habitually probing generalist

Last night (9 Jan 06) I finished The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights by Deborah Rudacille.

I enjoyed this book, as much as one can enjoy a book so full of the pain and suffering of others.  I have to thank my friend and former professor, Gina Bessa (Anthropology), for preparing me for it though.  If I had not taken her class on gender a couple years ago I might not have been ready for it.  In this class we read and discussed Don Kulick’s Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes.  This is an absolutely incredible ethnography and certainly an eye opener for a straight boy like me.  Simply to consider that someone would self-inject themselves with industrial silicone to change their apppearance and their gender display, all the while wanting to remain sexually male is one eye opening and mentally rearranging read.  Credit should also go to another former professor, Chris Horvath (Philosophy and Biology), for insight into the developmental, genetic, and philosophical issues.

My main gripe with this book of popular science is the use of notes at the end with absolutely no indication in the text that there is a note in relation to any specific part.  If you like to read notes then you must be constantly flipping back and forth, which results in even more interruptions to the text than there would be if you actually knew when there was an applicable note.  Probably the most useless reading structure I’ve ever seen.  Hell, at least with endnoted pdf files you know a note exists even if it sucks royally to scroll back and forth (assuming you haven’t printed it).  All in all, a small gripe I guess.

The author undertook to research and write this book a few years back when she

learned that a friend of mine was transitioning from female to male. This baffled me, as I knew nothing at all about transexuality, transgenderism, gender-queerness, or gender variance, nothing at all about the motivations that would impel a twenty-two-year-old female-bodied person to inject herself with testosterone or undergo a mastectomy or live as a man (xii).

I learned a fair amount about suppressed scientific research, gender as a new concept (1950s), the Stonewall riot, Magnus Hirschfield, Harry Benjamin, Christine Jorgensen, John Money, the environmental endocrine hypothesis, how gays and lesbians have disenfranchised the trans community so that they could gain the legal protections they now have, the pendulum swing of the tolerance of gender variation, how we are all human but that some are more human than others (in some people’s minds),….

The book is a fairly quick read at a bit over 300 pages.  It may be science, among many other things, but it is light on the heavier details.  It is not a research report, although it does report on research.  In fact, some of the information in this book should serve as a major wakeup call to American women and their children, and with God’s good grace, to the American medical and scientific communities.

"Fear and mistrust of men and masculinity still permeate discussions of gender. Neither women nor individual men appear to trust or think kindly of males as a group, … (xx-xxi).  Include me in that group, thank you very much.  I’m not a fan of men in groups, nor what they impose on other men, nor of too many inidividual men in Western societies.  Yet, I have little choice but to be one.

"Sexual orientation is invisible, but gender identity is difficult to hide" (8).

"Biological sex (and therefore gender identity) is thus regulated by the state in a way that sexual orientation is not" (9).

"It was a conscious way of manipulating the signifiers of gender to call attention to its constructedness, often in a playful, militant, and politicized way" (162).  Perhaps like wearing a "Real Men Read" t-shirt and a pink tiara?

"Their most radical claim, and the one that was to create a nearly unbridgeable chasm between proponents of the Benjamin model and an increasingly vocal and active transgender movement in the early nineties, was that American society, not transgender or transexual people, had a "gender problem"" (178).  Radical?  I’d say it is a correct claim.  The author’s use of ‘radical’ applies to the claims within the context of American society at the time.  She is not claiming that it is, in fact, a radical claim.

"But I think that the other thing that can get oversimplified in the queer community is that straight people have complicated gender identities too. There are some men born in male bodies who have spent their whole lives as males who are also trying to figure out what it means to be a man. And trying to negotiate not wanting to automatically fall into certain roles" (185-186, interviewee Marianne).  Amen!  See my comments above regarding the 1st quote.

"There is a certain amount of privilege in walking around the world in a body that fits who you feel like you are. Not just with gender, but with all kinds of things" (187, interviewee Marianne).

"In 1974 millions of Americans were suddenly cured of mental illness when homosexuality was deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), often referred to as the "bible" of psychiatry. … The DSM is used not only by psychiatrists, but also by courts, schools, and social service agencies in making decisions about matters as varied as child custody, criminal liability, placement in special education classes, and receipt of Social Security benefitds. The DSM also profoundly affects the way we as a society think about mental health and disease" (192).  Doesn’t it ever?  I’ve read a fair amount of the history of the fight for the removal of homosexuality from the DSM; sorry I can’t remember any references.

This did nothing to help those in the trans community, though:

"However, in medicine as in law, the transgendered were left behind when gays and lesbians entered the mainstream. Homosexuality may have been deleted from the DSM, but "gender identity disorder" has taken its place as the diagnosis most frequently assigned to children and adults who fail to conform to socially accepted norms of male and female identity and behavior" (193).

There have been some changes in the defintion of GID, but it is still "a kind of psychiatric sleight of hand. Although the focus of the diagnosis has changed from deviant desire to subversive identity, the core of the diagnosis remains the same: the individual is not a "normal" male or female, and his or her deviance from the norm is conceived as illness or pathology" (197).

DES.  Another pharmaceutical atrocity implemented, often unknowingly, on millions of women and their children.

It was 1st synthesized in 1938 in London.  "Within a year, DES was being manufactured and marketed in mass quantities by drug companies in Europe and North America. Never pateneted, the drug was sold under more than 400 different brand names by 275 pharmaceutical companies in the United States alone" (245).  It was used for hormone replacement therapy, to suppress lactation (bottle feeding was growing), to treat amenorrhea, vaginitis, and to prevent miscarriage (245).  Feel free to read about the seriously flawed studies that led to its use to prevent miscarriages.  "Nonetheless, more than three million pregnant women in the United States alone were prescribed DES between 1941 and 1971. Many more mothers and fetuses were exposed to the drug in pregnancy vitamins in which DES was the active ingredient" (245-246).  It was also used in livestock feed for decades, even after proof it was "producing "disturbing symptoms" in agricultural workers and consumers, incluidng sterility, impotence, and gynecomastia (breast growth) in men" (246).  Why did it take 20 years longer to be banned from cattle feed after being banned by the FDA for use in chicken and lamb feed?  Oh, because the cattle industry fought it.  "Our beef is safe."

I’ll spare you more of the immediate gory details, but this chapter, "Fear of a Pink Planet," is possibly the most important of the book based on widest applicability.  This is not meant to disparage the vast importance of the ideas involved in the rest of the book though.

Due to the fact that the initial problems in humans were the increase of a very rare vaginal cancer in girls and young women, DES has always been linked as a mother, daughter, cancer story in the medical establishment.  Nothing could be further from the full truth.  "Half of the fetuses exposed to DES in utero were male, subjected to a barrage of sythetic estrogen during the period of sexual differentiation, chemically primed to be exquisitely sensitive to estrogen and estrogen-mimicking chemicals for the remainder of their lives" (252).

There is a lot in this chapter about the fact that our environment is bathed in sythetic estrogens and estrogen-mimicking chemicals, about the process of sexual differentiation, about the effects of these chemicals on sex and gender, and on the failures of the scientific and medical communities.  Anyone who believes that science and medicine are objective, and not socially constrained, really needs to read this book.  On the extreme off chance it doesn’t convince you otherwise I’ll be happy to play reader’s advisor on this topic.  I am far from an expert, but I’ve done more than enough reading on these topics to do an acceptable job.

Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory of essential sex differences in the brain comes up in this chapter (see my post on a popular account of this theory).

"The various answers to the riddle of gender that have been proposed by scientists are no less culturally influenced than the answers provided by religion or law" (286).

"Scientific responses to the riddle of gender have been used to police gendered behavior, but have also at times been helpful in liberating us from limiting beliefs about the nature of the differences we observe between males and females" (286).

"Frye is right about the tendency of the law to lag behind science, and yet science and medicine, too, are inherently conservative endeavours that tend to cleave to old paradigms until forced to do otherwise" (290).

"Straight people, like gay or transgendered people, have complex and multifaceted gender identities" (291).

"Rather than insisting on the primacy of either nature or culture as the source of gender differences, perhaps we now need to recognize that both play a role and that neither explanation makes sense without the other. Nature may provide the architecture of gender, but culture does the decorating" (292).  This is so very true, but vastly oversimplified.  If you read this book you will be so much closer to understanding the simple, and the complex, truths of that statement.

This is an important book.

Highly recommended.  And if the topic makes you uncomfortable, then it is doubly recommened.

On a related issue, danah boyd at apophenia made a post on gender representation in the new film version of King Kong that I made a comment at.  I asked her to elaborate on a comment she made and I am sincerely interested in her response.  Seeing as it is my comment, I should be OK reproducing it here:

Sorry, haven’t seen it either, but I’ve been reading, thinking, and writing a bit about gender lately and am extremely curious as to your comment that "when technology evens the playing field, gender must be dichotomously maintained through performance." Why the "must?" I’m not sure if I agree or disagree (the real problem is I think it may be both) and would love a bit more explication of that statement.

Feel free to point me to something you’ve written previously or another source, if you prefer. I have done a fair amount of work in the history and philosophy of technology and a bit in gender. Currently,
I’m still of the mind that the dichotomy comes from society in a historical context (specific period) as it does seem to oscillate. Maybe technology exacerbates that dichotomy…?

Anyway, I’d be highly interested in hearing a bit more about that statement if you feel like it.  Thanks!