The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  The lack of trust between gays, lesbians, and the various groups generally lumped together today under the adjective “transgendered” became a public rift in 1974 for reasons that were partly political and partly aesthetic. Overtly gender-variant people were viewed with suspicion and distaste by some politically savvy gay men focused on gaining civil rights. For people whose goal was integration, not revolution, men in dresses were a decided handicap to public acceptance. The former advocated a right to privacy in the bedroom and tended to oppose flamboyant public displays of “difference” as counterproductive. They also increasingly rejected the view that gay men were more feminine than the average straight man. Instead, they emphasized their masculinity, a trend that was to become even more pronounced as the androgynous seventies gave way to the muscular eighties. In the nineteenth century “there was this very strong association formed between gender nonconformity and homosexuality,” says Simon LeVay, who sees an “overcorrection” of that association in the late-twentieth-century gay and lesbian communities, where “there’s been an almost excessive denial between homosexuality and gender nonconformity.” This attitude has been particularly acute among gay men, he says. “There’s definitely a femmephobia in the gay male community, generally a dislike of men who seem feminine.”

  The political position of lesbians was complicated by their allegiance to feminism; neither gay men nor straight feminists fully understood or shared lesbians’ concerns. But lesbians, too, were incubating a new kind of sexual chauvinism. Lesbian culture in the fifties had been just as wedded to the concept of gender dimorphism as the medical profession, dividing lesbian women into “butches” (masculine lesbians) and “femmes” (feminine lesbians). But a new aesthetic was forged in the late sixties and early seventies as young people of all sexual orientations began to reject the values and behaviors of their parents. “Gender issues stood at the forefront of the radical challenge. Antiwar activists rejected the masculine warrior ideal and feminists led a frontal assault on cultural injunctions that demanded feminine behavior among women,” writes historian Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. The sexual revolution was also a gender revolution, and the two aspects of the upheaval were inextricably entwined. For a brief period, fin de siecle sexual anarchy was reborn.

  People began to play with gender, to “bend” gender, in ways that hadn’t been seen before. The elegant female impersonators of Finoc-chio’s, a San Francisco supper club popular in the fifties and early sixties, were a far cry from the Cockettes, a group of singing, dancing, gender-fuck hippies who began performing in San Francisco in 1969. The Cockettes were female impersonators on acid—a psychedelic melange of beards, glitter, and colorful thrift-store robes and dresses— who spun about the stage like dervishes. Led by Hibiscus, a gay mystic who founded a commune of like-minded souls, the Cockettes ignored identity in favor of play and self-expression. Most of the Cockettes were gay men, but some were straight women and men who embraced the gender-fuck aesthetic. “They were people who brought together clashing styles,” says historian Susan Stryker. “Full beards and pink tutus, silver glitter combat boots, fucking with gender, fucking up gender. A lot of glam rock came out of that sensibility, that sense of ‘I’m not trying to pass as something.’ It was a conscious way of manipulating the signifiers of gender to call attention to its constructedness, often in a playful, militant, and politicized way.”

  For a time androgyny, a blending of masculine and feminine, became the new ideal. “Many of us believed that the best way to eliminate the male/female divide was for all of us to look as much like one another as possible. Men were encouraged to wear their hair long and to sport jewelry such as beaded necklaces. Facial hair was discouraged,” says Karla Jay. “In contrast, short hair was favored for women, and I was applauded when I finally cut my hair in 1972.… Most of the lesbians favored bell-bottom denims, boots, and flannel shirts with a T-shirt underneath. After all, we were dressing for the revolution, not Vogue.” This new aesthetic posed some problems for those who were, quite literally, “androgynous”—drag queens, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people. On the outside many didn’t appear revolutionary at all. Drag queens and transsexual women wanted to look like girls—and girls wore high heels, makeup, and short skirts or, in the hippie style espoused by folksinger Beth Elliott, granny dresses. Girls flaunted their womanliness. They didn’t try to hide it under layers of flannel. Lesbian women and straight feminists were angry and appalled by what they perceived as the charade of femininity expressed by some drag queens and transsexual women. To them it exhibited a lack of respect, akin to the lack of respect shown African Americans by white actors in blackface. Drag was perceived as a kind of gender minstrel show.

  Some lesbians and female-bodied transgendered persons were also having a difficult time adjusting to the new regime. If drag queens were too “feminine,” butch lesbians were too “masculine” for evolving standards of gay gender presentation. In Stone Butch Blues, a novel that reflects hir experience coming of age as a young butch lesbian in Buffalo, New York, Leslie Feinberg poignantly documents the turmoil in hir community that followed Stonewall. The new androgyny affected not only the masculine lesbians who had previously found a measure of comfort and security in the tight-knit lesbian community in the face of society’s hatred. Their femme partners, who were viewed by the new breed of lesbian as puppets of the patriarchy, were also attacked for acting out a kind of femininity that demeaned and oppressed women.One day I came home from work and found Theresa stewing in anger at the kitchen table. Some of the lesbians from a newly formed group on campus had mocked her for being a femme. They told her she was brainwashed. “I’m so mad.” Theresa thumped the table. “They told me that butches were male chauvinist pigs!”

  I knew what male chauvinist meant, but I couldn’t figure out what it had to do with us. “Don’t they know we don’t deal the shit, we get shit on?”

  They don’t care, honey. They’re not going to let us in.”

  “Should Jan and Grant and Edwin and I go to one of these meetings and try to explain?”

  Theresa put her hand on my arm. “It won’t help, honey. They’re very angry at butches.”

  “Why?”

  She thought about the question. “I think it’s because they draw a line—women on one side and men on the other. So women they think look like men are the enemy. And women who look like me are sleeping with the enemy. We’re too feminine for their taste.” “Wait a minute,” I stopped her. “We’re too masculine and you’re too feminine? Whatdya have to do, put your index fingers in a meter and test in the middle?”

  Rejected by the new breed of “woman-identified women” for being too butch, and shunned by society at large for being too androgynous, Feinberg’s character Jess Goldberg, a “he-she,” takes refuge in masculinity. Testosterone masculinizes hir body and deepens hir voice. Bearded and flat-chested after a mastectomy, Jess passes as a man without difficulty, but is consumed by loneliness and a sense of alienation. “As much as I loved my beard as part of my body, I felt trapped behind it,” Feinberg writes. “What I saw reflected in the mirror was not a man, but I couldn’t recognize the he-she. My face no longer revealed the contrasts of my gender. I could see my passing self, but even I could no longer see the more complicated me beneath my surface.”

  Jess Goldberg (like hir creator, Leslie Feinberg) chooses to embrace ambiguity and live in the undefined space between the poles of male and female—the space that would eventually be termed “transgen-der.” The choice was not without peril. When sie was a butch lesbian, “strangers had raged at me for being a woman who crossed a forbidden boundary. Now they really didn’t know what my sex was, and that was unimaginable, terrifying to them. Woman or man—the bedrock crumbled beneath their feet as I passed by.” Goldberg relates the comment of a shopkeeper to a fellow customer—“how the hell should I know what it is? The pronoun echoed in my ears. I had gone back to being an it.�
� As an it, the fictional Goldberg was beaten so badly that hir jaw was wired shut. As an it, the real Feinberg was denied medical treatment and nearly died from an untreated bacterial infection. Though Stone Butch Blues is a novel, the challenges faced by the book’s protagonist remain all too real for visibly transgendered people.

  Perhaps for that reason, many choose to disappear into more conventional gender presentations. This has been particularly true of female-to-male transsexual people (FTMs), who for the most part have far less difficulty “passing” in their chosen gender, as Jess Goldberg discovered. In contrast to the many memoirs and autobiographies published by male-to-female transsexual people (MTFs) in the sixties, the seventies, and beyond, the number of books by FTMs remains slim, reflecting the relative invisibility of transmen. Even today, there is no one FTM figure with the name recognition of a Christine Jorgensen, even though the first international “outing” of a female-to-male transsexual person occurred a few years after Jorgensen’s media baptism. In May 1958, the Sunday Express of London revealed that a forty-two-year-old physician, Laurence Michael Dillon, heir presumptive to the baronetcy of Lismullen, had in fact been born Laura Maud Dillon. “The very day the Express story appeared it went round the world courtesy of the Reuters news agency,” notes Dillon’s biographer Liz Hodgkinson. Dillon, who had transitioned fifteen years previously under the supervision of the British surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, was devastated by his new notoriety, and promptly abandoned his career.

  Like Dillon, many transmen avoid notoriety, and their stories remain largely untold. However, although fewer FTMs have written memoirs or spoken out about their feelings during the immediate post-Stonewall era, the ones who have acknowledge that they were just as uncomfortable with the new “androgyny” as the drag queens, stone butches, and MTFs. For one thing, most transmen adamantly maintain that they are not lesbians. They are men, period. In his autobiography, Emergence, published in 1977, Mario Martino clarifies the distinction between a “butch,” or masculine lesbian, and a female-to-male transsexual.

  “Proud of being a woman, she [the lesbian] responds to another woman who responds to her as a female. The lesbian’s satisfaction is the woman-to-woman contact,” writes Martino. “Unlike the lesbian, I did not want to be a woman and I felt I should never have been one, that I could be content only in the male gender. I have always wanted, will always want, only the male to female relationship.” Martino’s feelings are echoed in nearly every FTM memoir published to date, including What Took You So Long? A Girl’s Journey to Manhood, by Raymond Thompson (1995); and Dear Sir or Madam, by Mark Rees (1996).

  That said, it is also true that many FTMs today may have spent years and even decades in the lesbian community before transitioning. The decision to transition presents a terrible conundrum to many transmen, who feel loved and accepted in the lesbian community even if they never feel that the label “lesbian” really applies to them. “For me, some of the hardest people to come out to about being trans are some of my older lesbian friends. Some of them have been great about it, but some definitely had to struggle, feeling a sense of betrayal as butch lesbians,” says Ali Cannon, a thirty-seven-year-old transman I interviewed in 2001. “A friend of mine has talked about the way that the lesbians from that generation, my generation and older, have become the parents that the younger lesbians who identify as trans have to come out to. Their feeling of loss, and ‘you’re not growing up to be what we wanted you to be’ is very similar to that of straight parents first confronted with a child’s homosexuality,” he says. This is particularly true for those who came of age during the seventies, when lesbianism became almost synonymous with a deep and abiding mistrust of men and male power. “It was really hard,” says Tom Kennard, a San Francisco computer programmer, about his decision to transition in the 1990s. “I’m fifty-one, so when I was coming up I was a big feminist, a white lesbian feminist and I was kind of a separatist. You know, there’s all this stuff in feminism, like women are the highest of all, women are good. Women, good. Men, bad.”

  The woman, good/man, bad dichotomy that Kennard describes was forged in the feminist movement’s rejection of patriarchy and its mandates for gender-coded behavior. Women as a group, gay or straight, revolted en masse against the limitations implicit in traditional definitions of womanhood. Few burned their bras, but many began to question why it was that a woman could not be a mechanic or a doctor, why women were expected to be demure and accommodating, why women were always expected to place their own needs and desires after those of men. Why were women raised to be second-class citizens? In this struggle for self-definition, men, both as a group and as individuals, became Man, the tyrant and oppressor. A collective howl of rage was heard across the land, as activist women in particular noticed that their male counterparts were no more progressive in their attitudes toward and treatment of women than the system they were attempting to overthrow. The New Woman was back, but this time she was loud, proud, and overtly political.

  Robin Morgan—a feminist writer whose essay “Goodbye to All That” served notice to leftist men that their days of mouthing platitudes about liberation while expecting secretarial, sexual, and housekeeping services from leftist women was at an end—articulated the new ideology. Morgan encouraged women to claim the shadow side of femininity —to be “bitchy, catty, dykey, frustrated, crazy, Solanisque, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating.” Like the Black Power movement that succeeded the more high-minded civil rights movement, women’s liberation was about taking stereotypes and turning them on their heads. As Morgan noted in capital letters: WE ARE THE WOMEN THAT MEN HAVE WARNED US ABOUT.

  Gay or straight, women began to name and resist male privilege and to reject a subservient role based on male definitions of femaleness. In Out for Good, Clendenin and Nagourney report on the bitter divorce of gay men and lesbians in the nascent gay liberation movement in the seventies, as lesbians became fed up with the tendency of gay men to focus exclusively on their own issues, ignoring or discounting the primary concerns of gay women. Del Martin, a longtime activist who had cofounded the Daughters of Bilitis and worked alongside gay men in the pre-Stonewall homophile movement, published a letter in The Advocate announcing her own revolution. “I will not be your ‘nigger’ any longer,” she writes. “Nor was I ever your mother. Those were stultifying roles you laid on me, and I shall no longer concern myself with your toilet training.”

  In New York City, a group of lesbian women active in the Gay Liberation Front began meeting separately from the men within a year after Stonewall. Equally disgusted by the misogyny and arrogance of gay men and the homophobia of heterosexual feminists, this group wrote and distributed a passionate manifesto called “The Woman-Identified Woman” at the Second Congress to Unite Women, in May 1970. Calling themselves the Lavender Menace, a barbed response to Betty Friedan’s characterization of lesbians as a “lavender menace” that would derail the blossoming feminist movement, the authors of “The Woman-Identified Woman” described lesbians as “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” This ten-paragraph manifesto, Clendenin and Nagourney note, “called on feminists to cut their ties with men and the male culture, to redefine their own role in society by bonding with women—ideally lesbians, since they best understood the oppression women suffered in a male-dominated society.” As Clendenin and Nagourney note, the document was “a road map to a separate political movement,” lesbian separatism.

  Karla Jay, one of the instigators of the Lavender Menace action and a founder of the Radicalesbians, a group formed in its wake, says that “for lesbians, the best thing that emerged from the Lavender Menace action was the group of protesters itself—the first post-Stonewall group to focus on lesbian issues. Only weeks earlier we had been a random group of women associated primarily with gay liberation and women’s liberation. For the moment at least, we emerged a victorious organization
with a sense of solidarity, common purpose and sisterhood. We knew we would no longer accept second-class status in the women’s movement or the gay movement. We would be equal partners, or we would leave the straight women and gay men behind.”

  Nothing infuriated these “woman-identified women” more than biological males “masquerading” as women, particularly when these “women born men” claimed to be lesbian feminists themselves. At the West Coast Lesbian Conference held in Los Angeles in 1973 (three months before Jean O’Leary confronted Sylvia Rivera at the Pride rally in New York City), the keynote speaker, Robin Morgan, spoke for those who objected to Beth Elliott, a male-to-female transsexual folk singer performing at the meeting. Like Jean O’Leary and other lesbian feminists, Morgan characterized transvestites and transsexuals as men who flagrantly mocked and parodied women. “Man-hating,” she proclaimed, “is an honorable and viable political act”—and in her view and in the view of many members of the lesbian-feminist community, male-to-female transsexuals remained men, despite their transformed genitalia.

  The hostility of lesbian feminism toward transsexuals reached its peak in Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, published in 1979. Charging that transsexual women were patriarchy’s shock troops, medically constructed pseudo-females created to infiltrate the lesbian community and destroy it, Raymond characterizes sex-reassignment surgery as a new kind of rape. “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves. However, the transsexually constructed lesbian feminist violates women’s sexuality and spirit as well.” Like Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist who closed the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Janice Raymond rejects biological explanations for transsexuality and views it purely as a social phenomenon. Despite the extreme difference in their lifestyles and points of view (McHugh is a conservative Catholic and Raymond a radical lesbian feminist), Raymond and McHugh echo each other in characterizing transsexual-ism as “an ideology” and comparing sex-reassignment surgery to a lobotomy.