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By Root 1908 0

myself and not suffer violence or oppression because of that is what’s important. You always fight your battles and draw your lines differently. When I first started transitioning, I didn’t want to go to the corner store and say [speaks heatedly and aggrievedly], “All right, I’m here to buy a gallon of milk, and I can see that you perceive that I am a trans-gendered person, and it is my duty to educate you.” I was just “keep your head down, buy the damn milk, go home, maybe they hate you, maybe they don’t, but whatever.” But I find a greater sense of comfort in being really open with people. I want people to see me as a woman. I want my deepest and most closesly held sense of self to be visible and able to interact with other people. I don’t feel like I have to hide my differences. Difference can be a real source of pleasure.

Q: In the past, transsexual people were advised to make a complete break with their pasts and to basically keep their gender transition a secret, even with intimate partners. Even today, it seems, many people feel safer revealing their status as a transsexual person to very few people. It seems as though that kind of invisibility would create tremendous psychic strain.

I’ve met people like that, certainly. I can’t imagine it. I didn’t want to do that at all. I just thought that felt very inauthentic. However, I understand that they do it because of other people’s feeling about transsexuality. I don’t know how many times in my own life people have met me on the street, or at a presentation, and it’s “she, she, she” until I say, “I’m a transsexual,” and suddenly it’s “he, he, he, he.” I’m like, “I’m sorry, you were having no problem with me fifteen minutes ago. What are you confused about? What changed, except your knowledge of my transsexual past?” It’s that belief about gender and the body. Is change in the body shape a change in the essence of the soul? People trip up about that. And so I understand [the desire to keep quiet]. There’s that paradox of visibility. I’m doing all of this so that people understand me the way that I understand myself. But if they know that I’ve done this, then they don’t accept me as I understand myself. They see me as something different, and then all my hard work has been for naught. However, if I don’t tell them, they will accuse me of being duplicitous. It’s a catch-22.

For me, I think of how open I am about being transgendered or how I present at different times—it’s kind of like the difference between using language for poetry and using language to communicate. If what you really want to do is communicate with someone “I need x, y or z,” and you are using the language of gender for its communicative potential, and often that’s what we want to do with gender, is communicate a sense of self with an other. But within certain contexts, within more closely held communities and other contexts, other kinds of communication for different uses are possible. Are you doing your gender like a funky bass riff, are you riffing on some gender improv? Are you using the way that you are doing your gender to test the boundaries of language? You can do gender more like an art practice or like a political practice. And at times those can be very effective things to do. They can be really fun.

Three

THE BOMBSHELL

I looked into a sea of faces, lined up along the ropes of the “quarantine walk “ and held back by a sea of determined police, then heard a roar of voices shouting my name. I reeled under the impact. I thought for a moment that I had entered Dante’s inferno, as flashbulbs exploded from all directions and new sreel cameras whirred. A crowd of three hundred shoving reporters, news-reel and still photographers had converged, all jockeying for position and camera angles. I learned later it was the largest assemblage of press representatives in the history of the airport.

CHRISTINE JORGENSEN, NEW YORK CITY, 1953

Christine Jorgensen was the first star of the dawning age of celebrity, the first American to become internationally known simply for being herself. Her fame