The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [28]
Hirschfeld’s theories and the work of his fellow endocrinologists and sexologists fascinated not only fellow physicians but also the general public. “Early in the twentieth century, endocrinology was the shit!” says historian Susan Stryker. “It explained everything. It had this radical view of the body: ‘no one is fully man, no one is fully woman.’ We’re all a mixture of different things, and certain tendencies predominate and that’s why homosexuality can be caused by a glandular imbalance. That whole model that people exist on a continuum was Hirschfeld’s idea. Among the educated, that was more the model for how things were, part of the destabilizing thrust of modernism—that endocrinological view of gender difference,” says Stryker.
In many ways, we are the heirs of that “destabilizing” world view that Hirschfeld and his colleagues sought to anchor in biology. While reading Hirschfeld, I realized with a shock that I would probably qualify as a low-grade intermediary under the Hirschfeld nosology (system of classification). Although I do not have a beard or a male body shape, nor do I desire to be a man, I do exhibit a mix of the natural psychological attributes of absolute “maleness” and “femaleness” identified by Hirschfeld. “Capable, active, enterprising, wandering,” in general, men are “active, aggressive, searching,” says Hirschfeld, and tend to lack the “grace, gentleness, charm and submissiveness of the woman.” “Womanly” women, by contrast, are “receptive, impressionable, sensitive, emotional and more direct than the man while less concerned with the strongly abstract, the racking of one’s brains, or even the purely creative and active side of the human psyche.” Reading this description, I thought back to my research trip to California at the start of this project, in which I drove alone from hilly San Francisco to the fertile midsection of the state to the desert outside Palm Springs and then back up the coast, to San Diego and Los Angeles via San Juan Capistrano. Along the way I interviewed sources whom I had met over the Internet and through my local contacts. The trip required both “masculine” independence and initiative to get me on the road and keep me there, but also “feminine” receptivity and sensitivity as I asked questions, listened, and empathized with the life stories of my sources. If I had been purely “masculine” or purely “feminine,” in the traditional sense, I could not have carried out this work successfully. I should add that I thoroughly enjoyed both aspects of the trip, although, when I returned home, I discovered that my sixteen-year-old daughter had wrecked my new car in my absence! My response to this debacle was both “masculine” and “feminine”—the empathizing female self was exclusively concerned with my daughter’s well-being (thankfully she was fine), while the analytical male self grimly calculated the inconvenience and the expense. Like most “mixed” beings these days, I don’t perceive these aspects of my personality as at war with each other, however, nor do I consider myself transgendered. The definition of “femininity” has, over the past hundred years, expanded to include many qualities once coded “masculine,” and vice versa.
My research trip and my freedom to define myself as a woman in any way I choose are in many ways the consequence of a social revolution that began around the time Hirschfeld was initiating