We all maintain a balance between public and private. Some aspects of our lives we freely share with others, while other facets we keep confidential, retain as personal, and hold close to ourselves.
What we have underneath our clothes usually falls into the second category.
And yet when talking to someone trans or gender nonconforming, many people seem intent on peeking up our skirts, inside our shirts, or down our pants. From the day we come out, we are assaulted by never-ending questions about our bodies:
“Are you having surgery?”
“When are you having surgery?”
“What was surgery like?”
“Do/does your new (chest/breasts/vagina/penis) look real?”
“Were you disgusted by your (chest/breasts/vagina/penis) before?” “Can you actually have sex?”
“Can your sexual partners tell you’re trans?”
“Can you orgasm???”
And countless others. Of course, the idea of posing similar questions to a random cisgender individual on an everyday city or rural street corner is an absurd thought. In short, this is an area where double standards clearly apply.
There has always been a fascination with trans bodies.
Curiosity abounds. Gender is a fundamental way we categorize individuals, and when we encounter individuals who do not easily fit within the gender they were assigned at birth, there is a natural inquisitiveness, a desire to comprehend, and an intuitive need to talk. We may simultaneously shove the peculiar thing away, since “it” is other than “us,” odd and dissimilar. Perverse. Frightening. Often unacceptable. The unusual can make us uncomfortable.
Trans people defy the typical “penis=male” and “vagina=female” associations of identity with genitals, and so those not in the trans community frequently feel compelled to ask personal questions, often without recognizing the impact their questions may have on the person being asked. Where they insist on probing are the very places we are most sensitive.
Through writing and media interviews, there are those trans and gender nonconforming people who happily spread ourselves bare for all to see. Such individuals believe that by divulging personal information we provide accurate education from a first-hand source. Doing so can be an act of claiming power over one’s narrative, and proactively influencing what is said about us individually and as a group. This way, nontrans people get the real story, not one manufactured and spun for public consumption by others who may have political agendas.
In the groundbreaking 1996 book Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits, Loren Cameron and several of his transmasculine peers published explicit photography and writing about their transitions. Neophalluses, reconstructed chests, befores-and-afters . . . all were exposed in finely grained, black-and-white 8x10 glossies. Some images had accompanying text in which the genitals’ owners described their joyful and anguished relationships with their bodies. For many people this would be mortifying, but for the book’s participants, this was clearly liberating.
Western culture has a long history of objectifying and putting on display those it sees as different. For example, Saartjie Baartman, a woman born a slave in South Africa circa 1789 and sold to a circus showman, was exhibited throughout England and France as a carnival sideshow “exhibit,” undressed or in a skintight bodysuit, for the captivation of the masses. She was different; she was a large woman and it is said she had a particularly significant bottom, breasts, and labia along with ebony skin still uncommonly seen in Europe. Taken together, these features only accentuated that she was utterly unlike the “dignified” Caucasian women of Europe. She was compared occasionally to an orangutan rather than to a woman. Baartman became known as the “Hottentot Venus,” and she, or more accurately certain parts of her, were the exhibit.
A century and a half later, transgender people’s naked bodies were being scrutinized in similar ways. Christine Jorgensen, one of the first publicly known trans women in the United States, had served in the US Army during World War II and was greeted upon her return from surgery in Denmark in 1952 with great fanfare. She was an instant celebrity the moment her fashionable pumps hit the tarmac, but she simultaneously became someone obsessively scrutinized. Were her shoes too big? Was her chest hairy? Could she actually have sex? Who would she have sex with?
This curiosity persists today, and is often forced upon us. Trans people are the current peep show on display to the masses, and usually it is our genitals that are the starring acts.
That said, some transgender and gender-nonconforming people recognize that disclosure is a choice; we have the authority to say “yes” or “no” or “I’d rather not answer” or “fuck off.”
Some of us have been willing to exercise this right, rejecting the demands of others to enter our private lives. Christine Jorgensen herself stormed off a 1968 television interview with talk-show host Dick Cavett after being asked about her sex life.
And more recently, in 2014, on Katie Couric’s daytime talk show, actress Laverne Cox and model Carmen Carrera repeatedly deflected questions about their bodies, Carrera saying, “I don’t want to talk about it; it’s really personal.” At one point, Cox finally shut down the line of questioning for good, responding that there were far more critical topics to discuss:
I do feel there is a preoccupation with [genitals]. The preoccupation with transition and surgery objectifies trans people. And then we don’t get to really deal with the real lived experiences. The reality of trans people’s lives is that so often we are targets of violence. We experience discrimination disproportionately to the rest of the community. Our unemployment rate is twice the national average; if you are a trans person of color, that rate is four times the national average. The homicide rate is highest among trans women. . . . By focusing on bodies, we don’t focus on the lived realities of that oppression and that discrimination.
Invasive questions about transgender bodies imply that we can be classified according to what we have under our clothes. Being asked about topics generally off limits in polite conversation insinuates that we no longer have the right to privacy, that intimate details about our lives are open for discussion, even without our consent.
Asking about medical procedures before, during, or after an individual has transitioned would never be permissible in other areas of society. Genitals, and the decisions trans and gender-nonconforming people make about them, are intensely personal. Genitals can be markers of trauma, pleasure, shame, embarrassment, delight, pride, anger, dysphoria, and other complex emotions that may or may not relate to someone’s sense of identity.
Who we are is not reflected by what’s between our legs. Surgery and other body modifications are one aspect of the trans “experience”—something people may or may not choose to undergo—but either way, decisions about surgery are intensely private and personal.