Gender Insanity

 

How Gender Identity itself became confused by medicine, feminism and gender theory

By Cathryn Platine

 

Gender Identity is a new buzz phrase among gay, lesbian, feminist, psychological professionals and political activists and there are almost as many pronouncements about what it means as there are people discussing it.  The simplest starting point is one of what one sees themselves as: male, female, neither, both or something else entirely.  Being self defined in essence, defense of one's own viewpoint becomes highly personal and therefore coupled with a high emotional investment when someone else defines you in a manner different than you see yourself.  The one voice almost never heard on the subject is that of the post-transitional and post operative transsexual woman other than the occasional psych professional among this group, but ironically, it is this group that is most often defined, discussed and dissected by everyone else as "proof" of their own place in the debate!  In my own essay on The Transsexual Mirror Effect I discuss the historical and modern tendency to use the "classic" transsexual as a reflection of the insecurities and identities of others, here I shall attempt to delve a bit deeper into how this has essentially led to the erasure of "post-transsexuals" from the very debate they caused simply by existing.  When I use the term transsexual, I do so in a very specific fashion meaning the classical definition of someone who's own gender identity fits within the bi-polar model of male-female and is driven to and changes a born body opposite that identity as much as possible.  Both parts are important to the understanding of the "classical" form of transsexuality.  It is not just the changing of the body that defines the condition, but the resulting comfort within a bi-gendered worldview as well.  This condition, despite the apparent explosion of so called transsexual/transgender identified identities challenging gender roles and promoting a third gendered or fluid gender worldview, is quite rare.  Recently, given the almost complete colonization of the term transsexual, some of these people have redefined the condition as Harry Benjamin Syndrome just to be able to self define.  Many years ago I came to understand HBS transsexuality as a neurological form of intersexuality which the past 15 years of limited research on these specific individuals apparently confirms.  To the apparent horror of those who have colonized the term transsexual, it can be diagnosed based on this model quite specifically and a smallish number of psychologists and psychiatrists have begun to quietly use these diagnostic tools to distinguish between HBS transsexual women and autogynophilaics and transgender people.  Often HBS transsexuals show additional signs of intersexuality beyond neurological.  The fear of the non HBS transgenders stems from fear of being denied access to surgeries and hormones if this becomes widespread.  Personally, I believe anyone should have the right to their own identity and the means of expressing it and the vast majority of today's gender professionals seem to share this view.   It is ironic that gatekeeping concerns have transferred to the non HBS gender community when it was originally strictly a transsexual issue in the early days of the Standards of Care of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, since renamed The World Professional Association for Transgender Health.  This change of name reflects a desire of gender professionals to widen the net of influence beyond the classical transsexual which carries it's own implications for good or ill depending on one's viewpoint.  Personally I still am uncomfortable with a decidedly patriarchal approach that uses gatekeeping in any fashion to replace adults being responsible for their own life choices while recognizing that social costs of gender non-conformity in any fashion can cause a myriad of  allied adjustment problems that then become associated with it.  It's not the lack of gender conformity that is the actual problem but the sociological pressures that accompany it.
 
The two polar opposite philosophies on gender identity are those of the gender essentialists and those of the gender deconstructionists.  The average person tends to default towards gender essentialist because, frankly, it's rarely more than a passing concern to their day to day life and a world view that serves them quite well until they occasionally bump up against the gender deconstructionist viewpoint or encounter someone who doesn't fit the pattern.  This actually has large scale impact on the politics and civil rights issues on those outside the gender boxes and so when these conflicts arise, everyone is very invested in their own viewpoint and thus often forced into quite rigid positions.  Toss in the confusion often present between sexual orientation and gender identity it also often becomes a religious battlefield as well.  Homosexual "panic" is not just a reaction to a threat to one's sense of sexual orientation but rather also, although largely unnoticed, one's own gender identity which often is more the cause of the "panic" than being confronted with someone of a different sexual orientation.  It is much more a male reaction than a female one for sociological reasons.

Penises and the Patriarchy

Today's world is almost completely patriarchal and this colours every single aspect of philosophy and identity either pro or con.  This is so pervasive that even among feminists who oppose the patriarchal worldview it is hard to escape some of the assumptions that underlay it and of vital importance to a patriarchy is who is a man and who is a woman because it simply cannot exist without this distinction.  Sliding scales can be applied so the effeminate male can be seen as male but also "less than" a "real" man and the masculine woman still a woman but less desirable as a woman in male terms.  This sliding scale contributes to gender identity panic, which I define as fear of not being seen in absolute conformity with gender roles, because in a very real sense most people, but men in particular, define themselves against the standards imposed.  Since within a patriarchy a woman's worth is measured against desirability, a masculine woman does not move up the gender scale while a feminine male goes down.  With a patriarchal worldview, it is the penis that defines who isn't a man and who is and it becomes so important that even a ghost penis, as in a post-operative male to female transsexual, can still be used to define her as male.  Female genitalia becomes almost invisible and womanhood more defined by the lack of the penis, even medically in the case of intersexual birth, than in terms of wombs and vaginas.  The first well known modern transsexual, Christine Jorgensen, never did have vaginoplasty but rather an orchietomy and penectomy instead which ironically enough is the most ancient form of  "sex change" dating back far before written history and it was only in the past twenty or so years that surgeons doing sexual reassignment surgery for male to female transsexuals gave any concern to functioning beyond the ability to receive a penis in doing the surgery.  It should not be surprising then that penises became the battleground in modern gender identities as well.  It is interesting to note that having a functioning penis is not at all essential to a male identity as any female to male transsexual can tell you but then their POV is often ignored.  I suspect this is also a result of the importance of the penis overall to the patriarchy.  It became of vital importance to insist on the removal of a penis from someone who identified as a woman in order to place her in "proper content" within a patriarchal world not just because of her desire but because women are also defined by desirability and it was unthinkable to have someone potentially desirable to men also having a penis.  For this reason, the lives of post-operative transsexual women predating the "transgender revolution" and the rise of gender identity politics and fitting neatly within a heterosexual centric and bi-polar gender model often consisted of marriage and a reasonably "normal" (whatever that means) life.  You almost never heard of a post-operative transsexual woman being killed in a "homosexual panic" prior to the gender revolution, indeed, you almost never heard of transsexual women at all unless they had some public position before transition that made them noticeable after Christine Jorgensen..  Heterosexual female to male transsexuals you just never heard about at all unless they were "discovered" after death or serious injury for the simple reasons that women are often much less prone to homosexual panic when confronted with the lack of a penis on a male identified partner and hormone treatment for female to male transsexuals renders them almost invisible to the general public.   In the case of homosexual identified female to male transsexuals, the partners, being homosexual men, didn't rate fully as males in a patriarchy.  Further, a patriarchal worldview has little trouble understanding why a woman would rather be a man but cannot easily grasp why a man would want to become a woman, one being a step up and the other a step down in position.

The first real conflicts between HBS transsexuals and gender identity politics came within feminism and emerging gay pride movements and arose from a desire to politicalize the identities of HBS transsexuals based on penises or their lack of them.  Homosexually oriented HBS transsexuals and transgenders found community among the gays and lesbians precisely because of the gender non-conformity of that culture.  The rise of the radical lesbian separatists within the women's movement ironically focused similar importance on penises or their lack as the very patriarchy it opposed and for exactly the same reasons.  Lesbian identified HBS transsexual women suddenly found themselves the enemy within their own chosen community and they were told that if they were truly gender radicals, they should not have surgery to "challenge" gender norms and "oh by the way, you aren't real women either".  From this point forward most proponents of gender deconstruction, which became quite fashionable, became intolerant of HBS transsexuals of either orientation with the exception of the "third genderists" who were the darlings of the movement.  The real problem, overlooked by almost everyone on both sides, is not who is right but the simple respect of self identity.  The rather simple notion that traditional gender works quite well for some people (the majority outside the movement as a matter of fact) but that in no way should invalidate the identities of those who don't fit within it.  The warfare comes, not from differences in philosophies but rather from the need to impose the world view on those who do not share it and a total lack of respect on both sides of the basic right of the other to simply define themselves.  Faced with this disrespect, both sides become ever increasingly entrenched in self defense.  The true irony is this need to impose one's own world view is the ultimate expression of what is wrong with patriarchy but those opposing patriarchy became highly invested it's own worst elements while making enemies of those who, given the simple respect of their own identities, would naturally be their allies.

I see hopeful signs of this insanity ending coming from the younger feminists who's range of gender expression and self identity is all over the map while still seemingly having little trouble respecting the rights of others to their own identities.  Within the gender communities the prospect is much less rosy as almost everyone within the mostly male to female side seems hell bent on the right to define each other in total disrespect of self identity of others.  When the two groups intersect, maybe things will get better.  I suspect I'll be long dead before that happens however.

Babes in Genderland

In the middle days of second wave feminism we saw the rise of the radical lesbian separatist movement.  Having originally been cut out of the movement by the middle class women who first wrote to the principles on the basis of "too much male energy" they ironically then proceeded to root out the transsexual women in their midsts, the most well known case being Sandy Stone, the sound engineer for the now defunct Olivia Records.  Although mostly forgotten by almost all feminist women today, Janice Raymond wrote a disjointed and illogical book against transsexuality that seems to be remembered now only by transsexual women.  The ideas espoused however live on in a few vocal remainders of this school of thought including Lisa Vogel of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival fame.  The knee jerk reaction to a transwoman openly discussing her background at the festival was to eject her from it.  This set off a war of ideologies between the womyn born womyn set and the transgendered civil rights movement.  Both sides see the issues in terms of black and white but they are far from that simple.  Camp Trans, the counter festival set up outside "the Land", seeks to "educate" about the womanhood of transgender women but this would include what the festival organizers call "penis people" as well as women of transsexual history (post ops).  This has touched off a long running series of debates over who is a woman, how long does a transsexual woman live a woman's life before she is seen as one, is anatomy destiny, and a myriad of other debates, some well reasoned and some just rhetoric on both sides.  The ultimate truth of the matter, in my opinion, is that Lisa owns the property the Festival takes place on, is uncomfortable with transsexual women making her own save space less safe to her and set a policy that called for self policing based on her principles.  She has every right to do so and have that respected.  That is the least popular opinion even among women of transsexual history but to me the central issue is the same problem I have with the transgender community, a total lack of respect of someone else's identity and boundaries.  I've had my own experience with setting a clear boundary within a religious context only to have it violently objected to by transgenderists despite the boundary being set for specific historic and religious reasons.  It almost completely destroyed my life's work and left me almost homeless after five years of actively trying to help those who were homeless in the name of transgender justice.