The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [137]
CHRISTINE JOHNSON,
“ENDOCRINE DISRUPTING CHEMICALS
AND TRANSSEXUALISM,” SEATTLE, 2001
Christine Johnson is a petite, blond transwoman, thirty-eight years old. She is an engineer, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Drexel University, in Philadelphia, currently living in Seattle. Her major research interest is systems theory. I sought her out online after she posted “Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals and Transsexualism” on the discussion list of the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC). The list members, most of whom are activists focused on civil rights for transgendered people and the passing of anti-discrimination legislation, didn’t seem interested in Johnson’s article, but it hit me with the force of a depth charge.
In 1995, I had been asked to be a coauthor an article for an environmental magazine called Garbage on the potential effects of endocrinedisrupting chemicals (EDCs). The editors of Garbage (known for tipping the sacred cows of environmentalism) had wondered if the spate of panicky articles then appearing in the popular press—articles that ominously detailed falling human sperm counts, Florida alligators with micro-penises, hermaphroditic birds and fish in the Great Lakes region—were scientifically credible. Soon after my coauthor—a friend who was then a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health—and I signed the contract to write the article, the magazine went under, but by then I had downloaded two years of articles on the topic. I found the information in the newspaper and magazine articles disturbing, but as a feminist I was also deeply suspicious of the subtext, neatly summarized by the title of a BBC documentary on the topic: Assault on the Male. The media coverage of the “environmental estrogen” hypothesis seemed to me a transparent expression of male anxiety about the growing political, economic, and social power of women. All this talk of males being “feminized” and emasculated by exposure to estrogen seemed so clearly an expression of the antifeminist backlash that I was determined to call my article “Fear of a Pink Planet” (a riff on the music industry satire Fear of a Black Planet). However, Garbage sank, and as I wasn’t very far into the project, I abandoned it when the magazine ceased publication.
When I encountered Christine Johnson’s article sketching out a hypothesis between endocrine disrupters and transsexuality, I was two years into the research for this book. I had spoken to literally hundreds of transgendered and transsexual people at meetings and online. By then, it was abundantly clear to me that the people I was meeting were not mentally ill. Like the friend whose decision to transition had caused me to embark on writing this book, they seemed like regular people who had been dealt a tough hand by life, and were dealing with it as best they could. I also rejected the popular notion that gender was entirely “performative”—the newest twist of the social construction theory, most cleverly articulated in the work of the Berkeley scholar Judith Butler. Certainly, I thought, people “perform” gender in various ways, learned from their parents, community, and culture. However, most people also seem to feel comfortable basing their performance on the gender that is consistent with their anatomy. Most do not feel a disconnection between their anatomy and their “most deeply held sense of self,” as Susan