Psych of Gender week 6 paper

Psych of Gender Assignment 6-1
Gender Outlaw: on men, women, and the rest of us by Kate Bornstein

When Kate was a small boy, she had a chair in a dark corner of the basement that she pretended was her gender change machine. She could sit in it, become a girl, and imagine great adventures for herself. This was a vital coping mechanism when her world did not allow any gender ambiguity and provided stress relief from the expectation to act like a boy. It was the first of many ways that Kate attempted to make sense of a world in which she didn’t feel she fit.

Later, Kate discovered the theater, which allowed her to escape into the lives of the characters she portrayed. She felt powerful in giving voice to others’ writing, but ached for the absence of her own voice. I believe this is one of the reasons she found it necessary to write this book.

Over the course of the years Kate married three times only to have each one fail. She experimented with drugs and Scientology, but also found those lacking. Eventually she found the Living Theater Company, which came closer to what she sought, but still fell short. She began living part time as a woman, considering herself a transsexual lesbian, and started becoming involved with queer theater. She was hurt to learn that lesbian separatists wouldn’t accept her and boycotted the first play she directed.

She entered therapy to begin preparation for her physical transition through genital surgery. In the next stage of her emotional development she began to see herself as a woman who used to be a man. After some time that gave way to a self-perception as a woman with no qualifiers. The final step in her new consciousness was to separate herself from gender completely, deconstructing the very notion of the bi-polarity of gender and even the idea of an existence between man and woman, because for there to be a middle there must also be extremes. At this point she began calling herself a gender outlaw, non-conforming to any expectation.

One of her ongoing coping mechanisms is humor. She particularly likes camp, which allows her to poke fun at gender roles and play with identity in a healthy way. She also draws parallels between enacting gender and sexual games as healthy play-related behavior. I agree. Keeping a healthy sense of humor about all aspects of our lives, sex lives included, is vital for a well-balanced life.

Acceptance seems to have been a driving need for most of Kate’s life. She chose to reject the male role assigned to her, though she says she never hated her penis. She only hated that it made her a man. There is one incident she relates that is especially telling. When meeting with a former lover and her new boyfriend, the boyfriend has a slip of the tongue and refers to Kate as “he.” Her instant reaction is one of shame for failing to “pass.” She feels as if she’s been exposed as an imposter and is being rejected. None of the three of them know how to handle the mistake and it ends up standing painfully unspoken between them.

Another ongoing search for acceptance underlies much of her contact with the feminist community. Radical feminist separatists believe in establishing women-only spaces to provide emotional and physical safety completely apart from men. Some of these women could not accept Kate as a woman, insisting that because she was once male and grew up with male privilege she could not ever really know the oppression that “women born women” experience. She seems to sadly acknowledge that even as a lesbian she’ll never be considered one of them no matter what she does.

This is a conflict I still see played out in online feminist communities. Safe women spaces among blogs will limit posting and comments to women only, and that has led in some cases to anti-trans discrimination. Some have said that this is with good reason; that in previous organizations those advancing transphobia have experienced pressure and a battle for control with a transwoman. Perhaps so. But in my opinion that is no excuse for drawing lines to decide for someone else “who is a woman” any more than I consider it acceptable for others to decide “who is a feminist.” If a woman chooses to identify as such, and to share in the work of ending oppression, they are welcome in my movement. We must be cautious even against small biases, such as the accepted motto “No uterus no opinion,” because it subtly advances the idea of biology as destiny.

I found much to like and admire in this book, and much to stir my thoughts. But despite the author’s expressed anti-gender essentialism, by choosing surgical reassignment from male to female she seems to contradicts her own contention that gender is not binary. If this were truly so, she could have existed in a state of ambiguous fluid gender with male genitalia as easily as with female genitalia. She seems to be endorsing “male” as the default, with female a broad category encompassing everything that is defined as “not male.” In my opinion that casts femaleness as the generic Other, merely “not male” rather than a choice of its own.

The author seems remarkably self-aware of every step of her life except for this one, and I freely acknowledge that my questions on this point could be my traditionally gendered privilege showing. I believe that for opting out of gender to be a valid choice, so must opting to identify as male or female, irregardless of genetics or genital presentation.

In passing Kate mentions that she’s glad she had the surgery, and because of that I recognize it was the right choice for her, and affirm her right to choose. It is possible that what was necessary for her self-acceptance at the point in time that she underwent surgery no longer seemed so important later on in her emotional growth. But I would have liked to see the question addressed.