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By Root 1965 0

be a better place if gay people were more accepted. But of course you can never know how other people will use material like this. There could always be somebody to say, ‘This shows that there are cells missing in the brain. Let’s go and put some in.’ If gene tests become available to test babies or fetuses, I’m sure there will be some people who would want to abort or have their baby genetically altered. I think myself what we should strive for is to create a world where that won’t happen. I think that’s a kind of urgent task to accomplish, and I think that’s not only in the area of sexual orientation but basically across the board. There’s so much human diversity that is controversial in terms of ‘is this good, is this acceptable, is this something that we don’t want?’ People are really going to have to debate these issues and decide what is acceptable and not acceptable, what is within the parents’ right to decide.”

LeVay also points out that studies have shown that people who believe that homosexuality is an inborn trait, as opposed to a freely chosen lifestyle, tend to have more positive views about gay people in general. “There have been studies where the researchers get a whole bunch of college students together and give them some reading material. One group of students will read material suggesting that sexual orientation is an inborn trait, referring to papers like my own kind of studies; another group of students read material suggesting a lack of biological differences. There was nothing in what they read that was a value judgment—they are just summaries of research. Then afterward they gave these kids a test—the homophobia index or something like that—and they found that the kids who read the ‘born that way’ kind of material were more favorable than the kids who read the other stuff. So to some extent it looks like there is a connection between beliefs about causation and attitudes about how gay people should be treated. In that sense, it [research on etiology] is not merely a scientific enterprise—though I think that it is a perfectly worthy scientific enterprise to understand basic aspects of human nature like sexual orientation and gender identity—but it really is embedded in this kind of social controversy about gay rights.”

Thirty-five years after Stonewall, and ninety years after Magnus Hirschfeld’s advocacy of gay and gender-variant people in Weimar Germany, transgendered people remain, in Christine Johnson’s phrase, “the invisible ones.” For some, that invisibility seems a kind of protective cloak, but for others it is a dark closet that prevents them from being known and accepted as they are. The community itself is riven with conflict about the pros and cons of assimilation, and the value of difference. Many young trans people especially question why they should be forced to choose a “box”—male or female—given that making such a choice feels like self-betrayal. “In a world that separates gender, I have found the ability to balance the blending of supposed opposites. In a world that demonizes non-conformity, I have found the purest spiritual expression in celebrating my otherness. In a world that exterminates the heretic, I have embraced the danger inherent in holding a belief not shared by the majority of people in my society,” writes Alexander John Goodrum, an African-American transman, in an essay published in the program for the True Spirit Conference in 2002.

Goodrum, who served as director of TGNet Arizona, a transgender advocacy and education organization, committed suicide in 2002 while being treated for depression. He was a gentle soul, who conceived of his transgenderness as “a spiritual act, an offering of the highest kind. It is a sacrifice of the pre-defined self created by societal doctrine. It is the act of laying that pre-defined self upon the altar, ready to be sacri-fied in a supreme act of faith. And it is that act of faith, to whomever or whatever one perceives as god, in which lies the ability to express the infinite.”

Some might call Alexander Goodrum a victim—of society’s prejudices