GenderBenders

It is a testament to the crude fascination of scientia sexualis that with such a novel case of gender identity, everyone was busy trying to collect and examine the physical details of Christine Jorgensen’s life. This is epitomized in Document 3’s text from a Time’s article:“The New York Post put the facts on the line. Reporter Alvin Davis, who flew to Denmark to interview Jorgensen’s doctors, established two main points: 1) Jorgensen’s case was not one of hermaphroditism or pseudohermaphroditism 2) in an attempt to accommodate his urge to transvestism, his Danish doctors had simply amputated penis an testes, left him a male castrate” (Peiss 375). The preoccupation with physicality and external reactions was typical of mainstream media and the medical world, though the medical world could take it further and ask more probing physical questions. But once America found out Christine was, (in their minds) a completely normal male, and then had actively decided to become a women (Serlin attributes America’s initial acceptance in part to Jorgensen’s excellent maintenance of an ambiguous front; her vagueness and cheeriness about her “previous state” put her in an ambiguous, and not strictly homosexual, category), they rejected her as a medical oddity and a homosexual.

I watched an interview with Christine from 1966s. She was a perfect, elegant woman in dress and mannerism. And the male interviewer was only concerned with facts. How many other successfully gender-reassigned transsexuals did she know of, right now? A transvestite is a “dressing-up type of homosexual”, correct? And you don’t claim to be a homosexual…or I should say, you claim you’re not a homosexual? Etc.

Then I watched another interview with Christine from the 1980s and it turned out as nearly as disappointingly bland as the one from the 60s, again the interviewer was at fault. He asks Christine a series of vapid questions that miss the point entirely. For example Christine mentioned her sister and got, “Does she feel uncomfortable?” Then the interviewer said, “Cause there are certain things sisters share and a brother and sister don’t share…” Christine responded by telling him that her relationships with her sister, and in fact her whole family, grew stronger after her surgery, and continued to strengthen. As is typical, the interviewer shuts down this interesting statement, which could be explored emotionally, with a more empirical question about “what do you enjoy doing most – writing cookbooks, performing, or lecturing”. But I held on to her statement as a testament to self-identity being a crucial part in navigating and maintaining external relationships, something we’ve obviously been given a lesson in with Callie.

Despite their lack of poignant information, these interviews told me that people were concerned with external reactions. Not how the actual transsexual individual felt inside, but how their family, their community, and the world reacted.

It is interesting to see what ramifications occur in a society that has been mainly male (separate from) female gender structured, as everything from sentences to laws have to be readjusted and changed to reflect the ever widening scope of sexual and gender identity. There are obviously important and large-scale points of controversy like questions about policy issues (i.e. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, gay marriage)

But I am also intrigued by small points of contention, little things that seem vacuous yet oddly problematic (at least for some one, some where) at the same time. I’m speaking of people like Jenna Talackova, a contestant in 2012’s Miss Universe Canada pageant. Born a male, in her early teens Jenna began to transition to the female gender, eventually completing it with sex reassignment surgery. She was denied from the 2012 pageant when she applied at first, on the grounds that she was not a natural born woman.  She was planning to take a lawsuit to court, but the organization dropped its objections and stated that as long as her new gender was legally acceptable to Canada, she could compete. She, once a he, is competing to be the paragon of femininity … now we’re confusing ourselves, and we’re getting into ironies (probably a natural symptom being that our country is undergoing a perspective transition):

Even more convoluted: I was also thinking about sports, where the male and female bodies have been very segregated to represent different gender stereotypes. Male to female transsexual body builders are interesting in that they are leaving the male gender for the typically maleness-associated arena of bodybuilding, but with female competitors. Obviously the arguments against some one competing are derived from male/female stereotyping about strength – it’s not fair, males are stronger, he’s only trying to cheat the system, etc. But the enigma of a man turning female in order to compete with females in a male dominated activity seems like a very modern sexual history topic for contemplation.

Tags: Gender Identity, Middlesex, transsexuals

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at 12:01 am and is filed under May 7, Rachel Kisty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.