Being Transgendered, Being Compelled, Being FreeBy Emily Alford"Freedom is the Recognition of Necessity." G.F.W. Hegel. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Kris Kristofferson/Janis Joplin The theme of freedom looms large as we transgendered people consider ourselves, our desires, and our situation. As much as anybody else in the community, I'd like to be free to appear in public exactly as I choose, no questions asked, no aspersions cast, anytime or place I want. And, yes, I'd like to be free to occupy the body I should have had. But if we are honest, we will admit that we, the transgendered, have labored all our lives under what may be the most severe of compulsions. As we have grown up confronting our selves and what we want, we have not been free at all. Almost all of us discovered our desires very young, well before we could even understand what we felt and wanted, let alone exercise any serious choice. In some sharp, revealing moment, we realized exactly what we desired. A sensitive short story that appeared in the British edition of COSMOPOLITAN early in the 1980s caught the point perfectly. Called "Mirror, Mirror," it described the plight of a young transgendered boy as he discovered a closet full of women's clothes: "The first time, he looked. The second time, he touched. The third time, he could not stop himself." Is there any of us of whom that could not be said? But most of us also grew up thinking that what we desire is forbidden: by biology, by culture, by our parents, by God. We may want it, but it just isn't possible. We grew up with no more choice about feeling that what we want is wrong than we had about wanting it. It was a terrible combination. We are adults now, not children. Every single person who reads this has come far enough out to admit what we want, and, maybe, to stop feeling guilty about it. Since Christine Jorgensen those of us who would just plain rather be what we were not born have known that it is not impossible. Hesitant novice or comfortable TG, closeted or militant, knowing that we wouldn't actually change or happily post-surgery, we know that we are not alone. As adults most of us also know that we have made ties to others and that we fully expected those ties to bind when we made them. There lies the problem of our freedom, whether our being transgendered means dressing a little in private, coming right out about doing it, or heading toward SRS. It's a serious problem, and it isn't unique to us. Indeed, it's the basic problem of being free and being human, writ this time in our own specific terms, but writ also in terms that bear on every human being, somehow. We transgendered aren't freaks. We are just one special case of an issue that everybody faces in some context. There's an old TG novel called I WANT WHAT I WANT. Every person on earth wants what s/he wants. The issue is, what's the price? Consider some possibile approaches to the problem of desire and the price that has to be paid for satisfying it. People of conservative temperament recognize that our relationships with others do count, and that we sunder meaningful relationships at our peril. Cross-dress openly and we may risk marriages and our children. Transition, and we are very likely to lose them. We all know the terrible pain that might be involved, and not just to ourselves. Radicals see the whole issue otherwise. In that perspective freedom has to be seized, or it is not freedom at all. Can it possibly be enough just to be "tolerated" for what in truth is fundamental to a person's self? Mere tolerance, bestowed from above, isn't freedom, because what can be given can also be taken back. In between there is the liberal position. Taken to its extreme this says that personal freedom is an absolutely good thing, whatever the consequences. There is no problem at all in extending that position to the freedom to dress as one wants or to alter one's own body as one might choose. The ultimate liberal stance, perhaps, is SRS on demand, on the ground that it's a person's right to choose, no questions asked. Each position has its truth, but also has its fallacy. The conservative fallacy is to think that relationships must always bind, to the exclusion of all other possibilities. Should this include the hideous relationship of master and slave? Should it include the relationship of husband and wife, if that means domination and possession and abuse rather than love? Should it include the lifelong denial of what is most basic and most true within a person's own self? The radical fallacy is to say that all relationships are political, turning on power alone, and that all relationships of power are unequal and need breaking. Some human relationships turn on love and we know in our hearts that these ought to endure, even if the price is high. Submitting to domination is one thing; willingly recognizing obligation is another. The liberal fallacy is that free individuals should be able to do whatever they want to whatever is theirs, including their bodies, without consequences. Any fool can see that if we have made serious and meaningful connections to others, we have put ourselves in a position to hurt them by what we do, that consequences are bound to happen. This doesn't mean just we transgendered people. It means all of us who are human. So where does that leave us now? Only, perhaps, with a clarified understanding of the issues at stake. We transgendered people who are claiming our freedom are the heirs of a major redefinition of what being human is about. Since the age of the American and French Revolutions the whole notion of human freedom has expanded exponentially. Freedom is the the great theme of the age in which we live. "Biology is destiny," it used to be said of women, meaning that the only choice was to marry and bear children. Nothing is destiny now, not class, nor race, not gender. That's a historic achievement. We transgendered are among the people who have helped expand the idea of freedom itself. The gain is enormous. Yet we continue to debate the issues, both inside our own separate selves as each of us faces the possibility of choosing, and within the community we share, as we consider what we are about. What, then, about people who willingly remain in between, whatever their reasons might be? We are not children anymore, looking, touching, unable to stop ourselves. Nor are we absolutely free. Family, job, relationships of some sort: these constrain us all. In our time being female offers a much greater range of personal freedom than being male, especially in the realm of self-expression. That's part of what transgendered males envy. If I transitioned, I'd be free to wear skirts where and when I wanted. I'd also be free to not wear skirts at all. I'd have that choice, and I'd revel in it. I wouldn't always wear skirts. Yet for both genders the rule of "appropriateness" does hold. If I transitioned, I'd have to choose how to present myself from the whole repertoire that would be appropriate for a middle-aged professional woman. I do now, too. A suit and tie; running gear; jeans; the casual style I affect in my university classrooms; my (gorgeous) academic "drag": these are all possible, but free choice among them isn't the only issue at stake as I pick out which to wear. Any one of those costumes could be appropriate at the moment involved, but at another moment it could be completely wrong. By admitting my transgender desires, I've claimed my freedom to express my transgender self, too. I've also broadened my repertoire. It isn't absolute. But there are times and situations in my life now when it's absolutely appropriate for me to be entirely en femme, when it would be wrong not to. There are also times when it doesn't make much difference and the choice is really mine. Coming this far has given me a freedom that I didn't used to have when society said "no, you just can't do it" and when, given any opportunity at all, I could not stop myself. I'm not compelled anymore, either to not dress (because it's "wrong") or to dress (because I have the chance). I'm my whole self, which includes Emily as a strong, good, integral aspect of me, wherever I am and whatever I'm wearing. It just might be that I can express a really feminine concern for the relationships that surround me by remaining, publicly, in masculine guise. Think, for a moment, about a parallel situation. Late in the eighteenth century the age-old institution of slavery finally started to come apart. Slaves themselves began to find that they had choices. In the case of the slaves in the rebellious British colonies, it became possible to gain one's own freedom by going to the British, who welcomed the slaves of rebels and mocked the rebels pretensions to be lovers of liberty. Every slave who did so knocked a chip out of the foundation of slavery itself. But making that choice did mean abandoning the people from whom one had sprung, among whom one belonged, the parents, the siblings, perhaps the children and the spouse one loved. Being free to say yes also means being free to say no. A slave whom the chances of war had made free to go could also make the choice to stay. A vast number of slaves did stay, freely choosing their own continued enslavement. Most often it was for the sake of people they loved. A moral choice had to be made, and they, not the people who claimed to own them, were the ones who had to make it. I hope the parallel is clear. Getting on that plane to Portland or Neenah for SRS means saying "no, I am not going back" just as surely as boarding a British ship in the Chesapeake meant leaving one's own slavery behind in 1775. What those slaves faced was a sudden but only partial opening of a situation that up to then had been entirely closed. So too with the constraints of gender during my own half-century of life. The women's movement, gay rights, and we ourselves have been cutting opening after opening through a barrier that used to be absolute. Things are possible for us now, both as individuals and together, that seemed absolutely forbidden when my own desires first came to me at the age of six. Depart or stay, those slaves found themselves in a moment when they could make choices to make that had just not been possible before. Transition, full-time, out, quiet, or closeted, we face choices too that have only become possible in our time. Complete gender freedom isn't here yet, any more than the end of slavery was actually at hand in 1775. But something is happening and we are the ones who are making it happen, whatever the immediate choices that each of us makes, and whatever our reasons for making them. Not that long ago, none of us had any choice at all, either within our separate selves or in the societies we inhabit. I'm aware as I finish this of what I know from people who have transitioned. They've told me that the moment came when it just couldn't be withstood any longer, when the only choice was between SRS or death. "I didn't choose it, it chose me," as one good friend put it. Perhaps that undercuts my whole argument. It still seems to me, though, that we, the transgendered, have helped expand the realm of human freedom during the half-century since Christine Jorgensen. We've made history. But no more than anybody else, ever, have we become simply free to do what we want, with no cost attached.
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