The subject of transgenderism has only recently been discussed in the mainstream media. Even people in the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities do not fully understand the complexities of transgender experience. Transgender is a large category, and it is necessary to be cautious with generalizations. The term “transgender” is often used to refer to people who consciously resist the conventional associations among an inner sense of gender (gender identity), the public expression of gender (gender roles or appearances), and the gender assigned at birth (biological sex). One feature shared by many, if not all, transgender people is the experience of incongruence between their gender identity and biological sex.
Contrary to the myth, some, but not all, transgender people undergo sex-reassignment surgery. This is a medical procedure that alters a person’s secondary and sometimes primary sexual characteristics—breasts, ability to grow facial hair, genitals—to help produce a match between gender identity and the outer appearance of gender. Changing gender appearance to conform to the desired gender is not just about what other people see. It is as much about affirming an inner sense of self. But sex-reassignment surgery is only one of many options open to transpeople today.
Many nontransgender people cannot imagine the experience of being in the “wrong” body, let alone continuing to live, and live happily, with a serious disconnect between gender identity and biological sex. They assume that all transgender people want to transition to the “opposite sex” and will necessarily, and gladly, undergo sex-reassignment surgery to achieve this goal. This misguided belief is due, in part, to the increasing visibility of transgender people. The more transgender issues are discussed, the more questions and opinions nontransgender people will have. But it is also due to the fact that advances in medical technologies have, in the past decades, facilitated changing physical sex characteristics. To nontransgender people, the surgery may seem extreme, but the desired goal is not. For them, the correspondence between inside and outside reaffirms the widely accepted idea that there are two, and only two, genders. But what about those many people, both transgender and nontransgender, for whom this model of two and only two does not fit?
Questioning your gender and even changing how you express your gender are very common occurrences. We all present—or “perform”—our gender in very different ways. Most of these expressions may fall, to varying degrees, within the traditional standard of a female and male gender system. However, some people’s gender identity and presentation do not fit easily within these traditional roles. Some people resist prescribed gender roles simply because they do not fit into them. Others may resist these roles because they do not believe they are useful or even healthy.
In today’s culture, transgender people have come to be defined only by their gender variance, which is often pathologized as deviance. As a result, they are seen as extreme in their gender presentation. But there is nothing stable, definite, or normal about anyone’s gender.
Rather than referring to nontransgender people as normatively gendered, or just men and women, some people now use the word “cisgender” to refer to individuals whose inner gender identity, outer gender expression, and assigned gender at birth overlap and do so in ways that feel seamless and natural (cis is from the Latin for “on this side”). Cisgender is sometimes inaccurately used to describe anyone who is not trans-identified. Many nontransgender people also feel that there is a gap between their inner gender identity and how they present themselves and are received by others.
In other words, even nontransgender people have to work at “being” a woman or “being” a man. Think of all of the magazines that illustrate how to be the perfect woman or man: Vogue, Men’s Health, Today’s Bride, GQ. Can anyone live up to these ideals? Our culture’s fascination with transgender people and their changing bodies might even represent a covert recognition of how much work it takes for anyone to be a woman or a man. Transgender people show everyone else the tremendous effort, and possibly the pleasure, of having or becoming any gender at all.
Just as there are many ways to be a woman or a man, there are many ways to be transgender. These have come about in conjunction with, and been enabled by, the many ways all people manipulate and perform their gender. All of these changes are functions of historical developments, advancing technologies, and generational differences. Feminist challenges to gender-role stereotypes are certainly part of the backstory as well, despite the ambivalence and outright hostility some feminists have expressed to transgender people, especially to male-to-female transsexuals.1
To look at the many ways transgender people live their lives today, we need to examine how transgender people lived in the past. This includes examining the language that they have used to describe their lives and how ideas about gender have changed over time. The phenomenon of transgenderism has long roots in history and in a wide variety of cultures, even though the terms we may use today have come into common usage only in the past century and continue to evolve.
In Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Ru-Paul, Leslie Feinberg charts a long, complex, sometimes hidden, but often very public, history of people who boldly challenged the gender norms of their time. Joan of Arc famously donned soldiers’ clothes to lead French troops against the British in the early fifteenth century. She was placed on trial for heresy, and some of the charges against her included the sin (as it was then defined in Roman Catholic canon law) of cross-dressing. She was convicted and burned at the stake. Christian Davies was born a woman and cross-dressed and fought in the 2nd North British Dragoons in the early eighteenth century. In the late eighteenth century, Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont, usually called the Chevalier d’Éon, was a soldier and a spy for the French, who dressed as both a woman and a man and famously kept most of Europe guessing about his anatomical sex for his entire life. (It is from his name that we derive the word “eonism,” an early medical term diagnosing male-to-female cross-dressing.) We also know that many women cross-dressed as soldiers during the American Civil War. There has also been a vibrant history of “passing women”—that is, women who passed as men—throughout European and American history, and outside of soldiering. Mary Fields, often called Stagecoach Mary, was born a woman and a slave. In 1895, at the age of 60, she was hired as a man by the US postal service because of her speed in harnessing horses and driving a stagecoach.
In the 1930s, when medical technology made it possible to perform sex-reassignment surgery, some women and men began to physically change their sex. In the late 1940s, Laura Maud Dillon underwent surgery and became Lawrence Michael Dillon. In 1951, Robert Cowell, a British World War II fighter pilot, underwent surgery and became Roberta Cowell. These cases received some public attention; Cowell wrote a book about her life in 1954. But in 1952 the world became acutely aware of the medical possibilities of what was now being termed transsexualism when former US Army member George Jorgensen underwent surgery and became the glamorous Christine Jorgensen. Within weeks, Jorgensen became the most famous transsexual in the world and an object of enormous media interest and speculation. The idea of a “sex change” operation fascinated the world—and not only because it opened new possibilities of how we could understand gender and sex.
After World War II, there was an enormous interest in the possibilities of science, which could now not only send rockets into space, and ultimately put a man on the moon, but build the hugely destructive atomic bomb and change a person’s sex. In the popular imagination, the terrifying atomic bomb was closely connected to gender and sexuality. Marilyn Monroe and other platinum-haired female Hollywood stars were called “blonde bombshells.” Even the new two-piece bathing suit for women was called the bikini, after Bikini Atoll, where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1946. During this period, language used to describe gender-variant people also changed. Those who dressed in the clothing of the “opposite sex” were often called cross-dressers or transvestites (trans is from the Latin for “across,” and vestite means “to dress”). The new surgery gave us the word “transsexual.”
Over the decades, wide-ranging cultural changes—from the traditional roles women and men were able to play in society to changing social mores about appropriate dress and grooming—made a radical impact on American ideas about gender. For example, by the mid-1970s pantsuits on women were perfectly acceptable, and men could wear their hair long and don colorful clothing and jewelry. Things were changing for transgender people as well. Advances in hormone treatments in the 1970s allowed people to take on some secondary sex characteristics of another sex, such as growing facial hair, changing their voice, and sculpting musculature and body shape. Transpeople were now able to take on the physical appearance of another sex without having a full sex-reassignment surgery.
By the 1990s, there was a new tolerance, although still a great amount of fear and discrimination, regarding the various ways people enacted gender. Today, terms such as transsexual and even transvestite are used less and less. (The one exception is the use of transvestite, or cross-dresser, to describe women and men who do this as professional entertainers.) The experience of being transgender is also very different today from what it was two decades ago, and certainly from before that. Many more people now identify as transgender and for a wider range of reasons. Sometimes, rather than changing their bodies through surgery or hormones, this may mean changing a gender identification from male or female to the other sex, and using sex-appropriate pronouns to reinforce that identity. Still, many transpeople are acutely aware of the limits of a binary gender system and do not feel comfortable conforming to traditional gender norms.
There are also people who actively protest gender norms. They may go out of their way to flaunt conventions, perhaps wearing outrageous drag (often called gender-fuck) to call attention to the absurdity of gender conformity. People in these groups may claim a gender-queer identity—that is, their gender is “queer” and does not fit into easily defined categories—but not identify as transgender. Like many transgender people, they see gender as a fluid spectrum. As trans activist Kate Bornstein has stated, “The opposite sex is neither.” Many nontransgender people would agree with this too.
However people identify as transgender, they are confronted with decisions that non– trans-identified people never have to face. While it is often difficult for lesbian, gay, or bisexual people to come out, it is far more complicated for transgender people to explain their identities to friends and family. They frequently must deal with responses based in ignorance, confusion, or overt, even dangerous, hostility. Often they are asked very personal questions about their bodies or their sexual desires and activities. While there is a substantial body of popular and professional literature to help LGB people come out, there is very little available to transpeople.
Once people decide they are trans, no matter whom they tell, they must grapple with the question of how out they want to be. Do they want to pass as their actual—that is, experienced—gender, or remain “hidden” or cloaked in the sex they were assigned at birth? If they choose the first, they have to worry about how they appear to others through their clothing, personal demeanor, and emotional affect. If they choose the second—often for reasons of physical safety; visibly transpeople face an incredibly high risk of violence (see myth 15, “Transgender People Are Gay”)—how difficult or healthy will it be to live splitting their core gender identity from their outward physical appearance? These decisions are both helped and made more difficult by ever-changing gender roles for nontranspeople. How do you change your gender in a world in which all gender roles are not as stable as they were in the past? Transpeople understand their gender psychologically, emotionally, and through their bodies. In this way, living as a transperson is a very complex embodied experience that most nontranspeople do not understand.
It is not surprising that in the past decade we have seen younger and younger people coming out as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, as well as transgender. This is due, to a large degree, to our society being more open to many more modes of gender identity and expression than ever before. On August 8, 2012, the New York Times Magazine published a long feature piece, “What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?,” about young boys who expressed various forms of gender difference. (The author asserted, without argument, that it is much easier to be a gender-transgressive little girl.) The article openly and sympathetically described the problems faced by these boys and their families. It also painted an honest and nonjudgmental portrait of the boys and their wide range of experiences, noting how difficult it was to make sweeping social, medical, or cultural conclusions about their lives. Some boys eventually lost interest in “dressing up” as girls, and some did not. The article made clear that gender-variant behavior and identity were far less frightening to parents, and other adults, than they may have been a decade ago. The article also made clear that understanding, not panic or fear, was the most useful response to boys who expressed a desire to dress in girls’ clothes, wear pink, and partake in traditionally female play. As one mother wrote on her blog, “It might make your world more tidy to have two neat and separate gender possibilities, but when you squish out the space between, you do not accurately represent lived reality. More than that, you’re trying to ‘squish out’ my kid.” This is an amazing cultural shift.
This shift is reflected in the scientific community, as well. The American Psychiatric Association has replaced the diagnosis gender identity disorder (with which some of the boys in the article had been diagnosed) with gender dysphoria to remove the stigma of disorder (see myth 6, “Transgender People Are Mentally Ill”). This is yet another sign that we as a culture are moving to a deeper understanding of the complexity of gender as it is lived and getting past the pathologization of transgender people.
So many factors beyond the medical arena influence transpeople’s lives. For instance, because transgender experience and identity are shaped both by a longer history of transgenderism and by the particular cultural moment, generational divides between younger and older transpeople may be significant. Two decades ago, many of the boys profiled in the New York Times Magazine article would have been labeled as homosexual or psychologically disturbed—or possibly both—by the medical profession and even by their parents. There were no references to transgender children in medical literature before the mid-1990s; they were referred to as effeminate boys or masculine girls. But will preteens and teens who do not identify with their assigned gender see themselves as members of a transgender community? And if so, how? Who defines this community?
There will necessarily be countless divisions in this community because being trans can be defined in so many ways, and by so many people. For instance, if a person who identifies as a woman (after being assigned a male sex at birth) simply states that she is female and not trans, is she part of a self-identified trans community? If a person who easily passes as a man (after being assigned a female sex at birth) decides to “go stealth,” is this person part of the trans community? Who gets to decide how transpeople look and act? Many older transpeople have voiced opposition to younger transpeople taking hormones, because they fear a public-opinion backlash against medical tampering with children’s gender identity.2 We do not know how younger transpeople coming out now may think about the lives and decisions made by the generations of transpeople who preceded them. We also don’t know what tomorrow’s generation of transpeople and genderqueers will think of today’s gender rebels.
It is probably most useful to think of all gender as not only fluid but also on a broad spectrum of experience and appearance. Some transgender people are on the extreme end of that spectrum, others are more toward the middle. The decision to undergo sex-reassignment surgery is influenced by where you understand yourself to be on this spectrum. But for all people, the very idea of transgender allows for the attainment of a comfortable balance between your internal gender identity and how your body looks on the outside.