IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, I went out for basketball and tried to act like a boy … it was a disaster. … I’ve been a woman for three years now, and life is unbelievably satisfying.
—transsexual female
I had this fantasy of being male as far back as I can remember. … The surgery was a miracle. … My new girlfriend depends on me to be the strong one.
—transsexual male
Ever since a tennis-playing ophthalmologist named Richard Raskind had genital surgery, hormone therapy, a change of wardrobe, and became a tennis-playing ophthalmologist named Renee Richards, transsexualism has been a fact in the public consciousness.
Unlike Christine Jorgensen, who made the same transsexual journey and wrote a book about it in the 1950s, Renee Richards arrived in the midst of a national wave of feminist activity that is challenging both the justice and the biological basis of sex roles. Unlike Jorgensen, therefore, Richards was and is treated not only as a bizarre exception, an individual choice, but also as an example of sex-role change (and thus a frightening instance of what feminism could lead to), or as a living proof that feminism isn’t necessary. After all, if a man wants so badly to be a woman, why can’t biological females be happy with what we’ve got?
Most of all, Richards was greeted with publicity, and an amazing amount of acceptance. Though I’m sure she herself suffered from ridicule and public attention, the champions of this transsexual woman were surprising in number and identity. Tennis professionals and sports journalists who had fought tooth and nail against equality for women in tennis, and especially against equal prize money, now agitated for Richards’s right to play in women’s tournaments. They challenged women players who objected as being anti-civil libertarian, poor sports, or cowards who feared they would lose. The New York Times, where women who specifically request the use of “Ms.” are still denied it, cheerfully changed not only the name of Renee Richards (as well as those of other transsexuals) but also the gender of every single pronoun in news stories about him. Television and other parts of the media produced a commercial boomlet of articles on transsexualism, even though the first young men who challenged the traditional masculine role by refusing to fight in Vietnam had waited months, sometimes years, for equally sympathetic or explanatory coverage. Finally, every activist woman on any talk show seemed to be challenged with questions about Renee Richards.
It was this enormous publicity that first made me suspicious. At a minimum, it was a diversion from the widespread problems of sexual inequality. After all, the estimated ten thousand Americans who view themselves as members of the opposite sex, plus the approximately three thousand who have undergone transsexual surgery, hardly balance the millions of women who work at home for no pay, outside the home for unequal pay, subsist on welfare, and struggle to support their own children. When I got the inevitable Renee Richards questions, therefore, I simply defended her right to change her own body if she wished, but pointed out that she was an exception that had little to do with the plight of most women.
The more I listened to the questions, however, the more I realized something else was going on. For one thing, only male-to-female transsexuals were famous. Though biological women had undergone drastic surgery and hormone changes to become men, and had made that change public, their names were not household words. Jorgensen and Richards had been publicized worldwide, as had James Humphrey Morris, a writer and former British Army officer who became Jan Morris, the best-known example of transsexualism in Britain. For another thing, the questions about tennis had a certain glee in them, as if Richards had changed identity only to prove that any man, even a former one, could beat any woman.
When I probed further, I discovered that male-to-female transsexuals were not only used as a handy testimony to the desirability of the traditional female role, but they were also the only sort of sex change many interviewers could accept or imagine. For a man to give up his superior role and become a woman was easy—frightening, but no challenge. For a woman to rise out of her inferiority and achieve manhood was unthinkable, impossible—just too big a job. Men were not about to accept a former female as an equal, but they expected women to accept and even be honored by a former man.
Women tennis players, however, made very different arguments. Was it fair for women to face someone trained physically and culturally for forty years as a man? Like blacks who questioned the fairness of Black Like Me, a book by a white man who chemically and briefly darkened his skin, women pointed out that a lifelong experience can’t be duplicated by decree. Why should the hard-won seriousness of women’s tennis be turned into a sensational circus by one transsexual? And finally, as one woman tennis professional explained, “If they don’t let her play as a woman, they might have to let her play as a man. Then a woman—even a phony one—might beat men.”
But the most eye-opening evidence came from the heartrending testimony of transsexuals themselves. As I began to read the medical and journalistic literature, and to do interviews, one theme emerged. No matter how different their backgrounds or personalities, and regardless of whether their voyage was male-to-female or vice versa, transsexuals cited the deep conviction that their true personalities had been denied or restricted by the sex role assigned to them at birth. “I thought like a man,” said one biological woman. “I felt like a woman,” said a biological man. In a landmark doctoral thesis by Jan Raymond, a specialist in medical ethics at Boston College who analyzed in-depth interviews with transsexuals, those themes were repeated over and over again. Their most common expression was the sensation of having a female brain in a male body, or vice versa. But, as Raymond pointed out, “A female mind in a male body only makes sense as a concept in a society that accepts the reality of both.”
In other words, transsexuals are paying an extreme tribute to the power of sex roles. In order to set their real human personalities free, they surgically mutilate their own bodies: anything to win from this biased society—where minor differences of hormones and genitals are supposed to dictate total lives and personalities—the right to be who they individually are as human beings.
Raymond understands the crushing societal forces that make transsexuals choose this self-punishment, but she mourns the loss of individuals who might have acted as critics and rebels in this sexually stereotyped society. Instead of accepting the idea of “a female mind in a male body” by mutilating their physical selves, they might have challenged the very idea that there is such a thing as a female or male mind. They might have demonstrated that sex is only one of many elements that makes up each unique individual.
For that reason, she is also critical of the medical establishment that has grown up around the demand (and the big payments) for transsexual surgery, plus long-term hormonal treatments. Instead of serving more lifesaving but often less lucrative needs for their surgical and hormone-therapy skills, some physicians are aiding individuals who are desperately trying to conform to an unjust society. It’s a small group of successful physicians she names “the transsexual empire.”1
Of course, not all sexual surgery or hormone therapy is put to such use. Babies born with ambiguous genitalia are rescued by the same techniques, so their external selves conform to their internal chromosomal structure or reproductive capacities. So are some adults who could not otherwise perform the only physical functions dictated by sex—impregnation for males, gestation for females.
In a way, transsexuals themselves are also making a positive contribution by proving that chromosomes aren’t everything. By ignoring this internal structure they cannot change, and focusing on external body appearances and socialization, they are demonstrating that both biological women and men may have within them the qualities of the opposite gender and thus the full range of human possibilities. Unfortunately, this point isn’t made in the popular press. On the contrary, transsexualism is used mostly as a testimony to the importance of sex roles as dictated by a society obsessed with body image, genitals, and “masculine” or “feminine” behavior.
But the main question is whether some individuals are being forced into self-mutilation by the biases around them, and whether their self-mutilation is then used and publicized to prove that those biases are true.
Feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and the uses of transsexualism. Even while we protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision, and to be identified as he or she wishes, we have to make clear that this is not a long-term feminist goal. The point is to transform society so that a female can “go out for basketball” and a male doesn’t have to be “the strong one.” Better to turn anger outward toward changing the world than inward toward mutilating our bodies into conformity.
In the meantime, we shouldn’t be surprised at the amount of publicity and commercial exploitation conferred on a handful of transsexuals. Sex-role traditionalists know a political tribute when they see one.
But the question remains: If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
—1977
1. Jan Raymond, The Transsexual Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).