Normalized transgressions: Legitimizing the transsexual body as productive

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 100, 2008, Pages 38-59

  Irving, Dan ^a  

^a CARLETON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 38749139907     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2007-021     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. I use the term transsexual, a specific category that defines gender-variant individuals who communicated their desires to have their sex reassigned, as coined by medical experts. In other words, transsexual people did not create the term; rather, it was introduced by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1923, but did not become an official diagnostic category until 1980. I use the term trans to denote the current terminology used. It reflects a movement away from the transsexual/ transgender divide and acknowledges diversity among gender-variant identities and expressions including genderqueers, transmen, transwomen, and so on. I also use the term gender variant to mark the exclusion of all trans people from the hegemonic sex/gender binary.
2. Larry Buhl, "Historic 1966 Transgender Riot Remembered," Intraa, www.intraa.org/story/comptons (accessed May 8, 2007).
3. For examples, see Rosemary Hennessy, Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives (New York: Routledge, 1997);
4. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," 1984, in Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Reader, ed. Peter M. Nardi and Beth E. Schneider (New York: Routledge, 1998), 100-133.
5. Donald Morton, ed., The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996);
6. Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed, HomoEconomics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life (New York: Routledge, 1997).
7. Leslie Feinberg and Dean Spade are notable exceptions to this scholarly act of omission.
8. For examples of the myriad of texts describing trans identities, see Ann Bolin, In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage (New York: Bergin and Garvy, 1988);
9. Holly Devor, FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997);
10. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Random House, 1995);
11. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
12. For an example of literature concerning human rights debates, see Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter, eds., Transgender Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
13. For texts that address trans poverty, see, for example, Dean Spade, "Compliance Is Gendered: Struggling for Gender Self-Determination in a Hostile Economy," in Currah, Juang, and Minter, Transgender Rights, 217-41.
14. For scholarly publications on trans employment, see Viviane Namaste, "Beyond Leisure Studies: A Labour History of Male to Female Transsexual and Transvestite Artists in Montreal, 1955-1985," Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal 29 (2004): 4-11;
15. Christine Burnham, Gender Change: Employability Issues (Vancouver: Perceptions, 1994).
16. For trans community publications, see Marty Wilder, "First Day on the Gender," FTMI Newsletter 51 (2002): 8-9;
17. Janis Wolworth, Transsexual Workers: An Employers Guide (Los Angeles: Center for Gender Sanity, 1998).
18. Gary Browning and Andrew Kilmister, Critical and Post-critical Political Economy (London: Palgrave, 2006), 4.
19. Judith Butler, "Gender Regulations," in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2005), 41.
20. Sandy Stone, "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 232;
21. Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narrative of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 101.
22. SRS was delisted from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan in 1998.
23. The John Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in Baltimore is one of the most notable U.S. clinics, whereas the former Clarke Institute (presently the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health) in Toronto and the Gender Dysphoria program in Vancouver are Canadian examples.
24. For example, see Vernon A, Rosario, "Trans (Homo) Sexuality? Double Inversion, Psychiatric Confusion, and Hetero-hegemony," in Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Anthropology, ed. Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 35-51.
25. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, "Selections from Psychopathia Sexualis with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study," in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader, 22.
26. David O. Cauldwell, "Psychopathia Transexualis," International Journal of Transgenderism 5, no. 2 (2001), www.symposion.com/ijt/cauldwell/cauldwell_02.htm.
27. Ibid.
28. David O. Cauldwell, "Questions and Answers on the Sex Life and Sexual Problems of Transsexuals," International Journal of Transgenderism 5, no. 2 (2001), www.symposion.com/ijt/cauldwell /cauldwell_04.htm.
29. Cauldwell, "Psychopathia Transexualis."
30. For similar commentary, see Dean Spade, "Mutilating Gender," in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader, 325-29.
31. Prosser, Second Skins, 104.
32. Stone, "Empire Strikes Back," 228.
33. Jason Cromwell, "Queering the Binaries: Transituated Identities, Bodies, and Sexualities," in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader, 511.
34. While the real-life test is addressed using past tense to indicate a time in the history of transsexuality when GICs were prevalent, this requirement before any access to a medicalized transition still exists for many. Transsexuals located in suburban and rural locations, where trans awareness is lacking among medical professionals, continue to be referred to GICs still in operation.
35. It was John Money who referred to the employment requirement of the real-life test as economic "rehabilitation." Money, a psychologist and a sexologist, was a professor of pediatrics and psychology at John Hopkins University from 1951 until his death in 2006. He worked within the Sexual Behaviors Unit that researches SRS. See John Money, Gay, Straight, and In-Between (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 88.
36. Ibid., 92; emphasis mine.
37. Jo Hirschmann, "TransAction: Organizing against Capitalism and State Violence in San Francisco," Socialist Review (2001): 4, www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932894.
38. Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon (Dusseldorf: Symposion, 1997), www.symposion.com/ijt/Benjamin/chapt_07.htm.
39. Cauldwell, "Psychopathia Transexualis."
40. David O. Cauldwell, "Sex Transmutation - Can Anyone's Sex Be Changed?" International Journal of Transgenderism 5, no. 2 (2001), www.symposion.com/ijt/cauldwell/cauldwell_05.htm; emphasis mine.
41. Cauldwell, "Psychopathia Transexualis"; emphasis original.
42. Cauldwell, "Questions and Answers"; emphasis mine.
43. Ibid.
44. Benjamin, Transsexual Phenomenon.
45. Ibid.;
46. Cauldwell, "Psychopathia Transexualis";
47. David O. Cauldwell, "Desire for Surgical Sex Transmutation," International Journal of Transgenderism 5, no. 2(2001), www.symposion.com/ijt/cauldwell/cauldwell_03.htm.
48. Aren Z. Aizura, "Of Borders and Homes: The Imaginary Community of (Trans)sexual Citizenship," Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7(2006): 295.
49. The two failed attempts to receive the necessary access to medicalized transition procedures by the renowned FTM activist Lou Sullivan - a gay man who refused to comply with the imperative that transsexual men must desire women - demonstrate the rigidity of this narrative. For a discussion of Sullivan, see Pat Califia, Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (San Francisco: Cleis, 1997), 186.
50. While direct references may have been made to employment elsewhere, they were not at all prominent within sexology literature.
51. Benjamin, Transsexual Phenomenon.
52. Bernice Hausman, "Body, Technology, and Gender in Transsexual Autobiographies," in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader, 350.
53. Ibid., 341.
54. Christine Jorgensen, "Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography," in Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs, ed. Jonathan Ames (New York: Vintage, 2005), 72.
55. Ibid., 73.
56. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 79.
57. Leslie Feinberg, Transgendered Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 88.
58. Jason Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 63-72;
59. Nan Alamilla Boyd, "Bodies in Motion: Lesbian and Transsexual Histories," in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader, 423-24.
60. Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte, "ONE Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism," in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader, 387-406.
61. Namaste, "Beyond Leisure Studies," 4-11.
62. Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
63. C. Jacob Hale, "Suggested Rules for Non-transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexualism, or Trans," www.sandystone.com/ hale.rules.html (accessed May 8, 2007).
64. Thom Workman, Banking on Deception: The Discourse of Fiscal Crisis (Halifax: Fernwood, (1996), 23-24.
65. Roxana Ng, "Homeworking: Dream Realized or Freedom Restrained? The Globalized Reality of Immigrant Garment Workers," Canadian Women's Studies 19, no. 3 (1999): 110.
66. Jamie Swift, Wheel of Fortune: Work and Life in the Age of Falling Expectations (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995), 13.
67. Thom Workman, Social Torment: Globalization in Atlantic Canada (Halifax: Fernwood, 2003), 105.
68. Angela Harris, "From Stonewall to the Suburbs? Toward a Political Economy of Sexuality," William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 14 (2006): 1541.
69. Stephen McBride and John Shields, Dismantling a Nation: The Transition to Corporate Rule in Canada (Halifax: Fernwood, 1997), 26.
70. For an example, see Thomas Dunk, Stephen McBride, and Randle W. Nelson, eds., The Training Trap: Ideology, Training, and the Labour Market (Winnipeg: Society for Socialist Studies, 1996).
71. Harris, "From Stonewall to the Suburbs," 1542.
72. Kathleen Kenna, "Engineer 'Just Knew' He Was Really Female," Toronto Star, August 4, 1990.
73. Deirdre N. McCloskey, Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
74. Deirdre N. McCloskey, "Crossing Economics," International Journal of Transgenderism 4 (2000), www.symposion.com/ijt/gilbert/ mccloskey.htm.
75. Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 74.
76. ibid., 181; emphasis mine.
77. Wolworth, Transsexual Workers, 54.
78. Within the Western patriarchal capitalist system, one can say that gender and economic activity have always combined to produce an understanding of fully realized humanity. It is not coincidental that the titles of many recent texts written by transsexual men make use of the notion of the economic man to attempt to access hegemonic masculinity. Examples include Henry Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003);
79. and Paul Hewitt with Jane Warren, A Self-Made Man: The Diary of a Man Born in a Woman's Body (London: Headline, 1995).
80. For a general overview of the purpose of IBM's Executive Task Forces and a sample of the questions task forces comprised of GBLT people, Native Americans, and women were asked, please see IBM's Web site, especially Global Task Forces, www-03.ibm.com/employment/us/diverse/50/ exectask.shtml (accessed May 12, 2007).
81. IBM, "Diversity at IBM," www-03.ibm.com/employment/ca/en/ diversity.html; emphasis mine (accessed May 12, 2007).