Gynomorphs
Classic SF Novellas About Women Who Become Men
by Jean Marie Stine
Table of Contents
Weird Women and Expanded Men
The Feminine Metamorphosis Chapter I: A Woman Protests
Chapter II: Taine Gets a Commission
Chapter III: Taine Returns With A Tale
Chapter IV: A Silent Revolution
Chapter V: A Ring Turns Up
Chapter VI: Taine Goes To Work
Chapter VII: Mistaken Identity
The Dictator Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Author’s Note:
The Sex Serum Chapter I: The Manor House Murders
Chapter II: Determination
Chapter III: The Sex Gland
Chapter IV: A Change Of Sex
Chapter V: The Trial Subject
CHAPTER VI: TRAGEDY
Further Reading Fiction
Non-Fiction
Sf/F/H From Pageturner Editions Award Winning Nominee Stories And Authors
copyright
Weird Women and Expanded Men
FTM Experience in Fiction and Reality
Raven Kaldera
Women becoming men? For many people, the reverse has become an accepted, if understood phenomenon in our society; even if the idea makes you uncomfortable, you know it exists. But for most people, changing gender is seen as something that men do. Whether that’s because it’s seen as a sexual perversion and women aren’t supposed to have those, or because “women are the purer sex”, or because anything men do is more interesting and gets more publicity than anything women do, it means that the reaction of most people is confusion and bewilderment. “Does that kind of thing actually happen?”
This book contains a selection of little-known stories from the 1930’s, the age of the first blossoming of the genre of speculative fiction. They were compiled because they all have one thing in common: they feature the concept of female-to-male transsexualism, before the concept ever had such a name.
While these stories were being written in America and England, elsewhere on the Continent history was quietly being made. Most people associate the first sex reassignment surgery with the American male-to-female transsexual Christine Jorgenson, but in actuality that title belongs to a German woman, Lili Elbe, who convinced local doctors to transform her into a woman by any means that they could. As hormones (not to mention anti-rejection drugs) were not available at that time, the experimental attempt to transplant ovaries and later, a uterus, into her body merely caused her death.
However, women were also applying for sex reassignment to the doctors in question, who consisted of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and his Berlin team of surgeons and researchers. The first patients who could be easily considered female-to-male transsexuals had already been through their changes—which in the 1920’s consisted merely of surgical removal of the breasts and reproductive organs—by the time these stories were written. Most passed namelessly into the crowd, a few—such as Claire Schreckengost and Henri (Alice Henriette) Acces, left their names to history, but not their fates… and no notice was taken of them outside of a small number of European researchers. To the American masses, such a thing was as impossible as a man on the moon… and just as worthy of the attempts of science fiction.
The 1930’s brought the discovery of gland-extracted hormones (first created for use as chicken medication to increase laying!) and the Olympics, and those two innovations alone increased the public record of female-to-male transsexualism. Blood tests, newly required for athletes in the Olympic Games, disclosed some female athletes to have XY chromosomes (an intersex condition known as androgen insensitivity syndrome) or abnormally high levels of naturally-produced male hormones (in all eight cases found, due to an entirely different intersex condition known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia). Some chose to change over to a male gender after this revelation, although they were no longer allowed to compete on either side of the Olympic gender line.
The most outspoken was Czechoslovakian runner Zdenka Koubkova, who became Zdenek Koubkov, and who reportedly said, “To be a woman is nothing; to be a man is everything.” Zdenek was publicly interviewed after his transition in 1935, the same year that two of these stories were going to print… but due to political reasons, not much that happened in Eastern Europe, except for news of war, made it out to America. At the same time that the British author of the final story was penning his ideas, intersexed British athlete Mary Edith Louise Weston was getting her own sex reassignment to the role of Mark Weston. Two years later, champion Belgian bicyclist Elvira de Brujin changed over to Willy de Brujin.
World War II ended the exploits of the fledgling German SRS clinic, as the Nazis shut down Magnus Hirschfeld’s operation and forced him to flee the country, and the practice would not come to Britain until the 1960’s, when Dr. Harry Benjamin finally agreed to take FTMs. It was a quiet beginning; even twenty years later, many Americans were still unaware that transsexualism was more than an entirely male-to-female venue. Researchers themselves accepted the early statistic that there were five to ten times as many MTFs as FTMs; this remained unquestioned long after the numbers had averaged even. Today, the modern FTM experience can be found documented in the superb writings listed in the bibliography at the back of this book.
The stories that follow, while not outstanding for their literary content, are interesting as a historical perspective on the concept of women who assume the social roles of men. They encapsulate the assumptions and prejudices of one frozen period in time, allowing us to see into the minds of the men of that era, and understanding just how disturbing the act of gender-transgressing was at that time. The Sexual Revolution was still three decades in the future, as was the birth of the ERA. Rigid, inviolable gender roles for men and women was still a given for most people, rather than a point to be argued, and the idea that people could slip back and forth across them was provocative to the point of near-hysteria. Therefore, for someone to do such a thing, there would have to be extreme circumstances involved.
* * * *
The author of the first story, The Feminine Metamorphosis, claims via the introduction to be a physician as well as a writer, but refuses to give a surname, much less any credentials. The more one reads of his tale, the more one doubts his claim, since the actual biology in the story is mind-bogglingly poor even for a scientist of that time, especially at the end where he creates claims of the entirety of China being plagued by a disease that causes madness when transferred to the blood of Westerners. (My wife, upon reading this dubious and rather racist plot twist, dubbed it “Mad Chinaman Disease”.)
His story starts out with a somewhat sympathetic account of the glass ceiling for intelligent, competent women—indeed, if there is any positive message in this story it might be an underhanded warning to the male corporate establishment of the time to think strongly about what lengths women will go to when cheated of their rights. Still, his ambivalence about the situation comes out in an almost hysterically far-fetched plot about powerful, intelligent women who not only chemically change their bodies and masquerade as men, but plan to take over the country via a Wall Street money grab, and eventually create a “manless world”.
Although The Feminine Metamorphosis never made it big in American speculative fiction, the 1970s saw a number of works by feminist women writers that did, indeed, speculate the existence of a “manless world”, with more or less enthusiasm. The most controversial was Joanna Russ, with the publication of Th
e Female Man and When It Changed, the latter being a haunting tale of a planet where men had died out due to a virus generations ago, and women survive as a species by fusing ova to create children with each other. Later, the gifted talespinner John Varley would speculate about a floating L5 colony that contained a man-hating, woman-only society in his book Titan. These descendants of the genre attempted to objectively consider, rather than paranoidly exaggerate, what such a society might actually look and function like.
Ironically, the rise of feminism also contributed to the rise of female-to-male reassignment… much to the dismay of the feminists. Unlike the plans of the oppressed and frustrated women in The Feminine Metamorphosis, actual feminists of the 1970s openly rejected transsexualism as a potential weapon in the war against gender inequality. The doctrine of the philosophical 1970s feminist movement that evolved from the equal-pay-for-equal-rights 1960s stressed that gender roles should all be put aside for a rather bland social androgyny, and that women who presented themselves in roles that were either too stereotypically masculine or feminine were “male-identified”, and thus generally rejected from the community. Since the feminist community was, at that time, threatening to entirely swallow the lesbian community whole, this meant that nearly all uncloseted lesbians had to confront feminism at one point or another, and choose their sides.
Some chose with their sisters. However, as is discussed in the book Self-Made Men: Identity, Embodiment, and Recognition Among Transsexual Men (by Henry Rubin, himself an FTM and a professor at Harvard University), some extremely masculine women who had found solace as butch dykes in the 1950s lesbian community found themselves rejected as politically incorrect. Of these, a certain percentage of them slipped away into doctor’s offices, to emerge as men and blend into the crowd. Thus, by limiting the scope of sisterhood, lesbian-feminism inadvertently drove some of their sisters into a very special community of brothers. A few, like the main character in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, returned to a non-male identity, but most stayed the course and lived out (or are currently living out) their lives as men.
Another conflict unintentionally foreshadowed by this story is the argument of why women would change sex in the first place. The phenomenon of the “passing woman” has recently been coming to light; accounts of women who passed as men are being uncovered and republished. From soldiers in the Revolutionary (Hannah Snell and Deborah Anderson) and Civil (William Cathay and Harry T. Buford) Wars to ordinary folk (Ralph Kerwinieo and Dr. Alan Lucille Hart) to modern-day martyrs (Brandon Teena), it is becoming increasingly clear that a small percentage of men on the streets of our ancestors had once started out as women.
To most of the individuals who read these accounts, the answer is clear: these women lived as men because the economic (and for those who loved women, sexual and marital) opportunity was not present for them in the times and places where they had the bad luck to be born. If things had been different, this line of reasoning goes, if they had been allowed to hold any job, wear any clothing, and marry any person, then they would of course have stayed women. The Feminine Metamorphosis posits this as a meaning as well; why would a woman live as a man unless she wanted male privilege?
This view is currently being loudly challenged by modern female-to-male transsexuals, or FTMs, many of whom had good economic opportunities while living as women, and of whom many lived openly and happily as lesbians with female lovers. While our social situation is not perfect in terms of economic gender equality and gay rights, it is significantly better than it was in the 1930s, or even the 1960s… and the number of female-to-male transsexuals has increased exponentially. To the FTMs, sex reassignment is sought because of body dysphoria, a deep—and likely brain-wired—need to live in a male body. Roles and privilege are beside the point; it is the need to be see oneself and to been seen by others as male that is important.
How many passing women of former ages were simply desperate for economic or sexual-preference parity, and how many were transsexuals from birth? It’s impossible to know, and there have been loud arguments over which any given individual seemed to be. For example, the rumor was that jazz musician Billy Tipton took on a male identity, because “jazz was men’s music”, but his behavior with his wife seemed to be strongly dysphoric as well. Because these individuals are all long dead, we can’t say how many wanted male privilege and how many just wanted desperately to be men… but it’s likely to be some of both. Body dysphoria, of course, is a modern phrase; before the last couple of decades transsexuals had few words to describe such unusual and nebulous feelings, and such ideas would have been entirely incomprehensible to the writers of these stories.
Another telling attitude in this story is evidenced by the female millionaire who is the “evil genius” behind the “manless world” plan. Her vengeful plot seems to have been motivated by her inability to get married due to extreme ugliness. One can find hints of this attitude in early reactions to feminism, including men who swore that women only became feminists because they were too ugly to attract a husband, or lesbians who got the same assumption. To this day, this laughably and almost desperate-seeming self-importance still hangs around in the atmosphere; sometimes it is not limited to men. One FTM that I know who is arguably much more socially attractive as a man than as a woman still has his mother convinced that he transitioned because he felt unattractive as a girl.
It’s interesting to note the qualities of the “passing women” in this story; they are brilliant, hard workers, successful in business, and snappy dressers. Actually, a great deal of emphasis is placed on that last quality, as if being a clothes-horse was uniquely female. Gay men, too, have been “accused” of being too natty and concerned with clothing, and in the minds of some people, this confirms some level of femininity in them. In fact, at least one reality TV show was predicated on this stereotype. With the new visibility of the gay community and Gay Pride, many young men in the 16-22 age range are feeling compelled to be deliberately slovenly in their dress and appearance in order to prove their heterosexuality, which apparently creates difficulties with the straight women of their desire.
The author of this tale, of course, shies away from the most controversial aspect of the idea of women living full-time as men: what are their romantic relationships like? Do they pursue women, or men, and what happens when they get them? Perhaps his imagination refused to stretch that far, or became too boggled at the idea, or perhaps he knew that any attempts to plumb that swamp might be too shocking for the average publishing company in the 1930s. Still, passing women and FTMs have been pursuing, catching, and forming long-term relationships with both men and women for hundreds if not thousands of years. Some are open with their partners, some succeed in deceiving them for years or even until their deaths.
One of the themes in current fiction and essays written by actual FTMs is the idea that as well as being better dressers, men with a feminine slant (or who used to be women) have an edge up on ordinary clueless guys when it comes to romancing women. Actual stories told by the partners of some FTMs add fuel to the fire. Brandon Teena, the young Nebraska FTM who romanced many girlfriends better than their biological male peers (and was raped and killed for it by those same male peers) is still fondly remembered as “the best romancer of all” by his former girlfriend. Another FTM was unsuccessfully sued for “sexual deception” by several women he’d had sexual relations with; their complaints weren’t that he wasn’t good in bed. One even tearfully admitted on a local TV talk show that he was the best she’d ever had, and that he’d ruined her for ordinary men, and that was why it was so much more devastating for her to find out that he wasn’t one.
While the author of this story is not only disapproving but downright hostile of the extreme pseudo-feminist goals of the women who pass as men and attempt to gain social control, he does, ironically, show them as worthy enemies as a foil for his rather bumbling detective, who only wins out in the end by the deus ex machina insertion of Mad Chinaman’s
Disease. The detective Taine, who is so obviously the author’s character, seems bewildered by the idea that women would do something like this; he speaks from the assumption that all women like their men and their place, and uses the rather clumsy example of the ties his wife has bought him as proof of the compliance of “his” women. His moralistic attempts to call on religion and the will of God at the end exemplify the same scramble that has been used by many to stack up reasons why people shouldn’t cross gender lines. The motivations of FTMs may be quite different from this paranoid fantasy, but the rebuttals have not changed much at all in 70 years.
* * * *
The second story, The Dictator, was published in Amazing magazine and more properly belongs to the early burgeoning of speculative fiction. Author Stanley Birnbaum, writing in 1935, has clearly heard of the newly isolated chemical testosterone and its dramatic masculinizing effects, but he is unclear on the exact mechanism. The idea of a drug that can turn someone from a flirtatious, seductive, obviously physically female individual to a hard-nosed, aggressive, macho type who passes perfectly as male—and back again!—is a compelling idea, too fascinating for him to pass up. The actual effects of testosterone, while stunning in their ability to shapeshift most of a female body into a male one, are much slower and mostly irreversible; there is no going back entirely from that change, and certainly not in a matter of weeks. They also have less effect on the character than this story would have us believe. While testosterone does raise aggressiveness levels, and has been known to increase courage in women who take only small amounts, it will not transform a feminine-acting person into a masculine-acting one or vice versa.
The concept of an FTM taking over the government as a popular, charismatic dictator is one that ironically appeals to me, although as far as I’m concerned not nearly enough depth is given to the complex character of Steel/Helen Jeffers. Unlikely and fantastic physical changes aside, his/her shifts in behavior are more worthy of a dual personality, or perhaps simply a brilliant and twisted mind that is able to utilize an array of skillfully-acted gender roles to achieve his/her own grandiose ends. The author seems to want the happy ending where the smart but naive hero gets the girl so badly that he conveniently skips over the fact that the “girl” had lately been a brutal and ruthless dictator… and an enemy who had attempted to kill the hero as recently as the day before she conveniently melts into his arms and uses him to escape the coup that wants her alter-ego’s execution. Frankly, the story reads as if it ought to be Part 1 of a larger series… and Part 2 ought to start with his realization that the gifted and somewhat sociopathic Steel/Helen Jeffers is merely using him as a safety net while s/he plans his/her next dastardly scheme. I mean, come on, that convenient excuse of “The Secretary of State made me do it all!” is so unbelievable as to leave our jaws hanging, and the fact that the hero buys it makes us want to cover our eyes against what has to be coming down the pike for his (likely short) future. (And, hey, I want to see the scene where Helen turns back into Steel and decides that he still gets marital rights with this handsome, naive boy, at gunpoint if necessary… )
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