[2/4] The Lives of Transgender People, by Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin (Chapter 2 and a bunch of my wandering thoughts)

The Lives of Transgender People

Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin

Columbia University Press, 2011

Chapter 2 "Experiences of Transgender Identity"

…though both the introduction and chapter one were sprinkled with capsule details about various peoples' lives as a means of illustrating this or that point derived from the details, both also read a whole bunch of data being given as a narrative of sorts. While that dynamic characterizes much of this text, in the 2nd chapter and after, I at least began to find the reading more engrossing and the quotes and short narratives of people became more interesting as well. This chapter begins with a quote from one of the respondents Jeri, who writes;

"Since I was a child, I realized I could not express my feelings, and forced myself to present myself as a man. It is one of the loneliest decisions a child could ever make. No one can know you." (39, my emphasis). 

…[Autobiographical Alert] this quote threw me back into memories, not memories of making this precise lonely decision, but after getting in trouble a couple of times, once ending in a huge blow-up of rage from my father because I was both "talking like" and "acting like" a fag - he said, and worse yet - I did this in front of his tennis buddies. The first of the two times that this behavior took place (which I honestly do not recall as such, only remembering the attitude that it provoked and that I was playing backgammon with my a neighbor while my dad waited to play the winner) I must admit that I didn't quite know what it was I had done though it had to do with my speech and that sitting quietly through a grueling period of looking contrite was probably in order (look at all that internalization! I was a master at that age already.). But the second time, I do recall the scenario a bit more. I was in a good mood, I'd been inside the house of the guy who owned the tennis court and I'd spoken with his wife who I thought was as beautiful as a movie star and thus I always felt very quiet and still when I saw her and probably I stared a lot, but she was always very kind to me and actually asked me questions and then heard my answers. I'd been talking with her in the kitchen I think and I went outside feeling a bit giddy and happy somehow - I'd made her laugh a lot, and I liked making people laugh - and I recall racing from the house to the tennis courts where the game had ended or a break was being taken or something and the four men who had been playing doubles, all sat drinking in lawn chairs under a big umbrella. One asked me what I had been doing and I launched into an account of whatever I had been talking about inside with one of them's wife. I do not recall what I said, but that I had a sense that I was performing and that all were watching me and that maybe I was being funny again, who knows, maybe I was on a role. I was asked something and I answered and everyone laughed but my father who stood up a moment later and grabbing his stuff and my arm, dragged me out of there. In the car he started shouting at me. It is probably true that I was not a very self-reflective child at times, certainly I learned a strategy with my volatile father, of always just assuming guilt when in trouble and acting contrite and just oh so damned sorry until his anger and then his post-angry lecturing phase was over. & I remember many times when in that space, seated silently while he lecture ranted at me, that I often was not at all sure what I had done or if I knew, often why it was bad was a mystery to me. & so while none of this compares that well to the quote I typed in above, I did make a lonely decision of my own which had to do with how I'd comport myself when addressing adults, especially men, and particularly if my father was present. As I do not think I fully understood why whatever I had said was faggy or embarrassing to my father, I sort of thought of the problem as my showing too much cheer or playfulness and sure enough, when I spoke to adults and listened and answered them in a very serious and considered manner (minus large hand gestures and such), this led to positive attributions being made about me to my father, which usually was a good thing for the vibe between he and I. 

. . . returning to the text now, this chapter considers the responses to questions like When did you first begin to sense that there was something different about yourself? and then How did you experience and understand this difference? through to questions about uncertainty and confusion, various strategies used to respond to these feelings, such as being a tomboy, a relatively common social ascription for behaviors that allowed many female assigned-at-birth subjects a good deal more wiggle room during childhood and adolescence that male assigned-at-birth children didn't have as an option (is there a way to understand this other than as simply supporting the gender norm's presumption that being more masculine is understandable - go patriarchy, go team! - and so not pathological? I can't think of any other.) Of course even for those to some degree comfortable through these years, as tomboys with non-evil parental units let's say, puberty can come still as an unpleasant shock and is also a time when tomboyishness is expected to dim and traditional feminine modes to come to the fore. Here is a detail that I found interesting;

"For the most part, the cross-dressing (CD) individuals we surveyed did not want to change their bodies permanently to look more female; however, a few of the CD interviewees still experienced a profound sense of loss when their bodies began to virilize" (49, my emphasis).

Vin Diesel vs The Rock
...it took me a long time not to just
want to be something else entirely...

…the CD respondents to this survey tended to be older, just as those identifying outside the gender binary, as genderqueer, etc, tended to be younger. That creates some odd results here and there if one does not keep the age difference in mind, as the authors are careful to point out each time such a finding appears. Cross-dressing is perhaps phasing out somewhat as an identity term as well, given that it is said to be rare amongst younger trans people (maybe, if this survey is a gauge of that, seems like there are still a lot of cross-dressers around). What I found interesting above though is that "a few" cross-dressers recalled a sense of loss at puberty, when their pre-adolescent bodies began to change in ways that hurt.  Presumably by not evolving toward womanly characteristics. But the word chosen is loss. My immediate thought is that the preadolescent body felt more able to embody those characteristics in play and so forth and acted more stably as an anchor for those identifications. But thinking of the dynamics of mirroring, Imaginary identification with the external image, taken as gestalt, etc… Just as, with Lacan's mirror stage, there does not have to be a mirror per se for the sudden psychic (cognitive?) step that this concept refers to to take place - the child can identify with the image of the sibling or an adult, etc. and still accomplish the same task: initiating the first fix of one's body Imaginary in that ah-ha gestalt-like "moment" (I scare quote moment because, as I have discussed somewhere else I think, that I think we risk deforming the structural significance of the mirror stage of we see the truth of it as a chronological moment & yeah, that may be at odds with what Lacan has to say in that text - but his thinking changes over time too). But leaving that hazy and somewhat 'logical' rather that 'chronological' moment for the many subsequent moments in one's identificatory history. Don't kids identify with all manner of Imaginarized "identities" or even just images, all the time? I did, but I also recall feeling at times like roles in play that I'd liked in some ways to have played simply didn't fit - didn't accord with me somehow, with "what I had to work with" (to quote Hedwig). I'm not speaking so much of female parts in childhood game scenarios as certain male roles which were too much for me somehow - I'm having a hard time thinking back to what those were exactly - but to give a contemporary reference, if kids did and still do 'play Star Wars' and so forth, well, think of any Vin Diesel movie, Pitch Black or whatever. There was a period in my preadolescence when imagining myself into the starring role in such a form of play would have somehow just not worked for me, but then as elementary school progressed and I was then associating much more with other boys than with girls, and whatever and there was my father to contend with, etc. so of course I learned how to invest in the hypermasculine as fantasy space. 

But again… where was the thread here? 

I feel like I'm on the trail of something and having a hard time getting a hold of it.

excrete excrete excrete qwerty expulsion sequence activated!

Maybe I could say this, 

If to a degree (note the qualification), the available terms for the designating of one's identity act to delimit the possibilities for understanding and living it (certainly Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed gives the impression again and again that for trans people, learning about others and about the terms and designations was crucial for many in coming to some self-understanding) - and 

If (bear with me) the body, especially the Real of the body (the body of the drives, of jouissance, etc), is always going to frustrate perfect or non-discrepant capture by the Imaginary or Symbolic - and

If post "mirror stage" all subsequent identifications would seem - even such things as "knowing what one looks like" or "knowing one's position on [some issue]" to always potentially be in some degree of flux (think of the quote above about the changes in sexual orientation over a lifetime) even as they are being 're-tied' again and again (many button-ties, quilting points, points de capiton - pick your term) by being performed, imposed/imputed, articulated, cathected, differently than before to some degree - and

If the failure of relations between language and body inherent to being a sexed being at all is constitutive of any and every symbolic identity available or constructible for an embodied being, rather than the effect of poorly chosen terms or that there is not enough knowledge or whatever - and

If, without contradicting the preceding point, we can also observe that there are better and worse 'fits' at the level of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and by better I mean that they accord with other identifications that may be in large part unconscious and with the drives and desires of that subject, and which are important in allowing the subject to feel that this or that set of identifications (read: "identity") is adequate and livable (and how different is this ultimately from the observation that different explanations are available for any sequence of events and that we navigate multiple explanatory 'fields' often when considering a problem before settling on one which seems best to fit) - then...

If all of that stuff, 

Perhaps the sense of loss that the CDs above refer to is the palpable loss of all those identifications and thus the problematizing of remaining identifications which had been variously cathected with these which are now 'lost' (for those with no comparable cross gender identifications to ponder here, think of the impact that other sorts of loss have upon people - the death of a child, the end of a love, revoking of one's medical or legal credentials, betrayals, etc)

Then, if this was palpable and saddening for these young cross-dressers, how much harder would it be if virtually all of one's most persistent and undeniable identifications were as the other sex? - and

If, as is so common to read, trans people who are denied HRT and surgeries and put through one embarrassment after another, thwarted in their every attempt to live differently, are at high risk for suicide… why would that be surprising? If all one's most profound subjective identifications are denied or refused by one's social surround, if the body is used as evidence against the feelings of the person whose body it is such that identifications are continually challenged or undermined or redescribed as mental illness? If relatively stable sets of relating and reinforcing identifications are what allow any person to be who they are for themselves and to position who they are for themselves within a social world in a way that is meaningfully connected to social and cultural values and practices - then denying all that or explaining it away at every turn would look like the plan were one actually attempting to provoke suicide in someone. 

So, when the next chapter includes this statistic; "The proportion of transgender youth who attempted suicide in 2006 was 20 percent higher than LGB youth and almost five times higher than the U.S. average for all youth" (90)… might we be justified in observing that the lack of social space for identifications is dangerous?

Maybe, and very "maybe" too, if it is the case that the number of people who are identifying as trans in some way is increasing, due to the availability of better terms and a greater variety of instantiations of what it might be to live this or that set of identifications, we could read those instances when cross-dressers (an older population in the survey) refer to a sense of loss attendant upon puberty, these feelings could be read as tremors in the Symbolic, foreshadowings of the quakes to come [Even if it were true that in terms of percentages of the world population, trans people comprise a relatively consistent number, the option not to hide or deny those identifications has emerged and become generative for so many people is all that is needed to account for the perception that the number is rising… I do not know the number and have no clue, just speculating - plus without stats for the past, how could one compare?]

hm. 

but this is sort of about that book still right?  The Lives of Transgender People by Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin. That was the plan at least. So, a few more quotes from this chapter that caught my eye & I'll close. 

Some of the other commonalities that the authors discovered in trans life histories included strategies of denial that there was anything wrong or different, for instance diving into hypermasculine activities to establish or ground oneself as male (which probably had the effect of causing others to read these people as men doing men stuff, but seemingly never acted very compellingly to anchor identifications of oneself as sexed being) (50-51). …Or having trouble settling on an identity that would proven sustainable "many of the respondents, especially those who grew up in the 1940s through 1980s, initially did not understand their experiences or have the appropriate language to describe them, leading many to remain confused or to mischaracterize their identities" (51).

From here the text looks at the moment of acceptance of a transgender identity, the importance of support groups and the internet, of socializing with other trans people, as well as coming out to family, friends and acquaintances, at work, etc. 

[to be continued]