Before meeting Ashley, Corbett had been paying boys in the brothels to dress him up and masturbate him, but once he started seeing her and learned her back-story, he stopped. She ‘cured’ him, allowing him for the first time to feel that his life had slotted into place: ‘You’ve stopped my pendulum swinging.’ (Ashley helpfully explains that Corbett had been brought up in a world of grandfather clocks.)14 Not that Corbett’s fantasies of being a woman stopped there. According to Ashley, he had a second, ‘vile’ persona who during their relationship would regularly appear on the scene without warning – ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’, whose voice would rise in pitch, whose suddenly crossed legs would become terribly exaggerated and who would accuse Ashley of being a whore: ‘A bitchy accusing edge came into her voice, the mouth pursed, his bottom squirming among cushions.’15 None of this is mentioned in court. There is a limit to how far Corbett will go in his attempt to screw Ashley (he brings the case primarily to avoid any financial obligation towards her). Corbett is after all an English peer. Ashley is convinced that she loses the case at least partly through snobbery, the sheer affront of someone born into a Liverpool slum marrying into the aristocracy.16
Cruel and outdated as this case may be, it nonetheless makes a number of important things clear. The transsexual woman or man is not the only one performing; she or he does not have a monopoly on gender uncertainty; what makes a marriage is open to interpretation and fantasy – for better or worse, couples can want to change places, to be each other, as much as anything else. There is strictly no limit to what two people can do to, and ask of, each other. Above all, perhaps, this case suggests that the enemy of a transsexual person might be their greatest rival, embroiled in the deepest unconscious identification with the one they love to hate; while the seeming friend, even potential husband, might be the one furthest from having their interests at heart, their chances of living a basic, viable life. ‘Our lives and our bodies’, Viviane Namaste opens Invisible Lives – The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, ‘are forged in details of everyday life […] in the mundane and uneventful.’17 After the annulment, Ashley fell back into penury, where she, like many transsexual women, has lived a large part of her life (her fortunes wildly fluctuate). Both Mark Rees and Juliet Jacques, author of a well-known Guardian online column on her transition and of the 2015 memoir Trans, fall in and out of the dole queue (the job-seeking line-up of the unemployed).18 Even before the trial, Ashley’s career as a successful model had been brought to an abrupt end when she was outed by the British press in 1961. Up to that point, like many transsexual people who aim to pass, she had lived in fear of ‘detection and ruin’ (in the words of Harold Garfinkel, in 1967, one of the first medical commentators to write sympathetically about transsexuality).19
As Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura write in their introduction to the second of the two monumental Transgender Studies Readers, published in 2006 and 2013, contrary to today’s obsession with the most glamorous cases, most transsexual lives ‘are not fabulous’.20 In 2013 the level of unemployment among trans people in the US was reported to be fourteen per cent, double that of the general population; forty-four per cent were underemployed, while fifteen per cent, compared to four per cent of the general population, had a household income of under $10,000.21 Jacques gives statistics showing that twenty-six per cent of trans people in Brighton and Hove were unemployed in 2015, with another sixty per cent earning under £10,000 a year. This is also why so many, especially male-to-female transsexuals, take to the streets (to survive materially but also to raise the money for surgery). ‘Suddenly,’ Jacques writes, ‘I understood why, historically, so many trans people had done sex work […] I started to wonder if sex work might be the only place where people like me were actually wanted.’22
* * *
Transsexual people are brilliant at telling their stories. Doing so has been a central part of their increasingly successful struggle for acceptance. But it is one of the ironies of their position that attention sought and gained is not always in their best interests, since the most engaged, enthusiastic audience might be in pursuit of a prurient, or brutal, agenda of its own. Being seen is, however, key. At whatever stage of the transsexual journey or form of transition, the crux is whether you will be recognised as the other sex which, contrary to your birth assignment, you wish and believe yourself to be. Something has to be acknowledged by the watching world, even if, as can also be the case, transition does not mean so much crossing from one side to the other as hovering in the space in between (in the United States, only about a quarter of transgender women have had genital surgery23). Despite much progress, transsexuality, or transsexualism as the preferred term, is still treated today as anomaly or exception. However normalised, it unsettles the way most people prefer to think of themselves and pretty much everyone else. In fact, no human can exist without recognition. To survive, we all have to be seen. A transsexual person merely brings that fact to the surface of our lives, exposing the latent violence that lurks behind the banal truth of our dependency on other people. After all, if I cannot exist without you, then, among other things, you have the power to kill me.
While their material condition is lower, the rate of physical assault and murder of transsexual people is higher than for the general population. A 1992 London survey reported that fifty-two per cent of male-to-female and forty-three per cent of female-to-male transsexuals had been physically assaulted in that year.24 A 1997 survey by GenderPAC found that sixty per cent of transgender-identified people had experienced some kind of harassment or physical abuse (GenderPAC is a lobbying group founded in 1996 by trans activist Riki Anne Wilchins with the aim of promoting ‘gender, affectional and racial equality’).25 Several of David Valentine’s study participants in Imagining Transgender (2007) were murdered in the course of his writing the book.26
Over the past decade, this violence has seemed to be steadily on the rise. In the first seven weeks of 2015, seven trans women were killed in the US (compared with thirteen over the whole of the previous year).27 In July 2015 in California, two trans women were reported killed in one week.28 In June 2019, the American Medical Association described violence against transgender people as an epidemic.29 In the US only twenty-two states have laws to protect transgender workers, and only in 2014 did the Justice Department start taking the position that discrimination on the basis of gender identity, including transgender, constitutes discrimination under the Civil Rights Act.30 The 2016 UK Transgender Equality report noted the serious results of the high levels of prejudice experienced by trans people on a daily basis, including in the provision of public services. Half of young trans and a third of adult trans people attempt suicide. The report singled out the deaths in custody of two trans women, Vicky Thompson and Joanne Latham, and the case of Tara Hudson, a trans woman who was placed in a men’s prison, as ‘particularly stark illustrations’ (after public pressure, Hudson was moved to a women’s jail). Stephen Whittle, co-editor of the first Transgender Studies Reader, was special adviser to this committee. At the end of First Lady Ashley also credits him for recent changes to the law.
‘The intellectual work’ of transgender studies, Stryker writes in her introduction to the Reader, ‘is intimately connected to, and deeply motivated by, socio-political efforts to stem the tide of anti-transgender violence, and to save transgender lives’.31 ‘I saw’, Jacques writes in Trans, ‘that for many people around the world, expressing themselves as they wished meant risking death.’32 The dedication of Namaste’s book reads: ‘For the transsexuals who have not survived.’ In the present moment, the range and insistence of these voices matters more and more. In the US, violence against transgender people was of course bound to intensify under Trump, who has consistently made trans men and women the targets of hatred. One of his first moves was to ban them from the military (having seen off a legal challenge, the policy commenced in June 2019).33 He has revoked protections for transgender people in public schools, which means they ca
n now be obliged to use the toilet facilities that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth.34 He has proposed to define gender legally as either male or female and determined at birth, which effectively defines anyone who is transgender out of existence. The plan is to insert these strictures into Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prevents discrimination in education, which would make it impossible to use the law to fight discrimination against transgender people (as we saw in the previous chapter, Title IX has played a central role in the fight against sexual harassment).35
In 2007, Kellie Telesford, a trans woman from Trinidad, was killed in Thornton Heath in South London. Eighteen-year-old Shanniel Hyatt was acquitted of her murder on the grounds that she may have died as a result of a consensual sex game that went wrong or inflicted the fatal injuries herself (since she was strangled with a scarf, how she would have managed this is unclear). As Jacques points out in Trans, the Sun headline, ‘Trannie killed in sex mix-up’, anticipates the ‘transsexual panic’ defence, which argues that if a trans person fails to disclose before the sexual encounter, then they are accountable for whatever happens next (the shock of such a discovery is famously the pivot on which the 1986 film Mona Lisa turns).36 Murder, this suggests, is the logical response to an unexpected transsexual revelation. ‘Those moments’, writes Jacques, ‘when men are attracted to us when we “pass” and then repulsed when we don’t are the most terrifying […] all bets are off.’37 ‘She had hoped to avoid the worst possibilities of her new life,’ the narrator of Roz Kaveney’s novel Tiny Pieces of Skull observes after one particularly ugly encounter between the main transsexual character, Annabelle, and a policeman with a knife.38 (The novel, written in the 1980s but only published in 2015, is based on Kaveney’s post-transition life in Chicago in the 1970s.) In fact, whatever may have been said in court, we have no way of knowing whether Telesford’s killer was aware that she was trans, whether her identity might have been ambiguous, whether – as with Corbett – this may indeed have been the lure. Either way, ‘transsexual panic’ suggests that confrontation with a trans woman is something that the average man on the street cannot be expected to survive. Damage to him outweighs, nullifies, their death. Not to speak of the unspoken assumption that thwarting an aroused man for whatever reason – stopping his body dead in its tracks – is a mortal offence.
That Telesford was a woman of colour is also crucial. If transsexual persons are disproportionately the targets of murder, transsexuals of colour comprise by far the largest number of victims – the seven trans women murdered in the US in the first seven weeks of 2015 were all trans women of colour.39 When the American Medical Association adopted a plan at their 2019 Annual Meeting to increase awareness of violence against transgender people, they drew special attention to the increased physical dangers faced by transgender people of colour.40 Today, those fighting for transsexual freedom are increasingly keen to address this racial factor (like the feminists before them who also ignored racial discrimination at first) – in the name of social justice and equality, but also in order to challenge the assumption that transsexuality is an isolated, freak phenomenon, beyond human endurance in and of itself. It is a paradox of the transsexual bid for emancipation that the more visible they become, the more they seem to excite, as much as greater acceptance, a peculiarly murderous hatred. ‘I know people have to learn about other people’s lives in order to become more tolerant,’ writes Jayne County in her 1995 Man Enough to Be a Woman (one of the main inspirations for Jacques), but ‘sometimes that makes bigotry worse. The more straight people know about us, the more they have to hate.’41
Feminists have always had to confront the violence they expose, and – in exposing – provoke, but in the case of the transsexual person, there seems to be an even shorter fuse between the progressive moment and the virulent, crushing payback. It is a myth, albeit one of liberalism’s most potent, that knowing – finding oneself face to face with something or someone outside one’s usual frame of reference – is the first step on the path to understanding. What distinguishes the transsexual woman or man, writes psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici in Please Select Your Gender, her study of transsexual patients, is ‘that the almost infinite distance between one face and the other will be crossed by a single person’ (a space of acknowledged difference and otherness which is normally sacrosanct however close two people might get).42 Perhaps this is the real scandal. Not crossing the line of gender – although that is scandal enough – but blurring psychic and physical boundaries, placing in such intimate proximity parts of the mind and different forms of human embodiment, which non-trans people have the luxury of believing they can safely keep asunder.
* * *
Trans is not one thing. If crossing over is the version most familiar in the public mind – the Caitlyn Jenner option, as we might say – there are as many transsexuals who do not choose this path. In addition to transition (‘A to B’) and transitional (‘between A and B’), trans can also mean ‘A as well as B’ or ‘neither A nor B’, i.e. ‘transcending’, as in above, or in a different realm from, both. Thus Jan Morris in Conundrum in 1974: ‘There is neither man nor woman […] I shall transcend both.’43 Even that is not all. Once transsexuality is subsumed by the broader category of transgender – as it is for example in the Transgender Studies Readers – then there seems to be no limit. As if one of the greatest pleasures of falling outside the norm is the freedom to pile category upon category, like Borges’s fantastic taxonomy of animals with which Michel Foucault opens The Order of Things (no order to speak of), or the catechisms of James Joyce’s ‘Ithaca’ in Ulysses, whose interminable lists doggedly outstrip the mind’s capacity to hold anything in its proper place. At a ‘Binary Defiance’ workshop held at the 2015 True Colors Conference, an annual event for gay and transgender youth at the University of Connecticut, the following were listed on the blackboard: non-binary, genderqueer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid (the variants have increased exponentially since then).44 In 2011, the New York-based journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues brought out a special issue on transgender subjectivities. ‘In these pages,’ psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner wrote in her editor’s note, ‘you will meet persons who would be characterized, and would recognize themselves, as one – or some – of the following: A girl and a boy, a boy in a boy, a boy who is a girl, a girl who is a boy dressed as a girl, a girl who has to be a boy to be a girl.’45 ‘We are dealing’, Stryker explains, with ‘a heteroglossic outpouring of gender positions from which to speak’.46
These are not, however, the versions of trans that make the news. At the end of her photo session with Annie Leibovitz, Caitlyn Jenner looked at the gold medal she had won as Bruce Jenner for the 1976 Olympic decathlon, and commented, as ‘her eyes rimmed red and her voice grew soft’: ‘That was a good day. But the last couple of days were better.’47 It’s as if – even allowing for the additional pathos injected by Buzz Bissinger, who wrote the famous piece on Jenner for Vanity Fair – the photographic session, rather than hormones or surgery, was the culmination of the process (though Leibovitz herself insists the photos were secondary to the project of helping Caitlyn to ‘emerge’48). What happens, as Jacques asks in relation to the whole genre of ‘before’ and ‘after’ transsexual photography, ‘once the camera goes away?’49 Not for the first time, the perfect, still visual image – unlike the rolling camera of the endless Kardashian TV saga – finds itself under instruction to halt the world and, if only for a split second, make it seem safe (like the answer to a prayer). The non-transsexual viewer can then bask in the power to confer recognition on the newly claimed gender identity, or not. The power is real: plaudits laced with cruelty. It is the premise – you are male or female – which is at fault. There has been much criticism of Jenner, often snide, for decking herself in the most clichéd, extravagant trappings of femininity. But her desire would be meaningless were it not reciprocated
by a whole feverish world out there racing to classify humans according to how neatly they can be pigeonholed into their gendered place. This is the coercive violence of gendering which, Stryker is not alone in pointing out, is the founding condition of human subjectivity.50 A form of knowledge which, as Garfinkel already described it in the 1960s, makes its way into the unconscious cultural lexicon ‘without even being noticed’ as ‘a matter of objective, institutionalised ie moral facts’.51 In the twenty-first century this view has proved to be as pervasive as ever. Writing in the Evening Standard in 2015, Melanie McDonagh lamented the relative ease of ‘sex-change’ which she saw around her: ‘The boy-girl identity is what shapes us most […] the most fundamental […] the most basic aspect of our personhood.’52 Her article was entitled ‘Changing Sex Is Not to Be Done Just on a Whim’. A whim? She had obviously not spoken to any transsexual people or read a word they have written. Likewise, Ian McEwan commented derisively on the decision to transition: ‘The self, like a consumer desirable, may be plucked from the shelves of a personal identity supermarket, a ready-to-wear little black number’, for which he was roundly and rightly slated (he later apologised).53
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 9