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From The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 24, 2000 I look around and find myself, strangely enough, in the women's lingerie section of the Kmart in an upstate New York
town. I am with my 19-year-old son, who is comparison shopping for a pair of black tights. Some farm ladies are regarding us
with dubious glances. My son asks if I think medium is too large for him. He stands at about 5 feet 11 inches. I really
have no idea what will fit him. Trying to be helpful, I suggest that he might want to wear the fishnet stockings,
which seem to me a bit more goth, but he sticks with the regular ones. Then we move on to the cosmetics section for
lipstick and hair dye. As I help him pick out a L'Oreal shade called Parisian Black, I wonder to myself how I got here.
How indeed? A few days earlier, my son had arrived back from his first year at college. The following morning, he sat me
down at the kitchen table and announced that he had a big thing to tell his mother and father. My wife was on the
telephone, and as we waited for her to finish talking, my son whispered, "I'm getting married." Then he added, "No, just
kidding." He was jumpy with nervous intensity. When my wife sat down, he spoke: "I've been thinking about this for a long
time, and I wanted to tell you -- I'm transgendered!" He looked pleased with himself and somewhat triumphant. My wife
and I looked at each other, confused and horrified.
He must have sensed that we were nonplused. So, being of an
academic bent, as we are, he began pulling out of his backpack
books with titles like My Gender Workbook and Gender Outlaw,
reading us long passages like the following, from Leslie
Feinberg's Transgender Warriors:
"Both women's and trans liberation have presented me with two
important tasks. One is to join the fight to strip away the
discriminatory and oppressive values attached to masculinity
and femininity. The other is to defend gender freedom -- the
right of each individual to express their gender in any way
they choose, whether feminine, androgynous, masculine, or any
point on the spectrum between. And that includes the right to
gender ambiguity and gender contradiction. It's equally
important that each person have the right to define,
determine, or change their sex in any way they choose whether
female, male, or any point on the spectrum between. And that
includes the right to physical ambiguity and contradiction."
As he talked, I tried to listen but could not escape the
sensation that I was in someone else's movie. I thought about
this young person and wondered if there was something I was
missing. He had always seemed to be a very masculine guy --
interested in girls -- who never once could have been mistaken
for a female. He wasn't effeminate in the least, and there
seemed to be no apparent prehistory to this moment. Later,
though, I recalled the many comic strips and zines he had
written featuring female main characters. They seemed, in
retrospect, to have been his alter egos.
My wife and I both consider ourselves progressive academics.
We have been willing to accept virtually any behavior from our
children -- from their experimentation with marijuana to
having their sexual partners sleep over at our house. We are a
poster family for permissiveness and have cruised fairly
comfortably from grunge through swing to goth. I've seen my
kids' hair go from brown to blue to green, as mine has gone to
gray. I followed my son as he crossed a police line and
grabbed a bullhorn at City Hall to protest budget cuts in
education; worried as he came back late from punk-rock clubs;
trembled a bit as he explained that he might be arrested for
defacing (or reconstructing, as he would say) corporate
billboards. We are feminists against homophobia. And I teach
courses with titles like "Women, Nation, Empire" and "The
Different Body."
Could anyone be more of a political ally than I?
Had he announced, "I'm gay," my wife and I would have been
relatively prepared to say, "Great! Who's the lucky guy?" But
transgendered? I didn't have much of an idea then what the
word meant. We asked some predictable questions. "Are you
gay?" My son laughed, "No, I love women. I'm completely
heterosexual." "So, do you want a sex-change operation?" "No,
I like my body the way it is." "So, what does this mean?" "It
means, I'm a girl. I want to wear dresses, makeup, and
challenge the whole patriarchal, bourgeois idea of gender."
My mind raced. We were having Stanley Fish and Jane Tompkins
over for dinner that night. I imagined my son swirling down
the stairs, arriving at dinner like Loretta Young in flowing
chiffon. How exactly would I explain such a phenomenon to my
guests over hors d'oeuvres? As it turned out, our son dressed
neutrally and got into an argument with Stanley over Bosnia,
not biology.
Over the next few days, my son continued to explain his
metamorphosis to us: "Michel Foucault says that gender is
socially constructed. So does Judith Butler." Foucault!
Butler! Those were the names of scholars I teach, now being
hurled like grenades at my feet. Those theoreticians believe,
as I do, that such seemingly fixed and essential things as
gender or disability are really pliable and plastic. It had
seemed fine to accept that gender was a social construction,
but now here was my child before me, attempting to carry out
in principle what I had been teaching only theoretically in my
courses. I suddenly felt rage toward those ivory-towered
theoreticians who glibly spout gender theories. Now I was
going to have to pay in humiliation and pain, in seeing my son
in a dress. Thanks, Judy!
The next few days were pretty intense for my wife and me. As
we sat up late discussing this alteration in our family life,
we quickly passed through the phases associated with getting a
fatal illness. First was denial, followed by the willing
accomplices of rage and despair. Acceptance kept its reserved
distance; the sticking point was the issue of wearing dresses.
I thought I could logically argue my son out of that penchant.
"If women are oppressed and femininity is a construct, why
should you essentially reinforce or parody the feminine? Isn't
that giving in to patriarchy? Reinforcing the gender binary?"
As a litigious academic, I could in a pinch come up with a
cogent argument.
Knowing my rhetorical strategies only too well, my son replied
that to break down the binary, we had to be able to dress as
we wished. In our culture, women could wear men's clothing
without any opprobrium, but men could only wear women's
clothing at their own peril. If a woman wears a tuxedo she's
an icon, as Marlene Dietrich knew, but if a man wears a dress
he's comic. Just ask Tony Curtis or Jack Lemmon.
He was right, no doubt, but no matter how rational our
discussion was, the dress became an eternal stumbling block.
As some friends of ours said later, our son had picked the one
thing that we, as progressives, couldn't accept. I continued
trying to argue, "How would you feel if you saw me wearing a
dress and makeup?" He replied, "I'd be so relieved." I
countered, "What would your roommate think?" I was figuring
that his Japanese friend, who was obsessed with technology,
would be horrified. "Oh, he's saving up his money for a
sex-change operation." My last round of armaments was quickly
being depleted. One last salvo: "Well, you say you like women.
What will they think of you wearing a dress?" He smiled like a
cat with a canary in his maw and confided, "It's the greatest
way to meet women," and winked knowingly. What could I say?
By now, I was beginning to understand a bit about this
transgender issue, although I'm far from an expert. My son
says that a transgendered person is anyone who breaks the
rules of the gender binary. By his definition, people who are
gay, lesbian, or bisexual are not necessarily transgendered,
since they define themselves by their sexual preference,
rather than their gender crossing. They would be transgendered
only if they attempted to break from the gender they were
assigned at birth, by redefining their identity through an act
of philosophical or political awakening, hormonal or surgical
intervention, or choice of clothing.
My son says that it's all about a person's right to choose. He
defines himself as a "transgirl." Some women may choose to
define themselves as men. And other folks may head for the
shifting middle ground of gender "variants," who like to keep
things ambiguous. Inhabiting the transgender territory are
drag queens and drag kings, "transgirls," "transboys," and
those who vote for their identity with anything from estrogen
to haircuts. A heterosexual male could be considered
transgendered if he were a cross-dresser, although a
cross-dresser is not necessarily transgendered if he only
likes to wear women's clothing but doesn't consider himself
female or a gender variant.
The possibilities are mind- (and body-) boggling. There are
relatively simple variations along the transgender continuum,
including male-to-female "post-op" transsexuals, such as
Deirdre N. McCloskey, the noted economist, or female-to-male
transsexuals such as Leslie Feinberg, the author of Stone
Butch Blues. Then there are those who adopt hormonally and
surgically the secondary sexual characteristics of the other
gender while keeping the genitalia with which they were born.
There also are bearded women, like the well-known circus
performer and gender activist Jennifer Miller. Intersexuals --
formerly known as hermaphrodites -- whose parents "corrected"
their gender, walk side-by-side in this movement with those
who managed to retain the organs with which they were born.
Then, on the genetic level, there are women who, according to
their chromosomes, should be male (they have female
genitalia, but they can't reproduce).
The old gender binary begins to look pretty Procrustean when
confronted with this welter of permutations.
My son is part of what might be called a "fourth wave" in
gender activism. The first wave was clearly the feminist
movement, followed by the next tsunami, as gays, lesbians, and
bisexuals established their identities as individuals and
communities. Then came a surge of queer activism, which
challenged even gay notions of what was normal. But to my son
and his peers -- who are mostly under 30 -- those three sea
changes now seem merely to be part of a conservative undertow.
This generation believes that earlier activists, while
challenging various kinds of gender abuses, still clung to the
notion of the criticality of gender per se. First-wave
feminists, for example, never doubted that being a woman was
essential to their mission. Likewise, although gay men,
lesbians, and bisexuals challenged the notion of mandated or
"normal" sexual preference, they saw their identity as defined
by a ratio of one's gender to one's sexual choice. That is, a
lesbian could only be defined as a woman who chose another
woman as a sexual partner. Even some conservative
post-operative transsexuals cling to the gender binary, saying
"I was born the wrong gender, and now I've become the right
one."
Members of the fourth wave, who like to call themselves
"trannies" (perhaps in solidarity with 60's "hippies") see
challenging the fixity of gender as their most important goal.
My son reported to me that gender is so complex that there are
100 genders, and that we can morph through 20 of them in a
single morning. He indicts the quotidian norms that force
people to subscribe to one gender, to be legally identified as
having one, and to be forbidden to use certain social spaces
by that specific aspect of identity. Indeed, the International
Bill of Gender Rights, drafted and adopted in 1993, lists as
fundamental the prerogative to define one's gender identity,
control and change one's own body, and have access to
"gendered space."
When my wife and I asked my son why he thinks he is
transgendered, his snappy retort was, "I don't know which
bathroom to use." When he is wearing a dress, should he use
the men's room or the women's room?
The transgendered concept allows for some interesting family
groupings. A father in a couple might undergo sexual
reassignment surgery and thereby become a lesbian, if he
remains with his wife. Or a cross-gendered bisexual can pair
off with an intersexual lesbian. A cross-dressing male can
live with a post-op male-to-female and appear to fit nicely
into the prototype of the typical American family. The
possibilities are limitless. They make Ozzie and Harriet look
like something from the late Devonian period, and Ellen
DeGeneres's coming out seem as staid as that of a debutante.
I understood all this intellectually, but I was taking a fair
amount of time to process it emotionally. My wife initially
insisted on an N.I.M.H. -- Not In My House -- policy in regard
to cross-dressing. That stance resulted partly from
embarrassment and shame about how friends and family might
perceive our son if they knew the truth.
Somewhat conveniently, the grandparents had already
transmogrified to that genderless beyond, so at least we
wouldn't have to explain the situation to them. Our
16-year-old daughter thought the whole thing was kind of cool
and couldn't understand why we were so upset. "Some boys in my
school come to class in skirts or wearing lipstick, and we
think they're sexy." My brother, a financial analyst living in
the suburbs, was blase. His college-age son was open-minded,
having lived his four university years in a frat house, where
he had no doubt seen worse.
We were uncertain about what to say to our friends. The
artistic types were intrigued, and even offered some fetching
outfits, if needed. One male friend was judgmental, and said
our son was manipulating us. But that same friend sheepishly
admitted that, when his wife bought new high-heeled shoes, he
had to be the first to wear them at home. Another friend, who
is part of a gay couple, confessed that his dream was to be
married in a wedding gown, something his more conventional
partner just would not hear of. In fact, a lot of folks
stepped up to our confessional with Oprah-like stories of
their own journeys into the backrooms of sexuality, gender,
and fashion.
In the midst of all this turmoil, or because of it, my son
decided to go to an indie-rock concert in Washington State. He
would take a Greyhound bus and camp out. He asked me to help
him get organized, which is how I ended up in the Kmart as his
shopping consultant. He packed a few dresses into his
backpack, along with his other clothing, and left. All of us
felt relieved.
We began to get phone calls from bus stations scattered across
the country. At first our son was friendly, but one late-night
call from Fargo turned angry quickly. "I've been thinking, and
I'm really upset that you won't accept me for who I am." My
groggy response was that I was doing the best I could. "That's
not good enough. I can't believe that you, of all people, who
teach about the rights of people with disabilities, people of
color, working-class people, can't accept this. These are my
people! They are being discriminated against, cast out, and
you can't accept it?"
For the first time, I felt that he was completely right. I had
no counterargument. Whether I liked it or not, a
disenfranchised and despised group was in need of support;
what made it difficult to accept was the fact that my son was
in that group. I had to confront my own prejudices and realize
that I was a bigot. I, like many of my peers, thought that a
man in a dress was either humorous or pathetic, as so many
episodes of Monty Python or Benny Hill have suggested. It was
true that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry about my son.
My son asked that I read some of the books he had brought
home, and I agreed. I also ordered some books through
Amazon.com. (Then, when I logged on, I got helpful messages
like, "If you liked Transvestism: A Handbook, you'll like
Bound and Gagged.") I not only read through the material, but,
since I would be teaching a course in the fall called "The
Different Body," I decided then to put some of the books in my
syllabus. (It is interesting to me that my reaction, as an
academic, was to teach about what was mystifying and edifying
me.)
I've just about gotten used to seeing my child in women's
clothing. At first I experience a confusing, cognitively
dissonant moment, but then I remember that he is the child
I've known for years, with the same brio for life he's always
had, the same excitement over his ideas, commitment to
fairness and justice, and love for us. The only difference is
that he's in a skirt. I remember my mother's agony over my
long hair in the 1960's -- how she asked me not to come to her
place of business because she was embarrassed, and how much
that hurt me. I knew as a parent, and as an activist, that I
could not legitimately reproduce that rejection.
Our life has gone on. My son announced that he wanted to bring
his girlfriend, a "bidyke" as he described her, home for the
holiday season. I learned that the term "dyke" has now been
freed up from its dependence on sexual preference, and is an
operative word to describe a strong woman. When she arrived,
she seemed a bit androgynous, but not remotely butch. And she
wore a prom dress out one night. We all liked her, and it was
a memorable Christmas.
Meanwhile, my graduate course on "The Different Body" went
very well. The body in question was a little more different
than it had been in the previous year's version. But the
students were barely fazed by the transgendered component of
the course. They were blase, even when I told them about my
son or showed them pictures that I thought were pretty
shocking -- like a photograph of Tala Candra Brandeis by Loren
Cameron titled "Biology Is Not Our Destiny," depicting a nude
person with long, flowing hair, breasts, tattoos, and a penis.
It seemed to be all in a day's work for this generation of
cultural-studies adepts, brought up as they had been with
RuPaul and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I
shared with the class my son's zine entitled Boy Is Girl and
gave them his e-mail address so they could converse with him
about these subjects. My son was pleased with the
correspondence, and the students were, too.
The story is not over. In the months since his announcement,
my son's attitudes toward some issues have shifted. He has
come into conflict with more-conservative elements in the
trannie community who do not agree with his radical politics.
He has had to deal with the fact that some people within that
community do not regard him as truly transgendered, because he
hasn't taken hormones or had an operation. He is evolving a
position that I have come to respect and from which I have
learned a great deal. In many ways, he occupies a similar
position to the one I do in disability studies. I am not a
person with disabilities, and I have to negotiate that liminal
status on a regular basis. In addition, both he and I are
against the narrowness of certain kinds of identity politics
and see our goal as opening up the question of identity
through a notion of the mutability of the body. So, we talk a
lot about the ways in which our interests intersect. I've
helped him with his zines, and he's helped me with my course.
As an academic, my job is to learn from the world. And if that
world comes into my house in women's clothing, spouting Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, then I have to learn from that. As a
father, my pleasure is to love and accept my children. When
those two roles come together, in a kind of serendipitous
confluence, one must be quick to recognize the opportunity
that presents itself. My child and I have grown closer through
what might have been a terrible conflict, one that in some
families might have been the end of the line. What made a
better scenario possible was that same intellectual desire to
learn, to know, and to encourage that has been behind all my
teaching and scholarship.
The other day, my son announced that he wanted my wife and me
to refer to him as our "daughter." He asked that we not use
masculine pronouns or nouns to describe him. I told him that I
probably could not find it in myself to call him my
"daughter," that my sense of the English language was that it
was not sufficiently flexible, nor was I, to accomplish that
gender purification of my linguistic practice. This was
finally a moment, I felt, when the old binary dog couldn't
learn new transgendered tricks. We got into an argument, and
he hurled Judith Butler at me again. She was getting to be my
nemesis.
My son knew that I was writing this article, and he approved.
But when I told him that it would be impossible for me to
write this piece without using masculine pronouns, he was
upset. He suggested that I use "s/he" or "ze," and I responded
that I was sure the Chronicle style sheet was pretty limited
in that regard. After some discussion, he said, "OK, but just
do it at the end of the essay." So I told her I would. After
all, I figured, I wasn't losing a son, I was gaining a
daughter.
Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English at the State
University of New York at Binghamton. His most recent book is
My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness
(University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Copyright 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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