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TG Scholars Seek to Be Heard and Seen in Academe
By Robin Wilson
The Chronicle for Higher Education
Used with Permission & Contributed by Gina Marie
Before he delivers a lecture on gender identity to his
philosophy class this semester, Michael A. Gilbert must
decide what to wear. Most likely, he will put on a
knee-length skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, and low pumps.
Standing before a mirror at home, he'll fix his wig and
apply some makeup before heading out the door.
Professor Gilbert is a cross-dresser who teaches
philosophy at York University, in Ontario. When he
appears in drag this semester, it will be the second time
that he has introduced students in his "Gender and
Sexuality" course to a side of himself that he had kept
hidden for nearly 50 years. "Having tenure is a two-edged
sword," he says. "It means I can't be fired. But when it's
appropriate, it's also incumbent upon me to take a risk
and stick my neck out. My main goal is to provide an
openness for transgendered people."
Dr. Gilbert is among a growing cadre of "trans" people on
campuses who are going public. Organizations for gay,
lesbian, and bisexual students have already begun tacking
a "T" on the end of their names to embrace
"transgendered" or "transsexual" students. In the past year,
students and professors have also pushed universities to
extend protection to transgendered people under policies
that prevent discrimination against minorities.
What's more, work by transgendered scholars is making
transgender studies a hot new topic. One of the most
important contributions to the field, a transgender issue of
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, edited by
Susan Stryker, is due out next month from Duke
University Press. A flurry of other publications on the
topic is expected this spring and summer, and transsexual
academics have started an electronic mailing list on the
subject.
"We are pioneering a new field of scholarship," says Dr.
Stryker, an independent scholar, who changed from male
to female in 1991, a year before earning her Ph.D. in
history from the University of California at Berkeley. "This
whole area is going to become an increasingly big social
concern over the next decade."
Despite its growing visibility, most people still need help in
navigating the world
of transgenderism.
The label
"transsexual" typically
is reserved for
people who have had
at least some
sex-change surgery
and who take
hormones to further
the change.
"Transgendered" is a
catchall term that is
used to refer to
people who live as
the opposite sex,
whether or not they
have had sex-change
surgery. The description encompasses cross-dressers,
also known as transvestites, and is used by some lesbians
and gay men to describe themselves.
Transgendered people are gaining attention, but their
numbers are still small. Only about .025 per cent of
Americans identify themselves as transsexual, and about 2
per cent of Americans consider themselves transgendered,
says a non-profit group, the International Foundation for
Gender Education, in Waltham, Mass.
Having a sex change is a deeply personal matter, but
several transsexual academics spoke freely about the
experience for this article. Most of them told of being well
received on their campuses after they changed gender.
C. Jacob Hale chose to become a man and sought tenure
on California State University's Northridge campus in the
same year. The timing was risky. But Dr. Hale, a
professor of philosophy, didn't want to wait.
"I could not imagine going through my tenure review and
then telling my colleagues, 'Guess what? There's something
I forgot to tell you,'" says Dr. Hale, who made the
decision to change sex in 1995. But the professor did feel
vulnerable. "I was very afraid of losing my academic
career," he says. "What else do philosophers do?"
The first thing Dr. Hale did after announcing that she
would become a man was to buzz-cut her bleached-blond
hair. Dr. Hale also began taking male hormones and had
her breasts removed, but has stopped short of genital
surgery.
Dr. Hale's sexual transition has caused a transformation in
his scholarly interests. The professor began at Northridge
studying the philosophy of science and mathematics. Now
he works at the intersection of feminist theory, queer
theory, and transgender theory. Near the top of a list of
publications on his curriculum vitae is a paper called
"Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies: How to Have Sex
Without Women or Men."
Much of the research in the emerging field of transgender
studies is the work of
scholars, like Dr. Hale,
who consider
themselves
transgendered.
Although
male-to-female
transitions are the more
common, a lot of
recent scholarly work
explores the opposite
change.
It comes as no surprise that some people have problems
with such lines of research. Bradford Wilson, executive
director of the traditionalist National Association of
Scholars, says he objects to any group of people's
studying themselves and calling it scholarship. "When one
chooses one's research subjects as a means of affirming
one's difference, I think that one runs the risk of distorting
the scholarly enterprise," he says. "This is not necessarily
scholarly. It's political."
But Dr. Rubin says it is not unusual for scholars in any field
to write about their own experiences. "To claim that we're
skewing our scholarship because we're writing from a
position fails to recognize that everybody is similarly
situated," says Dr. Rubin, who landed a coveted lecturer's
job at Harvard in 1991 while he was still a woman,
completing a Ph.D at Brandeis University. Dr. Rubin made
his sexual transition, without any problems, four years after
he arrived at Harvard, he says.
Deirdre N. McCloskey is one faculty member who hasn't
made her transsexualism the subject of her study -- at
least not yet. She continues to work on the same questions
about the economy that interested her when she was
Donald McCloskey. But her writing is now
self-consciously female. Donald had been well known for
his pointed challenges to the basic assumptions that
economists make. Dr. McCloskey, who began making the
change to Deirdre two years ago, still poses such
challenges. But now she frequently refers to herself as
"Aunt Deirdre" in tweaking the predominantly male
profession.
In her first book as a female author, Deirdre McCloskey
takes her colleagues to task for what she sees as their
overreliance on theory and statistics to explain human
behavior. Donald did that, too. But unlike Donald's work,
Deirdre's book, published last year by Amsterdam
University Press, is full of references to gender. "There's a
woman's point here," she writes in one chapter of The
Vices of Economists: The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie.
She acknowledges that not everyone approves of her
interpretation of what it means to be a woman. "Red flags
go up when you speak of thinking like a woman, but that's
what I do," she says. "The crucial point is that it's not
because I've consulted page 35 of the manual on how to
be a girl. It seems to come from inside."
Like Dr. McCloskey, Michelle Stanton also talks about
noticing "a
softening in body
and perceptions"
since she
changed from
male to female in
1992. As a man,
Dr. Stanton was
drawn to the
technological
side of television
and film
production. He
wrote several
articles for the
journal of the
Society of
Motion Picture
and Television
Engineers. But after becoming a woman, says Dr. Stanton,
"I never wrote for them again." She explains: "In the
production side, you're involved in physical activity,
moving sets, pushing cameras. I didn't want to do that
anymore." Now her research and teaching concern the
marketing and advertising aspects of the entertainment
industry, fields she calls "more people-oriented."
Most of the transgendered professors interviewed for this
article describe their transitions on campus as uneventful.
Dr. Stanton even calls hers "tranquil." Universities,
particularly large research institutions, are known for being
tolerant places and may therefore be among the most
comfortable venues for someone undergoing a sex change.
Even Valerie J. Harvey, a professor of computer and
information systems at Robert Morris College, a small
liberal-arts institution in Pennsylvania, underwent a change
from male to female in 1996 without a hitch. Jo Ann M.
Sipple, vice-president for academic and student affairs at
the college, acknowledges that some of Dr. Harvey's
colleagues found the experience "unnerving." But officials
were more concerned about how students would react.
"We have a fairly conservative student population, and I
thought maybe some of them would object on moral or
religious grounds," recalls Ms. Sipple. The college had
counselors on hand to help students cope when Dr.
Harvey announced the change. "But," the administrator
recalls, "there were no complaints."
For Wynd D. Harris, a professor of marketing and
international business at Quinnipiac College, the transition
has not been that easy. The professor changed names
from William to Wynd last May, and in August asked to
be recognized as female.
But the college balked. Dr. Harris had been taking
hormones but had not yet had genital surgery when he
requested the change. The university asked for proof that
the professor was a woman. "They told me I had to have
a physical exam," recalls Dr. Harris. The professor
refused. In October, the college suspended Dr. Harris and
started termination proceedings against her.
Pat Smith, a spokesman for Quinnipiac, says Dr. Harris
made a series of requests that have troubled the college.
First, he says, the professor asked to be recognized as
Jewish (he had been a Protestant), then he wanted to be
considered American Indian, and then he wanted to be
called a woman.
Nonetheless, a committee of faculty members voted nine
to one last month, with one
abstention, to retain Professor
Harris. Now the provost must
decide what to do. In the
meantime, Dr. Harris has had
sex-change surgery and is
legally female.
To head off situations like the
one facing Dr. Harris, some
transsexuals are pushing for
administrative protection from
discrimination. The effort isn't
widespread, but it is
happening at some prominent
institutions.
The University of Iowa has
already adopted a policy that protects people from
discrimination based on their "gender identity."
Ben Singer, a graduate student in English who had
sex-change surgery in academic 1995-96, has pushed for
a similar policy at Rutgers University. He says his adviser
became angry when he told her he was having a sex
change. "As a feminist, her perception was that I was
giving up my womanhood," recalls Mr. Singer. He
decided to lobby the university to make things easier for
people like him.
Last month, the executive vice-president at Rutgers
directed administrators to provide protection for "people
who have changed sex or who are in the process of
changing their sex." But Mr. Singer says he objects to the
plan because it ignores transgendered people who may
have no intention of having sex-change surgery.
The Transgender Task Force, a small group of students at
Harvard
University, has
persuaded the
student
Undergraduate
Council there to
add "gender
identity or
expression" to the
list of protected
categories in the
council's policy
against
discrimination.
The task force is
now going on to
ask that the entire
university change
its
non-discrimination
policy, but
administrators are trying to put the brakes on the effort.
"I advised the students that this was a matter about which
there was not a great deal of information or
understanding," says Harry R. Lewis, dean of Harvard
College. "I thought their job was initially to educate the
community."
Harvard may already be doing a good job of educating
people about the issue, whether it realizes it or not. Last
year, it began allowing Alex S. Myers, a transgendered
student who dresses like a man but is biologically a
woman, to live on an all-male floor of a campus
dormitory. Mr. Myers, who is part of the Transgender
Task Force, is among a group of transgendered people
who don't take hormones or undergo genital surgery, and
don't plan to.
"There is a contingent of younger people who see that you
can live as transgendered without having surgery," says
Mr. Myers, who wears his hair slicked back and speaks
in a tenor voice. "The reason I pass as a man has nothing
to do with my genetics and everything to do with society.
Gender is completely different now than it was 20 years
ago."
A discussion on the article is also taking place at the CHE website at this address:
http://chronicle.com/colloquy/98/transgender/transgender.htm
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