Learning about transsexuality from transsexuals
by Kiira Triea
During the winter of 1992/1993 I went through a profound
experience which I called a kind of constructive breakdown or
awakening during which I started to come to terms
understanding my treatment as a young intersex teenager at the
Psychohormonal Research Unit of Johns Hopkins Hospital. I had been
told there that I was extremely rare biologically, which was not
actually true, and intersex clients at the PRU were discouraged from
meeting other intersex people. We were taught to keep our histories a
secret, which of course contributed to the shame we felt as intersex
children, teenagers and adults. I had never met another intersex
person and the public awareness of intersexuality at that time was
non-existent so the first thing I wanted to do was find out if what I
had been taught at the PRU was actually true - most importantly, that
intersex children who have surgery to "correct their bodies" became
happy well adjusted adults who were able to function sexually. I had
no experience at all doing activism and did not consider myself
capable of doing any, after all I had made my living since I was 16 as
a rock and blues guitar player. If it turned out that I really was
completely biologically unique and that I was alone in being messed up
sexually and emotionally then I would accept it because I just wanted
to know the truth.
I had tried contacting Hopkins and asking if there was any support or
counseling for former intersex clients of the PRU and was ignored so I
then tried using the internet. I wrote on newsgroups and mailing lists
for medical issues and birth defects, or those that were concerned
with endocrinology but had very little success (though later that
changed). I also decided to try and talk to transsexuals about their
experiences with surgery because I wondered if they had any problems
with sexual function. I thought that there might be some commonality
of experience since m2f transsexals also have vaginoplasty and I
presumed that they were as concerned about sexual function as I
was. Many people, especially transgendered people, often think of
intersexuality and transsexuality as being related somehow but the
truth is that the majority of intersex people, those with some history
of intersex related medicalization, are only about as likely to have
knowlege or first hand experience with transsexuals as any other
non-transsexual person. I knew nothing at all about transsexuality in
1993. I had some preconceptions about m2f transsexuals however, for
instance I thought that they were probably very feminine and had been
feminine as boys and simply found it more practical to live as girls
rather than as their assigned birth sex, in a similar way to some
intersex children who sometimes decide to change their sex identity
as teenagers because they do not fit in to their assigned sex very well
socially.
When I began talking with m2f transsexuals on the internet and in real
life, by going to some transgendered or transsexual support group
meetings and introducing myself, I quickly learned that they did not
seem to be concerned with the things that I was concerned with. I was
amazed that many transsexuals told me that they did not care about
their libido or sexuality and that they would have vaginoplasty even
if they were told that it would make them anorgasmic. They were
interested and polite for the most part but seemed to misunderstand
that I was not unhappy because I had been assigned a wrong gender but
because I had been mistreated as an adolescent. A few told me that I
was very lucky to be a GG (genetic girl) and to have had "free"
surgery2 to correct my birth defect. I didn't understand
their view of their gender and identity, which seemed illogical
because they did not seem to be socialized very femininely, and I
wasn't interested in "gender" or "identity" at all anyway, so I
decided my growing personal and socio-political awareness of intersex
had nothing to do with transsexuality because obviously the two groups
had very dissimilar goals and experiences. My goal was simply to try
and find effective ways to stop unconsented intersex medicalization
and subsequent trauma.
Email from the edge
As
my personal efforts began to take on some context as activism, by
meeting other intersex people and sharing experiences and ideas, it
also became apparent that many m2f transsexuals (and a few f2m's as
well) wished to involve themselves in an exploitive way with intersex
people. I quickly learned about intersex wannabes, a group of people
who wrote to me or approached me when I spoke publicly presenting
themselves as "intersexuals" (or originally, "hermaphrodites") and
providing confabulated medical or social histories as evidence.
These people seemed to fall into a few different groups the first
being gynandromorphophiles, men who are paraphilically attracted to
feminine appearing people with breasts and a penis who they call
"she-males". Another group of people who wrote to me were
apotemnophilics or people who have a paraphilic interest in amputaion
or are drawn to amputees sexually. Some of these people seem to focus
specifically on genital amputation. The other group of non-IS people
who wrote to me were m2f transsexuals or transgendered people, some of
whom were also gynandromorphophilic ("chasers" for short)
themselves. I became interested in this phenomenon so I corresponded
with some of them and saved all of my email over the years from doing
web work and support for ISNA (Intersex Society of North America) and
CISAE (Coalition for Intersex Support Activism Education). My mail
spool file became a kind of historical record of the public awareness
of intersex as reflected by the personal and political needs of
certain types of male to female transsexuals and transgenderists,
whose narratives evolved along with the cultural acceptance of the
intersex movement.
"Don't quote Ovid to me"
Prior to the time when actual intersex activists began trying to
change the CTM (current treatment methodology) and increase awareness
of the traumatic sequelae of unconsented surgery, most peoples'
understanding of intersex was based on mythology. Early transsexual
narratives explaining their "intersexuality" were accordingly
mythological in construction. Around 1994 a frequent contributor to
transsexual discussion lists wrote a typical narrative to me explaining:
I am a hermaphrodite and I have a penis and vagina just like you. I
like the freedom and unique ability to function sexually as a male or
a female and I don't know why you are so negative about
hermaphroditism. As the poet Ovid shows, being a hermaphrodite is a
beautiful and special thing and I feel very fortunate.
I pointed out to the correspondent that during Ovid's time actual
intersex children were killed as neonates and I started putting "Don't
quote Ovid to me" in my email signature. My relationships with most m2f
transssexuals got worse and worse as I became more socially visible as
an intersex activist and as m2f transsexuals increasingly became aware of
the intersex movement.
Being an IS activist means always having to say you're sorry
Around 1995/1996 ISNA created a
web site for activism and I also created another activist website
called Intersex Voices. The ISNA website was more medical and
political and Intersex Voices was designed to educate about intersex
people as real human beings and not as interesting medical cases or
mythological beings, our own stories written in our own voice. Both
websites were very effective for both education and activism and in
providing support services for people who had experienced unconsented
harmful medicalization. An unfortunate side effect of our successful
activism was that as public knowlege of intersex narratives and the
specific types of intersex syndromes became more accessable so did the
ability of transsexuals to appropriate those narratives and histories
and lie to me. I estimated that the ratio of people who wrote to me
lying about their history to the number of people with actual
histories of intersex related medicalization to have been somewhere
between 50 and 100 to 1. These were not people who were confused about
the meaning of intersex, they were people who were actually providing
false narratives of non-existent histories and medical conditions in
order to deceive me with the purpose of being admitted to internet and
real life support groups specifically for intersex people only.
Transsexual narratives describing
their "intersexuality" always had similar characteristics in being
very biologically essentialist, intersex "caused" transsexuality, and
in being very heirarchal in construction. Popular syndromes were "True
herpmahroditism" (why be a boring "pseudo-hermaphrodite" when you have
a choice?) and Klinefelter's (the extra "X" chromosome explaining the
desire to be female). I began to wonder about the arrogance of a group
of people who imagined that they could successfully lie to actual
members of the unique group they sought to be a part of, some
of whom were becoming recognized as medical experts in their own right
as part of their activism. I suggested that transsexuals try using
medline before lying to me in lieu of making up what I called
"biological gobbelygook" to describe nonsensical syndromes and I
suppose some took my advice because their stories to me sometimes
contained the journal write-ups of people I knew personally and once
even my own.
These false stories were easily recognizable of course but the volume
of them was annoying and it was sometimes also an emotional drain to
have so many people lying to me when I was concerned only with trying
to do activism and support. It was tiresome having to cope with sexual
fetishists who were paraphilically attracted to "hermaphrodites" and
transsexuals who imagined that they would be more socially legitimate
as "intersexuals". It became somewhat more emotionally and financially
difficult for me trying to provide support, though never impossible of
course. I still had no interest in concepts like "gender identity",
"transgender" or "gender expression" and was told by one well known
transsexual activist that I was naive and unsophisticated as an
activist because I was focussed only on intersex issues, stopping
unconsented medicalization, surgery and subsequent iatrogenic
trauma. I was called an "eliteist" and "exclusionist" because I did
not allow transsexuals to join the intersex support groups I ran for
ISNA and CISAE, as if I were running an exclusive club and not
support groups for severely traumatized people. Finally, I began to
understand transsexuality, as it was expressed by socially privileged
former men, in terms of being antithetical to my understanding of the
underlying socio-political causes of intersex oppression and at odds
with my goals as an intersex activist.
Certainly there are many conceptual frameworks within which intersex
can be understood but I found feminism to be usefull because it
addressed the core issues of what sexualities and what bodies are
allowable by an androcentric technocracy and answered questions like
why would doctors create non-functional female genitals in children,
not bothering to determine the results of those interventions for
decades. I also began to to wonder why the natural biological
variation of intersex, which did not actually result in socially
expressed "gender variance", was not allowed while the biological
variation and socially obvious gender variance that resulted when
adult men attempted to modify their bodies to become female was
allowed.
Despite my alleged proletarian approach to activism I actually began
to gain some theoretical insights about "gender identity" and
transsexuality subsequent to the aggressive attempts by transsexuals
to subsume and colonize intersex as an "identity" which they could
utilize in their single minded quest for social validation. My
personal experiences with m2f transsexuals had led me to to be curious
about their behavior, as a group, toward myself as an activist within
the feminist context of class and patriarchy. Eventually I began to
think of them as being on the other side of a profound cultural and
cognitive divide of experience and motivation despite their assertions
that we were all part of the the same similarly oppressed group. I did
not understand their motivations entirely, which seemed paradoxical to
me, and I began to think of transgendered politics as being about the
politicization of paraphilia. Out of neccessity, a need to protect
myself and establish boundaries which most m2f transsexuals evidently
did not understand, I divorced my activism as much as possible from
transgender involvement. I was simply tired of being misunderstood,
insulted and exoticized.
Gender Identity: it's anything you want it to be
Because I was a client at the Psychohormonal Research Unit as a
teenager I was aware of the outcome of several "interesting cases"
there besides myself. Certain types of intersex and non-intersex
children were experimentally valuable to medical researchers at the
PRU, for instance females who had been exposed in utero to progestin
and normal biological males who had been accidentally suffered
irrepairable genital damage. Progestin was given to some women from
the 50s to the early 70s to prevent miscarriage (it did not by the
way) and it had the effect sometimes of causing genital development in
females like enlarged clitoris or fused labia. Some of these children
were raised nominally as boys until their period started as
teenagers. Just as some normal male children had their penises
acidentally removed by botched surgery, progestin in a way
"accidentally" attached a "penis" to an otherwise normal female and
positioned them to be utilized in theoretical experiments concerning
sex identity, sexuality and gender.
Money claimed that several females who had been raised as males due to
androgenized genitals had integrated successfully socially, as normal
males despite his understanding that progestin is not systemically
androgenic, unlike for instance the prolonged exposure to testosterone
that some females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia experience in
utero, many of whom choose as teenagers to live very advantageously as
males. One of the female children utilized for these experiments was
living not too successfully as a very
feminine gay boy who I became friends with long before I had
sufficient insight and motivation to do activism. Jamie knew a lot
about some of the people who worked at the PRU and some of the clients
as well and I learned from him that another experimentally valuable
child, known then as "the twin", David Reimer, had not in fact gone on
to live as a female as John Money claimed for decades but had actually
started living as a boy again at age 14, subsequent to years of
typical traumatic medicalization as a child and teenager.
I thought it was interesting that prior to the truth about Money's
deception becoming widely public in 1997, m2f transsexuals often cited
David Reimer's erroneously reported outcome in support of a "natural"
etiological understanding of male to female transsexuality, presumably
because it was a narrative history of a biological male who had
genital surgery and was therefore "female" and who "went on rather
unremarakably to live her life without incident" (quoted from a
transsexuals private email to me) as reported falsely by Money. This
was illogical because the transsexuals who were citing Money's report
had not been raised as girls and did not seem like women behaviorly
when I met them.
Even more stunningly paradoxical to me however was that even after the
truth became known, primarily due to the efforts of Mickey Diamond,
Keith Sigmundson and also activists Cheryl Chase and myself,
transsexuals still continued to cite David Reimer's life as supportive
of their own understanding of their transsexuality, now as a "natural"
consequence of their "immutable inner sense of gender identity", again
completely illogically since they were normal biological males who
were choosing voluntarily to live as women and not as their biological
birth sex as males, as had David Reimer. Evidently the concept of
"gender identity" was so plastic and socially privileged that its
assertion was all that was required for acceptance, not any actual
logic or meaningful scientific data.
My sense of surrealistic ennui as an activist reached an all time high
when David Reimer appeared on the Oprah television show which included
m2f transsexuals Dana Rivers and Dierdre McCloskey, whose
autobiography Crossings: A Memoir documents a long history of
paraphilic transvestism prior to choosing to have sex reassignment
surgery after a very successful career as a man. These transsexuals
presented themselves as experts on the subject of "gender identity"
and participated proactively in diverting the real issues of human
rights for intersex and other children into a irrelevant
"transsexualized" discussion of their own "gender identities", itself
one of the theoretical concepts which led to the dehumanizing
treatment of children at the Psychohormonal Research Unit and other
teaching hospitals. It was incomprehensible to me that anyone would
imagine that these people had any commonality with or understanding of
the lives of children who had been psycho-sexually abused3 at the PRU
and other hospitals where traumatic unasked for medical interventions
were inflicted upon children and teenagers who were deemed interesting
enough to be able to provide insights about "real" human beings, like
Dana Rivers and Dierdre McCloskey. I began then in 1997 to understand
transsexuality and its supporting model of "gender identity" not as
medical syndrome but as a social instrument which eradicated
understanding in order to preserve social privilege.
Another understanding of transsexuality
In 1997 I joined Michael Bailey's discussion list SEXNET in order to
speak first hand to sexologists and other people interested in
intersex. Fellow activists Cheryl Chase and Heike Boedeker were also
on the listserv along with people I knew as allies from our activism
like Anne Fausto-Sterling, Mickey Diamond, Suzanne Kessler and Sharon
Preves. Transsexuality was also discussed of course and Ray Blanchard
and Anne Lawrence were contributors. I learned about Blanchard's
typology and accepted that it must be accurate because Anne Lawrence's
arguments were persuasive as a member of one of two types of
transsexuals, autogynephilic and homosexual, described by Blanchard. I
was aware that many other transsexuals who seemed to me to also fit
the autogynephilic category argued that Blanchard's theory was
completely incorrect but I found their arguments much less convincing
because I had met a lot of transsexuals as an activist and didn't
really agree with their ideas about "gender identity" at all and
because many of them were also the same transsexuals who had been
lying to me personally about being intersexed and who had behaved in
harmful ways toward my efforts as an intersex activist. It all seemed
to tie together logically with my experiences with transsexuals up to
that time, especially since I had also recently met members of the
other group, called homosexual transsexuals, and not just some, but
all of them, had told me that they considered Blanchard's typology to
be not only correct but socio-politically advantageous to
support.
When I finally met the "other kind" of m2f
transsexual it was immediately obvious to me why they were a socially
invisible population and why I had known nothing of their existence
for years. Occasionally I would speak at schools about intersex and I
found that I would often be engaged by autogynephilic transsexuals
very directly after speaking and that many of them would tell me that
they too "were intersexuals", but if any intersex people had attended
they would wait shyly in the background until I was alone to speak to
me and usually the first thing they would say was something more like
"I'm not intersexed, but...". The first homosexual transsexuals I met,
hsts/transkids, behaved the same way. None of them had tried to write
to me for several reasons, first was that they were not motivated to
acquire any other legitimizing identity as were autogynephilic
transsexuals because their social identities and personal identities
were congruent. They simply seemed like normal feminine girls or women
whose social "gender" or what Suzanne Kessler calls "gender
attribution"4 was immediately obvious both in their
appearance and behavior and required no theoretical explanation. They
did not present themselves to me as intersex nor did they advocate for
transsexuality to be classified as an "intersex condition" because, in
common with intersex children, they were a socially devalued
population who were often medicalized harmfully as children.
Some also told me that they felt reluctant about talking
to me because although they sometimes understandably wondered if hsts
might be related to intersex in some way, they were also very aware
that autogynephilic transsexuals often lied and attempted to present
themselves as intersexuals. In my experience, hsts are like intersex
people in sharing some behaviors based on the commonality of their
unique experiences and one of those behaviors is that once they become
socially aware of autogynephilic transsexuals they do not wish either
their behavior as individuals or their group identity as hsts to be
confused with those of autogynephilic transsexuals. Initially, hsts
knew they had to introduce themselves to me in person because any
meaningful social label which they could use to explain themselves to
me had been effectively appropriated and made meaningless by
autogynephilic transsexuals. I had never seen any transkids or adult
transkids in any of the groups of transgendered and transsexual people
I had met because they were so behaviorly and socially different that
those groups were as meaningless to them as hsts as they were to me as
an IS activist.
The differences between hsts and agp transsexuals were so obvious and
remarkable that I could not think of both groups simultaneously as
"transsexuals" at all. I began to think of autogynephilc transsexuals
as the "primary transsexuals" because transsexuality had more
immediate relevancy to their social identity and the majority of
socially visible transsexuals actually were all autogynephilic. Hsts
transsexuals sometimes called themselves transkids or if adults,
ex-transkids because all of their immediate experience with
"transsexuality" happened to them as children and teenagers. As
adolescents and adults it was impossible to see them as anything other
than girls or women, much in the same way that I knew my AIS women
friends. I had heard this comparison made many times by autogynephilic
transsexuals and now I realized that as I had always explained to them
the argument was not only colonizing of the social experiences of AIS
women but it was also an act of erasure of the hsts girls and women
for whom the comparison actually might have some
meaning. Autogynephilic transsexuals were in effect using the
appropriated identities of the hsts transkids whose actual social
presence they had eliminated to argue for and gain further social
acceptance as adults, as in the argument that "transsexuals are like
AIS women". One problem with this argument is that it may benefit
transsexual adults who feel that they will be absolved of blame if
their transsexuality is labeled a biological condition, but for
intersex children, and the transsexual children who are unacceptably
feminine from early childhood and who were also harmed subsequent to
their atypical behavior and appearance, this label remains
developmentally destructive; the primary mission of intersex activisim is
to prevent harm to children, not defining socially acceptable identities
for adults.
This was also an ineffective argument to present to me simply because
my definitions of "intersex" were not rigidly essentialist and sharply
demarcated, as agp transsexuals assumed (angrily accusing me of being
"exclusionist") but were non-procedurally defined in terms of
experiencial commonality. I had never been very concerned for instance
with whether people who needed to join ISNA and CISAE supports groups
were "really intersexed" so much as I was that they were able to
derive benefit and give mutual support based on the very specific
common experiences shared by intersex people. I invited the hsts
people I came to know in real life to the small CISAE support group
meetings that I had started because there was enough commonality of
experience and need for the specific type of support that those
meeting provided that I thought everyone would benefit, which turned
out to be true. While autogynephilic transsexuals had often lied to me
to gain access to those support groups or even demanded that I allow
transsexuals into them, I usually had to gently encourage hsts people
to attend because they did not want to intrude into someone else's
space and were as shy about being out as intersex people were.
I learned quickly from my hsts friends that autogynephilic
transsexuals had as a group accomplished with homosexual transsexuals
what they had been trying individually and as a group to accomplish
unsuccessfully with intersex people, that is, appropriate and redefine
to their own advantage the actual experiences and social realities of
a completely separate class with whom they shared no commonality of
experience other than the loose association of genital surgery. The
only reason that intersex cannot successfully be subsumed into the
meaningless social discourse of "gender identity" is because intersex
activists have a separate identifiable social-medical identity,
presence and activist mission which effectively prevents that from happening.
Extricating real intersex issues from discourses on "gender identity"
is part of the work of intersex activists. "Intersex" is as loose and
imperfect a descriptive social class as "intersexuality" is as a
medical definition, but it is nontheless effective, not as an
identity, which is irrelevant to intersex people, but as a label and
tool for social change. Hsts people have told me that they see the
value of the autogynephilia/homosexual model of transsexuality not so
much as a descriptive behavioral and etiological typology, though
certainly it is, but in the social recognition it gives to the hsts
people who have been erased and harmed by the rationalization of
autogynephilic paraphilia as a problem of "gender identity". I believe
them because people need a name to effect social change.
Toward a new understanding of gender. A less harmful one.
The problems I have with the transsexual (autogynephilic)
understanding of "gender identity" are the same problems I have with
the current treatment methodology for intersex children. They both
define "gender" in a purely essentialist way which actually destroys
any meaningful relationship between socialization and "gender", they
both depend upon and enforce the cultural invisibility of devalued
populations (intersex people and hsts people), and they are both
destructive to sexuality and understanding sexuality. If "gender
identity" is a meaningful descriptive model which is applicable to everyone
and not just to autogynephilic transsexuals then it would supply answers
to questions and not create them:
- Why are intersex children subjected to unconsented traumatic genital surgery
to prevent the "cognitive dissonence" of gender ambiguity which is
assumed to result from their unacceptable genitals while phenotypically normal
adult males who have been effectively socialized as men generally become very
gender variant as a result of voluntary transsexual medicalization?
- Why is the "gender expression" of spontaneously feminine boys labeled Childhood
Gender Identity Disorder and most often therapeutically discouraged and the "gender
expression" of adult male crossdressers and autogynephilics socially and legally
sanctioned?
- Why do the treatment protocols for m2f transsexuals fail to address treatment of
extremely feminine boys at a meaningful age, when it will help them achieve good social
and sexual function as girls, while facilitating feminization of adult men who will
become less socially and sexually functional as a result?
- Why are intersex children of all socio-economic backgrounds subjected to unasked
for destructive surgery early to "correct" their bodies and gender development before
they can express gendered behavior, while hsts transkids expressing early and unambiguous
feminine gender behavior are denied obviously helpful medical procedures as teenagers
because they are "too young"?
Understanding the logical inconsistancies behind the idea of "gender
identity" as applied to autogynephilic transsexuality is much easier
when the other two groups of people most affected are also included,
intersex children and hsts transkids. The answers to questions like these
must be truly inclusive of intersex people and hsts people and explain
things like gender, sex identity and sexuality for everyone, not just
autogynephilic transsexuals.
1. Triea K, (1999)
Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit in Intersex
In the Age of Ethics. Alice Dreger editor. University Publishing Group
2. Alexander T, (1998) "An
Analog for Childhood Sexual Abuse" Originally published on Intersex Voices (CISAE)
3. Kessler S, McKenna W, (1978) Gender: An Ethnomethodological
Approach. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
|
