We do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender and hence the unrecognizability of one’s personhood.
The aim of this artucke is to try and make sense of transsexual2 desire for body modification, given the apparent inadequacy of a certain model of understanding this desire. This model, in a way that makes the issue complex, is the one informing psychiatric and surgical practice, and perceived conformity to it is often necessary for access to the hormones and surgery which bring about the desired bodily transformations. The problematic model is something like this. From an early age transsexual people take themselves to have a gender which is at variance with the biological sex of their body. They experience themselves as having ‘the wrong body’. They experience their body as alien because it fails to capture their gender identity. Here, gender identity is conceived of as something fixed independently of the body, somehow lying behind it, which the body can fail to reflect. Body modification is desired to bring bodies into line with the ‘real’ gender identity which is taken to constitute subjectivity. Body modification brings experienced gender and bodily sex into line and enables people to live as ‘real’ women and men. As Jay Prosser remarks:
transsexuality in fact appears as a narrative; a plot typically beginning in childhood recognition of cross-gendered difference and ending, again typically, with the transsexual achieving some marker of becoming, … some degree of closure.
In these narratives there are certain recurrent features (the feeling of being trapped in the wrong body, childhood feelings of difference and a failure to conform to gendered stereotypes) and a telos: the reaching of a home of gendered realness most commonly achieved by some degree of bodily modification which enables the possibility of social passing. Here the changing of the flesh, the modification of the body, is taken as the guarantee of a gendered realness. Such a narrative claims a communality of ‘real gender’ between transsexual men and women and biological men and women who comfortably inhabit their categories as male and female.
There are a number of problems with this picture. In what could such gendered realness consist? It does not appear to have its origin in the biological body for we have to employ technological means to bring the body into line with it. Moreover the picture assumes a single kind of narrative when there are in fact many:
not everyone who experiences gender dysphoria experiences it in the same way, and not everyone deals with it in the same way. Not all transgendered individuals take hormones and not everyone who takes hormones is transgendered. I have a (genetically female) friend who identifies as male and passes perfectly. He’s never had a shot. I certainly know dykes who are butcher than I could ever be, but who wouldn’t consider identifying as anything other than women.
Furthermore the assumption of a ‘real gender’, originating in childhood, rules out other possibilities:
it can’t be … that you went to … clubs … saw that certain ways of living were possible and desirable, and that something about your own possibilities became clear to you.
Moreover, even when surgery takes place there is no comfortable home. The body retains traces, often severe scarring; and in female-to-male transitions, for example, there is no way to reproduce a functioning penis. Surgery and hormones seem to be no guarantee of gaining a body with a ‘real gender’, whatever that might be.
In this article I want to try and make sense of the demand for bodily modification without an assumption that in some ontological or originary way, anyone, including those seeking surgery or hormones, are really men and women. I shall suggest that gender identities, along with others, are something which we may lay claim to, on our own behalf and on behalf of others. The article is not an attempt to provide conditions which fix gender identity. It is rather, in the absence of a ‘truth about gender’, an attempt to make intelligible people laying claim to being male or female and in some instances expressing that claim by a request for body modification.
