Ever since Caitlyn Jenner’s interview with Dianne Sawyer, around 5 years ago now, I’ve noticed a distinct shift in what it’s like to be transgender. There is a night and day difference to me, being trans before and after that interview. Not only in the way the cis people saw me and spoke to me, but in the way that other trans people saw and spoke about each other. The divide between pre and post Dianne Sawyer only grows as the interview fades from memory, and the community I used to know is very different now. As we have stepped into the scrutinizing eye of society, we have experienced some growing pains. Many of those pains are the same that the gay community recently went through, and one of the most persistent questions is “Why? Why are you like this?” It is the same question asked of the gay community during the struggle for marriage equality. Both the gay and trans communities have offered a similar answer: that were just born this way. But with increased scrutiny they ask “But why are you born this way?” And they demand an answer of us, just as they demanded an answer of the gay community.
In fact, there are large parallels between the lines of investigation pursued into the origin of transness and gayness. There is the hunt for the ‘gay gene’ and the ‘trans gene’, the investigation into prenatal hormone exposure, the questionable psychological typing of us. Apparently everyone has forgotten from this deep investigation into the gay community that it simply didn’t turn up anything satsifying. No one ever found a gay gene, or a solid prenatal hormone link, or a robust psychological profile of the quintessential gay man. They just moved on. And now that scrutinizing eye asking ‘why are you like this’ is turned towards our community, and it is profoundly uncomfortable.
In an attempt to escape this gaze, members of the trans community have tried to offer up satisfying explanations. We have dug and scraped for a psychological theory or a trans gene or something to prove that we were born this way, that we really are the gender we say, that we aren’t just deviants. But in our attempt to escape this gaze and to justify our existence we have increasingly turned to bad science to justify ourselves. I will be the first to admit that I am not immune to the allure of escaping this scrutiny, but girls, it’s time to admit that the female brains theory just isn’t true. There is no significant difference between male and female brains (The Royal Institution & Gina Rippon, 2016). In this essay, I will attempt to explore my own theory about the ‘why’ of the trans community. It is not a comfortable theory, and it is not an answer that will endear me to the trans community or it’s allies, but it is what I have landed on in my attempt to avoid the bad science and be as honest as possible.
In the interest of clarity I think it only fair to state outright that this essay was written with a perspective on gender aligning with the work of Judith Butler. I will attempt to summarize my interpretation of her work and to be explicit about any position I hold so as not to either substitute Butler’s opinion for my own inadvertently, nor require familiarity with her work to make sense of this essay. This essay is not a defense of Butler’s work, and I will not waste time and space defending it. It is the framework this essay is built on, the merits of the framework are a separate conversation.
Butler’s thesis is that gender is performative. All people are unwitting actors in the play of life, and have roles assigned based on sex. The script survives any individual actor, but is nonetheless influential over and influenced by the individual actors all the same. One cannot stop being an actor in this play. To be an actor with a role on the stage during a performance is to be a part of the play, no matter how much that script might be taken off the rails by an actor who doesn’t know their lines or refuses to perform. As one with the body of a certain sex, one is expected to perform that sex. To learn how others perform that sex, and to replicate and recreate it. It is simultaneously a prescriptive act and a critical judgment of the public performance of that act.
“As a public action and performative act, gender is not a radical choice or project that reflects a merely individual choice, but neither is it imposed or inscribed upon the individual, as some post-structuralist displacements of the subject would contend. The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-pen cultural relations. But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies. Actors are always already on the stage, within the terms of the performance.” (Butler, 1988)
This relationship between an individual’s sex and the society which judges it can be found at the core of being transgender. To be transgender, to transition, is to alter the relationship between society and an individual’s sex. In Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, Butler states, “If the ‘reality’ of gender is constituted by the performance itself, then there is no recourse to an essential and unrealized ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ which gender performances ostensibly express. Indeed, the transvestite’s gender is as fully real as anyone whose performance complies with social expectations.” That is to say that to alter the performance is to alter gender, there is no underlying and essential ‘real’ gender which a person must perform. The clash between society and the transgender individual comes not from the reality of the performance but from the performance a body is expected to give. The dissonance goes away when the body is changed enough that it appears to complement the performance it is expected to give.[1] The anger and shock at the transgender individual arises from playing the wrong part, from disrupting the play on the stage. Once the disruption is resolved, the play can go on.
Throughout history, people have resolved this disruption in a variety of different ways. The most common is to change the way they perform their act, to get back on script. How many men have squashed back emotion, how many women have abandoned their careers, so as not to stray from their script? We have all seen this play out a thousand times inside our gender and out. It is the method by which gender propagates itself, following the script dutifully shows the next actor how they are to behave as well.
The next is to change the acts which are acceptable for their sex to play. Many feminists have worked their whole lives to expand the acts allowable and acceptable for women to play. The next is to change the act they are expected to play. This can be done by changing the sex one appears to be (thus changing what act is expected of them) or by changing the acts that are expected to be played (changing what is expected of a new group of actors).
As long as gender has existed, so have people who deviate from the prescriptive act of gender existed. In ‘On Airs, Waters, Places’, Hippocrates writes of the “effeminates” of the Scythians, who appear to be castrated males who take on the social role of women. In The SAL-ZIKRUM ‘Woman-Man’ in Old-Babylonian Texts, G.R. Driver and Jon C. Mills write about the complicated interpretation of the word sal-zikrum in the Code of Hammu-rabi. They propose that the sal-zikrum was an epicene, a male eunuch treated as a woman.
These spaces, found across history and culture, are something recognizable to many gender variant people. They speak to the variance in humans from the acts we are told today are natural for us to perform. Not all of these spaces are the same structure or role, not all of them have been voluntary. But the creation of gender variant cultural roles is something common to many societies and time periods, and something that was not very prominent in the West until very recently. Before the emergence of the transgender community as a gender variant cultural role for western society, the largest community to express gender variance was the underground drag and vogue communities.
It is important to remember that gender variant individuals are not the same as transgender individuals. To be transgender is to belong to a specific, modern day culture which challenges and changes the gender acts expected of its members. Regardless of any sense of community or even communication, transgender individuals adhere to common practices, standards, and beliefs. This is not to say that all contemporary transgender individuals are in agreement about what it means to be transgender, but to say that one cannot equate the modern phenomenon of the transgender individual with any historical example of gender variance any more than one can equate the western transgender individual with the cultural role of the fa’afafine. The only thing they truly have in common is the digression from the act assigned to them. Everything else is a culture-specific construct around the digression, and must be understood within the lens of that culture.
A common tendency among the transgender community is to characterize these historical examples of gender variance as precursors to the modern transgender individual, missing the knowledge of female brains, or prenatal hormone exposure, or the speaker’s choice theory. This is just falling victim to the sociological trap of viewing one’s own culture as the apex of knowledge and culture, unfailing in its correctness. These are retroactive justifications for why the modern transgender individual is the fulling realized gender variant individual. I propose that instead, modern transgender culture is another example of a gender variant cultural role: an alternate act carved out within society for members to play instead of the act typically expected of their sex.
As a gender variant cultural role, the transgender community is relatively standard. It has it’s own cultural standards, structures, and practices. While a far cry from being cloistered, the transgender community provides a distinctly separate space for it’s members to deviate from the script of gender assigned to them. The only significant difference between the transgender community and historical gender variant cultural roles is the claim to be the gender members transition to. Historical gender variant cultural roles most frequently claimed a new role, often one that focused on being halfway between two gender. Sal-Zikrum, for example, translates to woman-man. Hippocrates refers to the effeminates as men who do women’s work. The claim that trans women are women is unique to the transgender community, as far as gender variance goes.
Why the departure then? Why does the transgender community change acts instead of creating a new one? To understand why, we have to keep in mind not just the social role historical gender variant cultural roles took on, but their structure. The sal-zikrum maybe or may not have been a sacred prostitute (G. R. Driver and John C. Miles, 1939), but certainly had a special place for them in temples. The effeminates took on women’s work when they were too sick to ride horseback any longer. The Galli of Rome were eunuch priests. All of them took not just a specific cultural role, but a specific mode of contributing to society. Today we might call this a career, but using that word for past roles would be anachronism. What matters are the two qualities it shares with careers of today: it dictates a large portion of the person’s life, and is their primary method of contributing to a functioning society. In the past, gender variant cultural roles often structured themselves around something that explicitly or implicitly dissociated them with the gender act typically matching their sex. So, if the transgender community were to do the same, what would they structure themselves around?
Life for women in the west is not equal. Gender equality isn’t a solved problem. But discrimination in employment is outlawed in most first world countries. The segregation of careers into men’s work and women’s work is not gone, but it as at a low point in human history. In light of that, what is the transgender community to base their act around? There is no real women’s only work for them to participate in, and what remains as typically women’s work (such as homemaking) doesn’t manifest in institutions bearing the hallmarks of gender varient cultural roles (insular internal culture and social norms). The other historically common structure (the clergy), is dominated by Abrahamic religions that denounce them. The only place left to turn is to abandon the structure of the gender variant cultural role and base the community around the act of woman itself.
POSTSCRIPT
I feel it’s necessary to include this final note about what my argument implies about or means for transgender individuals. It is all too easy, and very common, for any argument that X is a social construct to be taken mean that X isn’t real. Rather than go over the usual argument about the fact that money is a social construct but I would still very much like some, I will say that whether a thing is a social construct or not is not does not change how the people inside a society which has constructed that thing experience it. The feeling of being born in the wrong body, or the desire to transition, or the deeply-held belief that one is a woman do not change based on whether that belief is based around a social construct. If we believe Judith Butler, and I’ve made it clear that I do, the origin of the transgender claim to being a woman is irrelevant to the truth of it. The reason one performs the act of woman, both in a personal sense and a societal or historical sense, does not affect the performance itself. We become our actions.
CITATIONS
Projects, C. (2020, April 14). On Airs, Waters, Places. Retrieved January 07, 2021, from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Airs,_Waters,_Places Driver, G., & Miles, J. (1939). The SAL-ZIKRUM ‘Woman-Man’ in Old-Babylonian Texts. Iraq, 6(1), 66-70. doi:10.2307/4241640
Butler, J. (1988). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519-531. doi:10.2307/3207893
The Royal Institution & Gina Rippon. (2016, June 1). How Neurononsense Keeps Women in Their Place - with Gina Rippon [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqR4cw9Amlg [1] Take care, too, not to mistake what the performance of gender entails. It is too easy to fall into a trap of thinking that the performance of gender is the clothing or makeup one can wear, and that to say “men can wear makeup or dresses” is to destroy the disparity between the acts bodies are expected to perform. But the acts we are expected to perform include language, include bathrooms, include everything. All of these are socially imposed expectations put on the body of a certain sex. There is nothing inherent in the biological, physical reality of the male sex which requires us to refer to it’s actors with the specific sounds constituting the word “man”, or even to refer to its actors by a different word than the actors of the female sex. Sex is merely physical reality, anything built on that physical reality is a part of the act which is gender.