Today We Have Naming of Parts

by Katherine Cummings

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

Adam named the animals to demonstrate his mastery of lesser creatures. He then ruled their lives and controlled their behaviour. We have outgrown the need for myths yet there are still those who claim the power to name and label, and build boxes around, the infinite variations of the human animal. Foremost among these box-builders are psychiatrists and psychologists, striving to create hard edges for their soft science and to make names for themselves by inventing names for others.

J. Michael Bailey, Head of the Psychology Department at North ­Western University in Chicago is just such a man. His recently published "The Man Who Would Be Queen; the science of gender bending and transsexualism", is ill ­informed and offensive from its title and cover to its final conclusions. There is very little of a scientific nature in Bailey's work. It is anecdotal and depends far more on the prurient imagination of Professor Bailey than on verifiable evidence.

The book opens with the case study of a "feminine boy" (Bailey's term) named Danny who prefers dolls and dresses to baseball and trousers and who is carted off to counsellors and psychologists to seek a "cure". At the end of the book Bailey encounters Danny again and we are assured that Danny will almost certainly grow up to be a gay man (the lesser of two evils?), because few "feminine boys" actually seek sex reassignment. The force of this ending is compromised by Bailey's admission to a friend that he invented the episode, or, as we would say, lied.

Bailey has adopted some of his theory from Ray Blanchard, of the Clarke Institute, in Toronto, who asserted twenty years ago that there are only two kinds of transsexual. There are homosexual transsexuals, who are feminine in appearance and behaviour from early childhood and go through the transsexual process in order to have sex with straight men; and there are autogynephiliacs (now that's a label!) who transition from male to female much later in life, and do so because they are in love with their own female images. Bailey chooses to ignore female-to-male transsexuals because they do not fit his bizarre theory.

A number of respected transsexual academics have attacked Bailey's book and it was recently denounced by John Bancroft, Director of the Kinsey Institute, at a meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research. Bancroft rose at the end of Bailey's presentation to state that he had read Bailey's book and cautioned Bailey against "calling this book science".

Fortuitously, two books on transgender themes have recently appeared, as the Bailey furore reaches a crescendo, and both can be used to demonstrate the superficiality of Bailey's "research". The first of these if is an anthology of first-person accounts, Finding the Real Me, edited by Tracie O'Keefe and Katrina Fox. The second is a transgender autobiography, She's Not There, by Jennifer Finney Boylan, an academic at Colby College in Maine.

The anthology shows up the restricted keyhole view taken by Bailey in considering only two kinds of transsexual. In O'Keefe and Fox's book there are twenty-six accounts and they include male-to­-female, female-to-male, asexual, bisexual, androgyne, metagender, early transition and late transition from a variety of cultures, including Chinese, Japanese, Czech­oslovakian, English, Scottish, Australian, American and Canadian. Yet I am sure the editors would not claim that they have done more than sample the gender diverse spectrum. In an earlier book by O'Keefe (Sex, Gender and Sexuality) forty-seven variations on the theme of gender/sex/sexuality were identified.

Boylan's book, which describes the transition of James Boylan, novelist and academic, into Jennifer Boylan, is better written than most. It is forthright, informative, witty, happy and heart-breaking. "I share a birthday with Kris Kristofferson and Meryl Streep," she writes, "both of whom I came to resemble, though not at the same time ...".

Boylan is one of the fortunate few whose wife and children have stood by her through transition, but the reader's heart goes out to all of them as marital tensions drive them to the brink of separation and despair.

In contrast to the assertion by Blanchard, echoed by Bailey, that late-transitioning transgenders do not really feel the urge to change in childhood, but rather fabricate stories of early desires to belong to the "opposite" gender to validate their mature-age transition, Boylan recounts stories of a childhood lived partly in the real world and partly in the fantasy world of heart's desire. She lived the typical lonely life of the transgender, conforming outwardly but always with part of her mind dwelling in worlds where sex is mutable at will, or where arrival on a sex-change planet will miraculously transform the intrepid space explorer from male to female. (My own fantasies involved the need for secret agents to be transformed physically in order to carry out vital missions for the war effort, or mad scientists who for no good reason would obligingly kidnap me to further their experiments in sex reassignment.) But like most transgenders, Boylan trod a perilous line where suicide often seemed to be the next logical step and despair was the most easily recognisable emotion.

Boylan was fortunate to have a loving family and a good mind. She was able to sublimate her need for a new gender role in study and in music. Like a great many transgenders she fended off the day of reckoning and when it came she was better able to cope, even though life's delays also added to the complications and responsibilities she faced in transition. It probably helped, too, for her to have found employment in academe, although I know of several cases where transgender academics have been hounded out of their employment by bigotry and ignorance.

Germaine Greer did her best a few years ago to have transgender academic Rachael Padman sacked from her teaching position at an all ­ women's college, on the grounds that Padman was not a "real" woman. The college stood firm and Greer lost. One can only wonder if Greer would have welcomed female-to-male transgendered academics with their beards, male­ pattern baldness and other stigmata of masculinity in her all-woman college on the grounds that, after all, they were not "real" men?

O'Keefe and Fox's anthology and Boylan's autobiography confirm that those of us who prefer to have our bodies modified to conform to our reassigned gender role do so for self-fulfillment, not to facilitate sex with the newly-opposite sex.

Observant readers will have noticed that I use the terms "transsexual" and "transgender" as if they were interchangeable. In some circles this would be disputed hotly on the grounds that the older term, "transsexual", refers to those who undertake reassignment surgery whereas "transgender" refers to those who decline to have their bodies tampered with despite their assertion that they belong to the "other" sex. There is, however, a growing view that it is not sex which is at issue, and certainly not sexuality, but gender role, which is a social (some would even say a grammatical) construct. It is argued that sex cannot be changed since it derives from genetic and chromosomal bases. Possibly gender cannot be changed either, if we are to believe that almost all transgendered people are aware of the conflict between their assigned gender and their innate gender from their earliest memories. But gender role can certainly be changed and gender reassignment (with or without surgery) is designed to bring innate gender and gender role into congruence. There is growing use of the term "transgender" both as an umbrella term for all gender diverse variations and for the narrower part of the spectrum formerly defined as "transsexual". For similar reasons the term "gender affirmation" is starting to supplant "gender reassignment".

Our understanding of transgender is developing at an amazing pace. While hardly exponential, the curve is steep and becoming steeper as more and more people come forward to assert their transgender status and demand appropriate legal and human rights. New techniques are being evolved to provide quicker, easier, more convincing rearrangements of the bits and pieces which discriminate the sexes.

Legal rights, however, remain a dog's breakfast of conflicting decisions caused by the division of legislative responsibilities between national and provincial legislatures. In Australia, for instance, several States have moved to amend birth certificates for registered transgenders, but the Marriage Act comes under Federal jurisdiction and the Australian Government continues to deny transgenders the right to marry in their new gender role.

This obstacle was circumvented recently when a female-to-male transgender's marriage to a genetic female was validated by the Family Court on the grounds that the husband was a man in the eyes of his family, friends and society and innate gender at the time of marriage was the touchstone, not gender assigned at the time of birth. This decision was later upheld by the Full Bench of the Family Court.

New Zealand, with its enviably simple legislative system, is well ahead of most of the world in its recognition of transgenders although the United States and Canada are also making progress.

In Australia there seems to be a growing, if mixed, recognition of the transgender community. Why now? The first factor is the passage of time since the first widely publicised reassignment case in Western society. Christine Jorgensen, an American who traveled from the United States to Denmark for gender reassignment, was outed by the press in December 1952, just over half a century ago. For some time she was a world celebrity and millions of words were written about her. But she, and the few cases which followed (and even preceded) her were seen as a very small sub-set of humanity, a curiosity posing no threat to the traditional fabric of society.

Years passed and transgenders became ever more visible and vocal. The image was no longer one of an amusing freak of nature to be viewed performing in a night club, or read about in lurid tabloids, but rather of a person who might be a work colleague or the boy or girl next door.

Social attitudes hardened and demeaning terms like "gender-bender" were coined to trivialise what was often an emotional trauma and a familial tragedy. There are now many autobiographies that have attest to the variety of experience encountered in the process of transition. The accounts written by the British writer, Jan Morris (Conundrum), and Australian female impersonator Carlotta (He Did It Her Way) have little in common.

Jan Morris, the mature husband and father transitioned relatively late in life whereas Carlotta the feminine boy turned homosexual transsexual was barely out of her teens. Jan Morris, and virtually every other transgender who writes an autobiography (or an essay for a gender diverse anthology) describes an early childhood desire to belong to the "other" gender. Some learn very early in life that if they admit their desire they will be ridiculed at best, punished at worst. Most, unaware that they are not unique in their desire to assume the other gender role, keep quiet and try to conform. Some become very good at hiding their desires and progress through puberty, teenage and adulthood without revealing their core belief that they are other-gendered. By the time they become aware of the fact that transgenders have existed in every age and every culture they may be committed to a life where they have accepted family responsibilities (parental or marital) that apply a brake to any thought of transition.

When Christine Jorgensen was outed I was seventeen and had embarked on a university career. Suddenly my world was turned upside down by the knowledge that my impossible dream was a possible dream. I agonised for some time, then decided that too many people would be hurt if I were to throw everything away in the hope that I could follow in Christine's footsteps. I sublimated my need in cross-dressing and day-dreaming and later married and fathered three children. It was not until I was fifty-one that my marriage foundered and I went forward to gender reassignment because I could do nothing else. The loss of my marital family was an agony and the subsequent divorce and annulment of my marriage were painful in the extreme.

Like most transgenders I thought often of suicide. It is sometimes only a distinctively quirky sense of humour that saves us from self-harm. When I woke from the anaesthetic after reassignment and the surgeon congratulated me, my first words were, "I've changed my mind, put it all back." He knew me well enough to respond, "Too late, it's gone to the delicatessen"; and a Melbourne friend, Julie Peters, tells of confessing her situation to her brother, who considered the situation solemnly for some time and then said "Can I have your boy clothes?"

There seems to be a growing acceptance of transgenders in society. I am often called on to speak to university classes, conferences or public meetings on the topic of transgender and I usually start by asking if anyone in the audience knows a transgendered person at first hand. When I first did this in 1987 there were very few hands raised. Now there are many, and question time usually demonstrates compassion and intelligent interest. It is possible that the transgender community is surfing in the wake of the feminist movement and the gay and lesbian liberation movement and benefiting from other human rights movements that have been so characteristic of the last half century. The transgender community is certainly associated in many minds with gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Many groups use the G.L.B.T. formula (sometimes with an added I for intersex). The inclusion of transgenders results partly from the natural inclination of disadvantaged groups to make common cause, and partly from the confusion caused by the older term "transsexual" which sounds as if it belongs with "homosexual" and "bisexual". A transsexual can in fact be homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual or asexual so that to some extent transgenders ride on the coat tails of the G.L.B. successes through an accident of language rather than identity of interest.

Many transgenders transition to their preferred gender role and then melt into society, pursuing their private lives and keeping their own counsel. This would normally be everyone's preference, since there is little point in leaving the closet in order to enter a ghetto. But the hidden transgenders have left the visible field to female impersonators, sex workers and exhibitionists and thereby skewed public perception of what a transgender is, or can be. Today, fortunately, there are more and more educated, articulate and socially conscious transgenders willing to stand up and be counted and prepared to work towards amelioration of social, human and legal rights, in defiance of those who would seek to label and contain transgenders within the rigid palisades of ignorance and prejudice.

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