Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
—Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light, 1988
Unlike Ben, Parker, and Lucas, Nadia isn’t undergoing a gender transition. She’s a gender bender who wants to modify her body and still be recognized as female. For a while, she considered simply getting a breast reduction. “Maybe smaller breasts would do the trick,” she says she wondered. “Then I thought that if I’m going to go through a procedure like that, I don’t want to still have to wear a binder. Why would I just settle on a breast reduction?” Scanning the Internet for the stories of others like her, Nadia found a couple of women who also decided to remove their breasts, but who didn’t identify as trans.
Some butch lesbians have top surgery too; twenty-eight-year-old Nadia is one of them. From the start of their relationship, Nadia told her girlfriend, Flora, her breasts were off-limits, making it clear that she didn’t want them to be a part of their intimate relationship, and that “she didn’t get enjoyment from them,” Flora tells me. Less than a year into their relationship, Nadia started binding—first using a sports bra, then two sports bras at a time, and then, for the past couple of years, a binder. The practice was painful.
When Nadia announced that she wanted to remove her breasts, Flora wondered whether it meant that Nadia wanted to become a man. Nadia assured her it didn’t. The term “dysphoria” never really spoke to Nadia, and she didn’t identify as transgender. She wasn’t seeking to change her gender. “My breasts just don’t reflect who I am,” she said. A former girlfriend once asked her if her breasts were fake. “Nadia, you have great boobs,” others told her. But “I didn’t want great boobs,” she says. “I didn’t want those things at all.”
When we met at Dr. Garramone’s office, Nadia had short hair and was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. Her cats’ names are tattooed on her arms. She works as an employment coach for a nonprofit that helps low-income people who have been laid off retool themselves and get back into the job market. She helps assemble their résumés and manage the financial and emotional barriers that prevent them from getting permanent work. Nadia grew up in the South. Her mother is Mexican, and her father is Lebanese. She (like Ben, Lucas, and Parker) was raised Catholic. Although the family didn’t go to church on a regular basis, “being Catholic didn’t leave a lot of room for flexibility,” says Nadia, especially around gender. Confirmation, communion, having to wear a dress and feminine shoes were a struggle for her.
Her immigrant parents don’t know she is having top surgery—“It seems like too much to explain to them,” Nadia says. “They wouldn’t understand.” They know she’s a lesbian, and they’re fond of her girlfriend, Flora, but Nadia hasn’t told them she’s having her breasts removed; she imagines they wouldn’t really notice anyway: she’s been binding them for years, and they haven’t said anything. “They don’t know very much about me,” she says.
To Nadia, being a butch lesbian means looking masculine and having a “masculine demeanor.” She says, “I don’t feel that I present as a typical female.” She doesn’t smile that much, and she’s not super expressive. People don’t think of her as a huggy sort of person. In relationships, she says, “I’ll be tender to people, but on a day-to-day basis I don’t really show people that.” Being a masculine female is not something she thinks about much—it’s just intrinsic to who she is, she says. She feels like a bit of a throwback to an earlier era, a “dinosaur,” she says. “Trans” doesn’t really describe her experience. Nonetheless, the successes of the transgender movement have enabled her to address her estrangement from her breasts.
To undergo top surgery, Nadia needed a letter from a primary care physician, so she went to a queer health clinic and told them she was scheduled for top surgery with Dr. Garramone. They said “great, good, you’ll be fine,” and dispatched the generic letter they had on file for such occasions. When they asked which pronouns she wanted to use in the letter, she told them “she.” But when she received the letter, she saw that the gender-neutral pronoun “they” was used. And that she was identified as having gender dysphoria. That wasn’t an error: few health professionals will support the removal of a healthy body part unless doing so is intended to address a gender identity issue—the clinic was covering itself legally. While large-breasted women routinely undergo reductions, the idea of removing healthy breasts entirely is widely unpopular. “Breasts have been so sanctified in our culture,” psychologist Katherine Rachlin tells me. “The assumption is that if you’re born with them, you would want to keep them.”
When Dr. Garramone asked Nadia why she wanted the surgery, she told him that she hates her breasts but identifies as a lesbian. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he queried. Later on, he mistakenly referred to her as “he.” In this, as in many other aspects of her life, Nadia is an outlier. “She’s an uncompromising individualist through and through and is troubling the very categories of gender,” says Flora, her girlfriend. Transgender activists created a story about top surgery that sees it as a “productive movement toward a new gender identity, or a gender identity you’ve always felt but could not claim. What Nadia’s doing is even more destabilizing than claiming a new identity,” says Flora. “At first, I didn’t really understand it, but now I think what she’s doing is really cool.”
Removing her breasts, Nadia hopes, will help her feel more comfortable in her body. Still, she worries that the ranks of those like herself are thinning to the point where she’ll soon be the “last butch standing.” Are transgender men essentially different from butch lesbians like Nadia, or are they simply making different choices with their lives? That question has a long history and few definitive answers.
An ashtray from the first known lesbian bar in the United States, established in San Francisco in 1933, reads MONA’S 440 CLUB: WHERE GIRLS WILL BE BOYS!1 The largely working-class world of lesbian bars offered masculine women and those who loved them a space in which to congregate, a place of refuge. They were factory workers, elevator operators, laborers who managed to find jobs that allowed them to dress as they pleased, or secretaries, nurses, teachers who counted the minutes until they could shed their office drag and change into pants after work. Within the lesbian world, “butches” became handsome swans, coveted for their masculinity and for their ability to please a woman. But it was not an easy life.
Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 semiautobiographical novel, Stone Butch Blues, documented the world of “he-she’s” who lived proud, precarious lives in the early 1960s—when they weren’t being beaten up by police or being harassed in the street. But in those early pre-Stonewall days, before the rise of a visible movement for gay and lesbian rights, bars could be pretty dangerous places. Bars catering to homosexuals were regularly shut down, and patrons were arrested and subjected to public humiliation. Cities swept streets to rid beaches, parks, and neighborhoods of gay people, even outlawing the wearing of clothes of the opposite gender. Periodic police raids on bars meant that those who congregated there were likely to be swept up if they weren’t careful, and they could end up in jail—or in a psychiatric institution.
Esther Newton remembers those days. A retired professor of anthropology who teaches part-time at the University of Michigan, she is a pioneer in the field of sexuality studies, having authored influential studies of drag queens, the gay resort of Cherry Grove, and a memoir about her life, which is titled My Butch Career. She is married to Holly Hughes, a diminutive performance artist who achieved notoriety as one of four artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants social conservatives tried to revoke in 1990 in a case that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. When I interview her in her Manhattan apartment, Newton, a distinguished-looking woman in her mid-seventies, recalls how embattled it felt to be a butch lesbian in the early 1960s. She was regularly “gawked at on the streets, made to feel like a pariah,” and lived in fear of police harassment. “I started to feel more comfortable with myself,” she says, when she had her first lover when she was in her early to mid-twenties, in the mid-1960s, a few years before the revolt at the Stonewall Inn in New York thrust gay rights into the public eye.
When feminism and the counterculture came around in the late 1960s and early ’70s, things became much easier for Newton. Feminists declared that they would change society to accommodate diverse bodies and desires rather than the other way around, and that everyone could be “free to be…you and me,” as the popular television special, narrated by actress Marlo Thomas, proclaimed. If the culture revered large breasts, hairless bodies, and pouty lips, feminists found beauty in naturalness, in the embrace of a femaleness unencumbered by oppressive body expectations. Dress codes relaxed, and many women cast off makeup and dresses in favor of a more androgynous style, blurring the distinctions between lesbians and heterosexual women. Masculine women like Newton began to feel more at home, more attractive.
“We were empowered by feminism to believe that we could create our own lives and possibilities,” recounts the artist Kate Horsfield, who is a contemporary of Newton’s. A critique of gender essentialism—the belief that women were equivalent to their bodies and were best suited to be wives and mothers, rather than doctors, lawyers, soccer players, or astronauts—was a central theme. Some, like author and philosopher Ti-Grace Atkinson, went even further, proclaiming in 1972: “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice.”2 Loving women, she declared, was the only choice for those who wished to live their feminist principles.
It was a period that blew open settled ideas about how Americans should live. All major social institutions came under question. Radical social movements emphasized the art of possibility. Much as one could become an artist by calling oneself one and creating art, one could be a lesbian by loving women and making them central in one’s life. Lesbianism was not in fact fixed at birth or in early childhood. Like artistic talent, it wasn’t something one did or didn’t have. These were untapped potentials in all of us that we could choose to embrace if we wished. In the 1970s, young feminists came out in droves as lesbians, entering what was mainly a working-class subculture and expanding the lesbian world to include many formerly straight women. I was a beneficiary of their efforts—and of cheap rents.
When I landed in San Francisco in the early 1980s, I found a room in a shared apartment for $100 per month together with other young seekers who were influenced by feminism, gay liberation, and other movements for social justice. My well-worn copy of the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Yellow Pages, which cost fifty cents, offers a window into the spirit of the time. There are listings for woman-run and woman-owned services, businesses, and resources: realtors, health product reps, and the caveat that no listings or ads that “clearly promote sexist, racist, classist, or ageist attitudes are included.”3 If you were looking for battered women’s shelters, a women-only hotel, rape hotlines, support groups for fat women, or sadomasochists, and even those in feminist group marriages (“We are heterosexual women who sleep with the same men, share income, promote world peace, and experience a higher level of trusting friendship than any of us has ever felt before”), you could find them along with female career counselors, dog groomers, attorneys, tax preparers, music teachers, and carpenters. There are ads for a women’s ice hockey team (“no experience or equipment is necessary, and somebody usually has an extra hockey stick”), amazon kung fu, and the women’s health collective where I got my first—and only—pregnancy test.
There are dozens of listings for feminist therapists. “I see women’s problems as a mixture of social oppression and individual reaction,” reads one entry, reflecting their general tenor. “I help women get in touch with their own power to effect desired changes in their lives.” And on the heels of the therapy section are ads for body workers, holistic masseuses, midwives, childcare workers, and a haircutter-healer who promises to cut your hair in accordance with “your particular energy field.” There is, too, a do-it-yourself ethos, and a distrust of experts: male doctors, male teachers, male shrinks. They will do you wrong, rob you, manipulate you, and make you unhealthy. A podiatrist advertises that she is “not interested in surgerizing [sic] you. Ninety-five percent of foot complaints can be alleviated without surgery.”
There were moments of goofiness, to be sure, but there was also a dreamy sense of possibility, of the boundless energy of young women remaking the world. It was a world comprising women of all races, classes, and sexual preferences, who were dedicated to the radical proposition that women were better than men: kinder, less violent, more empathetic. By infusing the culture with feminist values, they—we—believed we were creating a world in which gender roles would be irrelevant.
We second-wave feminists tried to create a more forgiving culture, one that would accept all kinds of bodies, which would make the world safer for big women, disabled women, women of different races and ethnicities, women who love women, poor women, boyish women. But women who would be men were never part of this plan. If women were the superior sex, why would one ever want to be a man? While giving license to gender benders, feminists cast a skeptical eye toward those who were too “male identified,” leading some masculine women who felt spurned by the lesbian feminist world to seek out other options.
In the mid-1970s, a few years before I landed in San Francisco, someone named Lou Sullivan had also arrived, in search of sex reassignment surgery at Stanford University. Because he openly identified as someone with homoerotic attractions, Sullivan was unsuccessful in convincing medical gatekeepers (who maintained that homosexual transgender people did not exist) that he was a good candidate for surgery. He nonetheless began to live full-time as a man and created a support network for other female-bodied people who strongly identified as male, calling themselves FTM. They didn’t have their own bars or coffeehouses, so they met in people’s living rooms, where they shared information about how to pass as men and survive in the world, and how to access testosterone and chest surgery outside of university-based gender dysphoria clinics. Today’s transmale subculture can trace its lineage, more or less, to that moment, and to Sullivan’s efforts.4
Still, the question remains: are butches and trans men fundamentally different groups of people? On this there is little consensus. Early transsexual narratives distinguished between transsexual men and butch lesbians, arguing that homosexuals who cross-dressed (or butch lesbians, in current parlance) and transsexuals were different categories of persons. A butch might be able to hide out in a dress when forced to do so, and she could masquerade as a feminine woman in order to survive. For a woman who knew herself to be a man, on the other hand, no such option existed: they needed a body to fit their mind. Dr. Harry Benjamin, who is often credited with coining the term “transsexuality,” agreed, more or less, and saw it as different from homosexuality or transvestism—phenomena with which it was often confused, in his opinion.5
The belief that gay/lesbian and transgender people are essentially two separate populations is especially strong among medical professionals. When I asked Dr. Paul Weiss, a New York surgeon who has worked with transgender people for the past twenty years, how he sees the relationship between the two, he tells me: “They’re completely different.” Transgender people, he says, “are attracted to the same sex, but are the opposite sex in their brain.” He and the other surgeons I spoke with tended to assert that there are clear, enduring, and natural boundaries that separate homosexual and transgender people, and males and females.
Trans people sometimes agree with this view, at times to gain access to the medical interventions that will make them more comfortable in their bodies and less vulnerable to violence in a society that enforces gender distinctions. Even trans activists who are critical of the medical model frequently embrace the view that gender nonconformity and homosexuality are conceptually separate phenomena. Being transgender is “not about who you want to go to bed with, it’s who you want to go to bed as,” writes trans author Jennifer Finney Boylan.6 In other words, while transgender people may have some interests in common with gays and lesbians, they are defined by their gender rather than by their sexual orientation.
Ben, Parker, and Lucas each called themselves gay, at least for a while, before they came to identify as transgender. Like many if not most (white, middle-class) transgender men who are today in their twenties (or older), many identified as butch lesbians at an earlier point in their lives, before they discovered the transgender world and came to identify with it. (People of color and sometimes working-class and poor whites are somewhat more likely to identify as “studs” or “aggressives.”) Today Ben, Parker, and Lucas say that the label “lesbian” never really fit them; it was at best a temporary stopover on the way to claiming their authentic trans selves—and acknowledging the fact that it is gender, not sexuality, that is so salient for them. As Ben told me, “Gender and sexual identity couldn’t be further from one another. It’s like one is an apple tree and one is an orange tree, but they just happen to be in the same garden.”
But at least one study, by sociologist Henry Rubin, shows in painstaking detail how individuals, once they come to identify as transgender men, distance themselves from their lesbian pasts. Rubin interviewed twenty-two transgender men in Boston and San Francisco in the early 1990s, who ranged in age between twenty-three and forty-nine, and who were part of the first significant wave of transgender men who transitioned. He asked them how they identified, what changing sex meant to them, and why they chose to transition. A majority of those he interviewed said that they once identified as butch lesbians, but they told him they were never really lesbians at all, in retrospect.7
Today, we tend to distinguish between transgender men and butch lesbians. But in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, homosexuality was synonymous with “sexual inversion.” As articulated by sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the concept referred to the reversal of gender traits: male inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally female pursuits and dress and female inverts to traditionally male pursuits. Popularizing this concept, Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness told the story of Stephen Gordon, a mannish woman. “I can’t feel that I am a woman. All my life I’ve never felt like a woman….I don’t know what I am; no one’s ever told me that I am different and I know that I am different.”8 Was Gordon (who, by all accounts, was a representation of author Hall) a masculine lesbian or a transgender male? It’s impossible to know. The technology of transitioning was only beginning to be developed then, but the language that accounted for it, and the culture that enabled it, was not available then.9
Humans like to classify, to decide what ought to go together and what ought to be separated. We draw conceptual distinctions between things we perceive as different (such as the Danish and Norwegian languages) and group together things we consider similar (such as grapefruit juice and orange juice). These cognitive distinctions are always somewhat arbitrary.10 Experts such as psychologists, medical doctors, and even activists carve up reality in different ways. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove the existence of “real” differences between trans men and butch lesbians, and there is certainly a great deal of overlap between the two populations.
When I spoke with Henry Rubin, the sociologist, in a Boston hotel coffee shop, he told me that he received a lot of push back from trans men after his book Self-Made Men, a study of transsexual men, came out in 2003. Some were uncomfortable with Rubin’s claim that the boundary between lesbians and transgender men is malleable and not at all clear and enduring. Trans men are men, and lesbians are not, they charged. “People experience anxiety about things they do not entirely understand,” he tells me. “They feel better and are more grounded if they have a clear identity.” Trans people, unlike presidential candidates, don’t go around talking about building walls to separate populations, but they do engage in what sociologists call “identity work,” emphasizing the things they have in common with other trans people, and also what sets them apart from others. I am gay, not transgender. I am transgender, not gay. “Society puts some limits on the infinite ways people make sense of their lives,” says Rubin. It provides categories (male, female, woman, man, transsexual, homosexual, intersexual). But these categories can never fully do justice to the complexity of our lives.
In the 1950s, when Esther Newton was growing up, “there wasn’t the sense that sexual orientation and gender are totally different. It was kind of all one thing,” she tells me. As a tomboy who liked boys’ sports and was attracted to girls, Newton often sees her younger self in the trans men she meets today. Like them, she says, she was happier with her body before puberty. She hated getting her period, and she never particularly liked her breasts. “Most butch lesbians experience dysphoria,” she tells me. She is not convinced that butches and trans men are essentially different from each other.
“It’s hard being a lesbian, but being a butch lesbian means you’re a flashing red banner to the world at large. Either you’re read as a man, which leads to problems using the bathroom, or you’re just read as a lesbian who’s out 24/7. It takes a toll and affects your life chances.” People stare at you on the street, and they don’t take you as seriously at work. It’s still a daily struggle for Newton, even at age seventy-four. In addition to being “sirred” and thrown out of women’s restrooms, she has strangers tell her to “smile more,” she says. “ ‘Come on, smile.’ Masculine women are still treated as other. Some people just get tired of it.”
In the 1990s, the crunchy-granola college town of Eugene, Oregon, was a pretty easy place to flout gender norms. Blue jeans, hiking boots, and Gore-Tex was (and still is, as far as I can tell) the unisex uniform. There were a couple of gay bars, a women’s bookstore, a tolerance for freethinkers and tree huggers. And with a population of about 120,000, Eugene was big enough that you could find others like yourself, but spread out enough that you could hide if you really wanted to. Alex Grayson went to graduate school at the university there, and I was one of his professors. When we first met, he had fled working-class Michigan in search of a different kind of life. He was a butch lesbian in a relationship with Julia, a fiery East Coast Jew who dubbed him Alex. The name stuck.
From an early age, Alex had what he calls a “secret boy life.” With his guy friends, he had a guy name that the grown-ups didn’t know about. When he was eleven or twelve, “things started getting weird,” and he could no longer be one of the boys. He knew he was attracted to girls. After several years of being isolated, he eventually found the lesbian world, which offered a place of belonging. Alex was able to live fairly comfortably as a butch woman, except that he often felt judged by others for his appearance. He had very short cropped blond hair and wore men’s button-down shirts. When he walked into a room at the university or into a gay bar, he always felt that he was pushed to the edge, that he didn’t really belong, and that he was “bumping into something, and somewhere he shouldn’t be.” His self-presentation was always more masculine than that of most of the others around him. Sometimes he seemed like a butch lesbian, but other times he seemed more like a man. “I never felt right. I always felt pushed to the margins,” he says.
At the time, feminists tried to soften gender binaries, promoting an androgyny they hoped would submerge gender distinctions. The butch lesbian, having a marked lesbian body, enjoyed privileged status as the “authentic” lesbian—as long as she was recognizably female. Gender expression was tamped down. It was okay to be butch—but being too butch veered into maleness, which was verboten. Alex says he always worried about being “too male.” Although he found girlfriends in the lesbian community, and it was “a social space that made for a livable life,” he never felt that he fully fit into the lesbian scene. “But at the time it was the only social category out there that seemed to describe who I was,” he says.
After finishing his doctoral degree, Alex moved to Los Angeles to take a teaching position. Shiny L.A., which mirrored the celebrity-obsessed culture that surrounded it, was a challenging place to live as a masculine woman, particularly during the rise of the “lipstick lesbian.” “No butches or fatties” read the typical lesbian personal ad. One evening, Alex and his best friend, Kristin, also a butch woman, went to a “lesbian-only night” at a gay bar in West Hollywood, and the bouncer asked them: “Do you know what night this is?” He didn’t admit them until they handed him their IDs, proving they were female. Once inside, they realized that they were the only butches there; the bar was filled with glammed-up dykes. Work shirts and combat boots were no longer the uniform of the Lesbian Nation. Femmes were taking over the scene in some cities, including L.A.
Alex’s unapologetic masculinity often isolated him and made him feel like a freak. In a warm climate where people wore fewer clothes, it was harder for him to hide his gender variance, or to bind his breasts without feeling uncomfortable, and he was regularly kicked out of public restrooms. “My ability to pee organized my daily life choices,” he told me. The constant need to figure out how to present himself in public drained him, and he was always frustrated with himself. “I didn’t want to stay in that socially murky space of neither male nor female. I constantly felt as though I’m the problem. It’s exhausting to feel wrong all the time. It’s corrosive.”
He also worried about being victimized by violence if someone didn’t like how he looked. “I think that because I mostly passed as a young boy/teenager, or possibly as gay, I felt particularly at risk. I felt like a very easy physical target for groups of younger men,” he says. He looked much younger than his age, so dating proved to be difficult. “At forty or forty-two it is a problem to look like a fifteen-year-old boy. It was un-sexy to be on a date with a forty-year-old woman and have the server assume you’re her son.” He was exhausted by “the amount of work entailed in managing [his] body”—staying out of certain places, trying not to take up too much space in others. “Gotta fix it, gotta manage it. It’s corrosive to feel wrong all the time.”
Alex and I lost touch over the years, but about ten years ago I heard through the grapevine that he had transitioned and begun to present himself as male, so when I began to research this book I contacted him to see if he would speak to me, and he agreed. When we meet on Skype, he has a modified crew cut, is wearing a plaid button-down shirt, and looks a lot like he did years ago, though with a thicker neck and deeper voice, a light beard and the beginning of male pattern balding. If you saw him on the street, you would never know he was once considered female—which was also true of just about every other female-assigned person who had undergone a gender transition whom I interviewed for this book. If they wanted to, they could pass pretty seamlessly as men—that is, they could be “stealth” in public, presenting themselves as cisgender men if they so desired.
Alex tells me he had long been aware of the existence of transsexuals, and he had even contemplated transitioning earlier in his life. He had known a couple of people over the years who had transitioned, but he had no idea of how to go about doing so, and he lacked the money and the wherewithal.
In the early 1990s, “the conversation changed,” he says, making it possible for him to contemplate transitioning. He heard about support groups for transgender men. FTM groups were forming in San Francisco and Seattle. A burgeoning “queer” movement was challenging the dominance of radical feminist ideas and was offering female-assigned individuals who wished to embrace their inner maleness a way to do so affirmatively, with a sense of pride. Writers and activists like Sandy Stone and Kate Bornstein were talking about a different, more expansive understanding of the radical potential of gender switching, rejecting medicalized notions of trans people as having the “wrong body,” or as being mentally deficient. The term “transgender” was established as a way to move beyond the medical model of “transsexualism” and to include a broad array of gender-variant persons who wished to challenge the binary. It enabled Alex to call himself transgender.
“I did not want to have to say I was ‘crazy.’ I don’t even like saying I’m dysphoric, though I fit the narrative,” says Alex. “I didn’t start T until I found a very good doctor who didn’t demand a letter from a therapist. I wouldn’t confess dysphoria in order to get access to top surgery. I won’t do it. Why would I want to make myself even more marginal?” However, once there was a “weakening of pathology, of judgment,” he decided to move forward.
Meanwhile, Kristin, Alex’s closest friend, settled in Seattle after graduation, where she found an accepting culture and a lively butch presence in the lesbian community. She worked for a state representative, and when she visited the state capitol to lobby on his behalf, people sometimes perceived her “as a boy.” But mainly she felt okay about looking different, and she fell in love with a woman, Jennie, who affirmed her right to be who she was. Kristin is pretty flat chested and small hipped, and “looks like she wants to,” more or less. She presented as a masculine female. It helped that her family tended to be supportive. “Even though I don’t really operate as a woman, I operate in the sphere of women, and there were a lot of really strong women in my big Polish family!” Also her dad, now deceased, was queer, and her brother (who appears in this book) is a transgender man.
Because Kristin, unlike Alex, received a lot of support for her gender nonconformity, she said it never became a major source of distress for her—which isn’t to say that it hasn’t been a challenge at times. She contemplated transitioning for a while but eventually made peace with her body. Being in therapy helped. “I thought that my anxiety was special and everyone else was normal,” she tells me. But as she found ways to ease her generalized sense of anxiety, she became more comfortable with her body and her gender nonconformity. “I thought, ‘Why do I care so much about what other people think about my gender?’ I have a right. I have a fucking right to be who I am,” she tells me, her voice cracking.
And as she became more comfortable with herself, she found ways to deal with bathroom confrontations. “Now when people come up to me and tell me I’m in the wrong bathroom, sometimes I look my body up and down and look at them quizzically and say, ‘Oh, really?’ Thanks!” She makes light of it. “The more comfortable I am, the more likely they are to think I’m in the right place and leave me alone. Now it’s even funny at times.” But airports, she says, are still particularly challenging. Heightened security seems to extend to the policing of gendered bodies in bathrooms.11 The other day, a blond woman in her fifties came over to her as she entered a bathroom stall and started yelling, “You’re in the wrong place—the men’s room is over there.” Kristin just smiled and said, “Thank you,” and the woman left in a hurry.
“I get why some people transition,” says Kristin, “to be normal, and not have people gawking at you all day. It takes a whole lot of energy.” Still, she came to the conclusion that transitioning would not solve her problems, and that it might open up new, unknown challenges. Alex, on the other hand, made the decision to modify his body and present as a male, and it has made his life much easier. He no longer gets harassed walking down the street, and he’s no longer as angry. “I still look young,” he tells me, “but at least the beard and receding hairline prove I’m through puberty!”
He is much happier now, he says. “I honestly don’t feel I’ve changed that much. That is, ‘transitioning’ didn’t change me so much as it forced others to see me as I saw myself. Yes, the bodily transformations were welcome and comforting. I felt that I was finally ‘home.’ But how do you separate that feeling from the sense that you’re finally recognized by others for how you see yourself?”
For her part, Kristin sees herself as someone who “embodies something different, who is on the edges of womanhood.” She loathes it when she’s in a group of women and they are addressed collectively as “ladies.” “I hate that,” she says. “But I do like embodying the space I’m in and being okay with it, and showing other people that you can be a woman who looks like a guy, and, guess what, you can be okay! You can be healthy and not crazy!” One day, Kristin and her girlfriend, Jennie, devised different gender identities for all of their friends. Jennie became “riot grrl,” after the Northwest feminist punk subculture of the same name. Kristin is “gay boy nerd.” Their friend Christine, who identifies as male but who is not modifying his body, is “nerd nerd.” Kristin says she wants to see all of those differences. “I’m not interested in erasing them. The differences are what makes things interesting.”
As Alex and Kristin’s stories suggest, decisions to transition or not are very personal ones, and they are also shaped by the contexts in which people live. What categories are circulating in the culture? What are the personal and political consequences of affiliating with one category over another? How can we move through the world relatively unimpeded, without attracting undue attention and the threat of harassment or violence? Will our parents disown us? Will we lose our jobs?
Gender and sexual identities—as cis, trans, gay, straight, and an ever lengthening list of others—don’t simply emerge from within. While they are shaped by a host of factors over which we have little control, we make choices about how best to live our lives, and these choices have a great deal to do with historical and situational factors. WPATH acknowledges this too. “Even if epidemiologic studies established that a similar proportion of transsexual, transgender, or gender-nonconforming people existed all over the world,” it says, “it is likely that cultural differences from one country to another would alter both the behavioral expressions of different gender identities and the extent to which gender dysphoria is actually occurring in a population.”12
Arlene Lev runs a clinical practice in Albany, New York, and teaches at the State University of New York campus there, training people to work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender clients. She is the author of a 2004 study called Transgender Emergence, which was the first book to suggest that being trans is an identity, not a diagnosis, and to advise therapists to understand their trans clients within the context of their families, as children, partners, and parents. Lev tells me a story that illustrates her perspective. Recently, she traveled by plane from New York to California, hunched between two large men. Lev is very short—four foot nine—and describes herself as a “fat woman.” At one point during the flight, she placed a suitcase on the floor of the plane so that her legs wouldn’t go numb. It pressed her legs together and made her feel “fatter and uglier by the second.” But when she stepped off the plane in San Francisco, “all these people are looking at me, just smiling and checking me out,” she recalls. “All of a sudden I was cute again, attractive even. It was a fascinating moment.”
“I noticed how much my self-esteem and sense of self was interactional. How comfortable I feel in my body is also a reflection of how I am seen by others.” For her, the experience was a metaphor for the challenges facing gender-variant people, including the decision of whether or not to transition. Transgender people are unique individuals, who are embedded in different social contexts—families, communities, workplaces, and also history—and must be understood in relation to those contexts. “It’s never just a question of who I am,” says Lev, “but also a question of how do I fit into the times that I am living in.”
When I lived in San Francisco in the 1980s and early ’90s, there were half a dozen lesbian bars. Amelia’s, on Valencia Street in the Mission District, was one of them. It was my neighborhood bar. There I could find a rainbow mix of Sapphic sisters on any night of the week. LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade” seemed to play on an endless loop. During those days, every major city and most college towns had at least one lesbian bar, and some places, like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, had a handful or more. But today such bars, which were once among the very few places women who loved women could dance, flirt, and socialize publicly, are fast disappearing—driven out by gentrification, the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian culture, and the uncoupling of lesbianism and feminism.
Rents in San Francisco and other major cities have skyrocketed, pushing young dreamers out. If you’re looking to find others like yourself, you no longer consult a typewritten booklet lovingly produced by a volunteer collective of feminists; you can look on the Internet, where you will find countless versions of different ways to live. Women can legally marry each other, and men can openly make their lives with other men, too, but the androgynous anything-goes style of the 1970s has given way to a renewed body consciousness. Taking personal responsibility for one’s health, one’s body, and one’s career advancement is the new normal—a practical strategy at a time when nearly half of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers who enjoy little job security.
The last of San Francisco’s lesbian bars, the Lexington Club, closed recently, and in Manhattan only two hang on. Younger women and trans men are more likely to identify as “queer” and less likely to seek out women-only spaces. It’s easier these days to live openly as a lesbian in much of the United States—especially if one is white, affluent, and gender conforming (think of comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres). For many people, claiming a homosexual identity is not nearly as risky as it once was. After all, you don’t have to worry about being arrested for visiting a gay bar or wearing men’s clothes. People meet each other online. Some observers say we are entering a “post-gay” era, when being queer is less likely to determine major life choices, such as where one lives or what kind of work one does—or even whether one’s family is accepting. “We should no longer define ourselves solely in terms of our sexuality, even if our opponents do,” says former Out magazine editor James Collard. “Post-gay isn’t ‘un-gay.’ It’s about taking a critical look at gay life and no longer thinking solely in terms of struggle. It’s about going to a gay bar and wishing there were girls there to talk to.”13 In a post-gay world, lesbian bars are no longer necessary because being gay or lesbian is no longer a very big deal. Of course the reality is much more complex. Although social attitudes toward homosexuality have certainly become much more liberal over the past few decades, sexuality continues to define many individuals’ lives.
As yet as I researched this book, many millennials told me that they didn’t like the word “lesbian” and couldn’t identify with it. They saw the project gay women of my generation worked so hard to achieve—affirming the L-word and the women-who-love-women it described—as largely passé. Today women still sleep with other women; they simply are less likely to claim an identity on that basis. Sometimes they call themselves queer. While only 1.3 percent of women actually identify as lesbian, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Health Statistics Reports, 17.4 percent have had same-sex sexual contact.14 The shifts in language and identity were largely generational.
If millennials I spoke with were less likely to identify as lesbians, baby boomer lesbians continued to strongly identify with the category. As the most visibly identifiable lesbians, butch baby boomers who came of age during the heyday of feminism, the 1970s and ’80s, were particularly vocal about naming their existence publicly. Identifying as a lesbian, writes cartoonist A. K. Summers, “marks me squarely in my middle age and as invested in a sexual culture which is less common than it used to be.”15 Esther Newton is even more adamant: “Lesbians are never in style no matter what. Never in style. It’s never easy to be a butch, especially.” Butches still exist, of course. Some call themselves “studs,” or “aggressives,” particularly if they’re from African American or Latina backgrounds. Others embrace terms like “boi.” But the decline of the lesbian bar means that these subcultures are somewhat less visible.
While I was researching this book, femme lesbians often expressed fears to me that their pool of potential dating partners is rapidly diminishing. An academic friend of mine, a stylish woman in her forties who never leaves the house without lipstick, said that if she and her partner, a proudly butch woman about her age who knows how to build furniture and is a fierce baker, ever broke up, she might have to go back to men. And, in fact, while researching this book, I had to admit that I, too, found myself unnerved at times by the sight of handsome women transforming themselves into dudes with stubby beards, thick necks, and deep voices, people who were passing out of the zone of my own attractions. Of course, I realize that it’s not about me—it’s about them. Still, at times it’s hard not to feel a sense of loss.
When we met, Angie Terry, a metalworker who lives on a farm in southern Arizona, inhabited a liminal zone between genders. Angie went by the pronoun “they.” In appearance, thirty-two-year-old Angie resembled any number of boyish women I’ve known throughout the years. But unlike them, Angie didn’t identify as a lesbian and described being estranged from their body, particularly their breasts. “My breasts feel like a deformity on my body,” Angie tells me. “I feel like there’s a big disconnect between my brain and my body.” Angie feels somewhere between male and female—closer to male, they said. They get “very upset in social situations, when I’m ‘ma’am-ed’ or ‘lady-ed.’ ” Sometimes when dealing with people at stores Angie tells people to refer to them as doctor or another gender-neutral pronoun. In relationships, they are always “the husband, boyfriend. Never the girlfriend or wife.”
After having top surgery, Angie wanted to keep their given name but live as a male, for all intents and purposes, and go by the pronoun “they”—to remind people of the limitations of gender binaries. “I have a lot of anger and distrust of men, and I have a lot of empathy and sweetness toward women,” Angie tells me, expressing ambivalence about transitioning to maleness. “I like the idea of having a female name, and looking gender-neutral or genderqueer.” Angie has no plans to take testosterone. The goal is to stay in between. One of Angie’s role models is Zackary Drucker, an actor and trans woman who retains her male name. “I really like the idea of confounding the idea of gender,” Angie says. “Now, I’m not confounding gender at all. In my head I am, but not socially.”
A few months later, Angie became Carson. Their voice was still female sounding, and their face was smooth, but they had given up living in between genders, and were planning to go on hormones. “I’m more comfortable being seen as male than female. In a perfect world, I’d like people to refer to me as ‘they,’ but at this point that’s asking too much of people. The mass public just constantly reverts to seeing me as female. That’s what they see, so that’s what they do. They’re not really paying attention.”
As appealing as it may have been to try to live in between, especially as someone who identifies as a feminist, and a gender bender, it was too difficult to pull it off in a world that continues to divide people into male and female. So, even as Carson would prefer to live in between, as neither male nor female, our culture makes that very difficult. Since he is more drawn to masculinity, Carson has chosen to embrace his maleness and undergo a transition. In a more perfect world, gender wouldn’t matter. But in this world, he’d rather be recognized as male than as female. For Carson, and for many others I met, seemingly personal choices such as these have profound political implications.
Baby boomer feminists tend to share that conviction. But having come of age in a “woman power” era, they are more likely to feel ambivalent toward masculinity, and toward a younger generation of individuals who were assigned female at birth, who seem to gladly embrace maleness. “Everybody now wants to be a man, or be with a man,” laments a fifty-eight-year-old feminist writer and critic who did not wish to be identified. Others are even less forgiving. A sixty-three-year-old retired schoolteacher in New York secretly wonders whether transgender people are dupes of the medical establishment, and whether it’s all a “big science experiment.” And Esther Newton tells me, “It just pisses me off that trans is what catches [younger people’s] imagination now. That’s where the energy is. From a lesbian perspective, that annoys me.”
Some (but certainly not all) feminists of this cohort imagine that the rise of the transgender movement is part of a broader backlash against the gains of feminism—along with the assault on reproductive rights, the sexualization of teenage girls’ bodies in the media, and other less-than-desirable developments. While some refer to such attitudes, and those who hold them, as TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists), they remind me of the laments I heard in the late 1980s about the growing numbers of lesbians who were “going straight,” leaving the lesbian world in search of “heterosexual privilege.” They signal a sense of loss rooted in a nostalgia for one’s youth, fears of demographic decline, and the real challenge of creating a different kind of life when the community that supported it is no longer. Lesbian subcultures still exist, of course. These days, Brooklyn is a haven, of sorts, for women-loving-women. So are college towns like Ann Arbor, Northampton, and Ithaca. But transgender is the hot new thing—which means that younger people are as likely to question their gender today as their sexuality.
“It’s a generational divide. I can understand that,” says Macauley DeVun, a forty-two-year-old activist and artist who lives in Brooklyn. DeVun masculinized his chest but never went on testosterone. DeVun identified as a butch lesbian prior to the rise of transgender, but now as “gender-nonconforming, queer, trans.” Any of the above. DeVun doesn’t identify fully as “male or female” and “uses all pronouns and enforces none.” His four-year-old son calls him Daddy. They’re gender non-binary and bi-gender, but not adamant about any of it. DeVun believes that many transgender men are actually quite ambivalent about maleness and would choose to be gender-nonconforming if they could.
When we spoke at a café in Greenwich Village, DeVun told me that he sees himself as a member of a “bridge generation.” Having come of age during an era when lesbian feminism had more clout, he was also influenced by the rise of transgender, so DeVun understands some of the misgivings older lesbians feel about the decline of butch space, and knows older lesbians who have tattooed teardrops on their bodies to signify that loss, the fear that the butches would be no longer. “But the times they are a-changing,” says DeVun.
For DeVun, being transgender is a means of survival, of being true to oneself and affirming a deep sense of gendered self. At a time when more and more gay and lesbian people seek out respectability, identifying as transgender also has the capacity to challenge many of our taken-for-granted ideas about the relationship between bodies and identities, and the differences between the sexes. It doesn’t mean being transgender is easy. Studies show that trans folks confront violence, family abandonment, job insecurity, and levels of precariousness that far exceed those in the general population.16 And yet that hasn’t stopped Ben, Lucas, Parker, and thousands of others. Only a few decades ago, being a transgender man was practically unimaginable. That’s no longer the case.
Would some butch lesbians of the feminist generation who are now in their fifties, sixties, and seventies have chosen to transition, too, if the technology—and cultural approval for using it—had been available when they were younger? Esther Newton says she would have willingly gotten rid of her breasts if it were an option, though she probably would not have transitioned. “I certainly spent a lot of time, especially as a child, wishing I’d been born a boy. But feminism profoundly affected my life,” Newton says; it made her “feel very differently about being a woman.” Feminism gave her the strength to beat back social disapproval and proudly assert her femaleness, even if she never felt all that womanly. She, too, wonders if lesbian identity is disappearing.
“If I were growing up now, I might consider myself trans too,” says my friend Kate. She grew up in the Texas Panhandle during the 1950s and gravitated toward feminism in the 1970s like many of her peers. She adds ruefully: “I’m glad I didn’t have that option.”
Nadia has absorbed those fears, and she wonders whether her friends will see her top surgery as an act of betrayal. Before they left for Florida, Nadia implored her girlfriend, Flora, not to tell lesbian friends of theirs that she’s “getting rid of [her] boobs,” joking that she’d “be out of the club.” Flora says she feared losing access to her lover’s body. Never having undergone surgery before, she was afraid of the unknown. “Will it really solve her problems?” she wondered. Why put yourself through that? And why go to a doctor who specializes in transmale top surgery if you’re not trans yourself?
Nadia has stayed in touch with some of the lesbian-identified people she met online who told her they were having top surgery. A few have since “decided to go on T and now identify as male,” she says. It led Nadia to question her own motivations: “Will I begin to identify as trans? Is removing my breasts some sort of internalized misogyny? Am I betraying the lesbian community?” The fact that transitioning is now an option for women who identify as male means that Nadia must consider how she wishes to identify herself. Flora reassured her: “Having tissue removed from your body is not going to make you a man.”
Several months after she had undergone top surgery, Nadia still sees herself as a woman—albeit a woman without boobs. She has a new job and a new girlfriend—someone she used to work with at the employment counseling nonprofit, who worked with her in her union. Her involvement in the union has energized her in new ways, renewing her commitment to social justice organizing. When we speak, she seems happier and more at ease with her life. Top surgery hasn’t changed her life radically, though it has helped her intimate relationships, she says, and has made her less self-conscious about her body. She goes to the beach or to the Y locker room topless now and no one bats their eyes. “I now look how I’m supposed to look,” she says.
Recently, when she was at a union conference in Las Vegas, Nadia spotted another person at the hotel pool who also had the familiar scars of someone who had had top surgery, who was also there with a girlfriend. Though they didn’t say anything to each other, they looked at each other and shared a glint of recognition. Her story suggests that after being estranged from one another, younger butches and trans men are finding one another and making common cause, welcoming gender-crossers into the Lesbian Nation. In an effort to blur the boundaries between butch lesbians and transgender men, some have suggested the label “transbutch.”17 When I ask Nadia whether that label is meaningful to her, she seems unconvinced. “It seems too ‘second wave,’ ” she says.
Nadia sees herself as part of feminism’s “third wave,” which is more aware of queer issues and racial diversity, and which refuses to “put people in categories.” Unlike her second-wave feminist foremothers, who, in their enthusiasm for remaking the world, seemed at times pretty prescriptive, she’d prefer to “let them decide for themselves how they identify,” she says. So for now, she’s calling herself “butch and queer.” Or “whatever.”