Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex and Gender Diversity. Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox, editors, San Francisco, John Wiley and Sons, 2003.
Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Leslie Feinberg, Boston, Beacon Press, 1996.
Since the 1990s, there has been a cultural boom of sorts, especially in publishing, film and theatre, which has made transgendered people more visible than ever. Several factors are driving this, but the most important is that transgendered people are leaving the closet to fight for liberation from discrimination and oppression, often inspired by past and present struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia. The transgender exodus is also connected to the Internet, which has been a powerful tool for organizing networks, advocacy groups and political campaigns. Transgender activism has so far won nondiscrimination laws and ordinances in four states (California, Minnesota, New Mexico and Rhode Island) and 61 cities. This remarkable achievement is also a result of a spirit of solidarity and inclusion that has united many transgender activists with labor and other peoples’ movements, including the gay movement, the National Organization of Women and the AFL-CIO (through its LGBT constituency group, Pride At Work).
Yet the picture is not always rosy. Like racism, sexism and homophobia, trans-phobia is a corrosive force that still undermines unity in working-class and democratic struggles. One important point of friction has been the refusal of the Human Rights Campaign to lobby Congress for trans-inclusion in its pursuit of an Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). As a result, the transgender movement has had to fight on its own. As I write this, the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition is preparing its annual congressional lobby to press for legislation to protect transgender and intersex lives.
Such laws would help workers like Peter Oiler, a truck driver for 20 years who lost his job when Winn Dixie Stores fired him for cross-dressing at home. They could help staunch the carnage that afflicts the transgender community, for trans-phobia is particularly deadly. In 2002, at least 25 transgendered people were murdered, but 2003 may turn out to have been an even worse year. Many of these involve beating, stabbing, gunshot wounds and torture of the type that took the life of Brandon Teena in 1993. Some are the tragic consequence of ignorance and fear, as in 1995 when Washington, DC firefighters denied emergency treatment to Tyra Hunter, a transsexual car accident victim who died of her injuries.
Those who want to deepen their understanding of the transgender movement, and contribute to strengthening its cohesion and its unity with other movements, can begin with two books: Finding the Real Me, which is of very recent vintage, and Transgender Warriors, a now-classic historical and political analysis that appeared in the mid-1990s.
Finding the Real Me is a ground-breaking collection of more than two dozen autobiographical sketches by individuals from many countries and cultures, who identify as transsexual, transgender, intersex, androgyne or multi-gendered. Editors Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox point out that this book – the first of its kind – would have been impossible ten years ago. Today, “the sex and gender diverse community” has a sense of pride and activism, which is rooted in its growth as a political movement “akin to that of women’s and gay liberation in the 1970s.” A gender diverse community is speaking out, and these are its authentic voices. This is an xcellent introduction to people who do not fit into idealized male/female boxes as prescribed by patriarchal social orders, and who are no longer willing to keep quiet. It might prove a frustrating read for anyone wedded to shopworn stereotypes or hasty generalizations, but its emphasis on gender diversity in the first-person is the greatest strength of this book.
Among these profiles, readers will meet Peter Häberle, who was born in 1969 Czechoslovakia, assigned a female gender and named Petra. But Petra was born with female and male physical features, with neither fully developed; she was not diagnosed as intersexed until she left Czechoslovakia much later and arrived at a gender identity in Amsterdam. After reaching the age of 30, Petra underwent counseling and hormone therapy, and became Peter. Before settling in Holland, Petra lived in Austria and Germany, where she learned her trade as a cook and became active in struggles for peace and for the environment, and joined antifascist and antiracist organizations. Comparing his experiences in Western Europe to Czechoslovakia, Peter remarks that, “the world does not change in this respect: there are nice people and there are assholes.” Although he is not a Communist, Peter Häberle notes that socialist Czechoslovakia was “alright actually…Heath care and education were free, nobody was hungry, and everyone had a job.”
Readers will also meet male-to-female transsexual Christine Burns, a leader of England’s Press for Change, who links her personal struggle to transition with a more general struggle to overcome her conservative upbringing in which “the unstoppable pursuit of the essential had to be interpreted as sick or bizarre, or deliberately and dangerously radical.” After her transition, Burns hoped to assimilate into the mainstream, and even achieved acceptance as a Conservative Party volunteer. But as Burns points out, “I moved on because both that party and I had evolved in different directions, on a whole range of economic and social issues.” Burns has become one of the best-known figures advocating for transgender rights in the UK, a one-time conservative who points out that transgender issues in the UK have gotten a more responsive hearing since the election of the Labour Party in 1997.
Finding the Real Me comes with a glossary of terms that is very useful to those who are just learning about issues of sex and gender diversity; there is also a forward by female-to-male transsexual scholar, and Press for Change founder, Stephen Whittle.
Transgender Warriors is now a classic book by trans-man Leslie Feinberg, who blended a personal narrative with a Marxist analysis of the history and contemporary politics of transgender liberation struggles. In becoming a transgender activist, Feinberg acquired a radical critique of society that linked struggles against imperialism and exploitation to those against sexual and gender oppression. Drawing on historical materialism, Feinberg connects the emergence and development of transgender oppression with the historical rise of societies based on class and private property. From archaeological and anthropological evidence, it is clear that many early forms of human society, based on communal forms of property, created a social space for, and even honored, transgendered people. Feinberg locates the “origin of trans oppression at [the] intersection between the overthrow of mother-right and the rise of patriarchal class-divided societies,” arguing that the “hostility to transgender, sex-change, intersexuality, women, and same-sex love became a pattern wherever class antagonisms deepened.” Feinberg supports his argument with an impressive survey of secondary sources which document the development of transgender oppression around the world, but he also reveals an equally long history of resistance to the crushing imposition of narrow and rigid gender roles. Defying the threat of severe penalties – imprisonment, flogging, shunning and death – transgendered people have persisted throughout the centuries in living the gender roles that corresponded to their sense of identity.
Feinberg also makes the important point that, at certain historic moments, cross-gendered behavior has been an expression of mass social rebellion. In plebeian celebrations of carnival in pre-capitalist Europe, cross-dressing was a common way for peasants and artisans to assert a desire to up-end the dominant social order (the world turned upside down); cross-dressing also accompanied many of the peasant revolts that erupted in Europe up to the 19th century. Feinberg also performs a valuable service to the history of the working class by reviving the memory of cross-dressing revolutionaries like Luisa Capetillo, who was a key figure in the early 20th-century Puerto Rican and Cuban socialist and union movements. From this angle, then, it is no surprise at all that drag queens were at the forefront of the 1969 Stonewell Rebellion, which ushered in the modern gay liberation movement in the USA.
Feinberg conceived of Transgender Warriors not only as a call for transgendered people to take pride in our history of resistance, but to raise our demands for justice within a broader struggle for fundamental change, and he closes with these words: “we will not be free until we fight for and win a society in which no class stands to benefit from fomenting hatred and prejudice, where laws restricting sex and gender and human love will be unthinkable.” Transgender Warriors includes a portrait gallery and biographical sketches of contemporary transgender activists, as well as appendices of transgender organizations and publications.
--Chris Frazer is a writer and activist from Providence, Rhode Island.
