Visible Man: Sex changed, but turf wars continue

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.

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For all those gay and lesbian people who are still wondering why trans stuff is being foisted upon them, Indiana University history professor Joanne Meyerowitz may have the answer. Her new book "How Sex Changed" is due out this October from Harvard University Press, and it is a detailed history of transsexuality in the United States that demonstrates how and why, from a historical and cultural perspective, homosexuality and transsexuality, transvestism and the concept of intersex are apparently inextricably linked in the public mind.

I've just finished reading an advance copy of the book, and I believe that anyone who wants to speculate about the position of transpeople in contemporary culture ought to study it thoroughly. It fills in many blanks in our collective understanding about the power of sex change and the historical powerlessness of the LGBT community.

When you get right down to it, it's all about language. All along, doctors, therapists, theologists, politicians, transpeople, straight people and gay and lesbian people have all been trying to describe what they think sex, gender, sexual orientation, sex roles, gender roles, sexual behavior, intersexed conditions and even the soul really are. And it seems we continually struggle over who gets to define and ascribe value to whose experience.

Professor Meyerowitz focuses primarily on the decades of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, with appropriate attention paid to underlying forces and theoretical and practical precursors as far back as the mid-1800s. (She also gives a nod to the conservative 1980s and the rapid evolution of the trans rights movement of the '90s.)

Meyerowitz delineates the turf and class wars that provided the foundation for the most recent debates over the scope and direction of the queer rights agenda. She also highlights how the medicalization of sexuality worked to objectify all of us in the LGBTIQQ world.

Contextualizing transsexuality -- which hit the popular consciousness in December 1952, when the press seized upon Christine Jorgensen -- and society's reaction to the idea of changing sex, Professor Meyerowitz illuminates the lives and professional struggles of sex researchers like Drs. Harry Benjamin, Robert Stoller, John Money and Richard Green, who have greatly influenced the field of gender identity studies.

She illuminates early transsexual people who predated Jorgensen, people like Louise Lawrence, who "devoted herself to teaching medical authorities and scientists about transvestites and transsexuals" in the 1940s in San Francisco, and Stephen Wagner in Chicago, who "had searched for male-to-female surgery since the 1930s."

She also documents the influence of the Erickson Educational Foundation, masterminded by a wealthy and eccentric FTM, and the dynamic political efforts that a broad spectrum of transpeople engaged in throughout the 1960s, driving many of the events that precipitated the modern gay rights movement.

The turf wars and identity politics battles we are so familiar with (and some of us are weary of) these days are not new among marginalized populations. "The American homophile movement had emerged with the founding of the Mattachine Society in 1950. ... From 1953 into the 1970s, the various publications of the homophile movement sporadically addressed the emergence of transsexuality." Professor Meyerowitz goes on to document the kind of debates that took place in those early days, which are strikingly similar to the kind of distancing and territorializing that took place in the early 1990s, before T was added to LGB, and that still occurs in periodic outbursts of discomfort with others today.

Class wars, legal debates, medical theories, the effect of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, national politics, the influence of the media -- all are twirled in a kaleidoscopic melange that guides our attention from one plane of existence to another, and as we read we can begin to understand how all these seemingly disparate forces affect us all, trans or not, LGB or straight.

While many people believe the contemporary transgender movement is the first articulation of radical new ideas, "How Sex Changed" proves this false. Virtually every aspect of the transgender movement has its precursor in the mid-20th century, if not earlier. The success of the present movement is built upon the achievements of trans ancestors and allies whose names and accomplishments are completely unknown to most contemporary transpeople, let alone the nontranspeople who are so shocked that we exist.

Sex has changed dramatically since World War II, and we are all a part of that change. But the struggle for self-discovery and the search for civil rights and social safety for marginalized people has not changed substantially in its form or process. Joanne Meyerowitz's book, with all its honesty about misguided attempts to control others, sexualized bodies, desexualized bodies, motives noble and perverse among professionals and transpeople alike, and the confusion/conflation of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, is ultimately a testament to the strength and determination of transgendered people. She gives us a much-needed perspective from which everyone may expand their awareness of humanity.