1. I'll be a post-feminist in post-patriarchy.
I write as a radical feminist -- a term that seems passé, even
obsolete, in late 90s culture. However, the use of this term proves to be
imperative when, for instance, I make a simple trip to the local shopping
mall and witness recalcitrant gender binaries in full-bloom. Aside from
the dichotomous fashions--skimpy dresses and high heels mark the female
vamp while comfortable clothes mark the sensible man--there are the cold
stares emanating from young, hyper-feminine women at the height of becoming
proto-woman. As my androgynous girlfriend and I stroll arm-in-arm into the
women's bathroom, a wide gap occurs between what seems 'normal' for them
and us. Are we invading their sacred space and rigid notions of
femininity? This scenario, repeated in countless bathrooms, leaves me
chuckling, but, nonetheless, concerned that there are so many public
restrooms and certainly not enough time for subversive feminist activity.
"Yes, she's a girl," I tend to scowl, a response to their horrified glares.
The examples from the innocent trip to the mall reflect conventional
cultural mores. But they also beg the following questions about issues of
gender construction, both socially and via biomedical technology. What
makes a woman and why is her technological 'production' being fortified and
sanctioned by the male-centered medical institutions? Why are doctors who
perform
re-embodiment surgery (once known as Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) and now
called Gender Reassignment Surgery (GRS)) on desperate transsexuals and
intersexed children (brought to their offices by desperate parents) bent on
eradicating ambiguity? Why do these doctors focus on creating
fully-functioning women while providing only mediocre replications of a
penis that barely urinates or becomes erect or even looks like the real
thing for the woman who wants to become a man? Why are the 'Stewards of
Technology,' as Bernice Hausman dubs them1, obsessed with
maintaining heterosexuality at the cost of the body's visceral surfaces?
Why, as is evident in the shopping mall incident, is our culture afraid of
ambiguity, of the 'in-between,' of the monstrosity of a mind that doesn't
fit its body? And, lastly, who disappears when one becomes a woman--in
both the literal as well as philosophical sense as put forth by the
male-centered theory kings?
2. Confusion rather than clarification.
First, some definitions. 'Gender' is a classificatory term to denote
primarily birth, race, kind; secondarily, 'sex'; thirdly, grammar and
sex. 'Sex' is either of two divisions of organisms distinguished
respectively as male or female; or, it is the thing that two people
do, when they do that thing they do so well. The two terms--gender and
sex--are inherently relational, i.e., a representation of a
relation, that of belonging to a class, a group, a category: they
construct a relation between one entity and another; a belonging. We
officially enter the sex-gender system when we check the 'F' or the 'M'
box, but really the 'F' marks itself on us2.
3. Does theory mean a thing to anyone but the theorists?
The definitions of sex and gender become blurrier still when the
philosopher/theorists attempt to discuss them under the metaphor of
'technologies.' Certainly they are not intending for a literal
understanding; rather they are using the idea of technology in a
politico-philosophical sense in order to highlight the ways in which
dominant social and economic structures-- i.e., ways of thinking, being,
acting--construct our very gender identities. However, it is interesting
to compare these metaphorical 'technologies' with the concrete, biomedical
ones (as I will do throughout this text); both are participating in the
social construction of gender, but it is only the latter which physically
alters and re-constructs the body.
'Gender,' like sexuality, says de Lauretis, is not a property of bodies
or something originally existent in human beings (as is 'sex')3. She agrees with Foucault that gender is the set of
effects produced in bodies, behaviors and social relations. This set of
effects is deployed by a complex political technology, one she dubs, the
'technologies of gender.' Her ideas seem to be a feminist spin-off of
Foucault's earlier 'technologies of sex,' which he believes have been part
of the bourgeoisie since the end of the 18th century, maximizing life to
ensure class survival and political authority. These include the
sexualization of children and women's bodies; the control of procreation;
and the psychiatrization of anomalous sexual behaviors as perversion4. Not surprisingly, they have been implemented through
pedagogy, medicine, demography, and economics and supported by the state
and the family. Simply put, the results are pervasive interpellation5, brain washing, and cultural hegemony leading to the fear
of ambiguity and transgression.
For de Lauretis, the construction of gender goes on today through
various technologies of gender (cinema, for one; spectatorship, for
another) and institutional discourse with the power to control the field of
social meaning and thus produce, promote and implant representations of
gender6. Even within the margins of authoritative
discourses--the latter which cement ideas of binary sex/gender
identities--where resistance supposedly takes place (i.e., transsexualism,
transgenderism, gender-bending, etc.), there are technologies of gender at
play, imposed from the outside by the heterosexual-social contract and
inscribed in micro-political practices7.
Her suggestion to cross the boundaries, to have movement from the space
represented by/in a representation, by/in a discourse, by/in a sex-gender
system to a space not represented yet implied in them8, is
related to the philosophy of Delueze and Guattari (albeit, much critiqued
by feminist theorists) about 'becoming woman.' Deleuze and Guattari (D&G)
have attempted to dig up the roots of rigid arborescence (metaphorically,
they see the tree and its roots as representative of strict hierarchical
ways of thinking as compared with the branches which are more fluid and
swaying); they attempt to establish a theory of bodies that flow in all
directions with intensities and lines of flight and 'becomings' that span
genres and defy strictures: from becoming animal to becoming minority to
becoming woman. For them, a becoming is a fluidity, something one does in
the process of movement, in the process of altering consciousness. When
one becomes a woman, they explain, it is not an appropriation, but a shift
in thinking, an escape of binaries9. Read in a particular
light, one could deduce these ideas as radical notions of ambiguity as
related to the narratives around gender and technology. However, feminist
theorists often critique D&G's 'becoming' as appropriative male theorist
behavior, bypassing gender in favor of a dispersed polysexuality--in a
word, a very male philosopher's activity10. With women's
disappearing goes their politics, struggles, theories and knowledges--all
are appropriated11. I would add that men who don't fit
in as stereotypical male subjects also disappear.
However, in their approach to talking about transgression, I acknowledge
that D & G might be translating woman into a metaphor as do other male
theorists. But, their steadfast adherence to non-hierarchical ways of
thinking leads me to be less critical of their notion of becoming woman, to
see it less as appropriative and more as instructive in the bigger picture
of transgression and fluidity.
4. Really becoming woman.
The Signs: XX chromosomes; the presence of ovaries; 'proper'
development of internal and external genitalia; appropriate time frame for
pubescent development; menarche (for some cultures this is the epitomizing
definition of womanhood); childbirth (signals another stage of full-blown
femaleness); administration of weekly hormone shots to ameliorate an
out-of-sync feeling with one's male genitalia/hormones; the reconstruction
of a penis into a vagina, (despite the diminished libido with the
introduction of estrogen and progesterone into the testosterone-burdened
body and loss of sexual sensation in the newly constructed vagina (but it's
a hole, capable of taking in objects, and maybe even the remotest
possibility of carrying a child intra-abdominally if the Gender Managers
can discover a way to do this . . . the ultimate sign of being a WOMAN).
Complete emasculation in favor of complete feminization is the end goal.
No ambiguity. Not just passing enough to enter a public restroom
undetected, but complete heterosexuality, enough to fool any hot-blooded
he-man.
5. History and teratology . . . or how monsters are made.
In 1949, the term 'transsexual' was introduced into clinical language.
Although it was not an introduction of the phenomenon itself, it was the
commencement of another stage of long-standing medical fascination with
ambiguous psychological and physiological conditions regarding sex and
gender. The approach has always been one of 'repairing' that which was
believed to be a mistake of nature. Endocrinology emerged as the science
that could explain and treat (combined later with plastic surgery) all
aberrance and even challenged earlier psychological explanations of human
behavior such as gender dysphoria. With the emergence of transsexualism
(an outgrowth of studies on intersexuality and homosexuality) came, in the
1950s, the use of the term 'gender.' Doctors initially intended for it to
be used more widely, i.e., as 'gender identity.' However, the common
understanding of transsexualism as a 'disorder of gender identity' was a
cover-up for the potentially more threatening idea that transsexuals are
subjects who choose to engineer themselves12.
Sex hormone research began its focus (and exploitation) on women's
bodies as sites of reproductivity and functionality (embryology, the Pill,
Estrogen Replacement Therapy, etc.). As endocrinology spread its focus to
other patients such as intersexed and transsexual subjects, plastic surgery
became its technological partner--always following a normal/abnormal
paradigm. Hormones merely describe the body and its functions; plastic
surgery changes the body's visceral surface and culture's ability to read
that surface as male/female, normal/abnormal, etc. Medical technology (and
its consequent drive to control a conventional storyline of gender) have
made possible these so-called new forms of being human13.
The divide between 'nature' and 'cyber' is the place where biomedicine has
excelled at and explored the possibility of re-inventing bodies along the
ideal/defective continuum (subsequently mutated to fit the transsexual's
understanding of male and female). These new bodies are made in both a
discursive and a material sense in which the 'natural' is subsumed by the
artefactual14. Medical technology is thus at the center
of the social construction of gender and on the making and unmaking of
monsters, depending on how one defines the impetus for and the results of
their clinical procedures.
6. A shift in name makes business boom.
Recently there has been a shift in terminology in the medical
establishment to describe the constellation of re- and de-constructive
surgeries that a transsexual can have performed upon his/her body. Under
the rubric of 'Sex Reassignment Surgery' (SRS) lies a variety of
procedures: vaginoplasty (making a vagina out of an existing
penis/scrotum), phalloplasty (making a penis out of an existing vagina),
mastectomy (removal of the breasts), OVH (removal of the uterus, ovaries,
fallopian tubes), metoidioplasty (augmenting the size of the clitoris and
constructing a scrotum but leaving the urethra/vagina intact). In
addition, there are reconstructive surgeries that don't necessarily affect
the genital organs, but are part of the SRS definition; these include:
minimally invasive rib removal, facial masculinization and feminization,
and breast reconstruction.
Interestingly, these same procedures are now called 'Gender
Reconstruction Surgery' or GRS. The medical community has conceded that if
you are to define 'sex' as innate characteristics one is born with
(chromosomes, endocrinology, genitalia), then, by performing various
plastic surgeries, you are not changing a person's 'sex' per sŽ, but you
are altering their 'gender' presentation. Hence the name change. But how
does a vaginoplasty equate a shift in gender reassignment if gender is
socially constructed as the theorists have us believing? If gender is
performative and constructed by the culture around us, if a person is
socialized to be either a boy or a girl (nothing in-between, please), then
reassigning 'gender' via a scalpel is impossible. A truer name for these
procedures would be genital reassignment surgery for that is what is being
altered. How culture reads that mutation is another story.
This shift from SRS to GRS reflects the long-standing reign of the
medical establishment over the sex-gender binary system (as well as its
role in defining notions of beauty, femininity, masculinity, age,
psychological 'imbalances,' etc.). Providing the amorphous, primarily
psychological gender dysphoria with a physical 'remedy' such as GRS,
essentially takes the responsibility of changing our rigid, anti-ambiguity
cultural consciousness off individuals and perpetuates a strict binary:
either you're male or you're female but if you feel out of sorts with the
hormone balance and genitalia you were born with, then you can, with the
aid of advanced medical technology, alter those characteristics and become
one of the above two genders. In a never-ending circle, this narrative
chases its tail supported by its participants--the Stewards of Technology,
the transsexual patient, and the rest of 'us.'
In the end, the Gender Managers would do society more service by packing
their scalpels and going out of business. However, biomedical technology
is big business and if you not only construct the narratives around
sex and gender but also make sure to include the idea that you are
helping people who are in pain, confusion and despair, then your
approach goes unchallenged. There's a deafening silence among bioethicists
regarding reconstructive surgeries that remove healthy tissue, such as a
uterus or breasts and reconstruct genitalia to ameliorate a psychical
condition15. The storyline becomes ubiquitous, the
bigger picture is ignored, the binaries are set in stone. Transgression is
popularized as long as it fits a certain model.
7. One story among many: he was murdered
because he had a vagina . . . and because he passed.
Brandon Teena, pre-op transsexual, lived as a man in a small town in
Nebraska. In 1993, he was arrested by local police for writing bad checks.
The authorities were obviously appalled at their discovery of Brandon's
true 'sex' (was this revealed during a necessary strip search for a
misdemeanor check forgery charge?). Due to their anger at having been
duped by this woman-cum-man, the local police took it upon themselves to
further 'punish' Brandon for his other 'forgery.' They reported Brandon's
state of gender ambiguity to the local newspaper, in the same vein that
they would divulge the name and address of a known sex-offender. In
violation of his privacy, Brandon Teena's putative monstrosity was revealed
to the town of Humboldt, Nebraska. One week later he was assaulted and
raped at a Christmas party by two men who understood him to be living a lie
and therefore in needof 'punishment.' Although Brandon reported the
assault (despite his assailants' threats of further violence if he did so),
Humboldt police didn't arrest the two men due, in part, to the political
aspirations of the County Sheriff. One week after the rape, Brandon Teena
and two companions were stalked, shot and killed. Despite the fact that he
passed as a 'man,' albeit with a secret beneath his underwear, Brandon's
ambiguous gender identity cost him his life.
One of his assailants talked about knowing Brandon as a friend and said
he didn't know what went wrong the night of the murders. In a report, he
kept calling Brandon "he" and said he had no idea that "he" was a woman.
"We went drinking together, talked about girls, and even wrestled
together!"16
Brandon's evolution was as typical as an atypical, queer lifestyle can
be: born female, accepted as male-identified, butch baby dyke by the
lesbian community, supported in his transition to manhood by his sister
Tammy, he was preparing for eventual genital reconstruction surgery. But
his murderers saw something askew in his gender presentation only after the
revelation by the press of his biological and legal status as female. They
harassed, assaulted and killed him as a woman via the rape and subsequent
stalking. They treated him with the disdain held over people who choose
ambiguity and transgression as a way of life, however temporary. Even
post-surgery, Brandon's passing as a man would still have been suspect
because he chose to engineer his own transition to manhood.
To ask if this happened because Brandon Teena was in transition is a
moot question. He was not yet a "fully functioning" man due to many
reasons: there are economic ones (the cost of a mastectomy, a complete
hysterectomy, and a surgical phalloplasty is exorbitant); there are also
reasons related to the hegemonic control of the male-centered medical
institution: a real phallus is born, not made--making a penis is less
focused on by doctors than making a vagina; and there is also the
relationship of women to their hormones: women are their glands, i.e.,
gonadal subjectivity plays a much larger part in women's lives compared
with men and is often more difficult to embark on the reorganization of
body parts than it is for men17.
To assume Brandon Teena was killed because he lived in a place where
people with small-town values couldn't accept ideas of genital mutability,
gender ambiguity, and self-engineered transitions, is to assume that the
broader population is entirely accepting of these phenomena. After the
death sentence was imposed upon one of the two convicted murderers, a
Saturday Night Live news skit offered this statement in the name of
humor: "In Nebraska this week, a man was sentenced to death for attempting
to kill a female crossdresser who accused him of raping her. Sorry if this
sounds harsh, but in my opinion, everybody in this case deserved to die."
18
Brandon's is not an isolated case of violence. Disproportionately,
transsexuals are harassed when it is discovered that they are in varying
stages of transition19. His is merely a reflection of a
cultural distaste for gender ambiguity and the extremes to which people
will react to this disdain.
8. The love affair behind the smoke
screen.
As part of the rigid sex-gender system, the medical establishment is
guilty of their love-affair with and fortification of the
beauty/body-perfection fairy tale at the cost of developing any strides in
andro-productions (hence the popularity of face lifts, tummy tucks, breast
de-sagging, etc. among women). In the end, it appears that the medical
establishment performs reconstructive surgeries on women (however mediocre
and unsatisfying for the Female-To-Male transsexual) as a smoke screen to
fulfill certain socially constructed notions of transsexualism, i.e., that
the 'syndrome' affects both men and women equally, all the while focusing
their re-embodiment technologies, experiments, and activities on the
production of women20.
9. When is a man not a man anymore?
Anecdotal reports by doctors who specialize in re-embodiment surgery
detail when and how they determine that a man is ready for the permanent
procedure. The mostly male doctors have their own criteria for evaluating
readiness. One clinician reported that he was convinced of a transsexual's
femaleness if she was particularly beautiful and capable of evoking in him
those feelings that beautiful women generally do. Another doctor reported
that if he feels aroused by his patient, then a transsexual is ready to
become a fully functioning woman. And several 'experts' view a
transsexual's participation in prostitution as an enhancement to
self-acceptance as a woman, a certain developmental stage in the transition
from man to woman21.
Hyper femininity is alive and well in the biomedical/technology
establishment. Sex-role stereotypes may even be an artifact of the
medical-mental health caretaker system, particularly gender identity
clinics where transsexuals are intensively involved in the stages of
becoming woman22.
10. At the other end of the continuum lies
ambiguity.
Just because technology exists to alter someone's genitalia and
endocrine system, does not warrant the ethics and decisions involved in
'correcting' bodies that appear to be ambiguously sexed. Related to the
dominant medical commentaries on transsexualism is that of the ambiguously
sexed subject; inordinate weight is put on 'fixing' the intersexed
child/adult and making him/her fit a strictly defined gender binary. Once
known as hermaphroditism and later as bisexuality, and now referred to as
intersexuality, this hybridity has been marveled at and feared for
centuries; in the past it was typically handled by hiding intersexed
people in insane asylums or putting their perceived somatic monstrosity on
display in the circus tent. Now, their ambiguity is preyed upon and
experimented on by the re-embodiment technologists until they become
presentable subjects able to fit snugly into the sex-gender binary. The
goal of that rigid system is to maintain heterosexuality, eliminate
perversion and ambiguity, and if at all possible, to save the existing
female reproductive system for its appropriate uses--even if the subject
identifies and feels male. If an intersexed person who is more female in
body but identifies as male and relates sexually to women, for instance,
then performing genital reconstructive surgery to make him/her more male
maintains the heterosexual paradigm--at least on the surface.
Traversing the continuum from intersexed infants to transsexual adult
keeps the male-centered, heterosexual-identified medical hegemony busy.
They do their jobs adeptly, replete with a constructed narrative for
desperate parents and interpellated transsexuals anxious to fit into the
strict gender identity binary. It is all part of a surgically focused,
biomedical maintenance of a dual system of sex and gender23.
11. High heels, typing, demotions.
The transsexual phenomenon presents a unique transformation that is more
than an individual's somatic experience. It affects our culture in
multifarious ways. What better way to remove a man from the workforce
(leaving a gap in the competitive, dog-eat-dog world only to be quickly
filled by a real man) and create a new victim of work-a-day oppression?
She can forget she was ever an engineer or scientist or tenured computer
science professor; now she has a chance to start her whole life anew, for
she has become a true woman, that which she has dreamed of, with the help
of the old boys biomedical technology network. Now she can look forward to
being a secretary or administrative assistant or sales clerk or prostitute
and feel the full flowering of her womanhood.
Certainly feminism has done more for women than make them work tedious,
boring, and/or exploitive jobs; women are in power at levels of equality
with men in far greater abundance now than they ever have been. But the
reality is somewhere in between as Teresa de Lauretis notes when she says
that all women will someday soon have their own last names, careers, and
property--all without altering existing social relations and heterosexual
structures to which we are securely screwed24. The
reality for many Male-to-Female transsexuals is a lack of choice: the man
who chooses to become a woman has limited possibilities of what kind of
woman he can become, limited to the predominating sex-role stereotypes that
refuse to fade away amidst late-90s feminism. He becomes a quintessential
woman: a demotion has taken place. Literally tranquilized by estrogen and
progesterone, detoxified of his poisonous testosterone, robbed of his
libido as a central aspect of his being, he becomes a subject, constructed
to obey, and therefore not of concern to the male-centered, dominant
world-view.
Not every MTF fulfills this model of becoming. There are the outlaws
who defy the stereotypes, as in any community/culture: the men who become
women who become lesbian (Kate Bornstein); the men who become women who
become radical theorists on gender (Allucquere Rosanne Stone). What a man
becomes is made up of his/her own creation steeped in a dominant narrative
molded by the Stewards of Technology. These Gender Managers have at their
fingertips (and scalpels) the opportunity to not only make a 'monstrous'
body seem more 'normal,' they also can make a 'normal' body seem more
'monstrous' seem more 'normal'--a body steeped in the cyclical morass of
dissimulation and socially constructed gender identity. Given their
positions of power over a despairing person who lives in a world that fears
indeterminacy and hybridity, these Gender Managers are complicit in the
rigidity of our sex-gender binary system. With advances in endocrinology
and reconstructive surgery, transsexuals now have the simulation of
choice--the latter which is engineered by the medical institution itself
with a long history of power and control. Interestingly, between 1939 and
1951, the Ciba Corporation, a pharmaceutical company, pushed their products
to doctors whose focus centered around the idea of glandular imbalance25 to explain such 'conditions' as intersexuality,
transsexuality and homosexuality.
In the name of technological advancement, the Gender Managers have
merely perpetuated a disturbing cultural construction of strict sex-gender
binaries: "Feel out of sorts as a man? We give you a choice, as long as
you agree to become a stereotypically female woman. We've got the
technology that will give you (approximately) what you've been dreaming
about for years. Aren't you lucky!" As for their patients, transsexuals
play the part of good, willing, hyper-feminine subjects, so that they will
get their desperately desired surgeries.
This narrative perpetuates a far scarier situation, that is, the
production of a woman who will not add anything radically opposing to that
model which feminists have been trying to get rid of for a long time.
12. ¿Qué es mas macho?
The total woman/man is the goal of transsexual becomings. What is more
radical, however, are transgendered people (mostly women ) who have decided
not to fully participate in biomedical technologies. Instead, they walk a
more ambiguous line, sporting beards and breasts, having lowered
voices and ovaries, opting for a metoidioplasty over a phalloplasty
(a kind of mini-phallus that can't penetrate anything but maintains sexual
sensation, as well as an overtly ambiguous genitalia). The continuum of
participation varies: to take hormones or have genital augmentation is
still part of the hi-tech gendering binary. But these approaches seem to
be decidedly pro-active compared with the permanent, often
disfiguring/dysfunctional binary-defining surgical outcomes.
In the end, the radical approach would be to change the socially
constructed text of the two-sex system, to open it up and allow for the
existence of 'transgressively gendered' subjects (this term is Kate
Bornstein's, despite the fact that she has had a vaginoplasty)26. To allow for more transgression among all of 'us' in
the first place would do the system a lot of good as would holding the
Stewards of Technology responsible for their participation in and
perpetuation of a dangerous story line on gender. Tangentially, but
related, is the importance of addressing the issue of why some women have
internalized such hatred for the female markings of their bodies
(menstruation, breasts) that the only amelioration of this aversion is to
participate in drastic and permanent re-embodiment surgeries. And as
marginalized communities themselves fail to make connections about issues
of oppression and technological exploitation, the idea that these surgeries
are the most radical way to deal with a strict gender binary will do a
disservice to our culture as a whole. At a recent gay and lesbian film
festival screening, the audience members cheered as the main character
vehemently announced her plans to have a sex change operation. But having
an operation to alter your genitals and consuming synthetic hormones to
appear like the opposite sex will not be a radical act until the idea of
gender and sex are loosened up to include people who defy these rigid
binaries, who resist the simulated sense of choice promoted by the Stewards
of Technology. When 'men' and 'women' can participate and be accepted in
all of the activities, power and play normally reserved for the 'opposite'
sex, then an extraordinary moment will have taken place and we won't need
the biotechnology medical institution advising us about the surgical
options available to us.
Endnotes:
1 Hausman, Bernice L. (1995) Changing Sex:
Transsexualism, Technology and the idea of Gender. Durham: Duke
University Press.
2 de Lauretis, Teresa. (1987) The Technologies of
Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
3 ibid.
4 Michel Foucault in de Lauretis.
5 The term 'interpellation' was given a new spin by Louis
Althusser to mean the process whereby a social representation is accepted
and absorbed unquestioningly by an individual as his or her own
representation; this image becomes real, although it is, in fact,
imaginary.
6 de Lauretis.
7 ibid.
8 ibid.
9 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. (1987) A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
10 For further discussion, see Grosz, Elisabeth. (1994)
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press; see below references: Rosi Braidotti, Judith
Butler, Alice Jardine and Luce Irigaray.
11 Grosz, Elisabeth. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward
a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
12 Hausman.
13 ibid.
14 Braidotti, Rosi and Nina Lykke, eds. (1996)
Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with
Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. London: Zed Books.
15 Nelson, James L. (1998) 'The Silence of the
Bioethicists: Ethical and Political Aspects of Managing Gender Dysphoria',
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Vol. 4, No. 2: 213-230.
16 See item reporting Brandon Teena's murderer's
statement.
17 Hausman.
18 see website
report.
19 See details of incidents of abuse to
transsexuals.
20 Hausman.
21 Bolin, Anne. (1988) In Search of Eve: Transsexual
Rites of Passage. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
22 ibid.
23 Recently, intersexed individuals have been raising
the issue of gender ambiguity and actively working towards opening up the
two-gender cultural binary construct. See the Intersex Society of North America website.
24 de Lauretis
25 Hausman
26 Bornstein, Kate. (199 ) Gender Outlaw
References:
The following are important texts that I have not quoted directly from
but have influenced my thoughts and ideas on this subject.
Bornstein, Kate. (1994) Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of
Us. N.Y.: Routledge.
Braidotti, Rosi. (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Butler, Judith. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits
of "Sex." New York : Routledge.
______. (1989) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity. New York: Routledge.
Devor, Holly. (1997) FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ellis, Havelock. (1910-1928) Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Co.
Feinberg, Leslie. (1993) Stone Butch Blues: A Novel. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Firebrand Books.
______. (1996) Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc
to RuPaul. Boston: Beacon Press.
Garber, Marjorie. (1991) Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and
Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge.
Irigaray, Luce. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman . Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
______. (1985) This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Jardine, Alice. (1985) Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and
Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Krafft-Ebbing, Dr. R. Von. (1894) Psychopathia Sexualis; a
Medico-Forensic Study. London: William Heinemann.
Laqueur, Thomas. (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks
to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Lothstein, Leslie Martin. (1983) Female-to-Male Transsexualism:
Historical, Clinical, and Theoretical Issues. Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Raymond, Janice G. (1979) The Transsexual Empire : The Making of the
She-Male. Boston: Beacon Press.
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. (1995) The War of Desire and Technology at
the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Terry, Jennifer and Melodie Calvert, eds. (1997) Processed Lives:
Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
Wittig, Monique. (1992) The Straight Mind and Other Essays.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Websites of Interest:
The American Boyz
site featuring links to sites related to Female-to-Male transsexual issues.
Dozens of links for FTM issues.
Dr. Michael
Brownstein, plastic surgeon, specializing in mastectomy and breast
reconstruction for the FTM.
Information on Brandon
Teena.
Information on
incidents of abuse to transsexuals.
Information on the Intersex Society of
North America.
The Renaissance Transgender
Association site featuring information/links on Male-to-Female issues.
Links for MTF transgender issues.
Direct-action politics of Transsexual Menace.
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