Transgender Experiences
Before he delivers a lecture on gender identity to his philosophy class this semester, Michael A. Gilbert must decide what to wear. Most likely, he will put on a knee-length skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, and low pumps. Standing before a mirror at home, he’ll fix his wig and apply some makeup before heading out the door.
Professor Gilbert is a cross-dresser who teaches philosophy at York University, in Ontario. When he appears in drag this semester, it will be the second time that he has introduced students in his "Gender and Sexuality" course to a side of himself that he had kept hidden for nearly 50 years. "Having tenure is a two-edged sword," he says. "It means I can’t be fired. But when it’s appropriate, it’s also incumbent upon me to take a risk and stick my neck out. My main goal is to provide an openness for transgendered people."
Preventing Discrimination
Dr. Gilbert is among a growing cadre of "trans" people on campuses who are going public. Organizations for gay, lesbian and bisexual students have already begun tacking a "T" on the end of their names to embrace "transgendered" or "transsexual" students. In the past year, students and professors have also pushed universities to extend protection to transgendered people under policies that prevent discrimination against minorities.
What’s more, work by transgendered scholars is making transgender studies a hot new topic. One of the most important contributions to the field, a transgender issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay studies, edited by Susan Stryker, is due out next month from Duke University Press. A flurry of other publications on the topic is expected this spring and summer, and transsexual academics have started an electronic mailing list on the subject. (Those interested in joining the list, called "transacademic," can send an e-mail message to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk)
"We are pioneering a new field of scholarship," says Dr. Stryker, an independent scholar, who changed from male to female in 1991, a year before earning her Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley. "This whole area is going to become an increasing big social concern over the next decade."
Despite its growing visibility, most people still need help in navigating the world of transgenderism. The label "transsexual" typically is recovered for people who have had at least some sex-change surgery and who take hormones to further the change. "Transgendered" is a catchall term that is used to refer to people who live as the opposite sex, whether or not they have had sex-change surgery. The description encompasses cross-dressers, also known as transvestites, and is used by some lesbians and gay men to describe themselves.
Transgendered people are gaining attention, but their numbers are still small. Only about .025 per cent of Americans identify themselves as transsexual, and about 2 per cent of Americans consider themselves transgendered, says a non-profit group, the International Foundation for Gender Education, in Waltham, Mass.
A Personal Choice
Having a sex change is a deeply personal matter, but several transsexual academics spoke freely about the experience for this article. Most of them told of being well received on their campuses after they changed gender.
C. Jacob Hale chose to become a man and sought tenure on California State University’s Northridge campus in the same year. The timing was risky. But Dr. Hale, a professor of philosophy, didn’t want to wait.
"I could not imagine going through my tenure review and then telling my colleagues, ‘Guess what? There’s something I forgot to tell you,’" says Dr. Hale, who made the decision to change sex in 1995. But the professor did feel vulnerable. "I was very afraid of losing my academic career," he says. "What else do philosophers do?"
The first thing Dr. Hale did after announcing that she would become a man was to buzz-cut her bleached-blond hair. Dr. Hale also began taking male hormones and had her breasts removed, but has stopped short of genital surgery.
Dr. Hale’s sexual transition has caused a transformation in his scholarly interests. The professor began at Northridge studying the philosophy of science and mathematics. Now he works at the intersection of feminist theory, queer theory, and transgender theory. Near the top of a list of publications on his curriculum vitae is a paper called "Leatherdyke Boys and Their Stories: How to Have Sex without Women or Men."
Much of the research in the emerging field of transgender studies is the work of scholars, like Dr. Hale, who consider themselves transgendered. Although male-to-female transitions are more common, a lot of recent scholarly work explores the opposite change.
Holly Devor, a professor of sociology at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, and a lesbian who considers herself transgendered, has just published a 700-page book called FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Indiana University Press), which tells the personal stories of 45 transsexuals, with excerpts from their own accounts. Second Skin: Body Narratives of Transsexuals, by Jay Prosser, a transsexual professor at the University of Leicester, in England, will be published by Columbia University Press in June; it features photographs of transsexuals’ physiques. Henry S. Rubin, a transsexual lecturer in social studies at Harvard University, is expecting to finish a book this summer tentatively called The Subject Matters: FTM Subjectivity and Embodiment, to be published by the University of Chicago Press.
It comes as no surprise that some people have problems with such lines of research. Bradford Wilson, executive director of the transitionalist National Association of Scholars, says he objects to any group of people’s studying themselves and calling it scholarship. "When one chooses one’s research subjects as a means of affirming one’s difference, I think that one runs the risk of distorting the scholarly enterprise," he says. "This is not necessarily scholarly. It’s political."
‘Everybody Is Similarly Situated’
But Dr. Rubin says it is not unusual for scholars in any field to write about their own experiences. "To claim that we’re skewing our scholarship because we’re writing from a position fails to recognize that everybody is similarly situated," says Dr. Rubin, who landed a coveted lecturer’s job at Harvard in 1991 while he was still a woman, completing a Ph.D. at Brandeis University. Dr. Rubin made his sexual transition, without any problems, four years after he arrived at Harvard, he says.
Deirdre N. McCloskey is one faculty member who hasn’t made her transsexualism the subject of her study — at least not yet. She continues to work on the same questions about the economy that interested her when she was Donald McCloskey. But her writing is now self-consciously female. Donald had been well known for his pointed challenges to the basic assumptions that economists make. Dr. McCloskey, who began making the change to Deirdre two years ago, still poses such challenges. But now she frequently refers to herself as "Aunt Deirdre" in tweaking the predominately male profession.
In her first book as a female author, Deirdre McCloskey takes her colleagues to task for what she sees as their over-reliance on theory and statistics to explain human behavior. Donald did that, too. But unlike Donald’s work, Deirdre’s book, published last year by Amsterdam University Press, is full of references to gender. "There’s a woman’s point here," she writes in one chapter of The Vices of Economics: The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie.
She acknowledges that not everyone approves of her interpretation of what it means to be a woman. "Red flags go up when you speak of thinking like a woman, but that’s what I do," she says. "The crucial point is that it’s not because I’ve consulted page 35 of the manual on how to be a girl. It seems to come from inside."
Like Dr. McCloskey, Michelle Stanton also talks about noticing "a softening in body and perceptions" since she changed from male to female in 1992. As a man, Dr. Stanton was drawn to the technological side of television and film production. He wrote several articles for the journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. But after becoming a woman, says Dr. Stanton, "I never wrote for them again." She explains: "In the production side, you’re involved in physical activity, moving sets, pushing cameras. I didn’t want to do that anymore." Now her research and teaching concern the marketing and advertising aspects of the entertainment industry, fields she calls "more people-oriented."
Most of the transgendered professors interviewed for this article describe their transitions on campus as uneventful. Dr. Stanton even calls hers "tranquil." Universities, particularly large research institutions, are known for being tolerant places and may therefore be among the most comfortable venues for someone undergoing a sex change.
Even Valerie J. Harvey, a professor of computer and information systems at Robert Morris College, a small liberal-arts institution in Pennsylvania, underwent a change from male to female in 1996 without a hitch. Jo Ann M. Sipple, vice-president for academics and student affairs at the college, acknowledges that some of Dr. Harvey’s colleagues found the experience "unnerving." But officials were more considered about how students would react. "We have a fairly conservative student population, and I thought maybe some of them would object on moral or religious grounds," recalls Ms. Sipple. The college had counselors on hand to help students cope when Dr. Harvey announced the change. "But," the administrator recalls, "there were no complaints."
Asking For Proof
For Wynd D. Harris, a professor of marketing and international business at Quinnipiac College, the transition has not been that easy. The professor changed names from William to Wynd last May, and in August asked to be recognized as female.
But the college balked. Dr. Harris had been taking hormones but had not yet had genital surgery when he requested the change. The university asked for proof that the professor was a woman. "The told me I had to have a physical exam," recalls Dr. Harris. The professor refused. In October, the college suspended Harris and started termination proceedings against her.
Pat Smith, a spokesperson for Quinnipiac, says Dr. Harris made a series of requests that have troubled the college. First, he says, the professors asked to be recognized as Jewish (he had been a Protestant), then he wanted to be considered American Indian, and then he wanted to be called a woman.
Nonetheless, a committee of faculty members voted nine to one last month, with one abstention, to retain Professor Harris. Now the provost must decide what to do. In the meantime, Dr. Harris has had sex-change surgery and is legally female.
To head off situations like the one facing Dr. Harris, some transsexuals are pushing for administrative protection from discrimination. The effort isn’t widespread, but it is happening at some prominent institutions.
‘Gender Identity’
The University of Iowa has already adopted a policy that protects people from discrimination based on their "gender identity."
Ben Singer, a graduate student in English who had sex-change surgery in academic 1995-96, has pushed for a similar policy at Rutgers University. He says his advisor became angry when he told her he was having a sex change. "As a feminist, her perception was that I was giving up my womanhood," recalls Mr. Singer. He decided to lobby the university to make things easier for people like him.
Last month, the executive vice-president at Rutgers directed administrators to provide protection for "people who have changed sex or who are in the process of changing their sex." But Mr. Singer says he objects to the plan because it ignores transgendered people who may have no intention of having sex-change surgery.
The Transgender Task Force, a small group of students at Harvard University, has persuaded the student Undergraduate Council there to add "gender identity or expression" to the list of protected categories in the council’s policy against discrimination. The task force is now going on to ask that the entire university change its non-discrimination policy, but administrators are trying to put the brakes on the effort.
"I advised the students that this was a matter about which there was not a great deal of information or understanding," says Harry R. Lewis, dean of Harvard College. "I thought their job was initially to educate the community."
No Plans For Surgery
Harvard may already be doing a good job of educating people about the issue, whether it realizes or not. Last year, it began allowing Alex S. Myers, a transgendered student who dresses like a man but is biologically a woman, to live on an all-male floor of a campus dormitory. Mr. Myers, who is part of the Transgender Task Force, is among a group of transgendered people who don’t take hormones or undergo genital surgery, and don’t plan to.
"There is a contingent of younger people who see that you can live as transgendered without having surgery," says Mr. Myers, who wears his hair slicked back and speaks in a tenor voice. "The reason I pass as a man has nothing to do with my genetics and everything to do with society. Gender is completely different now that it was 20 years ago."
Source:
Robin Wilson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6, 1998. pp A10-A12
It’s not that Matt Lundie wants to be a man, particularly. He just doesn't want to be a woman.
"Just enough so people don't pick me out as a being a freak" – that's his goal for the next year.
He has done two years of engineering studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, and he is taking the next year off to start another project. Next week. he moves to Winnipeg. In six months, he will begin to take male hormones and, a few months after that, he will have a mastectomy: both of his 38C breasts will be removed and his chest reshaped in a male contour. That will be it for the scalpel, though: "I don't have any need to modify my genitals."
He's having just enough surgery to get him what he wants: not a facsimile of a male body, just a less female one.
Matt was born Fiona, in a small south-western Ontario town. For 21 years, he lived confused. "Even as a child I knew the expectations placed on me weren't realistic, he says, calm and resolute. "Until puberty, I thought I was a boy. The social messages of my whole childhood, of being told the boy's washroom was down the hall, was that I didn't lit, not in either mould.
Then he arrived at university and began to encounter variations on gender identity in the gay community. Last year, he tried something new. "I didn't gender identify."
He was still Fiona, but offered no other clues. That felt better, better than being woman, anyway, but it wasn't great. When people couldn't figure him out, they reacted with confusion, awkwardness and often hostility. He got sick of dealing with that every day. So now, at 23, he's starting a new life as Matt.
"I don't believe gender is concrete, and people shouldn't be limited by their biological sex. But I can't really live in between."
Yet if he feels neither concretely male nor female, then why Matt over Fiona? "I like male clothes," he says with a small chuckle, then turns serious. "And the box you put men into has a bit more room."
He tried life in the other box. "Around Grade 11, I made an honest effort to be a traditionally gendered girl. I grew my hair, if you saw my prom picture, you'd think I was my sister or something." It didn't work. "I knew I didn't fit the mould of a woman, but I didn't know I had options. Now I know that neither of those two options fit who I am, so I'm going to stake out a third."
Sex is biological reality, but gender – the behaviour and characteristics associated with each sex – we construct. And it is gender, perhaps more than any other human characteristic, that shapes the way in which people interact.
Today, transgendered people such as Matt are poised to follow the path traveled by gays and lesbians 25 ago, when only a small number were "out" and stereotyped into a few accepted roles. Similarly, mainstream society has grown accustomed to one face of the transgendered: the archetypal transsexual, who transitions in midlife from very masculine man to very feminine (if rather broad-shouldered) woman, all high heels and nail polish.
But a new generation of the transgendered is seeking to carve out a space in the middle. They say they are both male and female, or neither; they say the polar, two-choice options for gender don’t fit. And they seek to live somewhere on the continuum in between.
"There is increasing openness to a spectrum of gender expressions," says Diane Watson, a psychiatrist who heads the gender-identity clinic at Vancouver Hospital. "It’s always been there psychologically, but now there is some challenging of our social structure of two discrete boxes."
There has been a marked increase in the number of such people coming to the clinic in the past few years, she says. "There are some clear-cut, high-intensity transsexuals, but there are more and more of those who feel female and masculine, and want to find some niche. There are a fair number in our clinic who are looking for a safe place in the middle, who are not interested in surgery."
These patients may not be seeking gender-reassignment surgery (the "sex change" operation). Some biological women have their breasts removed; many makes and females pursue hormonal treatment to alter their secondary sexual characteristics (such as facial hair and musculature). Some simply cross-dress; the clinic offers individual and group therapy "for people who don’t know where they fit or don’t know what to do," says Dr. Watson. Today, a quarter of her patients have total reassignment; most find they need to make some physical change. "Only a very small minority can say, ‘To hell with what everyone says, I’m just going to be who I am’."
One in 30,000 people is fully transsexual — believe they were born with the wrong biological body and want to live fully as the opposite sex — Dr. Watson says. One in 5,000 to 10,000 is to some degree transgendered — altered or want to alter their birth-designated gender through appearance or medical intervention. "We’re likely underestimating the number of transgendered," she adds.
Transgender is increasingly a political label, brandished by self-proclaimed "gender outlaws" in the academic, arts and queer communities. Transgender is also, however, a medical concept; the World Health Organization classes "gender dysphoria" as a psychiatric disorder.
Its cause is unknown. Research from the Netherlands, where most of the endocrinology work is being done, has tentatively linked it to brain development. A human embryo starts to develop genitalia at 12 weeks; the area of the brain that determines gender identity does not develop until 16 weeks. Fluctuations in levels of androgens (male sex hormones) in the womb in that period may affect the development of the brain; there is also a tentative suggestion that the cause may have a genetic component.
Dr. Watson wonders whether, in the 12 years her clinic has been working with the transgendered, there have not been "transsexuals in the middle who had to choose and who pushed themselves toward reassignment, where in a more understanding culture they might have lived somewhere in between. There is an enormous amount of denial of cross-gender identification; if you let it out, you've got to make the whole leap, go the whole route to surgery."
Peter Dunnigan knows there are things he would have done differently. At 39, he finds himself thinking wistfully of children. His journey from Kathy to Peter, 18 years ago, included a hysterectomy. "Now, I look back and think, wow, wouldn't it have been nice to be a parent," says Mr. Dunnigan, who recently finished training as an addictions counselor in Toronto. But he says he would not have been accepted as a transsexual male at Toronto's Clarke Institute if he wanted to keep his uterus. "I feel they robbed me," he says softly. "Why can't I use this body to have a child and still be who I am?"
A conviction that he had to be a fiercely male brought Mr. Dunnigan some unpleasant years after his sex change; he got big tattoos, drank excessively, was finally charged with assault after a nasty fight with his girlfriend. Today, he has a new calm. His small apartment is furnished with wooden treasures he has lovingly refinished; he spoils his tabby cat. "But it was a hard lesson to learn, that I am who I say I am. It almost killed me."
This is what sheer force of will and a little judicious use of makeup can do for you: Dee Sparling was born male, has had no surgery, takes no hormones, modifies neither gait nor voice – and lives full-time as a woman, with a demanding office job and a full social life.
"I identify primarily as Dee, as a 'human being,’" she says in a voice that, in someone else, would be a man's. "But the world demands you go at least part way to one or the other, so I identify as a woman. I don't go to great lengths to disguise my voice, I don't play the other games. This is my response to the options society gives me. I'm comfortable with myself but this [presenting herself as a woman] allows society to deal with me as more than an abstraction.
She reckons that, when people see her, no more than one in three believes she is a biological woman. That's all right. "I make an effort to look nice, I don't want to startle people." So Ms. Sparling, 33, wears makeup and subtle jewelry, and good office clothes – yes, skirts and heels. After a tortured youth ("I thought I was going to hell") and years spent as an occasional cross-dresser, she has been living as a woman for two years. Mostly, it's been fine. "More people are willing to accept you than you ever dreamed."
She has a wisdom, a serenity and a confidence about her to carve out that sort of space. She makes it seem as effortless as it is bizarre; within minutes, one forgets that there is any question of her gender – not that she seems so much a woman, but the question is not relevant.
With J.D., it is harder to forget. "I'm like a walking lava lamp," is how she puts it. A biological woman from a French-English-aboriginal family in Gatineau, Que., she is a sometime gardener, sometime drag king. Sometimes, she is a lesbian – except if she is feeling like a man, in which case she is a straight man. "My gender feels fluid to me. I respond to the energy people put out in either a 'male' or 'female' way – but I wish there were other words."
At 35, J.D. is six feet tall, with long black hair she wears in a braid or pony tail. She favours jeans and big shirts; she calls dresses and makeup "drag." She is, indeed, hard to peg, yet there is nothing that makes her obviously different. "I get 'Sir' at least once a day. Then people see my eyes – I have these really girly eyes – and they're like, 'Oh, sorry.' "
She does have girly eyes, copper-coloured with huge thick lashes. Everything else about her, though, changes from moment to moment: a woman's coy smile, a man's confident stroll. "It's not easy being a freak," she says with that smile. "But I'm learning to be amused that people can't get my label. It's an either/or, black/white world, and if you're not one, you're the other. I see people get angry, see the expression on their face as they get downright hostile. It's bewildering, because I think of myself as a gentle, kind human being. People really are hung up on these boxes and I just can't fit into them."
She intends to do nothing to make that process any easier. "I feel I'm already in the middle, in my brain chemistry. Surgery is just buying into the social construction of gender."
That's a radical idea, and one not enormously popular with transsexuals.
"That's really an academic thing," says Mirha-Soleil Ross, with a dismissive hand gesture. "I really resent the idea that people who are choosing to live across or between genders are more revolutionary than the old transsexuals. Everybody is transgendered now. My dad, if he crossdresses twice a year, he can get his membership card. Transgender is a political agenda pushed by people who are privileged." Ms. Ross is a poster girl for the old-school transgendered: a ferociously sexy woman with long, dark curly hair, a raspy Bette Davis voice and a winsome Québecois accent. She favours cargo pants, combat boots and little tanktops that show off a curvy upper body.
She was born a boy in a small, working-class town outside Montreal. She "never passed" as a boy; her voice, mannerisms and behaviour were all wrong. At 16, she read a book about the treatment of transsexuals, "got freaked" and decided she'd better do her damnedest to pass as a gay "boy" (an effeminate, youthful style cultivated by some gay men). "I knew I would never pass as a straight man for five minutes."
She managed to pass as a gay man for four years. They weren't happy ones; other gay men weren't interested in her. "They would realize there was something non-male there, my body was too androgynous. And I thought what the point if nobody wants to sleep with […]* a woman," says Mr. Karbusicky. "People always want to know about their sex life; he’s resigned to the curiosity. People always think I'm gay and I find that amusing because I'm really not. For me, she's clearly a woman and, just because she has a penis, I don't feel that makes her a man. It was just a matter of broadening my mind."
Other cultures have a place for the transgendered. Many aboriginal North American groups recognize "two-spirited" people and award them esteemed positions as healers and visionaries. In India, male-to-female transsexuals are institutionalized in a sort of religious cult called hirja, who sing and dance at festivals. In Burma, Oman and Tahiti, a special social status is given to those who identify across gender lines.
Not here –although gender roles in Western culture have been blurring for years. With Marilyn Manson and the latest wave of fashionable androgyny has come much more public discussion of gender identity. "It's largely something being done by young people, because they’re doing it, not because they're writing about it," says Michael Gilbert, a professor of philosophy who teaches gender identity at York University in Toronto, and a crossdresser. He calls it "gendermucking" – deliberately toying with people's perceptions of one's gender: men in nail polish and skirts, women in very butch clothes, neither of them trying to pass. "Lots of it goes on at raves, on Toronto's Queen Street on the avant-garde edges. We have a bipolar system, but they are saying, 'No, I'm not comfortable on either pole and would prefer not to be there.' "
Not that it's easy: the rate of attempted suicide among transgender youth is estimated at 50 per cent; every one of 12 transgender and transsexual people interviewed for this story, save one, has attempted suicide at least once.
"It's very, very hard to live in our society in a non-specific loophole," says Dr. Watson. "People become very anxious with a person they can't peg."
Anxious, and in Matt Lundie's experience, aggressive. "We're socialized to deal with people by gender," he says. "We are always taught that, there are men and women; this is how you interact with men, this is how you interact with women. When someone does something out of the expected, you don't know how to deal with it" Can it be that bad It's bad enough to make; him afraid to walk alone at night. "I need the chest reduction for my personal safety."
A quest such as Mr. Lundie's, to live in the middle, presents a new dilemma for clinics such as Dr. Watson's. "The clinic is starting to shift in philosophy,'" she says. "We were hesitant about giving hormones if people were not sure they wanted surgery, because you were promoting someone to the netherlands in between. Now there is less paranoia about it. If hormonally induced feminization is helpful to your peace of mind, then that in itself is a positive result. We're becoming a little less concerned about someone surviving in the middle.
"But ethically, it's still a big issue: To what extent are we the gatekeepers, versus allowing individuals to choose with informed consent, to be the individual they feel they are."
Sex: Physical sex of the body, either at birth or after reassignment.
Gender. Behavioural, cultural or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.
Gender identity: The sense of belonging to a particular sex, biologically, psychologically and socially.
Transgender: Umbrella term used for anyone who alters or wishes to alter, through appearance or medical intervention, her or his gender of birth.
Transsexual: Person who believes they were born into the wrong biological body; usually someone who has undergone some or all of the steps (hormone treatment, surgery) to change his or her gender.
Intersex: Having ambiguous sexual organs and reproductive system, caused by a variety of genetic and hormonal irregularities. Also known as hermaphroditism; in extreme or mild forms, occurs in an estimated one in 2,000 births. One in 500 people has a genetic karotype other than XX or XY.
Crossdresser: One who wears the attire associated with the other sex. Formerly known as "transvestite." Some people crossdress for sexual stimulation; others for recreation or exploration.
Drag Queens and Kings: Those who dress as the other gender, for certain occasions, often when performing.
Androgyne: Also called Third Sex or Epicene. Those who feel they are neither male nor female, or are both.
*text not readable in original document
Source:
Stephanie Nolen, Globe and Mail. September 25, 1999
In 1976, Renée Richards became the world’s most famous transsexual. The former Richard Raskind was a Yale grad, naval officer, amateur tennis champ and leading eye surgeon, with a wife, a young son — and a secret. Since the age of 6, when he began wearing his sister’s clothes, he had struggled with a desire to be female. In 1975, after 10 years of psycho-analysis and a divorce, he underwent a sex-change operation. At an amateur tennis tournament in 1976, the press discovered her identity, and Richards became internationally known. Now 64 and a pediatric eye surgeon in Manhattan, Richards shares her upstate New York home with her office manager, Arleen Larzelere. In her first in-depth interview in 22 years, she spoke to People correspondent Elizabeth McNeil about her life as a woman.
This route that I took was not easy. But the compulsion was so great, I couldn’t turn it off. You can’t turn it off by throwing away all of your women’s clothes or joining the Navy. I had to do it. I wish that there could have been an alternative way, but there wasn’t in 1975. If there was a drug that I could have taken that would have reduced the pressure, I would have been better off staying the way I was — as a totally intact person. Since there wasn’t, my alternative might have been suicide.
After the operation, I changed my name, moved to California and joined a new medical practice. There were only a few people who knew what had happened—and then it all came crashing down when my former identity was discovered by a newspaper reporter at a tennis tournament. I did something that was so painful — and I’m suddenly known all over the world. I remember being on vacation in Uruguay, and a guy at a magazine kiosk pointed to a picture of me on the cover of a Latin American magazine and said, "Is that you?" The press coverage was overwhelming.
Though I agonized over the decision to leave medicine, I became a professional tennis player, hoping that I could help raise awareness about transsexuals. Some players were against me going on the women’s tennis tour. I was barred from major tournaments for a year and went into serious debt. No prize money. No rent. I had to hide when the landlord came around. I fought for the right to play and got to the finals of the U.S. Open doubles with Bettyann Stuart in ’77 and began to make some money. When I started to coach Martina Navratilova, people respected me a little more because she was the best in the world. After she won Wimbledon in 1982, it was time to return to medicine and be with my son in New York.
When I was a man, I was at the height of my powers. All of a sudden, it was all gone, and I became a woman at 40. That’s no piece of cake. It’s not easy to become a woman after having been a man for all those years. You don’t know how to behave. You make believe that you are a woman. That’s not the same thing. Still, I’m a woman with a Y chromosome. I know deep down I’m a second-class woman. It’s second best. I’m not as perfect as an XX-chromosome female.
I get a lot of inquiries from would-be transsexuals, but I don’t want anyone to hold me out as an example to follow. Today, there are better choices, including medication, for dealing with the compulsion and depression that come with gender confusion.
There isn’t anything I miss about being a man. Maybe I’m not quite as arrogant. I can’t walk the street alone at night. I drive into a parking lot and the guy says, "I’ll part it for you," because he doesn’t want you to smash it up because you’re a woman driver.
I know that I’m considered a radical person, but I’ve always been conservative socially. I think men should open the car door and allow a woman to go first. Sometimes being an unmarried woman at 64 is awkward in social situations. Everything is couples. I don’t get up to dance when everyone else does.
I feel sorry that I caused a lot of grief to my son, who’s now 27, and his mother. He didn’t deserve to have a father who was a notorious transsexual. He suffered for a long time. He knows me as his father. He doesn’t need two mothers. He talks to me about his career, his car and his girlfriend. When my son has children, I can’t be the third grandma. I’m always going to be a grandpa. I don’t see my ex-wife much. She has her own life. She comes into the office for me to look at her eyes if she has a problem.
My mother died in 1961. My father, who’s 99, sees what he wants to see. He and I have never had a conversation about my sexuality. We talk about medicine and sports. He calls me Renée. Behind my back sometimes he’ll say, "We’re going to Dick’s house." You have to have a sense of humor about it.
As far as being fulfilled as a woman, I’m not as fulfilled as I had dreamed of being, but I live with that. I’ve had very close heterosexual relationships with a few men. I had a very full sexual life, more than most, both as a man and as a woman. An unmarried woman at 64 is a lot different than an unmarried man of 64. There hasn’t been a romantic liaison for many years. I’m too old now.
I don’t have a split in my psyche. I haven’t thought of myself as being Dick for 35 years. I know that I am Renée. There’s nothing pulling me back the other way. There’s much more acceptance of variations in sexual mores and behavior than there used to be. People think nothing today of RuPaul, the cross-dressing singer.
I go every year to the U.S. Open. The young players don’t have the faintest idea who I am. I don’t keep in touch with Martina much. We exchange cards and Christmas gifts. I play golf much more often than I play tennis. I live in a log home that sits on a beautiful lake. I’ve got it pretty good. I have a satisfying life that revolves around my family, my close friends and my profession. I feel very fortunate. Maybe my Y chromosome isn’t so bad.
Source:
People Magazine
The following is the short speech that Carrie Davis, the Director of Operations for GenderPAC, wrote and delivered to 100 to 120 transgender identified brothers & sisters and our partners, lovers, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, politicians, reporters, social workers and other allies at the Gender Identity Project's Town Meeting on Trans-Safety and Violence at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, in New York City on Thursday, March 4, 1999.
I'd like to start by saying that I am not accustomed to public speaking. When my supervisor and friend, Rosalyne Blumenstein, asked me to share myself with you all tonight, I was reluctant to speak. Eventually I decided to try to talk from my heart, and not from my head.
I stand before all of you this evening:
As a woman of transgender experience.
As an activist and as an advocate for our community through my role as a social worker, counselor and HIV outreach Coordinator for the Gender Identity Project and my other work at GenderPAC and NYAGRA.
Everyday I work with organizations that process statistics. These statistics indicate that almost 60% of all transpeople are victims of violence. Recently we have begun to realize that 1 transperson is murdered each month, nationwide. This is information that is routinely under reported and, in many instances, erased by the both the straight and queer media.
In addition, the random terror and violence that transpeople experience on a daily basis, far exceeds that for other queer groups. Transgender identified individuals are routinely (and legally) denied jobs, services, benefits, schooling and housing.
But when it is me that is being harassed, hosed down, beaten, and raped, at those moments, these statistics have very little importance. When I am hurting, I just want to know when that pain is going to stop.
Still, I consider myself fortunate to be able to be here tonight and I am fortunate to make my living working with and serving the transgender community. Through this work I am required to be a spokes-trans of some sort. It has become my job to be an "out" woman of transgender experience. But when I leave the relatively safe confines of the tiny queer ghetto I inhabit, I don't want to be out, and I don't want to be trans. What I want:
Of course this rarely happens. Nearly everywhere I go, I am seen as a transperson and I am seen as queer (of course, that's the most polite way to phrase it — I usually hear far, far worse). I am seen as trans, 24/7, by almost everyone, at all times. Like most transpeople, my body has become a political act:Is to be invisible.
To be anonymous.
To be safe.
To just be.
The identities of transfolk are continually erased from mention by the media. As a result, our dead are usually mis-identified as gay men or lesbian women. And we are labeled as just a transvestite, just a crossdresser, just a drag queen or JUST a prostitute. But transpeople are not being killed because of our sexual orientation. Transfolk are being killed:Because of the way I look ...
And because of who I am seen as ...
When I am beaten and raped by someone who cannot accept the fact that he is attracted to me, or when I am hosed down with water on the street by youths washing their car, or when I am confronted, pushed and shoved by men wandering the streets on a Saturday night, or surrounded and shouted at for 20 minutes by 20 people on the A train, at those moments, I am not being attacked and abused because of my sexual orientation, I am being subjected to that terror:Because of the way we look ...
And because of who we are seen as ...
When I am followed by a team of 4 security officers as I try to shop in Daffy's, or my sisters and I are asked to empty our pockets and empty our bags and to take off our coats and be searched at the Rite Aide drugstore, we are not being harassed because of our sexual orientation. We are being harassed:Because of the way I look ...
And because of who I am seen as ...
When, for nearly two years, I was denied a job interview, or housing by real estate agents, or physical access to my two children, it is not because of my sexual orientation. I am refused these basic and necessary accommodations:Because of the way we look ...
And because of who we are seen as ...
When I am stopped by the police while I wait for the light to change, on the street corners where my sisters work. And when they ask me for my ID, and when the city closes the clubs that I and my sisters and brothers go to. I endure this indignity not because of my sexual orientation. It is simply:Because of the way I look ...
And because of who I am seen as ...
And so I have lost most of the privilege that our culture claims we are all entitled to. I have learned to be afraid:Because of the way I look ...
And because of who we are seen as
And this fear is not because of my sexual orientation. I am afraid:To move
Or change jobs
Or fall in love
Or take the subway
Or go into different neighborhoods
Or walk to the store
Or go to the emergency room.
It is because I look and I sound just like a transgender person looks and sounds. I know this true because this is who I am.Because of the way I look ...
And because of who I am seen as ...
I'm not certain how to conclude this narrative but I know that I am here with my brothers and sisters to claim my voice. I know that I am here to shout and to cry out for the most simple of rights. But, most importantly, I want to be free from fear.
My controversial identity seems to draw a relentless barrage that I seem to keep wandering toward. I have confirmed that I have the strength to survive despite the violence, harassment, abuse, incidents, outings, and other hate filled moments that I encounter on a daily basis. It is a fact that I was never very good at math. Since I have been unable to divine the pleasure of complex mathematics I have, instead, chosen not to stray far from the basics of addition. I am doing my best but the accumulation of the damage that I feel with each day eventually has an effect.
Though it is not my nature to harden or to armor myself, I can still feel that happening.
On some days I am stone and on others, I am water ...
Thank you
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