Visible Man
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.
Nothing Gets Attention Like a Penis (Or Losing One!)
February was sweeps month for the broadcast media and, as always, the
print media were right there to help out. Several stories broke that had
to do with
transsexual themes. A 65-year-old priest in New York is becoming a
woman. So is a 37-year-old Canadian army sergeant, whose partner, a
former Toronto Police officer, is another MTF. These stories were both
sensationalized and their subjects derided in print.
But the story receiving
the most attention was the release of John Colapinto's new book
As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. An entire hour of Dateline was devoted to Colapinto's story of a boy raised as a
girl after his penis was accidentally cut off during circumcision.
On Oprah, the story was directly related to the transsexual
experience.
The correlation is not without basis. David Reimer did have an
experience
that closely parallels that of many FTMs. As children we were not
capable of behaving the way other little girls did. We were teased and
tormented by our classmates (and sometimes by our own families) because
the masculine gender signals we gave conflicted with the feminine
clothing we
were forced to wear. Try as we might to please the adults around us and
to
be accepted, we were constantly aware of our failure. Eventually we
found that we could live as men and feel at home in our
bodies, though we are continually aware that our bodies are (in varying
ways)
different from those of other men.
David Reimer was lucky, in a strange way, if you can call it luck to
have your penis burned off in a circumcision
accident. He had tangible proof of his maleness. His own parents had the
memory of his genitally defined sex and could give him a "reason" for
his
feeling that he was living a lie as a girl. As a parent myself, I can
sympathize with their situation. Faced with the appalling circumstance
of
genital mutilation, when a doctor gave them a sense of hope for their
child's
future they trusted in that doctor's authority. I don't think they can
be
blamed for trying the best they knew how to help their child live a
"normal"
life, and David has made it clear that he doesn't blame them, either. It
isn't their
fault that they didn't know any more than the doctors did about gender
and sex
over 30 years ago. Only those of us who live in the difference between
gender and sex actually know. Now David knows, and his family learned
along with him.
Once David was allowed to take on his own gender and to get his body
back, he had to be treated the same as an FTM. He had to have the same
genital reconstruction surgery that we are offered, which is not always
the most successful surgery in the world, and he will have to take
masculinizing
hormones for the rest of his life. One important difference: I suspect
that his
reconstructive procedures were paid for by insurance, whereas except in
countries where socialized medicine
covers transsexual procedures, we are each on our own when it comes to
financing our treatment.
Oprah invited my friend Dana Rivers -- the Sacramento school teacher who
lost her job because of her transition from male to female -- to talk
about the relationship between David's experience and the transsexual
experience. She correctly pointed out that the feeling of being in the
wrong body as a child was common to both her and David's experience.
Oprah also featured taped footage of another MTF, Deirdre McCloskey,
whose book Crossing. A Memoir has been getting decent reviews.
Oprah's point was that you can't make somebody be what they're not,
which is what transsexual people say, too.
But why use MTFs to tell an FTM story? The only reason I can think of is
that it isn't seen as an FTM story. It's seen as a penis story. David
lost his penis and had to get it back. Dana and Deirdre had
penises and wanted to give them up.
Oprah asked Colapinto "What was for you, John, the most disturbing thing
you uncovered while doing this?" He replied, "I think the most
disturbing
thing was the image of a child trying to get the world to hear who he
really
was -- the effort to try to make psychologists and psychiatrists
understand what he was feeling, and his inability to do so. That's
extremely
disturbing."
Welcome to the transsexual's life. But I think the operative
word here is "really." It's that tangible proof of the body that people
rely
on so thoroughly. The fact that he once had a penis is all the reason
David
needs to support his feeling that he should have one now.
Colapinto reinforced the concept that "the inner sense of self as male
or
female is so overridingly strong that even though people struggle along
trying to be [what others tell them], eventually they hit that critical
point
which they cannot move beyond where they have to make a change somehow
or they will kill themselves." That's a pretty dramatic statement, and
certainly some transsexual people feel that way. Many of us did not, but
who's to say that we might not have come to that point had we continued
to avoid treatment?
So, David "really" deserves to have a penis, and Dana and Deirdre
"really"
felt strongly enough about their inner sense of self to want to have
their
penises removed. But what about FTM reality? I guess we're just not real
enough. Not yet.
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