Growing up in the 1950s, I remember being fascinated by Christine Jorgensen, who is described today as the first person to become widely known as transgender. So when I first taught LMC’s 3304: Science, Technology, and Gender eight years ago, I chose to look at how scientific discoveries had impacted the human awareness of gender. As I planned the class, I knew I wanted to go beyond Charles Darwin’s binary division into male and female. I was also excited about four recent studies: Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex from Animals by Marlene Zuk; Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex by Olivia Judson; Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex by Alice Domurant Dreger; and Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender by Bernice L. Hausman. Learning more about the science and technology involved in aligning one’s body with their gender identity, I decided to revisit this icon from my childhood to learn more about the personal reasons an individual might choose this path. In fact, like most cisgender people, I can honestly say that I didn’t “get it.”
While I don’t remember anything lurid about Jorgensen’s transformation – my parents were contemptuous of the tabloid press, so I must have learned about her from mainstream publications such as Time and Life – her obituary In the New York Times reveals her courage facing awkward questions:
Rather than withdraw from public attention, she turned the notoriety to her advantage with a series of lucrative tours on the lecture and nightclub circuit. Her nightclub act featured the theme song, ”I Enjoy Being a Girl.”
”I decided if they wanted to see me, they would have to pay for it,” she said.
The obituary, though, also reveals sadness in her life. In addition to fielding questions of a highly personal nature, she was prevented from marrying a man because her birth certificate identified her as male.
Her obituary doesn’t say anything about the violence that transgender people experience, and nothing I read about Jorgensen indicates that she was ever threatened by violence. Such violence is real and often deadly. I learned about the violence that transgender people face when I read Crossing: A Memoir, in which the economist Deirdre McCloskey tells of her transformation from Donald (the name McCloskey was given at birth and known by for fifty-two years) to Dee (the name she adopts as she is going through hormone replacement, facial reconstruction, electrolysis and sex reassignment surgery), and finally Deirdre, the name she adopted once she felt she fully transitioned into a woman.. McCloskey angrily addresses the violence that transgender people face:
A sincere by detected attempt to jump the gender border from male to female . . . creates anxiety in men, to be released by laughter if they can handle it or by a length of steel pipe if they can’t. A 1997 survey claimed that 60 percent of crossgendered people had been assaulted. Deirdre knew a gender crosser who had been beaten by four young men outside a bar even in peaceful Iowa City.
McCloskey published her memoir in 1999, sixteen years before Caitlyn Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair and before transgender characters gained increased visibility in mainstream film and television. . I assumed that things were getting better for people who chose scientific and technological solutions to bring their bodies in accord with their gender identity.
I was surprised to read an Op-Ed piece in the August 22, 2015 New York Times. Written by Jennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender woman who teaches English at Barnard College and is the author of Stuck in the Middle with You: Parenthood in Three Genders, it describes the violence experienced by many transsexual women of color, looks at the deaths of eleven transgender women, and refers to news reports “about the deaths of at least five more trans or gender-nonconforming people.” Boylan ends her editorial by noting that transgender people of privilege have an easier time making the change:
My mother told me that love would prevail, and for me it has, as it often does for people in this country, people who can find themselves insulated from injustice by dint of race or class or education or accident or accident of birth.
For many trans women, though, especially those of color, something other than love prevails: loss. Did their lives matter any less than mine?
At a time when people can use science and technology to change other things about themselves, why is their decision to use that science and technology to live as another gender such a big deal? The hostility that individuals face when they choose to change their gender reveals that the issue has less to do with science and technology, and more to do with our deep humanity, or lack thereof.
-Carol Senf
GA Tech Body Image Blog 