THE JOURNAL

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #99, Fall 2002.
The following was presented in April, 2002 at the IFGE Coming Together conference in Nashville, TN

CONCEPT OF GENDER AMONG SELECTED NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITIONS

by Kenneth Dollarhide

As a blond-haired, blue-eyed mixblood child growing up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and living in border towns around the reservation, I was taught early that I must learn to define myself and not allow others to define who I am? or at least not to accept their definitions of me. Fullbloods would tell me I was white and not an Indian at all. Whites would call me ?dog-eater? or ?another damn breed? and claim I was not white at all. If I allowed either the Indians or the whites to define me, to give me by own identity, I would have gone insane, wondering where I belonged. Fortunately, a tribal elder, long since past, told me I belonged to the earth? and I knew in that moment who I am and that no one other than myself could define who I am. I understood the Indian notion of defining yourself.

BINARY NOTIONS

It seems to me that using the Western, European, monotheistic model, there is a rigid binary code of sex and gender which finally reduces all of us to being either a penis or a vagina. There are even rules, making it more confusing, that we must follow. Those individuals with a penis are supposed to develop masculine gender characteristics and select those individuals with vaginas as objects of sexual desire. And, of course, those individuals with vaginas are expected to develop feminine gender identities and sexually desire those individuals who have a penis.

Those who cannot or do not fit into this rigid tight box? no pun intended? are forced to appeal to some mental health or medical professional, who will then legalize their gender experience. This assumes that in some strange and esoteric manner those individuals need to be ?corrected? by medical professionals into being people with a penis or people with a vagina and that by doing so they will be made either male or female and the ambivalence will then disappear and all will be well. Or, as Leslie Feinberg says, ?Men are masculine and women are feminine. End of subject. But clearly the subject didn?t end there for me.? (Feinberg, p. 102) It seems to me, as it did to Feinberg, that it?s not that easy? and this is where the confusion comes in and I no longer understand. Kate Bornstein, in her book Gender Outlaw, says:

So there are rules to gender, but rules can be broken... gender can have ambiguity. There are many ways to transgress a prescribed gender code, depending upon the world view of the person who?s doing the transgressing: they range from preferring to be somewhat less than rigidly gendered, to preferring an entirely non-definable image... and then I found out that gender can have fluidity, which is quite different from ambiguity. If ambiguity is a refusal to fall within a prescribed gender code, then fluidity is the ability to freely and knowingly become one or many of a limitless number of genders, for any length of time, at any rate of change. Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules of gender.
? Bornstein, pp. 51-52

SEX AND GENDER DISTINCTION

Clearly, a distinction must be made between sex and gender, which are alltoo- often used as synonyms. Will Roscoe offers an interesting construction as a way out of this biological binary determinism:

If sex is a social construction, it cannot provide the ?transcendental signified? for defining gender. The challenge, therefore, is to define sex without presupposing the naturalness of its forms and to define gender without reducing it to a reiteration of sex. This can be accomplished by recognizing sex as a category of bodies, and gender as a category of persons. The first entails the criteria for being recognized as humans... the second involves distinctions between kinds of persons within a group. This shifts the emphasis from assumptions about biological differences to the social processes of categorization by which a body is acknowledged as being human.
? Roscoe, p. 127

This moves us from binary, biological determinism to a multidimensional social and cultural category which allows for profound differences between sex and gender? and we can begin to understand Kate Bornstein when she says, ?I know several women in San Francisco who have penises. Many wonderful men in my life have vaginas. And there are quite a few people whose genitals fall somewhere between penises and vaginas?
(p. 56). The late Kim Harlow described herself beautifully in her diary which was published shortly after her death:

The truth is, I?m not a woman. Of course? and this is going to shock others like me, and astound some people? you might wonder, why do all that, just to say at the end that she is not a woman? Well, it is quite simple really. I was a boy who felt terrible in his boy?s body, because in my head, in my mind, I felt completely female, and I really needed to.... I was incapable of living the life of a boy, of a man, and I didn?t feel like a man at all.... I did what I had to do to be in harmony with my mind.... But then it?d be wrong to say that today I?m a woman. I?m a transsexual, and what makes me a transsexual is that I was born a boy, and I changed so as to become someone physically totally female, with a physique which goes with my mind. But the problem is, when you say to someone you?re not a woman, they say you are a man. No, I?m not a man either, I?m a transsexual
? (p.10).

To the degree Kim Harlow believed she was not a woman, she accepted and bought into the binary model. By contrast, Rachel Pollack says:

When I came out I understood above all else that the knowledge of myself as female rested in the deepest places of my being. I understand now that that means the body. The body of a Trance-sexual woman desires to become female, recognizes herself as female. The body desires to change her outer form. Crossing sexuality is not a concept imposed on the body by a detached mind at odds with reality.... When I stopped resisting my desires I did not hate my body?s masculine form, but saw myself as female, whatever my shape.
? Pollack, p. 2

The ?correction? is not the correcting of gender, but of sexuality. Jennifer Spry says in her autobiography, Medical knowledge has advanced to where it has accepted that not everything can be known about a person just by merely looking at physical attributes. It is time for the medical profession to universally accept this and relinquish their dogma that a person?s gender is determined by genitalia. We are all much more than just a penis or a vagina. ? Spry, p. 183

Many Native Americans have known this for thousands of years. It?s good to know modern medical science may finally be catching up to Native Americans? way of thinking!

NATIVE AMERICAN RESPONSES TO GENDER AND SEX

Lame Deer, a Lakota Holy Man, says that Indians don?t try to define other people, but simply accept however they define themselves, as their true self. For many Native Americans, having a penis or vagina has nothing to do with making one male or female. Walter Williams, quoting an informant says:

It is easy to pick out a winkte. They act and talk like women, but are really half and half... Winkte are different, neither man nor woman. It is a third group, different from either men or women. That is why the winkte is regarded as sacred. Only the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, can explain it, so we accept it.
? Williams, pp. 85-86
Though the specifics vary from tribe to tribe, this non-binary notion allows for various possibilities. A child born with a penis may display characteristics and behave like a female, allowing for the possibility that he is in reality a female. The same possibility is true for one born with a vagina? she may display characteristics and behave as a male, allowing for the possibility that she is in reality a male.

Members of these third and fourth genders are referred to by many names. The Lakota use the word winkte or ?will be woman,? the Cheyenne, He man eh or ?manwoman,? the Shoshoni tainna wa?ippe or ?man-woman,? the Dine (Navajo), nadle or ?someone in constant process of change,? the Crow, bade, ?not man, not woman? (Long, p. 103). All of these terms encompass more than the rigid binary of monotheism; they indicate an unfolding, a moving toward gender rather than an absolute. Williams correctly points out they ... get a special recognition in native society not because they become social females, but because they take a position between genders. They serve a mediating function as Go- Between for women and men.... Because they are not considered the same as men or as women, their emphasized difference is a way of defining what women are, and what men are. Their androgyny, rather than threatening the gender system, is incorporated into it. ? Williams, p. 84

One of the interesting things about this concept of more than only masculine and feminine gender is the effect it has on issues whose implications involve sexuality and social acceptance. Among many Native tribes, the transpeople were held with equal or even greater status than those who fit into the binary male-female gender structure. Lame Deer says, ?They were not like other men, but the Great Spirit made them winktes and we accept them as such. They were supposed to have the gift of prophecy, and the secret name a winkte gave to a child was believed to be especially powerful and effective.

In former days a father gave to a winkte a fine horse in return for such a name? (p. 117). They were, and often still are, seen as spiritual or sacred people who are blessed by being transgendered. In contrast, the majority culture often sees the transgendered people as throwaways not blessed by the Creator, but damned. Paraphrasing Sue-Ellen Jacobs, biological sex may be the determinant fact in the sexbased binary structure in defining a male body or a female body, but gender encompasses the social activity and natural behavior of a person in relation to commonly-held notions of similar patterns of behavior. These patterns of behavior become stereotypes and expectations of a gender by a culture, and combining that with their obvious biological sex determines whether an individual is a male or female. (Jacobs et al., pp. 1-2). This makes it possible for Native Americans to break out of the binary stereotype? and here is where the gender based Native American structure differs from the biological sex-based binary structure. The combination of both the biological sex and the gender? both these factors? make a two-sided equation with four potential solutions which are the four genders found among many Native American tribes and nations.

Because gender identity is more important than biological sex, it is gender that determines the basis for human relationships. Thus, what could appear as a homosexual relationship involving two [biological] male-sexed persons may very well be a heterosexual relationship. Therefore what those who embrace the binary model know as a homosexual relationships may not be in Native American culture because they are relationships involving different genders. In fact, the very concept of homosexuality in Native culture was often defined as sexual relations between two people of the same gender or of two closely related genders?not sex but gender. (Jacobs et al., pp. 104-105). The Dine, for example defined homosexuality as a relationship involving two men, two women, a male-to-female nadle and a woman, a female-to-male nadle and a man, two male-to-female nadle, and two female-to-male nadle as homosexual and not approved by the tribe? whereas a relationship between a male-to-female nadle and a male or a female-to-male nadle and a woman are heterosexual relationships (Lang, p. 105).

It seems that for the Dine, there are six possible homosexual relationships and three possible heterosexual relationships:


Homosexual Relationships:
? Male-to-male
? Female-to-female
? Male-to-female Nadle with a female
? Female-to-male Nadle with a male
? Male-to-female Nadle with another male-to-female Nadle
? Female-to-male Nadle with another female-to-male Nadle

Heterosexual Relationships:
? Male and female
? Male-to-female Nadle and male
? Female-to-male Nadle and female


There are three possible types of heterosexual relationships, whereas the binary model allows for only one type of heterosexual relationship. This is clearly more complex than the binary notion will allow, and infinitely more open, tolerant, and compassionate. This system allows one to be who one is naturally and does not force an identity upon anyone.

However, in many Native American Tribes, homosexual behavior is looked down upon? though there are, as best I can determine, traditionally no acts of violence against homosexual behavior.

The Native Americans redefined the very notion of self: who you are, who you know yourself to be determines for the Native American your gender and sexuality, and both form your character.

Napewasin Marjorie Ann Schutzer, a Lakota winkte, says in her essay ?Narcissism is not a dirty word?:

This is, of course, nothing which we have a choice over. This is no more of a choice than water running down hill has a choice. Oh yes, we do have a kind of choice, you must remember that one always has a choice in everything. But, in this case, the only choice we have is to NOT do what we are doing. I don?t know about you? but I haven?t got that much courage to have chosen not to be me!! It is what it is? and quite simply put, our goals are the same as anyone else?s, balance, inner peace and to be directly in touch with all the power of the universe through our own being, nothing less will do for our lives. And you should never settle for anything less.
? Schutzer, p. 2

What must always be remembered when discussing Native American notions of gender is that the emphasis must always be upon gender. One should not focus too much upon sexuality, as the two are not necessarily related. What is or is not between one?s legs may or may not have anything to do with one?s gender.

CONCLUSION

Rachel Pollack says in one of her essays,

I would argue that transsexuality arises from a passion so powerful that it transcends issues of happiness. The word passion originally meant suffering, not pleasure. The suffering of transsexuality, however, is like that of religious ecstasy, or even orgasm? overwhelming, intense, and ultimately joyous when we surrender to it and let it carry us into the power of the experience
?(Archetypal Transsexuality, p. 2).

This sentence summarizes everything I have been thinking about and trying to understand. I think being transgendered is exactly that, a transcending, religious experience, a knowing that arises out of your very being, out of your very existence. When society denies the transgendered person her or his own-being or reality, tragedy is often the result. With the destruction of one?s ownbeing or self, there is nothing left.

Death is the only alternative? and there are many transsexual/transgendered people who chose death and self-destruction rather than life as a lie. As Pollack says, ?... finally, we undergo? we seek out, even demand? surgery on our genitals. No logical decision, or confusion, or social conditioning, or even mental illness, can account for such an overwhelming need? (ibid, pp. 2-3).

The most important word used here is NEED. That need, I believe, is to be authentic to one?s own-being, to be in the world as who you are? and is indeed a powerful and mystical experience or authentication. Lame Deer?s statement that Indians don?t try to define other people, but simply accept however they define themselves as their true self, begins to take on a real meaning in this context. It allows one to be selfdefined. Too often, Western culture cannot tolerate this notion of freedom to self-define.

What would happen to our society if all of us could or did define ourself? I suppose some of us would define ourselves as male, some of us would define ourselves as female, some of us would define ourselves as both male and female, and some of us would define ourselves as neither male nor female. That, I think, would make our society inclusive? everyone would be welcomed to the table. And wouldn?t that be shocking!

I would like to suggest, paraphrasing B.C. Holmes, that if there is a fraud perpetuated in being transgendered, it is perpetuated by a society that condemns and damns the transgendered. The fraud is not owned by the transgendered, but by the rest of us who force the transgendered to deny their identities and realities. What we have to learn from Native Traditions, in the words of the Lakota, is to listen to the one who is ceyaiglata? ?crying out.? And we must respond to this cry with compassion, and a sincere attempt at wokahnigapi? understanding.

Bibliography
Bornstein, K. (1995). Gender outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us. New York: Vintage Press. Feinberg, L. (1996). Transgender warriors: Making history from Joan of Arc to Ru Paul. Boston: Beacon Press.
Harlow, K., & Rheims, B. (P. Gould, trans.). (1994). Kim. Munich: Gina Kahayoff.
Jacobs, S-E, Thomas, W., & Lang, S. (Eds.). (1997). Two-spirit people: Native American gender identity, sexuality, spirituality. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Lame Deer & Erodoes R. (1972). Lame Deer seeker of visions. New York: Washington Square Press.
Lang, S., Vantine, J.L., & Long, S. (1998). Men as women, women as men: Changing gender in Native American cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Pollack, R. (n.d.). Abandonment to the body?s desire. <http://www.annelawrence.com/adandonment.html>.
Pollack, R. (n.d.). Archetypal transsexuality. <http://www.annelawrence.com/archetypal.html>
Roscoe, W. (1998). Changing ones: Third and fourth genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin?s Press.
Schutzer, M.A.N. (n.d.). <http://www.gendys. mcmail.com/welgndys/conf/trilogy/winkte.htm>
Spry, J. (1997). Orlando?s sleep: An autobiography of gender. Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers.
Williams, W.L. (1986). The spirit and the flesh: Sexual diversity in American Indian culture. Boston: Beacon Press.


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GENDERVARIANT PERSONS AND TRAUMA
by Jane Heenan, MSW

Given the context of our transphobic and heterosexist culture, it would seem noncontroversial to state that gender-variant persons are at increased risk of traumatic victimization in a variety of ways, in a variety of environments, and by a variety of persons. Some of these assaults are overt and take the form of verbal or physical abuse, while other kinds of abuse are the result of employment, health care, and housing discrimination, or exclusion from family and other social and spiritual gatherings and groups.

A variety of wounds? physical, psychological, spiritual, economic? accrue in response to more subtle enforcement of normative gender rules in our simultaneously anti-sex and sex-preoccupied culture: diagnosis as mentally disordered as defined in the Gender Identity Disorder found in the DSM-IV (APA, 1996); stereotyping via media images; and victimization and revictimization by law enforcement officers and legal and political systems. These cultural demands are often internalized and create additional difficulties for gender-variant persons who shame and sometimes hate themselves in what may be recognized as an understandable response to prejudice, hatred, and violence.

Additionally, many gendervariant persons know others like themselves who have been murdered or mutilated as a result of expressing their individual gender identity? and, like others who struggle with survivor?s guilt, may suffer from the complicated effects of being a survivor in what may be characterized as a gender war. An ongoing fear of victimization, even after many years of passing as a nondescript member of one?s chosen gender, often adds yet another layer to the exploration of the trauma endured by gender-variant persons.

Indeed, professionals often encourage their patients to pursue a post-transition status as ?normal? men or women? even, to cite a common example, telling persons to fabricate personal life histories about their childhood. It has been my experience as a helping professional that transpersons who seem to pass even in such intimate places as their marriages and their gynecologist?s office cannot pass in all places. Additionally, they often live in fear of meeting someone either from their past or who has a welldeveloped ability to read transpersons.

Some of the results of this fear of being read are not unlike the symptoms listed in the DSM-IV diagnosis for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: persistently re-experiencing distress as evidenced by, for example, intense psychological anxiety and physiological reactivity on exposure to reminders of one?s lived gender history; persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with one?s lived gender history; and persistent symptoms of increased arousal such as irritability or outbursts of anger or hypervigilance in a variety of contexts. What is even more tragic is that a powerful component of healing? coming out? is simply not available to them. It is as if they had traded one lie for another during their transition from living in the role of ?one? gender to living in the role of the ?other? and that to tell the truth at this stage would threaten their very existence.

DSM-IV DIAGNOSIS

There is presently a high degree of agreement on diagnosis of PTSD among the general population. Briefly, the DSM-IV diagnosis of PTSD includes four criteria: the person has been exposed to a traumatic event and responded with intense fear, helplessness, or horror; this event is persistently re-experienced; the person persistently avoids trauma-related stimuli and is emotionally numbed following the event; and the person has persistent symptoms of increased arousal following the event. Horowitz discusses a variety of reasons of PTSD, including social, biological, and psychological causes.

Biological responses to trauma, including chronic alteration of synaptic transmission of brain-alerting systems and changes in serotonin subtype chemistry, can cause a trauma-response cycle which leaves the person increasingly vulnerable. Psychological reorganization of internal cognitive maps or activation of latent, weak, damaged, defective, or bad concepts of self or of other persons in response to acute or cumulative trauma may cause dependent self-positioning and impoverishment of self-competence, or may lead to chronic emotional vulnerabilities such as depression, rage, shame, or fear. Failures in expected social support and exploitation of culturally less powerful persons by culturally more powerful persons are among the social causes of PTSD. These social causes happen to gender-variant persons with great frequency and in many arenas.

The effects of these traumas and effective ways to promote healing for gender-variant persons are not well documented within the professional literature of psychotherapy? nor are they well understood by the vast majority of those who practice psychotherapy. This lack of documentation and understanding constitutes ?epidemiological invisibility? of gender-variant persons within a variety of arenas which include social, political, spiritual, and governmental institutions. However invisible, the trauma endured by transpersons is no less hurtful to these individuals.

TRAUMA AND GENDERVARIANT PERSONS

Gender-variant persons face social and employment discrimination and are at considerable risk for victim- People are blamed for their own oppression, and the mental health system works in conjunction with the legal and criminal justice systems to maintain the status quo. in a variety of arenas? yet there is no available research describing interventions for the unique population of gender-variant persons who have been victimized or who are suffering from the aftereffects of trauma. In addition, my perspectives as author, helping professional, and transperson inform my recognition that specific interventions which emanate from a transphobic culture and which are defined as modernist ?treatments? for ?symptoms? cannot be applied to gender-variant persons without more careful consideration than effect sizes can show.

J.J. Sherman, in a 1998 article ?Effects of Psychotherapeutic Treatments for PTSD: A Metaanalysis of Controlled Clinical Trials,? published in The Journal of Traumatic Stress, describes general goals of treatments for symptoms of posttraumatic stress. These goals include developing a realistic appraisal of threat, overcoming avoidance of the cues and reminders of trauma, making meaning out of traumatic experiences, and working through trauma via re-exposure and subsequent reinterpretation. For gender-variant persons, Sherman?s first goal? developing a realistic appraisal of threat? would include considerations in general areas such as personal, family and other relationships, work, and community. Personal considerations may include questions like how well does ze pass; how well does ze wish to pass; does ze seek a more stable or more fluid gender expression; and does ze have any experiences of positive acceptance of hir gender-variant expression from others with whom ze has regular contact. Concerns about employment for persons with a job may include such things as: what is hir work environment; is ze out at work; what is the status of hir state-issued documentation; what workplace policies or legal or statutory employment protections exist; and are there particular threats to safety or the existence of positive support in hir work environment from specific persons. For those who are unemployed, considering employment issues may include: asking questions like what work environments match hir skills, interests, and abilities; how might ze best go about gaining employment as a transperson; will ze be out on the job; how has ze been generating income without formal employment; and what fears does ze have about possible homelessness.

Appraisal of family and other relationships may include: what is the status of hir primary relationship; is ze out in hir primary relationship; is ze out to all or part of hir family; does ze have children; do child custody disputes exist with hir partner or other family members; what local legal precedents or statutes, if any, exist regarding a trans parent?s child custody; and what is the status of hir available personal support structure. Community considerations might include: what is the status of the local trans community; how are transpersons recognized within the local sexual minority community; how does local law enforcement view transpersons; and is ze aware of the frequency of assaults and murders of transpersons. The review of these issues and others specific to particular individuals will help identify areas of greatest possible threat.

Sherman?s second goal? overcoming avoidance of the cues and reminders of trauma? can be especially difficult for gender-variant persons. Transpersons cannot remove themselves from a transphobic culture which tells us in a variety of ways and through a variety of persons and institutions that the expression of gender variance is shameful, sinful, evil, immoral, disordered, illegal, profane, and wrong. These cues and reminders of trauma are prevalent in so many and in such seemingly innocuous places that they can be overwhelming. In addition, transpersons may have internalized society?s transphobia. Helping the transpersons with whom we work have a healthy or at least nonpathological perspective regarding gender variance is important and can be facilitated through the person?s greater immersion in trans culture and the recognition of or identification with other, seemingly more successful, transpersons. Suggesting to transpersons readings or web sites which document a positive history of gender-variant expression and spending time considering cultural myths of a rigid, genital-based bipolar gender order may aid in overcoming avoidance. Also helpful for many transpersons is gaining a greater awareness of one?s own gender-role expectations by explicit discussion of definitions and expectations of concepts like woman, man, husband, wife, daughter, son, transition, sexchange, and gender variance. By identifying individualized constructs and goals in a supported and safe environment, persons can begin to create positive change in their lives. As progress is made toward gender goals, greater resilience and lesser avoidance can result.

This sort of meaning-making can also be helpful in gaining greater control over particular traumatic experiences? Sherman?s third goal. Becoming more aware of the (gender) water in which we swim as a culture and as individuals can allow new vantage points for viewing situations and new experiences to be found. These changes in perspective may help lead to new ways of seeing old things.

Additionally, greater control can be gained by participating more actively in local trans communities. This participation might include advocating for changes in statutes and policies, sharing personal experiences with gender-variant persons and others, or doing outreach education in more marginalized groups within the trans community, such as working with sex workers around issues of sexually transmitted diseases. Active participation can be empowering; Psychological reorganization of internal cognitive maps or activation of latent, weak, damaged, defective, or bad concepts of self or of other persons in response to acute or cumulative trauma may cause dependent self-positioning and impoverishment of self-competence, or may lead to chronic emotional vulnerabilities such as depression, rage, shame, or fear.

Helping to generate concrete, external, and generalizable differences can be a powerful elixir for personal healing. Working through trauma via re-exposure and subsequent reinterpretation? Sherman?s fourth goal? is potentially complicated for gendervariant persons who live in a transphobic culture. Unlike trauma victims whose struggles result from singular events, transpersons may not be able to remove themselves from the experiences of trauma in their everyday lives. Re-exposure can be a regular occurrence and often happens outside the safety and structure of counseling. As a result, ongoing reinterpretation of traumatic events is often a part of the healing process as traumatic events reoccur in the lives of transpersons. In addition, a transperson?s interpretations are likely to change as well in response to hir changing experiences in expressing hir personal sense of gender identity more openly.

Counselor sensitivity about and awareness of these processes can create safer places for transpersons to occupy during counseling and can keep counselors from additional victim-blaming when clients continue to report traumatic events.

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSELING WITH GENDER-VARIANT PERSONS

In considering the available professional discussions regarding diagnosis and treatment of gendervariant persons, therapeutic goals for Gender Identity Disorder would include elimination of gender-variant behavior, thoughts, and feelings. Treatments to reach these goals have typically included induction into a process of gender transition of physical and hormonal modification with the goal of living as an unambiguous member of the opposite gender with a heterosexual orientation in that gender role. Additionally, treatment of transpersons has often included counsel for the client to expunge hir gendered past in order to complete the elimination of gender variance. Those providing treatment have assumed that the culture, roles, and values of stable and unchanging bipolar gender constructs are inherently superior. As a result, research regarding transpersons has focused on the efficacy of hormonal regimens and surgical procedures, rendered invisible transpersons who do not fit the expected constructed outcomes in relation to stable gendered identities, sexual orientation, medical procedures, or desire for passability.

When working with disadvantaged minority persons, it is important to recognize that helping professionals have a choice? either to promote the reigning social discourse, or to empower transpersons to tell their own story. Empowerment involves interventions designed to reduce clients? powerlessness stemming from the experience of negative valuation and discrimination. By acknowledging environmental, social, economic, and political factors which can cause and maintain a person?s problems, affirmative counseling can reduce blaming the victim in counseling.

Affirmative helping professionals accept a person?s gender identity and do not work to change a person?s gender expression. They abstain from reinforcing the ?less-than? messages which emanate from our heterosexist society and refrain from labeling a person?s gender-variant expression as a pathology in and of itself. The work may proceed in identifying difficulties related to gender variance, even as there is an effort to distinguish between a person?s inner struggle and the culture-bound oppression which may be its source. Affirming helping professionals must work to recognize the complex layers of cultural expectations which may be present for any one person. They need also to attend to a person?s support networks, which can function as sanctuaries in an oppressive society, by exploring a person?s level of engagement with similar others and by helping them to identify more fully, engage more actively, and develop sources of support with these others.


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The received the following from the late Jody Norton shortly before her death. We find it most appropriate for The Journal.

GROWING UP FEMME-MALE IN MASCULINE CULTURES
by Jody Norton

GENDER IDENTITY: the sameness, unity and persistence of one?s individuality as male or female or ambivalent in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in selfawareness and behavior. Gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity.
?John Money, Gendermaps: Social Constructionism, Feminism, and Sexosophical History

?All right, then, I?ll go to hell.?
? Huck Finn, occasional crossdresser, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Samuel L. Clemens


The standard, opposed, explanations of gender development for the last twenty years have been John Money?s theory that sex of rearing is the overriding factor and Julianne Imperato-McGinley?s conclusion that ?when the sex of rearing is contrary to the testosterone-mediated biologic sex [of boys], the biologic sex prevails? (Imperato-McGinley, et al., 1979, pp. 1235-1236). Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of both theories is the extent to which they assume a general congruence between sex and gender and a prototypical binariness of both. Anne Fausto-Sterling states that ?it is difficult for young people to handle a disagreement between their external anatomical sex and their assigned sex? (Fausto-Sterling, 1985, p. 88). She goes on to point out:

In all of the cases studied both by Money?s and by Imperato-McGinley?s groups, either the assigned sex changed spontaneously to agree with the visible anatomy or doctors surgically altered the anatomy to bring it more into line with the assigned sex. ? p. 88

Fausto-Sterling is presumably right in regard to children who are traditionally gendered or intersexed. For some children, however, the source of friction is not between anatomical sex and assigned sex, but between assigned sex and experienced gender. Neither Money nor Imperato- McGinley theorizes sex/gender with sufficient flexibility or imagination to account for this kind of transchild, except through the threadbare strategy of pathologization? the tedious reversion to constructing as defective those individuals who reveal defects in the conceptual system of the theorist. The current DSM-IV category ?Gender Identity Disorder in Children? (302.6) is an example of this practice.

In the late 1990s, birth control, artificial insemination, cloning and other genetic engineering, organ transplantation, transsexual and cosmetic surgeries, cyborgian technologies, tissue regeneration research, and myriads of other medical/technical discourses and practices are changing the material possibilities of sex, and in doing so, are changing the meaning of both sex and gender. The sexed bodies of human beings are ever more clearly not divisible simply into males and females whose identity and meaning center on their reproductive functions.

The more human reproduction is undesirable rather than desirable, and the more medicine and biotechnology invent ways to create, transform, modify, and artificially support human life, the less social attention and energy will tend to be directed towards maintaining a binarism of the sexes, and the heteronormativity that has historically accompanied it.

The political and economic gains continuing to be made by women in a world where physical differences are increasingly less significant are also powerfully influencing contemporary meanings of sex and gender. Gender is rapidly shifting from being a key ?core? identity element tightly linking the subject?s sexed body to her socioeconomic role. It is now increasingly frequently irrelevant (or largely irrelevant) to individuals? economic and formal political roles and values. An individual?s gender, as she lives it, may not even have much to do with the external reproductive anatomy with which she was born.

Gender is now becoming an affective-intellectual combination of modes of self-presentation, sexual desire, and social affinities in a public personality that speaks/acts for, and symbolically represents, a private sense of self. Gender is manifesting its creative potentialities as an aesthetics, an erotics, and a field of spiritual/emotional/ social bonding and relationality rather than functioning statically and ideologically as a semiotics of reproduction and the oppression of women. One need not point out that the ?old? gender of the 1950s and 1960s assuredly functioned, in the U.S., in aesthetic, erotic, and social realms as well. But it did not do so with anywhere near the range of social and cultural possibilities that it has at its disposal today. Nor was the individual as free, legally and technologically, to follow her gender journey down new or newly accessible paths to non-traditional forms of gender definition and expression. The battle for gender liberation, however, is just beginning? especially for children, who are least equipped to fight that battle for themselves.

Children who transgress state, corporate, institutional, and familial norms/regulations of gender are made to feel that they are (in escalating order of intensity) mistaken, confused, in need of help, mentally ill, disgusting, perverted, sinful, depraved. The affective consequences of some version of this litany of criticism are guilt, shame, anger, depression, and self-loathing? and ultimately, the anguish of being alone. The image of seven-year-old Ludo, lying unconscious in the freezer, in Alain Berliner?s recent film ?Ma Vie en Rose? is a perfect representation of the absolute isolation that is too commonly the lot of transchildren.

The combination of social ostracism and internalized transphobia results in an isolation that puts the child at risk of physical victimization on the one hand, and suicide on the other.

Social survival, psychological survival, and/or literal physical survival, then, are the transchild?s most pressing issues. They create the need for strategies of location. If one can somehow negotiate a homeplace within the social matrix, one may be able to connect, or stay connected, with others. This, in turn, enables one to become ?real?? that is, to exist and to be visible as a social subject whose public meaning is functionally congruent with the subject?s meaning for hirself.

Given that to survive (let alone to thrive) is so difficult for most trans or proto-trans children, one wonders how, if human beings have any capacity for undetermined choice at all, transchildren can ever choose to do anything except disguise themselves, in a kind of flight to avoid persecution. And yet, as one peruses case studies; ethnographic, anthropological, and sociological accounts; literature; autobiography; and other sources, it is striking how frequently non-traditionally gendered children choose to follow their idiosyncratic gender journeys, despite great cultural pressure, and at great personal cost.

This fact suggests two observations:
? In the aftermath of poststructuralism, the degree of agency that individuals? even immature individuals? possess has been seriously underestimated or ignored.
? Gender identity may be much more deeply rooted in primary genetic, prenatal, and postnatal conditions, relations, and experience than radical constructionist accounts of the formation of gender would imply.

In this essay, I want to examine two texts in which the male-to-female protagonists consciously choose a transgressive gender formation, to ask why they do so (given that many transchildren experience gender cruelty even before they begin to make conscious transgender choices), to suggest that radical social constructionist theories of gender fail to provide adequate explanations for the life choices of such children, and to propose a theoretical prolegomenon to a more balanced and inclusive account of gender development.

In ?Pigs Can?t Fly,? the opening section of Shyam Selvadurai?s novel Funny Boy (originally published as a short story), seven-year-old Arjie?s once-a-month play world at hir grandparents? upper-middle-class home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, is rigidly divided into boys? and girls? play spaces (the latter behind the house). Arjie opts for ?the girls,? as their territory is called, the primary attraction of which is the ?potential for the free play of fantasy? (p. 4). Due to ?the force of my imagination? (p. 4), Arjie is selected as the leader in various games and stories, which typically center on a female character (Cinderella, Thumbelina). Arjie?s favorite is bride-bride, a day-long mock marriage ceremony involving elaborate preparatory rituals. ?The culmination of this game,? Arjie tells us, ?and my ultimate moment of joy, was when I put on the clothes of the bride. ... then, by the transfiguration I saw taking place in Janaki?s cracked full-length mirror? by the sari being wrapped around my body, the veil being pinned to my head, the rouge put on my cheeks, lipstick on my lips, kohl around my eyes? I was able to leave the constraints of my self and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self...? (pp. 4-5).

But this transgender world can exist only so long as it is invisible to the disciplinary gaze of parents and other adults. Upon the arrival of Arjie?s cousin Tanuja, whom the girls cruelly dub ?Her Fatness,? a struggle for dominion over what is already a distinctly nonegalitarian playworld takes place. Feeling herself to be losing the battle to Arjie, Tanuja enlists the help of the authorities and effectively ousts Arjie by outing hir as trans: when the grownups discover Arjie dressed, remarks are made, hir parents are embarrassed, and hir mother tells hir that s/he must no longer play with the girls. Upon Arjie?s asking why, Amma replies, ?Because the sky is so high and pigs can?t fly? (p. 23).

Forced to play with the boys, Arjie is clever enough to get hirself banished, only to lose a final skirmish with Tanuja, ending in expulsion from ?the girls?? that territory to which s/he ?seemed to have gravitated naturally? (p. 3) as well. Arjie concludes:

I knew that I would never enter the girls? world again. Never stand in front of Janaki?s mirror, watching a transformation take place before my eyes... And then there would be the loneliness. I would be caught between the boys? and the girls? worlds, not belonging or wanted in either.
? p. 39

Arjie loses our sympathy to some extent because of hir ?masculinity?? that is, hir initial subordination of Tanuja, and hir failure to share power within the girls? community. There is a certain justice in Arjie?s fate, in that a feminist sensitivity, generosity, and inclusiveness might have allowed Arjie to accommodate Tanuja, and to get along with her at least well enough to avoid the contretemps through which s/he is dismissed from ?the girls.? Yet Tanuja turns out to be at least equally domineering, so the text does not sustain a narrowly gendered political analysis of ?the girls.?

The adult world, however, is narrowly gendered, and Tanuja is able to turn this fact to account, engineering Arjie?s expulsion on the implicit grounds that a boy should not play with girls and dress in women?s clothing. Arjie?s days as a girl are, in any case, numbered, since hir desire is to live publicly (e.g., bride-bride) as what s/he can only be (within hir cultural context) insofar as s/he can maintain hir own invisibility. Until hir transgender behavior is interfered with, Arjie (who thinks of hirself consciously as a boy) has no idea that what s/he is doing is ?wrong.? But although s/he is hurt by hir mother?s rejection and hir father?s disgust, s/he doesn?t submit to the combined negative social judgment of hir behavior, but publicly defies that judgment. It takes the matriarch Ammachi herself to drive Arjie definitively out of ?the girls.? And once s/he is excluded, hir choice is not to attempt an abject reentry into the male community (which, ironically, contains one allowed tomboy), but to flee, in bitterness and tears. S/he returns, finally, to avoid yet more cruel corporal punishment than s/he will already face, yet we leave hir unreintegrated and alone. Hir efforts to locate hirself, as a transperson, have failed.

On what ground does Arjie defy the combined authority of hir relatives and the pervasive gender ideology of hir culture? What allows hir to mount such durable resistance? What causes hir, finally, to choose neither legal gender community over what, to hir, is the wrong one? We must remember, of course, that Arjie?s story is fictional (even if quasi-autobiographical).

Nevertheless, Arjie has many sisters, who can be found not only in the fiction of writers such as Henry James, Denton Welch, and Richard McCann, but in case studies such as those in Richard Green?s The ?Sissy Boy? Syndrome and the Development of Homosexuality, in documentary films like ?Paris Is Burning,? and in the largely undocumented streets of the world, from Mexico City to Dakar, and from Thailand to Detroit. Can it be that social construction alone accounts for so many individuals, across so many cultural boundaries, who despite their wide variation of beliefs, styles, and behaviors share a clearly recognizable similarity in their psychological affiliation with women?

Things do not conclude so grimly in Alain Berliner?s alternately humorous and horrifying film ?Ma Vie en Rose.? Ludovic, a French sevenyear- old with three older siblings (a girl and two boys) and suburban middle-class parents who had hoped for a girl, believes (or hopes) the s/he is a girl. S/he crossdresses whenever possible, and gravitates to girls and women and their activities (dolls, dance, romantic fantasies and rituals).

?It?s a scientific matter,? Ludo announces, explaining hir very out transgender behavior (an ongoing source of embarrassment to hir wouldbe upwardly-mobile parents) as the result of hir other X chromosome?s having accidentally fallen into the trash on its way down from heaven. And indeed, unlike Arjie, who seems comfortable in hir male body, Ludo may turn out to be a true transsexual. In the meanwhile, as Ludo instructs Jerome, the boy next door, she is ?a girlboy.?

Trouble starts when Ludo announces that s/he and Jerome are ?going to marry when I?m not a boy.? Ludo subsequently stages a mock wedding (dressed in a pink satin dress that once belonged to Jerome?s deceased sister), which is interrupted by Jerome?s mother just as Ludo is informing Jerome that he may kiss hir. Ludo?s high femme gender causes hir to be misread by Jerome?s father and others as gay, which, in a Catholic society, is understood as the next thing to damnation. A harrowing series of violent and transphobic confrontations (including some with hir parents) drives Ludo to attempt to kill hirself by going to sleep in a freezer. Ludo?s father (who works for Jerome?s dad) loses his job, and the family is hounded from the neighborhood, with many recriminations inside the family and out.

In the new neighborhood Ludo is approached by a transboy named Christine. The two make friends, and at the latter?s birthday party exchange clothes: Christine?s dress for Ludo?s cavalier outfit. After a final burst of hysteria from Ludo?s mother, hir parents finally decide to leave Ludo to hir own gender devices, and we watch hir at the end of the movie chaindancing with Christine and the other children. Ludo, then, has located hirself, at least for the time being. As the manager of my local alternative video store (herself an ardent devotee of ?Ma Vie en Rose?) put it, ?There?s hope for junior high!?

?Ma Vie en Rose? is more parabolic than realist. Ludo?s parents never explain to hir the difference between public and private? really only so that the film can represent publicly, for public debate, stereotypical ideologies of gender and their deleterious effects on the non-traditionally gendered. Further, we are encouraged to understand Ludo a bit too neatly as ?who s/he is? (though s/he does ask hir sister at one point to tell hir if s/he is a boy or a girl). Nevertheless, ?Ma Vie en Rose? presents a prototype of a drama that is lived out by thousands of boys and girls in equally violent and traumatic forms, though usually under a somewhat less spectacularly public gaze.

With Ludo, as with Arjie, two signal questions present themselves: why would a child make the choice to resist such social pressure with so much determination and persistence? And can radical constructionist theory account satisfactorily either for such anomalous behavior or for the intensity of each child?s commitment to hir own understanding of hir gendered being?

Anne Fausto-Sterling informs us that ?linear chainlike causal explanations? of ?complex human traits? are ?simply wrong? (p. 75), whether they are biologically or environmentally oriented. First of all, biology ?is not a one-way determinant but a dynamic component of our existence? (p. 121). ?The human body,? Fausto-Sterling writes, ?functions in a social milieu and ... changes in response to that context? (p. 88). But if biology alone cannot explain gender development (for example), it would be wise to avoid assuming that cultural discourses and ideologies can do so independently of the body. The term environment itself (that which ?constructs? us, as humanities theorists and social scientists put it) refers to very different kinds of locations and operations, from the in utero environment to the familial environment of infancy, to the cultural milieu. Some of its senses are biological, some involve unconscious psycho-structural events, some refer to conscious perceptions and identifications, and so on. It is not at all clear, in other words, what a term like social construction might or might not mean, despite its facile use in a great deal of recent humanities and social science research. Fausto-Sterling concludes:

To understand human development we need to know a great deal more about how the environment affects physical growth and patterns, and how individual variation including genetic variation plays into each different life history to produce adults with different competencies and potentials.
? p. 89

In Monique Wittig?s work, biological development at first appears irrelevant to the evolution of gender in the individual, since for her gender is ?an element of language? (Wittig, 1992, p. 80) that is appropriated by men for the purpose of the subordination of women. Specifically, the use of the personal pronoun I creates subjectivity in consciousness, an act which performs mastery of language as the foundation of subjectivity: the speaker is the subject. Because usage in English and grammar in French conflate the masculine with the universal, female subjectivity is precluded. The Other of the subject can never herself be subject.

For Wittig, then, gender is ?the enforcement of sex in language? (p. 79). But clearly, while Wittig?s account is in one sense radically constructionist (since it is convention, not the body, that determines the socio-political meaning of women and men), in another it is conceptually conservative. Judith Butler writes:

On some accounts, the notion that gender is constructed suggests a certain determinism of gender meanings inscribed on anatomically differentiated bodies, where those bodies are understood as passive recipients of an inexorable cultural law. When the relevant ?culture? that ?constructs? gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny. ? p. 8

We might conclude that Wittig?s formulation is in fact inadvertently biologistic in that for her, anatomy (albeit mediated by cultural/linguistic convention) inevitably determines gender.

Butler avoids Wittig?s mistake of using a radical brush to paint herself into a conservative corner. Yet I believe she makes a still more destructive mistake, despite the considerable explanatory power and suggestiveness of her thought. Perhaps the central idea of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is the relatively sober proposition that ?There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender ... identity is performatively constituted by the very ?expressions? that are said to be its results? (p. 25).

Butler?s theory of gender performativity is based on her deconstructive analysis of the Stoller/Money concept of gender as the social signification of sex. She points out: If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders .... When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. ? p. 6

Butler goes on to ask whether the term sex refers to a real or nominal category:

Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ?sex? is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. ? p. 7

The first problem with Butler?s argumentation here is the logic of the move from the deconstructive analysis of gender, as a culturally specific concept, to the claim that because gender ?cannot be said to follow from sex in any one way,? ?the constructed status of gender? can be theorized as ?radically independent of sex? (p. 6), which paves the way for the introduction of her theory of the performativity of gender. To say that a complex psychosomatic developmental process is culturally inflected, so that gender does not evolve out of the sexed body in any univocal way, does not warrant the conclusion that the materiality of the body is necessarily immaterial in the formation of gender.

Butler next moves to the claim that sex itself ?is as culturally constructed as gender.? The fallacy here is that Butler is collapsing signified into signifier. Her theory that gender is performative (is, in short, a kind of originary semiotic act) prepares her claim that the signified of gender is its signification. But sex cannot be dismissed under the same theoretical argument, as Butler tries to do, because no matter how constructed the conceptual content of the sign sex is, it has an unavoidable material referent: the human body. Butler simply effaces the materiality of the body, and treats sex as though it were a word whose content, analogously to that of gender, could be strictly accounted for as cultural production. This move, in turn, allows Butler to attack ?humanist conceptions of the subject? as tending ?to assume a substantive person who is the bearer of various essential and non-essential attributes? (p. 10). Butler concludes: This relational or contextual point of view suggests that what the person ?is,? and, indeed, what gender ?is,? is always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined.

As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations. ? p. 10

Here gender, inexplicably, is substituted for person, and the claim that gender, as an aspect of personal meaning, ?does not denote a substantive being? (which of course it does not) is made to imply that a person is not ?a substantive being,? but really only, in good Foucaultian fashion, ?a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations.? But a person, insofar as she is a human being, is precisely ?a substantive being?? one that can feel and act, and one that gives feminism its moral purpose and political force.

This essay ends far from an answer to the question of how transchildren engender themselves. My purpose is largely to insist that for the time being the question must be kept open, not foreclosed in the direction either of biology or social construction, especially since we do know that gendering involves both soma and psyche. Secondarily, it is to suggest that the term ?social construction? needs a much more complex definition than discourse theory alone can provide. Such a definition must involve knowledge of genetics, anatomy, physiology, endocrinology, nutrition, child development, child psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, communications, and cultural studies, among other fields of inquiry. It is clearly a project best undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, if it is to be done with any real depth and thoroughness. The alternative is the insularity of perspectives, the superficiality, and the blind spots and biases that currently plague efforts to give intelligent and compelling accounts of the formation of gender in the individual human being.

I want to close with a brief speculation on the origins of gender in MTF transgender children that I intend as a suggestive vision rather than as a thoroughly supportable claim. The first step toward this vision is mundane in the extreme, but it also represents a counter-reformation against the decaying but still reigning orthodoxy of an unreconstructed poststructuralism: it may be that children like Arjie and Ludo? like all other children? are moved to pursue the directions of gender that they do partially as the result of genetic and other biological factors.

We must acknowledge that historically we have been disproportionately interested in the reproductive anatomy and physiology of the body as a determinant of sex differences. We are beginning to understand that the female body is, in fact, much less different from the male than post- Renaissance male discourse on the subject had led us to believe. Furthermore, we know that many humans are neither ?male? nor ?female,? at least according to strict biological definitions of those terms. At the same time, we also know there is evidence for statistically significant differences in male and female developmental rates, predilections for certain kinds of large and small motor activities, patterns of conscious and unconscious identification, and patterns of social cohesion or lack of cohesion, among other characteristics. We should therefore be willing to think of sex, and of genes, and of gender as perhaps being related, but in much more subtle, complex, and negotiable ways than they have generally been conceived to be. The question is whether it really is senseless to say, not necessarily that an MTF transchild is a girl in a boy?s body, but that s/he is not a boy. This, in turn, leads not necessarily to Butler?s point that male and female are constructed categories, but perhaps to a way of understanding the relation between the biochemistry of the body and the formation of embodied consciousness (and consciousness of the body) as a dynamic potentiation. Ludo, then, may not feel like a boy (gender) because s/he may not be becoming, psychosomatically and ecobiologically, a boy (sex/gender) in the way that most boys (sex) do.

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender ... identity is performatively constituted by the very ?expressions? that are said to be its results Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Genes are only and always elements of extremely complex biochemical psycho-developmental processes that do not take place either entirely predictably, nor in a vacuum (environmental factors affect child development at every step, prenatally as well as postnatally). However, it may be that genetic, endocrinological, bioenvironmental (ecological and biosocial) factors create, or better, make possible or potentiate the development, within a child whose reproductive anatomy is male, of an affinity for females, female connections, and female communities, or for specifically trans communities, if these exist in the child?s world. Affinity, in turn, might shape