Visible Man
Brand new on PlanetOut!
Jamison Green offers a man's POV on life in the trans lane. Opinion,
advice, and information from an internationally respected leader of the
FTM community.
Transpeople -- transgendered and transsexual people -- are not in the
forefront of everyone's consciousness. But when the topic does arise,
most people think of a man in a dress, or a man who "wants to be a woman."
Wrong! There are a whole lot of transpeople out here who live, think, look,
and behave like men. Transmen, transfags (transmen who are gay men), FTMs,
or just plain guys, we make up half of the transgender world, the mostly
invisible half.
I named this column "Visible Man," which is also the title of my
memoir-in-progress, because its purpose is to increase consciousness
about transpeople who begin life in female bodies, who identify as
masculine or male, and who manifest that identity some or all of the
time. I can speak most comprehensively about the experience of
female-to-male (FTM) transsexual people, because I have undergone that
entire transition. But I am also aware of what it is to live in the
middle, to be identified as butch, to be perceived as male from within a
female body, to want to walk in the demilitarized zone between the sexes,
with armed camps watching from either side.
I identified as a lesbian for 22 years, most of the time knowing ---and
fearing -- that I was a transsexual. I came of age politically in the
immediately post-Stonewall lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s, but
even then my friends often excluded me from women-only events because
they perceived me as "really a boy." To make a long story short, I went
through the biochemical and surgical transition to manhood during the
period from 1988 to 1994. I started just before my 40th birthday, and I
had my last surgery in February 1991.
Accomplishing the transformation from boy-in-a-female-body to
male-bodied-man was one of the most terrifying, dangerous, expensive, and
ultimately rewarding things I have ever done. Having the conscious
awareness of being perceived and treated as both male and female, the
knowledge of what is expected from both women and men, and the body
experience of being finally at home and at peace is reward enough for
many of us. But I was also given an opportunity to be of service to others
like myself. In March 1991, at the death of its founder, Lou Sullivan, I
became the leader of a San Francisco support group for female-to-male
transsexuals and cross-dressers, called FTM, and the editor of its
quarterly newsletter. With the help and support of many other transmen,
I charted the course of the group's expansion to an internationally
focused nonprofit educational organization serving the informational and
support needs of FTM people worldwide. The group became known as FTM
International in 1994, held the largest ever (and first in North America)
FTM conference in San Francisco in 1995, and was incorporated in 1996. I
served as the first president until August 1999, when I resigned to focus
more attention on writing and international community development.
In the coming months I'll use this space to explore some of the facts and
myths about transmen's lives, and I hope readers will find my musings
and/or rantings informative. This time I'll close with some thoughts
about the recently-released film, Boys Don't Cry,
a film that exposes the overlapping experience of butch lesbians and FTMs
as it focuses on the act of "passing" and the violence that discovery can invoke.
I know all butches are not interested in passing, but the fact is that sometimes
they DO pass as men, and then they have to worry about being "found out."
In Boys Don't Cry,
Brandon denies being a "dyke" and insists that he is a man. Brandon and
his cousin drop hints about Brandon's visit to a gender clinic and his fears
about hormones and surgery. At various times he claims to be a "her-mafo-dite"
[sic] and a pre-op transsexual. He engages in petty criminal activity in order
to impress his friends or ingratiate himself with potential lovers, and while
we certainly develop sympathy for him, we are left to wonder just how messed up he is.
It's difficult to come to any conclusions about Brandon, other than the fact
that what happened to him (and his friends -- one murder victim was omitted
from the film) was horrible and shouldn't happen to anyone.
FTM people are often accused of masquerading as men, as lying and
deceiving to attain male privilege. Butch women are often perceived as
women who want to be men, or who think they are men. In either case,
female-bodied people are assumed to be deluded or deceptive (or both),
and both FTMs and butch women fear "being put in their place" by
brutalizing homophobes and transphobes like Lotter and Nissen (the men
who killed Brandon Teena). This is the terrifying common ground that
genderqueer people share. No wonder we get nervous around each other,
afraid we might attract some unwanted
attention, afraid someone is going to think they understand us because
they've made an assumption about someone else.
Whether one is butch, femme, MTF, or FTM, I believe that education about
gender variation is the key to our common survival. The fact is, things
are not always as they seem, and we can never really know everything
about another person. When someone's gender signals make us
uncomfortable, or when our own make someone else uncomfortable, does that
give the "offended" party the right to police the situation, meting out
discipline to control the self-expression of others? We have to educate
people so they will be able to be comfortable in a situation where their
gender buttons are pushed.
Boys Don't Cry
shows us what it's like to live in a small mid-western town, what it can be like
to be isolated and helpless, to be unable to realize one's dreams. Maybe even,
in the case of the murderers, what it might be like to be so unable to even
have dreams that wreaking terror on others is the most control they can hope
for in life. Brandon was raped because of the complex reactions people had to
his masculine presentation once they knew it shrouded a female body. He was
killed because he reported the rape to the police. The difference
between contemporary understandings of butch and FTM in this scenario
is lodged in Brandon's desire to be perceived completely as a man. More
than a desire to "pass" in public, his is a desire to "be" accepted fully
as a man among both men and women -- to be loved for who he knows himself to be.
Why has the trans community taken Brandon Teena as an icon? Because,
although his mother has tried to distance herself and Brandon's memory
from the trans community, Brandon claimed himself as one of us. He was
struggling for an explanation of who he was and why he felt the way he
did. Unfortunately, before he could get his answers, all his dreams were
destroyed by fear, hatred, misunderstanding, and the jealousy of others.
See Boys Don't Cry.
The acting in the film is uniformly excellent, with Hilary Swank portraying
Brandon with uncommon grace. When it's over, though, you'll notice that FTM
people are still invisible.
|
|
|
Community Centers
Message Boards
