Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (review)

David Valentine's ethnography of the category of transgender begins in a room full of gay people. Valentine describes sitting in the room as a gay man whose sex and gender have been consistently interpreted as male according to medical, legal, social, and personal sensibilities. The people who share the room with him do not share this cis-sex/gender status.¹ Instead, they are male-bodied people who identify themselves using a variety of culturally meaningful, gender-specific terms: they refer to themselves as girls, fem queens, women; most simultaneously refer to themselves as gay. It is a transgender support group, but no one in the room identifies as transgender, and they virtually never use that term. If they are, according to themselves, gay, then what is the category "transgender" doing in the room, and what impact does it have in their lives?

Far from deriving organically from their diverse lives and identities, it seems that "transgender" has been imported—even imposed—from outside sources: Social service providers, academics, and some portions of what may be termed a transgender liberation or rights movement. Those same sources, along with parts of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, prefer to reserve the word "gay" for cis-sexual men who are attracted to cis-sexual men. The distinction between "gay" and "transgender" in this case reinforces social hierarchies in which only cis-sex/ gender male-bodied people (like Valentine) are "really" gay and have a rightful claim to the term; in the same rubric, women-identified male-bodied people are "really" transgender and mistaken or ignorant in their claims to gayness. Valentine thus wonders, can everyone in the room call themselves gay?

Valentine's question derives in part from the apparent contradictions he encounters in the transgender support group. More importantly, his question effectively critiques the neatness of the constructed distinction between sexual and gender identity. A long history of medical practices, academic theorizing, social movement efforts, and social service provision have worked hard to construct distinctions between sexual preference (for example, homosexuality) and gender identity or expression (for example, transsexualism). But, as Valentine shows, the institutionalization of the categorical distinction between transgender, gay, and straight not only separates sexuality and gender, but simultaneously reinforces race and class hierarchies according to the priviledged logics of heteronormativity and homonormativity.

Based on fieldwork conducted in New York City in the mid–1990s, Imagining Transgender is an exciting addition to the rapidly growing, interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. It offers a great deal to conversations taking place within gender and sexuality studies, women's studies, cultural studies, and disciplines such as history and Valentine's own field of anthropology. An activist as well as an academic, Valentine reminds us to be aware of the ways in which scholars participate in producing social categories that fail to serve the people who purportedly fall into them. Rather than analyzing the lives and plights of people who may or may not think of themselves as transgender, Imagining Transgender is first and foremost an analysis of the emergence, power, and failures of the category of transgender; in short, it is an ethnography of a category. As such, the book elucidates "transgender" as a central cultural site for defining gender and sexuality and the relation between them. Although transgender is imagined as an umbrella category to serve an infinitely broad range of gender-variant people, its history as a field of knowledge makes it an inherently exclusionary category. Such categories then result in intellectual and social practices that ultimately fail to reflect a significant portion of people whom the category purports to encompass, and may even contribute to their disenfranchisement in various social contexts.

Valentine's ethnography is rooted in several Manhattan neighborhoods and community spaces, each of which is characterized by subcultural expressions and understandings of gender/sex identities and behaviors. For instance, there is the support group for transgender-identified people with HIV at a hospital...