Questioning the trans trend

Part one of a two-part series

By Victoria A. Brownworth
PGN Contributor
© 2008 Victoria A. Brownworth and Philadelphia Gay News

I should have been born a man. Certainly my father wanted a son and treated me like one for most of my childhood.

Since I was a very young child, I thought of myself as male and ached for a magical gender change from the time I was a teenager until quite recently. I was called a tomboy; a girl with my feminine looks and mannerisms wasn’t truly boyish.

I cross-dressed off and on as a teenager and again in my 20s. Occasionally I passed for a boy, but only in the half-light of dim gay bars. My double X chromosomes were omnipresent, threatening the fiction I was trying to turn into reality. If my porcelain skin and full lips weren’t a dead giveaway, my voice always was.

I appeared in a documentary on transgender a few years ago. The interviewers grilled me on why I felt the way I did when I looked so different. Stereotypically female and demure in a skirt and high heels, I explained how my femaleness often felt like both a burden and a birth defect.

The feeling that I really should have been a man hasn’t diminished. It’s real, and I have no doubt I will feel it for the rest of my life, to one degree or another.

But my desire to have what men have, from penis to power, is muddled by intellect: How can I determine my true gender in a society where gender is so volatile and so unequal and violence against women and those who seem like women to straight culture — gay men — is rampant? I can’t.

After decades of questioning my own gender and the gender identifications of others, I still have taken different political stances toward gender over the years. The paradigmatic shifts shock even me, and yet for anyone who questions gender in the 21st century, there must be shifts because gender itself is not static. Or is it?

Gender dysphoria or Gender Identity Disorder — when individuals believe themselves to actually have been born into the wrong body — is both a psychological and political condition. You want to be the opposite gender and you believe on some level that you indeed are that opposite gender. You believe you should be able to act on that need/desire.

Transitioning — moving from one gender identity to another — takes different forms. Most transgender people begin with cross-dressing and advance to body modification. Some FTMs (female to male) and MTFs (male to female) transgender people only dress as the opposite gender. This is not transvestism, however, because the TG person believes him- or herself to be the opposite gender, which transvestites do not.

Other aspects of transition include hormone treatments (estrogen for MTFs, testosterone and steroids for FTMs), electrolysis for MTFs to remove unwanted hair, voice lessons for both and surgeries to modify the body — breast removal for FTMs, breast implants for MTFs and genital surgery for both. MTF surgeries are considered the most “viable,” as the penis is turned into a vagina and labia in a vaginaplasty. Phalloplasty — a constructed penis — is done for some FTMs, but many choose only hormone treatments to grow the clitoris to the size of a small penis and implants to turn the labia into a scrotum.

Both FTMs and MTFs require life-long hormone treatments to maintain these gender changes.

“I was always a girl, never a boy,” asserts Desiree Perez,* a 27-year-old MTF from the South Bronx who moved to Philadelphia nine years ago “to become the girl I always was meant to be.”

At 5-foot-7, Perez is on the short side for a man, on the taller side for a woman. A light-skinned Latina with delicate bone structure and dark auburn hair that falls just below her shoulders, Perez says she was sure from the time she was in kindergarten that she was not male like her three brothers.

“This is not something you can fake,” she says. “I mean you know what you feel like inside. I never wanted to play with anything but dolls, never wanted to wear anything but girly clothes. I loved to put on make-up and put my hair up like my mami from the time I was very small. I had an ugly, ugly childhood because of all of that.”

Perez began cross-dressing in high school and was regularly beaten by fellow classmates.

“They just couldn’t take who I was,” she explains. “They wanted to beat me into being a boy.”

It didn’t work. Perez finished high school and then fled to Philadelphia with a transgender friend.

“I had been taking [estrogen] since I was in high school and had some small breasts, but when I came to Philly I got hooked up with a surgeon who did my implants and had my butt reconstructed. I haven’t had the other surgery yet, because I can’t afford it, but I feel like I am as close to being the girl I was meant to be as I can get.”

Perez isn’t alone in not completing the surgeries. The costs for sex-reassignment surgery on the genitalia vary widely — as do the results — but begin at $50,000. More and more sex-reassignment surgeries are being done outside of the U.S. because the costs are lower — as low as $20,000 in Thailand or India for the entirety of the surgery — for implants, body reconstruction and genital surgery.

FTMs feel as strongly about their need to reassign as do MTFs, even though there are far fewer — about half as many — FTMs as there are MTFs.

“I always knew I was a man,” America’s most famous FTM, Thomas Beattie, told Oprah when he appeared on her show recently.

Beattie is a FTM legally married to a woman, Nancy. He recently gained fame by becoming pregnant with the couple’s child.

Beattie grew up in Hawaii and as a female was involved in beauty pageants. But as he described his experience, his need to “become” male was overwhelming. Beattie has taken hormones and steroids and had some body modification surgery (double mastectomy). He has a beard and his voice is deeper than the average female voice, but not as deep as most men’s voices. (View the video at Oprah.com.)

The majority of FTM people choose the body modification Beattie has chosen — mastectomy, steroid and hormone treatments to grow muscle and hair and minimize female characteristics like curviness. But a majority still stop short of the actual genital surgery, opting instead for hormonal restructuring of the clitoris in order to maintain sexual functioning and pleasure.

Oprah has always been a trendsetter, so it’s not surprising that she has done a series of shows on transgender in the past year, including one with children and their parents.

But as transgender comes out of the closet, the question some are asking is whether the trend toward more transgender is real, imagined or by-product of assimilationist politics.

The psychiatric community views GID as a mental disorder on both sides: If a person does not identify with the opposite gender yet acts as if they are that gender, they are disordered, and if they do identify with the opposite gender and want to modify their bodies to meet their mental image of themselves, that too is perceived as a disorder.

But what about the political element of the transgender question? Several notable transgender persons have written that they have regrets about choosing gender reassignment. Dr. Renee Richards, formerly Dr. Richard Raskind, was a noted eye doctor and tennis star who after reassignment surgery sued — and won — to play in the U.S. Open as a woman.

Richards had the surgery in 1976. In 2007, Richards, who has written two memoirs, said, “Better to be an intact man functioning with 100-percent capacity for everything than to be a transsexual woman who is an imperfect woman.”

Kate Bornstein stops short of stating public regret for her MTF sex-change surgery, but in her book “Gender Outlaw,” she does raise the question rather blatantly.

“In our Western civilization we bow down to the great god Science. No other type of gender holds as much sway as biological gender, which classifies a person through any combination of body type, chromosomes, hormones, genitals, reproductive organs or some other corporal or chemical essence. Belief in biological gender is in fact belief in the supremacy of the body in the determination of identity ... By calling something ‘sex,’ we grant it seniority over all other types of gender — by some right of biology.”

But Bornstein contradicts herself totally by having her own sex-change surgery. If gender is a state of being, what does body conformity have to do with it? What’s more, Bornstein has repeatedly lamented the physical liabilities of sex-reassignment surgery — the damage done by hormone treatments, for example.

Within the lesbian-feminist community, the questions about transgender have been raised for decades in the context of male privilege. MTFs have been banned from women-only spaces like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

The objections of feminists, however, run deeper than these minor skirmishes. Lesbian-feminist essayist Lagusta wrote in “Transgender Politics” that although transgender is considered cool and even trendy, it is anything but and reinforces gender roles instead of smashing them.

“It seems to me that many (but not all) women who want to become men, who feel and have always felt that they are men living in a female body, have institutionalized misogyny (hatred of women) to a horrifying extent,” Lagusta asserts. “There, I said it ... Sorry, but I don’t believe violence against women is OK — especially self-inflicted violence, which is undeniably what’s happening when women take huge doses of a drug and undergo surgery to rearrange their body parts.”

Lagusta continues, “I think that trans people and their allies are so alluring to most liberal, feministy people because they seem to be so inclusive, open and liberal. They seem to be only widening the circle of radical politics to include all different kinds of people, and what’s wrong with that?

“What’s wrong is that I think the transgender philosophy has the effect of reinscribing and upholding, rather than deconstructing and destroying, gender roles.”

Is the increase in gender change due to real gender dysphoria or is it a reaction to the very things Lagusta describes? Is it really about assimilation and self-hatred?

Perez noted how drawn she was to all things feminine and Beattie declared that he was drawn to women “as a man.” But how much of that gender identification is actually about not being able to live as a nellie queen or bull dyke in a society where such extremes of gender are not acceptable? As noted in the psychoanalytic descriptions of GID, it is just as aberrant to be a nellie queen or a bull dyke as it is to actually physically change genders. Because in the psychiatric model for GID, identifying with the opposite sex is somehow twisted, whether there’s sexual reassignment involved or not.

In a truly queer and gender-neutral society, gender should be fluid — making a place for men and women who don’t fall into identity-appropriate pigeonholes. The desire to be male or female — and our interpretation of what that signifies — is itself fluid, which leads back to Bornstein and Richards and the questions they pose.

How we view gender is constantly evolving. How we incorporate that perspective, however, is what makes the difference between a trend and biological destiny.