Transgenderality: A Critique of Patriarchal Institutions

. . . the borderline between gender and sexuality so important to much recent feminist and gender theory is one of many boundaries tested and queried by the transvestite. The cultural effect of transvestism is to destabilize all such binaries: not only male and female, but also gay and straight, and sex and gender.

Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests.

In the closing decades of the Twentieth Century, Western society experienced a paradigm shift from patriarchal monosexuality to pluralist multisexuality. Gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals are no longer viewing themselves as the sexual Others of the dominant culture, but rather as legitimate, acceptable alternatives to the heterosexual norm. The most recent discourse into gender and sexual identity reveals that sexuality is becoming increasingly diverse as a wider variety of behavioral and social roles become available to the general population, replacing the more conventional binary codings of Man and Woman.

Masculinity and femininity are now accepted as socio-cultural constructs rather than biological absolutes. Gender is something learned or conditioned during childhood. The presence of two X chromosomes predestines no one to submissive femininity, nor does the Y chromosome predispose the recipient to brutish machismo.

On the vast continuum of human behavior there are innumerable elements which we might term masculine or feminine. Human beings are composites of these characteristics; no-one is exclusively man or woman (gay, bi, lesbian, etc). Fifty years ago, an assertive, independent woman was considered unusual if not a violation of natural femininity (such women were invariably maligned as butch or bull-dykes). Today, a hardheaded — if not aggressive — attitude is virtually mandatory for the successful business woman. Obviously, strength, ruthlessness and emotional stability are not exclusive signs of masculinity: these are traits shared by all humanity.

Media imagery today encourages a greater understanding between men and women, and promotes a more equitable division of labor within cohabitative relationships. We could, in the final analysis, postulate that an independent, working woman or a non-traditional man are both transgenderists, as they regularly transgress the boundaries of traditional gendered behavior.

Paradoxically, while transgenderality has become an acceptable lifestyle choice within the mainstream community, many of society’s institutions cling tenaciously to outmoded definitions of gender. Educational institutions still practice gender-appropriate conditioning in the young, without adequately questioning why one form of behavior is considered appropriate to one sex but not to the other. The legal systems of most English speaking countries employ definitions which confuse gender with biological sex. Medical research is still engaged in a struggle between physiological and psychological perspectives of sexual difference, the most common being a study of the organic differences between male and female neuron structures of the human brain.¹

It is my belief that the inadequacies of these and similar institutions have been highlighted by the emergence of a politically active transgender community across the Western world. Transsexuals, transvestites and transgenderists, by their disrupting of normative gender-codes, question the nature of gender, sex, genitality and sexual orientation. In this article I will argue that many of society’s most influential institutions retain anachronistic, phallocentric models of human behavior, and still regard heterosexuality as the norm. I will argue further that such notions of gender are both biologistic and essentialist, and therefore totally at odds with the development of a transgender society.

Transgenderality is a form of cultural articulation, a newly emerging system of signification giving voice to the transgender and multisexual nature of postmodern society. As Garber and Stone have both argued, transsexuality may be viewed as a form of representation in which the human body is inscribed with the pluralist discourse of gender and sexuality.

. . . the transsexual body is perfected memory, inscribed with . . . the ontological account of irreducible difference, an essential biography which is part of nature. A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription.²

Transsexuals are living testimonies of the constructed nature of gender and bodies, in which the codes of sexual difference are both fragmented and reconstituted to represent the self-constructed identity of the subject. Transsexuality is now depicted in terms of a lifestyle choice, akin to the conscious decision of the politically conscious homosexual to live and interact in the world as a gay or a lesbian.

This is a view diametrically opposed to the image of transgenderality promoted by society‘s more conservative institutions and professions. In the area of child education, for instance, transgender children³ encounter sexually prejudiced systems of socialization. Where the child is unable to cope with the demands of conventional gender, s/he is subjected to isolation, ridicule, hostility and violence — the supposedly normal reaction of normal children to the appearance of a stranger within their peer group.⁴

However, it is the system which is at fault, not the children.⁵ The gender role models promoted through primary and secondary education may not actually encourage peer violence against the transgender child — to say nothing of the gay or the lesbian — but, invariably, the TG child is viewed as the problem, a disruptive child with a behavioral problem, provoking discord by refusing to fit in. Handed over to the care of a child psychologist, this lonely, unhappy child is forced to repress his/her core gender identity for his/her own good.⁶

In this way, the TG child is punished by the system for disturbing accepted gender codes. It should be remembered, of course, that the imposing of guilt upon the innocent is an ancient practice. Patriarchal culture has a long history of blaming the victim.

Guilt and punishment are more often the provenance of the law. The law has been swift to punish the transgender body without officially recognizing it. Punitive actions have rarely taken the form of fines or prison sentences; the law has much more subtle forms of punishment at its disposal. Turning a blind eye or a deaf ear to the call for social justice efficiently silences the voice of the oppressed. Denial of equity and equality displaces the transvestite/genderist/sexual  to the outer limits of humanity.⁷ As mentioned above, the transgender body has been refused a place in the letter of the law: if it exists at all, it is only as an undefined space within a legalistic vacuum. 

Where the law has been forced to confront the issue of transgenderality, the results have ranged from the unsatisfactory to the infamous. Anatomy has been the issue rather than identity. Trans-femmes have been denied the right to call themselves women, Trans-hommes the right to describe themselves as men. The language of the law, so heavily invested with sexual dichotomy, resists the rights of the transgendered, just as it once resisted the rights of females, homosexuals, blacks and the working class.

Medical and psychiatric perceptions of gender are still derivative of phallocentric models of humanity, despite the development of a powerful, politically active feminist community in both professions. As Man is ultimately considered the measure of all things (so to speak), the male body is employed as the standard of value against which all else is tested.

As a result, medical and psychiatric terminology, while recognizing the existence of transgenderality, is nevertheless pregnant with the patriarchal obsession for sexual perversion. Masculinist culture casts the Other as deviant, abject or alien; consequently words such as transvestism, transsexuality, or gender dysphoria work to alienate and dehumanize the transgender individual as socially unacceptable, lower on the scale of normality than the criminal or the sex worker.⁸

The medical and psychiatric professions are not immune to this kind of prejudice. Speaking a fluent technical jargon of endocrine levels and psychological disorders, they represent the transgender person pathologically, divesting them of the human dignity usually reserved for the normal or the healthy.⁹

The prejudices of each of these institutions act to privilege the male heterosexual above all others. We might hypothesize that Education, Medicine and the Law are all weapons employed by patriarchal society to disadvantage its Others; to deny them their rights, and to represent them as diseased, insane, maladjusted or hideously ugly. In such a way, the Other may be kept well down in the cultural hierarchy, and privilege remains unified, centered and exclusively masculine.

Since the advent of postmodern feminism, the political power of the patriarchal order has been steadily eroded (although typically, heterosexist males are refusing to relinquish their position at the top) and we are now fortunate enough to be living in a pluralist culture. Binary or dichotomous gender codings are rapidly becoming irrelevant and outmoded — sexist stereotyping is totally inappropriate in a world where gender is no longer determined by genital sex. We are, as previously argued, witnessing the emergence of a multi-gendered worldview. Present educational, legal, medical and psychiatric definitions of gender and sexuality, of masculinity and femininity, of man and woman are anachronisms, survivals of a time when Patriarchy was the ultimate authority, against which no deviation was tolerated.

A reinterpretation of gender is not only necessary in the postmodern age; it is inevitable. Society and its institutions will catch up with transgenderality eventually. The fraudulence of sexism and phallocentricity has already been exposed; transgenderality has been one of the critiques. Human bodies are not an immutable source of human destiny: the body, male or female, is only the template on which gender and identity are built.

. . . Transsexuality is not an end in itself but a step towards wholeness, a drastic step to break our gender programming . . . For our society, transgenderism can offer a window through gender via its transcendence towards social wholeness. This century has seen the most serious questioning of the validity of the gender class system . . . It is important to encourage playing with gender and to be involved with the discourse (of transgenderality), which will create our future.¹⁰

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Footnotes

¹ This is one of literally hundreds of sexist views put forward in Robert Pool‘s infamously popularized treatise on biological sexual difference, The New Sexual Revolution (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1994). Like many sexually biased observers before him, Pool uses medical research to back up his claim that men and women are intrinsically and irreconcilably divided by behavioral and intellectual differences caused by varying hormonal levels between the sexes.

² Stone, Sandy, The Empire Strikes Back: a posttranssexual manifesto, Department of Radio, Television and Film, University of Texas at Austin, 1993.

³ Riseley, Donna, Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood; Diagnostic and Treatment Issues, In Walters, A.W., and Michael W. Ross (eds), Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986, pp. 40-43. Some MTF transsexuals report cross-dressing as early as four. ‘Symptoms ‘ include feminine gestures and body language, cross-dressing, a fascination for makeup and adornment, feminine play and an aversion to rough-and-tumble sports, and a repeated desire to be a girl. Some boys even claim, quite seriously, that they are girls.

⁴ Riseley, Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment,  pp. 38-40. Transgenderism in pre-pubescent girls is rarely seen as a problem (if noticed at all), as it is acceptable for girls to wear apparently masculine attire such as jeans, t-shirts, runners etc. Girls who act like boys are usually treated with amused tolerance: she‘ll grow out of it, she‘s  a tomboy. Both tomboys and TG girls are, as a rule, popular with both sexes and tend to grow up with a high level of self esteem. This is in sharp contrast to the severe isolation and victimization suffered by TG boys throughout childhood and adult life. 

⁵ Ibid,  p.43. For gender dysphoric children, please read transgendered:

. . . Cultural and social factors may interact to produce greater anatomic dysphoria leading to greater degrees of isolation for those children living in societies where sex roles are more rigidly stereotyped.

. . .  Rigid sex-role stereotyping is not good for anyone, least of all our children; it may well be that gender dysphoric children to some degree represent part of the cost society pays for its present gender organization .

⁶ Ibid pp. 40- 43. No figures are available at this time to suggest what percentage of feminine boys are referred to child psychologists, nor even how many grow up to become transsexuals. In all fairness, it should be remembered that many boys go through a dressing up phase in early childhood and that this is often no more than the sort of play acting common to most children. Even boys who express a wish to be a girl (or who insist that they are a girl) can grow out of this desire without the need for a psychologists intervention.

⁷ At the time of writing, many Western nations allow amendments to a transsexuals birth certificate, recognising the equal opportunity birth rights of  transsexuals. Such legislation, however, rarely covers the rest of the transgendered community – transvestites, transvestophiles, drag queens, and transgenderists.

At the time of writing, San Francisco‘s equal opportunity legislation covers the entire transgendered community. However, this appears to be something of an exception. Very few Western nations have equal opportunity laws relating specifically to transvestites, transsexuals or transgenderists; ie while a worker cannot be denied employment on the basis of race, religion, sex or sexual orientation, there are still instances in which he/she may be denied on the basis of gender choice.

⁸ Brierley, Harry, Transvestism: A Handbook with Case Studies for Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Counsellors, Pergamon Press, Oxford 1979, pp. 24-26. Brierleys study shows that as late as 1979, psychiatrists rated transvestites, homosexuals and transsexuals as suffering illness and disability. Transsexuals came in very low on the scale of illness, following in descending order, the psychopath, the homosexual, the prostitute, the sex criminal, the neurotic, and the transvestite.

⁹ Very few minorities experience as much medical discrimination as the transgendered. Presumably, a heterosexual male seeking cosmetic facial surgery is not required to undergo years of psychiatric counselling, nor is any woman forced to wear a prosthetic bra for a year to prove that she is a legitimate candidate for breast augmentation. Millions of women alter their hormone levels every day – fortunately, the contraceptive pill is available to all biological females regardless of ethnic or racial background. Very few would have their sanity questioned because they wished to raise the amount of oestrogen in their systems.

In spite of the general acceptance of gender as culturally constructed, the medical and psychological communities hesitate to renegotiate their position on transsexuality. At the time of writing, the American Psychiatric Association still classifies the transgendered as mentally disordered. Some psychiatrists maintain that sex reassignment surgery should be outlawed entirely, as it is simply reinforcing the patient‘s delusion.

¹⁰ Peters, Julie, and Jane Langley The Transgendered in the Queer Community: Gender Reactionaries or Transcenders? The Melbourne Inter-University Gay and Lesbian Studies Seminar Series, Latrobe University Centre for the Study of STDs, Carlton, 1994, pp. 18-19.

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Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender Opinion