The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  It’s not that these procedures make me a different person. It’s more like “if you cut on the dotted line, and I sign this piece of paper, I can legally be a different person. I can pay you these monies, and you’ll stick a little electrified needle in my face, and I won’t have hair there anymore. I’ll take this pill and it will make my breasts grow.” It’s that recognition that the body is malleable, and that it is how we present to people. There’s something very fundamental about being two bodies in communication with each other. Just the thought that I could use my body to communicate my sense of self to other people the way that everybody else does, instead of having to verbalize it or feel invisible. The idea that I could go to a beach, like I did yesterday, and lie around in the sun and drink beer and watch my kids play, and people would say “she” … Cool.

  Q: What is gender? It seems clear that it is somehow neurobiological in origin.

  I think our language is not really sufficient for talking about it. The words are too blunt. Gender means “kind” or “genre,” it means “what kind of person are you?” But you can’t divorce the question of gender from the larger question of how the human organism needs to live in culture. Humans are social animals. You can’t take a baby human and throw it out in the wild and expect it to learn how to forage. We have to be in society. Unlike a kitten, human babies don’t lick the gunk off and stand up on all twos and run about. They are born very young in a developmental sense. As soon as the lungs can work, the baby comes out. So the evolutionary pressure is for situations that provide care of the newborn. That, I really think, is the basis of culture, what we really physiologically need to reproduce the species—this familial economic social structure—and that has evolved with the human form, and the capacity for language has come along with that. We are creatures who live in language and we’re creatures who have exploited the cultural sphere.

  The exploitation of the cultural sphere, and the symbolic manipulation of the world, is the ecological niche that humans have developed; just like beavers cut down the trees to make their environment, we turn the world into language. That’s what humans do, and I really think that gender is about how the cultural system interfaces with the organism. Part of how you are as a being, part of what we are evolved to be, part of our neurobiological capacity that evolved words is that capacity to self-reflexively place oneself in a cultural context.

  For me, gender is both the cultural system through which you internalize as a subjective being, as an identification, how you situate yourself in language; and how other people situate you in language. And it’s done through these very complex mechanisms that no one discipline in the sciences or the humanities is able to fully address. There needs to be an interdisciplinary gender studies. Because, so far, all of the theory and the research has come from a body of knowledge that has never had to be critical of its own foundational assumptions. And so it just becomes another vector for naturalizing particular kinds of ideological agendas. So I think that critically conscious transsexual or transgen-dered people, who can reveal the ideological constructions of the sex/gender systems, have this tremendous work in front of us. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to get funding to do that work.

  You know, in the orisha religion, there is a being whose name means “the destroyer of patterns through whom the shape of the cosmos is revealed.” There is that sense of disruption that the trans figure brings, that rupture through the social construction of gender, and the revelation of the new, the different, the other. I once wrote a piece called “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamonix.” It’s about speaking as a monster, and that sense of disruption that we transsexual people stage for other people. It’s about trying to speak from this embodied place, that is technologically constructed—but is it human or is it not? There are many things about me that are very different from you. And I need to be able to speak the truth of my own process of embodiment.

  Q: I am sure that there are many trans gendered or transsexual people who would be very insulted to be viewed as monsters.

  [Laughing] Yes, when I wrote it, people said, “That’s not an effective tool for organizing.” But I don’t fear my monstrosity. The word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrere” (just like the words “remonstrance,” “demonstrate”) and the noun means “to show something,” and usually it was to show something about the supernatural. Angels and monsters are actually very closely linked, in that both show the providence of God and something about the nature of being. The word “monster” also has the subsidiary meaning of “assembled from incongruous parts.” The classical monsters were the sphinx, the gryphon—the idea being these things combine elements that are not supposed to be together, but that their being together, being alive, demonstrates something supernatural, superhuman, and makes them beings that the gods speak through.

  Q: What do you think about the assimilationist versus outsider argument that is so heated in the trans community today? Should transsexuals try to pass or should they stand out? Should they value and project their differences or should they strive to be just another person on the block?

  I think of myself as a queer. Non-separatist, but anti-assimilationist. Saying that “I’m just like you” doesn’t really get me where I want to go. In many ways, I am “just like you” but those aren’t the parts that give me trouble. And so that insistence on my ability to be fully myself and not suffer violence or oppression because of that is what’s important. You always fight your battles and draw your lines differently. When I first started transitioning, I didn’t want to go to the corner store and say [speaks heatedly and aggrievedly], “All right, I’m here to buy a gallon of milk, and I can see that you perceive that I am a trans-gendered person, and it is my duty to educate you.” I was just “keep your head down, buy the damn milk, go home, maybe they hate you, maybe they don’t, but whatever.” But I find a greater sense of comfort in being really open with people. I want people to see me as a woman. I want my deepest and most closesly held sense of self to be visible and able to interact with other people. I don’t feel like I have to hide my differences. Difference can be a real source of pleasure.

  Q: In the past, transsexual people were advised to make a complete break with their pasts and to basically keep their gender transition a secret, even with intimate partners. Even today, it seems, many people feel safer revealing their status as a transsexual person to very few people. It seems as though that kind of invisibility would create tremendous psychic strain.

  I’ve met people like that, certainly. I can’t imagine it. I didn’t want to do that at all. I just thought that felt very inauthentic. However, I understand that they do it because of other people’s feeling about transsexuality. I don’t know how many times in my own life people have met me on the street, or at a presentation, and it’s “she, she, she” until I say, “I’m a transsexual,” and suddenly it’s “he, he, he, he.” I’m like, “I’m sorry, you were having no problem with me fifteen minutes ago. What are you confused about? What changed, except your knowledge of my transsexual past?” It’s that belief about gender and the body. Is change in the body shape a change in the essence of the soul? People trip up about that. And so I understand [the desire to keep quiet]. There’s that paradox of visibility. I’m doing all of this so that people understand me the way that I understand myself. But if they know that I’ve done this, then they don’t accept me as I understand myself. They see me as something different, and then all my hard work has been for naught. However, if I don’t tell them, they will accuse me of being duplicitous. It’s a catch-22.

  For me, I think of how open I am about being transgendered or how I present at different times—it’s kind of like the difference between using language for poetry and using language to communicate. If what you really want to do is communicate with someone “I need x, y or z,” and you are using the language of gender for its communicative potential, and often that’s what we want to do with gender, is communicate a sense o
f self with an other. But within certain contexts, within more closely held communities and other contexts, other kinds of communication for different uses are possible. Are you doing your gender like a funky bass riff, are you riffing on some gender improv? Are you using the way that you are doing your gender to test the boundaries of language? You can do gender more like an art practice or like a political practice. And at times those can be very effective things to do. They can be really fun.

  Three

  THE BOMBSHELL

  I looked into a sea of faces, lined up along the ropes of the “quarantine walk “ and held back by a sea of determined police, then heard a roar of voices shouting my name. I reeled under the impact. I thought for a moment that I had entered Dante’s inferno, as flashbulbs exploded from all directions and new sreel cameras whirred. A crowd of three hundred shoving reporters, news-reel and still photographers had converged, all jockeying for position and camera angles. I learned later it was the largest assemblage of press representatives in the history of the airport.

  CHRISTINE JORGENSEN, NEW YORK CITY, 1953

  Christine Jorgensen was the first star of the dawning age of celebrity, the first American to become internationally known simply for being herself. Her fame was based not on her profession, her talents, her lineage, her looks, or her wit. None of these was particularly remarkable. Christine Jorgensen was famous simply for being Christine Jorgensen. She was a “reality” star decades before the concept was invented. A few other brave souls had undergone the same transformation before her, but Christine was the butterfly captured in the glare of klieg lights as she exited her cocoon. She was no more and no less than the man who had become a woman, and a pretty good-looking woman at that. “Ex-GI becomes Blonde Bombshell,” the headlines screamed as the young American who traveled to Denmark in 1950 to seek help for a baffling medical problem returned home. She soon found that the world press treated her recovery from surgery both as a matter of profound international importance and as a sexual scandal.

  Jorgensen was born on Memorial Day, May 30, 1926, the child of two first-generation Danish Americans, George and Florence Jorgensen. She was the second child born to the couple, and her parents named her George, Jr., after her father. Her sister, Dorothy (called Dolly), was three years older. Jorgensen’s autobiography, published in 1967 and reissued in 2000, describes her childhood as a happy one. “Dolly and I were surrounded by a closely knit, affectionate family of the sort that gives a child a warm feeling of belonging. Happily we had the advantage of being in a family that enjoyed activities as a unit, and that still applies today,” she writes. In her youth, Jorgensen was called “Brud,” short for “brother.” Brud was especially close to her grandma Jorgensen, “a person of grace and dignity,” Jorgensen recalled years later. “Grandma was always my champion when others laughed at my ‘sissified’ ways.”

  From an early age, Brud was aware of the differences between him and the other boys in the neighborhood. “A little boy wore trousers and had his hair cut short. He had to learn to use his fists aggressively, participate in athletics, and most important of all, little boys didn’t cry. Contrary to those accepted patterns, sometimes I did feel like crying and I must have felt that Grandma understood and didn’t disapprove when I ran away from a fistfight or refused to play rough and tumble games.” In her autobiography, Jorgensen describes George’s crushing disappointment when instead of the “pretty doll with long golden hair” that he already knew enough not to request for a Christmas present at age five, he was given a “bright red railway train.” She also describes a conversation that George had with his mother around the same time, asking why his sister, Dolly, was allowed to grow her blond hair long and wear dresses, things he envied and admired but was not permitted to have. “ ‘Mom,’ I asked, ‘why didn’t God make us alike?’” His mother explained that the world needed both men and women, and that there was no way of knowing before a baby was born whether it was a boy or a girl. “‘You see, Brud,’ she said. ‘It’s one of God’s surprises.’”

  “ ‘Well,’ I replied. I don’t like the kind of surprise God made me!’”

  Like many boys who fail to conform to society’s views of masculine behavior, Brud was often ridiculed for his differences by both children and adults. In mid-century America, those differences were particularly jarring. The “sexual anarchy” of the fin de siecle had long since given way to a rigid sexual binary. Male and female were once more separate and distinct categories, with no discernable overlap. Home and family, not the office and factory, were defined as women’s proper sphere, as Rosie the Riveter put on her apron and turned domestic goddess. Men were expected to be workers, husbands, and fathers. “After World War Two, there was the creation of this really rigid gender system in the West,” historian Susan Stryker said in our 2001 conversation. “Like, the world is cut in two and you are on this side or this side. There are no anomalies. That construction of gender/sex/sexuality is I think as much an artifact of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall.” Like the millions soon to be trapped behind the iron curtain of communism in the East, those who felt oppressed by the new gender regime in the West learned the virtues of silence, subterfuge, and secrecy. These were the skills they needed to survive. Not only gay and gender-variant people, but also those women growing more capable, independent, and self-reliant in the war years went underground rather than face the price of being “different” in an era that rigidly enforced sex-role conformity.

  Jorgensen describes one particularly painful incident in the autobiography—the time a teacher called Mrs. Jorgensen to school after she had discovered a piece of needlepoint in Brud’s desk. In front of Mrs. Jorgensen and the other students, the teacher asked Brud if it was his, and when he replied yes, she responded, “Mrs. Jorgensen, do you think that this is anything for a red-blooded boy to have in his desk as a keepsake? The next thing we know, George will be bringing his knitting to school.” Both George and his mother were humiliated by this incident, though to Mrs. Jorgensen’s credit, she didn’t utter a word of reproach to her unhappy son.

  Incidents like these increased Brud’s feelings of loneliness and isolation, which became even more acute in adolescence. “Instead of assimilating into a group as most teenagers did, I felt like an outsider. I didn’t like sports and I wasn’t interested in dating girls, which had become the chief topic of conversation among the boys of my acquaintance,” Jorgensen writes. “I tried to find some solace in books, and they became my closest companions.” Jorgensen also developed an interest in photography and began to dream of a “time when I would have an important place behind the cameras of Hollywood, the gilded Wonderland of make-believe.”

  This new hobby led to a job as a stock librarian with the Pathe News Service in New York City, after George’s high school graduation. “I wondered if my new associates would notice what I had long since known: that I was one who deviated, emotionally, from what had been termed ‘normal,’” Jorgensen writes. “But I was determined to behave like a man, even if I didn’t feel like one, and try to hide the pretense behind a brave exterior.” It became even easier to “act like a man” the next year, when the nineteen-year-old George Jorgensen was drafted. Though he had already been rejected by the army twice during the war, owing to his thin build, this time he was accepted. “I wanted to be accepted by the army for two reasons. Foremost, was my great desire to belong, to be needed, and to join the stream of activities around me,” Jorgensen writes. “Second, I wanted my parents to be proud of me and to be able to say, ‘My son is in the service.’ Although they never mentioned it, I was poignantly aware that Mom and Dad must have felt their child was ‘different,’ and hence unwanted.”

  Despite the triumph of passing the army physical, living with hundreds of other young men in close quarters during and after basic training provided yet more proof of George’s “difference.” As a clerical worker living in barracks and helping to manage the discharge of thousands of soldiers after VE day, Georgecouldn’t he
lp comparing myself with the boys in my group and I was aware that the differences were very great indeed, both mental and physical. My body was not only slight but it lacked other development as a male. I had no hair on my chest, arms or legs. My walk could scarcely be called a masculine stride, the gestures of my hands were quite effeminate and my voice had a feminine quality. The sex organs that determined my classification as male were underdeveloped. It was, of course, quite possible that some men having the same build would feel completely masculine, but my mental and emotional chemistry matched all the physical characteristics which in me seemed so feminine. “What is masculine and what is feminine?” I thought. The questions plagued me because I couldn’t find a clearly established dividing line.

  If George Jorgensen, Jr., wasn’t able to find a dividing line between masculine and feminine, he was quite clear about another line, one that he was determined never to cross. “During the months in the service, I had seen a few practicing homosexuals, those whom the other men called ‘queer.’ I couldn’t condemn them, but I also knew that I certainly couldn’t become like them. It was a thing deeply alien to my religious attitudes and the highly magnified and moralistic views that I entertained at the time. Furthermore, I had seen enough to know that homosexuality brought with it a social segregation and ostracism that I couldn’t add to my own deep-seated feeling of not belonging.” This was true despite the strong emotions that were aroused in the young soldier by a childhood friend, Tom Chaney; and by Jim Frankfort, another man he met while attending the Progressive School of Photography in New Haven, Connecticut, after his discharge in 1948. Jorgensen describes the strong attraction that drew George to these two unambiguously heterosexual men, and his equally strong feelings of confusion and terror of the implications of that attraction. “I awaited a miracle to release me from the growing horror of myself.”