Hirschfeld taught that these are natural variations and that law and social customs should be brought into accord in a rational way with this naturally existing diversity of human kinds. I think that his motivations were really noble, and he did tremendous political work on gay rights, transvestite rights, abortion rights. He was a very conscientious, well-meaning, thoughtful man. And he was a modernist, a sexual modernist, who was bringing up these taboo topics, and who recognized that these things that were supposed to be so illicit are just a part of human life. His view was that we shouldn’t act in an irrational, prejudicial, superstitious manner. “We’re all men of science here.”
Q: His unwillingness to pathologize sexual intermediaries was at odds with most of the other sexologists of the time, wasn’t it?
In a sense I think that he did pathologize, in that he thought that gender and sexuality were appropriate targets for medical intervention. But do you want to call that pathological? What many transsexuals are looking for is a nonpathologized way to say, “I want to interact with medical service providers.” So that treatment is offered much more on a service provider basis, which is of course part of a much broader shift in medicine.
Q: The history of interactions between transgendered people and the medical community is a very complex one, isn’t it? In one sense, it was very consumer-driven, with transsexuals seeking out physicians and requesting that they provide certain services like hormone treatments and surgery. It seems that early on, the relationship was much friendlier between clients and service provider than it is today, though. Why do you think that is the case?
I think that there has always been a tension between people seeking services and people providing services. And as much as I firmly believe that people have autonomy over their own bodies and can choose best for themselves—that people have the capacity to give informed consent—I understand that service providers have concerns. If I as a surgeon am going to do something to a person’s body, I need to be convinced that I’m doing the right thing, because of the Hippocratic oath, and its major principle, do no harm. I respect that and I understand that there’s a need sometimes for transgendered people seeking medical services, to educate the service providers about why, even though this is something that you might not choose for yourself, this is the best thing for me.
However, you can’t just talk about clients and service providers. You have to talk about the role of media as well, in publicizing the fact that certain options are available. At least in modern Western European culture, there are many people who feel like “my body isn’t shaped right” and it’s not an aesthetic question, really, so much as a question about how we internalize ideas about gender, historically and culturally. To develop a gender identity and feel like my body does not communicate my sense of self to my audience—and then to know that there are techniques for body manipulation that are available because I’ve read about them.
Even before Jorgensen, people who were looking for help would turn to science and medicine and say, “Look, I know you can do this, I’m reading about Eugen Steinach in Vienna, and he’s doing these gonad transplant things and these hormone injection things; sign me up.” And then they were perceived as crazy because they wanted to do that. So there’s been an awareness on the part of people seeking services that some techniques were available, and they could see an application of that technique to their situation, and then they would have to persuade a service provider that it was a legitimate thing to do.
So there was always that tension, and there have been some service providers like Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin who have been like, “Oh, okay, there’s no reason we shouldn’t do that.” They get it, at some level, for whatever reason. And then there were many other people who were like, “No, get out of here.”
Even with Jorgensen—though she certainly spoke well of her surgeons—there was more tension behind the scenes. She didn’t know of any other way to get what she wanted. There really wasn’t any other way at that point. So she volunteered to be an experiment. And her en-docrinologist decided, “Yes, this is a rare thing, and this person is more female than male. This is the most advanced case of intersex we have ever seen—the most truly feminine balanced with the most obvious male.” They wrote among themselves, evaluating. “Is this an effeminate homosexual? Is this a transvestite?” They knew those categories, but the prevailing belief at the time was there could be glandular imbalances, that she might have some female germ cells, and so the surgery was justified. It wasn’t really that long ago either: this was in the fifties, in the lifetime of people who are alive and well and running marathons today. And when you look back and read the medical discourses around it, the belief in what endocrinology meant and how the gender system worked, it’s so clear how ideologically constructed the relationship between gender and the body is.
That’s not to say that there aren’t real physical differences between bodies, but we have this cultural belief about the relationship between someone’s sense of self and how they interact with other human subjects, and how that relates to their physical embodiment, and we materialize gender through the body in accordance with certain cultural assumptions. That’s part of the radicalness about transgender politics in the later part of the twentieth century—that it just flies in the face of that construction. Part of why we (as transpeople) are so marginalized is that we offer this very radical critique of a very pervasive set of assumptions about gender.
Q: But isn’t that critique somewhat paradoxical in that transsexuals do essentially gender by saying that I need a certain kind of body in order to fully express my gender?
Admittedly my position is a minority position, but I see that whole “transsexuals are essentializing gender because they are so concerned with the body” as an artifact of Cartesian dualism, the mind/body split. You don’t ever not have a body; your body is that through which you interact with other people. There is a language of the body. There is an appearance of the body. We’re never disembodied people. My own sense of what I did is that I had this sense of self, whatever story you want tell about how that came about. There was that sense for me that it was more appropriate for me to answer to the pronoun “she” than “he”—it goes way back—and there was a perception growing up that “I’m in a situation that I can’t control, and that I can’t get out of,” and there was affect around that. I was really sad about it. I would try to put it aside and go about my business in life, but it proved to be really intractable and unshakable, and when at some point I figured, “Oh, I can do these things,” it was like a paradigm shift in my own head.
It’s not that these procedures make me a different person. It’s more like “if you cut on the dotted line, and I sign this piece of paper, I can legally be a different person. I can pay you these monies, and you’ll stick a little electrified needle in my face, and I won’t have hair there anymore. I’ll take this pill and it will make my breasts grow.” It’s that recognition that the body is malleable, and that it is how we present to people. There’s something very fundamental about being two bodies in communication with each other. Just the thought that I could use my body to communicate my sense of self to other people the way that everybody else does, instead of having to verbalize it or feel invisible. The idea that I could go to a beach, like I did yesterday, and lie around in the sun and drink beer and watch my kids play, and people would say “she” … Cool.