Q: What is gender? It seems clear that it is somehow neurobiological in origin.
I think our language is not really sufficient for talking about it. The words are too blunt. Gender means “kind” or “genre,” it means “what kind of person are you?” But you can’t divorce the question of gender from the larger question of how the human organism needs to live in culture. Humans are social animals. You can’t take a baby human and throw it out in the wild and expect it to learn how to forage. We have to be in society. Unlike a kitten, human babies don’t lick the gunk off and stand up on all twos and run about. They are born very young in a developmental sense. As soon as the lungs can work, the baby comes out. So the evolutionary pressure is for situations that provide care of the newborn. That, I really think, is the basis of culture, what we really physiologically need to reproduce the species—this familial economic social structure—and that has evolved with the human form, and the capacity for language has come along with that. We are creatures who live in language and we’re creatures who have exploited the cultural sphere.
The exploitation of the cultural sphere, and the symbolic manipulation of the world, is the ecological niche that humans have developed; just like beavers cut down the trees to make their environment, we turn the world into language. That’s what humans do, and I really think that gender is about how the cultural system interfaces with the organism. Part of how you are as a being, part of what we are evolved to be, part of our neurobiological capacity that evolved words is that capacity to self-reflexively place oneself in a cultural context.
For me, gender is both the cultural system through which you internalize as a subjective being, as an identification, how you situate yourself in language; and how other people situate you in language. And it’s done through these very complex mechanisms that no one discipline in the sciences or the humanities is able to fully address. There needs to be an interdisciplinary gender studies. Because, so far, all of the theory and the research has come from a body of knowledge that has never had to be critical of its own foundational assumptions. And so it just becomes another vector for naturalizing particular kinds of ideological agendas. So I think that critically conscious transsexual or transgen-dered people, who can reveal the ideological constructions of the sex/gender systems, have this tremendous work in front of us. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to get funding to do that work.
You know, in the orisha religion, there is a being whose name means “the destroyer of patterns through whom the shape of the cosmos is revealed.” There is that sense of disruption that the trans figure brings, that rupture through the social construction of gender, and the revelation of the new, the different, the other. I once wrote a piece called “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamonix.” It’s about speaking as a monster, and that sense of disruption that we transsexual people stage for other people. It’s about trying to speak from this embodied place, that is technologically constructed—but is it human or is it not? There are many things about me that are very different from you. And I need to be able to speak the truth of my own process of embodiment.
Q: I am sure that there are many trans gendered or transsexual people who would be very insulted to be viewed as monsters.
[Laughing] Yes, when I wrote it, people said, “That’s not an effective tool for organizing.” But I don’t fear my monstrosity. The word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrere” (just like the words “remonstrance,” “demonstrate”) and the noun means “to show something,” and usually it was to show something about the supernatural. Angels and monsters are actually very closely linked, in that both show the providence of God and something about the nature of being. The word “monster” also has the subsidiary meaning of “assembled from incongruous parts.” The classical monsters were the sphinx, the gryphon—the idea being these things combine elements that are not supposed to be together, but that their being together, being alive, demonstrates something supernatural, superhuman, and makes them beings that the gods speak through.
Q: What do you think about the assimilationist versus outsider argument that is so heated in the trans community today? Should transsexuals try to pass or should they stand out? Should they value and project their differences or should they strive to be just another person on the block?
I think of myself as a queer. Non-separatist, but anti-assimilationist. Saying that “I’m just like you” doesn’t really get me where I want to go. In many ways, I am “just like you” but those aren’t the parts that give me trouble. And so that insistence on my ability to be fully myself and not suffer violence or oppression because of that is what’s important. You always fight your battles and draw your lines differently. When I first started transitioning, I didn’t want to go to the corner store and say [speaks heatedly and aggrievedly], “All right, I’m here to buy a gallon of milk, and I can see that you perceive that I am a trans-gendered person, and it is my duty to educate you.” I was just “keep your head down, buy the damn milk, go home, maybe they hate you, maybe they don’t, but whatever.” But I find a greater sense of comfort in being really open with people. I want people to see me as a woman. I want my deepest and most closesly held sense of self to be visible and able to interact with other people. I don’t feel like I have to hide my differences. Difference can be a real source of pleasure.
Q: In the past, transsexual people were advised to make a complete break with their pasts and to basically keep their gender transition a secret, even with intimate partners. Even today, it seems, many people feel safer revealing their status as a transsexual person to very few people. It seems as though that kind of invisibility would create tremendous psychic strain.
I’ve met people like that, certainly. I can’t imagine it. I didn’t want to do that at all. I just thought that felt very inauthentic. However, I understand that they do it because of other people’s feeling about transsexuality. I don’t know how many times in my own life people have met me on the street, or at a presentation, and it’s “she, she, she” until I say, “I’m a transsexual,” and suddenly it’s “he, he, he, he.” I’m like, “I’m sorry, you were having no problem with me fifteen minutes ago. What are you confused about? What changed, except your knowledge of my transsexual past?” It’s that belief about gender and the body. Is change in the body shape a change in the essence of the soul? People trip up about that. And so I understand [the desire to keep quiet]. There’s that paradox of visibility. I’m doing all of this so that people understand me the way that I understand myself. But if they know that I’ve done this, then they don’t accept me as I understand myself. They see me as something different, and then all my hard work has been for naught. However, if I don’t tell them, they will accuse me of being duplicitous. It’s a catch-22.
For me, I think of how open I am about being transgendered or how I present at different times—it’s kind of like the difference between using language for poetry and using language to communicate. If what you really want to do is communicate with someone “I need x, y or z,” and you are using the language of gender for its communicative potential, and often that’s what we want to do with gender, is communicate a sense of self with an other. But within certain contexts, within more closely held communities and other contexts, other kinds of communication for different uses are possible. Are you doing your gender like a funky bass riff, are you riffing on some gender improv? Are you using the way that you are doing your gender to test the boundaries of language? You can do gender more like an art practice or like a political practice. And at times those can be very effective things to do. They can be really fun.