Trans America. Barry Reay

Introduction

      Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier times of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it, say, that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed ‘transvestism’ and ‘transsexuality’, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s?

      This book explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices.

There are competing narratives in trans history. Some have maintained that convictions of gender dislocation have always existed; this was claimed in True Selves (1996), the popular guide to transsexuality recommended by Jennifer Finney Boylan when she declared her transition to her academic colleagues: ‘one indisputable fact remains: transsexualism exists and has always existed’.¹ The authors of True Selves were in good company. ‘The historical records make it very clear that transsexualism has been a human problem since the most ancient times’, wrote the wealthy, female-to-male transsexual Reed Erickson in his foreword to the classic Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969).² For Max Wolf Valerio, a former radical feminist, ‘People like me have always existed, in every era, on every continent.’³ Yet this is not the case. As this book will explore, transgender does not float free of historical or cultural context.⁴

      For others, far from ‘always’ existing, transsexuality was a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. As Catherine Millot once put it, there is a sense in which there was no transsexuality before experts like Harry Benjamin and Robert Stoller ‘invented it’.⁵ Although Joanne Meyerowitz’s influential book on the subject has charted individual and sporadic instances of surgery and experimental sex modifications in Europe and (more rarely) in the USA from the early twentieth century, she effectively began her story with the intense publicity surrounding the sex-reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen in the 1950s: ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty’.⁶ Transsexuality, a category that had once not existed, quickly became a widely recognized term after it had been named and described in Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), Richard Green and John Money’s edited collection Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969), and Stoller’s The Transsexual Experiment (1975).⁷ Before that, those who experienced gender disjunction would invariably have explained those feelings in terms of homosexual or heterosexual transvestism – such was the rapid movement of sexual classification.⁸ Over the next ten years, the US national picture changed from one of no significant institutional support for transsexual endocrinology, therapy, and surgery to a situation where, by 1975, major medical centres were offering treatment and many transsexuals had been provided with surgery.⁹

One of the notable aspects of trans history is the rapid shift in sexual and gender configurations.¹⁰ The transgender community emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, more sexually and gender diverse than the older transsexual community (which it incorporated) and less wedded to medical intervention.¹¹ When Anne Bolin published her study on male-to-female transsexuals in 1988, stressing surgery (‘There are no halfway measures. If one is a transsexual, then pursuit of surgery accompanies one’s transition’), it was in that period of movement from transsex to transgender – and already seemed dated.¹² By 2008, on the other hand, Walter Bockting was explaining that there was ‘no one way of being transgender’: ‘Feminizing and masculinizing hormones and genitalreconstructive surgery are no longer two steps of one linear process of sex reassignment … Clients no longer necessarily need surgery to live and be recognized in the desired gender role.’¹³ Trans surgery too – for wealthy trans women at least – has shifted from an emphasis on ‘the genitals as the site of a body’s maleness or femaleness’ to an increased focus on the face as a site of true sex: moving from genital reconstruction surgery to facial feminization surgery.¹⁴

      The category transgender includes people who want to create and/ or retain characteristics of both genders and who see themselves as neither or both male and female; significantly, other pieces by Bolin in the 1990s argued for far more gender flexibility.¹⁵ The most recent large-scale survey of transgender people has discovered a vast range of different self-identity descriptions among those in the survey who classified themselves as ‘other’ or ‘transgender’, the more common self-descriptions including genderqueer, androgyne, and bi-gender.¹⁶ Trans/Portraits (2015), which contains short testimonies of the experiences of a spectrum of American trans individuals, includes an array of trans masculinities and femininities, as well as those who identify as nonbinary, agender, and gender queer.¹⁷ Dakota, who was agender, said that they were ‘a sort of subset of genderqueer, in that I feel like I don’t really have a gender at all. I don’t feel male or female. I have elements of both sexes, or maybe neither.’¹⁸ In short, there is a new awareness of the ‘diversity of transgender experience’.¹⁹

We are now past the moment when the inaugural 2014 issue of the new academic journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, itself indicative of the shift, could refer to the ‘postposttranssexual’.²⁰ It is the era of trans*.²¹ Transgender is considered too limiting, still connoting a gender binary. The asterisk in trans* indicates more openness, ‘greater inclusivity of new gender identities [though even the notion of identity may be too restrictive as we will see later in this book] and expressions … such as gender queer, neutrios, intersex, agender, two-spirit, cross-dresser, and genderfluid’.²² Aren Z. Aizura opts for ‘gender nonconforming’.²³ More crucially, these terms do not necessarily reflect those used by trans people to describe themselves. They have often seen no ambiguity: that is an outsider perspective. Or they have embraced their blurring of conventional gender boundaries – for example, those who use the pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘she’ or ‘he’. Nonbinary has become a new category.²⁴ CN Lester prefers to be referred to as ‘they’; and considers themself as ‘outside of the gender binary’, neither a man nor a woman.²⁵ Aperture magazine’s 2017 visual homage to ‘Future Gender’ stresses gender as ‘a playground’.²⁶ The androgynous, genderfluid bodies of Ethan James Green’s photographic portfolio Young New York (2019) capture the current moment perfectly.²⁷

      ‘Today trans is everywhere’, wrote Jacqueline Rose in 2016.²⁸ There are trans-themed television series: Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black (2013–19), Amazon Studios’ Transparent (2014–17), and Pose (2018– ), the last with significant trans participation in acting, directing, and the whole creative process.²⁹ There is an interest in transgender children that ranges from the ‘superficially positive’ to the downright hostile.³⁰ There is a developing trans fiction, aimed at young adults, clearly intended to educate non-trans readers and to support a trans audience.³¹ There are trans celebrities: the very white Caitlyn Jenner of I Am Cait (2015–16) and Vanity Fair (2015) fame, and the black trans woman Janet Mock,