question

•

•

David Valentine

I Know What I Am: Gender, Sexuality and Identity pp. 105-137

David Valentine., (2007) Imagining transgender : an ethnography of a category Duke University Press

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3

“ I K n o w W h a t I A m ”

G e n d e r, Sexu ality, and Identity

“ I am a wom an o f trans . . Tara pauses: “ transA frican experience!” she

laughs. Later, while N o ra is interviewing her on video, Tara says with

more confidence: “ I am a wom an o f transAfrican, transgender experi­

ence.” I am again in the conference room at N ew York H ospital for the

semi-monthly support group for m v -p o sitiv e transgender-idcntified peo­

ple. M y w ay into this group has been through N o ra , an H iv-positive

Latina heterosexual transgender wom an (her ow n definition) who also

w orks at the Gender Identity Project as a peer counselor and safer-sex

outreach worker. H owever, while N ora has a similar history to those in the room — she is a person o f color, a former sex w orker, and m v -p o sitiv e —

they do not say the same kinds o f things about themselves.

Today N ora is interviewing Tara and the other group members about

their experience with “ transgender sex w o rk ” for a conference presenta­ tion she will be making. T a ra ’s declaration o f self gets my attention pre­

cisely because I have never heard her or any o f the other group members

use such a formulation before. As with the Clubhouse ball participants and

the M eat M arket sex w orkers, it is more common to hear participants refer

to themselves as gay, fem queens, girls, and sometimes (though often jo k ­

ingly) as wom en. I do not know how long Tara has used this form ula to

describe herself, but I’m pretty sure 1 k n ow the origin o f the “ o f trans­ gender experience” construction. R o salyn e Blumenstein, g i p ’s director,

form ulated “ w om an o f transgender experience” to describe her ow n iden­

tity and experience about a year before I started doing field w o rk .1 Rosa-

lyne’s position at g ip has resulted in the distribution o f this term in many

contexts in N ew York and nationally, so that it has become w idely used

not only in g ip materials but in outreach w o rk , in print, and increasingly

in people’s self-identifications. So T ara’s statement is not just a statement

o f self but also indicates her location in a w eb o f relations in which identity

labels become distributed and sim ultaneously intelligible.

It seemed to me that T a ra ’s statement that m orning w a s elicited by the

form al situation o f a videotaped interview in the context o f a hospital-

sponsored support grou p, for at no other time did I hear her or any o f the

other group members use such an identity label about themselves or oth­

ers. H o w is it, then, that N o ra or Tara can access — strategically, and in

different w ays —the language o f “ transgender” w hile others w h o are as­

sumed by social service agencies to be transgender often have never heard o f the category at all? M oreover, w hat does it mean that Tara can em ploy

— and creatively extend — “ w om an o f transgender experience” in this co n ­

text while using different terms in others, some o f which resonate with

“ transgender” and some o f which do not? Finally, h ow does her cre­

ative assertion o f “ tran sA frican ” m odify w h at “ transgender experience”

can mean?

In much o f the literature about transgender, transexual, or gender-

varian t people, the concept o f “ identity” (or its kin in a fam ily o f concepts

— subjectivity, personhood, selfhood) is generally an organizing principle,

a chapter heading, o r a theme that runs through the text. Indeed, “ tran s­

gender” is culturally unintelligible w ithout a concept o f “ identity.” In these

accounts, transgender identity tends to be invoked in standard w ays. First,

psychological and psychiatric approaches seek to explain h ow and w h y the

process o f gendered development w o rk s differently (or, in m any accounts,

fails) in transgender-identified people. Sociological and ethno-m ethodolog-

ical investigations tend to focus on gendered practices, careers, and strat­

egies, looking at h ow transgender-identification both subverts and upholds

binary gender. And different arm s o f feminism take up this latter point,

seeing on the one hand the em bodied perform ativity o f transgender identity

as a site o f radical gendered possibilities, or, on the other, the m anifestation

o f false consciousness and the assertion o f patriarchal gendered norm s in

106 C H A P T E R T H R E E

201 W a a l 13th S t r a a t , N a w Y o rk C ity ( 212 ) 620-7310

GENDER IDENTITY PROJECT W in te r & S p r in g , 1997

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Do you identify as a person on the transgender spectrum ???

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conformist, t r o a i d m u r , etc. *te.

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I I(■ lj i<i s: Gender Identity Project Flyer (1997)

the individual body. For transgender-identified people themselves, identity,

whether understand as internal and eternal or as socially produced and

contingent, is deeply felt indeed. H ow ever, I am not particularly interested

in explorin g any o f these approaches, questions, or debates. Rather, I w ant

to exam ine the idea that there is a transgender identity that can be located in a distinct dom ain called “ gender.”

The title o f this chapter is draw n from a com m on assertion — “ I know

w hat I am ” — professed by m any study participants. When these partici­

pants described w hat they knew about themselves, however, their e x p la ­

nations moved out o f the realm o f w hat is usually understood by “ trans­

gender” in contem porary mainstream l g b t politics. In this chapter I want to look more closely at those w h o are included on the “ transgender spec­

trum ” by activists, scholars, and others but who do not usually use “ trans­

gender” to talk about themselves and their peers or w ho m ay not even

k n ow that it is a term which applies to them. In particular, I focus mostly

on the talk o f A frican Am erican and Latina fem queens o f the balls and

M eat M arker whom I discussed in the previous chapter. Some o f the peo­

ple I discuss below claim to “ k n ow what I am ,” and others claim not to

know w h o or what they are. But, I w ill argue, none o f these people’s

understandings o f themselves o r their desires are intelligible in political

categories o f collective agency, because o f the gap between their under­

standings o f personhood and the political categories o f identity which

claim to represent them. H ow ever, I do not w ant to sim ply conflate this

process with racial and class differences. As with my com parison o f the

three drag balls in chapter 2 , 1 com plicate the picture by looking at the

organization o f gendered/sexual identity across lines o f class, race, age, and em bodim ent.2 And, as with the previous chapter, I w an t to look at the

m argins o f the collective “ transgender” rather than at its center. Th u s, I

w ill not discuss at any length the experiences o f self-identified transexual

wom en or men, about whom much has been written.

M oreover, in analyzing this talk, I foreground not only w hat people said

about their gendered/sexual practices and identities — their know ledge o f

“ w h at I am ” — but also w hat I made o f this talk. I ask the reader to pay close attention to the questions I felt com pelled to ask. Th at is, I w an t to

consider how I m yself w as reproducing a theoretical understanding o f

transgender identity — and o f gender and s e x u a lity — which itself threat­

ened to produce these accounts as incoherent and unintelligible.

M y concern in this chapter is thus to docum ent the instabilities o f the

108 C H A P T E R T H R E E

category transgender when it is applied to individual lives, and how indi­

viduals’ use or non-use o f the category com plicates the terms in which it

has become institutionalized. In turn, it show s h ow the institutionalization

o f transgender produces these selves as unintelligible. The broader goal o f this chapter is not to call for a more accurate representation o f these lives

or the elaboration o f new categories to account for them. Rather, I will

argue that the goals and logics o f identity politics themselves produce this apparent unintelligibility and erase an analysis o f the entrenched inequali­

ties that underpin them.

THK MEAT MARKET

The M eat M arket is only one o f several “ strolls” in N ew York C ity to

which fem q u een —or transgender-identified — sex w orkers come to meet

their clients.1 W hatever the language I, the g i p , or the sex w orkers them­

selves use, in the sexual marketplace o f N ew York this niche is usually

referred to as “ chicks with dick s.” Alm ost all the girls (as they call them­ selves most often) who walk these streets are African American or Latina;

some are immigrants to the United States from Latin Am erica or the C a rib ­

bean; and many o f them have an affiliation with a ball House. The M eat M arket is particularly popular with clients w ho come from

N ew Jersey and the outer boroughs. Even today, on a Friday and Saturday

night, cars can be seen craw ling past the curb as their occupants (mostly

white men) observe the girls on the sidew alk. A pickup is made by a man

com ing to a stop and hailing a girl. M o st sexual encounters take place in

parked cars, though with increased policing and the presence o f many bar-

goers, finding a quiet venue is hard. Sometimes a motel room may be hired,

which the girls like because they can charge more. The girls do not live in o r around the M eat M arket; rather, they come from different parts o f the

city to congregate here. Some live in low-incom e public housing, others have their own apartments in lower-rent areas in the city. The M eat M ar­

ket, then, is a space in which they w o rk , exchange inform ation, gossip,

socialize, and come to understand themselves as constituting a group. Talking about the M eat M arket regulars as “ sex w orkers,” though, is

com plicated by the different experiences that people have o f doing sex

w ork. Some, like Sugar, have been out here for years — nineteen in Sugar’s

case. But there are also those like M o n a, out for the first time, and others

like Tam ara, w ho sometimes w o rk s, sometimes doesn’t. There are also

“ l KNOW WHAT 1 A M ” I 0 9

several core groups o f younger girls w h o w o rk the cars intermittently,

hanging out at Dizzy Izzy’s bagel store o r on the N inth Avenue loading

docks. India, Charity, R ita , Y o lan da, Sybil, and others will chat and ki ki

(or laugh) together for hours, often spending more time talking, it seems to

me, than w orking.

G rou pin gs in the M eat M ark et draw on social netw orks developed at

the balls o r in the M ea t M ark et itself. Some girls, like Ju lip or A n ita, w ho

are in their twenties, are rarely if ever in a group, tending to w alk alone in

the quieter streets further west. Th ey are not here to socialize but to m ake

money. Anita does not like hanging out in groups because she hates to be

gossiped about, and gossip is a m ajor activity here. In the even darker

corners, I meet girls like G ian a. Giana has a serious drug habit about

which she is very frank. Sometim es she is w illing to be draw n into conver­

sation, but more often not. Other girls stray into the areas north and south

o f the M ea t M ark et proper, w o rk in g alone on quieter, more residential

streets. Th ey do not have much contact with other w o rk ers, tend to be

older, non-English speaking imm igrants, and are outside the social net­

w orks o f the younger girls on Ninth Avenue. But if the cops are actively

rounding up, then the younger ones w ill also scatter north o f 14 th Street

(the boundary o f the sixth precinct) or along 14 th Street to Eighth Avenue

where they can blend into the larger crow ds o f pedestrians and su bw ay

users. It is here that I usually lock up m y bicycle and begin m y evening’s

participant-observation and outreach.

A m ong those people w h o hang out w ith the core group o f fem queen sex

w o rk ers on the stroll are a range o f others: their butch queen friends,

boyfriends, and other gay- and lesbian-identified youth o f color. As well as

the fem queens and butch queens, there are also some butches, most o f

them A frican Am erican, w h o hang out on the loading dock or at the corner

o f Ninth Avenue. Some o f them are boyfriends to the fem queens o r to

fem ale-bodied femmes, but they are rarely w illing to talk to me. Often,

they hang out w ith the m ale-bodied masculine people — those people w h o ,

outside this study, might be understood unproblem atically as “ men” —

w ho are also boyfriends to the fem queens.

The fem queens’ experiences on the street are not alw ays distinguishable

from those o f their peers and friends. Here, as in many U.S. urban centers,

young people o f color are frequently targets for police action, w hatever their

identities or appearance. The public space o f the street can be dangerous

simply because one is African American or Latina/o, since nonwhite racial

I I O C H A P T E R T H R E E

identification in the United States is heavily coded by assumptions about

criminality, drug use, and excessive sexuality. And as the realm of the public has contracted under neoliberal economic policies, evident in the gentrifica-

tion and redevelopment o f much o f N ew Y o rk ’s public space in the 19 9 0 s, the pressure on poor youth o f color from police and other authorities has become

increasingly severe (Chesluk 10 0 4 ; see Davis 19 9 2 [1990]). The fem queens

out in the M eat M arket, though, have the added stigma o f being male-bodied feminine persons, a fact well known to police, their clients, sightseers, and

potential assailants (see Manalansan 20 03: 8 0 - 8 1) .

Am ong the array o f people who engage in different forms o f sex w ork

here, virtually all were born as male-bodied people but present as feminine on the stroll. For some o f them, their feminine presentation may be a part

o f their daily lives; for others, it is guided by the requirements o f the w ork. One summer evening, I was handing out g i p safer-sex kits in the M eat M arket when I came across a group o f three young A frican American male

teenagers hanging out by a car. To my surprise (since they had not seen me

giving kits to anyone else), one o f them asked for a kit. Sorry, I said, they’ re only for the girls, invoking my instructions that the kits only be distributed

to those I could read as “ transgender.” “ I’ m T am ara!” said the boy w h o ’ d asked for the kit. “ D o n ’t you recog­

nize me?” He and his friends laughed as recognition dawned on my face.

He said that he w asn ’t w orking tonight, just hanging out.4 Some weeks

later, I saw Tam ara again, still dressed as a boy. He told me he had stopped

working the stroll, though he still hung out there as a “ butch queen.” And

though he was a butch queen in appearance, he told me she had started

taking feminizing hormones. A few weeks later still, I saw her dressed as

Tam ara again, but a week after that Tam ara w as dressed as a boy once

more. When I asked him why, he showed me a mark on his face: she was robbed, he said, and she’s scared o f being robbed again.

Other fem queens in the M eat M arket may shift back and forth between

butch queen and fem queen style (or identification) on the streets, but as at

the balls, this distinction is often unclear and style in and o f itself does not

necessarily indicate an internal “ gender identity.” S y b il- tw e n ty - s o m e ­ thing and Puerto Rican — for exam ple sees herself as a “ butch queen,” even

though she also sees herself as “ real” and lives full time in her feminine

presentation. When I asked her why she called herself a butch queen, she

said it w as because she w as not on hormones. For Sybil, even living full

time as a feminine person made her neither a fem queen nor a wom an.

“ I KNOW WHAT I A M ” I I I

S y b il’s claim s about herself, T a m a ra ’s shifting presentations, and his/her

reasons for such shifts and use o f horm ones indicate that for at least some

o f the girls in the M eat M ark et, being a “ fern queen” is more com plex than the ball categories would imply.

T h is presented me with some practical, ethical, and epistemological

problems. From the beginning o f my fieldw ork, I adopted the claim o f

activists and social service providers such as M elissa and Rosalyne that

people should be addressed with the pronouns and descriptive gender

categories appropriate to their gendered presentation. Indeed, sensitized as

I w as to these claim s, when I first started fieldw ork in the M eat M ark et I

referred to the girls as wom en in conversation. H ow ever, this w as fre­

quently contested by the girls themselves. On another evening in the M eat

M ark et, while hanging out with M on ica and Sugar, I referred to M on ica as

a wom an. Sugar said: “ You call her w hat you w ant, but I ’ ll call her a m an.”

This did not seem to faze M o n ica, who laughed and retorted w ith a com ­

ment about Sugar’s penis. “ Yeah, w ell, yours is bigger than m ine,” she

shouted, causing more laughter yet. This encounter left me feeling very

uncom fortable. It seemed, again, to reduce M o n ica ’s gender identification

to genitals, precisely the kind o f claim that social service providers like

Rosalyne w ould hotly contest. Yet I w ould also note that the description o f

themselves as “ men” offended neither M o n ica nor Sugar.

But even here, I am unwilling to make broad claim s about fem queen

identity and their understandings o f self through conventionally gendered

terms. On another w arm sum m er’s evening on Little West iz t h Street, I

bumped into Ju lip , to whom I had given a safer-sex kit earlier. She w as

w alk in g past me, ignoring me (as the girls often did when we had had an

interaction and they were now w orking), when she suddenly turned to me

and asked: “ D o you think I look like a m an?” “ N o ,” I said, caught o ffg u a rd ,

“ you don ’t. W hy do you a sk ?” I added, thinking o f a group o f men w hom I

had earlier seen taunting her out o f a car window. She told me that she had

just taken a photograph o f herself and some friends with a P olaroid cam era,

and in the photo som ething in her face had told her she looked like a man.

She said she w as hollow-cheeked and looked “ h ard .” “ D o I have a round

face?” she asked. “ N o ,” I adm itted, “ but you have a nice face.” I added:

“ T h e light is bad, and Polaroids aren ’t the best kinds o f ph otos.” She

nodded, turned aw ay, and marched o ff dow n the quiet street, wounded.

Ju lip ’s concern over “ looking like a m an” com plicates Sugar’s and M o n ­

ica’s jokes about each other’s penises. W hile there is not the same articu­

1 1 2 C H A P T E R T H R E E

lated differentiation that I heard am ong white, middle-class transexual women between being a man and being a w om an, there are also clear

investments on the part o f many o f the girls out here in being “ soft.” The

distinction between “ hard” and “ soft” is one o f the most important in the

M eat M arket (and at the Clubhouse balls too, where “ softness” is a m ajor

criterion for winning a fem queen face category). Hardness and softness —

with their clearly gendered implications — have no easy correlate to any

physical or sartorial appearance, though suppleness o f skin, smoothness o f

features, and perceived femininity in facial and bodily contours count for a

lot. The softer you are, the more “ real” you are. “ Softness” also applies to

perceived femininity in style, body movement, and language use. And while the use o f feminizing hormones is seen as essential for developing

softness, girls often deny that they are using them, claim ing that their

softness is “ natural.” In moments o f gossip and tattling, someone may be

described disparagingly as “ h ard” or admired for being “ so ft.” Pussy, out

in the M eat M arket one night, told me that the “ hard” girls are the ones

who will fuck, that is, the ones who will be the penetrative partner in anal

sex, something many clients desire but girls may not want — or may not be able — to do. For many o f the girls who are taking horm ones, the capacity

to sustain an erection is often impaired. This is a com plex condensation:

“ hardness” is a general term for the visible signs o f masculinity but also the capacity for sustaining an erection for the purposes o f anal sex, and the

desire or willingness to be the penetrative partner.5

The cross-cutting forms of identification, presentation, desire, and style

in the M eat M arket make it hard for me to justify the characterization o f

“ fem queen sex w orkers” any more than I could that o f “ transgender sex

w o rk ers.” M y use o f the former term is, then, as much a selection o f certain

meanings to the exclusion o f others as the latter one is. N e xt, I will draw on

taped interviews to show how fem queens’ (and hutches’ ) understandings

o f self resist any easy form o f identification in the terms o f the organiza­

tions which do outreach to them.

I KNOW WH A T I AM

The M eat M arker is also a space (represented by my own presence there)

where the fem queen sex w orkers will meet outreach w orkers from a

variety o f social service organizations who offer condom s, safer-sex litera­

ture, and information about services to which they are entitled as trans-

“ I KNOW WHAT I a m ” I 1 3

gender-identified people. The sam e outreach w orkers {again, m yself in­

cluded) are also likely to be found at the C lubhouse on a Wednesday, at the

Christopher Street Piers on a w eekend, or at some o f the bars, like S ally ’s,

where older fem queens tend to congregate. As such, M eat M ark et regu­

lars like T am ara, Ju lip , o r Sugar are likely to k n o w that they are considered

transgender but, as with Tara at the N ew Y o rk H ospital grou p, it is rare to

hear them use it in conversation about themselves.

If I and other outreach w orkers w ere giving safer-sex m aterials to trans­

gender sex w orkers, our w o rk w as made more difficult by people like

Tam ara w h o shifted back and forth between m asculine and feminine pre­

sentation, or by Sybil, w h o loudly proclaim ed that she w as a butch queen

and not “ a transgender.” In interviews w ith some o f the M eat M ark et girls,

this attempt to define fem queens as “ transgender” became even more difficult as they situated themselves in terms o f this category and others.

In my interview with Anita (Puerto R ican, age tw enty-four), for ex a m ­

ple, she told me she had been on feminizing hormones since her teenage

years. This practice marked her as “ transgender” in my understanding,

one which w as borne out in the first part o f our interview:

3-* a n i t a : I identify myself as a drag queen, you know, and [laughs] and you

know this is my lifestyle. I live my lifestyle like this twenty-four hours a day.

d v : You live as a woman.

a n i t a : I live as a woman everyday, you know. (Interview, June 1 6 ,1 9 9 7 )

It is notable that I read A n ita’s statement that she “ id e n tifie s herself] as a

drag queen” as “ you live as a w o m an .” Later in the interview, though, Anita com plicated my assum ptions. I asked her:

3-2. d v : D o you k n o w w h a t this t er m “ t r a n s g e n d e r ” me a ns ?

a n i t a : No.

DV: You never heard it before?

ANITA: No.

DV: Um, but, OK do you know what transexual means?

a n i t a : Transexual means a sex change right?

d v : Uh, yeah. You don’t consider yourself to be transexual?

a n i t a : No.

d v : N o , OK. But, and do you consider yourself to be a woman?

1 1 4 c h a p t e r t h r e e

a n i t a : I consider . . . yes, yes, but 1 know what I — I know what I am, but I . . . I . . . you know, I treat myself like a woman, you know I do everything like a woman. I act like a woman, I move like a woman, you know. I do everything like — everything like a woman. ]My emphasis)

Later still, shortly after I explained the collective meaning o f transgender

to Anita, she talked about herself as “ gay.” In return, I asked:

3-3 d v : You do you consider yourself to be gay then?

a n i t a : Yes!

DV: Yeah. a n i t a : Yes.

d v : Yeah. Um. a n i t a : Yes.

d v : Even though you live as a woman. a n i t a : Yes. d v : Right, OK. a n i t a : I know I’ m gay and I know I’ m a man.

I.ike Rita (who 1 quoted in the introduction), Anita claims a number o f different identities: gay, drag queen, man. While she did not claim to be a transexual or a w om an, she did not dispute my characterization o f her as “ living as a w om an ” ( 3 .1) and noted that she does “ everything like a w om an ” {3.2). In other w ords, being on hormones and living as a wom an did not make her either transexual or a wom an. But later in the interview,

she said: “ I don ’t wanna go back to a man, you know ,” im plying that even if she is not a w om an, she is no longer a man, despite her earlier assertion

that “ I know I’ m a man” (3.3). A nita’s long experience on the stroll might account for some o f these

claims, but others such as M on a who have not been out here as long say similar things. M ona w as new to the M eat M arket when I met her and had not spent much time socializing (or being socialized) by the other girls. She had heard about the M eat M arket from some friends and had gotten dressed up — rather androgynously com pared to the more extravagan tly fern style o f Sugar or Ju lip — to see if she could make some money, but she had not been too successful. The visual econom y o f sex w ork in this con­

text requires a certain constellation o f clothing, em bodiment, and style to

be successful.6 Despite this, her statements resonate with A n ita’s. In our interview, she began by saying:

‘ l K N O W W H A T I A M ” 1 1 5

3-4 m o n a : M y name is Mona, I’m a butch queen u p in drags, 1 live my life as a woman, I’m twenty-two years old, African American, born and raised in

Brooklyn. (Interview Ju ly 1 8 ,1 9 9 7 )

M o n a ’s simultaneous identification o f herself as a “ butch queen up in

drags” and her claim to “ live my life as a w o m an ” raises questions about

w hat these categories might mean. When we started discussing “ trans­

gender,” M o n a said that she w asn ’t sure w hat it meant but that she had

“ heard the girls you know, talk about transgender, you know, like talk

about like fem queens, you know, female im personators.” Clearly, “ trans­

gender” is not entirely absent from the vocabulary o f the M eat M arket

girls but it is com pounded with others like “ fem queen,” “ female imper­ son ator,” and “ g ir l.” M oreover, when I asked her about her experiences

with social service agencies, M o n a said: “ I would like to participate in a lot

o f gay activities,” indicating that this w as also a category she understood

herself to be part of. During the interview, as with A nita, I explained to

M o n a the meaning o f “ transgender” in its collective sense as used by the

g i p , and then asked her to position herself in relationship to it:

3-5 d v : Given that description that I’ ve just told you, would you consider yourself to be included under that category? m o n a : Exactly. d v : Yeah? Um, so do you consider yourself to be gay? m o n a : Exactly. d v : You are? OK. So what —what does that mean to you to be gay? m o n a : What does it mean to me to be gay? DV: Uh huh. m o n a : It’s not just only having feelings for someone of the same gender but also being turned on by the same gender.

d v : But you say that you’ re a woman as well? m o n a : Exactly.

N ote that M o n a ’s initial lack o f certainty — about w h at “ transgender”

means — is the only thing she is not sure o f in these extracts: she is certain

that she’s a wom an (“ exactly” ), that she’s transgender (“ ex a ctly ” ), and that

she’s gay (“ exactly” ).

Sim ilarly, A n ita’s exasperated “ yes!” to the same question — “ You do

C H A P T E R T H R E E

you consider yourself to be gay then?” (3.3) — as well as the confusion

apparent in the questions I ask, indicates a more com plex system o f identi­ fication than 1 was bringing to the interview. The significant point is that for both Anita and M ona, “ liv[ing| as a w om an ” does not preclude being

“ g ay” where “ g ay” indexes erotic desire for someone who is male-bodied.

M y attempts to get Anita and M ona to define themselves in terms o f one

category or another speak to how pow erfully this distinction had struc­

tured my research questions. Ju st as significantly, on a nightly basis, out­

reach w orkers from social service agencies across the city must decide whether the clients they meet are “ transgender” or “ g a y ” (like Ja y at the

Clubhouse ball in chapter 2), a product o f the institutional and funding

requirements o f their agencies. Like me, they often find it difficult to enu­

merate on their outreach reports how may o f their clients are “ gay male” and how many are “ transgender, m t f . ”

These modes o f identification are not the only ones in the M eat M arket,

however. Other young people o f color in this contcxt are very clear about

the differences between themselves and gay men and were much easier to

count in outreach reports. Cherry (African Am erican, age twenty), w ho

often hangs out in the M eat M ark et and at the Piers, is adam ant that she is a

wom an, that she has never been “ gay,” and she embraces transgender as a cat­ egory to describe herself. Unlike Anita or M o n a, though, Cherry is a regular

attendee o f Gip support groups, as well as other social services around the

city which are organized around the category transgender. Cherry responded to my “ how do you identify” question in our interview as follows:

3.6

c h e r r y : I identify as female. I mean just because I have this penis doesn’t

mean that I consider myself a man. I don’t even consider myself being born

male, like 1 mean, I was just born with a penis, that’s the w ay I look at it.

And I consider the penis a clitoris. (Interview April 1 2 ,1 9 9 7 )

Unlike Anita or M ona, Cherry also w as able to give me a definition o f

“ transgender” which excludes hom osexual identification:

3-7 c h e r r y : I know transgender can mean a person who may or may not go

through the sexual process, the sexual reassignment surgery. A transexual

can mean that a person who’s already had it done but may or may not be

totally happy with it.

‘ I KNOW WHAT 1 a m ’ 1 1 7

C herry explicitly rejects “ fern queen,” “ gay,” “ drag queen,” or “ butch

queen in drags” as terms that could apply to her. She spends a lot o f time

inform ing her peers that they are “ transgender” and not “ gay,” and had

she heard M onica or Sugar referring to one another as “ m en,” she w ould

no doubt have told them they w ere w rong. Indeed, she argued “ as I have

gone through my process,” she has been able to resist these labels by

insisting on her femaleness and by using the term “ transgender” (or “ tran ­

sex u al” ) to describe herself. C h e rry ’s narrative and her em ploym ent o f

identity categories is very sim ilar to m any (usually w hite, middle-class)

transexual w om en’s stories o f transition that I heard: an explicit rejection

o f hom osexual identity, a repudiation o f their maleness, and an identifica­

tion as a heterosexual w om an.

The significant difference between, on the one hand, C herry and T ara,

and those like Anita and M on a is not so much their class, racial identifica­

tion, or age but their contact with those form alized contexts o f com m unity

— support groups, social service agencies, clinics, and so on — which em ­

ploy the understandings o f “ g a y ” and “ transgender” that I am analyzing

here. Both Tara and Cherry, for exam ple, access services through g i p and

have had individual counseling w ith R osalyn e. Both m ake use o f a variety

o f services throughout the city which are part o f a netw ork o f agencies and

events — g i p , Positive Health Project, H arlem United, the annual T ran s­

gender H ealth Conference, and others —that provide services under the

fram ew ork o f transgender. T h at is, these contexts have provided for Tara

and C herry a language through which to interpret their experiences outside

the more com m only distributed categories in the com m unities through

which they move — fem queen, butch queen, drag queen, transvestite, and

so on — much as the N e w Y o rk H ospital group provided T ara with the

language o f “ w om an o f transA frican, transgender experience.”

For Cherry, this has given her a w a y o f conceptualizing herself that few o f her peers do. C herry fram es her ow n life experiences in terms o f “ my

process,” a com mon m etaphor for transition em ployed in transgender

discourses. This fram ew ork d raw s on a broader processual model in men­

tal health, twelve-step program s, and support grou p settings and one

deeply rooted in m iddle-class A m erican understandings o f self-transfor­

m ation and rem aking. For Cherry, her process involves a repudiation o f

those terms which im ply hom osexual identification and a movement to ­

w ard eventual surgical transition and identification as a heterosexual

w om an. A s such, she is able to see her penis as a clitoris ( 3 .6 ) and to

I l 8 C H A P T E R T H R E E

elaborate upon the differences between transexual and transgender (3.7).

This is in sharp contrast to those like Anita or M ona — neither o f whom access such services —who see themselves, simultaneously, as gay, as drag queens, as transgender, as men, as “ liv|ing| as a w o m an ,” and so on.

Even so, this is not to say that involvement in such formalized contexts

o f social service provision necessarily results in a radical split between

these two conceptual organizations o f identity. Certainly, as I pointed out at the beginning o f this chapter, Tara much more frequently refers to

herself as gay, as do other members o f her group. Likew ise, peer outreach

workers in the employ o f social service organizations, like Renee or Ja d e

(whom I discuss below), are quite aw are o f the use o f transgender, yet they

will often use a different model to describe themselves and even the people to whom they do outreach. Renee, w ho was a peer outreach w orker for

Harlem United, spoke o f doing outreach to “ transgenders in the M eat

M ark et” but later in our interview she said, o f herself and these same

“ transgenders” :

3.8

r e n e e : I really think we’ re all in the gay community [ . . . . ) But I don’t

really think that we’re all united, the transexuals are kinda off on their own. And that’s why, you know, the transexuals have to come together and start

their own shit up because o f the —1 mean a lot of the gay organizations,

they don’t give us any support. (Interview June 1 1 , 1 9 9 7 )

For those like Renee, Cherry, or Tara who involve themselves in such

organizations, “ transgender” is a discourse through which they can mount

demands o f the “ g a y ” com munity that in their view should respond to

their needs and concerns. And it is through recourse to “ transgender” — and the assumptions which underpin it — that these demands are made, a

process which, alm ost inevitably, requires the participants to position

themselves in relation to “ gay.” But this positioning, in turn, com plicates what “ g a y ” and “ transgender” can mean, blurring the lines that seem so solid on outreach reports.

All the people I have discussed so far have been male-bodied feminine

people. As I wrote above, hutches — female-bodied masculine people — also hang out in the M eat M arket, and they too become incorporated into

the institutional terms o f transgender. One exam ple o f this w as Harlem

United’s hiring o f Ja d e as a peer outreach w orker to the butches in the

summer o f 19 9 7 . A Harlem United staffer, J a y (the same person who w as

‘ 1 KNOW WHAT l A M ’ 1 x 9

pointing out “ the transgenders” to me in chapter 2), told me that Ja d e w as an A frican Am erican “ transgender m an” and suggested that I interview

him. But some w eeks later, at the C lubhouse, J a y informed me — rather

sh eepish ly— that Ja d e w as not transgender-identified; rather, she w as a “ butch lesbian.” Like the butch queen in drags he had pointed out to me at

the Clubhouse ball as “ a transgender,” his initial identification had been

w ron g. H ow ever, even the latter appellation turned out not to be entirely

accurate.

Ja d e ’s story is one w hich is indicative o f the com plex land between

“ gay/lesb ian ” and “ transgender,” and how institutionalized categories

com e up against personal experience. Ja d e ’s experiences and narratives are

both different from and sim ilar to the claim s o f people like M on a or Anita.

Ja d e explicitly does not identify as transgender, but not because her ex p eri­

ence does not match those o f the set understood as transgender.7 N o w

approaching fifty, Ja d e had w orked for twenty years as a man in the postal service, dating wom en and socializing with her co-w orkers as a man.

Though she has never taken testosterone shots, she passed as a man and

w a s accepted as such by her co-w orkers and friends.

In our interview, Ja d e initially defined herself as both “ g a y ” and as “ a

b utch,” but these claim s were also com plicated by other things she said

about herself. In w ays structurally equivalent to A nita and using the same

terms, she saw herself as a w om an (that is, an identification fram ed by her

embodiment) but sim ultaneously understood herself in som e w ays as a “ gu y ” :

3-9 j a d e : I kn o w what I am. I know that I’ m an aggressor, a very aggressive-

thinking woman. I think just like a guy thinks. (Interview, November 6, 19 9 7 , my emphasis)

Ja d e ’s use o f “ transgender,” like C h erry’s and Renee’s, has been fram ed in

terms o f her contact with social service agencies, in particular her em ­

ployer, Harlem United. When I asked Ja d e w h at her understanding o f

“ transgender” incorporated, she replied:

3 .1 0

j a d e : Well I heard the word when I came to Harlem United. I had never heard it before. I was like transgender? Transgender, the word “ trans” was

only used in “ transexual,” meaning that you were flipping over, changing

1 2 0 C H A P T E R T H R E E

your organs. That’s the only time that I was familiar with the word “ trans.” Then when I came to Harlem United and I started coming down here on the Wesr Side, I starred hearing gay guys talk about being transgenders. I’ m like, what the hell’s a transgender? And that if you go to a ball, it’s live like a

woman, walk like a woman, eat like a woman, you know. And I guess — their description of a transgender is what I am or whar I was.

Here, Ja d e seems to see herself as describable through “ transgender,”

but a short time later she also said: “ Do I consider myself a transgender?

N o .” To com plicate matters further, though, Ja d e returned to the question

o f transgender at the end o f our interview, saying:

3. 1 1 j a d e : I think it’s [the use o f “ transgender” at Harlem United] great, 1 think it’s great, it opens up Harlem’s eyes that there are gay men here, we’ re right

here, and we ain’t going nowhere.

In the latter quote, Ja d e makes the most com plex statement o f all, seeing “ transgender” as m aking people aw are that “ there are gay men here, w e’ re

right here.” This is a dense claim in which she seems to include herself in

the category “ gay men,” bur even more interestingly she equates “ trans­

gender” to “ g ay” as she also did earlier in the interview ( 3 .10 ). M oreover,

Ja d e ’s understanding o f transgender — and her relationship to it — is com ­

plicated (at least for me) by her experience as a mother to her fifteen-year-

old daughter. To her daughter, she is M om m y, “ the best mommy she could

ever get,” and at one point she noted that her daughter w as the only reason

that she w ould not transition to living as a man. Indeed, she noted that

prior to motherhood, she w ould have considered it:

3 .12

j a d e : I did then! I would have, yeah, back in the days if I would have had

the money or the knowledge. I don’t know if the knowledge was that good then. I would have did it, I would have did it.

d v : Right, so but what’s um — what’s different now. Why not now?

j a d e : I’ve gotten older. Um —your ideas change. Society is more accept —

they accept the gay life. It is a gay life.

Here again, Ja d e confounded my attempts to understand her as either a

transgender man (someone w ho would have transitioned if they’ d “ had

the money or the knowledge” ) or as a butch lesbian (“ It is the gay life” ). In

“ 1 k n o w w h a t 1 a m ’ 1 1 1

the end, in my attempt to get Ja d e to position herself in my terms, I asked,

som ew hat desperately:

3 .1 3 d v : Tell me about your gender in ten words.

j a d e : M y gender.

d v : You —I mean —I know you’ ve been very eloquent about it but I just want you to give like some — like if you could just do it in ten.

j a d e : I’ m a hard daddy. I’m a hard daddy. At times, more times I think I’m a man than not. Um . . . my demeanor is very aggressive.

There are other apparent incoherencies in Ja d e ’s account that make me

strive to get a statement o f “ ten w o rd s” about her gender: she is a momm y

to her daughter and a hard daddy to her lovers; she is a w om an , but “ more

times I think I’m a man than n ot” ; the reason she u sed to w an t surgery w as

that the “ gay life” w a s difficult and it w ould have been easier to be a man;

yet even though she claims it is acceptable and easier to be gay now, she

says she would still like the surgery if it w eren ’t fo r her daughter. She

recognizes that others m ay see her as transgender, but she says she’s “ gay.”

O verall, she is just a hard daddy.

Ja d e ’s statements clearly d raw on a vocabulary o f m asculinity available

to butch lesbians, as well as a long history and vocab u lary o f masculine-

identified passing wom en, and invoke the “ border w a rs” between f t m s and butches which I w ill discuss in the next chapter (see Halberstam

19 9 8 b ; H ale 19 9 8 ; Kennedy and D avis 1 9 9 3 ; G . Rubin 1992.; H . Rubin

20 0 3 ). A t the same time, Ja d e ’s understanding o f herself is not equivalent

to the self-conscious appropriation o f “ transgender butch” that H alber­

stam (19 9 8 b ) describes. Rather than draw in g on the possibilities o f “ trans­

gender” to elaborate her identification, she positions herself sim ultane­

o usly against and through its terms. A gain , “ transgender butch” certainly

captures som e o f those qualities and experiences that Ja d e describes, but

Ja d e ’s identification is more com plex still, since she explicitly states that

she does not see “ transgender” as a category that describes her even as she

recognizes that others m ay see her as such.

M y difficulty in pinning do w n Ja d e ’s relationship to identity categories is

not in the different w ays she identifies as butch, as a hard daddy, or as a

m asculine female-bodied person. Rather, it lies in the fact that w e are

operating from different perspectives abo u t tw o broader categories: “ g a y ”

and “ transgender.” Ja d e sees herself defined by a variety o f characteristics:

1 2 2 C H A P T E R T H R E E

her attraction to women, as a “ hard d ad dy” or “ an aggressor,” as a mommy

to her daughter, as a guy, and as a w om an. I am attempting to get Ja d e to talk about her gender apart from her sexual desire, about some kind o f internal desire to be a man: that is, I am trying to get her to pin herself as

either a butch-lesbian-hard-daddy (“ gay/hom osexual” ) o r as a (straight) man (“ transgender” ). Consequently, my confusion is less about those de­

scriptors o f “ female m asculinity” (Halberstam 19 9 8a) than about how to

account for this masculinity in terms o f the prim ary categories through

which it can be understood in institutional terms.

While Ja d e ’s experience is clearly different from A nita’s or M o n a ’s —

they are younger, male-bodied, have experienced sex w ork — their experi­

ences come together insofar as their w ays o f understanding themselves

escape easy classification through broader, more powerful discourses

about possible identifications. There is no room at Harlem United for

simply a “ hard daddy.” Ja d e w as hired to do outreach to “ the transgen­ ders.” This is the category through which her salary is funded via m v /

a i d s funds, the new ly developing epidem iological category which cap ­ tures the girls and guys she gives condoms to, and which organizes the

support groups, social services, and funding (minimal as they might be) which support the nascent attention to this group.

Ja d e ’s account is marked by apparent incoherencies and contradictions

that obviously, from my line o f questioning, were making no sense at the

time o f my interview. To others, Ja d e ’s claims could be gathered into one o f

several opposing stories: that she is really a butch, w ho used to w ant s r s

because o f the hom ophobia she experienced; or that he is really a transman

w ho, in other circumstances and with more education, would have made

that choice and lived happily as a man. Yet it is also clear that Ja d e , in her own words “ know|s| w hat I am .” When I pay attention to the context o f

those answ ers, to their place on the map that I am draw ing her into, it

becomes apparent that it is my questioning that is producing the incoher­ ence. Like Anita, Ja d e ’s claim to “ know w hat 1 am ” is the key to my mapping here.

These different accounts — drawn from interviews and social interac­

tio n s— are intended to make the broader point that despite the differences between Ja d e and those like Anita or Ju lip o r Tam ara in terms o f em bodi­

ment, age, gender identification, and sexual practices, all these individuals

can be incorporated into the explanatory force o f the collective mode o f

transgender, even as they contest some of its basic assumptions. Ju lip ’s

‘ I KNOW WHAT I A M ” 1 1 3

concern that she “ looks like a m an ,” S u g ar’s and M o n ica ’s jokin g about

being “ m en,” T am ara’s m asculine dress (though having just started fem i­

nizing hormones), M o n a ’s androgynous style, Sybil’s description o f herself

as a butch queen, Ja d e ’s seemingly contradictory relationship to trans­

gender, and C h erry’s rejection o f “ g a y ” and adoption o f “ transgender” —

all com plicate any assertion o f a stable identity for those on the M eat

M ark et o r at the Clubhouse. By this I do not mean that these individual

fem queens, hutches, or transexual wom en do not have “ stable identities.”

Rather I am m aking two other points: first, even using locally derived

terms for people does not capture the range o f (sometimes contested)

meanings that animate people’s understandings o f themselves in particular

contexts. M ore im portantly, though, the com plexity o f these identifica­

tions do es lead to some social service providers (like the one quoted in

chapter z) seeing them as having “ false consciousness,” o f shifting between

apparently stable categories o f identification because o f a lack o f educa­ tion or an adherence to outm oded systems o f meaning.

So w hat happens to those like Anita or M o n a or Ja d e w ho have not

taken on the understanding o f “ transgender” as something different from

“ g a y ” or even for those like Renee or T ara w h o em ploy it in strategic

moments to make particular demands? One could argue that A nita or

M ona are using “ the m aster’s to o ls,” and that they should be “ educated”

into the new language and meanings o f transgender as a liberatory and

“ true” description o f their identities and experiences. But this implies that

the new tools — those subsumed into “ transgender” — are free o f the social

pow er relations that my colleague sees condensed in these people’s state­

ments about themselves as, sim ultaneously, w om an , man, drag queen, gay,

and transexual; or as w om an , guy, butch, hard daddy, and mommy. M o re ­

over, such an “ education” also implies that w hat M o n a or Anita or Ja d e

know — about themselves and the w orld — is inherently false.

1 heard many o f these claim s to and statements about know ledge o f the

self on the streets o f the M eat M ark et and at the balls phrased in just these

terms: “ I k n ow w hat I a m .” I am arguing that these are politically signifi­

cant claim s. At the same time, if at least some o f the M eat M ark et girls

(like Cherry) can understand themselves through transgender, it might

seem that my concerns are caution ary at best. But w h at happens when

people try to mount these claim s about the self in particular social con ­

texts? N e x t, I want to look at how, in conversation, com peting claim s over

1 2 4 C H A P T E R T H R E E

vvhar counts as identity — what counts in knowing about oneself — become

adjudicated.

Tli F. A L T E R N A T I V E L I F E S T Y L E S G R O U P : “ S O M E O N E L I K E M E ”

The Communities Together Services Center ( c t s c ) is about a ten-minute

bike ride from the M eat M arket, on the Low er East Side.8 This center

offers services for residents o f the low-income housing in the area and in

1996 included an “ Alternative Lifestyles” group. The participants were a

group o f friends from the p ro jects— mostly young African American or

Larina/o people w ho could be described as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender— w ho came to the group weekly to talk about their experi­ ences. Like the mix on the loading dock o f the M eat M arket, they included

female- and male-bodied people with differing identifications. Though I

never met any o f the group’s participants at the M eat M arket, some o f them told me that they attended the balls, and, like the fem queens there,

some had engaged in sex w ork. M y w ay into this group, as with the N ew York Hospital group, w as

through N o ra. Though N ora shares common life experiences with group

members (as she did with the N ew Y ork Hospital group), the w a y she and

group members talked about themselves w as quite different, underpinned

by N o ra ’s experience in social service settings both as a client and as a

counselor. In the analysis that follow s, based on exchanges during an

Alternative Lifestyles group meeting in O ctober 19 9 6 , 1 focus on this d if­ ference in the escalation o f N o ra ’s attempts to get one o f the group mem­

bers to identify as either transgender or gay.

While this w as not a transgender-specific group, N ora w as called upon

to define the term at the beginning o f the meeting, to which she gave the

standard response o f contem porary N ew Y ork City social service pro­

viders. Transgender, she said, is an “ umbrella term which includes ( . . . ]

transexuals, pre-op, post-op, uh, transvestites, drag queens, female imper­

sonators.” We had not been talking long when M iss Angel entered the room, late as usual. M iss A n g el— African American and in her mid-twen­

ties, a former drug user and sex w orker —w as one o f the central partici­ pants in the group, the acknowledged linchpin o f the core group o f friends

in the group. Like M ona in her interview with me, M iss Angel felt the need

to give a brief narrative for my tape recorder:

‘ 1 k n o w w h a t 1 a m ”

3-I 4 m i s s a n g e l : M y name is Angel, I’ m a pre-op transexual. I dunno what I am, I’m a woman, simply . . . O K? I’ m Hiv-positive.

As such, M iss Angel seems to be reiterating the central tenet o f transgender

identity: that she is a w om an, despite her male em bodiment. H ow ever,

later M iss Angel talked about her experience at high school in w ays that

com plicated this assertion:

3-15 m i s s a n g e l : I h a d t o g e t t o k n o w n e w f r i e n d s w h e n I t u r n e d g a y a n d i t ’s n o t e a s y b e i n g gay. n o r a : H ow was your experience when you became a woman, a transexual woman? m i s s a n g e l : I was thirteen years old when I did everything. n o r a : Was it even harder? m i s s a n g e l : Was it harder? No. n o r a : Did it go from bad to worse? m i s s a n g e l : N o [ . . . | Um, when I was thirteen. It was hard, I went to school —

b e n : With breasts. m i s s a n g e l : The breasts.

N o r a ’s questions to M iss Angel ( 3 .1 5 ) are significant because she is

proposing to M iss Angel tw o different states o f com ing out: as “ g a y ” when

she w as thirteen, and as a “ transexual w o m an ” at a later date. M iss Angel,

how ever, dismisses this: she w as thirteen, she said, when she did “ every­

thing.” This becomes clearer still in a later exchange between them, when

they were discussing M iss A ngel’s sexual history:

3 .1 6

m i s s a n g e l : I w e n t t o b e d w i t h m y o w n k i n d . I t r i e d i t o n c e . b e n : H ow was it?

m i s s a n g e l : H ow was it? b e n : Uh huh. n o r a : N ow what is your own kind mean by definition, because you’re always telling us —

m i s s a n g e l : I’m a woman, well you know. n o r a : You’re a woman, transexual, you’re gay, you’ re homosexual. b e n : A man.

1X6 C H A P T E R T H R E E

m i s s a n g e l : Look, me, like me, someone like me. Someone like me . . . Someone like me. n o r a : I Who] c ha ng es sexual i t y, uh h uh. 9 b e n : With breasts.

m i s s a n g e l : With breasts.

n o r a : OK.

m i s s a n g e l : 1 went out with someone like me. Her name was Billie Jean, she lives in Coney Island.

In both 3 . 1 5 and 3 . 1 6 Ben offers “ breasts” by w ay o f explanation o f M iss

Angel’s being, which M iss Angel affirms. This reference to M iss A n gel’s

breasts — the result o f hormone therapy — is the final w ord in both cases.

The reference to her body is particularly instructive, for M iss A ngel’s changing body shifts her — in contem porary understandings — into the cat­

egory o f “ transgender” or, more specifically, “ transexual,” the latter cate­

gory which she indeed uses to describe herself. Yet, as is clear from the pre­

ceding conversation, M iss Angel does not alw ays stick to this definition o f

self. Indeed, N ora implicitly recognizes this in her attempts to get M iss Angel to define what her “ own kind” is. She lists the identity categories that Miss Angel has used about herself in this group and in others (woman, tran­

sexual, gay, homosexual) ( 3 .16 ), implying that she cannot be all these things.

To this, M iss Angel insists: “ Look, me, like me, someone like me. Someone like me . . . Someone like me.” In the end, Nora leaves it there: “ O K .”

Tow ard the end o f the meeting, N o ra told us o f her days o f sex w ork when non-transgender men who were her clients would ask her w hat their desire for her meant for their own sexual identity:

3-T7 n o r a : And they’ re attracted to that [a feminine person with a penis] So

they would tell me, “ Well, what am I? I said, Well, I can’t tell you what you

are unless you know and I can’t not tell you this is what you are and this is

what you’ re gonna be, you know, because it’s not my life.” M y life, I kn ow what 1 am.

m 1 ss a n g e l : r I'm a woman with a large clit. n o r a : L / know what la m . [My emphasis]

N o ra ’s and M iss A ngel’s talk overlaps in the last two lines o f 3 . 1 7 : they speak at the same moment. Both profess, simultaneously, a knowledge o f

the self, but what they know is rooted in different ideas about h o w to

“ 1 KNOW WHAT I A M ” I 2 7

k n o w oneself. N o r a ’s attempts to get M iss Angel to pick one o f the defini­

tions o f self that she has used in the group fail precisely because they do

not share the same understandings o f h ow gendered and sexual identity

w o rks. M iss Angel claim s to be gay, but also a transexual, and a “ wom an

with a large clit.” Like Cherry, she has reread parts o f her anatom y to claim

an identification as a w om an, but like Anita or M o n a, she also claim s other

kinds o f identities, including “ gay.” N o ra , as I have noted, shares much o f

M iss A n gel’s history and experience but she has an understanding o f gen­

dered and sexual identity gained through social service agencies, defined

by a distinct split between gay identities on the one hand and transgender

identities on the other. M iss Angel has no such model o f personhood. All

she can respond when N o ra puts her on the spot is: “ someone like me”

( 3 .16 ) . In the final quoted passage, N o ra states, “ I k n ow w h at I am ”

( 3 .17 ) . Like A nita, M o n a, and m any others, N o ra asserts a knowledge o f

the self that is mounted against conventional understandings o f bodily sex

and gender identity. But, unlike those people, her statement o f self never

varies: she is a heterosexual transexual wom an.

M iss Angel, at one point claim s “ I dunno w h at I am ” (3.T4), but it

becomes clear that, in fact, she has a strong idea o f “ what I am ” : sim ulta­

neously gay, hom osexual, transexual, and “ a w om an with a large clit.”

Even in the friendly atm osphere o f a peer-led support grou p, certain state­

ments o f identity and experience can become interpreted — by N o ra , by

m yself, and by others —as inconsistencies, but only because w e are inter­

preting them within a theoretical fram ew ork which cannot m ake sense o f

them unless they are dismissed as false consciousness or a lack o f education.

H ow ever, as I w rote above, I do not w ant to turn this into a simple story

o f h ow young, poor people o f color are excluded from dom inant dis­

courses and practices around “ transgender.” Indeed, it is not that easy to

make such a case, as T ara, N o ra , and Cherry m ake clear. M oreover, the

kinds o f com plexities I have discussed above are not restricted to the

young kids hanging in the M eat M ark et or the Clubhouse. In other places

around the city, I also met people w hose understandings o f self, practices,

and identifications sim ilarly confused an easy distinction between gay and transgender.

I l 8 C H A P T E R T H R E E

A T K A R A I . Y N ’ S: O N E O F T 1 I E G U Y S

From the Low er East Side and the M eat M arket, let’s go back to K aralyn ’s, the bar on ioth Avenue and 55th Street frequented mostly by white male

cross-dressers, though it has its share o f transexual wom en, adm irers, and

some people o f color too. It doesn’ t take me long to get up there from the

Village — it’s about a twenty-minute bike ride. Here, one o f the regulars is Sherry. Sherry is white, in her mid-thirties, and lives in Pennsylvania, trav­

eling into the city on the weekends in her Porsche to come to K a raly n ’s or

Tranny C h a ser.10 She used to own and run an insurance com pany but has

retired, partly because she is m v -p o sitiv e. Despite these m arkers o f upper-

iniddle-classness, Sherry has lived frugally since her retirement. She cross-

dresses on weekends and has been on hormones for a year or so but does not believe she is transexual; and indeed, while she w as quite aw are o f the

concept “ transgender” and all it implies, she most often referred to herself as “ g ay” in our conversations. One evening she told me “ Pm going up to

P-town with two other gu ys,” indicating through this structure that she

also understood herself at times as a “ guy.”

After talking over this issue — being gay, being transgender — over drinks at K aralyn ’s in the summer o f 19 9 7 , 1 received this e-mail from Sherry:

You asked about the differences between someone like myself and the 1. . . ] queens |a category to which she had opposed herself in our conversations].

Well, for one, none of them take hormones. They like using their penises,

while myself i prefer impotence. So in that regard, our identity and gender are somewhat different. They consider themselves gay drag queens, and to

a degree i suppose i consider myself gay as well, although a post op-TS friend of mine thinks i should go thru the change, and that i’d be more

happy living as a straight woman. That’s h e r opinion. 1 really don’t know. I do know that i love men, and that i could be quite happy living fulltime as a woman, but i also accept the fact that physically i don’t think i can pull it

off. Therefore i feel like i’ m trying things like hormones, and i’ m planning

on having some cosmetic surgery done to see just how far i can take this. {E-

mail, M ay 9 ,19 9 7 )

A few months later, this time at Tranny Chaser, I saw Sherry again. We

caught up on news, and she told me a bit more about the visit o f a non­

transgender wom an friend from Germany, whom I had met the last time I had

bumped into Sherry here. She divulged the fact that they had had sex the

‘ 1 K N O W W H A T 1 a m ” 1 1 9

evening I had seen them together at the bar. I was rather startled at this: how

did it feel to have sex with a wom an? I asked. She shrugged: it w as fine. It

w asn ’t the first time for Sherry, whose fourteen-year-old son lives with her.

A month after this, I cycled up to K a ra ly n ’s for the last time, as it was

abou t to close dow n. K aralyn had lost the battle to keep open a bar that

only really had a weekend crow d, a business not sustainable with N ew

Y ork rents. At the bar, I leaned over to say hello to Tina the barm aid and caught sight o f a h alf-fam iliar face to my right. H alf-fam iliar because it

w as Sherry, but she w as in masculine clothes — jeans, a loose shirt, and a

vest — and w as sporting a goatee. I w as startled again, and she w as amused

at my surprise. There w as some reason for the goatee that I cou ldn ’t quite

make out, something to do with a cut on her chin, which had led to her

com ing to K a raly n ’s in her male persona.

We settled dow n to a long talk, occasionally greeting other people we

knew as they came in. She told me she w a s still having electrolysis on her

cheeks and repeated that she w as on hormones, but her beard still sprouted

powerfully. I asked her h ow it felt being on horm ones, and she startled me

once more by taking my hand and placing it on her chest, visible under the

loose cotton shirt she w a s w earing. H er breasts were soft. She used to have

a lot o f muscle mass there, she said, but it has all gone due to the hormones.

I asked her h ow she w ou ld like me to refer to her as a m an, and she said

sim ply “ S h a y ” w ould do, as it w ould w ork for both Sherry and Shane, her

male name. Despite the horm ones and electrolysis, Sherry still had no

plans for surgery and shuddered when I mentioned it.

Unlike Anita or M iss Angel, Sherry does not claim to “ k n o w w hat I a m .”

In fact, her e-mail claimed that she “ really do[esn’t] k n o w ” whether she is a

gay man or a transexual w om an. The indeterminacy o f Sherry’s identity

and presentation seems to make sense in the collective mode o f trans­

gender, yet Sherry w as clear that “ transgender” could not describe her

experiences, especially since she w as attracted to gay men as a man. And at

other times, Sherry told me that she w as content not to know. Indeed,

Sherry’s lack o f certainty could be understood not as a function o f an

innate uncertainty about w h o she is but because o f the w ay she feels com ­

pelled to describe her desires through a set o f discourses that do not make

sense o f them. W hile Sherry is white, upper middle class, and in m ost w ays

shares very few o f the social experiences o f Ja d e , A n ita, or M iss Angel, like

them she is hard-pressed to align her self-understandings with discrete

categories o f identity.

130 C H A P T E R T H R E E

Sherry is just one o f a heaving crow d o f regulars who come and go at

K aralyn ’s. There are plenty o f others who easily fit into “ transgender” here, and who understand its boundaries and see themselves as incorpo­ rated within it in different w ays. Bur far more often, the boundaries o f

categories “ transgender, gay, transexual, transvestite, and others — blend and blur around the bar. O ften, the regulars sim ply refer to one another as

“ trannies,” a useful catchall, like “ transgender,” but one which can incor­ porate the gay male cross-dressers who sometimes come and hang out.

There is Chris, who says she likes men and used to think she w as gay, but

now she’s not sure w hat she is. Her psychoanalyst believes she is just too

hom ophobic to come out, but Chris rejects this analysis. “ I have one self, but two lives,” she says. And G w en likes being a gay man most o f the time,

but sometimes she gets the urge to dress and hang out at K a raly n ’s. “ I can ’t

do this do w n to w n ,” she told me, referring to gay male bars in the Village and Chelsea. “ What gay man w ould want to fuck someone in a dress?”

Here, she might score with a heterosexual cross-dresser. W hat I describe here may seem to be a reiteration o f the power o f

transgender — to incorporate many different kinds o f gendered expression

and desire under its umbrella. But the point is that for many o f the people at K aralyn ’s, “ transgender” (in its implicit opposition to “ hom osexuality” )

cannot make sense o f the w ay they experience their desires and selves

precisely because they see their desires fueled by their “ sexuality.” Whether

these people are secure in their knowledge o f “ w h a t” they are (like, in very

different w ays, Cherry or M iss Angel) or not (like Sherry), none o f their

experiences are easily accounted for through the categories o f either

hom osexuality or transgender.

F R A C T I O U S F R A C T U R E S

The critique o f identity politics is certainly not new and has been developed

in feminism, queer/LGb t studies, critical race theory, and other bodies o f

critical theory (e.g., M oraga and Anzaldtia 1 9 8 1 , Epstein 19 8 7 , Warner

19 9 3 , Scott 19 9 3 ). The stories that I have told above demonstrate the

usefulness o f those critiques which point out that “ identity” can erase the intersections o f different kinds o f social experiences, more often than not

asserting the experience o f white, middle-class U.S. American social actors

as the implicit exem plary center. The basic argument that animates these

critiques is that in privileging one “ identity” (“ w o m an ,” “ gay,” “ A m eri­

“ I KNOW WHA T 1 A M ” 1 3 1

ca n ” ), the intersections o f these social differences are erased, disabling

those who are multiply engaged by racial, ethnic, sexu al, gendered, and

other kinds o f differences. Identity politics also, as Scott ( 19 9 3 ) points out, simply affirm s the differences between groups and extends those differences back into history.

H ow ever, these stories are useful not simply to show how identity cate­

gories such as “ g a y ” or “ transgender” cannot account for the com plexity

o f people’s desires, understandings o f self, and experience (though they do

this too). Rather, they are most useful in show ing that the com plexity o f

experience can disrupt the very analytic categories by which social theo­

rists and others attempt to describe the intersections o f different forms o f

lived experience. Th at is, Anita or Ja d e do not simply dem onstrate the

w ays that gendered and sexual experiences escape the boundaries o f iden­

tity categories: rather, they show how that which counts as “ gender” or

“ sexu ality” is itself the contested ground. The point o f these ethnographic anecdotes and theoretical discussions

o f “ identity,” then, is not to reveal “ transgender” o r “ person o f transexual/

transgender experience” as empty categories. Rather, they show that the

category o f transgender is (as much as the category o f “ h om osexuality” )

an effect o f the distinction between w hat “ gender” and “ sexu ality” have com e to mean in much contem porary politics, theory, and social service

provision. W hat I am after here is the increasing institutional pow er o f

“ transgender” to order certain experiences, even as it erases their co m plex­

ity. If someone like N o ra or someone like Ja d e argues that “ I kn ow w h at I

am ,” that knowledge becomes differently understood — and judged — in

terms o f a categorical system where N o r a ’s knowledge is intelligible in

institutional contexts but Ja d e ’s is not. For Ja d e , being gay, a w om an, a

hard daddy, and a guy are equally and simultaneously possible. And for

M o n a, there is no necessary conflict between being gay (“ exactly” ) or a

w om an (“ exactly” ) or transgender (“ ex actly” ). T h at is, for M o n a, k n o w ­

ing you are a gay man does not exclude the possibility o f k n ow in g that you

live as a w om an , in the same w ay that for Ja d e , being a hard daddy and

“ thinking like a gu y ” does not mean you can ’t be a mom m y to your daugh­

ter and a wom an. T his, I w ould argue, is not the same understanding

which underpins dom inant ideas about gender and sexu ality in the United

States, the “ master’s tools” version o f gendered and sexual personhood in

which cross-gender identification is a restricted possibility fo r people who

C H A P T E R T H R E E

are “ really” hom osexual. N o r is it evidence that hom osexual identification

among those perceived as “ transgender” is the result o f not being “ edu­ cated” into the possibilities o f transgender identification. If the emergent idea o f gender and sexuality as separable and separate entities has been

opposed to the conflation o f these experiences in mainstream U.S. society,

then M ona or Ja d e ’s or T ara’s understandings are different again. T h at is, in their view o f the w orld, any differen ce sets you apart from heteronor-

mativity, a difference w hich can be n am ed in a variety o f w ays: for M on a,

as gay, a butch queen up in drags, or as transgender; for Ja d e as a w om an, a

guy, a hard daddy, a butch, or as gay; and for Tara as both a gay girl and a “ wom an o f transAfrican, transgender experience.”

The significant difference between M o n a ’s or Ja d e ’s or T a ra ’s under­

standing o f “ gender” and “ sexuality” and that employed in mainstream

i.g b t organizations is that in mainstream gay and lesbian politics, differ­

ence from heteronorm ativity is that which is to be elided. That is, contem ­

porary mainstream gay and lesbian politics w orks to minimize the differ­ ence between hom osexuality and heterosexuality, precisely by removing the visibility o f (class-inflected and racialized) gender difference from the

category “ gay,” part o f the dynamic that Lisa Duggan neatly captures with

the term “ hom onorm ativity” (20 03: 50). This is possible only through a

conceptual shift which produces gender and s e x u a lity — and the identities

that are seen to flow from them — as radically different dom ains and experi­

ences. And it is for this reason, I have argued, that “ transgender” has been

able to emerge as a distinct category o f being, predicated on an autonomous

sphere o f “ gender.” However, because M o n a, Ja d e , Tara, and a host o f

others do not share in this binarized conception o f their experiences or identities, their statements o f self become unrepresentable — and incoher­ e n t— to those w ho claim to represent them. To “ know what I am ,” in other

w ords, is not enough to be accounted for in mainstream identity politics.

M oreover, this is not simply a story that can easily be made along lines

o f race, age, or class. While A nita, M o n a, and Ja d e are people o f color, poor, w orking class, and in m any w ays disenfranchised, Sherry is white

and middle class. Cherry — M ona and A n ita’s peer — hangs out on the M eat M arket but explicitly rejects the idea that she w as ever “ g a y ” and

em ploys “ transgender” as a category which makes sense o f her experience.

The white, middle-class gay male drag queens o f the Imperial C ourt dis­

cussed in chapter 2 are very clear about the differences between themselves

‘ l K N O W W H A T I A M ” 1 3 3

and transgender-identified people, even though they are described as trans­

gender in many contexts. Ja d e is approaching fifty and has a long ex p eri­

ence in the butch/femme com munities o f color in N ew Y ork City, while

M on a — m ale-bodied and identifying sim ultaneously as gay, transgender,

and a wom an — is just tw enty-tw o. And Tara condenses racial, gendered,

and sexual identity by claim ing to be both “ g a y ” and “ a w om an o f trans-

A frican , transgender experience.”

By noting these divergences and convergences, I w an t to resist an y a t­

tempt to reduce my analyses here to one simply about class, race, o r age.

Rather, if there is a com m onality, it is one o f involvem ent in formalized

institutions which em ploy transgender as a category for the purposes o f

com m unity building and social service provision. C herry is distinguished

from her peers by her heavy involvem ent in g i p and other organizational

support groups. Sherry, Ju lip , A n ita, and M o n a do not participate in these

contexts. But even this does not fully explain all these differences, for Jad e

and Renee, w h o w o rk for a social service agency as “ transgender peer

outreach w o rk e rs,” shift between seeing themselves and their clients as

“ transgender” and “ gay.”

A fter reading this chapter, one might justifiably ask: so w hat if Ja d e or

M o n a or M iss Angel or Sherry come to understand themselves as —o r are

understood through —transgender? If, as it seems, at least some o f them

are com fortable with using the category about themselves at least part o f

the time or can make sense o f the category as incorporating them (for

exam ple, Ja d e , M o n a, Renee, or A nita), then doesn’t it make sense to

educate them into a distinction that enables them to organize their selves in

this w ay? In the end, I w ould say that this is not necessarily a negative

outcom e. For some, like Cherry, this has proved a pow erful tool o f self- understanding.

Yet, at the same time, I have some cautions. First, from a purely util­

itarian perspective, one o f the central tenets o f the kinds o f public h ea lth -

oriented social service outreach I have been invoking here — a central site

for the production o f transgender as a category — is to pay attention to the

experiences and identifications o f those to w hom such outreach is done.

T h at is, in order to reach people you w ish to help, you need to understand

and use the categories by which they understand themselves. As such,

instrumentally, it m akes sense to think about the im plications o f these

stories fo r the kinds o f public health models being developed under the

rubric o f “ transgender.”

134 C H A P T E R T H R E E

But second, from a more abstract but still political perspective, the “ edu­

cation” o f Jade or Anita or even Sherry in the meanings o f transgender

ignores the fact that for someone like Sherry the category sim ply does not

make sense o f who she feels she is. And, for Ja d e or A nita, it implies that

the w ay they understand themselves now is inherently false, and that to “ know w hat 1 am ” is, in fact, not really to know at all. Sherry, motoring down to N ew York in her Porsche, m ay not in the end have to choose between being gay or being transgender. Ja d e or Anita, on the other hand,

may not have this luxury, dependent as they are on social services and

(dwindling) institutionalized social safety nets, institutions which operate

through discrete categories o f identity. So, while I have argued above that I

do not w ant to reduce this analysis to race, age, or class, my concern here

finally is that the young, the poor, the people o f color who are understood as being transgender are increasingly having to un-know w hat they know

about themselves and learn a new vocabulary o f identity.

And even here, there is nothing inherently—ethically, m orally — w rong with this. Culture is produced in the constant, shifting emergence o f mean­ ing as people engage with one another as social actors in particular con­

texts. That is, 1 am not invested in romanticizing Ja d e or Anita as “ natives” whose “ culture” should be left alone or “ preserved.” But simultaneously, I

am cautious about the other possibility, where for them to become "trans-

gender” requires a recognition o f another organization o f their identities

as being, inherently, false and outmoded.

In writing about her experience o f being subject to surgeries at an early

age because o f an intersex condition, Cheryl Chase (19 9 8 ) writes that her

genitalia — understood in popular and medical discourses and practices as “ am biguous” — were not, prior to surgical intervention, am biguous at all. T hey were exactly what they were. Rather, a powerful system o f binary

gender and sexed bodies produced them as am biguous. C hase’s point is similar to one o f the earliest observations in Am erican anthropology. In his classic article “ On Alternating Sounds” (18 8 9 ), Franz Boas contests the

claims o f Euro-Am erican observers that N ative Am erican languages were “ prim itive” because there w as no consistency in the pronunciation o f

words in those languages. B oas’s counterargument w as revolutionary. He proposed that it w as the investigators’ inability to understand the pho­

nemic distinctions o f those languages, rather than the speakers’ impreci­

sion, which resulted in the interpretation o f primitivity.

With the stories I’ve told above, w hat struck me most while they were

‘ 1 KNOW WHAT 1 A M ” I 3 5

being told to me w a s how am biguous and shifting they w ere, an im pres­

sion not dissim ilar to those held by C h a se’s doctors and the nineteenth-

century linguists Boas took on. And, like those linguists, the call to “ edu­

cate” fem queens into the language o f transgender and the repudiation o f

their hom osexual identification as outmoded smacks o f an implicit claim

about their primitivity. Yet one can make the same discursive m ove here

that Chase or Boas makes: in their ow n terms, these stories are entirely

coherent. They are am biguous only in a binary system where prim ary

“ gender” or “ sexu al” identity must be conceived as tw o distinct arenas o f

one’s experience. A s M ark Joh nson w rites: “ there is nothing am biguous

about am biguity, sexual or otherwise. Rather, am biguity is the specific

product o r effect o f different historical relations o f pow er and resistance

through which various cultural subjects are created and re-create them­

selves” ( 19 9 7 : 1 3 - 1 4 ) . If, as I argue, these professions o f self exceed identity categories, another

w a y o f reading these interview excerpts and ethnographic anecdotes is to

celebrate them as queer, indeed to see them as breaking dow n or resisting

the solidity o f identity categories. Ja c o b H ale, w riting o f w hat he calls

genderqueer positions which contest a strict division between f t m and

butch identities, argues that “ our dislocatedness provides us with subject

positions. This might sound p arad o xical but it is not, for dislocatedness is

not the absolute absence o f location. Because borders between gender

categories are zones o f o verlap, not lines, our dislocatedness is constituted

by our locations in the overlapping margins o f multiple gender categories:

w e bear Wittgensteinian fam ily resemblances to people w ho occupy m ulti­

ple gender categories” ( 19 9 8 : 3 36 ). H ow ever, w hile H ale’s argum ent is

convincing for the subject positions he is discussing, it does not necessarily

account for the experiences o f the people I have discussed here. A perspec­

tive which celebrates dislocatedness in the M eat M ark et w ould ignore the

fact that in this context, fem queens, butches, and others are highly active

in maintaining categorical boundaries such as at the C lubhouse balls or in

the M eat M arket where being called “ h ard” is itself a form o f categorical

policing. Th at is, I do not believe that these stories dem onstrate a system

outside representation itself. Rather, it is still a system o f categorical order­ ings, but one that is differently organized from , and cannot be accounted

fo r in, the relatively more pow erful terms o f mainsteam identity politics.

It is true that even though they m ay not identify as “ transgender” as

such, people like Ja d e , M iss A ngel, or Anita nonetheless benefit from the

1 3 6 C H A P T E R T H R E E

outreach done in its terms. Yet, from both a theoretical and utilitarian

perspective, “ transgender” cannot account for the com plexity o f their un­

derstandings o f self. It is im portant to note that I am not calling for “ better representation” o f those I discuss above, or the simple elaboration o f new

categories, but rather a reexam ination o f a system which, in both practical

and theoretical terms, marks M iss Angel, Anita, or Ja d e as “ other.” This is

the case whether they are understood as suffering “ false consciousness” or

as representative o f a queer, subversive selfhood beyond categories. I am

suggesting, in short, that their claims about themselves should be taken

seriously, in their own terms. Indeed, as I will argue in more depth in Part

111 and especially in the conclusion, this suggestion is only the beginning o f

a broader analysis o f a system o f identity politics where “ representation” as a trope itself erases more com plex analyses o f political and economic injustices.

H aving laid out some o f the institutionalized politics o f identity and

com munity that are shaped by — and shape — the category transgender

and its differences from hom osexuality, I w ant to m ove, in Part il l o f this book, to consider three realms in which this category has become institu­

tionalized: academic and popular literature, the contexts o f political activ­

ism and social service provision to which I have alluded throughout the

previous chapters, and the recourse to narratives o f violence in m aking

claims for the state’s attention to transgender lives. Here, I want to co n ­

sider how the development o f a body o f knowledge around the category

transgender, shaped by an ontological distinction between gender and

sexuality, is doing similar w ork in contexts as diverse as literature reviews,

social justice activism , and telling stories o f violence suffered. And again,

my analysis — and my political concerns — revolve around w hat these or­ derings achieve, for w hom , and what the implications are for the increas­

ing use o f transgender in these contexts, even as they produce remarkable social achievements.

‘ i KNOW WHAT I A M ” 1 3 7

10 . The quote is: “ For the master’s tools w ill never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to heat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde 19 84 : 1 1 2 , em­ phasis in original).

1 1 . However, as Halberstam notes, in these contexts “ fluidity” does not refer to the experience o f individual social actors as much as it does to the range of pos­ sibilities that individuals have in making sense o f their selves and experiences.

3 . “ I KNOW WHAT I A M ”

1 . Rosalyne explains that this phrase —drawing on similar constructions such as “ person o f African descent” — foregrounds her identity as a woman first and foremost while acknowledging her transexual/transgender history.

2. The majority of the people I discuss were ascribed male at birth. The one extended case o f a female-bodied person — Jade — that I discuss below further complicates the gay/transgender distinction, but there are clear differences between Ja d e’s experience and those o f the male-bodied feminine people I am discussing. I must stress that I do not intend to simply conflate Ja d e’s experi­ ence with the experiences o f the other (male-bodied feminine) people I discuss. Rather, I want to point to the place where many kinds o f differences —gender,

sexuality, class, race, a ge— become smoothed out through the assumption o f common transgender identification and experience.

3. During my fieldwork from 19 9 6 through 19 9 8 , the M eat M arket was still an active semi-industrial space. N ow adays, it is better known for its art galler­ ies, boutiques, and upscale bars and restaurants which have replaced most of the meat industry in the eastern blocks o f the district, pushing the sex-work industry into the as-yet-undeveloped area between Washington Street and the Hudson River. The development o f the Hudson River Park and the Christo­ pher Street Piers bordering the M eat M arket to the west has accelerated the process o f gcntrification. The descriptions which follow draw on my experi­ ence in the late 1990s.

4. Tamara corrected me when I referred to him as “ she” to one of his friends, indicating that when dressed as a masculine person, he preferred masculine pronouns.

5. In many ways, this set o f meanings around hardness, softness, and penetra­ tion are similar to those that Kulick (1998) discusses for Brazilian travestis.

2 6 8 NOT E S TO C H A P T E R T H R E E

The majority of the girls in the Meat M arket do not desire genital surgeries {at least in their response to my questions). Like Kulick’s informants, the fem queens often rurn to unlicensed practitioners for body modifications; one of them, India, told me of her plans to have breast and hip silicone injections from a person in Brooklyn who did such procedures in her apartment, a procedure I later attended.

6. 1 have adapted this from Henry Goldschmidt’s (2006) phrase “ visual econ­ omy o f race,” itself adapted from Wiegman (1995).

7. The choice of the feminine pronoun here is one I agonized over, and it speaks both to the power o f binary gender and the assumptions underlying the categories “ gay” and “ transgender” I am analyzing. As the following interview excerpts make clear, Jade does identify as masculine in many ways, but she also insists that she is a woman. Consequently, I use Jad e’s own gendering of herself, as I have with all the people I discuss in this study.

8 . 1 use a pseudonym for the center’s name.

9. Given my argument, one might imagine that Nora would have said “ gen­ der” rather than “ sexuality” here. At the same time, however, her use o f “ sex­ uality” indicates the slippage between these categories in talk and practice and points to the gaps produced by needing to talk about erotic desire and gen­ dered practices in discrete categories.

10. Again, my use of “ her” and “ she” to describe Sherry is a conscious deci­ sion, based not necessarily on Sherry’s understandings of herself (which, as I discuss below, are not easily understood in terms o f binary gender) but rather on the fact that I interacted with Sherry mainly in her feminine persona.

PART 3 I N T R O D U C T I O N : THE T R A N S E X U A L , THE A N T H R O P O L O G I S T , AND THE R ABB I

i . It seems unlikely that the man was a rabbi, though he displayed signifiers of Orthodox Judaism in hairstyle and clothing. Also, his appearance on this eve­ ning was not a casual or mistaken visit as he was a regular attendee at Tranny Chaser.

4. THE MAKI NG OF A F I E L D

i. Other non-transgender-identified authors, while they might not find trans- genderism/transexuality objectionable, are taken to task for seeing trans-

NOTES TO C H A P T E R F O U R 2 6 9