Psych of Gender week 7 paper 1

Psychology of Gender
Gender Outlaw, Part II

To read Gender Outlaw, one would think that Kate Bornstein has spent most of her life in a vacuum, elementally alone and only occasionally brushing against the world of another. In addressing the reactions of people in her life to her transition, what to me is as interesting as what she says is what she doesn’t say. With the exception of a photo caption (“My mother was so proud of having given birth to a son. Today, our friendship is more than either mother-son or mother-daughter.”) and a question asking if her decision to become a woman was just another role, there is no mention of her family and close friends’ reaction to her gender transition at all. Likewise it is only in a one line passing remark that we learn she had been married three times while still a man. And we know almost nothing about her romantic life aside from a mention that her lover is transitioning from female to male. There is no mention of a father, or siblings, or cousins, neighbors, or school friends; only mother, nameless ex-wives, and Catherine who is becoming David.

She writes of only one personal incident, when, after her surgery, she meets with a former lover and the lover’s new boyfriend. In conversation the boyfriend slips and refers to her as “he.” None of them know how to handle it, so they don’t, letting the mistake hang in the air unaddressed. Kate’s reaction to this is one of shame at not successfully passing, blaming herself rather than the boyfriend, and feeling rejected. I wonder how many other incidents like this she endured that she does not mention.

While her intent in the book is to present broad theoretical ponderings through the lens of “the personal is political,” it seems odd to me that her relationships stay so completely off stage. This implies to me that either the people in her life accepted her transition without comment, or else that the subject is too painful to delve into. I suspect it is not the former. Were that the case, I don’t think acceptance from strangers would not be nearly so important to her as it appears to be in the first half of the book.

During and after her transition, Kate sought acceptance and solidarity within the feminist community. Too often, she didn’t find it. Separatists rejected her, claiming that after spending thirty years benefiting from male privilege she could not know the trials that “women born women” experience. They went so far as to boycott her first play.

Next she turned to the gay and lesbian communities, but found no harbor there. She discovered that there seemed to be no room for a transgendered lesbian within their fold, despite the struggle lesbians and gays had gone through to gain marginal acceptance.

Assimilation seems to be her point of dissention with lesbians and gay men, as well with as some “mainstream” transsexuals, who seek to be included in the current culture instead of overthrowing it. She believed that in order to guarantee their survival in the dominant culture, they had to reject those more outside of that culture than they were if they were to be accepted. She was left feeling rejected and alone.

Whereas the first half of the book is a quest for acceptance, the second half chronicles her journey from outcast to activist. In the theater she develops a group of gender-queer actors to stage productions which produce work which challenged gender and sexual roles. Her own work Hidden: A Gender was produced by Theater Rhinoceros. She seems to see the theater both as self-expression and outreach. She has high standards for queer theater, wanting it to be more challenging than entertaining, but it must also validate her world view of a genderless society, one which does not embrace assimilation. She laments that queer artists are not able to support themselves by doing their art full time, yet cautions that art must be separated from its funding source in order to maintain its integrity.

I think her decision to appear on Geraldo and other television talk shows is an extension of her concept of queer theater. My impression is that she considers herself to be subverting the bipolar gender system by standing front and center and answering every question brought to her. She is advocating for thousands of faceless Others as well as herself with these appearances. She seeks to challenge the viewer’s notion of his or her own gender, yet at the same time a line from the end of the book, where she speaks to her anonymous female readers who know themselves to be women, haunts me: “I want to get down on my knees in front of you, I want to get down on my knees, and I want to look up into your eyes and I want to say tell me! Tell me what it’s like!”

And so she lives with ambivalence. I don’t think she considers this a bad thing. The world is a wild, wonderful place of infinite variety in colors, textures, flavors and sensations. In her vision of future, someday a student may discover the work of gender outlaw writers such as herself and be struck by how quaint the notion of two genders was, so very long ago.

I hope she’s right.

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