Tra sgender activist slams men for not dating - matchless answer
: The Sacred Androgen: The Transgender Debate by Daniel Harris :
Daniel Harris
The Sacred Androgen: The Transgender Debate
[here is the entire article]
The Sacred Androgen:
The Transgender Debate
by DANIELHARRIS
Those who choose to alter or even mask their gender merit full protection
under the law merely because their decisions, while they may
divest them of breasts and birth names, do not strip them of their humanity.
TGs face violence, murder, mass unemployment, homelessness,
poverty, rampant HIV infection, inadequate healthcare, depression,
and, at alarmingly high rates, suicide. Many commentators have
singled out tolerance for this most vulnerable part of the population
as the final frontier of civil rights, a new contest against bigotry and
homophobia, one it would be irresponsible for both politicians and
everyday citizens not to address.
And yet just as the issue has come to the fore of public awareness,
TGs have ambushed the debate and entangled us in a snare of such
trivialities as the proper pronouns with which to address them, protocol
as Byzantine and patronizing as the etiquette for addressing royalty.
They insult us with the pejorative term “cisgender,” which they
use to describe those of us who accept, however unenthusiastically,
our birth gender, as opposed to the enlightened few who question their
sex. Moreover, they shame us into silence by ridiculing the blunders
we make while trying to come to grips with their unique dilemmas,
decrying our curiosity about their bodies as prurience and our unwillingness,
or even inability, to enter into their own (often unsuccessful)
illusion as narrow‑mindedness.
A case in point is the now infamous episode of Pierce Morgan
Live in which transgender activist Janet Mock objected to the headline
that appeared at the bottom of the screen, “Was a boy until 18”—a
fact that, while incontrovertible, was apparently tactless and naïve, the
correct caption being that she had always been a woman and had been
born, not a boy, but “a baby.” Mock organized a kind of witch hunt in
which she accused the liberal and tolerant Pierce Morgan of having, in
her words, “misgendered” her merely because he had questioned her
about her past and leapt to the conclusion—medical records would
surely bear this out—that she had in her youth changed her gender.
Such bullying interception of public debate should alarm anyone
who seriously wants to understand the issues involved, which, while
they may affect the transgender community most directly, are by no
means their exclusive province, to be broached only by those on whom
they most intimately impinge. TGs cannot expect to dictate to us the
terms of the discussion, for we are thinking people, too, and nothing,
notwithstanding many activists’ attempts to embarrass us into uncritical
consensus, can stop us from thinking our thoughts.
Here are a few of mine:
While I fervently support TGs’ rights to transition and to do so without
fear of reprisal, I believe that the whole phenomenon of switching
one’s gender is a mass delusion.
For one, the physical manipulation involved in transforming oneself
into a man or woman is apparently different in kind—or so the
transgender community presumes—from the nips and tucks undertaken
by the trophy wife or celebrity, anti‑heroes of a materialistic culture
with whom the TG, having taken advantage of the same merchandising
of the body promoted by commercialized medicine, bears a strong
and unfortunate resemblance. The general public almost universally
disapproves of plastic surgery and laughs derisively at celebrities who
present a face “different from the one they rode in on,” as one commentator
referred to their futile—and often ruinous—efforts to roll
back the hands of time. The obscene trout pout of Donatella Versace,
the misshapen nipples and oblong breasts of Tara Reid, the Joker’s
grimace of Kim Novak, are all fair game for that most American and
democratic of blood sports, the desecration of the rich and famous in
tabloids and gossip blogs.
And yet what is the actual difference between Michael Jackson
whittling his nose down to a brittle sliver of bone and whitening
his skin with alpha hydroxy acid and arsenic in order to efface his
blackness and the TG sanding down her brow bone and hacking off a
sizeable chunk of her mandible in order to efface her gender? Why is
the one decried as a racially reprehensible instance of self‑mutilation,
self‑denial, and self‑loathing and the other extolled as a celebratory
instance of self‑liberation? Why is it not only okay but valiant for
Caitlyn Jenner to liberate her inner woman through rhinoplasties and
laryngeal shaves while it is deplorable and pathetic for Michael Jackson
to liberate his inner Caucasian through bleaching and cleft chin
augmentation? When Rachel Dolezal goes to the Palm Beach tanning
salon for her weekly $30 dip, she is committing the unconscionable
crime of appropriating blackness (or, in her case, as the Gawker put
it, not blackness but “Medium Brown Spray Tan”), but when Laverne
Cox, one of the breakoutperformers on the television show Orange Is
the New Black, slaps on a transdermal estrogen patch, she is lauded as
a hero and role model. All of the arguments against plastic surgery—
that it is dangerous, even fatal, often botched, and symptomatic of either
extreme body dysmorphia or a lamentable effort to accommodate
Hollywood’s chauvinistic ageism—can be leveled against those who
transition from one sex to another. The trophy wife and the TG swim,
it seems, in the same surgeon‑infested seas.
Genetic women often sacrifice themselves to unrealistic standards
of beauty, of thinness, of eternal youth, of huge bosoms and
tiny, pinched waists. TGs likewise sacrifice themselves to outmoded
standards of femininity, attempting to achieve an hourglass figure with
gigantic breast implants that cantilever out from their chests like traffic
cones and injections to their hips and butt of silicone—or, for the
down‑and‑out, superglue, Fix‑a‑Flat, Slime Tube Sealant, and cotton
balls. In an effort to become a “body goddess,” famed Florida transsexual
Tatiana Williams inflated her buttocks with no less than eight
pounds of silicone (an entire gallon!) for each butt cheek. Such blackmarket
inoculations, delivered by medical impersonators at “pump
parties,” turned her spindly twenty‑five‑inch male rear end into a
sixty‑inch monstrosity, that of a goddess indeed, the Venus of Willendorf.
TGs do not model themselves on the average hipless, braless,
triple-A‑cup coed in jeans and T‑shirts, but on such vacuous female
fantasies as Kim Kardashian, Pamela Anderson, and the English singer
and fashion model Katie Price.
But just as genetic women develop eating disorders and low
self‑esteem from the omnipresence of images of the voluminously upholstered
bombshell, the TG is subject to a whole host of perils in her
transition from virago to vamp. Dissatisfied with the meager paps she
developed after hormone treatment, Rajee Narinesingh, a TG featured
on the television show Botched, sought help from a scam artist and
alleged murderer who injected her face and breasts with industrialstrength
liquid cement, a substance that over time turned her breasts
into ulcerated saddlebags and blossomed into stony excrescences on
her once fashionably chiseled cheekbones. Many spokesmen for the
transgender community posit a whole range of socially subversive interpretations
of gender, but even a glance at the advertisements on
Craigslist reveals a clichéd image of a hyper‑sexualized odalisque who
exists solely for men’s delectation—an enchantress who sacrifices her
health to her admirers: lungs punctured by syringes, second-degree
burns from laser hair removal, amputated breasts, and vaginoplasties
that create, not orifices, but fibrous lumps. Far from challenging conventional
sex roles, the TG seems to exist in a pre‑feminist dystopia
of rigidly stratified behaviors that hark back to an age of Hollywood
femme fatales, gold‑digging temptresses whose anachronistic beauty
routines attract heterosexual males dissatisfied with their wives’ Spartan
toilettes and sexually undistinguished casualwear.
In some less educated and more homophobic cultures, being gay
is by definition wanting to be a woman or, in the case of the lesbian,
a man. The lower class misunderstands effeminacy and mannishness
not as behaviors but as manifestations of an ersatz man or woman, an
anomalous composite of the genders. The state of being a homosexual
is simplified and to some extent rendered less objectionable as merely
another form of heterosexuality, another permutation on the acceptable
polarity of the genders, one that denies the homosexual his or her
autonomy as an individual existing outside this obsolete antithesis.
While only some 30 percent of the transgender community is gay, it
is not unlikely that a large sector of this demographic has internalized
the homophobia present in uneducated assumptions about homosexuality
and, in transitioning, are attempting to re-create themselves
in this intellectually obtuse image of the man or woman manqué, a
chromosomal chimera of sorts, a creature that has somehow fallen
short of its true identity and who must go on a prohibitively costly
quest to overcome its shortcomings. If we allowed greater latitude in
the accepted behaviors of the sexes and recognized that effeminate
men and masculine women are not just unstable subsets of heterosexuality,
many people would not need to correct this perceived genetic
malfunction. The message of the 1960s and 1970s was androgyny,
and yet the TG regresses to an age before androgyny. A culture that
recognizes only two possibilities of sexual response, either Adam’s or
Eve’s, gives the TG only one alternative, an ultimatum to reconfigure
her entire physiology in accordance with blunt, indiscriminate nomenclature
that dulls our understanding of gender.
The implications of this covert homophobia are particularly distressing
for children. More and more, parents are encouraging their
sons and daughters to transition when they spot even the slightest hint
of effeminacy or boyishness on the grounds that such behaviors indicate
desires to be the opposite sex when in fact their desire to play
with dolls and throw footballs may reflect the desire to be something
less exotic, even banal, namely, gay. Tolerance disguises a latent uneasiness
with homosexuality and an urgent parental need to shoehorn
the uncomfortable issues of children’s sexuality into pat rubrics. Children
now begin hormone therapy as early as the age of four. Laverne
Cox was recently confronted by a seven‑year‑old who professed that
she, too, is “trans,” to which Cox replied by, as one news outlet put
it, “shar[ing] some sweet words”: “remember, honey, transgender is
beautiful.” Her mother, who blogs as “Gender Mom,” may very well
have been nudging, if not unconsciously importuning, her effeminate
son into making an irreversible decision, one that he might later regret,
as, evidenced by a study from the University of Toronto which kept
track over time of 109 boys with gender identity disorder, only 13 of
whom sought to change their genders as adults. In the climate of permissiveness
developing around the public discussion of transitioning,
well‑meaning parents, unsettled by the unorthodox behavior of their
precociously gay and lesbian sons and daughters, could easily coerce
their children into something like a false confession, badgering them,
in a self-congratulatorywealth of good feelings, into decisions that
neither they nor their children are capable of making.
The discussion of transgender issues is dominated by the metaphor
of the imprisoned male or female, a belief in whose existence
requires an uncomfortably wide leap of faith. Such a theory is reminiscent
of largely discredited ideas about multiple personalities which, as
in the case of the two most famous case studies, that of Chris Sizemore
and Shirley Mason, Eve and Sybil (the latter of whom later recanted
her story), posit the existence of a whole cast of internal characters,
all struggling to shove their clamorous siblings off the soap box. The
imprisoned male or female argument also harks back to the superstition
of demonic possession, of an inner fiend, except the terms of the
exorcism have been reversed and it is the body that is the entity to be
expelled, and the demon the blameless Rapunzel locked away in her
tower. Such a crude dichotomy harks back even further to late antique
and medieval allegories of the psychomachia, the battle of body
and soul. This polarity provides the ideological underpinnings of pop
psychology, which defines the apogee of mental health as that point
in an individual’s history in which emotions and complexes supposedly
trapped within—pent‑up rage, frustrations, inner children, Oedipal
appetites—are released and thus neutralized, presumably by mere
exposure to the oxidizing effects of chitchat and air. Pop psychologists
describe the body as a pressure cooker in which tensions build,
stresses surge, blockages obstruct. Inhibition of any kind is viewed as
a dangerous form of self‑suppression that manifests itself in an array
of neuroses, deformations, and, especially in the case of women (an
example of the misogyny of pseudoscience), uterine and breast cancer,
a form of rot from within (according to this etiology of disease, men
do not rot but, in an empirically more plausible interaction of body and
mind, explode, spontaneously combust with strokes and heart attacks,
deaths far swifter and less painful than women’s slow, guilt‑ridden
malingering). This odd notion of inverting the self like a glove, of
getting the inside out, underpins the new craze for transitioning. The
myth of the imprisoned female and her chivalrous rescue on the operating
table is a fable of a disclosure culture, one in which all secrets
must be spilled, all impostures exposed, all latencies made blatant, lest
the toxins generated by inner pressures slowly corrupt the organism,
destroying both the mental and physical well‑being of the host body.
In resolving one conflict, however, aren’t TGs creating another?
In liberating the archetypal Andromeda from her chains, aren’t they
in turn suppressing their male or female selves even more violently
than they did their inner genders before they came out, creating an
internal embargo as psychologically devastating as the one they suffered
before they transitioned? Why is one gender more viable than
the other? In being true to themselves, aren’t they being false to their
own bodies? Physical evidence suggests that there may indeed be a
slim genetic component behind the desire to transition, but isn’t there
even more prepossessing data against it, namely, male or female bodies
themselves, the preponderance of a person’s genome, which is suppressed
at great cost to the individual’s peace of mind?
If gender reassignment surgery is the latchkey for the imprisoned
male or female, once he or she has been freed are they happier, have
they achieved the serenity that is the fundamental goal of a disclosure
culture? An attempted suicide rate of a staggering 41 percent suggests
that many TGs experience profound disillusion over the fact that their
problems were not resolved during their transition and that they are
still as out of sorts with their bodies and their failure to pass as they
were before they underwent hormone replacement therapy. High percentages
resort to prostitution to pay for their feminizing surgeries,
alcohol and drug abuse occur at higher rates, homelessness and unemployment
are rampant. Certainly much, if not most, of this unhappiness
can be ascribed to social disapproval, but it would be disingenuous
to say that the cruelty of stigmatization is the reason for all of it.
If TGs initiated this journey to find mental health, there is no evidence
whatsoever that they achieve it or, indeed, that they even marginally
improve their lots in life.
Many TGs insist that they were “born in the wrong body” and that
only a sex change, to use an out‑of‑date expression, or “sex reassignment
surgery,” to use a newer, more cumbersome one, can correct nature’s
blunders. The word reassignment presumes that there is an “assigner,”
that there was agency, someone making the decisions, rather
than one’s gender having just been an accident, the roll of the dice, and
since nature was so maladroit, so incapable of fulfilling its responsibilities,
TGs themselves assume the role of commander‑in‑chief and
rectify this gross oversight with amputations and implants. The entire
scientific community disagrees, however. Gender is not “assigned,”
apportioned like a sum of money or bequeathed like an heirloom. It is
revealed, first by the transducer of an ultrasound machine massaging
a besmeared and distended belly and then by the obstetrician as he
dangles the wailing infant by its feet.
TGs, however, are, like all of us, products of a self‑help culture
in which the will is all-powerful,
in which one can be anything one
chooses simply by dint of effort, leaping over such obstacles as fate,
destiny, tragedy, necessity, and chance to create “an entirely new you.”
Biological facts are mere opportunities to strengthen this hypertrophied
will, hurdles to overcome on one’s “journey” toward “self‑actualization.”
As the eponymous Laura in the transgender blog “Laura’s
Playground” puts it, transitioning is simply a matter of “disassembling
[the] old self, reassembling [the] new,” a kind of culinary rebirth in
which one follows one’s own chosen recipe: “More, more, now stir.
Now add new ingredients. What kind of person do you want to be?”
Unfortunately, there are too many cooks in nature’s kitchen. One can
no more change one’s gender than one’s species. However strong
one’s will, walls cannot be walked through (pace L. Ron Hubbard,
who invented the ultimate human potential religion whose adherents,
simply through the power of positive thinking, can correct blurred vision,
levitate, cure their own maladies, and—imagine the savings on
cleanings—grow new teeth). Transitioning is a collision in which the
human will slams into the hard, cruel, irrefutable facts of the body.
Let us assume for a moment that the TG really was born in the
wrong body. Is this internal male or female so gullible that it would
be fooled by vaginoplasties and scrotoplasties, by gonadectomies and
mastectomies? Is the inner man or woman such a sucker, so brainless,
so dimwitted, that it would believe that these cosmetic changes constitute
a real reversal of gender and thus feel any happier in its new
silicone shell? Wouldn’t he or she still feel that, while the penis and
breasts may have been cast away like so much medical waste, the arms
are still the same, the legs, the torso, the neck, the feet—all still chromosomally
identical to the body that existed before they went under
the knife? The internal male or female is never really freed from its
prison; its cells have simply been redecorated.
Pop psychology may provide the philosophical rationale for the
TG’s transformation, but postmodem theory provides the modish rhetoric.
Many TG activists believe that gender is a “social construct,” not
a physical reality but a set of attitudes and prejudices, of inhibiting
conventions that contain and entrammel our infantile polymorphousness.
As C. Carter says in “Sex/Gender and the Media,”Biology is no less a cultural construct
than gender socialization into masculinity and
femininity. While the point is that biology, like gender, is thought to be socially constructed,
that does not mean that there is no such thing as biology… . Identity critique
seeks to disrupt the very categories we have constructed between the sexes,
and to demonstrate how such categorization results in a narrow range of biological
differences… .
While science teachers across America can all breathe a sigh of relief
that Carter recognizes that biology is a real thing, the tone of the
passage suggests that its author feels that “identity critique” is a far
more compelling study than watching things grow in petri dishes. The
“social construct” theory of gender dematerializes the body, which
becomes that of a sexless seraph, too sacred and ethereal to be either
male or female, a Barbie or Ken Doll whose pubis is a rounded
bulge of thermoplastic polymer, the genitals having been magically
expunged with the vanishing cream of a few meaningless shibboleths.
The “social construct” theory provides a kind of instantaneous,
out‑patient sex reassignment surgery performed not by a “genital reconfiguration
specialist” with a few sharp incisions of a scalpel but by
a gender studies adjunct with an onslaught of paper cuts from his copy
of On Grammatology, for why does anyone need to submit to the knife
if one can change one’s gender simply by exploiting the malleability
of reality itself? The brave face with which postmodernists confront
both empirical reality and their colleagues in the sciences, like Don
Quixote tilting at windmills, is one of the great farces of contemporary
academia, a turf war with a pitiably foregone conclusion. In the case
of the transgender community, such ravings create a certain linguistic
elasticity that fosters the illusion that the borders between the genders
are more porous than they are.
In most instances, TGs cannot afford the feminizing surgeries and
haute couture wardrobe, to say nothing of the bevy of make‑up artists,
hair stylists, and celebrity photographers of the stature of Annie
Liebovitz, that turned Caitlyn Jenner, with her $100,000,000 fortune,
amassed while the spokesman for the Breakfast of Champions, into
the fairly astonishing success that she is. With a number of exceptions,
men’s noses are too big, shoulders too broad, jaws too square, voices
too deep, brows too beetling, and gait—at least in heels—too lumbering.
When the public sees most TGs, it sees either Mrs. Doubtfires
or Victor Victorias, and yet these incomplete figures, these arresting
amalgamations of sexual traits, insist that we not only call them “he”
or “she” but that we treat them as if they were indeed men or women
when all of our training, from the time we distinguished pink from
blue, tells us otherwise. The political agenda of the transgender community
often seems to demand that we be complicit in their convictions,
that we humor them, pretend that we view them as the genuine
article when in fact they seem to be staging a kind of masquerade,
dressing in a costume, playing at make‑believe. We are not asked just
to follow the humane policy of live and let live, exhibiting acceptance
and tolerance as well as fighting for their rights as human beings, but
we are required to act as their enablers, enter into their fantasies, protect
them from the truth of a devastating fallacy. We are expected both
to support them politically, an easy task for most liberals, and affirm
their deeply guarded conceptions of selfhood, something that lies well
outside the province of the struggle for equal protection under the
law—in truth, that lies firmly in the field of counseling or psychotherapy.
I know of no other human-rights movement in which supporters
are adjured, not only to advocate for the greater civil liberties
of a minority, but to aid and reinforce its self‑delusions, to guard those
who harbor them from the truth. When we fail as the chaperones of
these misapprehensions, we open ourselves up to criticism that we are
narrow‑minded bigots, that we have somehow failed the transgender
community, been derelict in our psychological duties as its caregivers,
the nursemaids of its inventions. Politics has acquired a psychological,
indeed, an aesthetic dimension, a deeply personal judgment of a
man’s or woman’s looks, of their passability or ugliness, a determination
many of us are too polite—indeed, too compassionate—to make.
To support the transgendered community is to profess to admire the
aesthetic adequacy of their transition whereas to attack them, in a discussion
in which disagreement is tantamount to hate speech, to hurling
ethnic slurs, is to admit that their “journeys” have not succeeded and
that, absent tens of thousands of dollars of surgery and a doctor skillful
enough to perform procedures on everything from scalps to earlobes,
are not likely to succeed.
For a minority group that expects us to subscribe wholeheartedly
to its usually insufficient illusion of malehood or femalehood, it is
shocking to discover how unkind TGs are to crossdressers and transvestites
whom they view as dilettantes and epigones, failed women,
indeed, as daffy gay men, whereas they are genuine heterosexuals,
über women of the most refined genetic stock. When I myself experimented
with crossdressing (as recounted in my book Diary of a Drag
Queen), I made many of my contacts with men in an AOL chat room
devoted to TGs and their admirers, an electronic brothel of sorts in
which transgender prostitutes met their johns, not infrequently members
of the online Vice Squad who entrapped these streetwalkers of the
information superhighway. It is possible that I stumbled into a unique
nest of snakes, but the behavior I witnessed there was so deplorable
that each “chat” started as mere emojied palaver and quickly escalated
to a crime against humanity. Each of our AOL profiles came
with a portfolio of photographs so the entire chat room knew precisely
how we looked, a type of exposure that, in the case of the crossdressers
or the unpassable TGs, led to countless exhortations that we kill
ourselves, that we jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State
Building—injunctions that struck me as at best cynical for a community
with such astronomical suicide rates. The bodies of the TGs were
also scrutinized for imperfections as if by Nazi phrenologists armed
with chromed calipers searching for the perfect Aryan, racial impurities
that were broadcast to the room as fodder for sadistic mockery, the
badinage of Internet scoundrels who held up their own pulchritude as
an edifying contrast with the hideously disfigured bodies of would‑be
women. Much of the stigmatization TGs experience comes not only
from heterosexual boors and hooligans but from other TGs, who shore
up their self‑doubts through the ruthlessness of their own constantly
appraising tribunals. The crossdressers present in this chat‑room‑cumcourt‑of‑physical‑fascism
received by far the brunt of the coven’s
malice because they were openly gay men, whereas the TGs were heterosexuals
who had an innate prerogative to wear dresses and who indeed
harbored incongruously homophobic attitudes toward men who
violated the sacred taboo against transvestitism. Through such open
self‑deceptions, TGs at once allay their insecurities and escape the
onus of their own self‑hatred as gay men.
A key aspect of the impersonation of women was missing from
the abominable manners of the TGs I encountered: the milk of human
kindness, that most stereotypical component of the female personality,
which, while possibly learned—indeed, “constructed”—or just
as possibly a genetic prerequisite of maternal responsibilities, often
makes women much more pleasant to be around than men. The chat
room was a dog‑eat‑dog world of male aggression, of inane braggadocio
and bellicose jockeying for power, a bully’s playground in which,
in the very act of flaunting their feminine bodies to their customers,
they betrayed their true gender, that of quarrelsome Alphas playing
an unhinged game of King of the Hill. TGs claim to have released
their inner female, but in the case of AOL’s chat room they simply
gave their inner males wider latitude to dominate and oppress. Their
mimicry of women extended only to the most superficial aspects of
femininity, the reproductive and secondary sex characteristics, from
vaginas to curvaceous hips—in short, a man’s interpretation of what it
means to be a woman, a misreading made all the more belligerent by
the disruptive effects of hormonal fluctuations, which cause irritability
and moodiness in TGs similar to PMS or menopause.
Not only is the TG a heterosexual woman, her boyfriend is a heterosexual
man, a hemale to her shemale, a stud of such incontestable
virility that there isn’t a gay bone in his body. The TG and her admirer
engage in a deeply subjective folie à deux in which they affirm each
other’s sexual authenticity. Many gay men are beset by the fantasy
of being the submissive partner of a straight man, whose masculinity
is more legitimate than their own. By remaking herself in the image
of the straight man’s desires (or for that matter, in the case of the lesbian
transitioner, in the image of the straight woman’s desire), the TG
engages in the ultimate act of self‑sacrifice, self‑suppression, not the
brave act of self‑liberation that she flatters herself she is performing.
Clitorectomies in Africa and the Middle East are in part performed to
prevent women from enjoying sex and giving erotic pleasure entirely
to the all‑powerful male who ravages an inert and unresponsive partner
who must simply endure his lusts, acquiesce in desires in which
she is physically unable to participate. There is a sense in which transitioning
is also a form of genital mutilation, in that the gay man seeks
to transform himself into a mere vessel for the heterosexual’s impulses
whereas his own libido is depressed to the point of extinction by the
gelding effects of hormone replacement therapy.
If one of the motivations for transitioning is the submissiveness
many gay men feel to heterosexuals, there is another motivation for
by far the majority of TGs: straight and bisexual men, who constitute
some 70 percent of those who transition. “Autogynephilia” is a
controversial theory, abhorred by the transgender community, that explains
many men’s longing to transition as a response to a fetish, to
the erotic pleasure they receive from seeing themselves as women, as
having a woman’s body and interacting with other women as lesbians,
Caitlyn Jenner being the most famous and, of late, most photogenic
example. Sex reassignment is the logical outcome of an excess of heterosexuality,
of a love for women so intense that the straight TG tries
to transform himself into the object of his desire. The theory has a
great deal of psychological plausibility, but it is violently condemned
by the transgender community on the ground that it defines gender
dysphoria as a pathology, an illness, a “paraphilia” or sexual perversion,
and this is indeed the case if you accept the idea that fetishes are
illnesses, maladies as pernicious as the desire to caress feet or hair,
to wear leather or soft fabrics, to worship muscles or stiletto heels,
to sleep with older women or stuffed animals—calamitous practices
known to simply tear apart the social fabric.
In response to this attempt to pathologize and sexualize their decisions,
TGs attempt to neuter their desires and reconstrue them as a
healthy form of self‑expression, salubrious and psychologically nourishing,
not “sick,” not “degenerate,” not “depraved,” but nice. Transitioning
is nicefied, denatured, its motivations cleansed of base sexual
desires, and instead TGs assert that they pursue their quests out of
fidelity to an asexual ideal of pure male‑ or femalehood, to that “inner”
man or woman who is emancipated, not to have sex for heaven’s sake,
but to comport him‑ or herself in accordance with some ascetic standard
of gynic or andric perfection. The fetish theory suggests that TGs
transition in order to accomplish a selfish and ignoble sexual agenda,
that they are in fact having a kind of sex in front of us, but the “inner”
man or woman theory makes their efforts more palatable by presenting
them as part of a spiritual quest, a valorous act of self‑disclosure, a
demonstration of the guts and glory of the sacred androgen.
In my eyes, she is sterile, too virtuous, a eunuch martyr to a cause.
Why are sexual motivations considered inadequate as justifications for
the procedures TGs undergo? Why is a fetish not a legitimate reason
for modifying one’s body whereas a mythic character bound in chains
of muscle and bones is? Only a sexually puritanical society would
condemn people seeking their own unique form of erotic fulfillment.
All of the other motivations TGs ascribe to themselves seem like so
much temporizing, so much prevaricating with a culture that finds sex
out of wedlock, let alone sex out of gender, disgusting and wrong.
In desexing him‑ or herself, the TG follows the same route that
homosexuals have been forced to take in order to achieve assimilation.
The public is willing to tolerate, even accept, anything provided that
“anything” is in essence indistinguishable from themselves, shares
the same values and aspirations, raises the same families, exhibits the
same sexual reticence, patriotism, and religiosity. Acceptance is no
more onerous than glancing in a mirror. Gay men have become caricatures
of bourgeois respectability: they are soldiers who return home in
the same flag‑draped coffins, spouses who pledge to each other eternal
love, dads who coach Little League teams, Cubmasters who award
Fire Safety Badges and medals for kite flying and conscientious tooth
brushing, and pastors who shepherd their flocks. The cost of conformity
to the individual is decimating, but this is a price that many, both
homosexuals and TGs, are willing to pay.
Daniel Harris is the author of Diary of a Drag Queen, The Rise and Fall of Gay
Culture, A Memoir of No One in Particular, and Cute, Quaint, and Romantic: The
Aesthetics of Consumerism. Previously published in our pages, Harris draws, reads,
and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
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