Whose Body Is It, Anyway?
By Veronica Smith
In TGForum recently, Cindy Martin wrote about a discussion she and I had at California Dreamin’. Somehow the topic of hormones came up (how odd at a gender convention!). I mentioned that I had once seen a daytime talk show where a man didn’t tell his wife he had been taking hormones until he could no longer hide his breasts. The wife, the host and the audience all came down on the guy.
The audience thought he was weird and the host told the guy he should have at least asked his wife’s permission. I mentioned to Cindy that the wife was very overweight and I wondered at the time whether she had asked her husband’s permission to get fat. After all, we are talking about modifying one’s body, right? She ingested something orally and changed her body; he ingested something orally and changed his body.
Cindy reacted strongly and called my comparison "bogus." She said that hormones and food were very different. Ingesting hormones, Cindy insisted, was deeper than mere appearance; it was about gender identity. And she said that marriage also was deeper than appearance. I agreed about marriage, but if that were the case, why couldn’t the wife love her husband even if he had breasts? As for taking hormones, I didn’t feel I had to agree that there was only one purpose.
But the objections Cindy raised were beside the point of what I was arguing. My point had to do with the possession of the body and whose permission was needed to change it. Does it belong to the spouse? To society? To Jerry Springer? When you are growing up, your body belongs to your folks. When you are in the service, it belongs to the military. When you are dead, it belongs to whomever to do with whatever they want. It seems there should be some time in your limited existence when your body actually belongs to you.
A man is permitted by society to do certain things with his body. He can get fat, he can build muscles, he can get a tattoo. He can even take hormones, as long as they are the right kind of hormones. Arnold Schwarzenegger admits he took steroids, artificial hormones, when he was a body builder. He took them and modified his body into something that was quite different from what was considered the norm of twenty-odd years ago. (In fact, his body was considered so different that in an episode of The Streets of San Francisco, he played a body builder who killed a women when she called him a freak.)
But was Arnold castigated by society for taking hormones to modify his body into something considered unusual? Arnold followed his own inner vision of how he was meant to be and by so doing redefined how all men look at their bodies. Perhaps if the transgender movement had more people who followed their own inner visions the spectrum of acceptable body types would broaden.
|