Comparing the Africa of Stephen—the dashing if self-centered young architect working across war-torn countries and enjoying exotic safaris while oblivious to danger—to the Africa of Chloe is daunting. My few times back in Africa as Chloe have been familiar and yet strange, as I now look out through a woman’s eyes and own my feminine sensibilities. I no longer feel any desire to impress, only to soak in the essence of this remarkable continent and its warm and gracious people. Africa has taught me so much about being present as myself in the world. Words can illuminate, but they can also get in the way, and what it means to be embodied differently while back in old and familiar environments and cultures is beyond my powers of description—except to say that there is a profound comfort in being myself, no matter where I am. Pursuing an intellectual analysis of being Chloe in Africa pushes me toward the constrained and inadequate nomenclature of the complicated and unevenly understood transgender phenomenon, which can best be described as evolving. The science that attempts to get a grasp on what being transgender entails remains in its infancy. Traditional, cultural, and often pernicious terminologies compete and confuse, while insulting stereotypes of transgender women (but almost never of transgender men) proliferate with galling durability. Current transgender vocabulary will do little to help me unpack Africa’s role in my life, and what gender had to do with it. I will simply take pleasure in knowing that Africa has received Chloe as herself—as me. Africa isn’t changed by that reception, but I have been.
So what is this change? Gender theorist Judith Butler argues that gender emerges through a series of acts repeated by a person, which are always subject to further changes. She believes that gender is conceptualized as repetitive social fictions that are created and built over time. In turn these social fictions are embodied as truth or natural through the performance of what she termed “social scripts.”11 What were my social scripts? Like all persons, transgender or not, I was routinely taught to conform to my assigned (male) gender as normalized in the American society of my time. For decades, and at times with great urgency, I was trained in manhood by a process that has its roots in the very origins of human society. Despite complete social immersion in a gender category, I upset everything by insisting that it simply didn’t work for me. I could only have made such a self-ish claim if I possessed a vantage point upon which to stand and push back from. That point of leverage for me, and for my transgender sisters and brothers, is our sense of who we are authentically at our cores. It’s a strong if inconvenient rebuttal and not one that Butler and others with similar convictions want to address.
The transgender author Julia Serano has made some headway in effectively targeting academics such as Butler, and all those who’ve taken no notice of the pervasive “core identity” argument shared among so many transgender persons. My own life similarly offers a rebuttal to the claims of Butler, but also to those who argue that our bodies provide the essential, biological, natural explanation of what constitutes gender. Despite over five decades of repetitive (and, I would argue, very persuasive) per formance of a male script—sometimes in exaggerated formats such as my Stephen life as an international adventurer—I completely failed to perfor-matively constitute a sustainable male gender. Even with the potent help of male hormones, male chromosomes, and a demonstrably male physical body, my gender dissonance remained and progressively became more unbearable. Serano’s alternative explanation—that each person possesses a subconscious sex that transgender persons come to discern in ways that cisgender persons cannot—resonates entirely with my lived experience.
At least within those more liberal un-Trumped enclaves where such discussions are welcomed, we can debate where gender is located, and what it means to transition gender. In much of the world, however, the gender identity dialogue is not articulated in terms of “performative” versus “natural” terms; instead it’s culturally imposed and not subject to revision on any terms. Rigid societal strictures determine that you are the sex and gender that your genitals marked you to be at birth, and any attempt to deal with internal gender dissonance by rejecting your biological sex assignment and redefining your gender identity is perceived by members of such societies as wrong, or even dangerous. In most traditional societies such as the ones that I encountered throughout Africa, gender roles are highly proscribed and define important power relationships, as well as carrying with them deep societal meaning. Challenges to such social gender structures and identities are deemed unacceptable, and transgender persons’ appeals for understanding, support, or some modicum of acceptance are generally unsuccessful.
Appeals for understanding may be successful or not, but ultimately the task of any transgender person is to reconcile the gender dissonance within, and to find an authentic way to be present in the world. Or not to—many of us do our best to make the irreconcilable simply go away. In my case, I gradually moved from a roughly workable persona as a sensitive, artistic boy to attempt to become Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the daring and intrepid adventurer forging a new life in the relative wilds of East Africa, and later South Africa, and even the Gaza Strip. It was a good, lively, even at times glamorous script while it lasted, and it came close to convincing me of my manliness. I pushed it for all it was worth, taking up edgy sports, going on camping expeditions deep into untamed environments, pushing myself to be a leader among men. In Kenya, I boldly started my own firm of architects and planners, and rapidly expanded that firm to operate from branch offices in four African countries. I lost myself in being busy, in being technically proficient, in being “the man,” or “bwana Stephen.” I drank too much scotch, competed ferociously for architectural commissions, travelled on projects to extremely dangerous locales in places such as southern Sudan, war-torn Somalia, Guinea, Ethiopia (while under the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam), Togo, Ghana, and tiny, hot Djibouti. The male adventurer/risk-taker/intrepid mode persisted even after my initial decade in Africa. My manhood would be tested in travels on the rivers and backcountry of Guyana in South America, and in El Salvador during its civil war. Africa again pulled me back, as I returned to work in South Africa just after the end of apartheid, and as a professor in the all-male philosophy faculty at Uganda’s Makerere University. Everyone bought into the manly version of Stephen, and many were quite impressed by it. I had Butler’s scripts down pat.
There were times when I got my comeuppance, times when I knew that it was all a sham even if I had no idea what to do about it or what it even meant. I just assumed that all men felt tested in their masculine performance, but in my case there were moments of unsought gender clarity that left me at best bemused, at worst deeply shaken. Once in 1982, when visiting the historic Kenyan coastal town of Lamu, the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement in that country, my friends and I stayed in one of the tall buildings made decades ago of coral stone and mangrove timber. The small but very tall building had an inner courtyard, a veranda, and an elaborately carved wooden door, but the only place cool enough to sleep comfortably was the roof terrace. While the sea breeze kept us relatively cool, a nearby stone house with its own roof terrace had a party going on well into the night. The revelers had only one song, or perhaps they only liked one song, and it wasn’t traditional Swahili Taarab music. Instead of that distinctive and pleasant mix of Arabic, Indian, and African influences, we were the unwilling beneficiaries of high volume repetitions of the 1978 hit by the Village People, “Macho Man.” The irony wasn’t lost on me, and the irritation of being assaulted by the unceasing repetition of this mindless song was only overshadowed by my own realization that “macho man” wasn’t me, and never would be. I wasn’t quite ready to throw masculinity aside completely, but the awareness was making its presence known. The truth wasn’t to be denied, even as I hunkered down on that roof terrace in a 700-year-old town on a quaint island off the fabled Kenyan coast.
Perhaps the Chloe within was finding her own way of signaling to me?
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11. In her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler took the position that gender identity is a “performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo.”