Galileo's Middle Finger (8 page)

Now, because they are so femme, when they dress as
women
, even before hormonal or surgical transition, these folks pass pretty easily (as women), which means straight men become interested in them. Needless to say, they pass even better after hormonal and surgical transition. As post-transition women, they can and happily do take straight men as their sex partners. As a consequence, for these male-to-female transgender women, sex reassignment makes possible a more satisfying sex life and a more comfortable gender presentation, as they no longer have to fight to dampen their natural femininity. Transition also means a less painful and safer life; as women, they are not as often subject to homophobic abuse and assault, always a danger for femme men.

In articulating this demographic profile among the clinical population of male-to-female transsexuals presenting for sex reassignment, Blanchard called these people homosexual transsexuals, because they are natal males sexually attracted to other males. Although scientifically precise, this is a term I generally find confusing because, when these people change their sex from male to female, they then become heterosexual. Therefore I generally use the less confusing and less clinical term that many of these folks use for themselves—
transkids,
a term that recognizes that in this population obvious gender boundary crossing starts early in life.

Bailey’s book contained portraits of several transkids, but the most vivid was that of an attractive Latina trans woman identified as Juanita. Juanita came across in Bailey’s prose as a seriously attractive and highly sexed woman, one who made a good living for a time as a sex worker. After her transition, she eventually landed a nice husband in the suburbs. However, Bailey reported, she finally gave all that up because she missed the excitement of the city—including the sexual variety. Juanita perfectly embodied Bailey’s understanding of transkids: She was a sexy, very feminine individual with a typically male (strong) interest in sex and a typically male (high) interest in casual sex—the kind of person, Bailey said, who “might be especially
well suited to prostitution
” (groan).

OK, now here drops the other shoe, the part of Blanchard’s theory that really pissed off the people who went after him: Blanchard noted that nonhomosexual transsexuals—putatively straight, bisexual, and asexual men asking for sex reassignment—looked very different from the transkids in their life histories, their habits, and their sexual interests. Members of this second group were
not
markedly femme in childhood. In fact, as kids they seemed to everybody like typical boys—often having been into sports, military play, and vehicles. Many of them went into fairly male-typical occupations—they were engineers, mathematicians, and scientists in heavily quantitative fields. They were exclusively or primarily sexually attracted to females, and before transition they were typically married to women and had fathered children. Unlike the transkids, these men looked to the outside world like typical straight men right up until transition. People who knew them were usually completely shocked when they announced they were going to change sex. But they didn’t
feel
like typical straight men do. Unlike most straight men, they felt there was a powerful, almost overwhelming feminine component of their selves. Part of that sense involved finding themselves sexually aroused by the idea of being or becoming women.

Wait—what? What does that last bit look like? Well, in terms of fantasies, it’s a variation on what each of us fantasizes about sexually, when masturbating, for example. One person might imagine oral sex with a particular movie star. Another might imagine being tied up and teased by a stranger. Another might imagine “plain vanilla” intercourse with a lover. Note that all these sexual fantasies involve gender; that is to say, when we fantasize sexually, we typically do so in ways that specify the genders of the parties involved. Gender can be seriously pleasurable for most of us. For the man who is sexually aroused by the idea of becoming a woman, the gendered component of the fantasy is brought to the fore; the simple idea of being or becoming a woman causes sexual excitement.
Blanchard coined a new term
for this type of male-to-female transsexualism:
autogynephilia,
meaning self-directed (auto) love of females (gynephilia). Pretransition, these men experience “love of oneself as a woman,” a phrase downright beautiful in French:
amour de soi en femme.

Blanchard’s taxonomy of male-to-female transsexuals recognized the importance of sexual orientation in the gendered self-identities of both those who begin as homosexual males and those who experience
amour de soi en femme.
However, he didn’t see sexual orientation as the
only
thing a male factors in when deciding whether to transition. He recognized that in one environment—say, an urban gay neighborhood like Chicago’s Boystown—an ultrafemme gay man might find reasonable physical safety, employment, and sexual satisfaction simply by living as an ultrafemme gay man. But in a very different environment—say, a homophobic ethnic enclave in Chicago—he might find life survivable only via complete transition to womanhood. Whether a transkid grows up to become a gay man or a transgender woman would depend on the individual’s interaction with the surrounding cultural environment. Similarly, an autogynephilic man might not elect transition if his cultural milieu would make his post-transition life much harder.

To firmly make this point about biology interacting with environment, Bailey’s book begins and ends with the story of Danny. Bailey presents Danny at the start of the book as a femme little boy who seemed to want to be a princess and whose mother consequently came to Bailey for advice. At the end of the book, the reader learns that Danny has been growing up into a young gay man in the care of accepting and loving parents. Surprisingly—given that the author is a self-identified genetic essentialist—Bailey used Danny’s story as the frame for his book to teach the importance of
culture
to identity. Bailey wanted the reader to understand this: Although people are born inclined to particular sexual orientations and gendered behaviors, transgender isn’t something you’re born either to be or not to be. Contrary to the popular mainstream understanding of transgender, whether you end up living as an out gay man, a closeted gay man, or a straight transgender woman depends not only on biology, but also on
cultural tolerance
of various identities. Biology plus cultural environment equals the experience of identity.

Just to be clear: This interplay of biology and culture affects everyone’s experience of identity, not just transgender people’s. To take an example familiar to most women, whether it matters that my female physiology turns my occasional frustration into tears rather than punches, whether I feel denigrated or accepted as a person hormonally prone to involuntarily crying—that depends on the culture around me. So, while in a very homophobic environment Danny might have grown up to be a transgender straight woman, because his parents and community generally accepted that he would always be a male attracted to men, he was growing up instead to be a gay man.

Paul Vasey has been documenting that in Samoa little boys who are naturally very femme are welcomed into a special gender category called
fa’afafine
,
a term that signifies living “in the manner of a woman,” and are raised like the girls. The
fa’afafine
grow up in female roles, tending to the family and taking men as their lovers, although they almost never alter their anatomy, because their traditional culture doesn’t require them to do so in order to live as women socially and sexually. They are transgender women without any hormone treatments or surgery. The
fa’afafine
are understood and accepted this way by their families and their lovers, and have been for generations. In now-Christianized Samoa, they wouldn’t be so well understood or accepted if they self-identified as gay men.

Samoa is not unique; indeed, Bailey’s book pointed out that “homosexual transgenderism” is the most common form of transgenderism around the world, found, for example, in Thailand, Mexico, Iran, and Albania. In many cultures, homosexual transgenderism has functioned for countless generations as a way to “straighten out” homosexual desires—a response that can be tolerant and progressive (as in Samoa) or repressive (as in Iran), depending on how it is enacted and experienced.

Thus, whether transkids change sex medically and surgically depends on the way their biology, their psychology, and their culture interact. As Blanchard and Bailey noted, the same is true for the men who become women by way of
amour de soi en femme
(autogynephilia). Whether a man who dreams erotically of becoming a woman opts to change sex hormonally and surgically depends upon the interaction of the individual’s body and psychology with the local cultural environment. Some of these folks simply fantasize about crossing into womanhood while remaining apparently typical straight men socially their whole lives. They may try to suppress the thoughts, or they may enjoy transsexual erotica, but they limit themselves to thoughts and dreams. Others will occasionally cross-dress for erotic purposes and to enjoy temporarily experiencing a deep feeling of femininity. The psychiatrist
Richard/Alice Novic
writes about this kind of bi-gendered life in the autobiographical
Alice in Genderland.
Novic spends part of the time living as Richard with his wife and children and part of the time as Alice, enjoying the company of a boyfriend who accepts and desires her as she is. Unlike Novic, a few men who experience
amour de soi en femme
do decide to seek medical interventions. Some opt to get breast implants or to take female hormones—to enhance their sense of being a woman and to be socially “read” as women—while keeping their male genitals. And a few autogynephilic individuals find that they can feel fulfilled only by complete hormonal, surgical, and social transition to women. For those who seek full transition, that’s what it takes to feel that they are living an authentic life, true to themselves.

In Bailey’s book, the portrait of
amour de soi en femme
male-to-female transgenderism came in the form of a trans woman identified as Cher, née Chuck. The reader gets the sense that Bailey likes Cher, but his portrayal of her is startling. As a boy and young man, Chuck seemed like a pretty typical guy. But unlike most guys, Chuck made elaborate pornographic films of himself dressed as a woman, complete with female masks, homemade fake breasts, and a glue-on vulva. (He pushed his penis up into his body and used an adhesive to hold it there, a feat made easier by having been born with only one testicle.) Chuck made robots to simulate heterosexual sex, so that he could experience sex as he thought a woman might. Eventually he realized he needed to be seen by all as the woman felt inside. And so, with the help of gender-affirming hormones and surgery, Cher emerged.

In Bailey’s account, Cher blossomed after transition, finally able to live out the gender identity she had long felt and desired. As is the case for transkids like Juanita, transition can make the lives of people like Cher far more fulfilling. It lets them be who they feel they really ought to be, who they really
are.
Life is surely a lot easier when people treat you the way you feel you should be treated in terms of your gender identity and sexual orientation. Perhaps not surprisingly, women from both groups—Juanita’s and Cher’s—report on average doing better psychologically post-transition. Blanchard is one of the researchers who has documented substantial improvement for
well-screened trans women
, and he has used that outcomes research to openly support, in sworn testimony, the public funding of
sex reassignment in Canada
. Blanchard and Bailey see trans women who begin with homosexual desires and those who begin with
amour de soi en femme
as radically different from each other in some ways (childhood gendered behaviors and sexual orientation) but equally deserving of quality care, human rights, and public support. But the subtlety of their position—supporting political rights for transgender people while promulgating a politically incorrect reading of male-to-female transgender—was lost on certain transgender activists, who attacked Bailey for his support of Blanchard’s theory.

Still, an outsider might wonder how Bailey’s acceptance of Blanchard’s conclusions could be read as so very offensive. Why were so many trans people willing to enlist in the army assembled to fight Bailey within days of his book’s publication? In the first pages of his book, Bailey summed up Blanchard’s taxonomy of male-to-female transsexuals in rather tender prose: “Those who love men become women to attract them. Those who love women
become the women they love
.” It sounds so sweet, really, all that love. But most of Bailey’s book represented male-to-female transsexuality as a matter of
lust
—gay lust in the case of the transkids like Juanita and self-lust in the case of autogynephiles like Cher. When Bailey talked about people like Cher, he explicitly labeled their sexual desires
paraphilic
—a word that to many means “sick” even when it refers to consensual, nonexploitive sexual interests.

Therein lay a real problem, one that explains why the transgender activists who went after Bailey were able to garner fairly widespread help from other transgender people, at least at first. Before Bailey, many trans advocates had spent a long time working to
de
sexualize and
de
pathologize their public representations in an effort to reduce stigma, improve access to care, and establish basic human rights for trans people. The move to talking about trans
gender
instead of trans
sex
was motivated in part by a desire to shift public attention away from an issue of sexual orientation (sexuality always being contentious) to an issue of gender. This is similar to how gay rights advocates have desexualized homosexuality in the quest for marriage rights, portraying themselves in living rooms and kitchens instead of bedrooms, in order to calm fearful heterosexuals.