The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [77]
The difficulty of distinguishing those individuals who might benefit from sex-reassignment surgery from those who would be crushed under the weight of postsurgical adjustment problems was a major preoccupation of the university researchers. They sought to define characteristics in prospective clients that might predict success in post-surgical life. For this reason, the university clinics have been lambasted by members of the trans community for creating a myth of the “classic” male-to-female transsexual. A classic transsexual was essentially a traditional woman who happened to have been born in a male body. She was attractive, with feminine mannerisms and a feminine outlook, and had felt like a girl all of her life. She was, above all, heterosexual and desired marriage and, when possible, children by adoption or step-parenting. “Back in those days, they used to say that you had to be hyper-feminine to transition, and I’d say, ‘This isn’t me. So maybe I’m not transsexual,’” says Dr. Dana Beyer, who transitioned in 2003 at the age of fifty-one. “If the only true transsexuals are Jayne Mansfield types, how the hell am I ever going to meet the criteria?”
Members of the trans community, with their sophisticated pre-Internet communications network, quickly sussed out the conservative criteria that the clinics were using to choose candidates for surgery. In a self-fulfilling prophecy that would be comic if it weren’t so tragic, candidates for sex-reassignment thus began presenting themselves to researchers as demure heterosexuals who wanted nothing more than a good man and a stable home, with lots of delightful children running around. In fact, many MTFs were attracted to women both before and after sex reassignment, but were careful to keep this fact hidden, knowing that it would destroy their chances of being accepted for surgery.
The university researchers began to sense the deception and to probe deeper, eventually discovering that many of their patients weren’t exactly the transsexual June Cleavers of their intake interviews. “They all claim that they are the same, but I don’t believe that they are,” Paul McHugh says today. “Most of them, the beginning ones, the ones that we were seeing here at Hopkins, were all men wanting to be women. And it was obvious that they weren’t women. They were caricatures of women. They had ideas in their mind about what it meant to be a woman, and you brought a woman into the room to talk to them and the woman quickly got the idea, ‘That’s no woman!’ Secondly, many of them would say, I am a woman in a man’s body, but I’m a lesbian.’ That’s crazy,” McHugh exclaims with some heat. “That’s a long way around for a guy to get a girl. That’s just nuts,” he says.
Echoing the conservative view of gender roles and sexual orientation that guided the decisions of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, and eventually led to its closure, McHugh says, “Look, in this situation, the issue for the person who is making the claim is to prove to you that they really are a woman. When they start saying that they are lesbians, that should increase your level of doubt. Then they have no maternal feelings—none, zip! I think that maternal feelings are a common quality of women. Do you think that the only thing it takes to be a woman is genitalia? No. There is a psychology to womanhood. We’ve just touched on two elements of that psychology which many of these guys coming to be women don’t have.”
Admitting that some genetic women, socialized as women throughout their lives,