Far From the Tree by Solomon Andrew

Author:Solomon, Andrew [Solomon, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

XI

Transgender

Western culture likes binaries: life feels less frightening when we can separate good and evil into tidy heaps, when we split off the mind from the body, when men are masculine and women are feminine. Threats to gender are threats to the social order. If rules are not maintained, everything seems to be up for grabs, and Joan of Arc must go to the stake. If we countenance people who want to chop off their penises and breasts, then what chance do we have of preserving the integrity of our own bodies? As the noted psychoanalyst Richard C. Friedman once joked, “It might help if they all wore T-shirts that said, ‘Don’t worry—it won’t happen to you.’” Gender itself is a slippery concept. The author Amy Bloom says, “Male is not gay or straight; it’s male. Neither the object of desire nor the drinking of beer nor the clenching of fists makes maleness. We don’t know what does, and neither do transsexual men, and neither do the people who treat them, psychologically and surgically.” But though gender is hard to define, it is not hard to know. Jan Morris, who wrote bravely of her transition—the process of switching gender—in the 1970s, has said, “Transsexualism is not a sexual mode or preference. It is not an act of sex at all. It is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction, and no true transsexual has ever been disabused of it.” She explained, “My inner uncertainty could be represented in swirls and clouds of color, a haze inside me. I did not know exactly where it was—in my head, in my heart, in my loins, in my blood.”

The term transgender is an encompassing term that includes anyone whose behavior departs significantly from the norms of the gender suggested by his or her anatomy at birth. The term transsexual usually refers to someone who has had surgery or hormones to align his or her body with a nonbirth gender. The term transvestite refers to someone who enjoys wearing clothing usually reserved for the other gender. Though the terms get used in a variety of ways, transgender and its abbreviation as trans are the most widely accepted in the trans community. A transman was born female and became a man; a transwoman was born male and became a woman. Intersex describes people who are born with ambiguous genitalia or are in some other physical way both male and female from birth.

It is a poverty of our language that we use the word sex to refer both to gender and to carnal acts, and from that unfortunate conflation springs much of the disgust around the notion of transgender children. Being trans is taken to be a depravity, and depravities in children are anomalous and disturbing. But trans children are not manifesting sexuality; they are manifesting gender. The issue is not whom they wish to be with, but whom they wish to be. As Aiden Key, a trans activist, put it, “My gender is who I am; my sexuality is who I bounce it off of.

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