“There are millions of us who were exposed to DES. And millions more exposed to DDT, DDE, dioxin, and God knows whatever else is out there that is estrogenic,” says Dr. Dana Beyer, a transgendered physician who serves as co-moderator of the DES Sons Network. “You look at DES and say, ‘If that can mimic estrogen, there must be other things out there. What are people eating? What are they exposed to in the water supply? Five million people were exposed to DES in this country alone. Globally, there are many millions more. And we’re still alive and kicking and suffering from the effects. Plus there probably will be third-generation effects and maybe fourth- and fifth-generation effects.”
Efforts to establish the etiology, or cause, of transsexuality and other forms of gender variance have most often focused on psychological rather than organic causes—this is not surprising, since gender identity disorders are classified as psychiatric, not medical, conditions. Many psychiatrists have attempted to root gender nonconformity in an unstable home environment, abusive or disturbed parents, gender confusion in the family, and other social factors. This line of research has not been very successful, however, as relatively few individuals who grow up in disturbed circumstances of any kind exhibit gender anomalies. As early as 1973, a psychologist working with cross-gendered clients noted that “there is no more psychopathology in the transsexual population than in the population at large, although societal response to the transsexual does impose almost insurmountable problems.”
For that reason many transgendered people reject “pathologiza-tion” and would like to see the gender identity disorders removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the same way that homosexuality was removed from the DSM. Others argue that this step would have disastrous effects for transsexual people. Rusty Moore, a professor at Hofstra University, in New York, says that transsexuality is “a part of human variation just like having a club-foot is human variation. So people have surgery to correct clubfeet or cleft palate and that gets paid for by medical reimbursement. But in the meantime, until that medical reclassification takes place, our biggest legal protection is what we already have, the DSM. Because that’s the only thing that stops the people that are out to get us.”
Some who believe that transgenderism and transsexuality are biologically based argue that the condition known as “gender identity disorder” ought to be removed from the DSM and reclassified as a congenital endocrinological disorder. “Somewhere the hormones that are secreted either by the brain or by the testes in response to the brain—the fetal hormonal system—are messed up. The end result is the morphological phenomenon, the brain anatomy or hypothalamic anatomy,” says Dr. Dana Beyer. For that reason, “we’re thinking of trying to push a new name for this: Benjamin’s disorder. So that when a baby is born or when a child is growing up and comes and says, ‘You know, Mommy says that I’m a boy, but I think I’m a girl,’ the doctor would say, ‘Okay, let’s rule out Benjamin’s disorder.’ Let’s figure out what’s going on here, rather than telling the parents the kid is crazy, delusional. The assumption is that you are psychotic or have some kind of mental abnormality. That’s the problem with the DSM. If we can make this a congenital anomaly just like cleft palate and cleft lip, or any of the physical intersex conditions, that shifts everybody’s perspective.”
In The Normal and the Pathological, a study that traces the development of the concept of pathology in medicine, the historian of science Georges Canguilhem pointed out that “an anomaly or mutation is not in itself pathological.” Canguilhem carefully delineated the distinction between anomaly and pathology. “An anomaly is a fact of individual variation which prevents two beings from being able to take the place of each other completely,” he writes. “But diversity is not disease; the anomalous is not the pathological.” This concept was articulated in various ways by many of the transgendered people with whom I have spoken over the past three years.
“There’s an idea that people have subconsciously inculcated about how gender and the body work, and when someone says, ‘I’m doing it a little differently,’ it’s like ‘No, you’re wrong.’ But no, we’re just doing it differently than you,” says historian Susan Stryker. “It’s a privilege to not have to think about how you are embodied,” she says, comparing gender privilege to race privilege and pointing out that normatively gendered people don’t have to think about gender “in the same way that white people never have to think about race.” According to Stryker, transgendered people must question basic assumptions about what it means to be male or female, and the relation of gender to the body, in the same way that other minority groups must examine and reject the assumptions that create their oppression. “I didn’t have the privilege of having my body communicate who I am to other people without some kind of interventions. Transsexuals are subject to a double standard. People say, ‘You’re essentializing gender because you think it’s all in the genitals.’ Well, no, I don’t. It’s about my sense of self, and being able to communicate my sense of self to other people the way everybody else does.”
The concept of “gender” as applied to human beings is itself a fairly new concept. Until the middle of the twentieth century, scientists recognized only biological sex, and though a determination of “sex” was usually based on the appearance of the genitals at birth, scientific discoveries complicated this simple picture as early as the eighteenth century. In cases of ambiguous genitalia, the gonads (testicles or ovaries) were used to establish sex until the discovery of Barr bodies (inactivated X chromosomes in female cells) in the mid-twentieth century. Then chromosomes became the new litmus test for sex—but by that point, it had become increasingly clear that there were persons, rare though they might be, whose sense of themselves as men or women was in distinct contrast to the results of chromosome testing. The terms “gender role” and “gender identity” as descriptions of a person’s innate sense of self were born in the 1950s, and very quickly the word “gender” became a synonym for sex, although transgendered people today (and throughout history) have made it clear that this is a misconception. Sometimes, they say, the body lies.