The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [22]
Q: It seems like FTMs in general choose to transition and then get on with their lives. They don’t seem so interested in activism, in being out and politically active as MTFs.
Well, I’m out. I don’t hide it. Hiding is why people are so ignorant about transsexuality. That’s why it took me so long to figure it out. But I think that males to females are so much more defensive in how they deal with it afterward. It seems to me that not that many males to females remain in the same job that they were in before they changed. For example, a geology professor here at Stanford changed male to female, and she totally changed her research. She does gender studies now. She had a much rougher time [than I]. She had a very difficult time. I think that the medical school is a more accepting environment because we are biologists, familiar with biological variation. Geology is much more of a macho, male-dominated field.
Q: What do you think about gender? Is it in the body or the mind? Is it biological or is it social?
I think that there is something bimodal about gender. Biologically bimodal because it’s important for evolution and all species have it. Males and females are designed differently, and it’s all under the influence of hormone-driven programs, and if you look at behavior, male and female behavior is different, and I don’t think that’s all social. In fact, some of the best evidence for that comes from transsexuals. If you look at female-to-male transsexuals and results of their spatial tests before and after testosterone—and hundreds of studies have shown, and everyone agrees, that males and females differ in certain verbal and spatial tests—what’s cool about transsexuals is that they are their own control; you can do before-and-after tests. They have the same genes; the only thing that’s different is the hormones—and you find that female-to-male transsexuals become more malelike in their spatial abilities after testosterone. So there clearly are some gender-specific things that are controlled by hormones.
So it’s a very bimodal thing, but of course in any spectrum there’s going to be something in between. I just think that’s biology; it’s just the way we are. I would think that a lot of transsexuals feel this way because otherwise why do they feel so strongly from the time they are born that there’s something wrong? Why can’t they just get used to the way they are? That doesn’t come from the way society treated me. That comes from deep within. It comes from within. That’s my own personal view.
Two
THROUGH SCIENCE TO JUSTICE
Plato was acquainted with persons on the borderline of both emotional worlds, that of man and that of women. “Mixed beings” they are called. But here in my sickly body dwelt two beings, separate from each other, unrelated to each other, hostile to each other, although they had compassion on each other, as they knew that this body had room for only one of them. One of these two beings had to disappear, or else both had to perish.
LILI ELBE (NEE EINAR WEGENER), BERLIN, 1930
Western science first took notice of cross-gendered people and tried to provide some kind of therapeutic assistance for those who sought it in the first decades of the twentieth century. Much of this work was carried out in Berlin, at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), founded in 1919 by the pioneering physician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld. Housed in a beautiful old building in the heart of Berlin once owned by the violinist Joseph Joachim, the institute served as a doctor’s office for Hirschfeld and his colleagues, research facility, library, museum, and lecture hall. Hirschfeld and his staff studied a wide range of sexual behaviors and treated a broad array of clients, acquiring data on the gender identities and sexual practices of more than ten thousand men and women through a tool that Hirschfeld termed a “psychobiological questionnaire.”
Few people today recognize Hirschfeld’s name, and yet