes up to the ‘horrific realisation’: ‘It’s still there!’ before remembering that another transsexual woman who underwent surgery before her had warned her that this is the dream.124 ‘Other forces’, writes Lili Elbe in her memoir, ‘began to stir in my brain and to choke whatever remnant of Andreas still remained there […] Andreas has been obliterated in me – is dead.’125 The pre-surgical body is, it seems, ungrievable (Judith Butler writes of ‘ungrievable lives’, referring to the dead bodies of the enemy in wartime that do not count or matter).126 Faced with which, New York-based psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou has made it a core part of her clinical engagement with transsexual patients for them to find a way to recognise and mourn the body they are leaving behind (the only basis, she suggests, for a successful surgical transition): ‘The body one has needs to be known to the patient, so that, when necessary, it may eventually be given up.’ For psychoanalysis this is a radical move in itself: ‘We have to accept’, writes Saketopoulou, ‘that when it comes to trans experience it’s often the body – and our old theories – that have to cave.’127 But without some respect for how deep the stakes are, how driven the impulse, the story becomes harder to fathom. It then risks being delivered straight into the arms of the crazy narrative, beyond all human understanding, with consummate and unforgiving ease. Nor do such insights have to undermine the more straightforward tale of a mistake being at last redressed. They are rarely to be found in each other’s company, but no one gains from the belief that the two forms of understanding cannot tolerate each other.

  In saying this, I realise I am repeating, in psychoanalytic terms, the call made by Sandy Stone as early as 1987, in her famous reply to Janice Raymond, ‘The Empire Strikes Back – A Posttransexual Manifesto’, in which she writes about having been personally attacked for working at an all-woman music collective. The process of ‘constructing a plausible history’, in other words ‘learning to lie effectively about one’s past’, Stone wrote, was blocking the ability of trans people to represent the full ‘complexities and ambiguities of lived experience’.128 The one thing Dean Spade, legal activist and theorist, learns from counselling sessions is that ‘in order to be deemed real, I need to want to pass as male all the time, and not feel ambivalent about this.’129 ‘We have’, Stone warned, ‘foreclosed the possibility of analysing desire and motivational complexity in a manner which adequately describes the multiple contradictions of individual lived experience.’130 ‘Plausible’ is the problem. It obliges the trans person, whatever the complexity of experience, to hold fast to the rails of identity. It turns the demand to take control of one’s own life, which is and has to be politically non-negotiable, into a vision of the mind as subordinate to the human will (the opposite of what the psychic life of the mind can ever be). And it leaves no room for sexuality as the disruptive, excessive reality and experience it mostly is. I have been struck by how little space for sex so many of these accounts, before and after, seem to offer. Kate Bornstein is one exception (she always pushes the boat out). In discussion with Paris Lees in London in February 2016, her refrain, first spoken loud and clear and then muttered more or less throughout the exchange, was ‘sex, sex, sex’. In A Queer and Pleasant Danger, she invites her readers, should they be so inclined, to skip several pages near the end of the book where she recounts an intense, in the end personally self-defeating, sado-masochistic interlude. Bornstein herself makes the link back to the operating table. In the prologue, she describes cutting a valentine’s heart above her heart as one way of dealing with searing pain. Once one barrier falls, then, if you choose not to keep the lid on, so, potentially at least, do all the rest.

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  From the middle of this past decade, trans has been everywhere, hitting the newsstands in the US and UK on a more or less daily basis. Not just the most photogenic instances such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox, or The Danish Girl, or the August 2015 special issue of Vanity Fair on Trans America (co-edited by GQ, the New Yorker, Vogue and Glamour), from which a number of my stories are taken; or Estrella Vázquez, the first muxe (indigenous Mexican transgender) woman to appear on a Vogue cover, in November 2019; but also, for instance, the somewhat unlikely sympathetic front-page spread of the Sun in January 2014 on the British army’s only transgender officer (‘An officer and a gentlewoman’); plus the Netflix series Transparent; Bethany Black, Dr Who’s first trans actress; EastEnders’ Riley Carter Millington, the first trans actor to play a regular transgender character in a mainstream UK soap opera; and Rebecca Root of Boy Meets Girl, the first transgender star of a British television show; or again reports of the first trans adopters and foster carers; or the surge in children seeking gender change, as reported by the London Tavistock Clinic which, together with the Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Service, provides the sole gender identity referral programme in the UK. Referrals had risen from 97 in 2009 to 697 in 2014–15. In 2015–16 the number of referrals rose to 2,016, and to 2,519 the following year (although the year-on-year rate of increase had declined during this period).131

  In relation to this increase, we can watch being rehearsed all the questions I have tried to outline here, now etched over the body of the child. Transgender children in the UK today have the option of delaying puberty by taking hormone blockers, can take cross-sex hormones from sixteen and opt for sex reassignment surgery from the age of eighteen. Cassie Wilson’s daughter Melanie announced he was Tom at the age of two and a half (at five he commenced annual appointments at the Tavistock); as soon as Callum King could talk, she said she was a girl, and from two or three years old, she refused to reply if anyone addressed her by her birthname. In 2004, the mental health charity Pace surveyed two thousand young people who were questioning their gender: forty-eight per cent had attempted suicide and fifty-eight per cent self-harmed. ‘They kill themselves,’ comments Julia’s mother. ‘I want a happy daughter, not a dead son.’ According to a 2016 report, children whose desire to transition is supported by their parents experience developmentally normal levels of depression and only minimal elevation of anxiety.132 Neuroendocrinologist and psychologist Vickie Pasterski has spoken of the ‘improved mental health and well-being of children’ who are ‘clearly and consistently’ supported in their wish to be the other gender (in her TED talk of 2019, Pasterski also described gender as a ‘kaleidoscope’).133 Critics of this viewpoint have seized on research studies suggesting that eighty per cent of children presenting with gender dysphoria will not persist with their cross-gender identification as they get older, but the figures are misleading. They are based on a pre-2014 diagnostic criteria of gender variance which did not require children to state that they wanted to be the other gender.134 Julia could in fact be seen as an example. She likes to ask her female friends at school if they would like to be a boy for a day just to see what it would feel like, and whatever they answer, she retorts, ‘I don’t have to because I’m both.’135

  Although many transgender children feel unable to talk to their parents, in some cases the desire for transition seems to come at least as much from the parents and other adults as from the child. One mother in San Francisco was told by the school principal that her son should choose one gender or the other because he was being harassed at
school. He could either jettison his pink Crocs and cut his long blond hair, or socially transition and come to school as a girl (he himself, having abandoned the dresses he used to like wearing, had never had any trouble calling himself a boy). She was wary: ‘It can be difficult for people to accept a child who is in a place of ambiguity.’136 At a conference in Philadelphia, attended by Margaret Talbot, the journalist writing about Skylar, one woman admitted that she was the one who needed certainty: ‘We want to know – are you trans or not?’ ‘Very little information in the public domain’, comments Walter Meyer, Texas-based child psychologist and endocrinologist, ‘talks about the normality of gender questioning and gender role exploration … It may be hard to live with the ambiguity but just watch and wait.’137 ‘How’, asks Polly Carmichael at the Tavistock, ‘do we keep in mind a diversity of outcomes?’138 What desire is being laid on a child who is expected to resolve the question of transition? On whose behalf? Better transition over and done with, it seems, than adults having to acknowledge, remember, relive, the sexual uncertainty of who we all are.