My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (27 page)

“Adam said if you want to meet men you’re in the wrong place.

And I wonder if I’m here deliberately, to protect myself from the pos-

sibility, the fear of rejection.”

Lisa, the woman who colors her hair, is a lesbian, and they have

long conversations about their respective lives and feelings. When

Lisa told Ellen she actually preferred being alone in the evening, and

didn’t want some lover pestering her with questions, Ellen suggested

that Lisa might actually want to be (or at least live like) a male, that perhaps she was a female- to- male transsexual, at least in spirit.

Lisa seemed to respond to this, even take pride in it. “How can you

want to be a
woman
?” she asked dismissively. Ellen was taken aback, even hurt. After all she’d told her, didn’t Lisa realize how happy she

was, how full her life, as a woman?

“And besides,” she said to me, “I don’t think, and never have

thought, that women are secondary.”

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c h a p t e r t h i r t e e n

The Year of the Transsexual

You are more and more authentic the more you look like someone

you dreamed of being.

— Agrado, in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film
All About My Mother

I am not a boy, not a girl, I am not gay, not straight, I am not a

drag queen, not a transsexual— I am just me, Jackie.

— Jackie Curtis

T
rend spotters are calling 2010 the “Year of the Transsexual.” By this they mean the new empowerment of gender nonconformists like

James Franco, Lady Gaga, Miss T Brazil, the gorgeous model. It’s all

very “downtown” and reminiscent of the seventies, as celebrities “flirt with the other side,” enjoying— the old buzzwords— fluidity of gender,

or as a
Times
reporter puts it, defining themselves “on a spectrum of gender rather than simply male or female.” The singer- songwriter and

deliriously shape-

shifting performance artist Justin Vivian Bond

wishes to be addressed with the gender- neutral and onomatopoeic

“Mx.” The anthem might be taken from
The Rocky Horror Picture

Show
: “I’m a transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania!”

On the other hand, far from these hip fashionistas, these slippery

sexual icons, transsexuals are vilified, their rights questioned, their status equivocal. Transgender performers are all over the map—

beautiful, comical, eerie, and fifty shades of camp. But for those who

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are neither glamorous nor performers— that is, most of the approxi-

mately 700,000 transgender people in the country— there are job

losses, frustration (they can’t afford surgery; take risky silicone treatments), assault, murder.

From the moment Chevey made his revelation, even during the

edict against writing, I filed away news and culture reports on stories of Transgender, subset Transsexual. At first it was a trickle, then a

flood tide. There were hopeful signs. In San Francisco (where else?),

Theresa Sparks, former sex toy executive, became the first male- to-

female candidate to run for district supervisor. In Atlanta (more sur-

prising), the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in favor of a transgender

politician whom opponents claimed had misled voters by running for

office as a woman. In Richmond, on the capitol steps, the noble edifice designed by Thomas Jefferson, Robyn Deane came out as a transitioning woman. Deane, who as a man was married for seventeen years to

the sister of Governor Robert McDonnell, chose this venue with the

express political purpose of embarrassing her former in- law, a Repub-

lican opponent of gay and transgender rights.

The trickle became a flood tide. “The Nation’s First Pregnant Fa-

ther” screams a tabloid headline. A former beauty queen, artificially

inseminated and now a man, appears pregnant on
Oprah
and four

months later has a baby girl. The sexes blur: refinements in male beau-

tification include men sporting guyliner and tights (a.k.a. “manty-

hose”).

A “Personal Love” column addresses the quandaries and confu-

sions among the new multigendered, for instance, when one partner in

a lesbian relationship becomes a man and the other, once proud and

comfortable in her same- sex orientation, is forced to drastically (and perhaps unsuccessfully) reorient as a heterosexual. There’s androgyny

chic: the
Vanity Fair
cover, “Patti Smith Meets Johnny Depp.”

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The Year of the Transsexual

Paul Auster’s
The Brooklyn Follies
features a beautiful Haitian transvestite named Rufus, employee of the rogue Harry, ex- con, homosexual, and rare- book dealer. His She is like the Platonic ideal of

woman (literally and figuratively, given the ancient Greeks’ sexual pro-clivity and practice), with long legs and a chiseled face, the modern-

day equivalent of the beautiful men- boys with whom Greek men

consorted. What woman can achieve such androgynous perfection?

The fashion industry shows its preference for the male body type by

using as models hipless, breastless, anorexic females. A short entry in
The Week
magazine in 2011 says, “The most sought- after model of this year’s London fashion shows was 19- year- old Andrej Pejic, a man who

specializes in modeling women’s clothes.” But over the door of this

glamorous party, there might as well be a warning sign: Plain Women,

Aging Women, Masculine Women Need Not Apply.

Citing the horrifying incident of a transsexual woman being bru-

tally attacked and spit on by two teenage girls in a McDonald’s restau-

rant in Baltimore County, Eliza Gray reports in the
New Republic

(Summer 2011), “Transgender people are some of the least protected,

most persecuted people in the United States.”

Certainly we are a long way from the shock of Christine Jorgensen

and Renée Richards, or those years mentioned by Candy Darling in a

recent documentary when being a female impersonator on the streets

of New York was against the law; or 1951, when Ernest Hemingway’s

son Gigi was arrested in a Los Angeles movie theater for entering the

ladies’ room dressed like a woman. But if Ellen is any example, far

from exulting in their “equivocal” state, most transsexuals still trem-

ble each time they enter a public restroom.

In the early days of transgender exploration, thanks to Harry Ben-

jamin’s pioneering work, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, also subject to enormous discrimination, made common cause with transsexuals. But

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in the seventies, there was a backlash and they closed ranks against

them— a bias that Susan Stryker (
Transgender History
) says has been somewhat repaired but “has yet to be fully overcome.”

There are movies extremely sympathetic to transsexuals, like João

Pedro Rodrigues’s
To Die Like a Man
, a poignant and melancholy fable about the life and death of a drag queen. Harking back to Fassbinder’s

tragic
In a Year of 13 Moons
, Rodrigues’s much warmer film shows us so many states of joy and sorrow as to make any kind of stereotyping

impossible. Kimberly Reed, once a quarterback at her Midwestern

high school, now a beautiful she- editor in New York, has made a fasci-

nating documentary,
Prodigal Sons
, about her own transsexualism. In it, this onetime high school jock returns to a welcoming class reunion.

“Well, everybody changes,” says one of her unperturbed former class-

mates.

More controversial was the burlesque
Ticked- Off Trannies with

Knives,
shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, which aroused the hackles of GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), who

protested Israel Luna’s film as a misrepresentation of transgender

women.

GLAAD was again outraged by a very funny
Saturday Night Live

skit purporting to advertise an estrogen supplement, Estro Maxx,

which, taken daily, turns a guy with a mustache into a girl. So successful was their protest that when I sent the link to Ellen to get her opinion, it had already been “removed by the user.”

I asked her what she thought of that. In my view, the more trans-

sexuals are
out there
, in whatever form, the sooner the public becomes habituated. But what does Ellen think?

“I don’t have a strong reaction. Mostly, I’d say, what a wuss to put

yourself out there as cutting edge but the minute somebody jumps on

you, you take it down. The time to take it down is before you air it in

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first place. Once it gets vetted, put your name on it, stand by it. It’s true of everybody that you might say something off the cuff, then be sorry

and apologize. But a skit is not something done quickly. Of course, it’s bowing to advertisers so I’m really talking to the advertisers. But if

you put money in
SNL
you’re going to offend people; that’s the whole show.

“My real resentment is against gays who don’t want anything to do

with us. They’re a protected class now and we’re not.”

That’s not entirely true anymore. Though legal protection for

transsexuals is basically ten or fifteen years behind the legalization of gay rights, increasingly states and other jurisdictions have added language to include transgender nondiscrimination. The Transgender

Civil Rights Project, part of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,

tracks various forms of discrimination worldwide; although we in the

United States have miles to go in both legal protection and public at-

titudes, conditions in other parts of the world— particularly Asia and

Latin America— are far worse. More shocking than the prohibitions in

these traditional societies is a law in Sweden and sixteen other Euro-

pean countries (including France and Italy) that forces would- be transsexuals to be sterilized. Thanks to a groundswell of opposition, the

Swedish parliament may soon change the law.

I talk to Dr. Jack Drescher, eminent psychiatrist and an authority

on gay and transgender issues. “It’s supposed to protect the 20 percent who have regrets,” he says, “but in effect, it punishes the 80 percent

who don’t. They have to go through a whole other set of hoops.” Dre-

scher was part of the American Psychiatric Association’s task team

that recently updated the important
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
, and notes that the decision to remove transsexualism from the “disorder” category (as homosexuality was removed in 1973), has caused a

rift between those who appreciate the destigmatization and others

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who fear it could lead to a loss of medical insurance. I ask whether the decision of some states, like California, to offer coverage for surgery for its citizens could lead to problems, like transsexual candidates

flooding the state, or a public backlash against them.

“There really shouldn’t be a problem,” he says. “Transsexuals are

such a tiny minority, but they’ve been blown up, sensationalized

through television, out of all proportion to the actual numbers.”

There have been various antidiscrimination bills, largely for state

employees, and New York pioneered legal name change, becoming, as

one reporter put it, the “capital of ‘Joe- to- Jane’ proceedings,” with a whole phalanx of lawyers devoted to the legal intricacies of name

change.

New York also moved to allow transsexuals to change their birth

certificates so as to reflect their new identity, an option that many

transsexuals have embraced but that I find almost more troubling than

anything else. For those who do insist they were always the sex they

have become, what about the lives they lived with others— as, say, hus-

band and father, daughter or wife? Here we get to the core of that

overused and amorphous word, identity. Is our subjective sense of our-

selves the only authority on who we are and were? Have we the right

to annul the past; does it belong only to us? Undoubtedly this revisionism on the part of transsexuals springs from a hunger for recognition,

and perhaps if they make the change earlier there will be less need to

rewrite history. But aren’t we all a composite of selves formed and re-

flected in our encounters with others, our relationships, and our pasts, awkwardness and alienation included? There may be a very real difference between those who felt the “wrongness” of their sexual iden-

tity very early on (at two or three or four) and those who came into an awareness of it later, but I still can’t accept such a willful erasure of the past, and luckily Ellen has no wish to do so.

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