The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  RUSTY: She was definitely gender variant in the way that she dressed.

  CHELSEA: Why the hell did anybody publish that thing [Raymond’s book, The Transsexual Empire Compare and contrast that book with The Turner Diaries, with the Unabomber’s Manifesto. She’s definitely out there with the rest of the crazies. Is it an exaggeration to compare Raymond’s book to Mein Kampf}

  RUSTY: But the problem is that book has been quoted again and again and again and used as the basis for legislation. It’s like the role of Johns Hopkins. People have quoted to me over and over again this idea that “you must be wrong, because Johns Hopkins stopped doing transsexual operations.” They were the first university hospital to do the surgeries and they got a lot of press. Their decision to stop doing that surgery had tremendous impact.

  CHELSEA: But getting back to Janice Raymond. You look at the first wave of that lesbian feminist crap. Robin Morgan used to hang out and smoke pot with Abbie Hoffman and me. She was part of all that. But then she went on to that “the new left is sexist” stuff. Eventually they [lesbian feminists] started to write history like ground zero was 1974, which I believe was the year that they reached critical mass and their dogma was canonized. It was coming together before that, but that was when they had their version of the Nicene Council to do the official canon. This is where the basic tenets of the faith were agreed upon. So they took ’74 as the cutoff point and if it happened before 1974 it didn’t happen.

  The second wave of feminism was happening at the same time as the Black Power movement. Certainly there was an extreme in the Black Power movement, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and that whole mentality was the feminist version of the same thing.

  You know what opened my eyes? I had finally figured out that I was transsexual. I had started taking hormones and started living as a woman. I figured out that I am bisexual too. Of course that’s a problematic word because it implies that there are only two genders, but you know what I mean. I figured out a lot of things about myself. But one of the things it took me a long time to figure out, trying to find myself, was that a large percentage of the so-called lesbian feminists were political lesbians, lesbians for political reasons, but not because they were sexually attracted to other women.

  There’s a stereotype that I question that’s been around since the fifties, that lesbians must hate men. In my experience lesbians tend not to want to sleep with men, but they tend not to hate men. After all, if you look at the traditional lesbian things—trucks and hot rod cars and guitars are cool. The lesbians weren’t saying, “We hate men because they do those things;” they were saying, “We want to play with those toys too.” A reasonable point of view.

  Q: That brings up a broader question, of course. What is gender anyway? Is there anything to gender?

  CHELSEA: Is there anything to race? You saw the movie Bulworth? Bill Bradley said the biggest problem in the United States, hands down, is race. I think that was true in 1776,1876,1976, and I think that it’s true now. America is uniquely fucked up because of race. The peculiar institution of racially based slavery is essentially an American phenomenon. So, can you ignore race? Is there anything to race? Does race exist? Yes, obviously, some people have dark skin, some people have light skin, and social constructs have been built around that. Is the transgender movement basically all about bathrooms and who is going to piss where? Yes, but go back to Martin Luther King and before, what was the civil rights movement about? Getting rid of the whites-only and coloreds-only bathrooms, and everybody pisses in the same place.

  So, as far as “is there anything to gender?” Let’s say that originally there weren’t very many Homo sapiens on this planet, and it was important that the reproduction rate be really high because of high infant mortality rates, medicine doesn’t exist, people are being trampled to death, et cetera. It’s that kind of world. I’m trying to make this funny, but I’m serious too. Now we’re in a world that’s overpopulated. There are too many people. Naturally, there’s going to be more homosexuality.

  Are we [transgendered people] more of a percentage of the population? I don’t know. Are there more people with a propensity to gender variance? I don’t know. Are more people manifesting it? Yes!

  I belong to all kinds of e-mail groups, conspiracy theorists, UFO [abductees], whatever. I’m no better than the rest of the nuts, but at least I have a sense of humor. But I also belong to something called the climate concern group. I’m one of the few non-Ph.D.s on that group. It’s a different thing from the UFOs and the “Lone Gunman” [theorists] and the other stuff, though that stuff is more fun. Anyway, actual scientific fact: there are more hermaphroditic polar bears than there used to be. There is a rise in hermaphroditism among arctic polar bears. I wasn’t looking for transgender stuff but I just happened to run into it. The same is true of several species offish in the Amazon River. There are all kinds of [transgendered and intersexual] animals. Maybe there are more transgender people because it was one of the unexpected results [of the scientific revolution]. Instead of the bombing of Hiroshima giving us Godzilla, it gave us me. Something is definitely happening. We can theorize about it, and I wish to hell that people would start theorizing about the scientific message, rather than [viewing transpeople as] signs of the end of the world foretold in the Bible.

  I’m into science. I’m an avid science fiction fan. Something I’ve discovered … there’s only one thing that the trans community agrees on. We all love Star Trek. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. Among MTFs anyway. I think that the two professions that have the most transsexuals in them, in no particular order, are prostitution and computer geeks. There are two basic groups of transsexuals, the prostitutes and the computer geeks. And most of us are people like me who have been both. If they wanted to make Star Trek more realistic, one of the captains would say, “Damn it, the computer system is on the fritz again. Where’s the transsexual?” Am I right?

  RUSTY: If they had really evolved, they wouldn’t say, “Where’s the transsexual?” They would’ve just had the transsexual come in and fix the computer. Star Trek is so popular with transpeople because they accept, without even thinking about it, all these weird-looking people. This total variation, no question asked.

  Q: That’s also true of certain kinds of rock and roll, isn’t it? You can be any thing you want to be onstage, and no one bats an eye.

  CHELSEA: I want to say something about music, because it’s something that gets ignored. Music helped me come out. Lou Reed’s Transformer album, okay, helped immensely. [iVngs] “Holly came from Miami FLA / Hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A. / Plucked her eyebrows on the way / shaved her legs and then he was a she.” Later on, I actually met Holly Woodlawn, after I was out.

  The New York Dolls helped me come out. David Bowie helped me come out. Iggy Pop helped me come out. I wrote Iggy Pop because a couple of albums ago he put his address on the back of the album and said, “Any fan wants to write me a letter, I’ll answer it.” So I sat down and I wrote a letter and said, “Ig, I’m a transsexual. I grew up in a conservative Christian home out in the boondocks and I would have had a much harder time figuring out who and what I am and what to do with my life if it hadn’t been for you.” He wrote me a beautiful reply—a beautiful, loving, supportive, un—Iggy Pop—like, loving answer— which I still have around here.

  I know tons of transsexuals that were influenced by Jayne County, Man Enough to Be a Woman. Before Hedwig, before Rocky Horror, she was a transsexual that was playing with The Ramones at CBGB. Rocky Horror was one of the things that saved my life. That song, “Don’t Dream It, Be It.” Every time my transition got scary, every time I was physically assaulted, raped, everything that happened to me, that phrase from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Don’t Dream It, Be It,” kept me going.

  Q: So you’re saying that cultural influences affected your choices, or at least helped you deal with the choices that you’ve made?”

  I think that time and place have lot to do with
it. I grew up in a very rigid, very conservative family. I’m the only person that’s still alive in my family that’s not a born-againer. I talk to my mother maybe once a year. What’s to talk about? She’s kind of gotten over it, but she used to attribute my being transgendered to demonic possession. So once a year, at Christmas, I’d send her a card and sign it “Chelsea, Princess of Darkness,” and forget about her for the rest of the year. What are you going to do?

  You’ve got to keep the books in balance. The gender thing was a bit more extreme. She thought that smoking pot and listening to the Grateful Dead were signs of demonic possession too. I used to be a Deadhead, and I was playing punk rock at CBGBs too.

  Q: Let’s talk a bit about Transy House. How did Transy House get started?”

  RUSTY: Transy House grew out of our thoughts on The Ramones. [Laughter] Actually, it just sort of evolved. The genesis of it was that Chelsea had been out for a long time. I was coming out around ’91 or ’92 and was basically heavy into transition then. And Chelsea told me that she was one of the last daughters of Sylvia Rivera, and Chelsea told me about STAR House [a refuge for homeless transgender youth], and that was sort of filed away in the back of my mind. We were living in Bellmore, Long Island, then, in an apartment, and after I came out definitively in ’93 and was teaching as a woman at Hofstra, I wanted to buy a house rather than live in an apartment. Since my daughter and son were living in Brooklyn then, with their other parent, I wanted to be close to them. Chelsea and I walked the streets of Brooklyn looking for a cheap place and we found the house that we live in now, and I bought it. And another person, Julia Murray, was living with us and she went through transition about the same time I did. So Julia, Chelsea, and I moved in around August 1, 1994, and then gradually other people … it was sort of unique for trans people to own a house in New York, so other people started to say, “I need a place to live. Can I come and live with you?” I think that one of the first was Christiana, and there’s been a dribble of people that have come and gone over the years.

  Transy House just gradually evolved because it was a safe space for transpeople. A lot of transpeople who were fighting their way through their lives would come in and all of a sudden … Bingo! In this house transpeople are in the majority, and no longer is it “You’re weird,” but this is a normal environment for you. And people really appreciated that. They came during transition. A lot of lesbians also stopped by too, people who were just gender variant in any way.

  Then also Chelsea and I were the mainstays of an organization called the Metropolitan Gender Network [MGN]. Because we had computers and telephones and fax machines and an office, we became sort of like an informational center for political activism. Definitely we were doing that from ‘96 on. And then, around 1997 Chelsea reconnected with Sylvia. And Sylvia at that time was living on the piers. She came and spoke at MGN, and that’s when I met her. And she came over a lot to the house quite often and eventually she came there to live, in around ‘98 or late ‘97. When Sylvia came she was really bottoming out. She had a lot of drug problems and she had decided that she would concentrate on one drug, alcohol, and she drank like a fish. Honestly, Chelsea harassed her so much about drinking. I was putting pressure on, but I put less pressure on people. Chelsea had these knock-down, drag-out battles with her. I wrote this devastating story about her, sort of contrasting her power when she was sober with when she was drunk. So Sylvia finally decided about eighteen months ago to stop drinking. She went cold turkey and stopped drinking. So she came back into her power after she realized that she was destroying herself. [Note: Sylvia Rivera died in October 2002 of liver disease. This interview was conducted before her death.]

  But when she came to live at the house, I used to say that Chelsea’s and my role in life was to deliver Sylvia to her speeches. We would get her there sober, but she might not come away sober. So we would take her down to Washington or other places. I remember being in Washington at the AIDS parade with her, and someone said “You’re Sylvia Rivera. I thought you were dead!”

  Q: She is such a huge folk hero.

  RUSTY: I would say that now that Sylvia has got it together again, she is definitely the most well-known transperson in the queer community, if you include gay and lesbian people.

  CHELSEA: Sylvia was at Stonewall. She was doing stuff [organizing] with Lee Brewster; These people were doing stuff from ‘69 to ’74. But then all this so-called lesbian feminist bullshit. Let me go on record about that. There’s nothing wrong with being a nationalist. There’s nothing wrong with being a socialist. But when you put the two words together and become a National Socialist, that’s something else. There’s nothing wrong with being a lesbian. That’s a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with being a feminist. This is a good thing. But for some reason when you string those two words together and make it lesbian feminist, the same thing happens as when you combined “nationalism” and “socialism.” Why? I don’t know, but it does.

  So what happened is that in ’74, they wanted to purge the drag queens out of the parades, out of the rallies. She apologized years later, but what happened is that one of the lesbian feminists, named Jean O’Leary, had Sylvia forcibly removed from the stage at the rally. So, basically, Sylvia went into a real funk, crawled into a whiskey bottle, and it was like ‘90-somethmg before she crawled out.

  The other thing that happened in ’74, though, is that when the original gay rights bill was drafted in New York it included trans—it actually said “transvestites and transsexuals” in the parlance of the day.

  In 1974, a bunch of people from the GAA [Gay Activists Alliance] cut a deal with the politicians, who said that if they took us out [drag queens and transsexuals], it would get the bill passed faster. That was ’74. The bill didn’t pass till ‘86 anyway, but we’ll let that slide for now. So the point is that in ’74 Sylvia just gave up; she wasn’t going to do anything else.

  But I thought what Sylvia was doing made sense, because I was hanging out with people like Abbie Hoffman. I was part of the New Left that’s now called the Old Left. Anyway, my message has always been that this came out of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and it started as something visible that could be seen in the press with Sylvia. Actually it started with Magnus Hirschfeld and what happened in Berlin in the ‘20’s. But after that unpleasantness in the 1930s and ‘40s, all that got wiped out. And coming after the fifties cold war thing, the next visible figure was Sylvia.

  Five

  LIBERATING THE RAINBOW

  We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops, and then the bottles started. And then we finally had the Morals Squad bamcaded in the Stonewall building because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn’t know we were going to react that way. We were not taking anymore of this shit.

  Sylvia Rivera, in Trans Liberation, by Leslie Feinberg, New York City, 1969

  Liberation. Revolution. In the summer of 1969, those were more than just words. As the song by Thunderclap Newman put it, “Call out the instigators / because there’s something in the air / We’ve got to get together sooner or later / Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right.” For gay men, lesbians, drag queens, and other gender outlaws, the revolution arrived on a hot night in June when, as so often happened, cops attempted to arrest the patrons of a gay bar—possibly because the owners were late in making their biweekly payoff to the Police Department. The Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village in New York City, was to become on that night, and the days that followed, ground zero for gay liberation, the rock thrown into the stagnant pond of social mores. The ripple effects of Stonewall are still being felt today as a steadily increasing number of cities and the states ban housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation; as gay men become the stars of a hit television show; as at least one state permits gay couples to marry while another
approves civil unions— and as the medical diagnosis of homosexuality as mental illness fades into history. This transformation in cultural attitudes was interrupted by a backlash in 2004, with eleven states passsing ordinances banning gay marriage, and gay rights itself becoming a major wedge issue in the presidential campaign. Yet the backlash itself (like a similar backlash against feminism in the 1990s) points to the success of the movement, not its failure.

  What happened on the night of June 23, 1969? Why have the Stonewall riots transcended history to become myth? For many people, Stonewall crystallized the moment when homosexuals and gender-variant people as a group stopped being ashamed, stopped being afraid, and began to fight back—against police harassment, against bigotry, against anyone who would deny them their human rights. Many point to Stonewall as the day that pride was born—pride in being gay, pride in being different. But like a couple whose future conflicts could be predicted from their first date, Stonewall and its immediate aftermath presaged difficulties and divisions that would haunt the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) movement to this day.

  Numerous accounts of the Stonewall riots have been published, but Martin Duberman’s book Stonewall is probably the best-known and the most respected. One of the activists whose story Duberman follows throughout the book is Sylvia Rivera, who was a nineteen-year-old drag queen in 1969. Rivera had lived on the streets since age eleven. Like Patricia Morgan, she had worked first as a boy prostitute and later in drag. In most accounts, Sylvia Rivera and the other street queens who hung around outside the bar played a crucial role in the riots. Some say that Rivera or one of the other queens threw the first rock at the cops who were attempting to hustle the Stonewall’s patrons into a paddy wagon, thus igniting the three days of intermittent rioting that followed. Others deny this—and in the debate over that single fact, thirty years of mistrust and suspicion are constellated. Who started Stonewall, and by extension GLBT liberation? Was it the queens or the gays? The gay men (and they were mostly men) being herded into the paddy wagon, or the crowd of drag queens who began to heckle the cops and eventually to pelt them with coins, stones, bottles, high-heeled shoes—and later to overturn cars and pull up parking meters? “Hand out the arms and ammo / We ‘re going to blast our way through here / We’ve got to get together sooner or later / Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right.” In the end, it may not matter who cast the first stone, only that the stone was cast and that it led first to an uprising and then to a movement. For a time, gays (male and female), drag queens, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people did indeed “come together” to ignite the revolution.