Transgender activism

Can the nascent transgender community resolve the age-old battles between the sexes?

by Dorie Clark

This Spring, the virtually unknown Hilary Swank walked away with a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of transgendered murder victim Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry. Decatur, Georgia, just adopted legislation making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of "transgender status," and the New York City Council is considering a similar measure. The Associated Press just issued new guidelines for reporters writing about transgendered people: the gender pronouns preferred by interview subjects should be used. Ithaca, New York, last month increased penalties for hate crimes against transgendered people. An out transsexual woman, Karen Kerin, is running for Congress in Vermont -- as a Republican.

THOMAS LEWIS: "Testosterone is like a sledgehammer in the universe -- it's easier to add it than take it out."

"Ten years ago, I would have said I didn't think [equality for transgendered people] would happen in my lifetime, but now I really do think it's possible," says Jamison Green, the former president of Female-to-Male International, an advocacy group.

Of course, not all the news is good. As you read this, transgendered people and their allies are camped outside the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which runs until Sunday, protesting for the eighth year in a row the festival's admission policy prohibiting trans women. The New York Times Magazine ran a controversial cover story in May accusing national gay groups of willfully obscuring the transgender identity of Calpernia Addams, the girlfriend of Private First Class Barry Winchell, in order to turn the hate-crime victim into a "martyr for gay rights." Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank added the phrase "gender identity, characteristics, or expression" to a bill reauthorizing domestic-violence grant money -- the first time language recognizing transgendered people had ever been proposed in federal legislation -- but the bill never made it out of committee. And Gender PAC, a national organization advocating free gender expression, estimates that over the past year, roughly one transgendered person per month has been murdered in a hate crime.

In the midst of this cultural ferment, though, many transgendered people are becoming more open about who they are. In the process, they're shaking up traditional notions of gender and sexual identity, dismaying the usual conservative suspects and even some gay activists. "It has a great potential to change how people view difference, not just gender difference," says Nancy Nangeroni, host of the radio program Gender Talk (which can be heard on the Web at www.gendertalk.com). "It makes us larger than ourselves and makes us compassionate to everyone's needs."

The trans movement, if it can maneuver past a number of internal rifts, may profoundly change how we view ourselves and others. At a minimum, the questions it raises give us one more chance to figure out whether Venus and Mars can ever get along.

STACEY MONTGOMERY: "We're not going to assimilate to society. Society will assimilate to us."

People who operate outside traditional gender roles have always been around. Joan of Arc may have been transgendered, some believe. And in The Legend of Pope Joan: In Search of the Truth (Berkley), Peter Stanford investigates the story that a ninth-century woman passed herself off as a man and became pope. More recently, Christine Jorgensen made headlines after her 1952 transition from male to female, and the openly transgendered Sylvia Rivera was one of the leaders of the Stonewall uprising, which launched the modern gay-rights movement.

But no one knows how many transgendered people exist today -- in part because many are still closeted about their identity, but mostly because there's no consensus on how to define the term. At its narrowest, it refers to transsexuals -- biological males who take hormones and/or have surgery to become women, and vice versa. Construed more broadly, the term often includes those with ambiguous gender, such as drag queens or women who pass as men. And some activists, such as writer Gabriel Rotello, author of Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (Penguin), argue that anyone who transgresses traditional gender roles -- basically, all gay people and quite a few straight people -- could appropriately be labeled "transgendered."

Politically and culturally, today's trans movement coalesced in the early-to-mid 1990s. Two groundbreaking books were published: Stone Butch Blues (Firebrand), Leslie Feinberg's fictionalized 1993 memoir about a lesbian who passes as a man; and a witty treatise called Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Routledge), written by male-to-female (MTF) transsexual Kate Bornstein in 1994. The insistence of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival that all participants be "women-born women" also galvanized the movement in the early 1990s. "A group of women ostensibly identifying as feminists were using an old definition of what it means to be a woman," says Penni Ashe Matz of the advocacy group It's Time, America. "To argue that someone with a penis can't be a woman is definitely an old-school notion -- it goes back to `Biology is destiny,' which the feminists said was bunk."

And lastly, the Internet and America Online came into their own, helping a nascent trans community to organize. "The Internet was the single most important device enabling the transgender community to happen," says Nangeroni. "It brought together the radical activists who were willing to go out and challenge the way things were and those who were more closeted and seeking greater comfort with themselves, and allowed those two groups of people to support one another and move in the same direction."

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Dorie Clark is the liaison to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities for Somerville mayor Dorothy Kelly Gay. She can be reached at DorieClark@aol.com.