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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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