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The following text appears in the No-Nonsense guide to Sexual Diveristy edited by Vanessa Baird 2001 ISBN 1-896357-50-4, published by New Internationalist Publications 2001 and the chapter’s main contributor was Zachary I Nataf. Many thanks to Ms. Baird and Mr. Nataf for allowing the reproduction of this paper on the Amnesty website. Transgender: As the stars in the sky/ Beyond the pink and blue There’s more to gender than ‘his’ and ‘hers’... genital mutilation western style... ‘third genders’ ... the eunuchs of India... human rights... and the radical challenge of transliberation. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?' tends to be the first question asked when a baby is born. And a cursory look at the genitals usually provides the answer. Meet a person for the first time and you will probably automatically, unconsciously, register whether that person is male or female. If you can’t place them, you may find yourself searching for clues. For some reason, it seems important to know. Most of us are culturally heavily conditioned to categorize sex and gender in this binary, dimorphic way. But actually life and nature are a lot more complex than that. Until recently most public knowledge of transgender issues came from ‘shock-horror’ style newspaper articles. They might be revelations of women who had ‘passed’ most of their lives as men and vice-versa. Or, in less sensational mode, they might be autobiographical accounts by people who had had ‘sex change’ operations as gender reassignment was more commonly called. Usually those who told their stories were male-to-female transexuals, who spoke of having felt, since an early age, that they were ‘trapped in the wrong body’. British travel writer Jan Morris was one who famously described her experience of gender as something more ‘spiritual’ than biological, a feeling that has been echoed by many trans people. Today more and more transgendered (or trans) people are ‘coming out’. In so doing they have revealed the extent to which the human-rights of transgendered individuals have been — and continue to be — violated. The sheer variety of people ‘coming out’ and the research that has gone into it the subject reveals a far more complex picture than previously imagined. The fact that many transgendered people, post-therapy or operation, are also gay or lesbian, is especially puzzling to the heterosexual mainstream. A far richer, far more diverse reality exists. It includes female-to-male transexuals (FTMs); male-to-female (MTFs); transvestites or cross-dressers; intersexuals or hermaphrodites (born with ambiguous genitalia), eunuchs (in India, hijras). It includes people who are transgendered in the sense that they live their lives as a gender different from their biological sex but have done nothing to alter their biology; people who have had partial or total gender realignment through surgery and hormone therapy; others who have elected for hormone therapy alone. It includes people of various sexual orientations — gay, straight, bisexual. And if that is not quite complex enough, some trans people describe themselves as ‘male-to-male’ or ‘female-to-female’ to reflect the feeling that they have always deep-down been the gender they feel themselves to be, regardless of social or biological assertions to the contrary. The possibilities and definitions seem infinite. Many people just settle for the simple, blanket term ‘trans’. Meanwhile, anthropological studies reveal transgender expressing itself in ways that are culturally quite distinct, with frames of reference that are not always translatable. Transgender in Peru is not the same as in Indonesia; being trans in North America may bear little resemblance to the experience in Namibia. What is certain, however, is that transgender is widespread and in its emergence from the closet is challenging fixed ideas about gender more radically than ever before. Enigmas and variations Chi Chi lives in a village in the Dominican Republic. 'Whatever I feel, that's the way I am. I was born as a girl, and that girl died one day and a boy was born. And the boy was born from that girl in me. I am proud of who I am. A lot of people actually envy us.' s/he tells filmmaker Rolando Sanchez in the 1997 documentary Guevote. The film portrays the daily lives of Chi-Chi and Bonny, two 'pseudo-hermaphrodites', and the way in which their families, partners and other villagers respond to them. They are not alone. A rare form of ‘Pseudo-Hermaphroditism’ was first found among a group of villagers in the Dominican Republic in the early 1970s. Thirty-eight people were traced with the condition, coming from 23 extended families and spanning four generations. Chi-Chi's mother has ten children. Three of those ten are girls, three of them are boys 'and four are of this special sort', she says. 'I knew that this sort of thing existed before I had my own kids. But I never thought that it would happen to me... I told them to accept their destiny, because God knows what he's doing. And I said that real men often achieve less than those who were born as girls. And that's how it turned out. My sons who are real men haven't achieved as much as the others.’1 The medical explanation is that, while still in the womb, some male babies are unable to produce the testosterone which helps external male genitals to develop. They are born with a labia-like scrotum, a clitoris-like penis and undescended testes. In the Dominican Republic, reports trans activist and writer Zachary Nataf, many of these children were first assumed to be female and were brought up as such. But because they were genetically male, they began to develop male characteristics at puberty, including penis growth and descending testes. Villagers gave these children the local name guevedoche or 'balls at twelve'. 2 For some scientists the phenomenon presented an ideal 'natural experiment' that would help them to prove once and for all that hormones are far more important than culture in the development of gender identity. A research team headed by Julliane Imperato-McGinley proposed that in a laissez-faire environment, with no medical or social intervention, the child would naturally develop a male gender identity at puberty, in spite of having been reared as female. 3 Not everyone agreed with this rather simplistic approach, however. Ethnographer Gilbert Herdt pointed out the guevedoche were different and they knew it as they had compared their genitals with those of girls during public bathing. Villagers, who were familiar with the guevedoche over generations, accepted them as a 'third sex' category, sometimes referring to them as machi-embra (male-female). 4 Furthermore, not all guevedoche wanted to adopt a male gender identity after puberty. In the documentary Guevote, Bonny relates the case of Lorenza. 'She had more chances as a woman. Lots of men fell in love with her. She always wore women's clothes and had very long hair. She liked it when men fell in love with her. That's why she wanted to stay a woman and not become a man.’ Here then is a community that recognizes the actual existence of 'third sex' people as part of human nature and creates corresponding gender roles to accommodate them. It's an attitude that enables Bonny to say: 'If I am like this, God will know why... If I feel good, why should I change things? This is how I grew up, why look for something else?'
The law and the knife Such an accepting approach to gender ambiguity has not been the pattern in most of the Western world. Far from it. Binary is the rule. We are, in the words of trans activist Leslie Feinberg, faced with ‘two narrow doorways — female and male’. But some people just don’t fit those doorways. When faced with official forms to fill in they cannot tick either the ‘M’ box or the ‘F’ one. They do not officially exist, unless they fit the binary model— or are made to fit it. Since the routine practice of correcting the ambiguous genitalia of intersexed children began in the US and Europe in the late 1950s, debates have raged about whether gender identity and roles are biologically determined or culturally determined. The work of John Money and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital, Maryland, has had a major impact on the treatment of intersex children, transsexuals and other sex-variant people. Money advised on the famous case of the identical twin boy who had been reassigned as a girl after he lost his penis in a circumcision accident at the age of seven months in 1963. The child underwent plastic surgery to make his genitals female-appearing and he was treated with female hormones at adolescence. Between 1973 and 1975 Money reported a completely favourable outcome and this became the key case in the following 20 years. The case influenced the treatment of boys born with 'too small' penises, and led to the recommendation that their penises and testes be removed and the boys be surgically reassigned as girls before the age of three 'to grow up as complete a female as possible'. In these cases quality of life was based on ideas of adequate heterosexual penetration. According to the Johns Hopkins team, the twin had subsequently been 'lost to follow-up'. But this was not so. As it turned out, the twin did not feel or act like a girl and had discarded prescribed oestrogen pills at age 12. She had refused additional surgery to deepen the vagina that surgeons had constructed for her at 17 months, despite repeated attempts to convince her she would never find a partner unless she had surgery and lived as female. At the age of 14 the twin refused to return to Johns Hopkins and convinced local physicians to provide a mastectomy, phalloplasty and male hormones. He now lives as an adult man. 5 Banishing ambiguity Intersexuals, popularly referred to as 'hermaphrodites', are usually born with genitals somewhere between male and female — rarely with two complete sets as in myth. The number of such births is more common than most people realize, with the highest estimates in the US at four per cent of births. That's some ten million children, annually.6 According to the Intersex Society of North America one in every 2,000 infants is born with ambiguous genitalia from about two-dozen causes. There are more than 2,000 surgeries performed in the US each year aimed at surgically assigning a sex to these intersex patients. The Intersex Society campaigns against what it sees as the unethical medical practice of performing cosmetic surgery on infants who cannot give consent. Doctors believe that quality of life is only possible for individuals who conform to male or female sex and gender. But the founder of the Intersex Society, Cheryl Chase, believes that 'most people would be better off with no surgery'. Born with ambiguous genitalia herself she was raised as a boy until 18-months-old when physicians told her family that she was really a girl and removed her enlarged clitoris. At the age of eight she underwent an operation to remove what she later learned was the testicular part of her ovo-testes. She currently lives as a woman. The surgical excision and scar tissue has left her without clitoral sensation or orgasmic response. Says Ms Chase:‘ "Genital mutilation" is a phrase that's easy for us to apply to somebody who belongs to a Third World culture, but any mutilating practice that's delivered by licensed medical practitioners in our world has an aura of scientific credibility.' 7 Chase’s own experience is shared by many intersexuals who as children underwent repeated unexplained examinations, surgery, pain and infection. This has gone on for four decades and in most cases the children have been 'lost to follow-up'. This means there has been no reliable medical data to assess the effects of surgery or to provide guidance for future practice. Cosmetic genital surgery is used to 'normalize' the appearance of ambiguous genitalia. It is admitted by surgeons to be an attempt to alleviate a 'psycho-social emergency' rather than a medical one. Instead of offering intersex children and their families or friends counselling to support them in accepting difference, doctors whip up a crisis which they can then fix with available medical technology. Ambiguous genitals are referred to as 'deformed' before surgery and 'corrected' after. But the reported experience of intersexuals who went through this in childhood is a sense of having been 'intact' before surgery and mutilated after it. And children were often lied to. A typical example is recounted by a woman who, when her body began to change at the age of 12, was told that she needed surgery to remove her ovaries because she had cancer. What actually happened during the operation was her clitoris and newly descended testes were removed. The adage that 'it is easier to dig a hole than build a pole' accounts for why most intersex individuals are made into girls. The standards which mark maleness allow penises as short as 2.5cm, and femaleness allow clitorises only as large as 0.9 cm. Infants with appendages between 0.9 cm and 2.5 cm are, according to psychologist Suzanne Kessler, considered unacceptable and require surgical intervention. In some cases, where parents haven't even noticed a problem, doctors still insist on surgery. Baby girls as young as six weeks may be operated upon to deepen their vaginas, even though the surgery is not always successful and has to be repeated at various stages as they grow up 5 Suzanne Kessler notes that genital ambiguity is ‘corrected’ because it threatens not the infant’s life but the culture the infant is born into’. In 1994 Chase and others began gathering stories into a newsletter called Hermaphrodites with Attitude. The first issue had a picture of Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer on the cover, with a hand-coloured red nose on each copy. The accompanying article satirized medical literature on intersex genital surgery by discussing Rudolph’s nose as a disfiguring deformity, and an ‘after surgery’ picture captioned ‘excellent cosmetic result’, clearly depicted a mutilated Rudolph in tears.12 Some medical experts have their doubts about ‘corrective’ surgery too. Dr Reiner, Assistant Professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University warns against placing too great an emphasis on the genitals, pointing out that and 'the brain is the most important sex organ in the body'. 8 Gender Actually identifying a person’s gender is far more complex than most people imagine. There are no absolutes in nature, only statistical probabilities. We all begin life with a common anatomy which then differentiates if there is a Y chromosome present. This activates the production of testosterone, appropriate receptors in the brain and the formation of testes. The other features which do not develop remain in the body in vestigial form. Several factors can be taken into account in determining a person's biological sex. They include chromosomal sex (X and Y, for example); hormonal sex (oestrogen and testosterone); gonadal sex (ovaries and testes); genital sex (vagina and penis, for example); reproductive sex (sperm-carrying and inseminating; gestating and lactating); and other associated internal organs (like the uterus or the prostate). These factors are not always consistent with each other. In fact science admits everyone falls somewhere along a continuum. But few people would know if they were 100-per-cent male or 100-per-cent female, chromosomally or hormonally, as there are not many cases in everyday practice in which this would be tested. Unless you want to take part in the Olympic Games that is, in which case you would have to undergo a chromosome sex test, although this has been abandoned as unfair and unreliable by other sports bodies. The British Journal of Sports Medicine claims that one in 500 female athletes and about one in 500 male athletes would fail the chromosome gender test. This is because chromosome variations do not necessarily affect physical appearance. A test might determine an athlete is not a woman for the sake of competition, but that certainly does not make her a man in her everyday life. Other indicators of sex are subject to similar variations. Even the capacity to reproduce is not a clear indicator: some intersexuals have had children. The so-called biological line between male and female is frankly quite fuzzy. British trans activist and academic Stephen Whittle writes: ‘Currently medicine recognizes over 70 different intersex syndromes and one in every 200 children will be born with some sort of intersex matrix. For some this will never be discovered, whereas for others it will only be discovered when they attend a fertility treatment clinic later in life. Furthermore the work of the Netherlands Brain Bank on brain sex determination has indicated that transexual people should possibly be included in the range of physical intersex syndromes as it supports the hypothesis that there is a brain sex difference between men and women and transsexuals have the brain sex of that gender group to which they maintain they belong.’ So much for sex. But sex is not gender. Sex is biological. Gender is social, cultural, psychological and historical. It is used to describe people and their roles in society, the jobs they do and the way they dress, how they are meant to behave. A person's gender is usually assigned at birth. The 'boy' or 'girl' which is documented on the birth certificate affects almost everything else that happens to that child socially for the rest of his or her life.
The third gender Responses to ambiguous genitals vary from culture to culture. Western culture’s two-sex/two -gender model is by no means universal. As we have seen in the guevedoche example from the Dominican Republic, in some societies that do not have access to surgery or whose world view is not mediated by biological 'facts' of science, there is more space for those who don't fit the norm. These children are accepted as a 'third sex' within the social order. One of the most humane and enlightened approaches was observed in the 1930s among the Native American Navajo people. The Navajo recognized three physical categories: male, female and hermaphrodite or nadle. Nadles had a special status, specific tasks and clothing styles, and were often consulted for their wisdom and skills Also known as berdache (see Chapter 3) these existed in other Native American groups: Will Roscoe describes how among the Zunis the death of a berdache such as We’wha elicited ‘universal regret and distress’. A person would become a berdache, would move into the third gender for spiritual and personal reasons. They did not change their bodies. They changed gender without changing sex - a change that was culturally acceptable, without concern for biology. No stigma was attached to them - or their lovers or partners either. A far cry from what partners of trans people in the Western world experience today. In India the hijra have a 2,500-year-old history. Known contemporarily as a 'third gender' caste, hijra translates as hermaphrodite or eunuch or 'sacred erotic female-man'. Some are born intersexual, others are castrated. But the community also attracts a wide range of transvestites, homosexual prostitutes and religious devotees of the Mother Goddess Bahuchara Mata.4 Hijras are viewed as a third sex and there is a social place for them in Indian society. It’s not, admittedly, an elevated place - they are perceived as somewhat discredited, associated with fallen women, prostitutes, marginals. But they do have a subversive power. It is considered bad luck to turn hijra minstrals away from important events like weddings and not to pay them for their somewhat risque song and dance routines. Hijras can bless children, and curse adults, to earn a living; their powers exercise symbolic control over life and death, notes anthropologist Serena Nanda in her authoritative study. They claim as their own caste all children who are anatomically hermaphrodite, or who have a strong desire to become hijras. In her analysis Nanda compares hijras with transexuals., and notes that because there is no Western category for ‘thirdness’ in general transexuals experience an existential crisis in definition. 4 Many contemporary hijra resort to prostitution, and they are also infamous for their lewd public behaviour. Sociological studies of hijra prostitution indicate that some Indian men 'prefer' sex with hijra as they will consent to sexual practices which women are reluctant to engage in. Interviews with hijras conducted by Serena Nanda indicate that those who chose to become hijra did so due to their homosexuality: ‘We dress like girls because of the sexual desire for men.’ Others earn a living as debt-collectors, and some are even making a career for themselves in politics (see box). Elsewhere, among the Samba people in the Eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, third-sex people are known as kwolu-aatmwol or 'female thing transforming into male thing'. Medically they are like the guevedoche in the Dominican Republic — they have rare form of hermaphroditism called ‘5-alpha reductase deficiency’. It was while doing fieldwork among the Sambia people in the 1970s that Gilbert Herdt got thinking along the tracks that would ultimately produce his seminal collection of essays: Third Sex, Third Gender. He found that, although in some instances they may be killed at birth, most kwolu-aatmwol are accepted as such and are partially raised in the direction of masculinity. They retain some female elements to their unique identity but this does not prevent them from becoming respected shamans or war leaders. 4 There are other examples of ‘thirdness’ — of the bayot or lakin-on people in Cebuen society in the Philippines, the Indonesian ‘third-sex’ role of waria; or the mahu of Tahiti. In most parts of the world, however, powerful taboos operate, underpinning fear and discrimination. ‘Sexually ambiguous bodies are threatening,’ suggests Zachary Nataf. ‘Perhaps they elicit desire, possessing it might seem an erotic potential beyond those with ordinary genitals. Maybe the notion of sex or gender mutability provokes a kind of terror or gender vertigo. Whatever the cause, medical professionals and others end up favouring drastic surgical remedies for minor conditions that present no medical or functional dangers’. But, Nataf adds, ‘what about compassion and faith in the ability of the parents to cope with their own emotional pain and distress about their child's "imperfection" and to nurture that child despite their difference? What about the rights of the child, especially the right of the child to decide their gender identity, if different from what the experts have designated it to be?’ Colombia recently became one of the few countries to legislate in favour of the rights of the child in such cases.10
Vulnerability Transgender people are especially vulnerable in a number of ways. They are discriminated against in employment — most countries do not protect the rights of trans people; they can sacked just for being who they are. Many more don’t get jobs to start with, despite whatever qualifications they may have. A comparatively high number of male-to-female transsexuals go into prostitution — partly because of the difficulty in getting other employment, partly to raise cash for operations. This makes trans people more vulnerable to HIV infection and violence. Kate More reports: ‘In Vancouver a study of 40 MTF street-involved transexuals reported severe social difficulties including homelessness, discrimination, rejection by others... Of the 40, 85 per cent practised unprotected receptive anal intercourse, 90 per cent prostitution, 62 per cent were injecting drugs. Of the 28 who had an HIV test, half were positive.’ In Australia, in spite of significant numbers of HIV-positive tests among MTFs and the particular vulnerability of post operative individuals to infection, no attempt was made at HIV/AIDs health provision for transexuals in the first 10 years of the epidemic there.’ 4 Waves of violence aimed at trans people have been reported in Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil and Mexico. In Mexico, between 1991 and 1994, 12 sexual minority men, many of them transvestite sex-workers, were killed in the city of Tuxtla Guttierrez in the state of Chiapas. Activists drew attention to other similar cases but police refused to follow up the links and no one was brought to trail. One of those killed was the vice president of the city’s gay and transvestite group, Neftali Ruiz Ramirez, who was shot, reportedly, by a member of the State Judicial Police. 11 Transvestite communities in Istanbul, Turkey and San Jose, Costa Rica have also been repeatedly harassed by police using sexual and other forms of abuse. In all sorts of mundane ways, trans people are routinely discriminated against. Using health services can be an ordeal — reports of humiliation and worse are common. As a result many avoid seeking medical help when sick. In many countries trans people cannot get important documents altered to reflect their gender following reassignment — denying the possibility of marriage and causing humiliation, aggravation and arrest on suspicion of using false documents. Last, but not least, they use gender-divided public toilets at their peril!
The challenge Challenging both the cruel rigidity of the two-gender model and the human-rights abuses that arise from it, is the Transgender Movement, a broad alliance of people who are inclined to cross the gender line. It includes cross-dressers and transvestites as well as intersexuals and transsexuals — both those who have or have not had reassignment surgery. Transsexuals whose gender identity is in conflict with their birth gender usually want to achieve a congruence of identity, role and anatomy by having sex-reassignment surgery. But increasingly transsexuals are taking the option to be 'out' as transsexual and are deciding against surgery, without compromising their core gender identity. It's simple. Some men don't have penises and have vaginas, some woman have penises and don't have vaginas. The acknowledgment of gender non-conformity is growing and has come about partly as a result of anger at discrimination, stigmatization, lack of civil rights and a reluctance on the part of the authorities to pursue those who commit hate crimes against non-conformists. The trans movement is growing. Although trans cultures may vary greatly from country to country, international networking and the internet, have made a difference. Coalitions with the lesbian and gay movement give greater visibility and campaigning muscle. And the fact that more and more transgendered people are choosing to be ‘out’ makes it easier to build a social movement. Zachary Nataf explains: ‘As a transgendered man (female-to-male transsexual) I do not "pass" as simply male but am "out" in order to campaign for non-discrimination and Transgender Pride. I did not choose to be transsexual, nor did I change gender roles in protest against society's oppressive gender system. I did it to achieve an authenticity and outward expression of a deeply abiding sense of myself as a gendered being. During transition I became more fully and truly myself, suspending the symbolic hold society's rules had over my body in order to achieve it. The rigidity of the rules is what is not natural.’ There are specific struggles, such as tackling police harassment, especially in Latin America, and trying to get legal recognition and legal rights in societies where one has to be either male or female. In Britain, for example, even post-operative transexuals are legally padlocked forever to the gender written on their birth certificates, even though this contravenes the European Charter on Human Rights. New Zealand on the other hand affords full rights. In the US, gender non-conformists are still listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As the stars in the sky But a legitimate political rage is replacing shame and secrecy. Awkward questions are being asked. ‘Gender and genitals comprise the stronghold of control binding all people to a social order that has serious difficulty tolerating diversity or change,’ says Jamison Green. ‘Somebody’s got us by the balls and they don’t want to let go. Who is that somebody? Who is so afraid of losing control? What are they going to lose control of? What is destroyed by denying the legitimacy of transexual (and transgendered) people? What is destroyed by acknowledging us? Is it the right to succession? Is it the right to own property? Is it the ability to know whether to treat another as an equal, an inferior, or a superior being?’9 Scholars are opening out areas previously sealed off in academe. ‘How many sexes and genders have there been?’ queries Gilbert Herdt as he takes to task the paradigm of unquestioned dimorphism that has stalked Western thinking, restricting even that of progressives like Darwin and Freud. There are exceptions: the strikingly original thinker Georg Simmel (whose theory of ‘money’ is one of the most illuminating) was at the turn of the 20th century observing that ‘there were too many categories and too few sexes to explain the immense varieties of human experience’. The two-sex system of Western culture is not inevitable, not universal. If it were, why are there so many examples to the contrary? It’s a product of societies hung up on reproduction., concludes Gilbert Herdt. ‘We need an anthropology and social history of desire that will lead is to a closer approximations of understanding the lived realities of peoples themselves,’ he says.4 As the space for them opens up, the reality is being made by trans people themselves. More transgender and intersex people are opting to live bi-gendered or hybrid gendered lives, choosing hermaphroditic bodies, through surgery, to match their core sense of who they are. Michael Hernandez says: ‘I have found a balance, a sense of peace. I am more than male and more than female. I am neither man nor woman, but the circle encompassing both... I just am. The name and the fit aren’t that important any more... Gender and behaviour as variable as the stars in the sky. There is no typical pattern which provides definitive proof that one is transgendered’ 12 Seasoned activist in more than one arena, Leslie Feinberg comments: ‘The women’s liberation movement sparked a mass conversation about the systematic degradation, violence and discrimination that women faced in this society... This was a big step forward for humanity... Now another movement is sweeping onto the stage of history; Trans liberation. We are again raising questions about the societal treatment of people based on their sex and gender expression. This discussion will make new contributions to human consciousness.’ The struggle has the potential to liberate all of us, whatever our gender, from rigid, stereotypical ways of being masculine and feminine.
1 Guevote, Rolando Sanchez, Fama Film AG, Bern, Switzerland, 1997. 2 This chapter draws extensively from Zachary I Nataf’s article ‘Whatever I feel’, New Internationalist, April 1998. 3 New England Journal of Medicine, Julliane Imperato- McGinley et al, 'Androgens and the Evolution of Male Gender Identity Among Male Psuedo-Hermaphrodites', No 300, 1979. 4 Third Sex, Third Gender, Gilbert Herdt ed, Zone Books, NY, 1994. 5 Hermaphrodites with Attitude Quarterly, Bo Laurent, Fall/Winter, 1995-96. 6 SLATE, David Berreby, 'Biology will Defeat the Defense of Marriage Act', Internet, 10 September 1996. 7 San Francisco Chronicle, David Tuller, 'Intersexuals begins to Speak Out on Infant Genital Operations', 21 June 1997. 8 Clinical Psychiatry News, Katherine Maurer, vol 25, No 7, July 1997. 9 Reclaiming Genders, Kate More and Stephen Whittle eds, Cassell, 1999. 10 IGLHRC, 2000. 11 Breaking the Silence, Amnesty International, 1997. 12 Trans Liberation, Leslie Feinberg, Beacon Press, 1998.
Box 1: The eunuch politician ‘You don’t need genitals for politics. You need brains.’ This unusual but true slogan came from Shabna Nehru, the first eunuch politician to run for Parliament in India. She did not get in, but her record as a municipal councillor for Hisar is exemplary. She has outshone her peers at getting water, sewer lines and roads for her district, a transformed slum. ‘I used to entertain people by dancing,’ says Shabna, whose husky voice contrasts with her attire, a delicately draped sari in the colours of the Indian flag — saffron, white and green. ‘Now I entertain them by doing good, humanitarian deeds.’ The councillor’s unlikely path to public service started in the southern city of Bangalore. The child of an upper-caste business family, she was born a eunuch, she says, declining to elaborate or to disclose her age. ‘I belong to both genders, but I was raised as a girl.’ When her mother died she was taken from her family by a gang of eunuchs and went on to live in a subculture of sexual outcasts who rank lower than the untouchables. Shabna and a handful of sister eunuch politicians are proof that eunuchs — or hijras, ‘impotent ones’ – long ostracized as freaks, are starting to gain mainstream respect. Some people even suggest that, without children or family, eunuchs are the perfect antidote to India’s political corruption and nepotism. And in 1998 another eunuch, Shabnam Mausi, became the first to be appointed to India’s Parliament. Sources: The Chandigargh Tribune, 13 March 2000; Wall Street Journal, 24 September 1998; Serena Nanda in Third Sex , Third Gender op cit..
Box 2: Alive, not trapped ‘I cannot say that I was a man trapped in a female body. I can only say that I was a male spirit alive in a female body, and I chose to bring a male spirit alive in a female body, and I chose to bring that body in line with my spirit, and to live the rest of my life as a man.’ Jamison Green, US fiction writer, essayist and public speaker. Source: Reclaiming Genders, Kate More and Stephen Whittle eds, Cassell, 1999. Box 3: When I was male.... ‘I was a straight, aggressive, hard male; when I was a woman I was the complete opposite, no one knew except my lady. When we went out in public with me as Linda no one ever guessed; after all, I had all the expertise and knowledge of one of the most beautiful woman in the world at my disposal. She could have never let me out of the door if I wasn’t as good as I could be, in those years cross-dressing was highly illegal. It was truly an era when to be read was to be dead.’ Linda (formerly Jim) Philips, US trans person I have a difficult time trying to explain the relationship between Linda and I. Everyone wants to know if I am excited about Linda’s lifestyle or I am the most tolerant woman... Neither is correct. The fact of Linda being transgendered person has really not played that large a part in our relationship... I have always looked inside a person and have not been concerned with appearances. So when I looked into Linda’s (Jim’s) soul I saw someone with the qualities I desired in a person I planned on spending my life with.’ Cynthia Philips, Linda’s partner Source:Trans Liberation, Leslie Feinberg, Beacon Press, 1998.
Box 4: We are fighting ‘Our lives are proof that sex and gender are much more complex than a delivery room doctor’s glance at genitals can determine, more variegated than pink or blue birth caps. We are oppressed for not fitting those narrow social norms. We are fighting back.’ Leslie Feinberg, US trans activist
FACTS * Australia has specific protection from discrimination for transgendered people. (ILGA)
* Transgendered people in Turkey, the Ukriane and Aoterao/NZ can have official documents reflecting their gender choice; those in Britain cannot. (ILGA) * Genetic, physical and hormonal gender complexities occur in an estimated one person in every 60 persons. (The Penguin Atlas of Human Sexual Behavior, Judith Mackay, Penguin, 2000. * One in every 12,000 people is a male-to-female transexual. (Penguin Atlas) * One in every 30,000 is a female to male transsexual. (Penguin Atlas) |
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