In February 2019, the difficulty of these questions came to a head at the London Tavistock and Portman Clinic when David Bell, staff governor at the time, wrote a highly critical report suggesting that irreversible blockers and cross-sex hormones were being given far too readily to adolescents without proper assessment of what might be the psychic factors at play; it also reported staff feeling intimidated for raising any such concerns (in February 2020, a review of such treatments was announced by NHS England).139 The Tavistock rejected the claims as unsubstantiated. Within the available and diminishing resources, the clinic insisted that it was taking due time and care (in turn one governor and five clinicians resigned). The Times’s headline described what was going on as an ‘experiment on children’; others spoke of children in ‘danger’, terms surely fuelled by a sexually charged backlash against transgenderism, though this seems to have received no commentary.140 Some of those interviewed attributed the problem to lobbying by trans pressure groups – Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence and the Gender Identity Research and Education Society – a claim which each of these groups denied (it is not clear why a pressure group that lobbies, as opposed to just protesting, is somehow seen as disqualifying its own claim). It was also suggested that homophobia at school was playing a key part in the desire to transition. Better to be a boy than a lesbian girl who will be the object of bullying and derision. The idea that young people were making such a momentous decision on the basis of a rational calculation of the relative social losses and gains seems somewhat at odds with the idea of them as complex, unconsciously driven and conflicted psychic subjects.141 Yet again we see the tension between a respect for the inner life and the struggle for freedom. How to keep the former in view while affirming the right to transition in a still mostly hostile world? In this context, being ‘trans affirmative’, a phrase used with reference to doctors and patients responding to a trans child, appears to be seen as a bad thing. Although it is also true that psychoanalysis affirms nothing, its sole aim being to bring to light, without judgement of any kind, whatever resists passing over the threshold into human consciousness.
The increase in trans children may be amongst the most striking, and for some shocking, new developments. But transgenderism is not new. Far from being a modern-day invention, we might instead see it more like a return of the repressed, as humans slowly make their way back, after a long and cruel detour, to where they were meant to be. One of my friends, when she heard I was writing on the topic, said we should all hang on in there as the ageing body leads everyone to trans in any case (I told her she had somewhat missed the point). The Talmud, for example, lists six genders (though Deuteronomy 2:5 thunders against cross-dressing). ‘Strange country this,’ Leslie Feinberg cites a white man arriving in the New World in 1850, ‘where males assume the dress and duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex.’142 Colonialists referred to these men and women as berdache, setting wild dogs on them, torturing and burning them. In pre-capitalist societies, before conquest and exploitation, Feinberg argues, transgender people were honoured and revered. Feinberg’s essay, ‘Transgender Liberation – A Movement Whose Time Has Come’, first published in 1992, called for a pan-gender umbrella to cover all sexual minorities. It was the beginning of a movement. The first Transgender Reader stretched back into the medical archive and then forward into the 1990s: the activism of that decade was the ground and precondition for the engagement, defiance and manifestos which, in the face of a blind and/or hostile world, the Reader offered. These volumes are vast, they contain multitudes, as if to state: ‘Look how many we are and how much we have to say.’ We need to remember that these bold and unprecedented interventions predated by more than two decades the phenomenon known as ‘trans’ in popular culture today.
At the end of his foreword to the first Transgender Studies Reader, Stephen Whittle lists as one of the new possibilities for trans experience opened up by critical thought the right to claim a ‘unique position of suffering’.143 But, as with all political movements, certainly any grounded in identity politics, there is always the danger that suffering will start to become competitive, a prize possession and goal in itself. The example of the berdache, or of Brandon Teena caught in a cycle of deprivation, shows, however, that trans experience can never be – without travestying itself and the world – its own sole reference point. However distinct a form of being and belonging, it has affiliations which stretch back in time and across the globe. I have mainly focused on stories from the US and UK but transgender is as much an issue in Tehran, where trans people have had to fight against being co-opted into an anti-Islam agenda that makes sexual progressivism an exclusive property of the West (in fact sex reassignment was legalised following a personal diktat from the Ayatollah Khomeini); and in India, where the hijras (men who wear female clothing and who renounce sexual desire by undergoing sacrificial emasculation) are recognised and esteemed as a third sex.144
Like the tales of anybody’s life, all the accounts I have discussed are caught in histories not of their own choosing. These stories also need to be told. Ashley, for example, a child of the Second World War, finds herself in a circle that includes Joseph Goebbels’s sister-in-law, who inherited his wealth and property after he and his wife murdered their six children and then killed themselves. ‘I was to find’, Ashley writes of their growing friendship, ‘that most people had secrets – some in their own way, as delicate as mine.’145 The link between them goes deeper than she might have realised. Magnus Hirschfeld, sexologist, founder of the first gay rights organisation and an early advocate for transgender people, was described by Hitler as the ‘most dangerous man in Germany’ – the Nazis destroyed his institute and burned his research collection (a chapter from his book on transvestites is included in the first Transgender Reader).146 The war is her story. Ashley’s mother, who hated her and would regularly pick her up by her ankles and bang her head on the floor, worked at the Fazakerly bomb factory, losing much of her hair and all her teeth from being around TNT (one of her friends burned up from the exposure and died). ‘As a child growing up during the Second World War,’ Ashley begins her memoir, ‘I was generally badly treated by everybody.’ She was also abused as a child by the husband of a couple the family were very close to.147
In 2016, Caitlyn Jenner voted for Donald Trump, despite his party’s dire record on LGBT issues, although she has now revoked her support and says that it was a mistake.148 She was, however, being consistent with her own past. As the world-renowned athlete Bruce Jenner, Bissinger recalls, she had once been a weapon in the Cold War: ‘Mom and Apple pie with a daub of vanilla ice cream for deliciousness in a country desperate for such an image.’ ‘He had beaten the Commie bastards. He was America.’ In an article in the New York Times in 1977, Tony Kornheiser described Jenner as ‘twirling the nation like a baton; he and his wife, Chrystie, are so high up on the pedestal of American heroism that it would take a crane to get them down.’149 Who is to say that something of that dubious political aura has not made its way, like a lingering scent, into the phenomenon that is Caitlyn Jenner today?
For Jayne County, by contrast, being a trans person was her ticket to the other side, what she calls the ‘flaming side of gay life’. One of the most successful plays she wrote and performed, World – Birth of a Nation, included a scene of John Wayne giving birth to a baby out of his anus (not how most people like to think of the birth of a nation, or indeed John Wayne). The Village Voice gave it a rave review. County was brought up in a right-wing rural America of Biblical prophecy where the Beast took the shape of a United Europe with Germany at its head (Germans would apparently unite with the Arab nations against the Jews). She credits Bill Clinton with fostering an atmosphere in the 1990s where the US was ‘wide open for people of all variations of sexuality, including trannies of every shape, size and colour’. But already by the middle of the decade when she returns from the Berlin underground, the conservative right were beginning to take power, and
the Democrats, with their liberal stand on abortion, gay rights and prayer in school, were seen as disciples of Satan ‘by Baptist bastards, Republican retards and right wing Christians’ (no change there then). ‘This’, she asserts, ‘just makes me more defiant than ever. I’ll get more and more outrageous just to freak them out.’150 These are the last lines of her book (she had previously been planning to retire to her home community, dress in more subdued fashion and settle down). We do transsexuality no favours if we ignore these contexts, throwing the transsexual person onto the sidewalk of history. As if, after all, trans reality is merely a tale which transsexual people are telling themselves, cut off in an isolation ward, leading a strange life all of their own (which must surely increase the voyeurism, the over-intense focus from which they suffer).
* * *
In 1998, the Remembering Our Dead project was founded in the US in response to the killing of Rita Hester, an African-American trans woman who was found murdered in her Massachusetts apartment. By 2007, 378 individuals had been registered and the numbers are climbing today. Such commemoration is crucial but also risky. There is a danger, Sarah Lamble writes in the second Transgender Studies Reader, that ‘the very existence of transgender people is verified by their death’: that transsexual people come to define themselves as objects of violence over and above everything else (the violence which afflicts them usurping the identity they seek). ‘In this model,’ Lamble continues, ‘justice claims rest on proof that one group is not only most oppressed but also most innocent’, which implies transsexual people could never be implicated in the oppression of others.151 Apparently, the list of victims in the archives gives no information about age, race, class or circumstances, although the activists are mostly white, the victims, as already noted, almost invariably people of colour, so when the images are juxtaposed, they reproduce one of the worst tropes of colonialism: whites as redeemers of the black dead. At the core of the remembrance ceremony, individuals step forth to speak in the name of the dead. What is going on here? What fetishisation – Lamble’s word – of death? What is left of these complex lives which, in failing fully to be told, fail fully to be honoured?
We are witnessing a sea-change, although this does not make the news. Now the call has gone out not only for the necessary cataloguing of violence against transsexual people and its recognition as oppression, but for this also to become part of a wider, more politically expansive vision. We are witnessing, I would tentatively suggest, the first inkling that the category of the transsexual might one day, as the ultimate act of emancipation, abolish itself. In one of her best-known essays, ‘Women’s Time’ (1981), psychoanalytic and literary theorist Julia Kristeva argued that feminism, and indeed the whole world, would enter a third stage in relation to sexual difference: after the demand for equal rights and then the celebration of femininity as other to the norm, there will come a time where the distinction will finally disappear as a metaphysical relic of a bygone age. In Transgender Studies Reader 2, Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee and Dean Spade call for a trans and queer movement which would set its sights above all on the neoliberal agenda which exacerbates inequality, consolidates state authority and increases the numbers of incarcerated across the globe. So far the official US response to the regular and fatal violence meted out to trans and queer people has mostly been hate crime legislation, tacked onto defence bills, which increases prison sentences and strengthens local and federal law. In 2007, the Employment Non-Discrimination Bill was gutted of gender identity protection. Bill Clinton – pace Jayne County – may have liberalised the sexual life of the nation, but on his watch, the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act limited aid and increased penalties for welfare recipients. Viewed in this light, Clinton becomes, like former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, a leader whose social liberalism, including on sexual matters, is what allowed him to drive through brutally unjust economic policies with such baffling ease (Cameron will now go down in history as the leader who precipitated the disastrous Brexit referendum of 2016).
‘Critical trans resistance to unjust state power’, the editors of the Reader introduce their essay, ‘must tackle such problems as poverty, racism and incarceration if it is to do more than consolidate the legitimate citizenship of the most privileged segments of trans populations.’ Once you talk about privilege, then everything looks different. Bassichis, Lee and Spade are calling for transsexuality and queer to become part of a movement, no longer geared only to sexual minorities, but embracing the wider, and now seen as more radical, aim of abolishing prisons in the US. ‘We can no longer’, they state, ‘allow our deaths to be the justification of so many other people’s deaths through policing, imprisonment and detention.’152 There is also a link here to the issue of sexual assault and the legal fightback against it which was the topic of Chapter One – amongst those accused of such crimes, the number of men of colour is, in the words of Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley, ‘creepily high’.153 No struggle for emancipation can afford to be co-opted by discriminatory and death-dealing state power. The regular and casual police killings of black men on the streets of America come most immediately to mind as part of this larger frame in which, Bassichis et al. are insisting, all progressive politics should be set. A reality and demand given renewed urgency by the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the midst of the pandemic, to which we must add Breonna Taylor from Louisville, Kentucky, the mother of an eight-year-old, killed in March while sleeping in her home. In the Transgender Reader, Bassichis and fellow editors are given the last word (theirs is the final essay in the book).
Death must not be an excuse for more death. Obviously it is not for me to make this call on behalf of transsexual people. I have written here from the position of a so-called cis woman, a category which I believe, as I hope is by this point clear, to be vulnerable to exposure and undoing, to say the least. Today, transsexuals – men, women, neither, both – are taking the public stage more than ever before. In the words of the Time cover story in May 2014, trans is ‘America’s next civil rights frontier’.154 Since then, the world has moved back and forward, sometimes, it seems, almost in a single step. On 12 June 2020, Trump added to his vicious anti-trans agenda the removal of transgender civil rights in relation to health care.155 Three days later, in a surprise victory, widely welcomed as a partial riposte to Trump, the US Supreme Court invoked the civil rights law of 1964 to guarantee trans, gay and lesbian people full protection at work.156 Healthcare, work protection, civil rights, incarceration – each one resonates in the fight for trans freedom. Perhaps, even though it does not always look this way on the ground, trans activists might – just – be in a position to advance what so often seems impossible: a political movement that tells it how it uniquely is, but without exclusivity, without, in a world of rampant injustice, separating one struggle for equality and human dignity from all the rest.
3
TRANS AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT
The Back-story
In the mid-1890s, at the very beginnings of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud encountered a young girl up a mountain in the Hohe Tauern, one of the highest ranges of the eastern Alps. From her dress he decided she was not a servant girl, though she had served Freud dinner in the inn where he was staying; more likely, he surmises, the landlady’s daughter. Still, she is the only woman among five in his early work, Studies on Hysteria, endowed with no title – ‘Fräulein’, ‘Frau’ or ‘Miss’ – but simply named as ‘Katharina’ (though Freud cites himself addressing her as Fräulein twice during his account). Slowly but surely, he unravels a tale of sexual abuse by her father, corrected by Freud in a final footnote from the ‘uncle’ who had been referred to throughout: ‘The girl fell ill as the result of sexual attempts on the part of her own father’ (the German ‘den sexuellen Versuchungen’, meaning ‘sexual temptations’ but translated somewhat flatly by Strachey as ‘sexual attempts’, suggests seduction, but no less abuse).1 It is the shortest
, simplest case in the book, perhaps in all of his work. At the very least it seems fair to believe, as Freud himself observes, that he could only fully hear Katharina because, in terms of geography and class, he had got away from it all. One analyst working today has suggested Freud made a fatal error in coming down from the mountain, literally and metaphorically, where his thoughts, the encounter between ‘physician’ and ‘patient’, were so free-wheeling, fluent and clear.2
Mostly, however, analysts have tended to agree that it is only when Freud moves from this moment – the violation it narrates – into the more complex realm of unconscious fantasy that psychoanalysis proper will begin. And yet the tale of traumatic violence and its memory shadows the rest of Freud’s writing, and if anything widens its reach. It is at the heart of his final great work, Moses and Monotheism, as the founding trauma of a people, his own, who have buried the memory of the violence that constituted them as a people (by suggesting there were two men named Moses, the first one murdered by his own followers, Freud places an act of violence at the origins of the social tie).3 It is at the heart of the second topography, or scheme of the mind, where the concept of the death drive erupts from the traumatic entrails of the First World War.4 And it is, I suggest, no less present in Freud’s late account of female sexuality, which tracks the ruinous path into normality for the wild, active little girl, for whom all the options of the world were originally and gloriously open. She must subdue her nature in the service of the species, a path he describes in the 1931 paper on the topic as – his words – ‘damage’ or ‘catastrophe’. (The German Umsturz has the military connotation of a putsch or coup d’état to which her active drives fall ‘victim’: geschädigt).5 This makes ‘normality’ a distortion and/or sacrifice. As I say to my students, contrary to one influential critique, psychoanalysis never states: It is not true that you were abused, or: Whether you were abused does not matter. Rather that the ills of the human condition are generic: Even if you were not abused, it still matters.
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 13
