for katetutor

READ

LIPS

Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender

RIKI ANNE WILCHIN

Firebrand Books

Several selections in this book have appeared in earlier versions in the Village Voice and Women on Women Be

K NOW LED G MEN T S

Copyright (Q 1997 by Riki Anne Wilchins All . r~ghts reserv~d. Except in qu~tation of short passages for the purposes of ~ntlcls

':l and ~evlew , no part of thIs publication may be reproduced in whole or In part In any tonn.

Book and cover design by Nightwood Cover and interior photographs by Mariette Pathy Allen

Hall' and make-up for cover ph ?togr~ph by Maurice XXX, courtesy of The Beach , Greenwich Village (New York City)

97-30783 CIP

As WITH ANY BOOK, THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE TO THANK than room to

thank them, but I would like to express my gratitude to: Linda Colognatollah" Cologna and Caitlin Flowers, for first taking my

work seriously and encouraging me to do the same; Joan Nestle,

for not throwing me out of her apartment fifteen years ago (as I fully expected) when I practically demanded to be included in the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and, instead, pulling out a tape recorder and spending three wonderful hours with me-your insight and compassion in the years since have been an inspiration; David Val-

entine, for many insightful and fruitful discussions on our way to demos and vigils, and for shaking, baking, and filleting the chapter on erotics until it began to make sense; Barbara Warren and the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Center, for years of

support and friendship; Judith Butler, whose ideas lit a candle in

the center of my life; Lisa Mitchell, for first explaining to me what the hell I was talking about and thus for making this book possible;

Kate Bornstein, for being Kate; Jessica Xavier, Denise Norris, Nancy

Burkhalter, and Janice Walworth, for dragging me into street activ- ism; Tonye " Hawk" Barreto-Neto and Nancy "Ninja" Nangeroni for

Printed in Canada

1098765432

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Wilchins , Riki Anne . R~ad my lips: sexual subversion and the end of gender / b Riki Anne

WIIchlns.

p.

cm. ISBN 1-56341-091-5 (alk. paper). ISBN 1- 56341-090-7 (pbk . Ik

I. Wilchins, Riki Anne, 1952- 2. Transexuals-United ' ~at ~ap

BIOgraphy. 3. Lesbians-United States-Biography. HQ77.8.W55A3 1997 305.9'066- dc21 (BJ

1. Title

Editori~1 Sales Rights and Pennission Inquires should be addresses to: FIrebrand Press, 22 Broad St. , Suite 34, Milford, CT 06460

email: editor(?Ylpcgroup. com

chasing around the country from one Menace picketing or demo or murder trial vigil to another-you ve always got my back; Dana Priesing, the goddess of all Congressional advocates, for her tireless dedication to making GenderPAC heard on the hill; Alison Laing, for taking lots of heat while I was learning to apply some of the theory to real- life problems and organizing; Nancy Bereano, who turned down the original manuscript for this book-first, for hav- ing the idea of how it could be made to work, and second, for hav- ing the astonishing lapse of good judgment to publish it; and, :::ourse, all my friends at GenderPAC, the Menace, and S. A., with- )ut whom I might not be here today. To Clare Howell

It was my incredible good luck to find in you someone with the same vision and just as desperate for these words. We searched for the same rainbow, but while my eyeslooked up, you kept yours on the map and guided us both home.

Without you, this book would never have been written. So this is for you, Clare, and all the others we know still out there, desperate,

disheartened, but still anxiously searching the skies, hopeful for any sign of that rainbow.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

WHY THIS BOOK

17 THINGS You DON' T SAY TO A TRANSEXUAL

WHAT DOES IT COST TO TELL THE TRUTH?

VIDEO TAPE

SEX! Is A VERB

THE MENACE STATEMENT TO JANICE RAYMOND

BIRTH OF THE HOMOSEXUAL

THE GAY GAMES CONTROVERSY

WHY IDENTITY POLITICS REALLY, REALLY SUCKS

PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A MOVEMENT

THE MENACE IN MICHIGAN

OUR CUNTS ARE NOT THE SAME

A FASCISM OF MEANING

CLICK. HELLO?

IMAGINARY BODIES, IMAGINING MINDS

EROTICISM: ON THE USES OF DIFFERENCE

LINES IN THE SAND, CRIES OF DESIRE

INTERVIEW WITH A MENACE

A SELECTED CHRONOLOGY OF THE

TRANSEXUAL MENACE AND GENDERPAC

A SUBVERSIVE GLOSSARY

109

115

125

137

141

159

173

185

201

223

Whence come I

and on what wings

that it should take me so long,

humiliated and exiled,

to accept that I am myse~f?

Colette, The Vagabond

IIPREWORD

FIRST OF ALL, SINCE I WEAR SEVERAL HATS (not to mention any number

of ill- fitting dresses), I should point out I am not speaking in any official capacity in this book, nor on behalf of any of the organiza- tions of which I am a member.

Second, in any underrepresented community, there is always the danger that the few voices that are lucky enough to be heard end up being cast as representatives. I face the same danger here. This is why I want to emphasize that my opinions are not to be taken as representative of the membership or board of GenderPAC, the coalition of advocacy groups of which I serve as executive di-

rector. In fact, few trans-identified folks will agree with everything that is contained in this book. Under the broad label of

transpeople-

which I am too quick to use myself-there is an extraordinarily rich and vibrant diversity. Our own margins, in terms of race,

ethnicity, class, and even divergent sub- identities, are still silent and

waiting to be heard from. Here s hoping it happens sooner rather than later.

In any case, the idea of being a spokestrans (or spokesherm)

14 READ MY LIPs FOREWORD

has always seemed absurd to me. You lock three transpeople in a sealed room and they ll come out with five opinions among them. We are that opinionated and stubborn; we have to be to survive. So when you read some particularly bizarre sally of mine, rest assured that I am not a community spokestrans, nor do we all sit around discussing postmodern gender theory every night. All the opinions here are my own. Now that I think of it, the ones you like are mine' those you don t were suggested by my editor, or my publisher probably both.

WILL YOU BE HAVING ONE S OR Two WITH YOUR T?

When I was making my interminable way through the Cleveland Clinic s gender program many years ago, some of the Brits working there spelled transexual with one s. I thought this at least made a single word out of it, since trans-sexual, the literal meaning of which

I take to be "across sexes," has always seemed absurd.

Since I'd never liked the word to begin with, I stayed with the

spelling I liked. This also seemed a way of asserting some small amount of control over a naming process that has always been en- tirely out of my hands-a kind of quiet mini-rebellion of my own. I think transactivist Dallas Denny captured the spirit of the whole enterprise: "Yeah, we ll change it to one until they all start using it.

Then we ll go back to two, or maybe to three." That about sums it

up.

A WORD ABOUT GENDER ACTIVISM

This book makes no pretense of neutrality with regard to the events that are covered, or what is left out. For instance, the chronology could have started with Anne Ogborn, who, as far as I'm aware, originated the idea of a trans protest movement along the lines of ~CT- Up. or Queer Nation in 1992 and founded Transgender Na- ~IO ~. Or I~ could reach back to the first formal radical transorgan- IzatlOn~ lIke ~treet Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S. R.), begun m the 70s by Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera after main- stream queer activism had already begun to turn away from its own genderqueers.

But this book is abolyt what I've experienced, a trajectory that took. me fr~m a camp in the woods outside the Michigan Womyn MusIC FestIval to-four years later-handing a letter signed by a dozen members of Congress decrying gender- based violence to an Assistant Attorney General of the U. S. Department of Justice.

My viewpoint is deeply influenced by those events I've either personally witnessed, or in which I've taken a direct part. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people involved in gender activ- ism today, but this book mentions, at best, only a handful of them or their actions.

In addition, some early readers have come away with the con- ~tion that in-your- face picketing-style transactivism originated

wIth the Menace. That's not true, and this is a good place to set the record straight.

FROM C TO SHINING C

While we re on language, I might as well address the dreaded C words, both of which you will find herein: cock and cunt. It's not

that I get off on being smutty-mouthed (of course I do), but in my

experience it's the way people talk. For those women who find their C word distressing, I can

only point out that I came of age in a lesbian community in which

we reclaimed and employed it with a certain insubordinate and affectionate abandon. I use it in the same spirit here.

ON CONSTITUENCIES: TRANSGENDER V. TRANSEXUAL

Who knows what to call transpeople these days? The dominant dis-

course in the transcommunity is at best a moving target. Transgender

began its life as a name for those folks who identified neither as crossdressers nor as transexuals-primarily people who changed their gender but not their genitals. An example of this is a man who

goes on estrogen, possibly lives full-time as a woman, but does not

have or want sex-change surgery. The term gradually mutated to include any genderqueers who

16 READ My LIps FOREWORD

didn t actually change their genitals: crossdressers, transgenders, stone butches, hermaphrodites, and drag people. Finally, tossing in the towel on the noun-list approach, people began using it to refer to transexuals as well, which was fine with some transexuals, but made others feel they were being erased. These days, I keep getting asked about the Transgender Menace, and I have to correct the ques- tioner. I know of at least one gay rag (which shall remain unmen- tioned) that interviewed me and then changed the name of the group in print, a new kind of censorship.

I secretly believe that transgender is so popular because people

are more comfortable saying it out loud than transexual, which-

you hold the word up in the mirror and read it backward-has sex

cleverly embedded in it. Except where noted otherwise, I've used these terms inter-

changeably, sometimes throwing in transpeople, or, to stress the act

of self-identification or social categorization, trans- identified people.

Although I still use both, during the time since this book was begun this practice has proven unfortunate.

Transgender began as

an umbrella term, one defined by its inclusions rather than its boundaries, coined to embrace anyone who was (in Kate Bornstein felicitous phrase) "transgressively gendered.

Alas, identity politics.is like a computer virus, spreading from the host system to any other with which it comes in contact. In- creasingly, the term has hardened to become an identity rather than

a descriptor. I recently had a butch tell me she didn t want to co-opt

my voice" and so only identified herself as " small transgender.

This is a woman wearing slacks, men s shoes, a man s vest, and so

on. In later (and unrelated) incidents, others asked if it didn t make

me angry that so-and-so was publicly identifying as transgender because she wasn t "really" a transexual, being "only" a drag person,

or an intersexual, or a crossdresser.

The result of all this is that I find myself increasingly invited to erect a hierarchy oflegitimacy, complete with walls and bound- aries to defend. Not in this lifetime.

I have begun speaking simply of gender as a name for that system that punishes bodies for how they look, who they love, or

how they feel-for the size or color or shape of their skin. I do this not to collapse differences, but to emphasize our connections. Dana Priesing, GenderPAC's Washington lobbyist, increasingly tries employ broad-based, inclusive terms like gender- different or gen- der-oppressed.

But at some point such efforts simply extend the linguistic fiction that real identities (however inclusive) actually exist prior to the political systems that create and require them. This is a se- duction of language, constantly urging you to name the constitu- ency you represent rather than the oppressions you contest. It is through this Faustian bargain that political legitimacy is purchased.

I only regret that I have succumbed to this very seduction in too many places. For this is not a book about identities, but about a common cultural machinery-one that repudiates, stigmatizes, and marginalizes many kinds of people. It is a book for anyone com- mitted to changing that system.

ON ApPROPRIATING EXPERIENCES AND ABSENT FRIENDS

To the extent that anyone feels neglected, or any readers feel I have misappropriated or misapplied their experience, I apologize in ad- vance, for this was not my intent.

IN CLOSING

This book has been a labor of love, inspired by the many people whose wisdom and courage have helped save my life. I've tried to write the book I needed sixteen years ago. Please feel free to take what you like and leave the rest.

WHY THIS BOOK

THE FIRST TIME I'D SEEN WHITE CUFFS LIKE THESE was in my women incest group. It happened that two of us were trans- identified. We kept fairly quiet out of fear, although, in truth, I was pretty much out.

Our fears were not misplaced: after a year of unremarkable participation, the casual mention that one of us was "pre-op" blos- somed quickly into weeks of acrimonious exchange. We looked on in silence, gripped by a kind of dazed fascination, as people we thought we knew discussed us amimatedly in the third person, as if we weren t there. In a sense, we weren

While part of me listened to the argument over whether we were "women enough" to stay, another part quietly wondered how it was that only my identity and body were suddenly " in play." vVho had made these rules so others got to vote on me in a way that I was not symmetrically empowered to vote on them? Why were their bod- ies a priori legitimate while mine was somehow the product of group resolution? And how was it that I knew, even if the vote went in our favor, we would have already been disempowered?

20 READ My LIPS WHY THIS BOOK 21

I did not know. I lacked the conceptual tools to understand anything about my situation except that it hurt. I wouldn t have any answers until years later.

It was during this time, in the lull of an inexplicably calm Thanksgiving meeting, that a woman blew like a winter breeze through the crack in our door, folded herself onto the edge of the gunmetal gray chair nearest the exit, and, perching there, began quietly examining the linoleum floor as if it contained the key to the scriptures. By unspoken agreement, we shared in a "go-around"

that night so she wouldn t have to raise her hand to speak. We needn t have bothered. She bolted the room without a

backward glance when her turn came, leaving a wraithlike hole where she d sat. Then it was the rest of us carefully examining the floor, until someone quietly mentioned the white tape on her wrists.

There had been two others after that. One was my friend Hannah, a sculptor. She d nearly severed her hand in a radial arm saw when she was eighteen. She swears she was lucid and calm at the time; yet she was also so desperate, lonely, and disconnected, she hoped it would kill her, or bring someone running-anyone- who d finally listen to the pain inside her.

The other was Christine;' a guitarist, writer, and sometime working- girl. Trying to esGape from her life for one night, she stoned

out on a mix of booze and PCP. Then, using the sharp blade of a sword, she severed the fingers of her guitar-picking hand right above

the top knuckle, one- two- three- four, and didn t feel a thing until

the next morning. The cops had seen this particular tranny in the tank so many times they didn t even try to have her fingers sewn back on.

And then, of course, there s Susan here. Her hands on the steer-

ing wheel look strong and capable in the bright Georgia sunlight. I have just come from addressing an indifferent Atlanta Pride parade audience on this hot June afternoon. She is winding her car along the endless freeways, expertly negotiating each turn

and on-ramp,

hauling me back to the air-conditioned Delta lounge and my plane to New York.

The baking heat must have made me more brain- dead than

usual, because only now do I notice her wrists. Around each, barely above the coffee tan of her hands, are two bands of surgical cotton gauze so immaculate and neatly taped they look for all the world like a matching pair of white shirt cuffs.

There is something peculiarly incestuous about trans-experi- ence. It robs us of our bodies, our intimate moments, our sexuality our childhood. It robs us of honesty, of open friendship, of t luxury of looking into a mirror without pain staring back at us.

It means hiding from friends and family, from spouses and children, as surely as it means hiding from the police car during an evening stroll, or from that knot oflaughing boys down at the cor- ner when we go out for a Coke. In the end, it is as tiring as a con- stant pain and as barren as the bottom of an empty well at high noon.

So why, with the surge of trans and gender theory flooding from the presses, does so little address or assuage our pain? vVhy is it mostly irrelevant to translives? Why have all the observations and theories been so utterly useless for transpeople themselves?

The earliest works were usually about people in rehab some- where. The psychiatrists who wrote them inspected our fetishes, fixations, and gender confusions, producing carefully distanced narratives which were couched in the obscure, analytic language of dysfunction and derangement. We were patients.

Then came the feminist theorists who-while erasing our own voices, and without soiling their pages with the messy complexities of our lived experience-appropriated us as illustrations for their latest telling theories or perceptive insights. We had become ex- amples.

Upon us now is the "trans gender studies" anthology, a ticket to an academic grant and a book. These come from earnest anthro- pologists and sociologists who study us as if we were some isolated and inexplicable distant tribe.2 Their gaze is firmly fixed on such

pressing issues as our native dress, social organization, kinship struc- tures, and relationship with the local gender witch doctors. They employ the objective and nuanced language of ethnography. We

22 READ MY LIps WHY THIS BOOK 23

have become "natives. Is there not something deeply immoral in the way these writ-

ers fail to help those whose lives they blithely mine for new insights and incantations? Do they never feel a twinge of guilt as their "stud- ies" merely escalate the politicalization of our bodies, choices, and desires, so that, with each new book, while their audience enjoys the illusion of knowing more about us, we find ourselves more disempowered, dislocated, and exploited than before?

Aren t you still a male? Do transpeople reinforce gender ste- reotypes? Are you a "third sex ? Why do transpeople divide them- selves up into men and women-shouldn t you be "gender- free Is sex-change surgery voluntary mutilation? Is transgenderism a pathology or mental disorder, and is it learned or genetic?

Academics, shrinks, and feminist theorists have traveled through our lives and problems like tourists on a junket. Picnick- ing on our identities like flies at a free lunch, they have selected the tastiest tidbits with which to illustrate a theory or push a book. The fact that we are a community under fire, a people at risk, is irrel- evant to them. They pursue Science and Theory, and what they produce by mining our lives is neither addressed to us nor recycled within our community. It is dot intended to help, but rather to explicate us as Today s Special: trans under glass, or perhaps only gender a la mode.

Our performance of gender is invariably a site of contest, a problem which-if we could but bring enough hi-octane academic brainpower to bear-might be "solved." The academician s own gen- der performance is never at issue, nor that of the "real" men and women who form the standard to which ours is compared. Through the neat device of "othering" us, their identities are quietly, invis- ibly naturalized. How nice to be normal, to know that the gender- trash is safely locked in the Binary Zoo when they turn off the word

processor at night. No one bothers to investigate the actual conditions of our

lives or the lives of those we hold dear. No one asks about the crush- ing loneliness of so many translives, or about sexual dysfunction. Nor does anyone question why so many of us have to work two

minimum-wage jobs and suck dick on the side so we can enjoy the benefits of a surgical procedure theorists and academics are casu- ally debating for free.

No one does an expose about people like my friend Sarah who was busted for soliciting. Aware that they had no case and that the judge would let her walk the next morning, the cops tossed

her-high heels, make-up, short skirt, boobs and all-into the men tank, and closed the stationhouse door behind them as they left. She was forced to have sex with forty- two men just to survive the night and, by the time the sun came up, she did walk without hav- ing to see a judge. But then, she had already served her sentence.

No one writes about the scores of us who lose our children in custody battles, or the trans-teens who contract HIV by sharing dirty needles because insurance doesn t cover hormones and their parents have thrown them out on the streets. No one researches the special struggles of transpeople of color, or documents the life of my friend Francis, who transitioned in a wheelchair and had bricks thrown through her windows at night.

Nobody inquires why so many transpeople are survivors of incest, child abuse, and outright rape, or what might be done to remedy these crimes.

No one writes about the names we cannot forget, names we still hear in the night-like Christian Paige, a young woman who moved to Chicago to earn money for surgery and ended up bru- tally beaten, strangled, and then stabbed in the chest and breasts so many times that her family at first thought her body had been in- tentionally mutilated. We don t hear about Marsha P. Johnson (drowned), Richard Goldman (shot by his father for crossdressing), Harold Draper (multiple stab wounds), Cameron Tanner (beaten to death with baseball bats), Mary S. (fished out of the trunk of her car-beaten, stabbed, and drowned), Chanelle Pickett (strangled), Brandon Teena (raped, beaten, stabbed, and shot), Deborah Forte (strangled and stabbed), Jessy Santiago (beaten, repeatedly stabbed

with box cutter, screwdriver, and knife), or her younger sister, Peggy, also transgendered, who was killed just three years earlier.

I carry with me a small slip of paper from Camp Trans, " the

24 READ MY LIps WHY THIS BOOK 25

Incested 5 (40%)

Sexually abused as a child 9 (75%)

Physically abused or beaten 12000%) (as a child or adult)

Raped 6 ( 50%)

Shot 2 ( 16%)

Stabbed 3 (25%)

Arrested 6 (50%)

plete isolation from the conditions and forces that create anu HlaW-

tain it. Trans-identity is not a natural fact. Rather, it is the political

category we are forced to occupy when we do certain things with our bodies. That so many of us try to take our own lives, mutilate ourselves, or just succeed in dying quietly of shame, depression, or loneliness is not an accident. We are supposed to feel isolated and desperate. Outcast. That is the whole point of the system. Our feel- ings are not causes but effects.

The regime of gender is an intentional, systemic oppression. As such, it cannot be fought through personal action, but only through an organized, systemic response. It is high time we stopped writing our hard-luck stories, spreading open our legs and our year- books for those awful before-and-after pictures, and began think- ing clearly about how to fight back. It is time we began producing our own theory, our own narrative. No one volume can hope to achieve all this. At best, this is a rough set of beginnings.

I intend to wage a struggle for my life. I intend to fight for my political survival. And until other authors wade down into the deep

end of the pool and confront the challenges we face every day, until

their gender is seen as just as queer as mine, then they are simply another part of the system I seek to overturn.

So this book is dedicated to those who have shared some of this experience: this having one s body and life captured and held hostage, made to bear witness against one s own deepest meanings,

this abduction in broad daylight. It is to trans- identified bodies,

incested bodies, aging bodies, fat- identified bodies, intersexed bod-

ies, differently abled bodies-'-to any and every kind of body which

has been stigmatized, marginalized, and made to bear unbearable meanings-that I write.

And it is to the people with the neat white cuffs that I speak. Some wear them on the outside, some on the inside. In the end, only they will judge my success or failure.

educational event across the road from the Michigan Womyn Music Festival;' as a reminder of what is really at stake in the struggle

over translives. Out of thirty of us at Camp Trans, twelve were trans-identified. We were mostly white, mostly middle and work- ing class, from big cities and small towns, many with at least a year or two of college. In other words, except for being trans- identified,

there was nothing exceptional about us. Whenever I see such courage and determination I assume

there s a lot of survivorship at work and so, on a hunch, I did a makeshift poll, walking casually from person to person as they

munched down cold cereal and hot eggs in the morning mist. After a while, folks started coming up, peering over my shoulder to check the growing tally. Their jaws would tighten, but none looked par- ticularly surprised.

I make no pretense at formal validity, but based on a popula- tion of twelve, here are the results:

In addition, one of us had been burned and one of us had been horsewhipped.

You won t find any of this in the next trans or gender studies book because the real challenges of our lives aren t perceived as

relevant to anyone s theory.3 It is far easier to invest us as a topic of

study than the depredations of the gender regime which margin- alizes and preys upon us. As if one could analyze any ghetto in com-

READ MY LIps

14i1 THINGS You DON' SAY TO A TRANSEXUAL

DON' T # t. " I WAS JUST TALKING TO A CHANGE THE OTHER DAY AND...

To me, this suggests that you are having strange conversations with your pocket money. No one IS a change. One can ask for change, own change, exchange, change tires, change clothes, change sides, change to a minor key, and have a change oflife, but one cannot BE a change.

1. There is an excellent term in medj~iri.e for this kind of practice: iatrogenic. Iatrogenic

medicine, such as blood-letting by leaches or treatment with arsenic, actually creates disorder and disease, sometimes the very one it is intended to treat. I believe any cat- egorical system of knowledge that creates and maintains people like me as a "

pathol-

ogy" ought to be described as an iatrogenic epistemology and named for what it does: e., naturalizing some bodies by creating mine as a kind of disease.

2. My anthro-apologist friend David Valentine has coined the verb to tribify (TRI~beh-

fi) to name this propensity of social scientists to naturalize their own gender and geni- tals while treating mine as if they were the product of some quaint practice by an exotic" or foreign tribe.

DON' T #2. "You LOOK JUST AS GOOD AS I DO.

Of course I do. And this is precisely the state of grace to which we all aspire. But more than likely, you do. both of us an injustice.

3. For a wonderful cou,nterexample of engaged and relevant academic inquiry, see Ki Namaste s remarkable " Genderbashing: Sexuality, Gender, and the Regulation of Pub-

lic Space" in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14 (1996): 221- 240. She

mines the critical issue of transviolence, but only to tease out and interconnect wider issues of all gender- based violence. In addition, she does so without stigmatizing her transgender subjects. The focus of her study is the workings of the gender regime it- self-the ways violence is used to regulate gender in public space-and not just transpeople as (detached) subjects.

DON' T #3. " WELL, I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I CERTAINLY CONSIDER YOU A WOMAN.

It is a never- ending source of wonderment that well- intentioned, and otherwise very well-brought-up people say this to me, with a light of total sincerity shining in their eyes for which any self-

28 READ My LIps 17 THINGS You DON T SAY. .

respecting cocker spaniel would kill. Unfortunately, this assurance turns on at least four assump-

tions which, upon closer inspection, prove to be unfounded: (a) my gender is a subject about which reasonable people might be expected to reasonably differ; (b) my gender is a topic that is cur- rently open for discussion; (c) my gender, and your perception of it, is something about which I suffer rather a great deal of anxiety and about which I am seeking some reassurance; and (d) you, since you are a nontransexual, are in just the providential position of providing me with this reassurance I so desperately seek.

DON' #8. " CAN YOU HAVE AN ORGASM?"

DON' #9. " You MUST HAVE HAD A LOT OF COURAGE TO FACE SURGERY.

DON' #4. " I THINK YOU' RE AS MUCH A WOMAN AS ANY OF MY FRIENDS.

To have the actual surgery, I just had to be able to breathe deeply, count at least partway backward from one hundred, and fall asleep with some semblance of dignity. In all of these tasks I was reliably aided by enough anesthesia to subdue a small water buffalo. It would also have helped had I ten- to- twenty thousand dollars in spare change (see #1 above). Unfortunately, while I was thus drifting majestically off to sleep, I found I also had to be able to watch

friends, most of my lovers, all of my family, and any lesbian who used the term politically correct in any context other than a Lily Tomlin joke, fade out of my existence forever. Also, I found that I woke up to endless refrains of DON' Ts #1- 8, above. That is the hard part. The surgery I could probably do again before breakfast.

What a treat for them. Especially your male friends.

DON' #5. " I WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED YOU WERE A TRANSEXUAL. "

This phrase is usually accompanied by a look of the utmost incre- dulity, followed closely by a searching, penetrating, and largely sotto

voce reappraisal of all thethings you thought you knew about me (or, perhaps, only all the times we slept together). Unfortunately, this utterance assumes that your credulity, no doubt a topic of end- less fascination to you, is of equal interest to me. Since there are tens of thousands of us (maybe in your building alone!), the fact that some of us can "pass" (a nasty concept if ever there was one) as nontransexuals only prophesies that, wedded to the entirely fragile notion that you should be capable of identifying all of us on sight, you are destined for a life of more or less unending private humili- ations.

DON' # 1 O. " I DON' T THINK IT' S ANYONE' S CONCERN WHAT' S BETWEEN YOUR LEGS UNLESS THEy' RE SLEEPING

WITH YOU.

Well, yes. But you, like me, might be surprised at the profound lack of fastidiousness some people display to even this tender area, as my weekly trips to the accoutrement racks at the Pleasure Chest and Eve s Garden confirm. In any case , I'm quite certain that what- ever is between your legs, even during those hot, sticky, yucky days of summer, is totally above reproach and perfectly charming, while what's between mine , even on the very best of days, is, well, let's just not talk about it.

DON' # 11. " I THINK TRANSEXUALS ARE JUST MEN IN

DON' #6. " CAN YOU HAVE AN ORGASM?"

Yes, but only when I'm asked this question.

DRAG.

DON' #7. " CAN YOU HAVE AN ORGASM?"

Of course you do, and you re entitled to your opinion. You can even be justifiably proud to think so. Do not, however, voice this senti- ment while surrounded by a room full of men who really are

30 READ My LIps 17 THINGS You DON T SAY. . .

drag (for instance, at the next Fantasy Ball). Also, be certain to note the exception to this rule , which is, of course, female- to-male

transexuals, who are really, well, just women in drag. We all know how naturally distasteful it is when men wear dresses or women wear pants. Do not, however, voice this sentiment while surrounded

by a room of S/M dykes in full leather and studs.

entirely of compressed soy by-products. And you look just like a REAL transexual. Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn t realize that was an insult.

DON' T # 17. " ISN' T IT AMAZING, YOU' RE THE ONLY TRANSEXUAL I KNOW.

DON' T # 13. " I THINK OF TRANSEXUALITY AS A KIND OF BIRTH DEFECT.

Yes, and isn t it amazing that when you came out to your mother, you were the only homosexual she knew. Ho-hum. The fact that am the only transexual you know only emphasizes that: (a) you probably know a few hundred of us but you don t know you k~ow us, and we won t tell you that you do; (b) there are tens of thou- sands of us, and more all the time; (c) we are secretly plotting to take over the planet Earth, and infiltrating your prevailing non- transexual culture is just the first step; and (d) while we are waiting to take over your planet we are amusing ourselves at your expense by seeing just how much we can fuck with your heads.

DON' T # 12. " I HEAR YOU RE A TRANSEXUAL. WHEN DID YOU

HAVE SURGERY?"

Yes, and I hear you re a homosexual: when did you first suck cock? Ohhhh- s not about sex.

So do 1. I was born into the wrong culture.

DON' T # 14. " How DID YOU KNOW YOU' RE A WOMAN?"

How did you know you were a woman? Ah-hmm: breasts and va-

gina. Well, I can introduce you to some very handsome, bearded, muscular young men oJ my acquaintance who began life with the very same equipment, so that s not particularly compelling evidence,

is it?.. I see, inside YOU just know. Call me sometime, we ll have

lunch.

DON' T # 15. " Is IT TRUE THAT TRANSEXUALS ARE ' WOMEN

TRAPPED IN MEN S BODIES'

Yes, that's right. In my own case, they had to call in both the Fire Department and the EMS and even then it took them hours to cut

me out. Luckily I had my Walkman and some wonderful Judy Gar- land tapes, so it wasn t too awful a wait.

DON'T # 16. " You LOOK JUST LIKE A REAL WOMAN.

How splendid, especially when you recall I'm composed almost

HAT DOES IT COST TO TELL THE TRUTH?

I WAS TIVENTY-SIX WHEN I LEARNED I was very tall. For most of my life I had been considered normal height. But at twenty-six, suddenly, strangers in elevators began leaning toward me conspiratorially and asking, "How tall are you, anyway?" as if we d been having a conver- sation on the subject. There were delivery men who inquired, "You play roundball?" and even one man on a motorcycle who slowed alongside me to exclaim, "You must be a volleyball player!"

Although I had never before worried about my height, I be- gan studying myself in mirrors. I began seeing myself as tall. In short order, I became self-conscious about the length of my body. I stooped fashionably while walking down the street, tried not to stand up too straight in bars or at parties, and leaned against walls and pillars when speaking so I wouldn' t appear to be towering over shorter people.

WELCOME TO GENDERHELL

I learned a lot of other things about my body as well. My voice was unnervingly deep. My hands were too large, my shoulders too broad,

34 READ MY Lips WHAT DOES IT COST TO TELL THE TRUTH?

my hips too narrow, and my feet much too big. The same size bas- ketball sneakers I'd been wearing for over ten years suddenly looked ridiculous, even to me. People made public jokes about my "boats.

I stopped wearing them, even stopped shooting hoops. Although I'd been slender for decades, since I was now " too big," I stopped

working out at the gym as well. I was obsessed with how I looked and was perceived. I be-

came a ferocious shopper, lusting after any clothing that would hide my height and shoulders. I bought winter gloves and dress shoes size too small. My pinched hands and feet went along with the higher

voice I practiced when speaking on the phone. Over a terrifyingly short period of only one year, my entire

perception of my body changed to match the social truths every- one else read there. The mirror, formerly a friend, turned into a deadly enemy. I felt humiliated, ashamed, each time I looked in it, weeping quietly in dressing rooms and loudly at home. I appeared ridiculous to myself because I was seeing what I was told was there:

this absurdly tall person with large hands, ungainly feet, wide shoul- ders, a deep voice, and a masculine manner. Need I go on? What is most remarkable is that I had been about the same size and shape since I was fifteen.

hit puberty and are seized by the cultural machine. In my case,

though, I already had a stable body image, and I was an adult, fully aware of what was going on. It shocks me to this day how quickly r learned to make my body over, to embrace the various social truths about it, and to see on it what I was told. I knew what people were thinking when they looked me up and down, stared at my body parts, and inspected my face.

TELL ME How I LOOK

READ ANY GOOD WOMEN LATELY?

People being introduced to me no longer make eye contact-they

make crotch contact," a friend, just starting to be read as a woman, told me.

My body, like hers, heretofore just a place to put food, carry

out certain operations of pleasure, and get me from point A to point B, had overnight become an armed camp which I surveyed at my peril. It hurt to be me, and it hurt to see me.

I am reminded of a recent meeting with a transexual female friend of mine. She had begun living full-time as a woman, and eagerly showed me pictures of herself in make-up and various out-

fits. Again, this is much like any teenager would do. What particu-

larly struck me was that, as she anxiously scanned my face for a reaction, she said, " I have to depend on other people to tell me how I look because I don t know how to see myself yet.

How strange that she was soliciting this information from someone who customarily walks around with a short, butchy hair- cut, wearing no make- up, dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, and a large black Transexual Menace T-shirt. Which is to say that I do not, at

first blush, inspire confidence as the best possible judge of such matters. I could not care less how either of us is read by nontransexuals.

What had happened was that I'd started being read by others " as a

woman. That my body became the site of all kinds of social inspection

and pronouncements didn t surprise me. But the virulence did. I

was accosted from every direction: from the men who hissed at me on street corners; to the man on the train who leaned over and

said, " Nice tits," as I boarded; to the construction workers who whistled or yelled, " Faggot!" ; to the driver who rolled down his win-

dow at a crowded intersection, the very first time I went out in a dress, to shout, " God, you sure are uuug- Iy!"

In many ways I imagine that what happened to me is not much

different from what happens to many teenagers once their bodies

No ADMISSION TO LIFE WITHOUT A VALID GENDER ID

How does it happen that the human subject makes himself into an

object of possible knowledge, through what forms of rationality, through

what historical necessities, and atwhatprice? My question is this: How

much does it cost the subject to be able to tell the truth about itse~t?

36 READ My LIPS WHAT DOES IT COST TO TELL THE TRUTH?

What does it cost to tell the truth? Michel Foucault, " How Much Does It Cost to Tell the Truth?"!

Foucault asked about the necessity of making one s self an object

of possible knowledge, to be learned and memorized. For gendergueers, that necessity is survival. The purpose of a gender

regime is to regulate these meanings and to pumsh .those wh? tra~s-

gress them. In order to survive, to avoid ~he. bashmgs, ~he Jo~ dIS-

crimination, and the street-corner humilIatIOns, my frIend wIll be

forced to place herself as a site of truth to be mastered. That knowl-

edge will come from others. She must know how others see ~er so she can know how to see herself; otherwise, she enters soCIety at

her peril. She will gradually learn how she looks and w~at ~er body

means. She will carry this knowledge around, producmg It on de- mand like pocket ID when she enters a subway car, applies for a

job, approaches the police for directions, uses a w?men s ro~m, or

walks alone at night past a knot of men. Summomng up the I in her mind's eye, she will recall the truth of her looks, checkmg It

quickly to determine if anything is "wrong:' feeling shame at her

shortcomings and pride in her attractive features. Like me, she may find nerself growing further and further

from direct sensation, S0 that in small, gradual steps it becomes successively less important what her body feels like than how she

feels about it. As the source of what her body means becomes more

firmly lodged in the perceptions of others, she may exp~~Ience .

curious and distressing sense of dislocation and vulnerabIlIty. ThIs ID that she carries-her body-will be continually subjected to being displayed, stamped, and judged.

Since her status and legitimacy as a woman wIll always be at

risk, always be determined by and dependent upon others: she may

find that her lack of contact with sensation grows along wIth a nag- ging sense of bodily disorientation. She will wake one day to .

find

herselflost within the unfamiliar landscape of her own body, lIke a

nomad in some strange and foreign desert, surrounded by unkno ,:n

landmarks and inhabited by those whose alien features, and dIS-

tant ways, she can no longer recognize.

A DACHSHUND PONDERS WIENER-PEOPLE

Someone out there is undoubtedly saying, "Well, all this is very moving, but there is a reality to bodies and you can t get around it. For starters, compared to other women, you are tall." Such a com- ment highlights my point.

We like to think, in Judith Butler s memorable phrase, that physical features exist somewhere out there "on the far side oflan- guage."2 But if even a feature as fundamental and measurable as my tallness" can only be derived through your reviewing a popula-

tion of bodies, perceiving some normative measure, and then car- rying out (albeit unconsciously) an operation of comparison, then that tallness looks suspiciously to me like something you read on me instead of some innate feature in me. My measurable height may not be arguable; what it means is.

Characteristics of mine that are truly innate, that originate on the far side of language:' ought to be totally apparent to you

whether you d ever seen another human being or not, even if you only seen me mounted like the gendertrash insect I am, even if you were a Martian seeing your first humanoid, or a wiener-dog view- ing its first vertically challenged primate. Any other readings of my body are culturally relative, contingent upon the context in which you locate me. Hence, if we lived among the Munchkins, you d ar- gue I was naturally a giantess, while if we lived among the New York Knicks, you d insist I was somewhat short.

The response to deconstructing the body in this way is fre- quently to offer up counterexamples, of which skin color is the most common. That line of reasoning goes like this: "Perhaps you re right. Perhaps some things about bodies are culturally constructed. But some features are simply there. For instance, what about race? Surely color is just color and not some cultural by-product.

Not so, I say, for while skin color itself may be on the far side of language, nearly everything else we can know about it and all that is culturally resonant is not. Such resonances are often specific to particular subcultures. Black, for example, is a peculiarly

38 READ My Lips WHAT DOES IT COST TO TELL THE TRUTH?

American phenomenon. White Americans often see only African-American" or "black" when they look at someone who

appears darker- hued than they are. This perception unconsciously follows the notorious one drop rule;'3 a bizarre invention

of white

America which historically held that one drop of African blood

made a person black. Yet most black Americans are able to see the

complex range and variety of shades in which skin color can come.

Since being white has been supremely privileged, and therefore re- quired no further qualification, specific shades of brown or black

have held tremendous significance and implications for surviving

within a racist system.

found small penises masculine and attractive. Large dicks were con- sidered animal-like, and often the butt (sorry) of public jokes. Men with big dicks learned shame and began to tuck;' just like any sen- sible drag queen. A transmale friend who recently returned from a trip to Greece told me how comfortable he d felt. Everywhere he went, all the statues and pictures had small, manly dicks-just like his.

OH YEAH? WELL, My MOM SAYS YOUR BODY Is JUST A

DISCURSIVELY PRODUCED EVENT BASED ON HIGHLY VAR!ABLE

CULTURAL NORMS

EVERYONE' S ANSWER Is THE ONLY ANSWER

Each era in history considers its own embrace of the body s fea-

tures as "natural" and eternal. But bodies, like all cultural products, go through periods, phases, and even fashions. Consider the breast in the recent American landscape. Only a few decades ago the duckbilled breast, as shaped by the tortured duckbill-shaped bra, was the standard of beauty. Shortly thereafter, large full breasts were seen as beautiful and the height of femininity. In just the next gen-

eration, with bras burning across the land, small breasts were "natu-

rally" feminine and those "cursed" with big, full breasts found them-

selves "too big. For another hoot, consider how definitions

of masculinity and

muscularity have changed. Look at George Reeves of the old

black-and-white Superman TV show. His stomach stuck out be-

yond his chest; his arms had no noticeably defined muscles.

pare him to Christopher Reeve of the modern Superman mOVIes,

who was sculpted like a body-builder. Both generations find their models " naturally" manly. Both would find the other s model in-

comprehensible. For that matter, you would think at least that cherished staple,

the Big Dick, would have a stable cultural identity. I mean, more

always better, right? Not necessarily. Thomas Laqueur 4 relates t~at

the ancient Greeks, from whom we inherit much of our aesthetICs,

As I sat down next to my seatmate on the bus leaving the National Women s Music Festival in Bloomington, Indiana, she said quickly, Please pardon my fat hips." I was nonplused, not having noticed

her hips. Foucault's questions came to mind: What kind of system bids us each make of our bodies a problem to be solved, a claim

must defend, or a secret we must publicly confess, again and again? Since she and I were stuck together for the next two hours,

proceeded to discuss some of these questions, in particular, why she had felt obliged to apologize to a complete stranger.

Oh, I know, I shouldn t think of them that way," she said. My feminist friends tell me I should think of them as nurturing

and matemal." Oh, no, I exclaimed, "that's the same thing. It just means

this time the jury came back with a different verdict. You re still in the dock awaiting judgment-either way they decide, you ll still have been radically disempowered. The question really should be, what is the original cultural concern with your pelvis and bodyfat that requires us to recognize and agree on a meaning in the first place? In other words, whose agenda is it that demands your hips must be gendered with a particular meaning, or to even have any

meaning at am"

The body," said Simone de Beauvoir, " is a situation."o In Of-

40 READ My LIPS

del' to grasp our bodies; to think of them as well as to understand the cultural gaze that fixes upon them, we must construct what our bodies can be said to mean and to look like.

\fIle rely upon other members of our speech community to do this, since it is in the meanings reflected back at us through culture

that we find truth. Almost everything about bodies is discovered through comparison from the collection of meanings stored in a common language: pretty, fat, plain, masculine, short, light -skinned, wrinkled, feminine, broad, sleek, ugly, athletic, deformed, slim, ro- tund, buxom, old, delicate. The litany traps and enfolds each body.

For some of us, the meanings culture drapes upon our bodies

are extremely painful and depressing. Worse still, a gender system tends to enforce monolithic meanings. Big breasts must mean one thing, hairy backs another, wrinkles yet another still, providing us little or no room to construct our selves and create alternatives.

Simply having our bodies exposed to social judgment can be painful and disturbing to some people. I remember my sixty- five-

year-old friend who said, "You know, when I first look at myself in the mirror, I look fine. I think, Well, all right! But I look once again,

harder, imagining how people must see me, and then I see only the fat and wrinkles and I feel just awful:'

What does it costtotell the truth? I guess if your sense of self matches closely with the cultural

grid of what you should mean, and you find those meanings pleas- ing, then the "truth" doesn t come too expensive. For the rest of us, though, it can cost a great deal.

IDEO TAPE

REWIND

It' s beautiful;' I exclaim. It is, in fact, a particularly fine watch my father has just bought for my seventh birthday, the jewelled face throwing back at me the summer s sunlight. "It' s.. .it's..., " I hesitate, searching for just the right word, " it's divine. I breathe happily. My father s face comes up sharply, his pupils narrowing. " Boys don say divine." And he watches me, his head cocked slightly to one side. I open my mouth to question this unfathomable statement, as if certain dictionary words were colored blue for boys and pink for

girls, but there is something hard in his voice and eyes. Suddenly,

my pleasure evaporates and is replaced entirely by fear. know if I question him I'll probably get the palm of his hand. You know, when a six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-pound man hits you in the face

with his open hand, it's like being hit in the head with a ham. And so, mumbling something to my feet like, "Well, it is very nice;' I make a

small mental note to avoid this particular word in the future.

1. Michel Foucault in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith

Butler (New York, Routledge, 1993), p. 93.

2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 114.

3. Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex (New York: An-

chor Books, 1992), p. 14.

4. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 3

5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 301. Read at a transexualspeak-out held at New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Center in 1993 in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Christine Jorgensen s sex-change surgery.

READ MY Lips VIDEO TAPE

FAST FORWARD

The woman sitting across from me is so butch she is often mis-

taken for a man. We have been discussing the pros and cons of her

beginning testosterone treatments. But at the moment, she is lec-

turing me on being more feminine. "You sometimes-I don t want

to hurt your feelings-but you sit crosslegged in meetings and some-

times it takes up some of the space of the woman next to you. As a

woman, I just wouldn t do that. It's your male training, like the

men on the subway who have to spread their legs and take up

two

seats. You don t understand how intimidating to women male be-

havior can be.

and I have a mouthful of saltwater. For once, I've got to confront someone who is discriminating against me, if only to talk. I call,

just asking for a dialogue, a chance to at least explore our differ- ences. After a few minutes she tells me I'm simply a transvestite who has mutilated himself and hangs up.

REWIND

QUICK REWIND

I have been invited as a guest panelist at the Lesbians Undoing Sexual Taboos conference for women. I sit when I'm done speaking, sens- ing the pressure that has built up in the room. The women start applauding, and it just goes on and on and on. I sit. I can t even

look at this stunning validation, this unbelievable, unsought wel- come back into some kind of

women s community after I left all

that behind twelve years ago iri Cleveland. Later, in response to

audience question, I ret'ffark how strange it is to be an honored

guest at an event that probably would have tossed my ass out ten years ago. It's like riding the

crest of a wave. What a strange thing- to be on the edge of a coming change, a change you have waited for,

hungered and worked for, that suddenly begins to happen all around

you.

Eighth-grade math class. I cannot hear what the teacher is saying. In fact, I don t care what she s saying. I am totally mesmerized by the sight of Dara Rosen new young breast disappearing into the cup of her new young bra, something I can just barely see as she sits across from me in her sleeveless dress. Worse, I am torn between wanting desperately to touch that soft breast and wanting desper- ately to have that soft breast.

FAST FORWARD

FORWARD, NORMAL SPEED

One of the exciting things to come out of the LUST conference is

that a woman is planning a dinner and sex party for one hundred women. Oh boy, does this sound hot or what? I've

been waiting

about a decade for something like this to happen. I find one of the

fliers at the Center. As I quickly scan the brochure, I see on the

bottom of the last page: No Men, No Transvestites, and No Tran-

sexuals. Riding the crest of a wave indeed. The board has just flipped

I am on the trading floor at Republic National Bank. It is the third day of my nine-month consulting contract. One of the block trad- ers far down the floor is taking down everyone s name and phone extension, and when he gets to me he calls for me to spell out my name. I do, and he yells back, " Riki Anne, that s cute. Where d that come from?" "Well;' I respond, " it used to be Richard." The heads of two distant block traders, intently tracking the DOW movement on their monitors, swivel sharply around as if on soundless ball bearings. They stare briefly at me before returning to the DOW. My boss, sitting next to me, who has come to Wall Street from a very gay twelve-year career in musical theater, chuckles softly without even looking up from his screen. He is having more fun with this than a pig in shit.

FORWARD, NORMAL SPEED

My new boss, a twenty-five-year-old NYU finance graduate, is star- ing intently at my chest. Actually, not my chest, but the area on my coat over my chest-just over my heart, on the left side. I've been a little intimidated here at J. E Morgan. I've spent a year and a hi"

44 READ MY Lips VIDEO TAPE

trying to get a consulting contract and I'm finally in. I look down,

knowing helplessly that I'm probably wearing some of my break- fast. Just what I need. But I am not. What I am wearing is my Take a

Transexual to Lunch button, which I wear everywhere butinto work

and which this morning, of all mornings, I have neglected to re- move.

running out of hyphens here) friends can stand and giggle and point at someone as strange and unique as me.

REWIND

REWIND

Dad is climbing through the fence, which is made of barbed-wire strands, strung from fence posts all over this farm where we are hunting pheasant. It is freezing cold with a half foot of snow on the ground, but we are both bulkily dressed and shod against the weather and the wind that gathers speed blowing down across the open fields. To get through the fence, to separate and hold the rusted barbed wire, he has to hand me his big 12- gauge shotgun, which I hold along with my smaller, lighter 20-gauge. As he climbs through, I can see the only thing around us, the clubhouse, far over his shoul- der in the lonely distance, a single black silhouette against the gath- ering sky. I tell myself I can do it. I can say I dropped it and it went off, and inside my head a little pounding begins and small quivers are starting to knot my stomach and shoulders. You wouldn t re- ally, I say to myself, but already I can see the look of surprise, that final, complete grasp of fact as the shotgun goes off, blowing a hole in that bastard that only a 12- gauge shotgun at very close range can make, a hole I could put my entire thirteen-year-old fist through, the sound echoing off the clubhouse and back at us, locked in that moment, gratefully and mercifully our last moment together. Me knowing I am free, finally, at last. They ll believe me if I cry, if I withdraw into myself. I know how to do months of silent, strained shock to hide from people. He has at least taught me that. And then I imagine the devastation to my mother and our lives, and the years of questions and forms and police and authorities and, while I am thinking of all this, he is through the fence and reaches for me to hand him his gun, no thought in his head but that I obey instantly, as usual, and like a puff of quick air, the single moment of safety and freedom hits me and is gone.

My friend Deborah has offered to stay over with me. It' s my first

night back home from ~urgery, and I gratefully accept. We lie qui- etly in bed together. She s holding me gently. "Can I feel?" she asks after a minute. "Yes, but I have a dilator in, so you can t really go

inside." She puts her hand between my legs anyway. "Can I move

it?" she asks. " Sure, why not." I have no thought on this subject, just a kind of curiosity and a small, flaming desire to lose whatever kind of virginity this is, after losing so many others. She pushes gently, firmly, on the dilator, as her body leans toward mine. For the first time in my twenty-eight-year-old life, I feel a woman moving in- side me, in my vagina.

FAST FORWARD

I am at a private, very underground, lesbian women s S/M night at

Paddles here in New York, having been invited by Pat Califia, who, by many accounts, began this movement. This is, at best, a super-marginalized minority within a minority, which New York' Finest can raid with complete impunity at any time they choose during the evening. A woman approaches me, dressed entirely in shining black leather from neck to toe, holding a rather substantial riding crop. She flexes it as we talk. After a few minutes, she con- fides that she finds me very attractive, and wonders if! enjoy being whipped because she would very much like to whip me. As we con-

tinue talking and I mention I am transexual, she freezes, stares in-

tently, and looking a bit green around the gills excuses herselfhur-

riedly to stalk across the room, where she and several of her nontransexualleather- clad lesbian- feminist sado-masochistic (I'm

FAST FORWARD

Jaye Davidson is going to pull the trigger. She is absolutely going to

46 READ MY LIps VIDEO TAPE

pop that nontransexual IRA bitch. I am watching The Crying Game, which every nontransexual friend and acquaintance has told me I must see, and I'm remembering being in that final presurgical meet- ing at the Cleveland Clinic. I am in tears, surrounded by about eight doctors and a dozen perky young nurses, trying desperately to con- vince these sodden bastards that yes, I am a transexual and yes, I want them to make sure I have a functioning clit when they re done carving up my groin because yes, I do still get hot for women and I look forward to them going down on me. One doctor has asked me with barely suppressed disgust how I would feel if I couldn t have an orgasm (how would you feel if your sorry-assed wienie-roasted limp dick couldn t have an orgasm?) and another has pointed to his impossibly feminine, delicate WASP nurse, explaining patiently that I understand, of course, I won t come out looking like her, and I am thinking of all the women telling me that I can never be a real woman, presumably like them, and now phrases like women- born

women only, biological women only, genetic women only-or what- ever exclusionary formula is in vogue with our very best lesbian thinkers this year-start tumbling over and over each other in my head like a bunch of manic puppies. I am thinking about all those feminine, self-satisfied, dismissive young Jewish girls I grew up with, went to synagogue with, hated and lusted for and lost sleep over, and I swear I am practically coming in my pants here on the theater seat as Jaye finally pulls the trigger on that nontransexual bitch. Not just once, the first shot echoing out and the surprise register- ing on those small, delicate, well-spaced features just like I knew it would on my father s larger, heavier European ones. No, Jaye, my hero of the moment, my trans-savior, pulls again and again and again and five, six, seven-how many shots are in an automatic?- until that beautiful nontransexual woman, the kind that if we look like them they tell us how well we pass, she s do~n for the count, and I'm telling myself frantically after four years of Twelve- Step programs that I'm not about violence and I've given up fighting anyone or anything. But the anger and tears rise in my throat with the bitterness of bile and stick there like some kind of demonic fishbone, and I know helplessly and a little guiltily that I'll rent this

video, not for the directing, which is nearly perfect, nor the storylin e . which is brilliant, but just to see Jaye pull that trigger in this scene

again and again and again.

The problem with transexual women is not that we are trapped in the wrong bodies. The truth is that that is a fairly trivial affair corrected by doctors and sharp scalpels. The problem is that we are trapped in a society which alternates between hating and ignoring, or tolerating and exploiting us and our experience.

More importantly, we are trapped in the wrong minds. We have, too many of us for too long, been trapped in too much self- hate: the hate reflected back at us by others who, unwilling to look at the complexity of our lives, dismiss our femaleness, our femi- ninity, and our sense of gender and erotic choices as merely imita- tive or simply derivative. Wanting desperately to be accepted, and unable to take on the whole world alone, we have too often listened to these voices that were not our own. We have forgotten what Alice Walker says when she declares:

No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your si- lence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any

fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.

And our lesson is neither new nor unique. From Lyndall MacCowan:

It means knowing I'm a freak. It means knowing that I am not a woman. I means falling in love with girls and, at the same time, despising their femininity, their obsession with makeup and boys, their lack of strength and brains. It means knowing that both the kind of woman I want and the kind of woman I am don t exist, do not have names... If it does not someday make me kill myself, it something that can get me killed.

READ My LIPS

Transexuality? No, she s speaking about being a self- identi-

fied lesbian femme in the 70s and 80s. There are no new changes,

just new faces. In closing, let me tell you about one transexual. After ten years

of hiding and passing and sucking up to nontransexual women, strung out and totally desperate, she started a transexual group.

She started talking with them and hanging out with them and being seen with them, although at first she hated it. She started wearing buttons a:o.~ coming out at every appropriate and inap- propriate moment, just as if her life were as normal and natural as anyone else s. And she learned that although she might hate herself, she could not hate the fifty or one hundred other transexuals she met, whose stories she heard, whose tears of frustration and rage she saw, whose everyday, one- day-at-a-time, courage to survive she witnessed. And she understood, at last, the redemptive power of community, and how it can only be stifled by self-hate and silence.

Community, my friends and transexual kin is what we build here today, by coming together to claim our own, our history, and our Christine. Christine, standing alone in God's own light, in a way none of us have had to since, made all of this and all of us possible.

-~

EX. Is A VERB

The Transexual Menace demonstrates at a reading Janice Raymond does in 1994 at Judith's Room, the last of New York City's women s bookstores (and now defunct). She is the author of a remarkably hostile, transphobic tract. Dr. Raymond draws about two dozen people who are obviously bewildered to be in the midst of an equal number of genderqueers in black Menace T-shirts. By prior agreement with the owners, Dr. Raymond and I engage in a debate following her reading. I am taken aback as she immediately exclaims, " But why would you want to do that to your body?"

Do what?" 1 ask.

1. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1983),

636.

2. Lyndall MacCowan, " Re-collecting History, Renaming Ourselves: Femme Stigma and the Feminist Seventies and Eighties" in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-

Butch Reader,

edited by Joan Nestle (Boston: Alyson. 1992), p. 311.

\/VeIl, have it cut into, change your sex.

How do you know I' ve had surgery?"

Well, I mean I assume... :' she trails off, gesturing vaguely at my Menace T-shirt and looking baffled.

But why would you care? At the risk of sounding heartless, Dr. Raymond, I don t give a damn what you do with your body.

50 READ MY LIPS SEX! Is A VERB 51

CLICK.

that matter, forget all these arguments and try the "negligible" line out on Cheryl Chase, a founding member of the protest group Her- maphrodites With Attitude.

Yes. Hello, I'm a transexua1 woman and

Hello? Hello?

CLICK.

HONEST OFFICER, THEY WERE SEXED HERE WHEN I ARRIVED

re taught that while gender may come from Culture, sex comes from Nature. All bodies already have a sex " " them. This sex is ~cog?ized an~ expre:sed by culture as gender through social prac-

tIces lIke clothmg, haIrStyles, and whether one finds pastels simply faa~aabulous. ~ this narrative, sex is a natural property of bodies, whIle gender IS Just what culture makes of them. In Judith Butler terms, ! Sex is to Nature (raw) as Gender is to Culture (cooked). ~he naturalness of sex grounds and legitimizes the cultural prac- tIces of gender. But what if this narrative is actually inverted?

The more we look, the less natural sex looks. Everywhere we turn, every aspect of sex seems to be saturated with cultural needs and priorities. Mother Nature has Mankind's fingerprints all over Her.

Maybe the formula is reversed. Gender is not what culture creates out of my body s sex; rather, sex is what culture makes when it genders my body. The cultural system of gender looks at my body, creates a narrative of binary difference, and says, " Honest, it was here when I arrived. It's all Mother Nature s doing." The storv of a natural sex that justifies gender evaporates, and we see sex sta~ding revealed as an effect of gender, not its cause. Sex, the bodily feature most completely in-the-raw, turns out to be thoroughly cooked, and our comforting distinction between sex and gender collapses. We are left staring once again at the Perpetual Motion Machine of gender as it spins endlessly on and on, creating difference at every turn.

Yes. Hello, I'm interested in changing my sex on my driver

Hello? Hello?

MEET ME IN THE DARK, UNDER THE SMALL PART OF THAT

CURVE , You KNOW-WHERE ALL THE HOT, NEW ANOMALIES

HANG OUT

Is there one sex or two? Or, including the intersexed (hermaphro- dites), how about three or four? The argument that intersexed bodies are pathology doesn t help us much, because-assuming the bod- ies are perfectly functional-that's a value judgment masquerad- ing as medical fact.

Saying that the intersexed comprise just a negligible fraction doesn t help us, either. It just takes us out of the land of Fact and Nature, plopping us squarely in the squishy realm of Probabilities and Chance. Deciphering this begins to look suspiciously more like cultural judgment than the cold eye of Impartial Science.

ATTACK OF THE INTERSEXED PEOPLE!

Who gets to say which bodies "count," and why? How small a per-

centage counts as negligible? Whose body counts as the standard for normal, and how different can I be before I become pathology!

According to the Intersex Society of North America, about one in two thousand births is intersexed. They estimate that five intersexed infants are operated on each day. All these operations, oj

course, are performed without the patients' consent. Many are mu-

tilated for life by a medical science that seeks to impose aesthetic norms on bodies that function perfectly well but are different. FOJ

ANOTHER DAY IN THE LIFE OF A GENDERTRASH REJECT

What social systems make the recognition and lifelong attachment of a sex on my body possible? What cultural agencies push it along? Which institutions store and retrieve knowledge about my bod~,

52 READ MY lips SEX! Is A VERB 53

and at what points of contact with society is this information brought into play?

Let's take a walk around town. I've a busy day, so try to keep up. It's 1980 and I'm preparing for " sex -change" surgery, which is wonderful, but the timing is kind of a bummer since I have to reg- ister for graduate school at Cleveland State University. But I can handle it. I'm a genderqueer. I can handle anything.

My first stop is the Cleveland Clinic. My social worker makes notes as usual in my chart as I talk about how my life "as a woman

is going, whatever that means. I think it means how people are re- acting to me and how I feel about it. But why should that count toward my surgery? I mean, it's going to be my body lying on the table, not theirs, and certainly not the hospital's.

What is it like living as a woman? Well, between the stares in the bathroom with threats to call the cops, and the guys on the street who make sucking noises and comment on the teenage breasts growing on my twenty-six-year-old body, it's no picnic. Everyone seems to be looking at my body and trying to do something about it. She scribbles away.

She asks me to sign these long, legal-looking documents. One says that I understand all the various procedures they re going to do; the other that I'm nofmarried. Seems that after the operation, I'll be considered legally female, so it would be illegal for me to be married. This takes them off the hook. Huh...so if I had a wife, our

relationship would suddenly become a same-sex marriage. A lov- ing union made in heaven becomes a crime with a flick of a blade.

Oh, goody! She is not amused. I shut up and sign. She gives me a

date for surgery. From the medical bureaucracy to the civil bureaucracy. I go

down to the County Recorder s office and don t even get to see a

judge. Alas, I will miss the irony of a man who lives half his life running around publicly in a floor-length black dress passingjudg- ment on my gender. Instead I get some bored clerk who looks like a third-year law student. He eyes me sourly from behind a battered gray desk, one of those broad, rough things that invites graffiti. I

try to read the desktop art upside down while he examines my proof

that I've publicized my legal change of name in the Cleveland Legal

Register for the required thirty days.

He asks me how the sovereign state of Ohio can know I' m not doing this to defraud someone, because that kind of name change is strictly illegal. I mean, look at me, asshole. I'm a guy in a dress who gets hassled in the restroom for trying to take a pee and you re worried

that I'm going to turn out to be John Freaking Dillinger on the lam in drag? Get a life. I say nothing, of course, just look at him respect- fully and bat my eyelashes until he thinks I'm probably making a pass at him, or the estrogen has fried my brain. He finally signs the papers, staring up at me as if I'm something he s discovered in the back of the fridge from last year s hunting trip.

But I'm not done. I ask him about changing my Ohio birth certificate, which still lists me as male. He loftily informs me that the state of Ohio doesn t do that sort of thing. It turns out they want a record "contemporaneous with my birth." He intones con- temporaneous solemnly, all one- hundred-and- twenty- pounds of him. I'd like to contemporaneous his geeky twit head, but right now he s my knight in shining armor because I have my name- change papers tucked under my arm. So, batting my lashes one last time, this time just to cheese him off, I exit stage left. Anyway, it's September, and if I don t get to school in time for registration, all my preferred courses will be closed out.

A guy holds the door for me at the elevator. As he gets in be- hind me he casually asks, " So, how tall are you anyway, Miss?" Then he looks again, a lot closer. Clearly confused now, he s not sure if he

has just been polite or if he s made an ass of himself by holding the door and flirting with a guy in drag.

When I arrive at Cleveland State, I have to fill out the admis- sion forms, including indicating my sex. Well, I guess I can start checking the Fbox. The student behind the counter is trying to be friendly. I've stopped by home to change into a pair of jeans, and doesn t look real close, thinks he s talking to the average guy, and asks, "You play any hoops?" As I consider the answer he eyes the forms I've been completing, spots Sex: F, and looks up quickly. But

by then he s mine. " Oh yeah. Love to. In the men s league last year

54 READ My Lips

they considered me just a small forward. But in the women s league

this year I got to playa Patrick Ewing sort of power center. Great;' he replies, without an ounce of enthusiasm. I want to

ask him if we can go out and shoot baskets sometime, but he s al-

ready turning an interesting shade of green so I leave for the regis-

tration lines. On the way I stop to sign up for student insurance, which they offer at a really good discount. Again I have

to declare

and sign my sex. Only this time, I have to answer a whole barrage of questions: Have I ever been pregnant? Hmmm.. .let me think.

Have I ever had an abortion? Not knowingly. Do I need informa- tion on birth control pills? Not unless my surgeon is a lot better

than I think he is. But who knows, a good girl scout is always pre- pared. I check that one Yes. Maybe now I'll find out where you in- sert those little pink pills.

It's on the way to the financial aid office that I become aware I have to pee. This is always the most complex part of the day. Get-

ting a sex-change is easier than negotiating the public toilet system.

Which is worse-a woman in the men s room in heels using the urinal, or a man in the women s room using a stall? It's a toss-up. I

make a beeline for the women s room. Naturally, there s a line. I have to stand there, pretending ig-

norance of all the sta1'es:Although half the women waiting are more butch and gender-variant than I am, I'm a head taller than anyone

else. What can I say-a swan among the platypuses draws atten- tion.

Someone asks me the time, which is usually a voice check. I

see that she is wearing a watch herself. She s closely examining my

face, along with about three of her friends. The rest of the line is casually watching while trying to look like they re not watching.

I'm tempted to shift into low gear here and use my truckdrivin growl, but I need a stall, not a scene. I answer in my highest and most petite voice. Th~y ain t convinced, but at least they conclude

I'm not the Mad Cleveland Bathroom Rapist stalking their restroom.

Once in the cubicle, I sit. But then I notice I'm making more noise than anyone else. They re all swooshing, and I'm splashing

like a fire hose against a kettle drum at close range. I pass on fluff-

SEX! Is A VERB 55

ing before the mirror when I'm done and beat a hasty retreat. Dis- cretion is the better part of gender valor. On my way out, a dyke smiles indulgently. Mon ami!

At the student aid office there are still more forms for loans, for the minimum-wage on-campus job they re throwing in to sweeten the package, and for more insurance in case I croak in school so the loan is retired. Each time I have to record and declare my sex. Why do they need my sex on a loan, for chrissakes? Do penises pay differently? Am I going to sit on the money or something so that what's between my legs makes a difference? When I have a vagina will they change my interest rate?

The registration lines still reach halfway across the gym. But in short order, I'm done. It's almost five o clock and time to go. I stop off at the library for some books I'll need for the first day of classes. Too much Coke while waiting in lines and again I need a bathroom.

Uh-oh. This time there are two CSU campus cops in their brown uniforms right outside the door. This is a city campus, and they're fully armed these days. The whole thing flashes in my mind like an old George Raft movie:

Cop One: "All right, Miss, step away from that door!"

Cop Two: "Look out, Charlie! She s got a dick!"

Cop One: "Don t move, Miss! Okay, put both balls on top of your head. Now lay your dick on the

floor, and kick it over here... slowly!"

I can t handle another situation right now. I need to get busted for Public Impersonating like I need a hemorrhoid. I'll bear the pain until I get home. A young kid on the subway, noticing I'm carrying a load of books, offers me his seat. Chivalry isn t dead. Then his friend elbows him and whispers and they both look at me again and start to crack up. Chivalry hits the floor, colder n a mack- erel.

56 READ My LIPS SEX! Is A VERB 57

That's the easy part. The hard stuff is getting past the guys

hanging around the corner near my house. It's usually not too bad,

only they don t seem to know my name. One of them thinks I'm someone called "Mary Cohen." No, wait, it's maricon. Another calls

me putah. They do this every time I walk by. So far nothing physi-

cal has come of it, but I'm waiting and I'm also well- prepared. I'm

well- prepared to hysterically cry my head off the first time one of them so much as touches me; then I'll hit them with a full load of Jewish guilt. After that, they won t want to live.

I have a date tonight with Kris, my sweetheart. Contemplat- ing this makes the day behind much more bearable. She comes by at eight, and we go to our favorite gay bar. The music is awesome.

While I get up to snag some brewskies, another woman comes up to her and says, "You know, that's really a guy you re with.

Kris just smiles sweetly. As if mulling over this new informa-

tion, she begins thoughtfully scratching her chin with her middle finger. Later that night she wonders aloud if my surgery will " fi-

nally make an honest lesbian of me." Who knows? What are labels,

anyway, but whole-body condoms to protect us from making inti- mate contact with each other?

person at the checkout counter who asks, " Is that a boy or a girl?" to the insistent hospital records office which absolutely requires a sex, to salespeople in the kiddy clothing stores, to the forthcoming battles with nursery school officials.

There is an entire social apparatus whose sole purpose is to determine, track, and maintain my sex. Perhaps sex is not a noun at all. Perhaps it is really a verb, a cultural imperative-as in, " Sex yourself!" in the face of which none of us has a choice.

WHAT IF THEY GAVE A'SEX AND NOBODY CAME?

Sex! is a cultural command that all bodies understand and recog- nize themselves in a specific way, an identification of our bodies

that we are forced to carry around and produce on demand. participate in society, we must be sexed.

We see this with perfect clarity in the case of the intersexed, the original lost brigade in any discussion of binary sex. Intersexuals are not permitted to live without a sex. Even if they resist, society

inevitably forces one on them. The machinery of sex gets very up- set when you try to live outside of it.

I have a friend who is raising his first child. He is determined to raise it without a sex until it is old enough to select its own. In

the meantime, he tells me he cannot believe the incredible inten- sity of the daily cultural pressure he gets to sex his child. From the 1. Judith Butler, Gel1der Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 37.