Delusions of gender (book review)

Book review: "Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us", by Kate Bornstein. New York: Routledge, 1994, 245 pp., US$23.00 hardcover.

GENDER OUTLAW:
On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us.
By Kate Bornstein.
Hardcover - 245 pages (June 1994)
Routledge;
ISBN: 0415908973
£30.00

Order this book on-line from Amazon.co.uk

When I was sixteen, like many of my peers I earned money baby-sitting. It was my practice to while away he boring and usually chilly hours between he retiring of my charges and the return of heir parents by invading the living room bookshelves and coffee tables in search of something to read. This practice occasionally had frightening results, as anyone will tell you who’s ever read Rosemary’s Baby while sitting alone in a strange house.

But the most dizzying, frightening and disorienting thing I ever came across this way was an article in a medical journal describing the diagnosis of sex in newborns. Illustrated with blurry black-and-white photographs of infant genitalia, the piece laid out a method for assigning sex in ambiguous cases and described the surgical interventions necessary to make the assignment stick. I remember a moment of intense physical panic — a swelling sensation in my head, heat running up and down my spine. There was pure terror in the idea that someone might be born neither male nor female. So central to my understanding of the world was the natural bipolar division of human beings by gender that it was as if gravity had stopped working, or the moon had disappeared.

After that flash of fear came a moment of profound hope. Maybe someone had made a mistake in diagnosing me; maybe I wouldn’t really have to be a woman. Reading further, I was disappointed to learn that in almost all of these cases the medial solution was to turn these infants into females. (Apparently it’s easier to excise than to enhance the outward signs of maleness.) I was stuck with being a girl, after all, and with all the diminishment of power, privilege and humanity that accompanied the diagnosis "female."

I grew up and became a feminist and a lesbian, passionately committed to the liberation of women. Early on, I grew wary of essentialist feminism, the kind that argues that women deserve certain kinds of power in society because we are "naturally" more nurturing, more conserving of life, more peaceful and cooperative than men. Definitions of woman’ s nature seemed self-evidently dangerous and likely to be used by our adversaries as a means of and justification for constricting our participation in the world. Still, it never occurred to me to ask whether or not women exist at all. It seemed unlikely that a universally practiced (albeit with local variation) system of oppression wasn’ t based on something real.

Now comes Kate Bornstein, who in Gender Outlaw is saying exactly that: suggesting that the reader consider the possibility that our "culture may not simply be creating roles for naturally-gendered people, the culture may in fact be creating the gendered people. In other words, the culture may be creating gender." An amalgam of autobiography, political theory, transcribed interviews and play script, Gender Outlaw is designed to leave the reader asking questions. In it, Bornstein tells the story of her numerous transformations, from boy child to male actor to Scientologist to self-conscious lesbian transsexual actor and playwright. In many ways, this is a gentle, playful, funny book. The author intends to amuse her audience, loosen us up a bit — as well as shake us up as much as the article in that medical journal shook me.

Besides sketching out her life story and the nuts and bolts of sex- change surgery, Bornstein also lays out a political argument: gender — maleness and femaleness — is a socially constructed method of categorizing human beings for the purpose of allowing people assigned to one category to oppress people assigned to the other. She points out that not only do male and female gender roles differ from culture to culture, but that some societies admit of more than two gender categories and ascribe particular value to people who occupy a "third" role. I’d argue, though, that even the examples she provides of beyond-binary gender categories derive their social meaning from the two primary categories of man and woman. Those members of some Native American societies whom European writers have called berdache, or the "soft men" of Siberia, for example, are defined in their own cultures as people of one sex taking on the role of the other — at least in the reports of their ethnographers.

Many lesbian feminists of my generation had our first contact with transsexual in the 1970s, when we found ourselves faced with a problem. A number of male-to-female transsexuals were demanding admission to various woman-only events and organizations. In The Transsexual Empire (Beacon Press, 1979), Janice Raymond articulated a feminist response to these demands, locating the "first cause" of transsexualism in "the socially prescribed definitions of masculinity and femininity, one of which the transsexual rejects in order to gravitate to the other." Raymond argued that surgical mutilation could not turn a man into a woman, and that the solution to the "problem" of transsexual was to be found in a restructuring of society, not of individual bodies.

Unlike many male-to-female transsexuals who attempt to join the lesbian subculture, Bornstein agrees with much of Raymond’s analysis. She writes out of an acute awareness of the ways in which the existence of transsexuals paradoxically serves to reinforce gender roles. US society is fascinated by the confessions of transsexuals. Until recently, she notes, transsexuals have been able to publish only autobiographies, tales of women trapped in the bodies of men or men pining away in the bodies of women. Stories by and about brave people who’d lived their lives hiding deep within a false gender — and who, after much soul-searching — decided to change their gender, and spent the rest of their days hiding deep within another false gender. (pp. 12-13)

On the "woman-trapped-in-a-man’s-body" notion, she says: I understand that many people may explain their pre-operative transgendered lives in this way, but I’ll bet that it’s more likely an unfortunate metaphor that conveniently conforms to cultural expectations, rather than an honest reflection of our transgendered feelings. (p. 66)

In Gender Outlaw, she seeks to expand the definition of transsexualism, to include the experience of everyone who has felt uncomfortable within the constraints of her or his assigned gender, essentially to include us all. She points to the growing number of people who are happy to stop somewhere in the middle of a sex-change process, and to a number of people who find folks of indeterminate gender sexy. She also argues against defining transsexualism as a disease or disorder. At the same time, she’s gentle with transsexual who choose to see it that way, recognizing that insurance companies will only pay for surgery if it’s done to correct a "medical condition."

Bornstein is also gentle with lesbians who seek to exclude transsexuals from their groups and events. "From what I can see," she writes, women inhabit "women-only" spaces to heal from the oppression of their number by the larger culture, by men in particular, and because they don’t see us as women, we’re perceived as the other side of the binary: men. Perceived as men, we get in the way of their healing, and so we’re excluded. (p. 82)

Bornstein knows something about the difference between exclusion and oppression:

Some transsexuals take exclusion by lesbian separatists as oppression, but I don’t think so. Lesbian oppression at the hands of the dominant ideology is not the same as the exclusion experienced by the transgendered at the hands of lesbian separatists — lesbians just don’t have the same economic and social resources with which to oppress the transgendered. (p. 82)

While Bornstein is not at all convinced of the existence of men and women, and therefore doesn’t place herself in the latter category, she also says that, fortunately, she does not regret her own decision to have "the surgery." She explains:

I had my gender surgery partially as a result of cultural pressure. I couldn’t be a "real woman" as long as I had a penis. Knowing what I know now, I’m real glad I had my surgery, and I’d do it again, just for the comfort I now feel with a constructed vagina. I like that thang! (p. 119)

In response to a talk-show guest’s question about whether she can orgasm "with that vagina,’ she replies cheerfully, "The plumbing works, and so does the electricity."

Just as bisexuals have for some years demanded admission into communities of lesbians and gays, transgendered people are now knocking on the door. Many organizations find themselves debating a name change these days. Should the Lesbian and Gay Resource Center become the Resource Center for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgendered People? Bornstein has her doubts about the possibility of creating a single "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community" because she thinks the groups such a community would hope to unite have distinctly different interests. The first three terms refer to people who come together because of the gender of the people with whom they choose (or are born, if you prefer) to have sex, which Bornstein calls a "function." Transgendered people find their unity in their discomfort with the gender "system." Although she calls herself a lesbian, Bornstein thinks that all forms of sexual expression that focus on the gender of the sex partner essentially maintain that gender system.

If I have a quibble with Bornstein, it’s that her feminism, while heartfelt, seems undeveloped on a theoretical level. She describes herself as an incipient Marxist, and calls the system of apportioning power along gender lines a "class" system. As anyone who has struggled to raise "the woman question" in Marxist circles will tell you, whatever sexism is, it is not a system of oppression based on class in the traditional sense of the word. To her credit, Bornstein takes her own crack at answering the tough questions like "Can there be equality between the genders?" (no, not as long as gender is conceived of as a binary category) and "What is the source of gender’s power?" (the fact that it’s an unnamed category of oppression).

What’s missing here, I think, is that Bornstein’s feminism is ultimately about identity and naming, and not about the material realities that keep most women in this world the salves of slaves. She knows that women earn less money than men, and are treated differently than men, but she doesn’t seem to have much idea about why this should be so. Of the differences between women and men, she says,

There are differences enforced by the culture, and these need to be dealt with, but these differences are not intrinsic to the genders. By focusing on the so-called "inherent differences" between men and women, we ignore and deny the existence of the gender system itself — the idea of gender itself — that needs to be done away with. The differences will then fall aside of their own accord. (p. 114)

Difficult as doing away with the idea of gender might seem, I wish women’s liberation were even that easy. I think, for example, that unlike women who can conceive, Bornstein has had the option of completely divorcing sex from reproduction. For most women in the world, their capacity to bear children, whether or not they actually do so, fundamentally defines and limits their power and participation in their societies. On the other hand, it’s not fair to expect a 240-page book, half of which is occupied by a disquisition on queer theatre and the script of Bornstein’s play Hidden: a Gender, to hold all the answers to why women are oppressed and what we ought to do about it.

Bornstein isn’t the first thinker to point out people’s tendency to conflate sex and gender. It’s useful to remember that the consensus definition of lesbians and gay men as people who choose sexual partners from the members of their own gender is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. Earlier this century, it was common to explain lesbians and gay men in terms of gender identity, rather than choice of sexual object: lesbians and gay men were members of a third sex, stuck tragically between male and female. I wonder whether we’re about to experience a swing of the pendulum back in that direction and if the effects of such a swing would be entirely liberatory. Here in San Francisco, a growing number of people, some of them quite young, are seriously considering female-to-male transsexual surgery in an attempt to resolve their gender conflicts. Some lesbians who’ve consciously rejected the constrictions of traditional female roles are feeling pressure to redefine their lives not as a radial critique of those roles, but as a groping toward a true, "male" identity.

My grandfather had a simple way of evaluating every new development in the world. "Is it good for the Jews," he’d ask, "or bad for the Jews?" I’m tempted to ask a similar question in relation to the growth of a transsexual movement: Is it good for women or bad for women? To the extent that it reifies the categories of man and woman, and perpetuates the domination by one of the other, I agree with Janice Raymond that transsexualism is one more dangerous trap for women. But if folks like Kate Bornstein succeed in wrenching their lives out of the hands of the medical profession and using them to present a radical challenge to women’s oppression, how can that not be good for women — and ultimately, for all of us?

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