The Riddle of Gender by Deborah Rudacille

Author:Deborah Rudacille
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780307490162
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

As this list illustrates, if gender-variant people agree about anything these days, it is about their right to express their identitities and to label themselves (or not label themselves) in any way they choose. But even as Raymond was writing about the tendency of transsexual people to adopt highly conservative views of gender to placate their medical masters, individuals and groups were beginning to challenge that perspective. During the late sixties and early seventies, transsexual people, like almost everyone else, began questioning traditional gender norms—and were consequently liberated from the view that doctors and researchers were the primary authority on transsexuals and transsexualism. The Transsexual Action Organization—founded in Los Angeles in 1970 by Angela Douglas—for example, was a radical group that, like the Gay Liberation Front, stood shoulder to shoulder with other revolutionaries working to change American society and that viewed the system, and not the (transsexual or transgendered) individual, as the problem. “I have a newspaper article in my files by Angela Douglas from ‘70 or ‘71 that calls for ‘transgender liberation now’ and provides a whole political critique of the gender system,” says Susan Stryker. “She was fairly self-aware in saying ‘the things that are fucked up about me are the result of oppression, and I have a critique of the conditions that have produced me as I am.’”

Douglas was not the only transsexual or transgendered person connecting her own oppression to a broader social critique, says Stryker. “There are some interesting connections between the antiwar movement and the transgender movement,” she says. “I think it’s not coincidental that these were the height of the war years, and that there is a relationship, particularly in what male-to-female transsexual people were able to accomplish, and a larger cultural imperative to fuck with masculinity, at least from the standpoint of the left. The way that you kept from being put in a green uniform and shipped home in a body bag was you became non-normatively masculine and therefore unfit for military service. The long hair, the love beads, the paisley shirt, the bell-bottoms—there was a way that the critique of gender became part of that larger critique, and it created a space for people who were coming from a more self-identified transgender place to work within the broader cultural synergy.”

This new breed of transsexual activist rejected the attempts of doctors and researchers to define transsexuality as a form of control— well before Janice Raymond burst onto the scene. “By the mid-sixties, I think that transsexuals were using the scientific discourse as received for their own ends,” says Stryker. “They were saying, ‘Because I am a transsexual, I should be allowed to change my legal identification paperwork. Because I am a transsexual, I am going to work with the neighborhood legal defense fund, and we’re going to wage this case and change employment law. Because I am a transsexual, I should have my medical needs met; therefore the city clinic should give me hormones.’ So the classic transsexual medical discourse was being deployed for purposes of gaining civil and human rights.

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