The Look of a Woman: Facial Feminization Surgery and the Aims of Trans- Medicine by Eric Plemons

Author:Eric Plemons [Plemons, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2017-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

FACIAL FEMINIZATION SURGERY DOESN’T DO ANYTHING: MATERIALS OF LEGAL RECOGNITION

While some politically minded trans- women criticized FFS for what they saw as its damaging assimilationism, the individual efficacy of FFS was also challenged by American legal and policy institutions that remain committed to a genital-centric definition of sex and of surgical sex change. For this audience the face-to-face recognition of sex that doctors and patients often described as passing and to which adherents to a performative model of sex/ gender attribute the power to produce embodied sex/gender as such was quite irrelevant. The state does not recognize sex based on interactions on the street; the state keeps sex in documents and enforces it through policies that significantly impact citizens’ daily lives. This is especially the case for trans- folks whose body contrasts or conflicts with the documents that track them (Beauchamp 2009; Cantú 2009; Currah and Mulqueen 2011). Despite what FFS surgeons and patients say, American legal and public policy institutions do not recognize facial reconstructive surgery as a meaningful transformation of sex.

In the United States individuals are assigned a sex at birth, generally based on the appearance of their external genitalia. Sex designation is a legal artifact, marking an identifying characteristic of the body that has largely been considered permanent—except when it is not. Policies regulating whether and how sex can be changed on state-issued documents such as birth certificates and driver’s licenses have varied widely over time and across jurisdictions (Beauchamp 2009; Currah and Moore 2009; Meadow 2010; van Anders et al. 2014). U.S. courts have also stipulated acceptable forms of surgery or documentation depending on whether the person requesting a change of sex designation is a trans- man or a trans- woman (Markowitz 2008; Meyerowitz 2002; Ohle 2004). As of this writing, some states require proof of surgery from the operating surgeon in order to change a citizen’s sex designation on a birth certificate.4 Others require only a letter requesting such a change. Some will not change sex designation on a birth certificate for any reason (Lambda Legal 2015). Although those states that require surgery as a condition of changing documents vary in what kinds of surgery they require and how proof of such surgery is to be presented, none accepts FFS as a surgical transformation of sex.5 Defined and determined by an ideal of “permanent” (Currah and Moore 2009), genital-centric, and binary sex—or what van Anders and colleagues (2014) call “newborn bio/logics”—surgical requirements for changing sex designation are predominantly focused on genital surgery.6 Based on an essential and genital-centric understanding of sex and sex change, claims to the performative efficacy and centrality of facial reconstruction that FFS advocates claim as common sense make no sense at all.7

In the close and controlled monitoring of bodies and identities, medical and legal authority often work together toward the aim of “correcting” trans- people’s bodies into those that are coherently recognizable and countable (Spade 2003; Stryker and Currah 2015). But counting as an instance of “male” or “female” is not

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.