The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [6]
Like many of the transmen I interviewed, Kennard had to overcome deep-seated negative feelings about masculine identity and behavior in order to proceed with his transition. He didn’t want to be a “man” as manhood is defined in our culture, and yet, he felt that he had no other choice because he was not a woman either. “People say that gender is what’s between your ears and not between your legs, but I don’t know,” he says. “I just didn’t belong in the girls’ pile. It’s sort of an exclusion thing, rather than inclusion. I just felt like I didn’t belong over there. If we have a binary system, and there are only two choices, I belong here. And I like being over here. I’m really comfortable being over here.”
These observations lead me to the most salient fact that my conversations with transsexual people have illuminated: though the way we express gender is clearly influenced by culture, gender identity itself seems far too deeply embedded to be purely an artifact of culture. There are few benefits to adult sex reassignment, other than the feeling that one’s body and social role finally reflect one’s inner sense of self. The process of sex reassignment is physically and emotionally grueling, and hugely expensive in terms of money, time, and lost personal relationships. Most of my transsexual sources knew from a very young age (typically before age five) that there was something different about them. Often they spent decades trying to understand the source of that difference and come to terms with the implications of their process of self-discovery. Those who decide to physically change their sex then spend a number of years committed to the process of transition; the outcome is a series of painful surgeries. No one would undertake this arduous quest unless driven to it by acute misery. I have been told by person after person, “It was this or suicide.”
Transgendered people who do not surgically transition, who live with bodies at odds with their gender presentation, court even greater risks, enduring the constant threat of discovery and exposure. The penalty for such transgression is often brutal. Many people have heard of the murder of Brandon Teena (nee Teena Brandon), the subject of the film Boys Don’t Cry, but few know that such murders are commonplace. In 2002 alone, twenty-three people in the United States were slain in what appear to have been transgender hate crimes. For example, in October 2002, while at a party, seventeen-year-old Gwen Araujo was dragged into a garage, where she was beaten and strangled by three young men who had discovered that she was male-bodied. Her body was then dumped in the desert. It took two weeks for the other young people present at the party to report the murder. Two months before Gwen Araujo’s death, on August 12, 2002, Stephanie Thomas, nineteen, and Ukea Davis, eighteen, were shot to death as they sat in their parked car a block from the apartment they shared in Washington, D.C. Davis and Thomas had lived as women since their early teens, and became close friends after meeting at a support group. Unlike Araujo, whose “secret” was unknown to many of her acquaintances, Thomas and Davis were well known and apparently well liked in the southeast D.C. neighborhood where they grew up. Their openness did not protect them. Each was hit more than ten times in the head and upper body