The Caitlyn (née Bruce) Jenner case has engendered if not a new subject at least a newly publicized and sensationalized one. For an old-timer like myself, transgenderism is reminiscent of the postmodernism that swept the universities several decades ago. Indeed, transgenderism now looks like a more dramatic, audacious, and, it may be, perilous form of postmodernism. Like postmodernism back then, so transgenderism today is moving very far, very fast. Before it goes much further, one might look back upon its predecessor as a cautionary tale, recalling its aspirations but also its tribulations.
A passage from an article I wrote almost 20 years ago may help put the current issue in historical perspective.
and knowledge itself an instrument and product of the “power structure.” Thus traditional discourse and learning are impugned as “logocentric” (dominated by the word), “phallocentric” (dominated by the male), and “totalizing” or “authoritarian” (in the presumption that reality can be contained and comprehended).
In literature, postmodernism entails the denial of the fixity of any text (not only the immutability of meaning but the immutability of the text itself); of the authority of the author over the critic or reader in determining the substance and meaning of the text; of any canon of great books and, more significantly, of the very idea of greatness. In philosophy, it is a denial of the constancy of language, of any correspondence between language and reality, of any proximate truth about reality, indeed, of any essential reality. In history, it is a denial of the objectivity of the historian, of the factuality or reality of the past, and thus of the possibility of arriving at any truths about the past. For all disciplines it induces a radical skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism that denies not this or that truth about any subject but the very idea of truth—that denies even the ideal of truth, truth as something to aspire to even if it can never be fully attained.
Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which in 1967 introduced the concept of deconstructionism, is now regarded as one of the founding documents of postmodernism. The preface by the translator was euphoric. “The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom.” Almost half a century later, the striking image of the abyss was evoked for another postmodernist eminence, Paul de Man, Derrida’s friend and colleague at Yale. De Man, his biographer tells us, was “the only man who ever looked into the abyss and came away smiling.”
The abyss de Man confronted, and came away from smiling, was the Holocaust. After de Man’s death in 1983, it was revealed that during the war he had written hundreds of antisemitic articles for a pro-Nazi journal in Belgium (and had led a rather unsavory life in general, including criminal financial dealings and a bigamous marriage). Even more revealing than the antisemitism was the response of other postmodernists. The “soft deconstructionists” (as they called themselves) dissociated themselves from de Man, although not from postmodernism. But the “hard” ones, including Derrida, hotly defended him, not on the grounds that the antisemitic articles were an unfortunate youthful lapse (he was then well in his twenties), but by deconstructing those “texts” until they appeared to say very nearly the opposite of what they obviously said.
The de Man affair was a wake-up call for postmodernism—and for its present manifestation in transgenderism. As postmodernism had made its way through the university deconstructing one after another of the humanities, so it now seems to be deconstructing humanity itself. The “indeterminacy” and “problematization” of the disciplines, the denial of the “fixity” and “immutability” of “texts,” indeed, the denial of any “essential reality” in
the postmodernist “project” (as we now say) may be reflected in a similar denial of reality in the transgenderist project.
The transgenderist would protest that it was not a denial but precisely an affirmation of reality that was being sought, a sexual reality that had been obscured or belied by the accident of birth. To which a skeptic might reply that reality, once deconstructed, is not so easily reconstructed. The fact that transgenderism requires for its completion not only hormonal treatment but nothing less than genital surgery may induce serious second thoughts. The removal—the deconstruction, so to speak—of the very organs that define gender and enable the reproductivity that is of the essence of gender is surely a denial of reality of the greatest order.
The Caitlyn Jenner affair, one reporter recently observed, sent Americans on a “crash course in transgender acceptance” and sent Europe even further, “toward an even higher plane . . . a post-gender world that critics say is leaving no room for women to be women and men to be men.” Recalling the checkered experiences of the postmodernist world, we may be wary of an even more venturesome, and hazardous, post-gender world. Instead of the resplendent image of Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair, we may see the agony of people who regret the ordeal of the transformation—such operations are taking place at an ever younger age, even early childhood—and who then want to return, psychologically if not physically, to their original sex.
We might wish to take comfort today in the thought that after the initial enthusiasm for transgenderism has subsided, a more wary approach to the real problems of sexual dysfunction may prevail. So some of us once thought in the case of postmodernism. When postmodernism began to lose its novelty about the turn of the century, it looked as if the humanities might revert to type—poetry retrieved from the literary critic, history recalled as narrative, philosophy rediscovered in the classics. But that reprieve was short-lived. If postmodernism is no longer the modish term it once was, it is because its spirit has been so integrated in the culture that it no longer needs affirming or controverting. One can only hope that it won’t require a new abyss, a new de Man, to transcend transgenderism.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author, most recently, of The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill.
