The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [0]
THE RIDDLE OF GENDER
Deborah Rudacille is a science writer at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The Conflict Between Animal Research and Animal Protection. She lives in Baltimore.
ALSO BY DEBORAH RUDACILLE
The Scalpel and the Butterfly:
The Conflict Between Animal Research and Animal Protection
FOR AIDEN
Glory be to God for dappled things—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Hands of God
Conversation with Ben Barres, M.D., Ph.D.
Through Science to Justice
Conversation with Susan Stryker, Ph.D.
The Bombshell
Conversation with Aleshia Brevard
Men and Women, Boys and Girls
Conversation with Chelsea Goodwin and Rusty Mae Moore, Ph.D.
Liberating the Rainbow
Conversation with Tom Kennard
Childhood, Interrupted
Conversation with Dana Beyer, M.D.
Fear of a Pink Planet
Conversation with Joanna Clark
Answering the Riddle
Two Years Later: Afterword to the Anchor Books Edition
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
“And what sort of person might you be?” asked the smiling young man behind the registration desk.
I stared at him for a moment in bafflement and dread, running through a list of potential responses. I was registering for the True Spirit Conference, an annual gathering for transsexual men and their partners and families. It was my first foray into the community, and I was nervous and feeling very much like an outsider; I was sure that people could tell merely by looking at me that I didn’t belong.
“Well…” I said, preparing to announce that I was a heterosexual woman, a single mother of three, and a science writer, when suddenly I noticed the three options for registration on the page I had just signed: student, low income, and regular.
“Regular,” I said, with relief.
“Great,” the young man replied, as I filled out a check for ninety dollars and handed it over, my face burning as I realized how close I had come to looking like an idiot.
Nonetheless, throughout the next two days, as I attended sessions and introduced myself to people at the conference, I was asked the same question over and over in varying forms. The answer to the question seemed important to everyone I met. What kind of person are you? Why are you here? Why are you interested in our lives? Not far beneath those questions lurked accusations. Are you here to exploit us? To attack us? To make us look like freaks or deviants? “Just what,” one guy said, “is your agenda?” I thought the question fair enough. And since it has been posed, in one form or another, by everyone whom I have interviewed on this subject, I feel that it is right that I begin this book with an answer to it, since it is probably also a question that will be entertained by readers.
I attended the True Spirit Conference in 2001 because I had recently learned that a friend of mine was transitioning from female to male. This baffled me, as I knew nothing at all about transsexuality, transgenderism, gender-queerness, or gender variance, nothing at all about the motivations that would impel a twenty-two-year-old female-bodied person to inject herself with testosterone or undergo a mastectomy or live as a man. I was concerned and confused and I soon learned that I was not alone. Nearly everyone I spoke with about the subject was as confused as I was, and in some cases far more judgmental. “That’s crazy,” “It’s sick,” and “That’s disgusting” were some of the most extreme comments, together with the pious “It’s against God’s plan to change your sex” and the pseudoscientific “She needs psychiatric help.”
It’s important to note that these comments were uttered by people who are more or less comfortable with homosexuality. People who had accepted