Across the divide

Can the transgender community help resolve the age-old battles between the sexes?

by Dorie Clark

CHANGING MINDS: Nancy Nangeroni, host of the national radio program Gender Talk, says transgender activism "has a great potential to change how people view difference, not just gender difference."

This spring, the virtually unknown Hilary Swank walked away with a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of transgendered murder victim Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry. Decatur, Georgia, just adopted legislation making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of "transgender status," and the New York City Council is considering a similar measure. The Associated Press just issued new guidelines for reporters writing about transgendered people: the gender pronouns preferred by interview subjects should be used. Ithaca, New York, last month increased penalties for hate crimes against transgendered people. An out transsexual woman, Karen Kerin, is running for Congress in Vermont -- as a Republican.

"Ten years ago, I would have said I didn't think [equality for transgender people] would happen in my lifetime, but now I really do think it's possible," says Jamison Green, the former president of Female-to-Male International, an advocacy group.

Of course, not all the news is good. As you read this, transgendered people and their allies are camped outside the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which runs until Sunday, protesting for the eighth year in a row the festival's admission policy prohibiting trans women. The New York Times Magazine ran a controversial cover story in May accusing national gay groups of willfully obscuring the transgender identity of Calpernia Addams, the girlfriend of Private First Class Barry Winchell, in order to turn the hate-crime victim into a "martyr for gay rights." Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank successfully added the phrase "gender identity, characteristics, or expression" to a bill reauthorizing domestic-violence grant money -- the first time language recognizing transgendered people had ever been proposed in federal legislation -- but the bill never made it out of committee. And Gender PAC, a national organization advocating free gender expression, estimates that over the past year, roughly one transgendered person per month has been murdered in a hate crime.

In the midst of this cultural ferment, though, many transgendered people are becoming more open about who they are. In the process, they're shaking up traditional notions of gender and sexual identity, dismaying the usual conservative suspects and even some gay activists. "It has a great potential to change how people view difference, not just gender difference," says Nancy Nangeroni, host of the radio program Gender Talk (which can be heard on the Web at www.gendertalk.com). "It makes us larger than ourselves and makes us compassionate to everyone's needs."

"People have been redefining their gender for years," says Antoinette Pezet, president of Transsupport, a Portland-based advocacy group. "Women had to fight to wear men's clothing; we're just the extreme of that spectrum.

"People who are transgender have an important message: the differences between us are not so radical. I mean we all have families. We all bleed when we're cut."

The trans movement, if it can maneuver past a number of internal rifts, may profoundly change how we view ourselves and others. At a minimum, the questions it raises give us one more chance to figure out whether Venus and Mars can ever get along.

People who operate outside traditional gender roles have always been around. Joan of Arc may have been transgendered, some believe. And in The Legend of Pope Joan: In Search of the Truth (Berkley), Peter Stanford investigates the story that a ninth-century woman passed herself off as a man and became pope. More recently, Christine Jorgensen made headlines after her 1952 transition from male to female, and the openly transgendered Sylvia Rivera was one of the leaders of the Stonewall uprising, which launched the modern gay-rights movement.

But no one knows how many transgendered people exist today -- in part because many are still closeted about their identity, but mostly because there's no consensus on how to define the term. At its narrowest, it refers to transsexuals -- biological males who take hormones and/or have surgery to become women, and vice versa. Construed more broadly, the term often includes those with ambiguous gender, such as drag queens or women who pass as men. And some activists, such as writer Gabriel Rotello, author of Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (Penguin), argue that anyone who transgresses traditional gender roles -- basically, all gay people and quite a few straight people -- could appropriately be labeled "transgendered."

Politically and culturally, today's trans movement coalesced in the early-to-mid 1990s. Two groundbreaking books were published: Stone Butch Blues (Firebrand), Leslie Feinberg's fictionalized 1993 memoir about a lesbian who passes as a man; and a witty treatise called Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Routledge), written by male-to-female (MTF) transsexual Kate Bornstein in 1994. The insistence of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival that all participants be "women-born women" also galvanized the movement in the early 1990s. "A group of women ostensibly identifying as feminists were using an old definition of what it means to be a woman," says Penni Ashe Matz of the advocacy group It's Time America. "To argue that someone with a penis can't be a woman is definitely an old-school notion -- it goes back to `Biology is destiny,' which the feminists said was bunk."

And lastly, the Internet and America Online came into their own, helping a nascent trans community to organize. "The Internet was the single most important device enabling the transgender community to happen," says Nangeroni. "It brought together the radical activists who were willing to go out and challenge the way things were and those who were more closeted and seeking greater comfort with themselves, and allowed those two groups of people to support one another and move in the same direction."

This burgeoning activism has focused on a number of issues. Hate crimes are a top priority. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute reported in its new manual, Transgender Equality: A Handbook for Activists and Policymakers, that 60 percent of transgendered people have experienced hate-related violence. Workplace discrimination is also a concern. Currently, the state of Minnesota and about two dozen cities (Portland is not one of them) offer protection on the basis of gender identity, but this pales in comparison to the 200-plus cities that protect gays and lesbians in the workplace, and the additional thousands that don't offer any protection at all to GLBT people. Another focus is access to health care. Transsupport's Pezet says doctors still don't know how to treat transgenders.

"There are standards for treating transgenders," says Pezet, "but you have to first convince the doctor that this isn't just some kind of psychological issue, and then you have to get them to read the standards. It's an ongoing problem."

Though there's still a long way to go, the trans movement has had notable success, considering that it really entered the political arena only five years ago. Gender PAC, which executive director Riki Wilchins says should be described as a "gender rights" organization, orchestrated a recent lobby day that netted 57 congressional pledges not to discriminate on the basis of gender identity. "When all the faxes roll in, we expect to have 70 or 75," Wilchins says.

Much of this rapid progress is due to the trans movement's affiliation with the gay community, which is now politically connected. Indeed, over the past five years, it's become de rigueur for gay groups to identify themselves as "GLBT" (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender). Sometimes this is a heartfelt symbol of inclusion, and a recognition that the movements were linked from the beginning because a number of transgendered folks fought at Stonewall. Other times, it's merely a way to silence politically correct types who seem to insist on including anybody and everybody. This makes for an uneasy alliance. Stacey Montgomery, a transgendered lesbian who led the much-publicized Stop Dr. Laura protests in Boston, says of the relationship between the two communities: "We're not friends. That's very misleading. We're family. Friends, you want to hang out with; family, you can't get rid of. We're like brothers and sisters in the back seat of the car."

"It's getting better," says Pezet. "But I still have to impress on the straight transgender community that they need to embrace gays."

One of the most infamous gay-trans showdowns was the mid-1990s donnybrook over whether the words "gender identity" should be added to the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would ban workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay political group, refused to support the added language. HRC has subsequently reached out to the trans community, helping Gender PAC with its recent efforts. But mistrust lingers among other trans activists (and ENDA, which still doesn't have a "gender identity" clause, has yet to pass either the House or the Senate). The tension recently surfaced in the pages of the Advocate, the gay newsmagazine of record, where columnist Norah Vincent made waves by calling transsexuals "the most draconian arm of the PC language police" and assailing them for "multilat[ing] their bodies in order to make them conform to the fashionable version of the opposite sex and gender."

For better or for worse, the existence of transgendered people raises difficult questions about what it means to be gay. Gay men and lesbians have for years defended themselves against charges that what they really want is to belong to the opposite sex. But the trans community's growing visibility highlights the uncomfortable fact that many transsexuals are former lesbians who have become men, or former gay men who have become women. Even more complicated, it's not uncommon for people's sexual orientations to change after sex reassignment. "Radical lesbian feminists all of a sudden become tranny fag-boy bottoms," notes one observer. "It's a remarkable thing."

Some worry that this fluidity of sexual preference will come back to haunt the gay community. Two years ago, a nationwide ad campaign touting "ex-gay ministries" stirred up the debate over whether homosexuality is chosen (and therefore capable of being un-chosen, as the religious right argues it should be) or innate and unchangeable. Many gays argued for the latter view -- that gay men and lesbians should be accepted because they are born gay, just as people are born black or born with blue eyes. This is an argument that makes sense to Middle America, but it's also oversimplified and flawed. The transgender experience forces us to confront these flaws. And some fear that if mainstream America isn't ready to handle a more complex and accurate explanation of how people come to be gay and why gay men and lesbians deserve rights, the movement might lose the gains it's already made.

But others are simply excited by the trans movement's potential to shake things up. Newfound Hollywood glamour and the mystique of the "gender outlaw" have fueled "transgender trendiness" at a number of colleges and in the gay communities of large urban areas. Says Thomas Lewis, a Boston-area volunteer for the GLBT-education group SpeakOut: "FTMs are sort of the flavor of the month."

And movies like Boys Don't Cry and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert are also bringing "gender queers" into the living rooms of mainstream America. Transgender activism "seems to be moving into an adolescence where the movement has won a certain degree of respectability," says Nancy Nangeroni. "Most activist organizations are now welcoming and affirming of trans people," she adds. This recent acceptance has empowered many transgendered people to come out.

We're not going to assimilate to society," predicts Stacey Montgomery. "Society will assimilate to us. . . . Whether it's being intersexed or transgressive in terms of how one dresses, I think society is going to be more culturally relaxed." If that happens, activists believe it will make life better for everyone -- and it will be because of today's transgender community, which is pushing the gender envelope. "Increasingly," says Penni Ashe Matz, "we're seeing transgender people who are less interested in blending in and becoming invisible. I would have to put myself in that category. . . . I've personally developed a philosophy and I'm seeing it in other transgender people -- I want to pass, but not too well."

With medical and surgical advances, transgendered people will have the potential to blend in more seamlessly. As transgenderism becomes less stigmatized, though, there may be less need to do so. The technology could even lure curious thrill-seekers. Says Montgomery, "If in 100 years people are able to get cheap sex changes and spend a week on the other side for $1000, who will notice us at all?"

"I think the transgender movement calls for a paradigm shift in how we perceive the value of human beings," says Jamison Green. "We're asking people to give up their fear of other people's identities and beliefs." If it works, transgender activism will be batting clean-up, finishing what the civil rights, women's, and gay and lesbian movements started: the drive toward a truly equal, accepting society.

But before this can happen, the trans community has to deal with its own internal schisms. Those individuals who prefer to blend in with one gender or the other are very different, politically and philosophically, from those who want to shake up the gender duality. Some of the latter are even putting their beliefs into practice, turning to "lo-ho" (low doses of hormones such as estrogen and testosterone) to create deliberately androgynous bodies.

Similarly, there's a rift between those who prefer to remain closeted and those who are open about their transgender identity. As Karen Kerin, the congressional candidate from Vermont, notes: "Once most transsexual people go through transition, they want to disappear back into society. They want to live out their lives in what they perceive to be their proper [gender] role." In a sense, a community of out transgendered people blows their cover.

Another point of contention is that, because of financial and psychological pressures, many trans people do not have the energy to agitate politically. Some of these people bristle at those who do. Montgomery reports, "I get older trans people coming up to me and saying, `Stop the activism! The secret for trans acceptance is invisibility.' "

Sexual orientation is also a sticking point, which is ironic because being gay is generally considered more "socially acceptable" than being transgendered. Some transgendered people identify as gay or lesbian, but as Green says, "there are a lot of people in the trans community who are homophobic, who have never had any experience with gay and lesbian people and don't want it."

Pezet tells a story of trying to start a satellite chapter of Transsupport. "We had been working on getting a group started in Aroostook County for about a year. We were ready to go, but the only place the group could think to meet was a place where gays went. They wouldn't meet there because they didn't want to be identified as gay."

Finally, despite transgendered people's common history of gender bending and blending, their biggest challenge may be overcoming the age-old battle of the sexes. "Right now, we're not united," admits one activist. "There's little communication between MTFs and FTMs." In the transsexual community, FTMs are sometimes envied for their ability to pass undetected. As Thomas Lewis puts it, "testosterone is like a sledgehammer in the universe -- it's easier to add it than take it out." But the price of blending in (and avoiding a share of the harassment and hate crimes that might otherwise come their way) is that FTMs have, until recently, been almost totally invisible to the public eye.

This may also be the result of what some FTMs call the residual air of "male privilege" that MTFs carry with them when they become women. Transgendered men often feel left out by transgendered women. "Most of us girls just don't know how to include the guys," says Penni Ashe Matz. And when there are outreach efforts, they may simply fall flat. As Green recalls, "One of the things that upset me in the beginning when I was trying to build bridges was that MTFs assumed they knew all about our lives [as FTMs]. They assumed we wanted to be the kind of men they thought they should have been but couldn't. They'd tell us how we should be as men, and it was very obnoxious, and it wasn't what we were looking for."

Some, like Stacey Montgomery, are obsessively on guard as a result. "I'm very sensitive to the old charge that trans women show up and take over the women's movement," she says. "I'll go to ridiculous lengths to avoid it -- if I'm in charge on a given day, is it because of my previous [gender] background? More often than not, it's just because I'm unemployed and have time on my hands."

Clearly, even the trans community's unique perspective on gender can't solve all the problems. Biology may not be destiny anymore, but rethinking old patterns and relating across the gender divide is still as complex as ever. But the trans movement is raising good questions, and offering simple advice that takes us beyond the clichés of Mars and Venus: whether you're male or female, FTM or MTF, or something in between, if you wear wingtips, try walking a mile in someone else's high heels -- and vice versa.

Dorie Clark is a freelance writer and can be reached at DorieClark@aol.com.