IF TINA BROWN were alive today, we wouldn’t be able to escape talk of transgender buzz. The eighties were the gay decade. The nineties belonged to lesbian chic. Now it’s a transgendered world. We have seen the rise of the transgender movie–“The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (1994), “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar” (1995), “Flawless” (1999), “Boys Don’t Cry” (1999), and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (2001)–and, more recently, the appearance of transgender TV characters on “Friends” and “The Education of Max Bickford,” and even the transgender mini-celebrities Boy George, RuPaul, and Ben Schatz (former advisor to President Clinton, cum drag-apella sensation).
Transgender people were once the forgotten stepchildren of sex interest groups. When the gay-rights revolution erupted at Stonewall in 1969, the transgender set wasn’t even an afterthought. Twenty-five years later, the group has been completely embraced by the gay-rights crowd, with the word “transgender” tucked into the mission statement of every advocacy group in the cosmos, from the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund to the Human Rights Campaign.
Other groups have been more circumspect. Last winter an argument broke out on Ms. magazine’s Internet bulletin board when it was revealed that one of the most strident male-haters was a transgender woman, which is to say someone who was born male. Many of the “WBWs” (woman born woman) wanted to exclude the “WBMs” (Woman Born Man) from the talks, presumably because in the victimology sweepstakes, no group, no matter how marginal, is allowed to feel another’s pain.
Here it may be helpful to provide a little taxonomy to readers who don’t keep up with such things. “Transgender” is an umbrella term which applies to people who aren’t entirely happy with the sex into which they were born. Some of them manifest as cross-dressers–either full- or part-time. Others feel the need to actually live their lives as members of the opposite sex. Members of this subgroup are referred to as “transsexuals.” Some transsexuals merely dressup, some take hormone therapy to alter their appearances, and some go the drastic route of surgical alteration. More on that later.
There doesn’t seem to be much reliable data on transgender people. The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition website claims that between 2 and 3 percent of the American population is transgender and that about 10 percent of them are homosexual. The group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays says, “The largest subgroup of transgender persons is crossdressers who are mainly heterosexual men, although there are also women who crossdress.” But beyond that–What’s the racial distribution? What’s the breakdown of men vs. women? What percentage of transsexuals seek surgery?–it’s all mist, and many transgender groups are intent on not giving out hard data. Persistent attempts to contact transgender-rights groups–including the Human Rights Campaign–were rebuffed. And members of the scientific community–including Dr. Peter Fagan at Johns Hopkins Hospital–also avoided interviews for this piece. Which is curious, because it would seem that the case for transgender rights is an easy one to make.
Consider Christina Madrazo. A recent article in the Village Voice detailed the trials of this transsexual who was born a man in Mexico. He was beaten and tormented as a youngster for being a maricon (“faggot”); even Madrazo’s family was cruel because the young boy acted and tried dressing like a girl. “Why do you want to wear those girlish clothes?” Madrazo’s mother would shriek. “Why do you have to move like that?”
When puberty hit, Madrazo started taking female hormones and finding solace in the company of another transsexual in town. At fifteen, Madrazo left home and, unable to find steady work because of his/her appearance, took up a series of odd jobs to save $500 for breast implants. Eventually Madrazo joined a traveling transvestite show and then, in 1991, quietly sneaked across the border to El Paso and hopped a bus to Miami.
Even in Miami there was little work, and Madrazo was eventually arrested for soliciting. In despair, Madrazo went back to Mexico four years later, only to be beaten so severely in the street one night that his/her face was permanently scarred. In 1998, Madrazo came back to the States and tried to become legal. Instead, Madrazo was caught up in the INS bureaucracy and placed in detention. INS, unable to decide whether Madrazo belonged in the men’s or women’s wing, put him/her in solitary confinement. There Madrazo was raped, twice, by a male guard.
MADRAZO’S CASE seems exceptional, but not isolated. And it is, of course, easy to understand why transgender people would be such frequent victims of abuse. For one thing, unlike, say, homosexuals, many transgender people can’t hide or pass unnoticed when in hostile company. Also, because they inhabit a strange cultural place between the sexes, they are often placed in situations where the culture must choose whether a person is male or female, and the mechanisms for handling transgender people are clumsy at best. Finally, although it’s not polite to say so, many transgender people live their lives in an attempt to pass off a lie. It isn’t right, but it is true that people don’t like being lied to, and in many situations concerning sexual identity, violence quickly follows revelation.
It is impossible not to acknowledge the difficulty of the transgender life. The sheer lengths to which some of them go in order to change their bodies are staggering and–in the truest sense of the word–pitiable. Transsexuals who are born male often go through an agonizing process to reassign their sex. It begins with hormone therapy and then electrolysis. A tracheal shave helps raise the pitch of the voice. Breast implants are common, as are cheek implants and rhinoplasty. Often the transformation process is completed with radical surgeries–vaginoplasty and labiaplasty, where the penis and testicles are removed and a simulacrum of female genitalia is created. Transsexuals who are born women will frequently take high doses of testosterone, which lowers the voice, adds facial and body hair, and muscle bulk, particularly to the shoulders and arms. Some female-to-male transsexuals will undergo double mastectomies. In the end, some opt for the surgical creation of a penis while others spend vast sums of money in the search for a realistic prosthesis.
All of which suggests that at least for some transgenders, the compulsion to be the opposite sex is not merely a cry for attention or a political statement–these people endure too much. Whatever they feel must be real. Not to be sympathetic to their suffering, both internal and physical, would be inhuman.
That said, we shouldn’t allow an evaluation of the transgender-rights argument to be ruled by sympathy. What, politically speaking, do transgenders want? For starters, not to be assaulted by prison guards and barroom toughs, the way Christina Madrazo and Brandon Teena were. Also, they want not to be discriminated against when competing for jobs or housing. All of which are philosophical no-brainers: America would be a poorer place if it didn’t provide these rights for transgenders.
But as you look further down the transgender grievance list, the demands become less and less compelling. Transgender advocacy groups want unfettered license to alter birth certificates, so that, for example, a transgender born male could become legally female. Correspondingly, they want the courts to recognize their marriages, and hence their interests in child custody cases and inheritance. In San Francisco, transgenders have already persuaded the city to provide sex-change benefits for city workers and separate jail space for prison inmates, two perks they would like to see expanded nationwide. And, in a small but telling detail, they want to dictate the way people use pronouns in reference to them. A Transgender Nation primer explains, “To refer to transgendered persons using pronouns and possessive adjectives appropriate to their birth sex (i.e., ‘he’ or ‘his’ for male-to-female persons, ‘she’ or ‘her’ for female-to-male persons) is equivalent to calling a gay man ‘faggot’ or a lesbian ‘dyke.’ It is extremely offensive.”
The heart of the transgender argument was on display recently in Kansas, where the state supreme court ruled that the marriage between a man and a transsexual woman wasn’t valid. J’Noel Gardiner was born male in Wisconsin. In 1988, J’Noel, still living as a man, married a woman. Three years later, J’Noel began sexual transitioning. In February 1994, the court record states, “J’Noel had a bilateral orchiectomy to remove the testicles.” Three months later he and his wife divorced. After sex-reassignment surgery, J’Noel had Wisconsin change the sex listed on his/her birth certificate.
In May 1998, while working as a professor at Park College, J’Noel met Marshall Gardiner, one of the school’s financial contributors. After their third or fourth date, Marshall proposed. The two were married in September. J’Noel was forty; Marshall was eighty-five. Marshall died a year later and his estranged son, Joe, filed suit in an attempt to prevent much of his father’s estate from passing to J’Noel. The case made it to the Kansas Supreme Court, which eventually ruled that the marriage had never been valid.
In their judgement, the court cited the ruling in a similar Texas case which stated, “[T]hrough surgery and hormones, a transsexual male can be made to look like a woman, including female genitalia and breasts. Transsexual medical treatment, however, does not create the internal sexual organs of a woman, except for the vaginal canal. There is no womb, cervix, or ovaries in the post-operative transsexual female. . . . [T]he male chromosomes do not change with either hormonal treatment or sex reassignment surgery. Biologically, a post-operative female transsexual is still a male.”
The Texas court concluded, “There are some things we cannot will into being. They just are.” And they’re right. All of the hormones, and all of the surgery is just cosmetic. It’s an extended version of crossdressing, and it doesn’t change matters at the molecular level.
Which uncovers the Orwellian center of the transgender debate. More than acceptance, more than justice, more than anything else, transgenders want to control an official, plastic version of the truth. They want to believe a reality that doesn’t exist, which is acceptable. But they want to compel others to believe, which isn’t.
There are thousands, if not millions, of men in America who, deep down, know that they are major league shortstops. No, they can’t throw a ball from short to first like a rocket. And no, they can’t hit a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball. But in their heart-of-hearts, they’re ballplayers. If they were to march on Yankee Stadium and demand spots on the roster, all of America would laugh at them.
In a news story in the early nineties, male-to-female transsexual Veronica Klaus complained, “I get tired of having to prove who I am. It’s a matter of people respecting people to see them as they want to be seen.”
Which is perhaps the saddest thing about the transgender life. We all want to be seen a certain way. None of us should be given the power to force others to do it.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard. This article first appeared in the Women’s Quarterly.
