ULTIMATE SUBJECTS—bodies, sex, anatomy, gender, genes, hormones, chromosomes: identity. Sexuality, though causally and reciprocally dependent upon gender, is indubitably more complex, because it subsumes the entire range of behavior and psychology. What’s more, gender goes beyond being male or female. How does one explicate the tangle of anomalies, abnormalities, and antinomies of double sex? Changing one’s sex has to be one of the all-time most mysterious and daunting of transformations, even exceeding the province of art.
Gender is more malleable, inexplicable, and inscrutable than its dualistic inscriptions would have one believe, perhaps better likened to an adjustable slide rule that moves over and across the entire gamut of psychosexual binaries, while its formative impulses inform secondary sexual characteristics, object desire, fantasy transference and libidinal urge. Hence the continuum of trans-sex that exists—meaning not only changing sex but moving across the entire gender spectrum.
While men and women can easily get under each other’s skin, neither gender can get inside the other’s skin to comprehend what the opposite sex actually experiences. One can only surmise or simulate the other through mutual attraction or an appropriation of the other’s cultural roles, such as through cross-dressing. Thus an irresolvable psychological discrepancy not only inheres in the transference known as gender empathy, but is reinforced by an unbridgeable epistemological displacement as well. Transsexual beings move through an even more extreme confrontation with self and other than do most gay or bisexual individuals, and they embody psychosexual elements potentially inclusive of all sexual orientations and gender persuasions.
Several books in recent years on the transsexual (and transvestite) experience range over this fascinating frontier: Dean Kotula’s The Phallus Palace: Female to Male Transsexuals (2002), Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002), Amy Bloom’s Normal: CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, Hermaphrodites with Attitude (2002), and Jeffrey Eugenides’ best-selling Pulitzer-winning novel Middlesex (2002), about a hermaphrodite. Alice Domurat Dreger’s Hermaphrodites and the Medical Intervention of Sex (1998), Suzanne J. Kessler’s Lessons from the Intersexed (1998), and Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000) offer an array of informatively incisive, mind-bending insights that broker and illuminate any gender persuasion by expanding parameters and supplying (meta)structural ciphers for grounding the broadband spectrum of (trans)gender and trans-sex ontology.
It may be argued that the sexual revolution began in 1951, when ex-GI George Jorgensen became Christine and the shocking news of this gender change in Denmark exploded in headlines around the world. Christine Jorgensen’s transformation into a glamorous woman following hormone therapy and genital surgery led to a highly visible career in entertainment attended by unrelenting media attention that made her one of the most famous celebrities of her time. Boosted by Alfred Kinsey’s sociological surveys of America’s secret sexual practices, a new world order of public awareness about sexuality was inaugurated. And it continues to evolve with far-reaching psychosocial ramifications today. The history of gender reassignment surgery’s capacity to transform the body’s hormones and genitals was culturally transforming in its impact on the psychopathology of sexual taboos.
What makes the determination of gender the site of tangled complexities are eight criteria that are not always easily reconcilable or distinguishable: chromosomes, gonads, internal sex organs, hormonal profile, external genitalia, habits, sex of rearing and gender role, and orientation or “brain sex.” Further complicating the diagnosis are the distinctions between intersexuality (hermaphroditism), transvestism (many practitioners are heterosexual), and transgendered identities, along with straight, gay, and bisexual orientations. (“Transgendered” can include all categories and persuasions or can be constituted by a combination of any of them.)
The study of hormones belongs to the complex medical field of endocrinology. Joanne Meyerowitz cites Eugen Steinach’s discovery of their interactive potency when he transplanted gonads and ovaries between rats and guinea pigs in 1913 and observed the gender transmutations; within a few years human testicular transplants had developed. Also, the enigmatic physiological dimensions of sexuality involve evaluating how central the new medico-surgical procedures are for changing the psychosexual profiles of individuals who are convinced that nature made them the wrong biological sex.
In 1993, my own fascination with the subject resulted in an essay, “On Hermaphrodites,” which I excerpted and recorded for a dance solo, Dancing and Writing (On Hermaphrodites). I drew largely upon John Money’s pioneering work in his book Hermaphroditism. Art, too, can mirror this double conundrum: being a dancer, one experiences the somatic qualities of both sexes in the mercurial flow of movement and in the fluid equilibrium of constantly changing kinetic registers that require tensile strength complemented by grace and agility. During the intervening decade, the material that I had initially been seeking finally appeared: Alice Dreger and Suzanne Kessler provide historical and contemporary overviews that supplement the intersexed case studies pioneered by John Money at John Hopkins’ gender clinic, which later encountered contentious disagreement regarding the ethics of surgery for infants and children.
Alice Dreger picks up the historical conundrum of the evolution of diagnostic methodology where Foucault left off, tracing the origins of 19th-century clinical practice before there were chromosomes, genes, or sex change surgery. She then considers gender reassignment as a dilemma that parents and doctors face when attempting to interpret a newborn’s intersexed genitals and the consequences of surgery versus ambivalent identity for the individual (which can include loss of sensation and sexual potency, scarring, the need for repeated surgeries, anatomical complications, pain, incontinence, not to mention identity confusion and the like).
Dean Kotula, who changed gender to become a male, offers mind-bending photographs of female-to-male gender surgery in The Phallus Palace. He also contributes several dialogues he had with medical practitioners—including surgeon Milton Diamond, who declared that “the brain is the most sexual organ of the body”—to illuminate the process, noting that female-to-male conversion is less common and presents a tougher set of challenges, phalloplasty being much more difficult and expensive than vaginoplasty. The earliest gender surgeries date back to the second decade of the 20th century, in Germany (though corrective vaginoplasties originated in the 19th century), and involved the simple removal of the unwanted organs without any attempt to construct new genitals, a technology that required several more decades to pioneer.
On the heels of these books, Jeffrey Eugenides’ enchanting novel Middlesex explores the life of a modern-day hermaphrodite whose confusing lineage can be traced to the incestuous marriage of her/his Greek grandparents. Eugenides did a lot of research on intersexuality, including a reading of Foucault’s Herculine Barbin, about a person who lived in the 19th century and left a journal that Foucault later discovered. Barbin would now be classified as a male identifying as a female (because of exemplifying a pseudohermaphroditic 5-alpha-reductase deficiency). Eugenides’ prose mirrors a highly accomplished gender diffusion that’s presented as a latter-day (1974) memoir of Cal, now male, who traces his incestuous family’s history and his childhood as a girl with a masterful grace. His novel amalgamates the confusing psychological dissonance of gender dysphoria and delivers it with literary allure and alchemical panache. That Eugenides was savvy enough to create an original modern hermaphrodite, and a Pulitzer award-winning page-turner to boot, is testimony to the rare treatment of what has heretofore been considered an arcane if not taboo subject. Cal runs away from her family because an endocrinological specialist has recommended genital surgery, a strategy to which her parents want her to accede without informing the child about her options.
The private testimonies of actual transsexuals, who come from all walks of life, while attempting to enlighten the public about their unusual and ongoing processes of redefinition and transformation, often end up bewildering “normal” heterosexuals. These enigmas include accomplished, high visibility artists, here enumerated.
Let’s start with composer Walter Carlos, who won a Grammy in 1968 for his best-selling record Switched-On Bach and notoriety for his music for Stanley Kubrick’s movie A Clockwork Orange before becoming Wendy Carlos in May 1969 (though not having genital surgery until 1972, the same year as Jan Morris, and coming out in a provocative Playboy interview in 1976). Then there’s concert pianist David Buechner, winner of a dozen international piano competitions, “with an eclectic repertory, dizzying technical prowess and a flashy performing style” (New York Times Magazine, 9/13/98), who became Sarah in 1996. James Finney Boylan, a revered professor of literature and author at Colby College who became Jenny in 2002, wrote an engaging, light-hearted but seriously probing book, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (2003), and moved the issue further into the mainstream by appearing on Oprah. Ben A. Barres, formerly Barbara, is a pioneering scientist with a degree from MIT, a medical degree from Dartmouth, and a doctorate in neurobiology from Harvard, now a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Deirdre McCloskey, formerly Donald, is a renowned Harvard-trained economist, historian, author, and professor at the University of Illinois whose Crossing: A Memoir (1999) charted her transformation. Sports writer Mike Penner of The L.A. Times is now Christine Penner. Ray Carannante, now male, a licensed social worker at the LGBT Community Center of New York City, was profiled in the Times in November, 2006. And, before Christine Jorgensen, Laura Dillon had thirteen operations between 1946 and 1949 to become Dr. Michael Dillon, who wrote a book about hormones and transsexuality.
Gender per se is defined by a double dialectic based upon the designations of masculine and feminine traits. The idea of a being who is both sexes, a classical paradigm, has to be differentiated from the androgyne that represents an ideal fusion of archetypes while skirting the nitty-gritty issue of genitality.
Being is ontologically all-encompassing, but any particular being is differentiated by his, her, or its total body configuration, more specifically by the facticity of the flesh. Facticity discloses the embodiment of systemic evidence, the wavelength and amplitude of reality in its existential given-ness that informs corporeality. Flesh marks a virtual boundary and demarcates the body’s telepermeable membrane—the border thresholds between the invisible and disembodied. The experiences of transsexuals, and more distinctively and categorically what I would designate here all-inclusively as trans-sex, or the total movement of being as it becomes engendered across and within the entire spectrum of difference and identity, seems to offer the most tantalizing criteria not only for rectifying the reciprocal conundrums of sex and gender, but also for understanding the emerging horizon of future sexuality as well.
And because one’s psychological profile necessarily remains invisible, the transgendered are deemed the most problematic of people, revolutionary beings who have done something truly radical, even metaphysical in its implications. And yet, they’re precisely the people who can shed light on the complexities of gender itself and its psychosexual transformation. If photographs provide any evidence, those of James Boylan seem to reveal a physiologically indeterminate gender that appears to elude even the category of androgynous, so that being transgendered can incorporate a physical and psychical interfusion of both genders without the person actually being anatomically intersexed.
FROM MAE WEST and Greta Garbo to Tony Curtis, Charles Pierce, Lily Tomlin, Barry Humphries (Dame Edna), John Leguizamo, Rocky Horror, the Trocks, etc.—performers adept at impersonating the opposite sex have exercised an unmistakable charm and mercurial magic. Actually changing gender, however, is harrowing. Before electing genital surgery, one must undergo at least a year of hormonal treatments while living and dressing as the opposite sex. This happens while one is also undergoing counseling and psychotherapy, as well as grueling if not painful cosmetological and other medical procedures. So it’s not a decision that’s taken on a whim.
Understandably, notoriety and sensational titillation often attend those who cross gender barriers. They inspire an inherently abject fascination and outright incredulity. If one could understand and incorporate the knowledge and insights of the opposite sex, gender dualism would undoubtedly become less absolute, more transparent; in any case, they would be transformed. Most of us might be hard-pressed to understand the driving necessity for such a transformation, but the testimonies of transsexuals disclose elusive clues for unmasking their double image of the self.
Andreas Krieger, formerly Heidi, the 1986 East German shot-put champion who was unknowingly virilized in a secret state-sponsored steroid program, subsequently elected to have a sex-change operation in 1997. Dana Rivers, an award-winning model teacher at Center High School in a Sacramento suburb, where she had been David Warfield, was placed on formal leave in 1998 pending dismissal after the ensuing turmoil that greeted the announcement of her sex change. Rev. Richard Zomastny of Maryland, Virginia, who in 1999 became Rev. Rebecca Ann Steen, was the first transsexual United Methodist Church minister from a mainline American denomination. But she left the church a month later after a complaint was lodged against her during the review process. Father Dennis Brennan of St. Margaret of Cortona Roman Catholic Church in the Albany diocese became the first priest to change his gender, having sent out a pastoral letter in 2000 (at the age of 65) informing his parishioners of the fact. And veteran New Jersey cop John Aiello, now Janet, after 25 years of service and with a wife and kids, tested the legal parameters of discrimination when he had a sex change operation and insisted on returning to the force, which necessitated departmental arbitration and consciousness-raising sessions.
Even for the best-adjusted among us, sex poses a formidable challenge. Understanding one’s needs and priorities, fulfilling one’s desires, and finding’s one routes and partners through the labyrinth of the flesh probably provoke consternation in almost everyone. For those inclined to transgenderism, satisfaction was long out of reach: before the emerging technology of gender reassignment surgery, the only available alternative was transvestism.
One ultimate fact of the flesh is that the genitals are the site of inchoate secrets, undoubtedly the most complicated element in the facticity of the flesh and a philosophical problem if only because of the importance we attach to them. The somatic reflexes of the flesh and the throes of carnality can incite difficult struggles, but they hold important keys to epistemology, too, for we know the world through the lens of whatever constitutes our identity. Transsexuality both opens and exposes not only the warring binaries that bind any gender configuration, but all the assumptions underlying identity, personality development, consciousness, and destiny. The desire to change sex has to be one of the most difficult and puzzling quests of all.
What makes understanding the obsession of becoming the opposite sex (as other) fascinating, what gives it a patina of forbidden glamour and mystery, is the indisputable incredulity that each gender harbors when confronting, much less empathizing with, the otherness of gender. Of course there are no guarantees, but trans-sex is the closest approximation we mortals have to glimpsing an undifferentiated gender reality rather than that unbridgeable dualism. Before, this had remained the precinct of fable and myth, such as Tiresius’ transformation into an old woman in Greek mythology.
Transsexuals are our future “gendernauts”: their testimonials and confessions might be likened to the firsthand frontier adventures and psychic debriefings of extraterrestrial exploration. Trans-sex can even be a site map for the transformation of mortality: Jenny Boylan treats her former self, James, as if he is now deceased. But the radicalism of the transformation does not preclude incorporation of the former self if only as a kind of rebirth. This same finality occurred with ophthalmologist Dr. Richard Raskin after becoming Renée Richards, the lanky tennis champion trainer of Wimbleton winner Martina Navratilova, whose Second Serve is a fascinating and cogent account of gender variance. Yet both Richards and Boylan, like Carlos and Beuchner, retained their extraordinary talents in medicine, literature, and music after their sex change, even though their gender transformations tested psycho-physiological and ontological limits. Whether their second self had been an alter ego that emerged and overwhelmed them may be unknowable; corporeality harbors the potential for multiple personas.
Of course, transsexuals and intersexuals resolve the ontological conundrum of being both sexes by changing gender rather than living life as two simultaneous identities. These individual beings offer variations for reconceiving the possibility of double sex because they’ve physically crossed the cultural thresholds of transgendered identity. Becoming both sexes, though a virtual impossibility, nonetheless tantalizes as an ideal transformation within the existential configurations and psychosexual preoccupations of the corporeal binary. Perhaps one day transsexuality will be seen as a virtual syndrome, a steppingstone to another sexual stargate. Either way, the assumptions of having and being a body, having an identity, and assaying gender specificity are made transparent by such anomalies that remain less than a century old and that have been made manifest by the technological capacity to alter the body surgically.
Nonetheless, living life as one sex and then enduring the difficult transformation into the opposite sex, with all the accompanying psycho-physiological and cultural dimorphisms, displacements, and adjustments, has to be one of the most unusual, bewildering, and formidable of all human experiences. The personal sagas of these individuals offer us important front-line accounts into what had until recently been deemed impossible. We have to continue to listen to, learn from, and appreciate the lessons and adventures that their difficult lives, brave convictions, and prescient beings can provide.
Kenneth King, an author, dancer, and choreographer who’s been called “American’s dancing philosopher,” is the author of Writing in Motion: Body—Language—Technology (2003), a collection of essays.
