The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [95]
One day I came home from work and found Theresa stewing in anger at the kitchen table. Some of the lesbians from a newly formed group on campus had mocked her for being a femme. They told her she was brainwashed. “I’m so mad.” Theresa thumped the table. “They told me that butches were male chauvinist pigs!”
I knew what male chauvinist meant, but I couldn’t figure out what it had to do with us. “Don’t they know we don’t deal the shit, we get shit on?”
They don’t care, honey. They’re not going to let us in.”
“Should Jan and Grant and Edwin and I go to one of these meetings and try to explain?”
Theresa put her hand on my arm. “It won’t help, honey. They’re very angry at butches.”
“Why?”
She thought about the question. “I think it’s because they draw a line—women on one side and men on the other. So women they think look like men are the enemy. And women who look like me are sleeping with the enemy. We’re too feminine for their taste.”
“Wait a minute,” I stopped her. “We’re too masculine and you’re too feminine? Whatdya have to do, put your index fingers in a meter and test in the middle?”
Rejected by the new breed of “woman-identified women” for being too butch, and shunned by society at large for being too androgynous, Feinberg’s character Jess Goldberg, a “he-she,” takes refuge in masculinity. Testosterone masculinizes hir body and deepens hir voice. Bearded and flat-chested after a mastectomy, Jess passes as a man without difficulty, but is consumed by loneliness and a sense of alienation. “As much as I loved my beard as part of my body, I felt trapped behind it,” Feinberg writes. “What I saw reflected in the mirror was not a man, but I couldn’t recognize the he-she. My face no longer revealed the contrasts of my gender. I could see my passing self, but even I could no longer see the more complicated me beneath my surface.”
Jess Goldberg (like hir creator, Leslie Feinberg) chooses to embrace ambiguity and live in the undefined space between the poles of male and female—the space that would eventually be termed “transgen-der.” The choice was not without peril. When sie was a butch lesbian, “strangers had raged at me for being a woman who crossed a forbidden boundary. Now they really didn’t know what my sex was, and that was unimaginable, terrifying to them. Woman or man—the bedrock crumbled beneath their feet as I passed by.” Goldberg relates the comment of a shopkeeper to a fellow customer—“how the hell should I know what it is? The pronoun echoed in my ears. I had gone back to being an it.” As an it, the fictional Goldberg was beaten so badly that hir jaw was wired shut. As an it, the real Feinberg was denied medical treatment and nearly died from an untreated bacterial infection. Though Stone Butch Blues is a novel, the challenges faced by the book’s protagonist remain all too real for visibly transgendered people.
Perhaps for that reason, many choose to disappear into more conventional gender presentations. This has been particularly true of female-to-male transsexual people (FTMs), who for the most part have far less difficulty “passing” in their chosen gender, as Jess Goldberg discovered. In contrast to the many memoirs and autobiographies published by male-to-female transsexual people (MTFs) in the sixties, the seventies, and beyond, the number of books by FTMs remains slim, reflecting the relative invisibility of transmen. Even today, there is no one FTM figure with the name recognition of a Christine Jorgensen, even though the first international “outing” of a female-to-male transsexual person occurred a few years after Jorgensen’s media baptism. In May 1958, the Sunday Express of London revealed that a forty-two-year-old physician, Laurence Michael Dillon, heir presumptive to the baronetcy of Lismullen, had in fact been born Laura Maud Dillon. “The very day the Express story appeared it went round the world courtesy of the Reuters news agency,” notes Dillon’s biographer Liz Hodgkinson.