The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [83]
CONVERSATION WITH CHELSEA GOODWIN AND RUSTY MAE MOORE, PH.D.
Chelsea Goodwin is an activist and was a founding member of Queer Nation. She worked at the Strand bookstore in New York City for many years and has also been a commercial sex worker. She currently works as a tele-marketer. Rusty Mae Moore is a soft-spoken college professor and a parent of three children, with whom she remains close. Goodwin is an extrovert, who says that her childhood ambition was to be a Catskills comic. Moore is quiet and thoughtful. They have lived together for over a decade. Goodwin and Moore underwent genital surgery together in Belgium in i()()5. Together they operate Transy House, ashelterfor trans gendered and transsexual people in Brooklyn, New York.
Q: You don’t like the word “trans gender”?
CHELSEA: What I don’t like is that it’s based on a false premise. There is a transsexual community. There is a cross-dresser community. There is a community of people like Jasmine here, or like Sylvia, or like Melissa, which pretty much involves that kind of underground, prostitution-based thing. Those are three different communities, with three different languages, three different sets of mores and values and folkways—all those groovy anthropology words they taught me to use in college. If I were an anthropologist from another planet coming to study trans earth people, I would say that those are three different tribes that are unrelated.
Q: So you don’t see any value, political or social, in all those groups working together as a single entity?’
CHELSEA: Frankly I don’t, and I’ll tell you why. One, cross-dressers insist that transsexuals are somehow just extremist cross-dressers. They don’t understand. “You’re a kumquat and we’re avocados.” We’re not even in the same food group. You’ve got transsexuals. We’re a pretty diverse bunch, but there’s a commonality. A common language and culture which, yes, goes back to Benjamin and Christine Jorgensen and all that. And then you’ve got the street community, where there is a culture of trans street prostitute types. You’ve got the same thing in Brazil, in the Philippines, in Mexico. You’ve got it all over the world. It’s a real phenomenon. But it’s different than transsexuals like Rusty or me. I came out of the working class. Rusty came out of the middle class. But we’re still transsexuals.
Q: I’m confused about the distinction between street queens and non-operative transsexuals. Isn’t the distinction based purely on access to surgery?
CHELSEA: No, I think it’s a different community. It’s a different world. See Paris Is Burning. That is a different culture than you’ll see with people who have had or are about to have surgery. That’s a different track. A whole different world. And that’s totally different from people who like to wear a dress on weekends and go to conventions with their wives. It’s a whole different culture.
Q: Does age play a part in this? It seems like older folks tend to prefer to identify as transsexual, whereas younger folks prefer transgender.
RUSTY: I think that it’s an age thing in part because some of those people who say transgender are going to evolve [into transsexuals] and some are not going to evolve.
CHELSEA: I think it’s an age thing in that you have a generation— and some of them are still left, people like April Ashley and Christine Jorgensen, even Renee Richards—that pretty much came out of a pre-Stonewall mentality and they were the people who first went through the Benjamin Standards of Care.
Q: And they had a fairly hetero-normative view of gender? RUSTY: Right. CHELSEA: Right. And then you have a whole generation of trippies.
I’m a trippie. Trippies are people that are of the right age that we were hippies and yippies and freaks in the sixties and seventies.
Q: Testing all kinds of boundaries and gender