The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [96]
Like Dillon, many transmen avoid notoriety, and their stories remain largely untold. However, although fewer FTMs have written memoirs or spoken out about their feelings during the immediate post-Stonewall era, the ones who have acknowledge that they were just as uncomfortable with the new “androgyny” as the drag queens, stone butches, and MTFs. For one thing, most transmen adamantly maintain that they are not lesbians. They are men, period. In his autobiography, Emergence, published in 1977, Mario Martino clarifies the distinction between a “butch,” or masculine lesbian, and a female-to-male transsexual.
“Proud of being a woman, she [the lesbian] responds to another woman who responds to her as a female. The lesbian’s satisfaction is the woman-to-woman contact,” writes Martino. “Unlike the lesbian, I did not want to be a woman and I felt I should never have been one, that I could be content only in the male gender. I have always wanted, will always want, only the male to female relationship.” Martino’s feelings are echoed in nearly every FTM memoir published to date, including What Took You So Long? A Girl’s Journey to Manhood, by Raymond Thompson (1995); and Dear Sir or Madam, by Mark Rees (1996).
That said, it is also true that many FTMs today may have spent years and even decades in the lesbian community before transitioning. The decision to transition presents a terrible conundrum to many transmen, who feel loved and accepted in the lesbian community even if they never feel that the label “lesbian” really applies to them. “For me, some of the hardest people to come out to about being trans are some of my older lesbian friends. Some of them have been great about it, but some definitely had to struggle, feeling a sense of betrayal as butch lesbians,” says Ali Cannon, a thirty-seven-year-old transman I interviewed in 2001. “A friend of mine has talked about the way that the lesbians from that generation, my generation and older, have become the parents that the younger lesbians who identify as trans have to come out to. Their feeling of loss, and ‘you’re not growing up to be what we wanted you to be’ is very similar to that of straight parents first confronted with a child’s homosexuality,” he says. This is particularly true for those who came of age during the seventies, when lesbianism became almost synonymous with a deep and abiding mistrust of men and male power. “It was really hard,” says Tom Kennard, a San Francisco computer programmer, about his decision to transition in the 1990s. “I’m fifty-one, so when I was coming up I was a big feminist, a white lesbian feminist and I was kind of a separatist. You know, there’s all this stuff in feminism, like women are the highest of all, women are good. Women, good. Men, bad.”
The woman, good/man, bad dichotomy that Kennard describes was forged in the feminist movement’s rejection of patriarchy and its mandates for gender-coded behavior. Women as a group, gay or straight, revolted en masse against the limitations implicit in traditional definitions of womanhood. Few burned their bras, but many began to question why it was that a woman could not be a mechanic or a doctor, why women were expected to be demure and accommodating, why women were always expected to place their own needs and desires after those of men. Why were women raised to be second-class citizens? In this struggle for self-definition, men, both as a group and as individuals, became Man, the tyrant and oppressor. A collective howl of rage was heard across the land, as activist women in particular noticed that their male counterparts were no more progressive in their attitudes toward and treatment of women than the system they were attempting to overthrow. The New Woman was back, but this time she was loud, proud, and overtly political.
Robin Morgan—a feminist writer whose essay “Goodbye to All That” served notice to