Becoming a Visible Man

Chapter 4 Body of Knowledge

89 4 Body of Knowledge Surgery is not what transsexualism is ultimately about. Transsexualism is about life. It’s about relationships, and not just intimate ones. Being a transsexual is not something we do in the privacy of our own bedrooms; it affects every aspect of our lives, from our driver’s licenses to our work histories, from our birth certificates to our school transcripts to our parents’ wills, and every relationship represented by those paper trails. Still, for many of us, surgery is a crucial part of managing our gender variance. Some people have characterized transsexual individuals as highly conservativeconformistswho “buyinto”thebinarygendersystemandgravitate to the extremes of stereotypical, culturally-defined gender behavior, and the fact that some of us want surgery is used as evidence for this theory. I’m sure there are individual transsexual people who are like that—who think of themselves as inadequate if they don’t measure up to particular stereotypes of gender roles—just as there are non-transsexual people who feel the same way: for example, the woman I saw on some television magazineshowwholovesBarbiesomuchshe’shadscoresof plasticsurgery to make herself like Barbie; and then there’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Body modification is a complex phenomenon. People have done it since the beginning of time,for various reasons and with various results.Changing one’s sex is just one way of changing one’s body,and a sex change is not necessarily part of a search for perfection or a reification of stereotypes. The reality of gender is that anyone who has not opted for androgyny has usually accepted the binary gender system by age three, and no one makes much of a fuss about it, so why imply that transsexual Green,BecomingFinal.indd 89 3/24/04 2:36:04 PM Becoming a Visible Man 90 people have any greater share of responsibility for reinforcing that binary? When it comes to generalizations about bodies, that binary is a given. It’s what one does with the social aspects of that binary that count. What most people fail to understand is that, because of their gender variance, most transsexual people are not normatively male or female either before or after transition. Most of us are not seeking perfection when measured againstexternalstereotypes;rather,mostof usareseekinganinternalsense of comfort when measured against our own sense of ourselves. When we undertake a sex transition (which in some cases may look or feel like a gender transition) the purpose, usually, is to facilitate our being perceived socially by others as the men or women we know ourselves to be, even though we may acquire or retain physical differences from other men or women in the process. Rationality and vanity may play equal parts in the quest for a body that is pleasing, both to oneself and to others. Before embarking on a transition, transpeople have homework to do. We must know when and how to find a therapist or gender program that can help us sort out the issues and, if we need it, initiate access to medical technology. We should also have an idea about the legal and other social issues involved: what our legal status will be; how we change our records, how we obtain healthcare beyond the transitional time. These topics are covered in other publications (e.g.,Bergstedt,1999; Brown and Rounsley, 1996; Denny, 1994; Ettner, 1996, 1999; and Whittle, 2002), or may be exploredinnetworkinggroups.Ialwaysemphasizethatmedicaltransitions are not right for everyone;nonetheless,people always have questions about hormones and surgery, and information specific to the FTM transition is often difficult to find. This chapter will cover some of the basics. Modern hormonal and surgical sex reassignment technology has been available in the United States and Europe for well over sixty years (Meyerowitz ,2002).But the process is not perfect.No one can tell exactly what will happen to any particular body when any hormone is administered.No one can predict, as pre-adolescents, what we will look like when we grow up,and neither can we know precisely what cross-sex hormones will do to ourbodies.Doctorsknowonlygenerallywhatresultsmaybeexpectedfrom hormone therapy. Neither are surgical outcomes uniform or consistent. I’m not a physician, so nothing I say here should be construed as medical advice. Consider this a report from one explorer of the territory. Green,BecomingFinal.indd 90 3/24/04 2:36:04 PM Body of...