Is trans the new gay?

We’ve all heard about the tragically closeted homosexual of the 1950s or ’60s. It is hard to feel anything but pity when imagining what drove gay and lesbian people to marry, submit to blackmail schemes or abuse at the hands of police officers rather than be outed — or any one of a hundred other incomprehensibly self-hating acts we’ve heard about.

But recently I found myself in conversation with a trans man who is afraid to shower at the gym for fear that people in the locker room will challenge him for his lack of penis. I myself am wondering which locker room to use, and whether I should go to a different gym for a while so I don’t go directly from the women’s to the men’s at the same gym. Is this equally tragic?

Perhaps gym-going can never quite be tragic: point taken. But another trans man I know was driven from his job when his co-workers learned what was in his pants. Trans people are making choices every day, however small or large, about whether they can safely come out to people who have no frame of reference for transsexuality. It’s one thing to tell someone that you belong to a group that’s considered less than ideal: Imagine confessing that you may have to declare bankruptcy. But it’s another altogether to confess to something unspeakable, something that puts your very humanity in question.

Judith Butler wrote that the language that introduces your existence on this earth genders you (It’s a girl!) and when your gender is in question, your humanity may as well be, too. Am I a person or am I a Frankenstein? If I transition completely, will friends and family outside my queer bubble be able to see me as still me, with some important but ultimately cosmetic changes? Or will they see me as a costumed Cameron, an ersatz human being?

It’s easy to wonder how gays and lesbians of a bygone age could fail so tragically and so prolongedly to acknowledge what they so clearly (in retrospect) were. But that is only because we can’t imagine what it would be like to be so close to mainstream society’s damning view of us that we didn’t see it as a misguided absurdity.

As homosexual identities become increasingly socially acceptable despite pointed efforts by social conservatives to compare them to pedophilia and beastiality — things that clearly aren’t okay — transsexual identities have come to occupy the borderlands of what’s okay. At a recent talk, the black activist Angela Davis hammered on trans liberation as an urgent civil rights issue. She sees the historical pattern in which somebody is always left out.

Since 1970, the mainstream view has continued to judge gay identities, but it cannot pretend not to see them as human. Trans identities are just beginning to be seen as human in the Bay Area. Elsewhere, transsexuality remains a sad — and exotic — joke. I look with envy on trans men and women in their 20s, who have the luxury of never having known another way. They wonder aloud how their parents could possibly fail to support them; I marvel silently at the parents who somehow do.

I can still see quite clearly the image of trans people as hardly human. The ready accessibility of that image — the knowledge of how others may see me — makes it hard to find the causal self-confidence required to say, with feeling, that I am human, that being trans is not a tragic attempt at self-effacement but a simple gesture towards being myself, like cutting my hair short or refusing to work a corporate job. It is not a lie or a regret; it is a complex reality.

Gender is either a tragedy or a comedy but it can’t be both.

People always talk about how huge a decision transitioning is, and how permanent. But is it really any bigger than a tattoo you don’t much like, or a scar that resulted from something foolish? Every decision comes with the possibility of regret, but parents and other spokespeople for yesterday’s order of things wield the catastrophic permanence of particular decisions over us. The narrative evokes death just enough to engage in a dangerous echo chamber with the idea that trans people aren’t human.

There’s a certain biological inability to see yourself as something less than human. If you’ve been taught that trans is less than human, it’s fairly difficult to see with clarity that you are trans without also seeing with clarity — and serious mental health consequences — that you are sub-human. Look at me saying this so painfully clearly and still not being able to find an emotional way out of the paradox. Isn’t this the battle fought by early homosexuals who knew they were human even as they wanted sex and intimacy with people of the same gender — and even as they were forced into dangerous situations to get it?

The image was so powerful that the word homosexual had to be overthrown before real activism could take root. Just as now we are jettisoning the word transsexual (with its implied adjective, tragic) for its friendlier versions trans and tranny and for more specific (though still somewhat cyborg-ish) appellations like MTF and FTM.

But re-appropriating the word queer might have been the most important move of all, defining the queer ethos of irony, dark humor and welcome perversions. Will there be a defining twist be for trans people that renders the old views of them comic, absurd and harmless — mostly?

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Tale of the First Two Transsexuals

In an article I wrote for AlterNet that was meant to serve as an introduction to the many-splendored world of queer identities—about which, more later—I claimed that male-to-female gender reassignment surgeries have been around for longer, and consequently so have MTF transsexuals.

Well, slap my ass and call me Sally! It turns out the first ever transsexual was Michael Dillon, né Laura. He fell in love with a man who wanted to become a woman, and did—making her the first male-to-female transsexual. (Their love was predictably ill-fated.)

All of this is in a book reviewed in the New York Times, called The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution, by Pagan Kennedy.

The review is pretty interesting, but I'm a little disturbed by this pronouncement by the writer (Mary Roach, of Stiff fame):

I wanted to stand by [Dillon] through all 200 pages, but I fell hard for Dr. Gillies. It is no small feat to make a romance between the world’s first two transsexuals seem ho-hum, but Gillies almost manages…Gillies was altering not merely faces and bodies, but the very nature of surgery.

See, surgery that affects everyday people is more interesting that the intense plight and bravery of the first ever transsexuals, who served as Gillies' guinea pigs in order to live the lives they needed to. Or am I just being hypersensitive? And hypersensitivity is precisely the subject of my next blog post (OK after the one on Gates that I'm cross-posting from Mother Jones), so stay tuned.

Largo City Commissioner Becomes Trans Activist

Steven "Susan" Stanton has protested being fired as Largo City Commissioner after coming out as a transsexual (she is being represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights). The Saint Petersburg Times ran this kind, human portrait. The Saint Petersburg Times, y'all. It always does take someone pretty mainstream who's cried a lot about who they are to break through the walls, but it's still great when it happens.

D-D-Delinquent

In another disastrously-Deirdre ditty, Dee Deirdre Farmer is being returned to jail this week after being sentenced for identity theft and fraud. Dee Deirdre Farmer is a transgender woman who chose her name. She scored a landmark victory for trans people in 1994, when the Supreme Court ruled that prison officials could be held responsible for her gang rape while in men's prison. Ms. Farmer was a pre-op transsexual at the time.

But it seems Ms. Farmer's interest in changing identities goes farther than her sex change and subsequent selection of the misfortunate name Dee Deirdre:

Farmer was sentenced in 1986 to 20 years in federal prison for credit-card fraud and 30 years in state prison for theft. While awaiting sentencing, she was caught participating in a telephone jewelry theft scheme from jail.

After being released because she was dying of AIDS, Farmer again indulged in identity theft. In order to avoid prosecution, she presented a forged court order in an attempt to "change the death certificate of a man named Charles Smith, who died June 6, 2006, to reflect that Dee Farmer had died on that day instead."

Can Somebody Please Give Me One that Works?

In this week of slow news and recovering from our national consumer frenzy, I choose for my topic products for the transgendered man.

For the non-consumers among us—and I think we are pretty strongly represented in the transgender community—it is odd to depend on products to supply one’s identity and sex organs. It leaves no doubt about how successful sex is at moving merchandise. It doesn’t matter how little money a guy has; if he or his partner want a phallic upgrade, one will be obtained. And, generally, it reminds us how deeply products—the newest thing—are an inextricable part of existing in this culture.

But because this week is also returns week, I would like to gripe about the poor quality of tranny products. The transman needs two things: something to flatten out his chest and something to fill out his pants.

Let me remind the newcomers to this brave new world of gender that a penis has three separate functions. I’ve already said it fills out the pants to bewilder probing eyes trying to determine if it’s a he or a she. It also works as a sex organ. And, finally, it pees.

Problem is, there is no single artificial penis that can reasonably perform all three of these functions. It seems “an enterprising FTM transsexual” has recently designed a dick that works for both all-day wear (packing) and peeing. I have yet to try this one, but I have doubts that it's comfortable enough to wear all day, every day (look at that pokey little nozzle thing!). And the lovely people at Good Vibrations tell me that chubby people can't get the angle to work for them (think wet pants).

Most transmen opt to wear a non-peeing flaccid penis in public. Ideally, one should also have a special harness made for comfort as opposed to the stability needed for sex.

Packing and playing, or having sex, with the same implement is a problem that has yet to be solved even by the most enterprising transsexual. Some folks wear dildos made for sex when they go out, but an hours-long erection is painfully uncomfortable and, in my opinion, looks absurd. The only other choice is changing cars mid-race. It's no fun: You lose any illusion of authenticity and, more importantly, spontaneity. (This dildo, made of soft material with a wire inside, has been around for a while. It allows you to fold down your erection while you're out and about, but the wire breaks so quickly that San Francisco's Good Vibrations doesn't even sell it.)

A dildo made for sex (silicone is a must) runs about $70, and a harness (leather is a must) about $75. So our tranny's total outlay for a dick can be as much as $145.

Now he must also buy a chest binder of some sort. The ones I've tried don't get you flat enough to pass and succeed in making me, a feminist transguy, feel like a Victorian women in a corset. I need a fainting room at the top of the stairs. Not only does most health insurance not cover top surgery, but (and I'm sure I'll take heat for this from some happy breastless men out there) I think they do a shitty job. The massive scars the surgery leaves are a neon TRANNY sign flashing in any locker room. If I can't pass significantly better than I do with my current manboobs, I'm not going under the knife.

My question is: are these problems really so insurmountable? I'm on board with the notion that constructing a truly (triply) functional penis for transsexual FTMs may be impossible. But the pack-and-play and surgery problems seem utterly solvable; the real problem is that transfolk are considered too small a market with too little disposable cash. And yet, what we do have, we spend on too many partial solutions.


P.S. For a hilarious Onionesque story on butch lingerie, click here.

The Loophole

Gay marriage is almost universally opposed by Republicans and Democrats alike. But transsexualism has somehow slipped through the cracks. It's not OK for a butch dyke to marry hir partner, but said butch dyke is awarded a marriage license if s/he takes testosterone and cuts off hir boobs. It seems odd that the same state governments that trip over themselves to ban gay marriage in as many ways as they possibly can (22 states ban it by both statute and constitutional amendment) allow people to change their gender on official documents, tacitly accepting the idea that gender doesn't always match sex.

At least one county in Ohio has sniffed out the loophole and closed it. You must solemnly swear not to be a transsexual to get a marriage license in Clark County, whose county seat is Springfield.

The Springfield News-Sun reporter thinks the policy is a real hoot, because people obviously know if their partner is transsexual. Not only is that not necessarily true, but the reporter assumes that no one would knowingly want to marry a trans person. Maybe that's for the best.