The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  The colonel said, “I didn’t know about it.” And I said, “Well, the commanding general of the Sixth Army knows about it.” “How could he?” I said, “Because I had lunch with him three weeks ago! Because everyone wanted to meet me. The general asked me, Are you happier?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I am.’” Nobody cared, because I was doing a great job. But when Washington found out about it, when the paperwork went through and they began to put two and two together and realized what had happened, then they started asking questions coming down the line, or in the proverbial military terms, it became CYA time: “cover your ass.” They wouldn’t admit to the fact that they knew. So all of a sudden my commander calls me in and says, “Someone is out to get you.” I said, “What do you mean?” and he says, “Well, the Inspector General is coming down, and you’re being charged with subversive activities, prohibited access to classified documents, immoral sexual activity, and fraudulent enlistment.” They had about fourteen charges, and that was the saving grace because they had gone so overboard…. They wanted to discredit me so badly that if it got into the press, the press would simply write me off as a bad apple. But when the press started looking at the record, they said, “Something’s wrong here. No person could be this bad and get this far in their career without being discovered and discharged years ago.”

  I met Christine Jorgensen around this time. Long story, but my friend Jude Patton invited me to come with him, and I was in uniform at the time, and when we got into her living room she turned around and looked at me and said, “Do they know?” And I said, “Yeah, the ones that count locally know. I was open with them.” She said, “Your day will come.” So when the colonel announced that I was being charged with all these things, I called Christine and … it was ten o’clock in the morning… and she said, “Do you know what time it is?” I said, “Yeah, it’s ten o’clock,” and she says, “I don’t get up till two in the afternoon. I’m a night person.” Click. So I called back about three and apologized for waking her up and said, “This is Sergeant Clark. Do you remember me?” and she said, “Oh yeah.” I said, “Do you remember what you said to me? ‘Your day will come.’ Well, it has.” She says, “Come on down.” So I drove down and brought all my paperwork. And she looked it over and said, “This is great stuff. Do you mind if I call a friend of mine at the Times}” and I said, “Not at all.” The reporter for the Times came down and looked at everything and she looked over at me and said, “This is what we call a ‘gee whiz’ story.” So she interviewed people all the way up the line. Basically, they had me walking on water without getting my feet wet, is what she told me. So I took her article and a TV interview and I mailed it all to President Carter and said, “I need help.” Well, Christmas Eve of ’77 I get a letter from the White House, three pages long, clearing me of all allegations but saying, “Don’t call us, we won’t call you. Transgendered are deemed to be psychologically unstable, therefore unfit for military service.” I only had nine months left to go before retirement, but they wouldn’t let me finish my service. Nine and a half months and I would have retired with a pension that included my service in Vietnam.

  Q: When were you in Vietnam?

  Sixty-eight during the Tet Offensive. I wasn’t on the ground. I was in naval aviation flying out of Camh Ran Bay, Ton Son Nhut. We were stationed out of Okinawa and we would fly down the coast looking for shipping two or three times a month.

  Q: Have you met any other Vietnam vets who have transitioned?

  Yeah, sure. Including one SEAL.

  Q: That’s one of the most unexpected things I’ve discovered during my research, the number of transgendered veterans. Nobody outside the community knows about that.

  Yes, well there is a tendency, I think, within the transgender community to go into the military or very macho roles that will help you conform. I liked scuba diving and I wanted to become a navy diver, but I liked to fly also, so I wound up in aviation. I was very happy to get out [of the service] and I didn’t think that I would miss it, but I did. To this day, I still miss it.

  Q: What did you do when you got out of the army?

  When the army discharged me, I went back to college and I enrolled in a class in career development to find out where my interests lay, and my counselor said, “You’re not going to believe this. Numbers one and two on the list are Catholic nun social worker and Catholic nun teacher.” And I said, “Well, you’re not going to believe this, but that was my dream as a child. I wanted to be a nun.” We were Protestants but we lived in an all-Catholic neighborhood and we lived across the street from the convent. And all throughout my childhood I would go across the street and sit on the steps and talk to the nuns. I loved them.

  So then I spent the next ten years looking for a community that would accept me. Because of all the notoriety [from the military case] I would always be up-front with them and say, “This is my past, but I feel called,” and I always got nice letters back saying, “Thank you, but don’t call us and we ‘re not going to call you.” So, finally, I was down at Saint Clements, and a very dear friend of mine said, “Have you ever considered the Franciscans?” In the meantime I had a spiritual director and I told him that I had written to them, and he said, “Well, they probably won’t write back,” but I got a letter back that said, “Why don’t you come visit?” So I drove up and spent a week with them, and I got some interesting lessons when I was there. The first morning, I was walking down the hallway with the mother superior. She came about up to here on me and she was Scottish and about seventy years old—and I referred to her as a nun and she did an about-face and looked up at me and said, “The cloistered are nuns and we are sisters, and don’t you ever forget that.” I said, “Oops.” Then she explained the difference to me.

  Then I came back here and talked to my spiritual counselor, and he said, “What do you want to do?” I told him I wanted to close up my business and join the Franciscans. They invited me to come up and spend another week, and I did, but in the end they couldn’t do it [accept her into the community]. It was a small community, and they felt that because of my notoriety, the press would probably come down on us like a ton of bricks.

  I told my spiritual director that I had been turned down, and he said, “You don’t need those old ladies anyway. What God is calling you to do is start a new social order for social justice. Write to the Episcopal nuns here and get their instructions on how to start a rule.” So they sent me the book, and I started writing the rule, and soon I had two other women join me and we wrote the rule together. All of a sudden the doors started opening up and we got support, even from the hierarchy. I got a letter from the bishop congratulating me and saying he wanted to come down to the service. Then the press got hold of it, through a woman that I worked with, and the next day it was all over. The bishop renounced me in an article in the L.A. Times. Sol made my vows, but it was a fiasco. The Episcopal Church jumped ship. They didn’t bother to put the lifeboats down; they just bailed. They had a Spanish Inquisition at Saint Clements, and so I finally left Saint Clements.

  Qj Obviously, you’ve had some horrific experiences with the press but you’ve also had some good experiences—the articles that have run in the Los Angeles Times about AEGIS, for example. This ties into some questions I wanted to askyou about Christine Jorgensen because I know that you were friends with her in the last years of her life. How does one not just come to terms with that media attention but also learn to use it for your own purposes, as she did?

  She certainly didn’t want it. What happened was that she wrote a letter to her parents, and somebody saw the letter and picked it up and sold it to the papers for two hundred dollars. She went into hiding for about six months, then thought that since there was nothing she could do about it, she might as well capitalize on it. She did a very good job of capitalizing on it. But also in the capitalization process, she went on with her career, working at movie studios, where she was a film editor. As a result, she got to know all the big stars. I’ll never forget, one nigh
t I was taking care of her dog while she was gone and all of a sudden, at two o’clock in the morning, her phone rang and I rolled over, half awake, and this voice says, “Christine?” I said, “No, Christine’s not here. This is Joanna,” and he says, “This is Uncle Milty. Tell her I called.”

  She was an absolutely wonderful human being. I think that there was a part of her that was very lonely because of things that she had gone through. She realized that she had very good friends in the world, but a lot were just her “friends” because of who she was. For the first four or five years she worked very hard trying to answer letters that came to her, people saying, “I’m like you,” and so forth. Then she came to the realization that there were a lot of crazy people out there, and she would help who she could help. She of course knew Harry Benjamin really well, Paul Walker, some of the folks at Hopkins, John Money.

  She loved to party. She would have her “Christmas in July” party every year. She put up a fully decorated Christmas tree that would stay up till after Christmas, then come down. At least twice a month she’d have a big party at her house. When I got involved with her she made me part of her circle, and I would go to her parties. Of course there was a lot of drinking, and I don’t drink. At two o’clock in the morning she’d go into her bedroom and pass out and go to sleep. I’d go home and get up in the morning and go over and clean the house for her.

  Q: Do you think she enjoyed her life?

  I think she did. Even though there was a lot of pain in her life. I think she overall led a good life and had her good times and her bad times. The best of times and the worst of times. She chose to remember her good times. She wasted very little time on her bad times. She went to the colleges and universities and did her lectures. So did I, but I made a mistake because she got paid and Jude [Patton] and I went and did them for free. Eventually Jude stopped and I stopped. I still do one though, because I really like the professor. It’s at the Southern California Christian College, and he really prepares his class. They are all fundamentalist Christians, so it’s an opportunity to really go in and open minds. That’s probably the only reason I continue to do it.

  Q: That leads to another thing I wanted to talk with you about: faith background and whether religion and spirituality are a source of nurturing or otherwise for transgendered people.

  I think spirituality is a very key component to success. Of course, there is a big difference between spirituality and religion. At the program where I work as a consultant, one of the questions I ask people is, “What is your relationship with God?” But most take offense to it and they are like, “I don’t need God.” They were raised in a very fundamentalist environment, and it was shoved down their throat that what they were doing was sin, and they just don’t want to deal with it. My response is, “I don’t care what your religion is. I’m concerned about how you’ve dealt with it. If you’ve decided that you’re not going to deal with it, rest assured that it will come back and haunt you.”

  The real issue is that if the person going through the transition has a good spiritual relationship with the Creator, and realizes that the Creator loves them and isn’t condemning them to hell because of their feelings, they have the support they need to get through the difficult times. But to just close it out and say, “I don’t need this,” because of the bad experiences they’ve had, they don’t have closure. This is where you are going to see the problems, because it will keep resurfacing. In terms of finding a church where you can be accepted, it’s the same as the gay issue. As long as they don’t know about you, they are fine. If they find out, you’ll have problems.

  Q: Which denominations are most accepting?

  I think Unitarians have been very accepting. But in reality it doesn’t matter what denomination it is. Every denomination is going to have a community that is really a community of God, that loves, that is not going to judge, that is going to accept you as a child of God, as you are. They are going to say, “Are you happier now than you were before? Yes? That’s all that matters.” And they’ll be supportive.

  Q: Have you ever considered your transgenderness to be a spiritual gift?”

  No, but I do look at myself as being blessed. There were times when I didn’t look on it as a blessing, prior to surgery and the misery that I inflicted on my ex. She never knew what was going on in my head, why I was standoffish. And yet, society forces us into roles that we weren’t meant for with no consideration that, by doing this, instead of hurting just one person, you’re going to wind up hurting lots of people. It’s tragic, and small wonder that so many suicides have occurred.

  I was also blessed that when the time came that I had to finally acknowledge who I was and go for help, I had supportive parents. Dad told me that at first they didn’t understand so they went to see a psychiatrist, who told them, “I don’t know very much about the subject but I will tell you this: if your son is a transsexual, then get used to the idea that you are going to have a daughter, because she’s always been your daughter but has just worked overtime to hide it from you.” So Dad took the position that this wasn’t my fault, this wasn’t my choice, and he was very supportive. Mom had more difficulty than Dad but I think it was because of her family. My mother’s side was military and Republican and very straitlaced, and so it was hard for them. My grandmother was about eighty-two when I started transition and wanted nothing to do with me.

  But she was a paraplegic and she would spend two weeks with Mom and Dad and two weeks with my aunt and uncle. I came home from the hospital the day she was to come back for her two weeks here. I had taken a shower and I was lying on the bed, changing my dressings, and she rolled into the room, saw me, was shocked and apologized, but she had this look on her face. She was curious as all get-out. And I said, “All right, Grandma. If you want to look, come over.” And my mother came in and said, “Oh, I’ll get Grandma out of here,” and I said, “No, it’s okay. Grandma wanted to see.” And I could see that mother wanted to see also. And so they came over to the edge of the bed, and Grandma leaned forward and she looked at me and she said to my mother, “She looks just like us.”

  That was the first time she had ever used “she,” and from that moment on I was Joanna. And she never once slipped. And if anyone else slipped she corrected them.

  ANSWERING THE RIDDLE

  The various answers to the riddle of gender that have been proposed by scientists are no less culturally influenced than the answers proposed by religion or law. Scientific attempts to solve the riddle are determined not only by cultural beliefs about the different roles of men and women but also by the state of science itself—the kinds of questions that scientists are able to ask and answer in any given era. Milton Diamond repeated to me the old joke about the man who had lost his most valuable possession and was searching for it under a lamp on a street far removed from the place where he had lost the object. “Why are you looking here?” a passerby asks. “Because the light is better here,” the man responds. Scientists have searched for the solution to the riddle of gender in the place where the “light” of scientific inquiry has shone brightest in various eras—endocrinology, psychiatry, embryology, and neuroscience. Yet those searches have produced no definitive answer to the riddle, only more tantalizing questions.

  Scientific responses to the riddle of gender have been used to police gendered behavior, but have also at times been helpful in liberating us from limiting beliefs about the nature of the differences we observe between males and females. It’s surely no accident that the birth of endocrinology coincided with the first wave of feminism, nor that the social construction hypothesis was generated by, and helped fuel, the second wave. It cannot be mere coincidence that gender-variant people became highly visible during those periods of “sexual anarchy,” when the scientific and social markers of gender suddenly became less fixed and less immutable. Gender, as distinct from sex, was defined during an era when many people hoped that biology was not destiny, an era in which women acquired reproductive freedom
and were liberated from menarche-to-menopause childbearing. The biological basis of gender is being reasserted during an era of resurgent social conservatism, when many people are feeling disenchanted with the excesses of feminist rhetoric, and seeking a way to be both pro-woman and pro-family.

  The belief that gender is a social construct enables us to diminish the limitations assigned to the female sex in most cultures, but it also penalizes women in subtle ways. Like it or not, women remain the bearers of children and their primary caretakers. Any theory of gender that ignores this elementary fact, and the economic and social impact of childbearing and child rearing on women, is bound to fail because it ignores not only social reality but biological reality. Yet not all women choose to bear children these days, and even many who do, do not not wish to be perceived primarily as mothers. In this realm, as in so many others, a middle-ground perspective that acknowledges women’s unique biological responsibilities and yet does not seek to define women solely in terms of biology seems most appealing.

  And who can speak more authoritatively of what it is like to inhabit the middle ground between biology and culture than gender-variant people? An individual who has inhabited the social roles of both man and woman, with all the cultural baggage that accrues to both states— or to neither—acquires a kind of gender gnosis: a secret knowledge denied the rest of us who live in our assigned boxes, M or F, without really probing the boundaries. Yet rather than letting these individuals be themselves, or even soliciting their insights, society in general continues to try to force gender-variant people (whether transgendered, transsexual, or intersexual) into one of the two socially acceptable boxes. This seems not only cruel but also foolish. In certain cultures, transgendered or “two spirit” people were considered wise counselors, shamans in fact. There are traces of this belief in our cultural tradition. Tiresias, the ancient Greek sage—who transformed into a woman after seeing two snakes mating, and then back into a man many years later—was wise because of, not in spite of, his metamorphoses. The religions of the world are replete with androgynous deities, or deities able to transgender themselves at will. Even Christianity and Judaism, together with Islam, the most androcentric of religions, retain traces of an ambigendered deity. Shekinah is the feminine face of God in Judaism, just as Wisdom in Christianity is gendered female. Neither Shekinah nor Wisdom is a separate being; both are a part of God, who is perhaps just as omnigendered as the embryo, and as potent with possibility.