WHAT IS THE PART OF us that knows we are male or female? Where is the seed of that certainty? Can it be located in the brain or the body? Throughout the twentieth century, scientists and psychologists have hunted for the part of us that is sexed. In 1937, the New York Times crowed that researchers were on the verge of discovering a hormone like substance in the body, which they nicknamed "it." Whatever "it" was, the substance determined the sex of fetuses in the womb—and provided the script for adult behavior. A University of California biologist had produced charts showing "the secret of 'it'—that high degree of masculinity or femininity that makes man or woman the idol of the opposite sex."1 Unfortunately, the discovery of "it" never went further than that.
Fifty years later, the hunt was still on. In 1995, a team of researchers in the Netherlands claimed they had identified the seat of gender—in a tiny smudge in the brain stem nicknamed the BSTc. The region is bigger in males than in females; in transsexuals, the pattern is reversed, which seemed to indicate that the feeling of being a man or a woman might originate in this part of the brain. But rival scientists immediately began poking holes in the BSTc theory.
Just how much of the child's brain sex is set at birth has been one of the most hotly contested issues in science. Currently, most researchers agree that crucial elements of our gender identity develop in the womb and just afterward. This supports the accounts of transgendered people, many of whom feel that they were born into their identities and whose earliest memories are of being stuck in the wrong body. "My inner boy showed up early on, when I clobbered the little neighbor boy with my Raggedy Ann doll to get at his Tonka dump truck," according to Eli Wadley; he was born into a female body but eventually transitioned into a man.2
Some transgendered people describe growing up with a much more subtle sense of their identity—they experience gender as a tug, a hunch, a cloud of doubt. "I was thirty-nine years old, living as a lesbian, when I first realized I'd probably be happier living as a guy," writes Reid Vanderburgh.3 Even after hormones and surgery, Vanderburgh never felt resoundingly male. "I gradually came to realize that I had not transitioned from female to male. I had transitioned from female to not female . . . Now1 feel I'm neither a man nor a woman, though the limitations of English force me to choose sides. So I'm a guy, much more comfortable with male pronouns than female, but not really feeling like a man."4
Few of us can agree on exactly what it means to be male or female, and whether we acquired our gender identity in the womb, at age two, twelve, or forty. Scientists, too, are still far from reaching a consensus about the causes of gendered feelings and behavior. Nor can the medical establishment agree on how many people are transgendered. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-LV) estimates one in thirty thousand biological males in the population and one in one hundred thousand biological females pursue sex changes.5 Scholar Lynn Conway argues those figures are hopelessly out-of-date. By compiling year-by-year numbers for sex-change surgeries and adding them up, she came up with her own figure: for every twenty-five hundred males in the United States, there is one male-to-female transsexual, according to Conway.6 She provided no estimate for the incidence of female-to-male transsexuals, however. Indeed, that number is far more elusive. Since the "bottom surgery"—the construction of a penis—is expensive (upwards of one hundred thousand dollars) and prone to infections and other complications, many F-to-Ms do without it. They may rely on testosterone and a double mastectomy to accomplish their switch. This means that many trans men may never be counted. But the real problem is that almost no one is counting: far too little research has been done in this area.
Harry Benjamin defined a transsexual as a person who craves a sex-change operation, who longs specifically for the surgeon's knife to shave and shape his or her genitals; in the 1960s, transsexuality was a syndrome characterized by its cure; you had to have surgery, or want surgery, to be a "transsexual." But by the 1970s, activists had begun to quibble with Benjamin's definition and to look for other ways to talk about gender and its discontents.
In 1968, Virginia Prince performed her own kind of sex change, without bothering to submit herself to screening interviews at a gender identity clinic or going under the knife. She simply began dressing, speaking, and living as a woman full-time and called herself a transgendenst. She invented the word to describe people like herself who did not need to change their body to change their sex.
In her extensive writings, Prince laid out a blazingly original view of what makes us masculine or feminine. As she saw it, while all animals are sexed, only people have gender. Like sculpture or tap dance or architecture, gender is a set of flourishes that we use to communicate something about our identity to others, as well as to delight and entertain. Prince practiced her femininity as a high art: in one of her books, she dwells for five pages on the intricacies of ladies' shoes.
The word she'd invented—transgender—caught on in the 1970s and evolved into something bigger and more inclusive than what Prince may originally have meant. It became an umbrella term for gender benders of every variety and sexual proclivity. The word resonated with the times. By the 1970s, androgyny had become hip and sexy: glam rockers wriggled across the stage in leather pants and boas; cocaine-thin fashion models vamped in newsboy caps; teenagers in fright wigs waited in line to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Tiny Tim strummed his ukulele and in baritone and falsetto sang "I Got You Babe"—performing both the Sonny and Cher parts, a veritable duet with himself.
Gender had become a song you made up as you went along, a show tune you lip-synched when it matched the secret beat of your own heart. And the "sex-change operation" had burst out of the hospitals and operating rooms, out of the psychiatrists' offices and the pillbox, and moved out onto the street. What was a man? What was a woman? Those questions would no longer be left to the experts.