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Book Review
Califa & Hausman: Female Authors Take on the TG Community
By Emily Alford
Pat Califia, Sex Changes: the Politics of Transgenderism
(San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997, pp. 307, $16.95, ISBN 1-57334-082-8
[pbk.])
Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism,
Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press: 1995, pp. 245 + xi, ISBN 0-8223-1692-7 [pbk.])
The day is long past when books about gender transgression
are condemned to either the category of "adult" reading
or that of "abnormal" psychology. Here are two serious
studies that both compel attention. Both are by born-women. One
author is a fully qualified and academically sophisticated therapist
who has published her study through a house that specializes in
"provocative books by women (and a few men)." The other
is a young academic who has passed the peer-review process at
a major university press. They exemplify the different possibilities
that "serious" discourse about gender-crossing presents.
In their different approaches, one of the books maintains that
we, the transgendered who form its subjects, remain a problem
to be considered. The other argues with passion and sophistication
that transgendered people face problems that we can and ought
to overcome, and shows how far we have come in doing it.
The starting point of both volumes is lesbian discourse.
Bernice Hausman gives away nothing about her own orientation,
beyond a cryptic comment in her acknowledgements. (Nor, it needs
to be said strongly, should she have to do so, unless she thinks
it bears on what she has to say). Pat Califia is quite explicit
about her own lesbianism, her interest in S/M, and her own flirtation
with transsexuality. Both books, however, bounce off Janet Raymond's
explicitly lesbian-feminist and very influential condemnation
of ourselves and whatever we do, The Transsexual Empire.
Hausman is not hostile to transsexuals as individuals.
While working on her book she won the cooperation of prominent
transsexual Dallas Denny. She is very hostile, however, to the
entire transsexual phenomenon (to use the sympathetic terminology
of Harry Benjamin rather than that of Raymond).
In Hausman's view, the possibility of "changing
sex" and the appearance of transsexualism as a wide-spread
possibility are strictly functions of medical discourse. Psychiatry,
endocrinology, and plastic surgery have a lot to answer for.
Without their invasions of the human personality and body, there
would be no transsexualism. Hausman writes from the perspective
of a professor of English. She treats her subject through the
medium of the discussions that physicians have carried on. In
keeping with developments in her discipline, she subordinates
the real human beings who have experienced gender distress and
found the possibility of gender reassignment as less important
than the discourse of specialists that has made reassignment thinkable
and possible. In her own words, "a project that initially
suggested that studying transsexualism was a way to investigate
the operation of gender in culture became one that suggested how
gender was produced as a named concept in the first place (p.
viii)." Her implicit large point is that the concept itself
is the illegitimate product of a combination of self-seeking troubled
individuals and equally self-seeking professionals.
Ultimately, Hausman's book is about other books,
not about human beings. Among the books she considers, she does
devote a chapter to transsexual autobiographies. It may be a
function of how slowly academic texts develop, but anybody familiar
with current transgender discussion cannot be struck by how dated
her sources are. She cites Mario Martino, Roberta Cowell, Christine
Jorgensen, Nancy Hunt, and Renee Richards. Nobody would deny
either the courage or the importance of those writers, as they
explored ways to describe their own situations in a situation
of having no literary models. Richards, particularly, fits her
concerns, given its author/subject's experience as a physician.
Perhaps she could not have consulted either the medically sophisticated
website maintained by transsexual physician Anne Lawrence, M.D.
or the moving and equally
sophisticated autobiography of another transsexual doctor, Rebecca
Anne Allison. But had she done
so, or written about the texts she considers with more humane
sympathy, she would have written a far better book.
To be fair, the discussion that goes on in books
moves slowly. Pat Califia cites most of the same sources and
does not cite either Lawrence or Allison. She writes, however,
from the perspective of a greatly-increased familiarity with us
who are transgendered, beginning with her initial thanks to historian
Susan Stryker and including a reference to this website. She
is quite explicit about her own initially conflicted responses
to the idea and the practice of gender-crossing. She writes about
"the gender scientists" who so preoccupy Hausman: Harry
Benjamin, John Money, Robert Stoller, and the rest. Medical discourse
is not the only subject that she considers. The book includes
a wonderful chapter on "The Berdache Wars and 'Passing Women'
Follies:" Transphobia in Gay Academia," in which she
takes on such major scholars as Walter Williams and Ramon Gutierrez.
But lest it be thought that she is merely a transgender cheerleader,
she also writes a demandingly engaged discussion of Kate Bornstein's
Gender Outlaw.
Most of all, she takes on Janice Raymond, who forms
the continual object of her attacks. Reading Raymond as a person
who would read others out of the realm of legitimate human experience,
Califia draws on a deep well of empathy, as opposed to a shallow
puddle of condemnation. Hausman claims that her book "historicizes"
the transgender phenomenon, by explaining it in terms of what
technology has made possible. Califia genuinely does historicize
(and I make that point as a heavily published Ph.D. historian).
She treats her subjects as people wrestling with the problems
and the possibilities that their own times gave them. She does
not lionize, because she has humanely critical things to say about
the people she has studied. But she understands that all these
people did the best they could for their own times. Califia understands
that making history takes time. The title of her penultimate
chapter says it all: "Trashing the clinic and burning down
the Beauty Parlor: Activism Transmutes Pitiable Patients into
Feisty Gender Radicals."
As I was thinking about this review Betty DeGeneres,
mother of Ellen, was interviewed on National Public Radio. She
historicized as well, describing her own development from a conventional
woman who had been taught to believe that every woman needs a
man into a person who loves and delights in what her own daughter
has made of herself. Both Hausman and Califia consider what we
transgendered have made of ourselves since Roberta Cowell and
Christine Jorgensen made themselves the mothers of us all, whichever
direction (m2f or f2m) we travel the transgender road. Hausman
has a lot to say that is worth knowing. It's too bad, though,
that she chose to focus on the step-fatherhood of physicians who
tried in their own ignorance to help (and who learned as they
did), rather than on the genuinely historical change that transgendered
people have wrought in our time.
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