The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  In The Transsexual Empire Raymond promotes a somewhat paradoxical view of sex and gender. On the one hand, she says that sex is determined by chromosomes; this assumption is the foundation of her belief that “it is biologically impossible to change chromosomal sex, and thus the transsexual is not really transsexed.” On the other hand, Raymond denies that chromosomes and the cascade of physiological effects they initiate have any relevance in determining gender. Gender, in her view, is purely a matter of “sex role socialization.” Although she attacks John Money and his research throughout the book, she says that the role of sex hormones in the development of gender identity “is clearly outweighed by environmental factors,” a position that differs very little from Money’s belief that the sex of assignment and rearing trumps all other variables in the formation of gender identity. Masculinity and femininity, Raymond asserts, “are social constructs and stereotypes of behavior that are culturally prescribed for male and female bodies respectively.” Transsexuals, she says, are people who have been inadequately socialized into their culture’s sanctioned gender roles. “The transsexual has not been adequately conditioned into the role/identity that accompanies his or her body.”

  These statements, with their underlying assumption that gender is a purely social construct, make it difficult to understand Raymond’s vehement objection to sex reassignment. If gender differences are simply a matter of “sex role socialization” then men and women must be (in their pure, unsocialized state) psychologically identical. So why shouldn’t they be free to express their “gender” in any way they please? Raymond’s answer to the riddle of gender reflects the assumptions of the period in which she wrote The Transsexual Empire, and the community of which she was a part. Though it is clear that she recognizes significant differences in behavior between men and women, Raymond does not believe that these differences are biologically based. Instead, they are based on shared history and culture. In her view, “maleness” and “femaleness” are political categories above all, and the defining characteristic of womanhood is a shared subordination and victimization at the hands of men.

  “We know that we are women who are born with female chromosomes and anatomy, and that whether or not we were socialized to be so-called normal women, patriarchy has treated and will treat us as women,” she says. Transsexual women (or, to use the term that Raymond prefers, “male to constructed females”) do not share this common history of victimization and subordination and so are not, and can never be, women. “No man can have the history of being born and located in this culture as a woman. He can have the history of wishing to be a woman and of acting like a woman, but this gender experience is that of a transsexual, not of a woman. Surgery may confer the artifacts of outward and inward female organs but it cannot confer the history of being born a woman in this society.”

  Discomfort with one’s body, the sense of having been born in the “wrong” body—one that does not match one’s view of one’s self as a man or woman—is a manifestation of “sex role oppression,” akin to racial oppression, Raymond says. Transsexual people suffer gender dysphoria because society has provided them with a stereotyped view of what it means to be a man or a woman, Raymond maintains. The fatal error of the transsexual is acceptance of the patriarchal gender system, swallowing patriarchy’s claim that certain feelings and behaviors are reserved for certain bodies. Transsexuality is a political problem that demands political solutions, Raymond argues. By surgically and hormonally altering their bodies to achieve a better “fit” between gender identity and physical appearance, transsexual people play into the hands of the patriarchal enemy, men whose primary goal is to keep women powerless and subservient. “Transsexualism is thus the ultimate, and we might even say, the logical, conclusion of male possession of women, in a patriarchal society. Literally, men here possess women.”

  Transmen (female-to-male transsexuals) are, in Raymond’s view, mere “tokens” whose role is to “save face for the transsexual empire.” Female-to-male transsexual people adopt “stereotypes of masculinity,” says Raymond, and “have been assimilated into the transsexual world, as women are assimilated into other male-defined worlds, institutions and roles, that is, on men’s terms, and thus as tokens.” Though Raymond seems to view all transsexual people as puppets or pawns of men and of the male power structure, she absolves transmen as victims (after all, they were born women), whereas transwomen (born men) are active collaborators with the real enemy—the doctors and researchers who have developed and maintain the transsexual empire. “The Transsexual Empire is ultimately a medical empire, based on a patriarchal medical model. This medical model has provided a ‘sacred canopy’ of legitimations for transsexual treatment and surgery.” Sex reassignment is nothing more than behavioral modification, Raymond asserts, and its goal is social control through the creation of stereotyp-ically female pseudo-women who will be used to keep biologically born females in their place as a second sex, prisoners of a male-defined “femininity.”

  Raymond’s book, which despite its harsh rhetoric does in certain places provide a compelling critique of gender roles, deteriorates into outright paranoia near its close. “One hypothesis that is being tested in the transsexual ‘laboratories’ is whether or not it is possible for men to diminish the number of women and/or create a new ‘breed’ of females,” she states darkly. “Scientists have already stated their ‘scientific’ interest in diminishing the number of women.” She compares the relationship between transsexual people and the physicians and surgeons who treat them as “master/slave” and “sadist/masochist” pairings. Finally, and perhaps predictably, she drags in the Nazis, saying that “it is significant that the first physician on record to perform sex-change surgery was a German by the name of F. Z. Abraham, who reported the first case in 1931.” Abraham, of course, was a colleague of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose institute was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.

  Janice Raymond’s book was mentioned by nearly every transsexual person I interviewed. Until the publication of Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed, in 2002, The Transsexual Empire remained the best-known and most widely read and discussed book on transsexualism by an academician who is neither a physician nor a transsexual person. This is unfortunate, as Raymond’s book provides an account of transsexualism that is far from balanced and is scientifically quite naive. Though she accuses doctors and physicians of ideological bias, her book is itself anchored in ideology, the ideology of lesbian separatism. Reading the book today, one is struck not only by the vitriol of Raymond’s argument, but also by its profound paranoia. One senses that under Raymond’s rage lies a deep fear of men and an unwillingness to believe that any person born (and socialized) as a male can ever be “cured” of the desire to impose his will on women. As Tom Kennard notes, describing his years as a lesbian-feminist separatist, “Women, good. Men, bad.”

  A generation after the publication of The Transsexual Empire, that view seems comically simplistic, as does another of Raymond’s core arguments—that transsexuals are, as a group, “more royal than the king” in adhering to stereotypical gender roles. Transgendered and transsexual people today (particularly young people) express a sometimes bewildering range of gender identities and roles. For example, around the time I began working on this project a friend sent me an e-mail survey he had received from a Washington, D.C., area support group, which inquired:Do you identify as transgendered, transsexual, transvestite, cross-dresser, trangenderist, genderqueer, FTM/F2M, MTF, M2F, trans-man, transwoman, transperson, third-gendered, gendertrash, gender outlaw, gender warrior, trans, transfag, transdyke, tranny, passing woman/girl, drag king, drag queen, male lesbian, girl boy, boychick, boy girl, boy dyke, gender-bender, gender blender, transqueer, androgynous, transfolk, butch dyke, nelly fag, gender-different, gender subversive, man/boy with a vagina, chick with a dick, shape-shifter, he-she, she-male, transboy, transgirl, androgyne, gender variant, genderfucker, trannyfag, trannyqueer, trannydyke, Two Spirit, new man, new woman, she-bear, Tom
boy, intersexual/female guy, tranz, bearded female, herm, hermaphrodite, MTM/M2M, FTF/F2F, un-gendered, agendered, genderfree, bigendered, midgendered, polygen-dered, pangendered, omnigendered, crossgendered, byke, boi, pre-op, post-op, non-op, no-ho, epicene, othergendered, transkid, female impersonator, gender-atypical, ambigendered … or any other related term not on this list?

  As this list illustrates, if gender-variant people agree about anything these days, it is about their right to express their identitities and to label themselves (or not label themselves) in any way they choose. But even as Raymond was writing about the tendency of transsexual people to adopt highly conservative views of gender to placate their medical masters, individuals and groups were beginning to challenge that perspective. During the late sixties and early seventies, transsexual people, like almost everyone else, began questioning traditional gender norms—and were consequently liberated from the view that doctors and researchers were the primary authority on transsexuals and transsexualism. The Transsexual Action Organization—founded in Los Angeles in 1970 by Angela Douglas—for example, was a radical group that, like the Gay Liberation Front, stood shoulder to shoulder with other revolutionaries working to change American society and that viewed the system, and not the (transsexual or transgendered) individual, as the problem. “I have a newspaper article in my files by Angela Douglas from ‘70 or ‘71 that calls for ‘transgender liberation now’ and provides a whole political critique of the gender system,” says Susan Stryker. “She was fairly self-aware in saying ‘the things that are fucked up about me are the result of oppression, and I have a critique of the conditions that have produced me as I am.’”

  Douglas was not the only transsexual or transgendered person connecting her own oppression to a broader social critique, says Stryker. “There are some interesting connections between the antiwar movement and the transgender movement,” she says. “I think it’s not coincidental that these were the height of the war years, and that there is a relationship, particularly in what male-to-female transsexual people were able to accomplish, and a larger cultural imperative to fuck with masculinity, at least from the standpoint of the left. The way that you kept from being put in a green uniform and shipped home in a body bag was you became non-normatively masculine and therefore unfit for military service. The long hair, the love beads, the paisley shirt, the bell-bottoms—there was a way that the critique of gender became part of that larger critique, and it created a space for people who were coming from a more self-identified transgender place to work within the broader cultural synergy.”

  This new breed of transsexual activist rejected the attempts of doctors and researchers to define transsexuality as a form of control— well before Janice Raymond burst onto the scene. “By the mid-sixties, I think that transsexuals were using the scientific discourse as received for their own ends,” says Stryker. “They were saying, ‘Because I am a transsexual, I should be allowed to change my legal identification paperwork. Because I am a transsexual, I am going to work with the neighborhood legal defense fund, and we’re going to wage this case and change employment law. Because I am a transsexual, I should have my medical needs met; therefore the city clinic should give me hormones.’ So the classic transsexual medical discourse was being deployed for purposes of gaining civil and human rights. That started in ‘65 to ‘66 here in San Francisco.”

  Rather than applying to one of the university gender clinics, with their stringent criteria for acceptance, many transsexuals began to seek out private surgeons who were willing to perform surgery on demand. The most infamous of these, John Ronald Brown, “presented himself as the champion of transsexuals,” says Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed, “but he also won a well-earned reputation as the back-alley butcher of transsexual surgery.” But more reputable doctors and surgeons also began working with transsexual clients, and it became somewhat easier for people to access the services they required—if they had the money. Others traveled overseas for surgery, effectively subverting the medical model by contracting for services with health care providers who did not share American physicians’ views of the need for an extended period of “real-life” experimentation prior to surgery. A number of transsexual memoirists have written of their surgeries with “Dr. B” in Casablanca, Morocco. Dr. Georges Borou was for many years the surgeon of choice for affluent transsexual people, such as British journalist Jan (nee James) Morris. “He was exceedingly handsome,” Morris writes in Conundrum. “He was small, dark, rather intense of feature, and was dressed as if for some kind of beach activity. He wore a dark blue open-necked shirt, sports trousers, and game shoes, and he was very bronzed. He welcomed me with a bemused smile, as though his mind were in Saint-Tropez.”

  Meanwhile, John Money’s erstwhile benefactor, Reed Erickson, continued to fund research and public education on transsexualism through the Erickson Educational Foundation throughout the seventies. “What Erickson did on a small scale in Harry Benjamin’s office in the sixties they did on a much larger scale later,” says Aaron Devor. “The first three international conferences on transsexuality were all funded by the EEF.” The first symposium was held in London, in 1969; the second in Denmark, in 1971; and the third in Yugoslavia, in 1973. A fourth conference, named the Harry Benjamin Fourth International Conference on Gender Identity, in honor of Benjamin’s ninetieth birthday, was held in 1975. The EEF, says Devor, “chose the locations, invited the people, did the advertising. That synergy created a whole new field of research. He [Erickson] created a whole new discipline, as well as a support network for transsexuals themselves who would call the EEF to find out where they could find a doctor or a therapist.”

  The Erickson Educational Foundation also produced numerous publications for transsexual people and their families, brochures and pamphlets that explained in everyday language what transsexualism was and offered effective strategies for treatment. “In their day, these were the only educational material that transsexual people and their families could get their hands on. They were quality publications, and have been subsequently republished and are still in circulation,” says Devor. “The EEF really created public awareness, public sympathy, even empathy for transsexuals. I give Erickson a tremendous amount of credit for bringing this issue to the attention of researchers and the public.”

  The EEF financed a steady stream of lectures at medical schools, at schools of social work and law, and to police officers in training.

  “They sought out people in positions of power and influence over the lives of transsexuals and tried to educate them while they were being trained,” says Devor. “The EEF made movies and then sent them around to medical schools. In collaboration with John Money, they produced definitions of transsexuality and transvestism, which they sent out to 105 dictionaries and encyclopaedias, so that when you looked for a definition [of those terms] you found the ones they had created. It was almost as though they asked themselves what they could do to make people aware of this issue on every front.” The advice columnists Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers even referred people to the EEF in their columns. When the imminent closure of the EEF was announced at the Fifth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, held in Norfolk, Virginia, in February 1977, the assembled group of researchers, under the direction of Paul Walker, M.D., discussed the creation of a new organization to carry on its work. The proposed organization, named for Harry Benjamin, was formally approved at the Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, held in San Diego, California, in February 1979.

  In March 2003, I spoke to Jude Patton, a transman who was the first “consumer advocate” on the new Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) Board of Trustees. Patton, a psychotherapist, was a graduate student when he became involved with HBIGDA through his doctor/patient relationship with Donald Laub, M.D., a surgeon at Stanford University’s Gender Clinic and one of the first members of the board. “When the first HBIGDA conference was going to be held, I asked Don Laub, who was my surgeon, if I
could attend, and I came as his guest. At that time I had also met Zelda Suplee [of the EEF] and Paul Walker through some of the early support groups that I had started,” says Patton. At the meeting in San Diego in 1979, “there was a band of outspoken heterosexual TVs, consumer voices, who were very strident, saying, ‘Why don’t you include us?’ and other things of that nature,” says Patton. “So when they actually formed HBIGDA, Doctor Laub suggested that they include a consumer advocate, and he nominated me. The vote was fifteen to fifteen.” Patton says that the votes against were not against him personally—as “nobody really knew me”—but against the idea of having a consumer voice on the board at all. “I remember that someone stood up and said, I will not serve on any committee that has a consumer on it,’” he recalls.

  Laub cast the deciding vote in favor of Patton’s membership, however, and Patton was elected. Patton served on the HBIGDA board from 1979 to 1981, and found the experience somewhat overwhelming. “I was very intimidated,” he says. “I was still a grad student, and these people were big names in the field.” Still, he says, “they were polite and they listened to me.” But after his two-year term expired, the board did not appoint another consumer advocate until 1997, when Patton was once again asked to serve, together with Sheila Kirk, M.D., an MTF surgeon. “It was my understanding that the position [of consumer advocate] would always be there,” he says. “But it didn’t happen again until 1997, when Sheila Kirk and I were contacted by the board. They knew our work and trusted us. I give Richard Green, who was president at the time, credit. He said, ‘It’s time.’” Patton believes that he was recruited to serve on the board again because of “the personal relationships I had developed over the years” with board members, and also because he is “an educator. I’m not a rabble-rouser,” he says.