The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [36]
Q: His unwillingness to pathologize sexual intermediaries was at odds with most of the other sexologists of the time, wasn’t it?
In a sense I think that he did pathologize, in that he thought that gender and sexuality were appropriate targets for medical intervention. But do you want to call that pathological? What many transsexuals are looking for is a nonpathologized way to say, “I want to interact with medical service providers.” So that treatment is offered much more on a service provider basis, which is of course part of a much broader shift in medicine.
Q: The history of interactions between transgendered people and the medical community is a very complex one, isn’t it? In one sense, it was very consumer-driven, with transsexuals seeking out physicians and requesting that they provide certain services like hormone treatments and surgery. It seems that early on, the relationship was much friendlier between clients and service provider than it is today, though. Why do you think that is the case?
I think that there has always been a tension between people seeking services and people providing services. And as much as I firmly believe that people have autonomy over their own bodies and can choose best for themselves—that people have the capacity to give informed consent—I understand that service providers have concerns. If I as a surgeon am going to do something to a person’s body, I need to be convinced that I’m doing the right thing, because of the Hippocratic oath, and its major principle, do no harm. I respect that and I understand that there’s a need sometimes for transgendered people seeking medical services, to educate the service providers about why, even though this is something that you might not choose for yourself, this is the best thing for me.
However, you can’t just talk about clients and service providers. You have to talk about the role of media as well, in publicizing the fact that certain options are available. At least in modern Western European culture, there are many people who feel like “my body isn’t shaped right” and it’s not an aesthetic question, really, so much as a question about how we internalize ideas about gender, historically and culturally. To develop a gender identity and feel like my body does not communicate my sense of self to my audience—and then to know that there are techniques for body manipulation that are available because I’ve read about them.
Even before Jorgensen, people who were looking for help would turn to science and medicine and say, “Look, I know you can do this, I’m reading about Eugen Steinach in Vienna, and he’s doing these gonad transplant things and these hormone injection things; sign me up.” And then they were perceived as crazy because they wanted to do that. So there’s been an awareness on the part of people seeking services that some techniques were available, and they could see an application of that technique to their situation, and then they would have to persuade a service provider that it was a legitimate thing to do.
So there was always that tension, and there have been some service providers like Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin who have been like, “Oh, okay, there’s no reason we shouldn’t do that.” They get it, at some level, for whatever reason. And then there were many other people who were like, “No, get out of here.”
Even with Jorgensen—though she certainly spoke well of her surgeons—there was more tension behind the scenes. She didn’t know of any other way to get what she wanted. There really wasn’t any other way at that point. So she volunteered to be an experiment. And her en-docrinologist decided, “Yes, this is a rare thing, and this person is more female than male. This is the most advanced case of intersex we have ever seen—the most truly feminine balanced with the most obvious male.” They wrote among themselves, evaluating. “Is this an effeminate homosexual? Is this a transvestite?” They knew those categories,