Is this the End of the "Butch Dyke"?

"Anne Lister, (1791-1840) the First Modern Lesbian"

This is uncharted territory for me – possibly even a minefield, given my heading. Nevertheless I want to speak my mind – or at least write what happened in my attempt to think, after I heard two speakers talk on transgender issues at the conference I attended in New York. I'm writing this post to try to make sense of an issue that puzzled and confused me. Why would I do this - especially since it includes labelling, stereotyping, generalising and probably being politically incorrect....? I'd love to know what this article evokes for you. So I invite you to comment.

After talking to several people after the conference, I conclude that I am probably not the only one who might be confused. Other than possibly a few science fiction writers and their readers, mutability of gender confounds most of us. Not that I hadn’t heard about the ‘T’ of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) before. I just ignored it as a really minority issue that I would never have to take on board.
If confronted with it in some way, I supposed that I’d have to try to understand the particular issues for that person, and that was as far as I got. It seemed a bit on the lunatic fringe of gender troubles – making something concrete out of what is an emotional and socially constructed difficulty. I was all for changing society, not flesh – and deep down I thought the changers of flesh were both self-indulgent and self-destructive. I figured that you might need an awful lot of time and money to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and that it would require a level of crazy desperation to subject the most sensitive parts of your anatomy to the skills or lack thereof of plastic surgeons. You might end up with being incapable of enjoying sexual pleasure. To me it sounded like the horrors of genital mutilation, albeit voluntary, and the thought of that makes me angry.
So it’s a Sunday morning in May and I’m listening to Griffin Hansbury who tells us he’s a transgender male analyst and that he’s been given short shrift in the psychoanalytic community and, because he sees trans patients, he knows that they also, have had similar experiences as psychoanalytic patients. My mind goes to wondering how this prickly-faced guy could ever have been female, and can there really be enough trans patients to fill his practice, even if it is in New York?
Then Virginia Goldner, a brilliant theorist and writer from the Relational School of psychoanalysis does a presentation in the role of a spokesperson/ally. (I don't know at the time that they have both written papers in a recent issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21(2):153-238, 2011. I will say more about that in my next post.) Her main point seems to be that if we think gender enhancement surgery is OK, why not gender reassignment? She talks about people using their bodies as a canvas. Interesting viewpoint I think, dazzled by her articulateness. Given that the day before I had moved from thinking that the USA deserved 9/11 to consciously  valuing every human being (see previous post: “Becoming a Witness”), I am listening with my liberal hat on. I forget that I don’t really think gender enhancement surgery is OK. Also, I'm feeling a bit like a country bumpkin from South Africa – why is trans such an issue all of a sudden?

So I began to ask. I dined out on the questions in my mind. What did people think about transgender issues? Was gender reassignment happening a lot? Most of the people I asked were even more impassioned about the issue than I was. In Boston some dinner guests remarked that there’d been a demonstration at Harvard. Students were demanding more gender-neutral toilets. “How many are there?” I asked. “Sixty-eight”, was the reply. My mouth opened, I laughed – “isn’t that enough?” No, apparently not. There are hundreds of buildings at Harvard, I was told. Later in London, I discussed this with a friend. This could be a good thing, we decided – as long as individuals with penises became adequately toilet-trained. I remembered that in the TV series “Ally McBeal” there had been gender-neutral loos. That was more than 10 years ago! We felt we would welcome the end of those long female queues in public places.

My research continued. I spoke to quite a few women leaders who I’ve known since the turbulent 70’s. One even mentioned this issue without my asking. They were all being pressured by the transgender community to come up with some kind of response. (Remember that trans women have mostly been brought up as male.) Their wish to be included feels to many feminists like an invasion of womenspace. (For a history of these struggles, click to read a recent article in the New Yorker) Clearly these women (originally boys) are not of the generation of feminist men we tried to train in the 70’s, who knew when to shut up! Some of these friends also talked with horror about castration and mutilation. I thought about my beloved Women’s Pond on Hampstead Heath – the saving grace of a beach-loving Capetonian during many a hot London summer's day – how would they be dealing with trans women there, and how would I feel if they were around?
Of course through all of this I believe that if a person wants to mess with their body it’s their choice, just so long as they don’t come to me for therapy, or expect taxpayers to pay for their operations. I feel similarly about gender enhancement surgery too.

While I am still away, Professor Jack Drescher sends an e-mail to a listserv to which I subscribe. I always read his e-mails – they are informative about LGBT issues and respectful of colleagues both in the USA and Europe. This one is about transgender citizens suing NYC for what they allege is dangerous mistreatment.
A trans woman felt humiliated when she went to the motor vehicle department to apply for a new license and a clerk kept calling her "sir" because her legal birth certificate listed her as "male", and a trans male, whose birth certificate says "female," applied for new health insurance and endured a disapproving, shaming gaze from the company's employee. The article goes on to explain why this kind of official behaviour could be dangerous. But honestly! what else could you expect? If I try to think about the shame and humiliation these two must've experienced growing up, how pathetic is this legal action? I'm not able to muster one ounce of compassion and I'm even cross with Jack Drescher for bringing this to my attention! I find that I have reached my limit with regard to political correctness - this is beyond ridiculous!

Then a co-counsellor asks me in my session what has all this got to do with me? Good question!
I must’ve been very young – nevertheless I can remember wondering why I had to be a girl. I’m sure it was in response to something behavioural - not biological. I was probably being told I couldn’t do something a particular way because I was a girl and the-little-girl-that-I-was, rebelled against the restriction. Why couldn’t I be both? I wondered. Later, I felt that I didn’t really want to grow up – if being grown up meant bras, girdles, stockings, high heels, make-up and a boring life. All far too constricting for me! I don't think I wanted to be a man (in fact I can remember the shame of having body hair and worrying about the maleness of it), but I certainly didn’t want to be the kind of female I was expected to be. Is this why I'm getting so riled up? I don't think so.

Fast forward to London in the early 70’s. The Women’s Liberation Movement. We could now try to be the kind of females we wanted to be. And it also meant accepting the imperfect bodies we had and fighting against objectification and the pressures to be a certain size and shape. We fought for diversity in the way women were portrayed. The fight included being out as lesbians ( if that was one's sexual orientation) and not having to dress a certain way in order to be recognized as one. If one wanted to present oneself as “butch”, that was fine but it didn’t necessarily mean one wanted to be a man, which is how the straight world perceived it. We fought to have lesbianism understood to be even more varied in expression than heterosexuality. There could be a fluidity in sexual fantasies, role playing and power dynamics in relationships between women. We were against self-hatred. Patriarchy had spent centuries getting us to feel bad about ourselves.Trying to unpack this for ourselves and to support other women, many of us became therapists. OK, so this is why I'm outraged - I feel that I'm being asked by transgender people to be aware of a level of self hatred I would rather not know about and to condone it being acted on instead of worked through.
Fast forward again. I’m at a recent meeting of psychologists. Someone mentions she is seeing a trans male (Female to Male) patient. (Oh! So not as rare an issue in South Africa as I had thought.) Later, when I go to ask her more about what she said, another woman approaches her too. I have no idea who this woman is, but she reminds me of “butch dykes” I have known (forgive me for stereotyping). She thanks the psychologist effusively for raising the issue without saying why she's so grateful. I look at her in disbelief. My head starts to spin. Does she mean that she’s always wanted to be a man and given the opportunity she’d undergo gender reassignment??? Maybe the straight world was right after all – perhaps those “butch dykes” of the past did actually want to be men all along. Now that they can become trans men, will this be the end of the “butch dyke”?

P.S. Griffin Hansbury has written a novel!Its about a character who lives a lie in a post 9/11 scenario. How interesting is that! (13/02/13)