Across Contested Territory: the transsexual subject in medical and radical discourse

NOTE: I tried for like 45 minutes to figure out how to format this properly. It just wasn’t working… I don’t know enough. I can’t get any line breaks between any of the paragraphs… so everything looks absurdly squished together. Sorry! – J

Jonathan Liang Stafstrom, Swarthmore College

Bryn Mawr College GSST 257: Gender and Technology

Profs. Blankenship and Dalke

Across Contested Territory:

The transsexual subject in medical and radical discourse

In their works Demanding Subjects and A Posttranssexual Manifesto, Bernice Hausman and Sandy Stone attempted to formulate histories of transsexuality in relation to the emergent medical-technological discourses of the twentieth century. Both authors, noting the prominence of technological powers in shaping emergent trans discourses and narratives, highlight the mainstream medical establishment’s dominant role in what they describe as the construction of contemporary transsexuality as a condition; likewise, both authors frame ‘transsexual subjectivity’ as mainstream medicine’s corresponding minor yet contributive discourse. A dialectic of sorts underpins both arguments, in which the medical establishment competes with minoritized transsexual subjects for the discursive and actual control of certain technologies of the body; the consequence is the production of transsexuality.

Though these similarities unite the two articles, Stone and Hausman align themselves with very distinct ideological positions. Hausman approaches transsexuality with a historian’s skepticism, ultimately seeking to affirm the discursive and practical power of technology and to highlight what she considers the agentive, pseudo-self-productive nature of the transsexual condition. Stone, on the other hand, writing as a transwoman and a radical feminist, articulates an impassioned critique of trans acquiescence to the oppressive discourses of the medical establishment, culminating in a rallying cry against binary gender. This paper will examine the concepts central to both authors’ articles, paying special attention to exposing and critiquing the unexamined acceptance of a ‘trans narrative’ and a transsexual subjectivity marring both authors’ positions.

The crux of Hausman’s article can be found in the introduction to her 1995 book Changing Sex: “…the commonsense understanding of transsexualism as a “disorder of gender identity” is a cover-up for the potentially more threatening idea that transsexuals are subjects who choose to engineer themselves.” (Hausman, 9; emphasis mine.) Critiquing mainstream discourses in which gender figures as an ahistorical totality, Hausman attempts to firmly link the mainstream medical-psychological binary of gender/sex to the twentieth-century emergence and spread of certain medical technologies (inclusive of both practices and discourses, as described by Teresa de Laurentis [Hausman, 14]). Within this framework, transsexuals become not passive victims of a flawed gender-sex binary, but rather active (in Hausman’s words, “demanding”) subjects who aggressively harness emergent technologies/discourses, crafting new selves. Without denying the agentive nature of this subjectivity, Hausman repeatedly reminds us that such subjectivities are largely indebted to the technological developments through which they are realized, even going so far as to suggest that technology ultimately creates transsexuals: “I argue that transsexualism necessarily depends upon a relation to developing medical discourses and practices” (4). In Hausman’s framework, transsexual subjects submit their demands to the emergent and extremely powerful technology which ultimately en“genders” them.

In narrating the genesis of transsexual practices and subjectivities as primarily, even solely the products of dominant medical discourses, Hausman adopts a position that unapologetically dismisses the diverse experiences and personal narratives of transsexual subjects—many of whom would no doubt be “potentially threatening” to her argument’s reductive thesis! Proceeding from an uncritical acceptance of the consolidated definition of transsexualism as outlined by the medical authorities she discusses, Hausman problematically reduces the endlessly complex experience of trans people to a single position of “demanding subjects,” that is, eager consumers of experimental technologies. For Hausman, transsexuality does not resemble a dialectic as much as it does a consumer service, bought and sold like any other product in late capitalism’s florid marketplace. While the history of the ties between the twentieth-century evolution of the consumer and the ‘marketing’/economic control of transgender technologies is no doubt a worthy topic of exploration, Hausman’s reductive model fails to accomplish even this. Ultimately, she puts forth a profoundly marginalizing position which neither accounts for the dialectic nature of the techno-medical construction of transsexuality nor leaves any room for the diversity and complexity of actual trans experiences.

Stone offers a refreshingly different and far more flexible genealogy. Early in the essay, she narrates a “trans history,” canonizing the Chevalier d’Eon and an Assyrian king, among others, as testaments to the transhistoricity and universality of “the trans condition.” (Stone, 323) (She describes all of these individuals as “transsexuals;” I have instead opted to use the more neutral term “trans.”) Clearly, in opposition to Hausman, Stone understands gender dysphoria and trans conditions as existing outside of time and culture; however, she is highly critical of the twentieth century medical-psychological establishment’s canonization and homogenization of transsexuality as a diagnosable condition defined by (and rectifiable through the technological modification of) a) genitals and b) social presentation, ie gender cues. In short, Stone vigorously criticizes the pervasive definition of transsexuality as a condition of having “being born in the wrong body,” (331) exposing the troubling heterosexism, cissexism, and gender-dualist ideology which marked that definition’s internal history.

Stone’s critique proudly raises the ideological banner of the feminist third wave, decrying the binary gender system as an oppressive construct of patriarchal power and citing trans people as among the many victims of its constraining norms. The medical-technological establishment, to Stone, bears perhaps the greatest guilt in terms of the damage it has caused transsexuals: requiring discursive justification for its legal and technical control of emergent sex-modification technologies, medicine patriarchally formulates oppressive and restrictive definitions—narratives—of transsexualism, to which trans people are forced to acquiesce in order to obtain what they desire (331), and which reinforce and reinscribe the dualistic gender system upon the trans body (ibid, etc). Stone’s perspective is obviously in opposition to Hausman’s, which reads the medical establishment more as a neutral, objective power petitioned acting on, yet existing beyond, the petitions of demanding subjects.

Stone’s critique does not stop at exposing medicine’s complicity in the systematic exploitation of trans people. Echoing Barbara Kruger’s famous icon, Stone points out that the trans body is the ultimate battleground. The discourses of medical science, law, feminism, patriarchy, queer movements, and countless other ideological fronts rage constant discursive warfare over the trans body, which is made so vulnerable by its inherently transgressive, interstitial position (333).

Stone incites trans people to take up active struggle against their constant marginalization, mobilizing their non-normative, complexly-gendered subjectivities to act visibly and transgressively towards the liberatory goal of deconstructing binarized gender, rejecting the containing, re-normativizing “passing model” of transsexuality proffered by the medical establishment. Stone thus offers a prelude to a truly radical trans politics, calling for the transcendence of the containing “transsexuality of the masters” in favor of an open-ended, radically-aligned trans politics—a multiplicitous Harawayan affinity rather than a social group defined repressively from without.

As inspiring and progressive as Stone’s call to action is, it remains marked by two crucial, if subtle flaws. First of these is a confusing tendency within Stone’s work to conflate the categories of “Transsexual” (that is, as a monistic definition engineered by techno-medical discourse) and trans (people of trans experiences, or in Stone’s own words, trans as genre rather than gender [332]). In her strident statement that “the essence of transsexualism is the act of passing” (336), Stone seems to assume that all trans people have uncritically accepted the definition offered by the medical establishment, and are, we might assume, well on the road to passing. The reality is far more complex. As Stone should be well aware, trans conditions cannot be summarized in a single definitive statement; they are fluid, multiplicitous, and interstitial, grouped together not under a single definition but by virtue of their similar experiences. Genderqueer-identified people, non-operative transsexuals, non-passing transsexuals (purposefully or otherwise), and countless other patterns of trans identities all fall outside the definition of transsexuality as constructed by the medical establishment and as echoed by Stone. Making no reference whatsoever to this enormous diversity, Stone unconsciously accepts at least one of the dominant (and marginalizing) narratives of transsexuality, namely, that trans conditions begin and end at the medically-constructed definition of transsexuality.

This issue is further complicated by the second flaw which appears in Stone’s writing: her over-reliance on the notion of authenticity. While the overall theme of the Manifesto is decidedly anti-subjective, critiquing those who form “totalized, monistic identities, forgoing physical and subjective intertextuality” as “hav[ing] foreclosed the possibility of authentic [sic] relationships” (335), Stone’s disavowal of passing (as “lying”) paradoxically reverts to an idealization of the modernist “truth” of the subjective personal narrative, the authority of the empirical, the rule of the self. Such essentialistic, subjectivist notions of selfhood seem bizarrely misplaced in Stone’s otherwise highly critical Manifesto; they contradict the polyvocalistic anti-subjective approach espoused throughout, attempting to locate a transcendental index of truth where, I would argue, none need or should be asserted. Stone’s troubling critique of transsexuals who pass (and, by her definition, accept the entirety of the oppressive techno-medical discourse) is grounded in an exposé of their “inauthentic,” “constructed” selves; asserting transsexual bodies as bearers of specific truths which must be told and made visible, she ignores the crux of the intertextualist injunction against transcendent truth itself.

Despite these flaws, Stone’s Manifesto remains an empowering document with an admirably agitating presence in the history of feminist theory. The Manifesto’s enduring power can be attributed to its rallying cry for a diverse, radical, and self-reflexive trans politics of affinity. Truly utopian in its outlook, the Manifesto directly prefigures a dynamically liberatory discourse in which all identities are valid and able to speak.

Works Referenced

Hausman, Bernice. “Introduction: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender.” In Changing Sex:
Transsexualism, Technology and the Idea of Gender (pp. 1-19). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005.

Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology. Ed. Patrick Hopkins. Indiana University Press, 1998. pp. 322-341.