Forwarded by a friend.
>
>
>>   From the Chronical of Higher Ed. dated March 24, 2000
>>
>>
>>
>>   Gaining a Daughter: a Father's Transgendered Tale
>>
>>   By LENNARD J. DAVIS
>>
>>       I look around and find myself, strangely enough, in the
>>   women's lingerie section of the Kmart in an upstate New York
>>   town. I am with my 19-year-old son, who is comparison shopping
>>   for a pair of black tights.  Some farm ladies are regarding us
>>   with dubious glances. My son asks if I think medium is too
>>   large for him. He stands at about 5 feet 11 inches. I really
>>   have no idea what will fit him. Trying to be helpful, I
>>   suggest that he might want to wear the fishnet stockings,
>>   which seem to me a bit more goth, but he sticks with the
>>   regular ones. Then we move on to the cosmetics section for
>>   lipstick and hair dye. As I help him pick out a L'Oreal shade
>>   called Parisian Black, I wonder to myself how I got here.
>>
>>   How indeed? A few days earlier, my son had arrived back from
>>   his first year at college. The following morning, he sat me
>>   down at the kitchen table and announced that he had a big
>>   thing to tell his mother and father. My wife was on the
>>   telephone, and as we waited for her to finish talking, my son
>>   whispered, "I'm getting married." Then he added, "No, just
>>   kidding." He was jumpy with nervous intensity. When my wife
>>   sat down, he spoke: "I've been thinking about this for a long
>>   time, and I wanted to tell you -- I'm transgendered!" He
>>   looked pleased with himself and somewhat triumphant. My wife
>>   and I looked at each other, confused and horrified.
>>
>>   He must have sensed that we were nonplused. So, being of an
>>   academic bent, as we are, he began pulling out of his backpack
>>   books with titles like My Gender Workbook and Gender Outlaw,
>>   reading us long passages like the following, from Leslie
>>   Feinberg's Transgender Warriors:
>>
>>   "Both women's and trans liberation have presented me with two
>>   important tasks. One is to join the fight to strip away the
>>   discriminatory and oppressive values attached to masculinity
>>   and femininity. The other is to defend gender freedom -- the
>>   right of each individual to express their gender in any way
>>   they choose, whether feminine, androgynous, masculine, or any
>>   point on the spectrum between. And that includes the right to
>>   gender ambiguity and gender contradiction. It's equally
>>   important that each person have the right to define,
>>   determine, or change their sex in any way they choose whether
>>   female, male, or any point on the spectrum between. And that
>>   includes the right to physical ambiguity and contradiction."
>>
>>   As he talked, I tried to listen but could not escape the
>>   sensation that I was in someone else's movie. I thought about
>>   this young person and wondered if there was something I was
>>   missing. He had always seemed to be a very masculine guy --
>>   interested in girls -- who never once could have been mistaken
>>   for a female. He wasn't effeminate in the least, and there
>>   seemed to be no apparent prehistory to this moment. Later,
>>   though, I recalled the many comic strips and zines he had
>>   written featuring female main characters. They seemed, in
>>   retrospect, to have been his alter egos.
>>
>>   My wife and I both consider ourselves progressive academics.
>>   We have been willing to accept virtually any behavior from our
>>   children -- from their experimentation with marijuana to
>>   having their sexual partners sleep over at our house. We are a
>>   poster family for permissiveness and have cruised fairly
>>   comfortably from grunge through swing to goth. I've seen my
>>   kids' hair go from brown to blue to green, as mine has gone to
>>   gray. I followed my son as he crossed a police line and
>>   grabbed a bullhorn at City Hall to protest budget cuts in
>>   education; worried as he came back late from punk-rock clubs;
>>   trembled a bit as he explained that he might be arrested for
>>   defacing (or reconstructing, as he would say) corporate
>>   billboards. We are feminists against homophobia. And I teach
>>   courses with titles like "Women, Nation, Empire" and "The
>>   Different Body."
>>
>>   Could anyone be more of a political ally than I?
>>
>>   Had he announced, "I'm gay," my wife and I would have been
>>   relatively prepared to say, "Great! Who's the lucky guy?" But
>>   transgendered? I didn't have much of an idea then what the
>>   word meant. We asked some predictable questions. "Are you
>>   gay?" My son laughed, "No, I love women. I'm completely
>>   heterosexual." "So, do you want a sex-change operation?" "No,
>>   I like my body the way it is." "So, what does this mean?" "It
>>   means, I'm a girl. I want to wear dresses, makeup, and
>>   challenge the whole patriarchal, bourgeois idea of gender."
>>
>>   My mind raced. We were having Stanley Fish and Jane Tompkins
>>   over for dinner that night. I imagined my son swirling down
>>   the stairs, arriving at dinner like Loretta Young in flowing
>>   chiffon. How exactly would I explain such a phenomenon to my
>>   guests over hors d'oeuvres? As it turned out, our son dressed
>>   neutrally and got into an argument with Stanley over Bosnia,
>>   not biology.
>>
>>   Over the next few days, my son continued to explain his
>>   metamorphosis to us: "Michel Foucault says that gender is
>>   socially constructed. So does Judith Butler." Foucault!
>>   Butler! Those were the names of scholars I teach, now being
>>   hurled like grenades at my feet. Those theoreticians believe,
>>   as I do, that such seemingly fixed and essential things as
>>   gender or disability are really pliable and plastic. It had
>>   seemed fine to accept that gender was a social construction,
>>   but now here was my child before me, attempting to carry out
>>   in principle what I had been teaching only theoretically in my
>>   courses. I suddenly felt rage toward those ivory-towered
>>   theoreticians who glibly spout gender theories. Now I was
>>   going to have to pay in humiliation and pain, in seeing my son
>>   in a dress. Thanks, Judy!
>>
>>   The next few days were pretty intense for my wife and me. As
>>   we sat up late discussing this alteration in our family life,
>>   we quickly passed through the phases associated with getting a
>>   fatal illness. First was denial, followed by the willing
>>   accomplices of rage and despair. Acceptance kept its reserved
>>   distance; the sticking point was the issue of wearing dresses.
>>   I thought I could logically argue my son out of that penchant.
>>   "If women are oppressed and femininity is a construct, why
>>   should you essentially reinforce or parody the feminine? Isn't
>>   that giving in to patriarchy? Reinforcing the gender binary?"
>>   As a litigious academic, I could in a pinch come up with a
>>   cogent argument.
>>
>>   Knowing my rhetorical strategies only too well, my son replied
>>   that to break down the binary, we had to be able to dress as
>>   we wished. In our culture, women could wear men's clothing
>>   without any opprobrium, but men could only wear women's
>>   clothing at their own peril. If a woman wears a tuxedo she's
>>   an icon, as Marlene Dietrich knew, but if a man wears a dress
>>   he's comic. Just ask Tony Curtis or Jack Lemmon.
>>
>>   He was right, no doubt, but no matter how rational our
>>   discussion was, the dress became an eternal stumbling block.
>>   As some friends of ours said later, our son had picked the one
>>   thing that we, as progressives, couldn't accept. I continued
>>   trying to argue, "How would you feel if you saw me wearing a
>>   dress and makeup?" He replied, "I'd be so relieved." I
>>   countered, "What would your roommate think?" I was figuring
>>   that his Japanese friend, who was obsessed with technology,
>>   would be horrified. "Oh, he's saving up his money for a
>>   sex-change operation." My last round of armaments was quickly
>>   being depleted. One last salvo: "Well, you say you like women.
>>   What will they think of you wearing a dress?" He smiled like a
>>   cat with a canary in his maw and confided, "It's the greatest
>>   way to meet women," and winked knowingly. What could I say?
>>
>>   By now, I was beginning to understand a bit about this
>>   transgender issue, although I'm far from an expert. My son
>>   says that a transgendered person is anyone who breaks the
>>   rules of the gender binary. By his definition, people who are
>>   gay, lesbian, or bisexual are not necessarily transgendered,
>>   since they define themselves by their sexual preference,
>>   rather than their gender crossing. They would be transgendered
>>   only if they attempted to break from the gender they were
>>   assigned at birth, by redefining their identity through an act
>>   of philosophical or political awakening, hormonal or surgical
>>   intervention, or choice of clothing.
>>
>>   My son says that it's all about a person's right to choose. He
>>   defines himself as a "transgirl." Some women may choose to
>>   define themselves as men. And other folks may head for the
>>   shifting middle ground of gender "variants," who like to keep
>>   things ambiguous. Inhabiting the transgender territory are
>>   drag queens and drag kings, "transgirls," "transboys," and
>>   those who vote for their identity with anything from estrogen
>>   to haircuts. A heterosexual male could be considered
>>   transgendered if he were a cross-dresser, although a
>>   cross-dresser is not necessarily transgendered if he only
>>   likes to wear women's clothing but doesn't consider himself
>>   female or a gender variant.
>>
>>   The possibilities are mind- (and body-) boggling. There are
>>   relatively simple variations along the transgender continuum,
>>   including male-to-female "post-op" transsexuals, such as
>>   Deirdre N. McCloskey, the noted economist, or female-to-male
>>   transsexuals such as Leslie Feinberg, the author of Stone
>>   Butch Blues. Then there are those who adopt hormonally and
>>   surgically the secondary sexual characteristics of the other
>>   gender while keeping the genitalia with which they were born.
>>   There also are bearded women, like the well-known circus
>>   performer and gender activist Jennifer Miller. Intersexuals --
>>   formerly known as hermaphrodites -- whose parents "corrected"
>>   their gender, walk side-by-side in this movement with those
>>   who managed to retain the organs with which they were born.
>>   Then, on the genetic level, there are women who, according to
>>   their  chromosomes, should be male (they have female
>>   genitalia, but they can't reproduce).
>>
>>   The old gender binary begins to look pretty Procrustean when
>>   confronted with this welter of permutations.
>>
>>   My son is part of what might be called a "fourth wave" in
>>   gender activism. The first wave was clearly the feminist
>>   movement, followed by the next tsunami, as gays, lesbians, and
>>   bisexuals established their identities as individuals and
>>   communities. Then came a surge of queer activism, which
>>   challenged even gay notions of what was normal. But to my son
>>   and his peers -- who are mostly under 30 -- those three sea
>>   changes now seem merely to be part of a conservative undertow.
>>
>>
>>   This generation believes that earlier activists, while
>>   challenging various kinds of gender abuses, still clung to the
>>   notion of the criticality of gender per se. First-wave
>>   feminists, for example, never doubted that being a woman was
>>   essential to their mission. Likewise, although gay men,
>>   lesbians, and bisexuals challenged the notion of mandated or
>>   "normal" sexual preference, they saw their identity as defined
>>   by a ratio of one's gender to one's sexual choice. That is, a
>>   lesbian could only be defined as a woman who chose another
>>   woman as a sexual partner. Even some conservative
>>   post-operative transsexuals cling to the gender binary, saying
>>   "I was born the wrong gender, and now I've become the right
>>   one."
>>
>>   Members of the fourth wave, who like to call themselves
>>   "trannies" (perhaps in solidarity with 60's "hippies") see
>>   challenging the fixity of gender as their most important goal.
>>   My son reported to me that gender is so complex that there are
>>   100 genders, and that we can morph through 20 of them in a
>>   single morning. He indicts the quotidian norms that force
>>   people to subscribe to one gender, to be legally identified as
>>   having one, and to be forbidden to use certain social spaces
>>   by that specific aspect of identity. Indeed, the International
>>   Bill of Gender Rights, drafted and adopted in 1993, lists as
>>   fundamental the prerogative to define one's gender identity,
>>   control and change one's own body, and have access to
>>   "gendered space."
>>
>>   When my wife and I asked my son why he thinks he is
>>   transgendered, his snappy retort was, "I don't know which
>>   bathroom to use." When he is wearing a dress, should he use
>>   the men's room or the women's room?
>>
>>   The transgendered concept allows for some interesting family
>>   groupings. A father in a couple might undergo sexual
>>   reassignment surgery and thereby become a lesbian, if he
>>   remains with his wife. Or a cross-gendered bisexual can pair
>>   off with an intersexual lesbian. A cross-dressing male can
>>   live with a post-op male-to-female and appear to fit nicely
>>   into the prototype of the typical American family. The
>>   possibilities are limitless. They make Ozzie and Harriet look
>>   like something from the late Devonian period, and Ellen
>>   DeGeneres's coming out seem as staid as that of a debutante.
>>
>>   I understood all this intellectually, but I was taking a fair
>>   amount of time to process it emotionally. My wife initially
>>   insisted on an N.I.M.H. -- Not In My House -- policy in regard
>>   to cross-dressing. That stance resulted partly from
>>   embarrassment and shame about how friends and family might
>>   perceive our son if they knew the truth.
>>
>>   Somewhat conveniently, the grandparents had already
>>   transmogrified to that genderless beyond, so at least we
>>   wouldn't have to explain the situation to them. Our
>>   16-year-old daughter thought the whole thing was kind of cool
>>   and couldn't understand why we were so upset. "Some boys in my
>>   school come to class in skirts or wearing lipstick, and we
>>   think they're sexy." My brother, a financial analyst living in
>>   the suburbs, was blase. His college-age son was open-minded,
>>   having lived his four university years in a frat house, where
>>   he had no doubt seen worse.
>>
>>   We were uncertain about what to say to our friends. The
>>   artistic types were intrigued, and even offered some fetching
>>   outfits, if needed. One male friend was judgmental, and said
>>   our son was manipulating us. But that same friend sheepishly
>>   admitted that, when his wife bought new high-heeled shoes, he
>>   had to be the first to wear them at home. Another friend, who
>>   is part of a gay couple, confessed that his dream was to be
>>   married in a wedding gown, something his more conventional
>>   partner just would not hear of. In fact, a lot of folks
>>   stepped up to our confessional with Oprah-like stories of
>>   their own journeys into the backrooms of sexuality, gender,
>>   and fashion.
>>
>>   In the midst of all this turmoil, or because of it, my son
>>   decided to go to an indie-rock concert in Washington State. He
>>   would take a Greyhound bus and camp  out. He asked me to help
>>   him get organized, which is how I ended up in the Kmart as his
>>   shopping consultant. He packed a few dresses into his
>>   backpack, along with his other clothing, and left. All of us
>>   felt relieved.
>>
>>   We began to get phone calls from bus stations scattered across
>>   the country. At first our son was friendly, but one late-night
>>   call from Fargo turned angry quickly. "I've been thinking, and
>>   I'm really upset that you won't accept me for who I am." My
>>   groggy response was that I was doing the best I could. "That's
>>   not good enough. I can't believe that you, of all people, who
>>   teach about the rights of people with disabilities, people of
>>   color, working-class people, can't accept this. These are my
>>   people! They are being discriminated against, cast out, and
>>   you can't accept it?"
>>
>>   For the first time, I felt that he was completely right. I had
>>   no counterargument. Whether I liked it or not, a
>>   disenfranchised and despised group was in need of support;
>>   what made it difficult to accept was the fact that my son was
>>   in that group. I had to confront my own prejudices and realize
>>   that I was a bigot. I, like many of my peers, thought that a
>>   man in a dress was either humorous or pathetic, as so many
>>   episodes of Monty Python or Benny Hill have suggested. It was
>>   true that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry about my son.
>>
>>
>>   My son asked that I read some of the books he had brought
>>   home, and I agreed. I also ordered some books through
>>   Amazon.com. (Then, when I logged on, I got helpful messages
>>   like, "If you liked Transvestism: A Handbook, you'll like
>>   Bound and Gagged.") I not only read through the material, but,
>>   since I would be teaching a course in the fall called "The
>>   Different Body," I decided then to put some of the books in my
>>   syllabus. (It is interesting to me that my reaction, as an
>>   academic, was to teach about what was mystifying and edifying
>>   me.)
>>
>>   I've just about gotten used to seeing my child in women's
>>   clothing. At first I experience a confusing, cognitively
>>   dissonant moment, but then I remember that he is the child
>>   I've known for years, with the same brio for life he's always
>>   had, the same excitement over his ideas, commitment to
>>   fairness and justice, and love for us. The only difference is
>>   that he's in a skirt. I remember my mother's agony over my
>>   long hair in the 1960's -- how she asked me not to come to her
>>   place of business because she was embarrassed, and how much
>>   that hurt me. I knew as a parent, and as an activist, that I
>>   could not legitimately reproduce that rejection.
>>
>>   Our life has gone on. My son announced that he wanted to bring
>>   his girlfriend, a "bidyke" as he described her, home for the
>>   holiday season. I learned that the term "dyke" has now been
>>   freed up from its dependence on sexual preference, and is an
>>   operative word to describe a strong woman. When she arrived,
>>   she seemed a bit androgynous, but not remotely butch. And she
>>   wore a prom dress out one night. We all liked her, and it was
>>   a memorable Christmas.
>>
>>   Meanwhile, my graduate course on "The Different Body" went
>>   very well. The body in question was a little more different
>>   than it had been in the previous year's version. But the
>>   students were barely fazed by the transgendered component of
>>   the course. They were blase, even when I told them about my
>>   son or showed them pictures that I thought were pretty
>>   shocking -- like a photograph of Tala Candra Brandeis by Loren
>>   Cameron titled "Biology Is Not Our Destiny," depicting a nude
>>   person with long, flowing hair, breasts, tattoos, and a penis.
>>   It seemed to be all in a day's work for this generation of
>>   cultural-studies adepts, brought up as they had been with
>>   RuPaul and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I
>>   shared with the class my son's zine entitled Boy Is Girl and
>>   gave them his e-mail address so they could converse with him
>>   about these subjects. My son was pleased with the
>>   correspondence, and the students were, too.
>>
>>   The story is not over. In the months since his announcement,
>>   my son's attitudes toward some issues have shifted. He has
>>   come into conflict with more-conservative elements in the
>>   trannie community who do not agree with his radical politics.
>>   He has had to deal with the fact that some people within that
>>   community do not regard him as truly transgendered, because he
>>   hasn't taken hormones or had an operation. He is evolving a
>>   position that I have come to respect and from which I have
>>   learned a great deal. In many ways, he occupies a similar
>>   position to the one I do in disability studies. I am not a
>>   person with disabilities, and I have to negotiate that liminal
>>   status on a regular basis. In addition, both he and I are
>>   against the narrowness of certain kinds of identity politics
>>   and see our goal as opening up the question of identity
>>   through a notion of the mutability of the body. So, we talk a
>>   lot about the ways in which our interests intersect. I've
>>   helped him with his zines, and he's helped me with my course.
>>
>>
>>   As an academic, my job is to learn from the world. And if that
>>   world comes into my house in women's clothing, spouting Eve
>>   Kosofsky Sedgwick, then I have to learn from that. As a
>>   father, my pleasure is to love and accept my children. When
>>   those two roles come together, in a kind of serendipitous
>>   confluence, one must be quick to recognize the opportunity
>>   that presents itself. My child and I have grown closer through
>>   what might have been a terrible conflict, one that in some
>>   families might have been the end of the line. What made a
>>   better scenario possible was that same intellectual desire to
>>   learn, to know, and to encourage that has been behind all my
>>   teaching and scholarship.
>>
>>   The other day, my son announced that he wanted my wife and me
>>   to refer to him as our "daughter." He asked that we not use
>>   masculine pronouns or nouns to describe him. I told him that I
>>   probably could not find it in myself to call him my
>>   "daughter," that my sense of the English language was that it
>>   was not sufficiently flexible, nor was I, to accomplish that
>>   gender purification of my linguistic practice. This was
>>   finally a moment, I felt, when the old binary dog couldn't
>>   learn new transgendered tricks. We got into an argument, and
>>   he hurled Judith Butler at me again. She was getting to be my
>>   nemesis.
>>
>>   My son knew that I was writing this article, and he approved.
>>   But when I told him that it would be impossible for me to
>>   write this piece without using masculine pronouns, he was
>>   upset. He suggested that I use "s/he" or "ze," and I responded
>>   that I was sure the Chronicle style sheet was pretty limited
>>   in that regard. After some discussion, he said, "OK, but just
>>   do it at the end of the essay." So I told her I would. After
>>   all, I figured, I wasn't losing a son, I was gaining a
>>   daughter.
>>
>>   Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English at the State
>>   University of New York at Binghamton. His most recent book is
>>   My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness
>>   (University of Illinois Press, 2000).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>_________________________________________________________________
>>
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>>_________________________________________________________________
>>Copyright 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
>
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>Mark Connolly | The LEAD Center | University of Wisconsin-Madison
>[log in to unmask] | (608) 265-4935 | fax: 265-5923
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