The challenges faced by transgendered and transsexual people in their dealings with scientists and physicians are even more daunting. Like the general public, most hear the word “transsexual” and immediately visualize an episode of the Jerry Springer Show. They don’t conceive of gender variance as a medical condition, nor do they view it as a legitimate focus of research. Not many people are well acquainted with the kind of professional transpeople whom I interviewed for this book or with the data that point to a biological etiology for gender variance. In many ways, the scientific and medical professions mirror the prejudices of society at large with respect to trans people. No wonder so many trans people show little interest in participating in research and avoid seeking medical care. The history of interactions between trans people and health care providers has been a complicated one, as this book indicates. Arrogance, paternalism, dishonesty, manipulativeness—the accusations fly back and forth while the civil status and health status of transgendered people hang in the balance. Many in the trans community recognize that their efforts to achieve civil protections are somehow bound up with scientific and medical perceptions of their condition, while others heatedly deny that science and medicine will make any contribution at all to their efforts to gain job protections, to marry, to retain custody of their children, and to achieve the degree of social acceptance that has thus far eluded them.
Dr. Dana Beyer believes that further research combined with activism is essential. “People need to understand why this happens; they need to understand about DES and the effects of EDCs, and that this isn’t going away. This is personal for me. I live with this twenty-four—seven. But as a society we’ve got a real problem. Fish changing sex? Hermaphroditic frogs? But they don’t make the connection. And then when a story comes out, local sperm counts down 20 percent, they just sort of ignore it.”
The only way that the scientific community will accept the possibility that exposure to DES and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals is driving a silent epidemic of gender variance is if (a) epidemiologic studies show a clear correlation between an exposed population and a statistically significant increase in manifestations of gender variance; or (b) laboratory studies illuminate the mechanisms by which exposure to estrogenic chemicals might produce changes in sex-dimorphic brain structures and consequently in gender-specific behavior. Of course, this latter point raises another provocative question—what is gender-specific behavior and how might it be affected by exposure to EDCs?
In 2003, Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, published a book that attempts to anchor readily observed differences in male and female behavior in the brain. In The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain, Baron-Cohen admits that “the subject of essential sex differences in the mind is clearly very delicate” and that his theory could “provide grist for those reactionaries who might wish to defend existing inequalities in opportunities for men and women.” Nonetheless, Baron-Cohen believes that compelling data exist to show that the brains of the average man and woman are skewed to perceive and respond to the world differently. On average, he says, females spontaneously empathize (identify and respond to another’s emotions and thoughts and respond to them with an appropriate emotion) to a far greater degree than males. The average male, on the other hand, spontaneously systematizes (analyzes, explores, and constructs systems) to a greater degree than the average woman. Baron-Cohen is quick to point out that neither of these modes of interacting with the world is better or worse than the other—they are just different.Systematizing and empathizing are wholly different kinds of processes. You use one process—empathizing—for making sense of an individual’s behavior, and you use the other—systematizing—for predicting almost everything else. To systematize you need detachment in order to monitor information and track which factors cause information to vary. To empathize you need some degree of attachment in order to recognize that you are interacting with a person, not an object, but a person with feelings, and whose feelings affect your own. Ultimately, systematizing and empathizing depend on independent sets of regions in the human brain. They are not mystical processes but are grounded in our neurophysiology.
Calling the two types of brains E for empathizing and S for systematizing, Baron-Cohen stresses that not all women have the E type and not all men have the S type. The evidence does suggest that more women are E and more men are S, however, and Baron-Cohen marshals much behavioral data to support his claim. When it comes time to explain the neurobiological mechanisms that might create this difference, he cites some of the same evidence that I have presented in this book, including the effects of hormones on the sexual differentiation of the brain. Indeed, he points to studies of DES sons that found the youngsters “likely to show more female-typical behaviors—enacting social themes in their play as toddlers, for example, or caring for dolls.” Studies of male-to-female transsexuals show “a reduction in ‘direct’ forms of aggression (the physical assaults that are more common in males),” Baron-Cohen points out, and “an increase in indirect or ‘relational’ aggression (the style of aggression that is more common in females). This is strong evidence that testosterone affects the form the aggression takes,” he concludes. He also explores evidence for an anatomic and/or genetic basis for the E/S distinction.
Most provocatively, Baron-Cohen characterizes autism, a relatively rare condition in which a person shows abnormalities in social development and communication and displays obsessional interests, and As-perger’s syndrome, a more common and less disabling version of autism, as extreme cases of the male (systematizing) brain. Autism is diagnosed ten times more often in males than in females. Indeed, Hans Asperger, an early researcher on autism, suggested in 1944 that “the autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence.” This “monumental” idea, Baron-Cohen says, went unnoticed for nearly fifty years, and it wasn’t until 1997 that researchers began exploring this “controversial hypothesis.” Diagnoses of autism, like those for gender identity disorder, have been rising steadily over the past few decades, and though Baron-Cohen does not suggest any linkage between environmental factors and autism, one does wonder what might explain the sudden upsurge in cases of autism and Asperger’s syndrome.
Baron-Cohen’s research and his book, which was the subject of a cover story in Time magazine, provide another indication that the theory of psychosexual neutrality in particular and social construc-tionist views in general are steadily being eroded in both scientific and popular accounts of gender. A few months after Baron-Cohen’s research was highlighted in Time, a cover story in the New York Times Magazine inquired, “Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top?” The answer: “They Choose Not To.” Author Lisa Belkin concluded that “as women look up at the ‘top,’ they are increasingly deciding that they don’t want to do what it takes to get there,” namely neglect their families and their own emotional well-being. One of her sources says: “I think some of us are swinging to a place where we enjoy, and can admit we enjoy, the stereotypical role of female/mother/caregiver…. I think we were born with those feelings.” Belkin notes that “when these women blame biology, they do so apologetically, and I find this tone as interesting as the words…. We accept that humans are born with certain traits, and we accept that other species have innate differences between the sexes. What we are loath to do is to extend that acceptance to humans. Partly that’s because absolute scientific evidence one way or another is impossible to collect. But mostly it’s because so much of recent history (the civil rights movement, the women’s movement) is an attempt to prove that biology is not destiny.”
Like it or not, we seem to be reaching the point (again) at which we are willing to entertain the possibility that there may in fact be “essential” differences between the average man and the average woman, differences grounded in biology, not culture. In our attempts to sort out what those differences might be, and how they are formed, and how vul
nerable the human reproductive anatomy is to environmental assault, intersexual, transgendered, and transsexual people are a hugely important and almost completely ignored source of information. Not everyone will want to participate in research studies or discuss personal struggles with strangers, of course, but in the three years that I spent researching this book, I found among many transgendered people a real hunger to be heard and understood. There is some fear, however, that if a cause for gender variance is found, the search for a “cure” will inevitably begin. “Once the source is found, the drive to cure or eradicate our particular form of biological variation is probable, based on current medical mentalities. Isn’t it better not to address this issue at all?” says one of the trans friends I asked to review this chapter. Dylan Scholinski also voiced this concern. “I have a real problem with this being conceptualized as a birth defect,” he said. “I am not ‘defective.’”
Many gay people express the same reservations about the search for a gay “gene,” or organic etiology for homosexuality. Neuroscientist Simon LeVay acknowledges that studies like his, which identified structural difference in the brains of gay and straight men, are perceived by some as an attempt to “re-pathologize homosexuality and take us back to a time when it was considered some sort of disease. In all my writings and lectures I don’t present it that way. I’m gay myself. I’m happy to be gay. I think the world would be a better place if gay people were more accepted. But of course you can never know how other people will use material like this. There could always be somebody to say, ‘This shows that there are cells missing in the brain. Let’s go and put some in.’ If gene tests become available to test babies or fetuses, I’m sure there will be some people who would want to abort or have their baby genetically altered. I think myself what we should strive for is to create a world where that won’t happen. I think that’s a kind of urgent task to accomplish, and I think that’s not only in the area of sexual orientation but basically across the board. There’s so much human diversity that is controversial in terms of ‘is this good, is this acceptable, is this something that we don’t want?’ People are really going to have to debate these issues and decide what is acceptable and not acceptable, what is within the parents’ right to decide.”
LeVay also points out that studies have shown that people who believe that homosexuality is an inborn trait, as opposed to a freely chosen lifestyle, tend to have more positive views about gay people in general. “There have been studies where the researchers get a whole bunch of college students together and give them some reading material. One group of students will read material suggesting that sexual orientation is an inborn trait, referring to papers like my own kind of studies; another group of students read material suggesting a lack of biological differences. There was nothing in what they read that was a value judgment—they are just summaries of research. Then afterward they gave these kids a test—the homophobia index or something like that—and they found that the kids who read the ‘born that way’ kind of material were more favorable than the kids who read the other stuff. So to some extent it looks like there is a connection between beliefs about causation and attitudes about how gay people should be treated. In that sense, it [research on etiology] is not merely a scientific enterprise—though I think that it is a perfectly worthy scientific enterprise to understand basic aspects of human nature like sexual orientation and gender identity—but it really is embedded in this kind of social controversy about gay rights.”
Thirty-five years after Stonewall, and ninety years after Magnus Hirschfeld’s advocacy of gay and gender-variant people in Weimar Germany, transgendered people remain, in Christine Johnson’s phrase, “the invisible ones.” For some, that invisibility seems a kind of protective cloak, but for others it is a dark closet that prevents them from being known and accepted as they are. The community itself is riven with conflict about the pros and cons of assimilation, and the value of difference. Many young trans people especially question why they should be forced to choose a “box”—male or female—given that making such a choice feels like self-betrayal. “In a world that separates gender, I have found the ability to balance the blending of supposed opposites. In a world that demonizes non-conformity, I have found the purest spiritual expression in celebrating my otherness. In a world that exterminates the heretic, I have embraced the danger inherent in holding a belief not shared by the majority of people in my society,” writes Alexander John Goodrum, an African-American transman, in an essay published in the program for the True Spirit Conference in 2002.
Goodrum, who served as director of TGNet Arizona, a transgender advocacy and education organization, committed suicide in 2002 while being treated for depression. He was a gentle soul, who conceived of his transgenderness as “a spiritual act, an offering of the highest kind. It is a sacrifice of the pre-defined self created by societal doctrine. It is the act of laying that pre-defined self upon the altar, ready to be sacri-fied in a supreme act of faith. And it is that act of faith, to whomever or whatever one perceives as god, in which lies the ability to express the infinite.”
Some might call Alexander Goodrum a victim—of society’s prejudices or of his own conflicted nature. I prefer to think of him as a prophet. If the stories contained in this book teach us anything it is that gender variance is neither a fad nor a revolution. It is a biological fact. Our continuing failure to acknowledge this fact virtually ensures that there will be more Alexanders and Tacys and Gwens, individuals whose pain cannot be assuaged by a syringe or a scalpel and who die violent and premature deaths. Whether dying by their own hands or at the hands of uncomprehending others, these individuals have been sacrificed to an illusion, the belief that the spectrum of gender contains only two colors, black and white, and nothing in between.
CONVERSATION WITH JOANNA CLARK
Joanna Clark served in the United States Navy for seventeen years, rising to the rank of chief petty officer. She was discharged early in her transition but later served for eighteen months as sergeant first class in the army, after informing her recruiter and superiors about her sex reassignment. When the army later charged that she had fraudulently enlisted, she fought the charges and was eventually granted an honorable discharge. After becoming an activist, she lobbied for the California law that permitted replacement birth certificates and wrote two books on transsexualism and the law. She helped establish the Transsexual Rights Committee of the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union and, after taking vows as an Episcopal nun (a move at first sanctioned but later repudiated by church officials), founded the first and largest AIDS and online HIV information service, AEGIS (AIDS Education Global Information System). I spoke to Clark in the mobile home she shares with her elderly father and the bank ofcomputers required to run AEGIS.
Q: Can we talk a little about your military Service?”
The navy discharged me in ’74 and I had my surgery in ‘75. Then in the last part of ‘75 an army recruiter came through the building and wanted to put posters up, and I said, “Sure you can put ‘em up,” and he says, “Why don’t you join the Reserves?” And I said, “I’d love to but I don’t think I’m eligible.” He said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I was a chief petty officer in the navy, and the navy discharged me because of what I was going through.” He said, “What was that?” and I said, “I had sex reassignment.” And he says, “Well, it [sex reassignment] wouldn’t keep you from doing your job, would it?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “Why don’t you send me your D2-14 and your resume, and I’ll see what I can find out?” So I sent it. Well, Congress had gotten my records changed to show that I had served in the navy as a female (at my request) through the late Senator Phil Hart, who was chair of the Armed Services Committee and who my dad knew from when he was a city councilman. We were told later that when Senator Hart went to the navy and said, “I want the records changed and it’s been done in the past,” the navy’s argument was “Well, it’s never been done for a chief petty officer w
ho had a long career of seventeen years in the military.” It had been done for people who had been in the service for three to four years.
Q: And why would that make a difference?
Status, I guess, and embarrassment for the navy that they allowed someone in the navy for that long. So Hart says that he wanted the records changed, and the navy said no. Hart, who was chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, said, “Well, you have an appropriations bill here for a new aircraft carrier. I’ll schedule hearings when you change the records.” Well, whether that’s true or not, or whether the person in his office just told my dad that to make him feel good, I don’t know. It made a good story.
Anyway, they changed my records, so when the army got my stuff, they said, “Fine, we can take you as long as you can pass the physical.” So I went out and took the physical and the army gynecologist did a pelvic on me and passed me. So I served in the Army Reserves for about six or seven months, and they liked my work and said, “How would you like to work full-time for us as an army technician, civil service?” I said, “I’d love to.” So I filled out the paperwork and I was hired as a GS-7 and went to Psychological Operations as staff training assistant. Later, they wanted to promote me to warrant officer. So then I had to have security clearance, and that created a problem because, of course, fingerprints don’t change, and I’d had top secret before, so I had a full file with the FBI. So anyway, I get a call: “We got your fingerprint card back and it has written across it in red ink ‘Michael Clark.’ What is that?” I said, “Very simple. That’s what my name used to be. It’s all on the card. I went through sex reassignment.”
The Riddle of Gender Page 34