Abstract
While the Kinsey reports (1948 and 1953)—as they came to be known—neglected a distinction between transvestism and transsexuality, Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) made up for this omission. However, Benjamin focused his analyses on what he called “high intensity” transsexuals, in spite of his own descriptions of various types of trans experience. These texts normalized certain sexual embodiments while leaving others marginalized, if not impossible to conceive, and they were major influences on the context within which Sullivan was “coming out.” Analyses and responses arising especially from trans studies, however, reveal limitations exercised upon trans people—even still today—especially by medical and psychiatric institutions. Given that those who are marginalized or impossible to conceive still manage to recognize their lack of representation in dominant discourses, though, the question then becomes how this is possible if embodiment is fully discursive, and further, how to negotiate between these different experiences of embodiment, from the materiality presumed by scientific approaches, to the model of discursivity and performativity employed in the humanities, to individual embodied experiences that include both rudimentary, sensory experience and concrete, lived situations.
Excerpts from Sullivan’s diaries accompany the theoretical discussion in a way that Sullivan himself might engage in the theory.
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Notes
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- 3.
See especially Bullough (2003, 233).
- 4.
Money’s paradigm case that was meant to demonstrate that gender can be socially constructed, famously called the “John/Joan” case, actually ended very badly. The boy, David Reimer, who was raised as a girl reacted quite negatively to his socialization as a girl, especially as he grew older. Ultimately he returned to living as a man, and then committed suicide. Money’s involvement in the case rendered him not only guilty in the public eye of doing serious damage to his young patient but also cast doubts on his theory of the social construction of gender overall. In fact, his position on the malleability of gender contributed to hospitals’ standard procedure for intersex infants; infants were assigned a sex through sex assignment surgery as early as possible, a practice that since has been described as unduly harmful (Colapinto 2000). In addition to this issue, Money also supported a theory of “affectional pedophilia” as opposed to “sadistic pedophilia,” linking him with pedophilia in general. This perception of him led to further dismissal of his work overall (see Downing et al. 2015).
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In fact, after the media appearance of Christine Jorgenson, the stories about transsexuals in the media increased. According to Meyerowitz (2002, 52–3): “With the Jorgensen story, the floodgates broke. A torrent of new stories on other transsexuals made sex change a constant feature in the popular press.” While it is clear that there were reports about transsexuality in both medical and popular publications, we can see in Sullivan’s diaries that they were perhaps not such a “torrent” of information. Sullivan (7/7/1973) himself describes going to the library to find stories of transsexuals in his diaries.
- 6.
For a useful description of the fluctuating opinions on human sexual biology, and especially the understanding of humans as essentially physically bisexual, see Meyerowitz (2002, 21–9).
- 7.
For a more thorough discussion of the interplay between social forces and scientific work, see, for example, Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body (2000).
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Available on the Kinsey Institute website: http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/research/ak-hhscale.html (accessed March 17, 2016). Courtesy of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
- 10.
Subsequent studies have revealed varying statistics, depending on the population and the type of inquiry. These statistics have ranged anywhere between 1% and 7%, so Kinsey’s early statistics fall neatly in the middle of more recent calculations. For a compilation of some of these studies, and reference to current studies in sexology, see http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html.
- 11.
To put it in logical terms, if sexual behavior is defined as requiring penetration, and if penetration always requires an aggressor, and further, if homosexuals are never aggressive, then there could never be sexual behavior between two men where both participants were homosexual.
- 12.
Kinsey et al. (1948) equivocate here between the physical and psychological characteristics of homosexuals. I try to work through the steps that would connect a presumption of intersex physical characteristics with homosexual behavior in the next paragraph. In any case, the historical connection between the theory of human “bisexuality” and homosexuality, as well as how this theory played into explanations of transvestism and transsexuality, is explained well by Meyerowitz (2002, 22–9).
- 13.
Although Benjamin’s text was groundbreaking in its depth in treating the topic of transsexuality, especially in the USA, he was not the first person to coin the term in the way we understand it today. Rather, the term appears to have been introduced by David Oliver Cauldwell, who wrote an article entitled “Psychopathia Transexualis” (1949). Here Cauldwell discusses the case of “Earl,” a female-to-male trans man who wished to have surgery to complete his transition. Cauldwell was generally not sympathetic to such requests. However, in this article he makes a point to distinguish Earl’s case from homosexuality (even though Earl’s orientation was toward women), and he recognizes an “irresistible desire to have their sex changed surgically” (Cauldwell 1949, 276, cited in Meyerowitz 2002, 43). In fact, the awareness of trans people, as well as operations for those who wished to live as the “opposite” sex, actually had been taking place since the early 1900s in the USA and especially in Europe. Magnus Hirschfeld and Henry Havelock Ellis used the terms of “transvestism” or “eonism” to describe “crossgender identification as well as cross-dressing” (Meyerowitz 2002, 15). Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin was also at the center of experimentation with and the performance of sex-change operations in the 1920s and 1930s. Benjamin had collegial contact with both Kinsey and Hirschfeld, referring patients to one another. See Meyerowitz (2002, 14–50) for an in depth presentation of the development of the understanding of transsexuality.
- 14.
As mentioned in the introduction to this book, “gender identity” is usually described as the gender to which a person feels he or she belongs. It is understood as a deeply internal sense of embodiment that we cannot control. For cisgender people, gender identity usually aligns with their gender assigned at birth. For many trans people, however, gender identity often does not match up with their assigned gender, leading often to some level of discomfort with, or simply a desire to change, their body or genitals. The sense of disconnect between gender identity and birth anatomy is not limited to those who identify as transgender; it can also be experienced by those born as intersex, since intersex genitalia do not at all mean that a person has an intersex gender identity (see Meyerowitz 2002, 98–129).
- 15.
Kinsey and his colleagues’ (1953, 679–81) section on transvestites is a bit unclear: The researchers might have lumped transsexuals in with their descriptions of transvestites, because, prior to Benjamin’s work (in the USA at least), these two types of persons had not yet been distinguished from one another. Thus, Kinsey et al. may have allowed for both hetero- and homosexual transsexuals, had they been aware of the distinction. Nevertheless, their descriptions do focus on transvestites.
- 16.
In the USA, homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. Meanwhile, “transsexualism” was entered into the DSM in 1980. The most recent version of the DSM (DSM-5) in 2013 still includes the broad notion of “Gender Dysphoria” as a diagnosis.
- 17.
There are several texts that have vilified transgender persons from the perspective of feminism and other disciplines in the humanities. Some of the most notable include: Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979), Bernice Hausman’s Changing Sex (1995), and Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests (1997). More recently, we see Julia Bindel’s “Gender Benders, Beware” (2004), and Sheila Jeffrey’s Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism (2014).
- 18.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health submitted a formal response to the diagnosis of “gender incongruence” and its criteria during the process of the development of the DSM-5. (DeCuypere et al. 2010) Some of the concerns voiced in the article would seem to remain, including the question of whether, and if so, how, “gender dysphoria” should be a diagnosis. However the authors also acknowledge that these concerns are difficult to resolve, especially since the medical community remains an important factor in addressing some of the needs of trans persons.
- 19.
- 20.
There are, of course, exceptions to this claim, but many analyses that take transgender persons’ descriptions of themselves seriously are often limited to theoretical work within the transgender community, as indicated by Stryker’s comment, which follows. The Transgender Studies Reader (Stryker and Whittle 2006) does remarkable work in bringing many of these discussions to a wider reading audience. Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body (2010), of course, does address the descriptions provided by trans men and is a text written and read (and for the most part, reviewed) external to the transgender community, but there are also shortcomings to her text, as I pointed out in Chap. 2.
- 21.
See also Fausto-Sterling (2000, 76).
- 22.
The fear of material determinism seems to have been a strong motivator that restrained Butler from admitting a materiality to the body. In an interview with Kate More (1999), for example, Butler was asked “if biological gender dimorphism is proven to be determining, where do we go from there,” to which Butler replied: “Proven?! I don’t think it can be proven. I am actually permanently suspicious of any such proofs on logical grounds. [...] It’s either semantically empty, at which point the proof could be valid without having any meaning whatsoever, or it’s using an utterly fictitious construct as if it were valid. I’d love to look at this paper, I’m sorry I don’t know it, but I bet I could destroy it, and I would seek to do so! … I’m unequivocally hostile to such explanations” (More 1999, 288–9).
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Rodemeyer, L.M. (2018). Discourses Available to Sullivan: The Kinsey Reports and The Transsexual Phenomenon . In: Lou Sullivan Diaries (1970-1980) and Theories of Sexual Embodiment. Crossroads of Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63034-2_4
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