Relationship Seedlings

I have begun a wonderful correspondence in Facebook with an old graduate school buddy, whose invitation to be her friend came out of the blue to me. Rachel Peacock writes about how, as a lesbian, she felt pressured to be the go-to woman for all things queer, including teaching queer theory, retooling her research interests to cover queer issues, and generally embodying the concept of queer in her person and her job. She describes her metamorphosis from Rachel to “The Queer” as the old faculty retired and were gradually replaced by newer scholars. She also writes about the few times we met in the past, but never got beyond the cordial how-do-you-do’s, and laments why we didn’t talk more substantially.

I especially feel for her as she battles the sticky label of “The Queer” — in fact, it really frightens me, the possibility (eventuality?) of my becoming “The Tranny,” because it’s not an identity I aspire to, but rather just a nature I’m becoming. If we express our nature, it’s both invisible and pervasive because it’s not something we wear or put on airs about, but something that infuses our countenances and our speech and our gestures. You can see it if you look hard enough for it (like Whitman under your bootsoles), but it’s invisible in normal relations. I’m intellectually excited about the times to come, and I’ll help out around the university and the city when it comes to trans* issues, but I’d rather not be the token Trans*person. It’s as frightening as being the Black, or the Woman, or the Marxist — those categories box us in and the labels are so sticky as to be virtually indelible.

In reflecting on Rachel, I thought she didn’t like me when we were introduced. Contrary to her hypothesis that I held back because I might be discovered, I didn’t really ever worry about being discovered by lesbians or gays because I had learned over the years that just because you had Gaydar didn’t mean you had Transdar (see Ellen Andersen’s column about my announcement in Bilerico). But what I was afraid of, especially with Out gays and lesbians, is that I would feel squashed down into my little pre-defined category of straight, boring, white guy, when inside I knew I was a lot more than that. I envied their exuberance and ended up becoming exactly what frightened me most: the uber-closeted tranny, thus perpetuating the shell I disliked.

Rachel was much more closed, or perhaps subtle, and I doubt I felt these things about her. If I can recall, I suspect that I felt her judgment, intellectual, gender, and human — maybe that’s my fault for building her up as a person of exceptional quality, or maybe it’s just that people who are like her and me, naturally quiet and reserved, convey what other people perceive as judgment or confidence, when in reality, we’re just observing the world and listening to the non-stop inner monologue that narrates our lives. If Rachel feels that she missed out in chumming it up with me, I feel an equal loss.

I wonder how many potential relationships end up in the “non-actualized” pile because of mutual fear, hesitation, or reticence? It’s not really a rhetorical question, at least these days, because what I’ve discovered is that when you make an earth-shattering announcement about your very identity, the people who don’t run screaming (and they aren’t many, really) see it as an occasion to open up and share their stories. I have “met” a bunch of people I thought I already knew before, but actually only skimmed the surface, and I like it. I feel like I’m part of humanity, like I’m finally part of a larger conversation that I barely knew was happening. I’ve been standing outside a nice house, seeing through partially shuttered windows the party guests laughing and chatting and touching and whispering, not fathoming what they’re saying or doing, but knowing deep down that I have been excluded somehow.

The internet is a beautiful thing, a garden that allows these sorts of relationships to grow — maybe because we’re unburdened from our face-to-face sizing-each-other-up or our jealousy or our sexual attraction or our timidity. However these seedlings get started, I’m committed to nurturing them, and living the second half of my life tending them — there’s a lot of living to do and a lot of hiding to make up for, and if flying to meet Rachel or flying her down to Bedford Falls to spend some time is part of that process of relationship husbandry, I’m game.

 

Gender Spectrum as Culprit for Late Transitions

I’ve been trying to answer the question I’ve been asked by others and by myself a lot these past 3 months: “Why did you wait so long to do something about this?”

Looking from the vantage point of someone having jumped off the cliff, it’s easy to say, “If it was coming to this for 45 years, and if it was going to end up being this easy, then I’m baffled as to why I didn’t do something about it earlier.”

I’m still working this out, but I’d like to begin thinking of a couple of reasons. The first is what I fleshed out for my talk in Austin and which I presented to my graduate students in May, or the model of GID mapped through time, peaks and valleys slowly trending upwards towards greater and greater distress. That’s the inevitability model.

But the other concept is the gender spectrum, a staple of all modern socially-constructed theories of gender. The gender spectrum is what gives legitimacy to androgyny, drag queens, gender-queers, cross-dressers, and a whole host of people who don’t make the big jump from one sex/gender identity to the other one, not to mention non-gender-dysphoric people who are free to express their gender fluidly to suit the circumstances. If there were no spectrum, but only a rigid binary, then all these androgynes, cross-dressers, and drag queens would have to be defined as frustrated transsexuals or perhaps transsexuals in denial of their own destiny. Without the concept of the spectrum, with all points on the line being perfectly reasonable places for identity and expression to live (permanently or occasionally), sex and gender would have to be described in terms of a binary, or essentialist, model.

So I am a firm believer in the gender spectrum because of the oppression of a gender binary.

However, I think the spectrum may help explain why late-transitioning transsexuals are so late.

We don’t have a handy personalized chart of GID that determines the course of the affliction for everyone — my chart is only metaphorical, and each transgendered person would draw their chart differently. In other words, it may look nice as a model, but it is not deterministic, and shouldn’t be seen as such. Now that I’m transitioned, with 1.5 years of hormones in my body, my beard almost gone, my face lifted, and everyone told, it’s a horrible fallacy for me to look back and say that this was inevitable. The reality is that I got here through a life’s worth of experiences, had an early inkling of my gender-variant nature, had a few truly distressing periods, but could never have predicted or imagined my current life. In technology studies, naively thinking that bicycles, planes, or any other technologies inevitably would have evolved a) at all or b) in their current form is called technological determinism, and pastes the rosy lens of revisionist history on products and services that evolved in very complex ways. In gender, any effort to show the inevitability of transsexualism has the same theoretical faults.

What we have that’s reasonable is the spectrum, and for someone like me who may or may not change sex later in their life, the gender spectrum acts as a comforting, dampening agent that can absorb the shock of one’s distress. Feel like a girl? Well, dress up and take pictures of yourself. Or find a club. Or go to a friendly GLBTQ bar. Allow that feeling to pull your spot on the spectrum wherever it needs to go, perhaps let off the pressure, and then let the dot on the spectrum return to its old spot (or a different spot where you feel just fine). Every spot on the spectrum is OK, even if the younger trans*person feels guilty about some or all of those spots. And here’s my logical quandry: if every spot on this spectrum is OK, then where’s the urgency to make a radical change? What’s the impetus to stop viewing the world as a spectrum and begin viewing yourself as someone who only has binary choices? In other words, when does gender incrementalism give way to sexual binary so that a late-transitioning transsexual suddenly feels incredible distress?

I don’t know the answer to this question, but my thesis in this blog post is that the gender spectrum can help diffuse this distress for a long time, perhaps decades, and thus contributes to the “lateness” of late-transitioners. If there were theoretically, socially, and practically ONLY two genders, and parents, doctors, clergy, teachers, and others were highly invested in maintaining this binary, one might hypothesize that a gender-dysphoric youth would be swiftly taken to be “fixed” in the eyes of the state and the minds of society. Iran’s approach to gender-variant people might be a good example of this kind of behavior.

Note: A logical alternative that’s available to us, but which I don’t really think can be a good answer, is that transgenderism and transsexualism aren’t part of the same general thing. In other words, the condition that drives some people to eventually take hormones and change their bodies and minds to become someone of the opposite sex isn’t the same condition that drives people to play with gender. In fact, this line of argumentation is precisely what the “Harry Benjamin Syndrome” followers say — they argue that they suffer from a birth defect and that their need to change sex is simply medical and has absolutely no connection with Judith Butler, gender theory, G or L or B or Q issues, or anything else remotely socially-constructed. As I’ve written elsewhere in this blog, while I guess I understand their arguments, I think it’s sheer folly to try to cleanly separate sex and gender in the way that these sexual essentialists have tried to do. While sex and gender are distinct, only thought experiments manage to separate them cleanly — out in the real world, gender is what tells the world about your sex, and your sex generally drives your sense of gender. It is telling that for many, many transsexuals, their initial distress as a young person revolves around both sex and gender when they recognize that a) they are not built (sex) like those they relate to and b) they are held to different behavioral standards (gender) from those they relate to.

 

Trans People in Love

I have not seen this new book from Routledge, and at $95 new I think I’ll ask our library to buy a copy. Here’s the description:

Trans People in Love is a illuminating resource for members of the trans community and their partners and families; gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and intersex people; sexologists; sex therapists; counselors; psychologists; psychotherapists; social workers; psychiatrists; medical doctors; educators; students; and couples and family therapists.

Trans People in Love provides a forum for the experience of being in love and in relationships with significant others for members of the trans community. This honest and respectful volume tells clinicians, scholars, and trans people themselves of the beauty and complexity that trans identity brings to a romantic relationship, what skills and mindsets are needed to forge positive relationships, and demonstrates the reality that trans people in all stages of transition can create stable and loving relationships that are both physically and emotionally fulfilling.

I’m very interested in understanding how transsexualism specifically (and transgenderism, more generally) impacts relationships and makes it harder or easier to raise kids, have friends, and nurture relationships. I have tried to write about what it’s all like from my perspective, but I would love to collect your thoughts, dear readers and try to get a snapshot of the how one transsexual’s crisis (and hopefully, resolution) impacts their network of friends and family.

 

Narrative Erasures

A couple of nights ago, we were over at Milo and Anabelle’s house, where they were hosting a faculty couple who was in town to buy a house. Since the new couple didn’t know much about people in the department, the occasion was ripe for stories. At one point, Annabelle started to tell a story about the time that Milo and I flew to New Mexico, a story that went something like this:

I don’t know if you know, but Joyce is a pilot and she and Milo go flying on these “missions” all over the place. Well, one time, about three years ago they were flying to Alamogordo and Milo needed an air-sick bag. Joyce looked through his flight bag and rummaged around for a while and all he could come up with was a little water bottle. He also found his knife, so they cut the top off this bottle to improvise. I find that she’s quite resourceful — at least outside the department. (laugh)

At this point, Annabelle had a confused look on her face and asked, “when you tell a story about a woman who used to be a man, what pronouns do you use in the past? I’m feeling really weird about the way I was talking about you just now.”

We talked about how odd it is, from a narrative perspective, to have a character who is sometimes “he” and sometimes “she” in the story, and without a backstory, such an approach could be quite disruptive. (It could also provide the writer with playful and rich complexity, and these aspects has been fleshed out by Gayatri Spivak and others.)

On the other hand, changing the story so that the pronouns and characters are all consistent washes away the complexity of a real life. This concept is called erasure, and that’s the idea that during or after a transsexual transitions, s/he (and her friends, family, or colleagues) engage in a revision of history so that, in my case, Joyce flew that airplane, and she was always a woman, and there was never a man named George in that story. Call it a whitewash, if you will.

Erasure isn’t the same thing as “living in stealth,” as some transsexuals call creating a totally new life story with no trace of your transsexual past. Living under a condition of erasure, one may reveal that s/he is a transsexual and talk freely about it, but still revise all of their history. Living in stealth, one was never a transsexual, was always the sex s/he now appears to be, and has always had a history consistent with his/her current gender presentation. In other words, stealth always involves erasure, but erasure doesn’t necessarily imply stealth.

Near the end of her essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” (web or pdf), Sandy Stone cautions her readers on the harmful nature of erasure, harmful not only to individual transsexuals but also to the broader category of trans*people.

Why would tidying up your pronouns in stories be bad? What if it’s painful to remember the depression and crisis of gender that you fought so hard to correct? There’s no harm in that, is there? Well, yes, I think there *is* harm, but perhaps let’s call it “cost,” instead, and these costs are incurred by the individual and by society in general.

At the personal level, erasure makes it seem as if you haven’t had a rich, complex life, that you didn’t struggle with your identity for years, that you didn’t achieve good things in your career and family. If every version of me in my stories is Joyce, then what happened to George’s deeds, intellectual development, and personal quests?

What about those stories that only make sense with George, like the times Will or Wade hauled me to a topless dance joint to cheer me up (no cheer, I’m afraid, but they seemed to enjoy the visits)? Or the stories about being in situations that women with common sense would avoid, like walking around alone in Paris at 3:00 a.m., or sleeping under my car while driving to college on the west coast. I think those stories have a very different sense of adventure, danger, and meaning if the character is a female Joyce than if they’re a male George.

Or what about the rich and complex stories that detail George’s transformation into Joyce, beginning with early memories and adolescent experiments, and ending with real exploration of gender and sex? The only possible way of telling those stories is to not only acknowledge George’s existence, but to foreground it in the story. He’s the protagonist, after all, and the narrative tension of this type of gender story involves gender dysphoria. Erasure would prevent me from telling these stories.

At the social level, widespread erasure does two things. First, it robs transgendered people who are grappling with their identity of role models — examples of people who have gone through Gender Identity Disorder and survived. Young trans* people are especially vulnerable to feeling as if they’re the only one of their kind in the world, and that’s a very lonely position, let me tell you. Second, erasure makes it seem to society in general that transsexuality and transsexuals (or more generally, transgenderism and transgendered people) don’t exist. They must be something that Oprah’s producers dig up from time to time for ratings, or something radical gender activists write about to sell books, rather than a phenomenon that you can see in any city in the world.

In other words, the costs of erasure are invisibility and abnormality.

To be fair, we ought to balance costs with the benefits of erasure, and they are not to be trifled with. On a personal level, erasure helps create a consistent self, helps one avoid talking about very painful matters, and helps transsexuals avoid discrimination and danger. After all, not everyone is cool with transgender people, and if telling a story where you once were a “he” but now are a “she” is going to get you beaten up, then I’m all in favor of erasure. Socially, erasure prevents people from having to think about gender or sexual fluidity, which makes some people nervous. Ambiguity is frightening when morality is so black-and-white, and erasure helps lessen ambiguity. In other words, the benefits of erasure are fitting in, not making waves, and invisibility.

It’s telling that “invisibility” comes up as both a cost and a benefit of the policy of erasure, personal or social. Why? The positive side of invisibility is the camouflage that gives its wearers control over their environment and personal safety. On the negative side, invisibility constitutes a weak political position — when you’re invisible, you don’t count (literally, because when pollsters count demographics and healthcare researchers try to establish baseline data, invisible people aren’t counted). When you’re invisible and you aren’t counted, you don’t matter. And this invisibility, this not-mattering, is not necessarily related to bigotry or fear or bias (although invisible people are usually easy victims of that sort), but is a state imposed on the erased themselves.

Erasure is the process of making the visible invisible, actively and deliberately, as an artist would remove a defective part of a pencil drawing. The opposite of erasure is actively creating — drawing or sketching, to use our art metaphor — something that can be seen by others, bringing something that doesn’t exist into being on the page. This type of creativity doesn’t require anyone to march in the street or to sign petitions or to get in anyone’s face. However, this sort of identity creativity does require you to have an authentic history and to claim this odd history as your own. More broadly, mass identity creativity requires society to recognize trans* as a legitimate category of human-hood — whether it’s a good category or a bad category depends on our deeds and our participation in society, but “good-and-bad” is a different kind of question than “existence-and-nonexistence.”

Whether it’s better to be visible or invisible, drawn or erased, depends on whether you think it’s worth following a more complex path than you’d like in exchange for providing young transsexuals with role models and society with a viable category of citizen, or whether you think personal safety and narrative consistency achieved through erasure are worth not being counted and not mattering for young transsexuals and the broader society.

The strategy is not as clear as you might think. Everyone must choose the path that’s right for them, and that path is always more complicated than theory would suggest. What is important to remember is that the act of changing yourself doesn’t necessarily have to lead to erasure. The question of whether to erase or not is a completely separate question from the agonizing question of whether to change or not, and a transitioning transsexual shouldn’t combine the two.

Change is difficult, frightening, and generally weird for transitioners and their friends and family, and while these changes may ultimately give rise to a process of erasure, they may also give rise to a creative process of drawing a fully-developed and complex character for family, friends, and society to count, understand, and appreciate.