These philosophical and theological musings are, of course, of little interest or value to many gender-variant people, who are focused on the battle to achieve civil rights as they remain the most vulnerable minority group in our culture, and the target of the most virulent discrimination. What can one say about the case of Peter Oiler, the truck driver who was fired by the Winn-Dixie supermarket chain after twenty years of exemplary employment when his supervisor discovered that he occasionally dressed in women’s clothing? Oiler was not wearing dresses to work, nor was he negligent in his duties in any way. However, he did make the mistake of being honest when his supervisor called him into his office to discuss rumors that Oiler was gay. The married Oiler said that he wasn’t gay but that he cross-dressed occasionally and had attended support group meetings, dined in restaurants, gone shopping, and occasionally attended church services while dressed in women’s clothing. He was asked to resign shortly thereafter, and when he refused to do so, was fired, with his health care coverage and other benefits terminated.
Oiler, backed by a number of trans advocacy groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, appealed to the courts of the state of Louisiana, which denied his claim of discrimination and request for damages. Cross-dressers, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people are not covered by existing federal civil rights legislation, so people like Peter Oiler have little legal recourse when they are fired from their jobs or refused an apartment or a loan or harassed in the workplace or in a restaurant or store. Another book could be, and I hope will be, written about the legal travails of gender-variant people and the manner in which they are consistently denied the most basic liberties that most Americans take for granted.
At the fifth annual symposium sponsored by the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, held on February 27, 2002, trans attorney and activist Phyllis Randolph Frye delivered a keynote address that laid out some of the challenges that have confronted transgendered people and their allies as they have sought protection under the law. Like Sylvia Rivera, Frye continually reminds audiences that despite their crucial role in the Stonewall riots and in the early days of gay liberation, transgendered and gender-variant people have been consistently excluded from proposed legislation by gay leaders who feel that various bills would not pass if they included transgenders.
“In 1989, I became aware that even though transgenders began the Stonewall Riots in 1969, we were not welcome in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights. And as the other speakers here today know, beginning in 1989, we of the transgender community began a decade-plus-long fight for that reincorporation…. Today, we are an almost completely reincorporated LGBT community. Unfortunately, transgenders plus gender-variant lesbians and gays and bisexuals remain excluded from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) before the U.S. Congress.” ENDA, first introduced in Congress in 1994 and resubmitted each year since then, would provide federal protection for gays and lesbians—but as Frye notes, “each year since then, ENDA has been introduced with sometimes different language, but always with a deliberate and intentional exclusion of transgenders and gender variants.” At the 2001 Gender and the Law Conference, Professor Chai R. Feldblum of Georgetown University, one of the original drafters of ENDA, said that she had since come to believe that it was crucial to include protection for gender-variant people in any proposed legislation. Many of the legislators who support ENDA maintain that the act cannot be passed with such a clause, however, even though a number of cities and towns have passed laws protecting the civil rights of transgendered Americans over the past two years.
At the Georgetown conference, Phyllis Frye noted that much progress had been achieved in recent years, notably that “more and more transgenders are coming out of their closets” and that “although rampant employment discrimination still exists … more and more companies, some that used to fire transitioning transgenders in upper management,… are now giving transgenders a try.” Still, challenges remain, legal and other, she said. One of the most important of these is a matter of language, which reflects outdated perceptions. “A very important change that has yet to be made is the time we transgenders are no longer called ‘sex changes.’ After all, consider this: we are NOT CHANGING anything! Indeed, we are merely CORRECTING pronouns, names, manner of dress, hormones and flesh to MATCH what has always been in our brains…. The law must learn to assimilate the advances of medical science in a quicker manner and not remain legally stuck in the medical thinking of thirty years ago.”
Frye is right about the tendency of the law to lag behind science, and yet science and medicine, too, are inherently conservative endeavors that tend to cleave to old paradigms until forced to do otherwise. Harry Benjamin acknowledged this fact in the introduction to The Transsexual Phenomenon. “Conservatism and caution are most commendable traits in governing the progress of science in general and of medicine in particular. Only when conservatism becomes unchanging and rigid and when caution deteriorates into mere self-interest do they become negative forces, retarding, blocking and preventing progress, neither to the benefit of science nor to that of the patient. More power, therefore, to those brave and true scientists, surgeons, and doctors who let the patient’s interest and their own conscience be their sole guides.”
In researching this book, I have been greatly impressed by the courage exhibited not only by the “true scientists, surgeons, and doctors” who sought to help their gender-variant patients find greater happiness and fulfillment, but also by the incredible bravery of gender-variant people themselves. Presented with a seeming dilemma, they have struggled to create a solution in the face of nearly universal incomprehension and condemnation. “I made a decision a long time ago that when I successfully pushed through a door, metaphorically speaking, that I would never let the door swing shut to block the way of other people, but that I would instead remove the door from its hinges,” Phyllis Frye said at the Georgetown Law School. The same might be said of Christine Jorgensen, Reed Erickson, Sylvia Rivera, and the many other activists, scholars, and citizens who have labored to find an answer to their own personal “riddle of gender,” and in doing so, have opened the door to greater freedom and authenticity for all. In an era in which scientists are being cautioned not to use hot-button words and phrases such as “gay,” “men who sleep with men,” or “transgender” in AIDS grant applications, that may seem a naive conclusion. However, as the history cataloged in this book illustrates, the pendulum of policy may swing from left to right, but it always swings back to the other side eventually, and each time it does, the arc of understanding widens. Will we ever find a definitive solution to the riddle of gender? Maybe not—but as this history indicates, the questions we ask about gender tend to be more liberating than the answers. I would prefer to live in a society that gave me the freedom to ask those questions, rather than one that enforced autocratic conclusions.
As I neared the end of the research for this book, the friend whose journey inspired it asked me if my own gender identity or sexual orientation had changed at all as a result of the things I had learned and the people I had met over the past few years. My answer was no. I am hardwired as a heterosexual woman, and I am comfortable with that identity; it feels authentic. However, I no longer view my sexual orientation and gender identity as “normal,” generic, or “regular.” Instead, I see that my particular expression of gender and sexuality are unique to me. Straight people, like gay or transgendered people, have complex and multifaceted gender identities. My sense of what it is to be a woman, for example, is quite different from that of Laura Bush or Venus Williams or Condoleezza Rice, or the other women on my block. All of us are natal women, but our sense of ourselves as women, and the way we express our gender, varies from person to person. There are similarities, it’s true, but the range of gender expression within the categories “man” and “woman” seems to vary nearly as much as it does between them. Prior to writing this book, I did not see that variation. Now I do, and I am grateful to those who ena
bled me to see the world of gender through their eyes, and consequently expanded my range of vision.
With that new perspective, I have come to view gender less as a riddle that should be solved and more as a collage, which we each assemble in our own fashion. Nature provides the canvas, and on that canvas we assemble scraps of meaning from family, religion, science, friends, and the media—a kind of surrealist montage that, like children’s art, is a natural expression of being, so natural that we forget that it is art. Rather than insisting on the primacy of either nature or culture as the source of gender differences, perhaps we now need to recognize that both play a role and that neither explanation makes sense without the other. Nature may provide the architecture of gender, but culture does the decorating. If gender identity is, as seems increasingly certain, hardwired into the brain at birth, and if the way we choose to express our sense of ourselves as gendered beings is dependent on cultural norms, shouldn’t culture follow nature’s lead and celebrate variety? Difference can be, as Susan Stryker points out, “a real source of pleasure,” if only we can overcome our ancient suspicion of diversity. In an era in which Americans are fighting and dying purportedly to free other people, perhaps we might take this one small step toward freeing ourselves by finally outlawing discrimination based on gender expression. What is freedom, after all, if it is not the freedom to be one’s self?
TWO YEARS LATER…
Afterword to the Anchor Books Edition
Oh, those perverse fruit flies!
Butch female fruit flies seducing femme ones with the time-honored drosophila courting rituals—tapping the chosen lady on the foreleg, singing to her, and vibrating one wing. Girlish male fruit flies gathered on a food plate forming boy on boy chains, like some kind of Fire Island conga line. What could possibly incite such behavior? Have the fruit flies launched their own Stonewall rebellion—casting off the chains of fruit fly heteronormativity, buzzing with newfound “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” pride?
Not exactly.
The gender-queer fruit flies are instead the result of a rather elegant scientific experiment. Ebru Demir and Barry J. Dickson of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences genetically manipulated male and female drosophila—splicing a single neuronal gene, fru—in order to determine whether or not a complex innate behavior like courting could be controlled by a single gene. The answer, in fruit flies at least, is yes.
Among wild-type fruit flies, males court only females and females don’t court at all. The female instead responds to male overtures with her own stereotyped courtship behavior, slowing down in flight and opening her vagina to permit penetration. These courtship rituals are known to be tied to the fru gene, which is spliced differently in males and females. Males with naturally occurring variants of fru have previously been observed to be somewhat unsuccessful in their courting— the fruit fly equivalent of the forty-year-old virgin. Building on this earlier research, Demir and Dickson hypothesized that fru might be a behavior “switch” gene, capable of regulating courtship behavior in the same way that other genes dictate reproductive anatomy. To test this idea, they spliced the gene in the female direction in anatomically male fruit flies, and in the male direction in anatomically female fruit flies.
The result? Sexual anarchy.
Males courted other males, females courted other females, and most astoundingly, when the gender-queer females and gender-queer males— that had been further manipulated to produce female pheromones— were placed in the drosophila equivalent of a singles bar, the females courted the males. It was Cabaret in a jar!
In the sober language of science, Demir and Dickson describe the effects of their experiment in a June 2005 paper published in the prestigious journal Cell.
“Forcing female splicing in the male results in a loss of male courtship behavior and orientation, confirming that male specific splicing of fru is indeed essential for male behavior. More dramatically, females in which fru is spliced in the male mode behave as if they were males: they court other females. Thus, male-specific splicing of fru is both necessary and sufficient to specify male courtship behavior and sexual orientation. A complex innate behavior is thus specified by the innate of a single gene.”
So what, some people might say. Fruit flies aren’t human beings, and just because tweaking a single gene turns a fruit fly community into West Hollywood doesn’t mean that human sexual orientation and gender identity are biologically based. True enough, although drosophila are one of the most popular model systems used by scientists to study genetics and much has been learned from the manipulation of the fruit fly genome. But just to satisfy those who don’t see the relevance of fruit fly genetics to human behavior, let’s turn to some studies in other species more like us, fellow mammals. Mice, for example.
Around the time I was finishing the research for this book, researchers at UCLA discovered that testosterone might not be quite the all-powerful force scientists had assumed when it comes to prenatal sexual differentiation. Throughout this book I have repeated the central dogma of sex research, that maleness is the result of the surge of testosterone midway through the second month of pregnancy. Before the newly formed testicles begin flooding the developing embryo with testosterone, the embryo is androgynous; without that all-important gush of testosterone, it will develop “by default” in the female direction. I mentioned that many female biologists object to this notion of female being the “default” sex, and point out that even if we don’t know exactly what causes an embryo to develop in the female direction, something must be happening. It turns out that they may be right.
Eric Vilain, chief of medical genetics at UCLA, has used DNA microarray analysis to blow a giant hole in the prevailing theory that steroid hormones produced by the gonads are responsible for sex differences in neural and behavioral development. By chopping up embryonic mouse brains, purifying and amplifying their DNA, and measuring the expression of various proteins, Vilain and colleagues identified over fifty genes expressed differently in the brains of male and female mouse embryos before the gonads begin producing any hormones at all.
As the researchers pointed out in an October 2003 paper published in Molecular Brain Research, their results “suggest that there are functional differences between male and female brains which occur independently from hormonal influence. Moreover, these differentially expressed genes are good candidates for a role in brain sexual differentiation and sexual behavior.”
Vilain’s findings attracted a good deal of attention in the media, as did the gender-queer fruit fly study. But unlike Demir and Dickinson, the fruit fly researchers, Vilain didn’t hesitate to connect the dots between mouse brains and human ones. Vilain is a clinician as well as a researcher, and has long worked with intersex children and their families. The knowledge he has gleaned from his work in both the lab and the clinic have convinced him that defining maleness and femaleness from a biological standpoint is a very complex undertaking. “There is no one biological parameter that clearly defines sex,” he says. Nonetheless, his research has shown that the sexual differentiation of the brain begins very early in development, much earlier than was previously assumed, and is at least partially driven by genetics. This understanding has made him an advocate not only for intersexed people, but also for transsexual people. Legal definitions of sex, he says, “are arbitrary and should not impede the freedom of individuals.” Moreover, “significant minorities of individuals are left out of simple civil rights because they don’t fit established categories of sex.”
This point of view is gaining more and more adherents, as hard science comes to bear on questions of sex and gender. A 2005 paper produced by researchers at Goteberg University in Sweden presents evidence that an anomaly in the early sexual differentiation of various brain structures may be involved in transsexualism. The researchers found three common polymorphisms—genetic variations—that may influence the chances of transsexualism, providing support for the c
oncept that transsexualism may be driven by genetics. In the language of molecular biology—“a long allele of the ERb gene may increase the susceptibility for transsexualism, and certain variants of genes coding for the AR, aromatase, and the ERb may partially contribute to the risk of male-to-female transsexualism if present in certain combinations.”
Each of these studies presents solid scientific data in support of the hypothesis that complex traits like sexual orientation and gender identity are biologically based and that anomalies in the sexual differentiation of the brain are entirely plausible. Other studies published over the past two years have similarly used the tools of molecular biology, genomics, and proteomics to explore possible mechanisms by which these might occur. This approach to sexual differentiation and development is not an isolated phenomenon; in fact it is part of the new systems biology. New tools and technologies like high-throughput genomics and bioinformatics are enabling scientists to analyze not just the actions of single genes, but of the vast arrays of genes and proteins that organize development.
The Riddle of Gender Page 36