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Migrants in Genderland
By Emily Alford
Back in January, the TG Forum Bulletin Board carried a week-long
discussion on how one might explain transgender to somebody who just did not
know. A lot of sparky ideas were put forward, Perhaps surprisingly, nobody
picked up on Kate Bornstein's metaphor of being a GENDER OUTLAW. Maybe we're
too conformist (as some our critics say) to accept the idea of outlawry. But
outlaws like Robin Hood, Maid Marion, the (genuinely crossdressing) Joan of
Arc, and even Billy the Kid do have a way of becoming culture heroes. Maybe
Kate will too.
In the meantime, I want to propose another possibility, based on a
terrific new book that I've just read. As the disclaimers go, the spin I put
is entirely mine, and the book's author bears no responsibility at all. But
that's how it goes with writing: cast something out upon the public and there
is no guarantee at all as to what some reader will do with it.
The book is STRANGERS AMONG US by Roberto Suro (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
It's about the most thoughtful thing I've ever seen on the undoubted crisis
that the United States now faces with immigration from its south. Suro is
Latino himself, so he cannot be accused of hysteria or hostility. On the
contrary, he is deeply sympathetic toward the migrants who fill his pages.
But he is no knee-jerk fool. He recognizes that very major problems of
culture and politics and economics and loyalties and identity need
confronting.
What Suro has to say on the politics and future of his own subject is
irrelevant here. Maybe I've already convinced some people to buy it. If so,
great. What's of interest in this place is how his thinking bears on the
situation of all the people who may finding themselves reading this.
Migration is a complex phenomenon. Something must be terribly wrong "at
home" for a person ever to consider leaving. Something must be very
attractive about the goal for a person to consider going there. That much is
common place. It's called push/pull theory, and it's not much of a theory,
as theories go.
Suro's breakthrough is to take his readers right into the agonizing
choices of the people he came to know as he worked on the book. Some have no
doubt: leave the old behind and embrace the new. But most find themselves
caught. Sometimes it's between the desire to return, finally. Migrants who
go back successful can feel vindicated for having left because leaving has
made it all so much better, for themselves and for the others who count in
their lives. Sometimes people find themselves caught in what Suro calls "the
channel," which means the in-between existence with which they've had come to
terms. Sometimes the result is being caught between what the migrant thought
was the perfect, final adaptation to the new situation and the unexpected
consequences that it has produced. As Suro describes it, the matter is never
easy.
Suro contrasts migrants, who are his heroes, with mere victims. Drawing on
the famous poem at the Statue of Liberty, he suggests that people who migrate
are not "teeming refuse" at all. Instead, they have rejected the idea that
they must accept the victimhood of fate, and have tried to do something about
what fate has done to them. His heroes and heroines are doers, refusers,
hell-no-ers.
Like push-pull, that much may be commonplace. But Suro's heroines and
heroes do not necessarily end up where they want to be or even where they
expected to be. Emotionally or geographically, the journey that begins in
Puebla does not necessarily end in Anaheim, or Boyle Heights, or East LA. And
that is where the metaphor of migration seems to me to work for the subject
here.
How does the migrant metaphor apply to us, the transgendered? One easy
answer comes from people who literally have migrated in space to find the
chance to have the bodies and the social roles they've always wanted. They
truly have left the old behind, all of it, jobs, names, families, histories,
genders, identities. They are complete migrants, born in a place and
situation to manhood or womanhood, as culture and society define these
things, but rejecting it all for the sake of self-recognition, or
self-choice. In the simplest sense, a gender migrant lives one role and
situation and perhaps identity behind and adopts another, entirely. Like any
migration that process means loss, sometimes terrible loss. But the
committed migrant faces that problem and decides that yes, this must be, if I
am to be what i can become. That's no different, at all, from leaving Sicily
for Brooklyn, or Oaxcaca for Los Angeles.
But that misses the power of Suro's imagery, his recognition of the
strength of what most migrant leave behind and the hold of the left-behind
upon the migrants themselves. In his reading migration is not a one-way
street, but a field in which people find and act upon many possibilities. The
new place and its rewards beckon, but the past and its memories beckon too.
So do the loyalties that the past has imprinted, loyalties that a loving
person will reject only with great difficulty.
To borrow from another writer, Thomas Wolfe, nobody can go home again,
once they've left. But people do try, even if the home to which they
thought they were bound is not the same as the home as they finally found.
(Yes, I know I'm quoting and punning upon James Fenimore Cooper).
That's precisely where Suro's reading of the migrant experience seems to me
to offer the perfect metaphor for us, the people condemned by history or
hormones or genes or whatever, to wander between the one homeland called male
and the other called female. People who are unquestionably at home with
where they grew up cannot comprehend departing. Similarly, people who are
just at home with having been born to be a woman or a man possibly can
understand what it is to be born the one and to want desperately, in some
fashion, to be or at least experience the other.
Migration leads to strange consequences, including the formation of
identities that do not exist in in the place the migrant left. Sicilians and
Neapolitans and Lombards and Tuscans in Brooklyn all become "Italians."
Hondurans and Santo Dominguans and Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and native-born
Hispanics en los Estados Unidos all become "Latinos." But no Sicilian can
become a Napolitan. Nobody born Irish Catholic can entirely become a Jew,
even a Dublin Jew. Our own most intelligent spokes people understand this,
and they realize that it isn't the issue. Kate Bornstein writes that she
knows she isn't a man and she isn't sure she's a woman either. Deirdre
McCloskey comments that nobody who wasn't born a girl, or Italian, can know
what is it so be entirely a girl. Or Italian.
That, precisely, speaks to the issue of finding oneself to be
transgender. Can I ever, possibly, know what it would have been like if I
had been conceived female? Of course not, any more than given my own
ancestry I can know what it would have been like to be born in Palermo or
Naples. But I can know what it's like to set out towards another shore,
whether I end up saying "yes, this is where I belong," as some migrants do,
or saying "I like it, but it never can be home," as do others, or, finally,
saying, "it's not what I thought it would be, at all, and I'm going back."
All those are migrant experiences. They represent possibilities, not
certainties, within the general field of experience of leaving home in
order to find something better someplace else. But whatever choice
migrants make, they do not buckle under to whatever fate happened to
decree. They do not simply remain and and accept and suffer. They
work out their own prospects and possiblilties. And if they go back,
they return different for having been away.
Migration from place to place, culture to culture means opening a realm of
possibilities. It's only a metaphor for the experience of leaving behind the
surety of conforming to the role that goes with a person's body of birth.
But maybe the metaphor works.
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