The Riddle of Gender
Deborah Rudacille
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0385721978
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When Deborah Rudacille learned that a close friend had decided to transition from female to male, she felt compelled to understand why.
Coming at the controversial subject of transsexualism from several angles–historical, sociological, psychological, medical–Rudacille discovered that gender variance is anything but new, that changing one’s gender has been met with both acceptance and hostility through the years, and that gender identity, like sexual orientation, appears to be inborn, not learned, though in some people the sex of the body does not match the sex of the brain.
Informed not only by meticulous research, but also by the author’s interviews with prominent members of the transgender community, The Riddle of Gender is a sympathetic and wise look at a sexual revolution that calls into question many of our most deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being.
century—that it just flies in the face of that construction. Part of why we (as transpeople) are so marginalized is that we offer this very radical critique of a very pervasive set of assumptions about gender. Q: But isn’t that critique somewhat paradoxical in that transsexuals do essentialize gender by saying that I need a certain kind of body in order to fully express my gender? Admittedly my position is a minority position, but I see that whole “transsexuals are essentializing gender because
with hermaphroditism. The transsexual is physically normal (though occasionally underdeveloped). These persons can somewhat appease their unhappiness by dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex, that is to say, by crossdressing, and they are, therefore, transvestites too. But while “dressing” would satisfy the true transvestite (who is content with his morphological sex), it is only incidental and not more than a partial or a temporary help to the transsexual. True transsexuals feel that they
strongly, based on his research, that to operate on intersexual people before they can tell you is a tremendous mistake. And this is based on hard data.” Regretting that research like Reiner’s was not being conducted forty years ago, when the neonatal intersex protocol was being developed, Paul McHugh says that “maybe if all that kind of data had been collected, we would have known better. We would have our feet more firmly on the ground.” Scientific hindsight is, of course, not very comforting
10:14 AM Page 123 MEN AND WOMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS 123 the pediatric surgeon, “that this was something that maybe should be done.” Paul McHugh, who was to close the Gender Identity Clinic at Hopkins shortly after he assumed the directorship of the department of psychiatry in 1975, confirmed in a 2002 interview that Money worked hard to persuade his colleagues to perform adult sex-reassignment surgery, in the face of considerable resistance. McHugh, who is adamantly opposed to sex-reassignment
identity has thus sometimes been reduced to a simple formula with four variables: male or female, gay or straight. This perspective is shared by members of the (straight) public who believe that a man who wears dresses can’t possibly be heterosexual, even if he sleeps with women only, just as some gay Americans believe that a female-bodied person who dresses like a man must be a masculine lesbian. Both gays and straights have a hard time believing that both of these individuals might in fact be