Transgenderality & Class Struggle:

A Transfeminist Reply to Annalee Newitz's Gender Slumming

By Christina Ellen Holbrook/Perry Symon Fowler

Second of two parts




ewitz's statement that transfemininity is a nostalgia for the traditional woman - 'socially disempowered, largely unemployed and eager to appear physically attractive' is both inaccurate and misinformed. Very few modern transfemmes - particularly politically active transfeminists - would adopt a socially damaging feminine role. Transsexuals, transgenderists, transvestites et al are usually well educated people, whose notions of femininity are not bound up with abuse, degradation or submission. Fortunately, there is a much wider variety of image and lifestyle choices available to transfemmes now than were available to Christine Jorgensen or April Ashley.

Critics of transfemininity would do well to avoid the stereotypes imposed on transsexuals by heterosexual observers. The most highly publicised images of transgenderality are those of the transsexual striptease dancer or the transsexual prostitute; grossly insulting stereotypes which are as damaging to the transgendered as the male-engineered images of the vacuous 'bimbo' or the promiscuous, teenaged 'slut' are to the feminist community.

Transfeminine people - particularly MTF transsexuals and transgenderists - are generally private, quiet individuals, wishing simply to pass as their chosen gender; to live and work without disruption or harassment. They are unlikely to work as lingerie waiters or table-dancers; most are inclined to more socially acceptable forms of employment, particularly in areas demanding a high level of creativity.

While many tend to be 'quiet achievers', they do not constitute a 'traditional' image of femininity. In common with other women, they support feminist ideals and seek equality in the home and the workplace. A large number of MTF transsexuals are lesbians, which certainly cannot be considered a traditional image of femininity.

It is sometimes difficult to see which section of the MTF community Newitz is actually criticising. Claiming that transfemmes employ their feminine identities as a crude, masculinist display of wealth is indicative of Newitz's universalising vision of transfemininity. This is an accusation which may only be levelled at a very small proportion of the transgendered population.

For example, transvestites, as mentioned above, are inclined to practice their sexuality in private; a situation which excludes the possibility of a public exhibition. MTF transsexuals/genderists normally seek a complete integration into society; as Sandy Stone maintains, transfemmes are programmed for 'invisibility'. Vulgar flashes of wealth would doubtlessly attract unwanted attention.

One can only assume that Newitz is referring to the so-called 'Drag' community. If this is so, her aim is somewhat off-centre: Drag Queens, while adopting flamboyant and lavish 'female' costumes, make no attempt to pass as women. Drag Queens, as a rule, combine masculine physical appearance and feminine dress in order to project a gay sexual identity. In no way do they see themselves as women.


Transfemininity has been attacked by some feminist observers as a simple reinforcing of a repressive patriarchal regime, one which represses women culturally, economically and socially. This is a claim which is disputed most vehemently by transfeminist writers on the basis that transfeminine transition is a deconstruction of traditional phallocentric modes of representing gender.

When a biological male assumes an unconventionally feminine identity, she is disrupting the gender specific codes which underlie all forms of sexual prejudice. The successful integration of the MTF transsexual provides evidence that gender is a culturally relative construct rather than an immutable biological determinate.

Mimesis and appropriation are crucial to the transfemme's critique of patriarchy; just as lesbians, feminists, and professional women sometimes appropriate and adapt masculine signifiers (e.g. clothing, hairstyle, attitude, body language) to signify their resistance to enforced gender identities, the transfemme employs feminine signifiers to reconstruct herself beyond the patriarchal definitions of Man and Woman. To quote Peters and Langley:

. . . the (transfemme) who doesn't pass disturbs the stereotypes. The (transfemme) who passes and behaves in a non-stereotypical way helps break down stereotypes . . . Transsexuality is not an end in itself but a step towards wholeness, a drastic step to break our gender programming.

At the present time, the transgendered community is amongst the most isolated and discriminated against communities in the world. While transgenderality crosses all cultural, sexual, and social boundaries, there are many critics in both the conservative and feminist camps who seek to silence the voice of the transgendered. Where attacks have been made, the strategies have been almost identical: transgenderality has been branded politically dangerous, subversive, and unnatural.

Whatever the method employed by its opponents, transgenderality has been repressed for centuries, and is only now gaining the support it needs from other cultural groups. Having freed itself from the stereotypes inflicted on it by a heterosexist order obsessed with the annihilation of the Other, transgenderality must now be allowed to take its place within the diverse spectrum of multisexual culture.

. . . For our society, transgenderism can offer a window through gender via its transcendence towards social wholeness. This century has seen the most serious questioning of the validity of the gender class system. We are seeing an unprecedented increase in discourse on transsexuality, in all transgender behaviour and in the assertiveness of the transgendered . . .

Footnotes

1 Stone, Sandy, The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto, Dept Radio, Television and Film, University of Texas at Austin, 1993.

URL: Gopher://english.hss.cmu.edu./OF-2%3A1950%AStone-The%20

2 Newitz, Annalee, 'Gender Slumming', Bad Subjects, number 7, September 1993.

3 Newitz is quick to point out that women are capable of transcending the inferior roles imposed upon them by the patriarchal social order. Women involved in education, academia and politics usually construct powerful 'masculine' (i.e., non-traditional female) personalities for themselves to counter heterosexist prejudice.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, p.17.

9Jokay, Alex, We'wha Goes to Washington: The True Story of the Zuni Man-Woman,

URL: Http:/WWW.MCS.com/~rune/zuniManWoman.html

The historical case of We'wha, the so-called Zuni man-woman is perhaps the most telling in regards to the shamanistic position occupied by transfemmes in native American culture. We'wha was sent by her tribe to Washington in 1886 to represent the 'best male and female characteristics of her people'. Jokey identifies We'wha as a biological male, although the Zuni considered her to be a woman, and she apparently enjoyed all the privileges and responsibilities usually accorded to a sacred female. Evidently, the polite society of nineteenth century Washington never guessed her biological sex.

10 Grosz, Elizabeth, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990, p. 35.

11 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990, pp. 6-7.

Sedgwick, Eva Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 27-29.

Lacan, Jacques, and the Ecole Freudienne, Feminine Sexuality, Macmillan press, London, 1982, Edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose; Trans: Jacqueline Rose, pp. 8-16.

12 There is no reliable data available at this time on how many transgendered children go on to become transgendered adults. In some cases, the remnants of a transgendered identity will be 'burned out' during puberty, and the individual will adopt a typically heterosexual position. This is particularly evident in girls who had been tomboys in earlier years.

13 Riseley, Donna, 'Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood; Diagnostic and Treatment Issues', In Walters, A.W., and Michael W. Ross (eds), Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986, pp. 40-43.

14 Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Havard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990, pp. 2-3. Laqueur's book is a well researched and closely argued account of the political development of modern concepts of gender/sexual difference.

15 This is one of literally hundreds of sexist arguments put forward in Robert Pool's already infamous popularised treatise on biological sexual difference, The New Sexual Revolution, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1994. Like many sexually biased observers before him, Pool uses medical research to back up his claim that men and women are intrinsically and irreconcilably divided by behavioural and intellectual differences caused by varying hormonal levels between the sexes.

16 Another theoretical point which Newitz fails to acknowledge is that even biological notions of the body are constructs, mediated by language and created - too often - from a phallocentric viewpoint. The human body is by no means a given constant, as numerous feminist essays emphasise. See Grosz, Elizabeth, 'Desire, the Body and Recent French Feminism', Intervention, (Flesh), 1988, pp. 28-32,

de Certeau, Michael, 'Tools for Body Writing', Intervention, (Flesh), 1988, pp. 7-11,

Jardine, Alice, 'Of Bodies and Technologies', in Hal Foster (ed.) Discussions in Contemporary Culture, DIA Foundation, 1987,

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990.

17 In actual fact, academic and scholastic achievement within the transgendered community has been shown to be consistently higher than in the general population. An estimated 80% of TG respondents to a recent internet p