TRANSWORLD

Once upon a time, I had no interest in “gender issues.” In my retro, Edenic worldview, I was content to divvy up human beings—at least, human bodies—into two neat categories. I knew not everyone fit the categories and felt vaguely sorry for their affliction. I had no particular curiosity to know more. When I was forced to accept the presence of transsexuality in my life, I felt that understanding it with my head wasn’t really going to help with what was happening in my gut. Actually, I was right about that. It didn’t help. After a while, I realized I’d better understand it as well as I could anyway. Raising three children who didn’t have the luxury of avoiding this terrain demanded it.

The literature on transsexuality is limited and contradictory and often seems to reflect the biases of those turning it out more than any sort of data. I had to overcome a considerable reluctance to delve into it. Which is a nice way of saying that once I was forced to think about Tracy in these terms, any reference to men in skirts made me feel faint. As faint as Tracey said he felt when not wearing them. To this day, a Scot in a kilt makes me a teensy bit queasy.

When I did take a look at the material on transsexuality, I brought three basic questions to my inquiry: What did it mean that Tracey felt he was the wrong gender? What had caused this mind-body disconnect? And, oh yeah—What exactly is gender?

Transgender is an umbrella term used to cover an array of gender stances. These genderful days, there are almost as many designations as there are transpeople. “If someone calls himself a tranny boy,” commented G, a transgendered activist I spoke with, “first of all what the heck does that mean? If two people use the term, it probably means two different things.” To name just three transgender subcategories: There are cross-dressers, formerly known as transvestites, people who don’t want to change their bodies but who dress up as the gender they aren’t for a miscellany of reasons from political shock value to sexual stimulation. There are gender-queer people who don’t feel they fit solidly into either the male or the female half of the great divide. And there are transsexuals, people such as Tracey who feel they were born in the wrong body. A transsexual identifies as the gender that doesn’t match his or her body—sexuality is an independent issue. That’s something a lot of people have trouble grasping. When friends heard that Tracey had proudly announced to my children that he was a lesbian, there was a lot of laughter and eye rolling. Some people reacted with a kind of outraged bewilderment. As one person expressed this (heterosexist!) view, “Why does he want to be a woman unless it’s to be with a man?”

No one knows what causes someone to develop a sense of him- or herself as male or female in contrast with the evidence of anatomy. My sense that Tracey’s rejection of manhood grew out of his deep psychological scars wasn’t unique. Gender identity disorders are still classified as psychological conditions, and the endocrinologists and surgeons offering hormones or genital reconstruction to transsexuals generally require their patients to be approved for treatment by therapists. But now gaining traction is the thought that transsexuality is more likely rooted in the body than in the mind. It seems that the prenatal process of gender formation is complex and highly vulnerable to mishap. According to one theory, gender disorders are the result of hormone imbalances during fetal development.

In The Tell-Tale Brain (Norton, 2011), neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran suggests the brain is imprinted with a map, or image, of the body. When something happens to damage this map—something like a stroke—patients may experience an intense aversion to an arm or leg, to the point where they might wish to have it amputated. Tracey viewed body parts as ripe for amputation, too. Ramachandran speculates that for a transsexual, anatomy and body image go separate ways in the womb.

There are more and more transsexuals. I for one see them everywhere. I see transwomen behind the wheels of oncoming cars, particularly in the rain. I see them every time an apparently female person is the least bit taller than average. Worse, I see Tracey. Like a trans Forrest Gump, his peculiar feminized visage has been known to appear on anyone in clothes vaguely similar to his, even to turn up under Jacqueline Kennedy’s pillbox hat in black-and-white photos, beneath towers of dusted curls in eighteenth-century museum portraits.

Okay. Seriously. More and more people are coming out as transgendered. It’s important to distinguish between visibility and incidence. As activists like to point out, transgendered people have been recognized in diverse cultures throughout history and have sometimes been accepted and accorded special roles within communities. In the West today, there is obviously a much more accepting climate for coming out than at any time in the past. That’s enough to explain an increase in people seeking services for gender transformation. But it doesn’t appear to be the whole story. Gender lines are being muddied in the animal world as well as in the human. Presumably transgendered fish weren’t staying in the closet until the political waters warmed.

From California to Washington, D.C., male fish are turning up with high levels of estrogen and female ovarian tissue in their testes. In 2004, The Washington Post reported that in the south branch of the Potomac River, 42 percent of male bass were producing eggs. While noting that the cause is unknown, the article pointed to speculation about pollutants in the water, most likely hormonal waste from humans or poultry. Environmental groups are also raising the alarm about estrogen, particularly synthetic estrogen from sources like birth control pills, hormone replacement therapies, and pesticides. Storm water, agricultural runoff, and flushing toilets all send these chemicals into streams and rivers, where they alter the environment in which fish develop and reproduce. And fish aren’t the only creatures operating in a chemically compromised world. Similar stories are surfacing about frogs and other species. Tracey told me that he had made friends online with a transsexual who lived in a small, remote Canadian town in which the incidence of gender identity disorder was well beyond the norm. Transgendered folks weren’t coming out in unusual numbers there because the town was so darn trans-friendly.

Tracey certainly believes that his female identity is a physiological fact. He describes himself as having an illness. As being sick. Very sick, sick unto death if he did not alter his appearance to match his internal sense of himself. He maintains that he has a birth defect, a female brain in the body of a male. He means this literally, subscribing to the opinion that there are male and female brains, and transsexuals possess the wrong kind. For most of human history, there was little dispute that men and women were as different above the neck as below it. Women supposedly lacked men’s mental as well as physical strength, so it followed that they would be excluded from so much worldly endeavor. Then for a time the two-brain notion was largely left behind. Remember the uproar when Harvard president Lawrence Summers suggested that women were innately less equipped to excel in math and science? But curiouser and curiouser: The new acceptance of transsexuality entails a return to the old belief in his and her brains. How else to understand the kind of violent self-loathing Tracey expressed for his physical being? His own explanation was mind-body mismatch. Since the mind couldn’t be altered, the body had to be.

What caused Tracey’s birth defect, if birth defect it is? Early on, I suggested to Tracey that there might be a link between the DES his mother took while pregnant with him and his gender identity. He didn’t discount the possibility. He simply didn’t know. DES, diethylstilbestrol, is a synthetic estrogen that was given to women from 1938 to 1971 in the mistaken belief that it would prevent miscarriages. Doctors stopped prescribing it when it was linked to a rare form of vaginal cancer in the daughters of women who had taken it. DES daughters have an increased risk of vaginal, cervical, and breast cancers as well as infertility. Much less is known about its effect on sons. At the time I proposed the idea to Tracey, I was shooting in the dark. Later, searching for information about gender identity disorders on the Web, I was startled to come across a site linking DES exposure to transgender issues in men. Later still, I read a book titled The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights (Anchor Books, 2006) by Deborah Rudacille, a science writer, who reported that the best evidence that transsexuality has a biological cause comes from DES research. Men whose mothers took DES while pregnant with them describe themselves as transsexuals in numbers way beyond the general population.

Not all transgendered people identify with the illness or birth defect model that resonates for Tracey. But if DES or some other environmental pollutant damaged what would otherwise have been a typical development of male identity, then describing the result as a birth defect is not so far off target. Being transgendered isn’t like other medical conditions, though. Transgendered people wouldn’t necessarily want a cure if one existed.

Early in Tracey’s explorations, I asked him, “What would you do if you could take a medication—say, a hormone—that would let you feel right in your male body?”

The question took him aback. He had no answer.

Whatever the cause of gender identity disorders, people have them. They need legal protection and equality, medical care, dignity, understanding. They need to make their own decisions and live, like everyone else, without harassment. Demanding protections and inclusion is a political stance. Being trans is not in itself a political stance—right? For some people, gender would seem to be more about politics than it is for others.

Tracey wanted to look like a woman: to pass. Other transgendered people make a political decision to present themselves as trans rather than as a single gender of choice. Some speak of the tyranny of the gender binary. Huh? In other words, the assumption that there are two genders. Male and female. They argue that not everyone fits one of these two narrow molds. For some, breaking the molds is clearly a political position. Others just feel that they could be quite comfortable inhabiting a space between male and female if the world would let them be. G, the activist already quoted, inhabits that space. Tall and rail thin, with long hair worn in a man ponytail, G is a biological male who presents as a biological male, albeit one with an unusually smooth face. Facial hair removal is G’s sole physical gesture toward a transgendered appearance. An academic who never felt male, G began to use the label transgendered about ten years ago, around the age of thirty. At that time, “The transsexuals I knew were more stereotyped transsexual women, women in their forties and fifties who did everything, hormones, surgery, to look female. They didn’t see me as trans. I got more support from my non-trans colleagues.” G didn’t feel a burning desire to disappear into a female identity and perhaps didn’t see it as a realistic option. “When you transition there’s almost an unlearning process,” G says. “I see this a lot with transwomen in particular. There’s a certain male privilege that’s there, that they have to unlearn. I see so many women where I think, Gee, you act just like a guy. Just because you now look female that doesn’t mean that gets lost.”

Tracey fits nicely into G’s definition of the “stereotyped transsexual woman” affirming conventions more than breaking them. But for some, cross-dressing is a revolutionary act, meant to trans-gress. To bend gender. It might be retro for women to wear makeup and high heels, but in this view it’s cutting-edge for men to do the same. According to press materials for Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde, a 2010 exhibition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, male artists from Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp to their contemporary descendants dress as women to “shock the bourgeoisie” and to express anxiety about feminism. They aren’t men who want to be women. They are men who want to be bad boys.

So a handful of male (non-trans) artists wear drag to make a political point. But no one identifies as transgendered for political reasons—right? Actually, I’ve been told that at certain women’s colleges it’s become political fad to be trans. This news-of-the-weird item aside, I think we can assume that most transsexuals are actually at odds with their bodies, not saying they are because it’s cool.

To recap: Being a transsexual is not about sexual orientation and not about psychology. It runs deeper than politics. And it’s not about social roles—right? When Tracey began his transformation, I tried to understand if there were things he felt he couldn’t do as a man—ways he felt he couldn’t be. There’s confusion, in my mind for sure, but among transsexuals as well, about body versus gender role. A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey interviewed transsexuals on her television show. According to the show’s Web site, Oprah.com, one guest, Denise (formerly Don) Brunner, felt “feminine since kindergarten.”

I couldn’t really say that I wanted to be a woman, but I didn’t want to go out and play in the sandbox. I wanted to play in the kitchen with the other girls. I didn’t want to go out on the jungle gym. I wanted to be inside doing hair and makeup.

Taking it at face value, this is a statement, pure and simple, about social roles. We can deduce that Don grew up in a neighborhood that took a breathtakingly rigid approach to gender conventions, where even the sandbox (!) was male turf. If children were allowed to play wherever they damn pleased, he wouldn’t have had to take estrogen? If he could have chosen to act like a girl, he wouldn’t have needed to change his body? Presumably, a transsexual in any time and place will feel drawn to the artifacts of the opposite gender’s domain specific to that culture—as symbols of the gender they carry within. Yet I have repeatedly read and heard that biological men are much more likely to take surgical and hormonal steps across the gender divide than biological women. The explanation for the imbalance is that it is more socially acceptable to be a butch woman than it is to be an effeminate man. That social roles for women are more fluid than they are for men.

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What about bodies? Transsexuality is about gender—right? What is gender?

Gender seems to be a deep, internal principle by which we organize ourselves. If your gender identity and your body are a good fit, you are likely not even aware of it. “Do you think I walk around thinking about how great it is to be a woman?” I once asked Tracey. If your gender identity and your body do not fit, you can’t forget it. Why should it only be so terribly important if it’s wrong? I understand it by going back to the notion of illness. You don’t walk around thinking about your head unless it’s splitting. Even the day after a headache, how likely are you to consciously experience the pleasure of not having a headache? Of the rightness of your head? Again: What is gender? If it’s the fit between an immutable identity and the body it inhabits, then changing one’s social role, one’s presentation, can’t be enough. Is gender an absolute and unchangeable attachment to a particular set of genitals? So that the brain says, for example, female to someone like Tracey, who then experiences a kind of vertigo when he looks down and sees it ain’t so? And that sense of vertigo is intolerable, simply not to be borne? And because the brain can’t be changed, the body has to be?

A gender identity disjunction is tough to understand if you’ve never had one. Maybe it’s tough to understand even if you have.

Tracey, hell-bent for femininity, admitted that he couldn’t really comprehend the longing for masculinity felt by some women. He said that when a young woman told him she wanted to become a man, he was horrified—much as his feelings had horrified me. He said he saw the irony.

One day he told me he’d had a telephone conversation with a woman rabbi who was planning a gender change to male. “The rabbi’s speaking voice was very feminine and incredibly beautiful,” he said. “And when I thought of her changing it, masculinizing it, I felt so sad that this beautiful voice would be lost forever.” He went on to say that he had reported these feelings to a friend of his. “She said to me that if I could feel that way after a single phone call, I should try to imagine what you must feel about the destruction of the voice, the body, the man you’ve loved for so long.”

Tracey repeating this conversation to me was a rare instance of acknowledgment that I had any kind of right to a viewpoint. To an experience of loss. Having said this, he then went on with his merry program. His momentary acknowledgment wasn’t enough. But I remember it.