Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa

Introduction: Transition Matters

Introduction Transition Matters In 1994, transsexual Simone Heradien underwent sex reassignment procedures funded by the South African state. The timing of her personal transition was significant: 1994 . . . was also the year we were going through the democracy , the transition, so it was a lot of things. . . . When we were going through our transition stage, there was what we call the RDP, getting water and electricity to those who didn’t have [them]. The RDP stands for the Reconstruction and Development Programme, and that was 1994, the same year that I had my op. So I said to everybody, well you’ve heard of the RDP, that’s me! . . . I was definitely reconstructed and developed. (Heradien 1997)1 As Simone indicates, South African gender liminality is intimately connected to the histories and political economy of South Africa itself. Under apartheid, many South African transsexuals had access to free sex reassignment surgeries and, following surgeries, were able to legally alter the sex listed on their birth certificates. Transsexuals’ transitions were, in some ways, sanctioned by the state. But since the end of apartheid, publicly funded sex reassignment programs like the one accessed by Simone have largely ceased. And while the South African Constitution, one of the most progressive in the world, promises freedom from discrimination based on sex, gender, and sexual orientation, during the transitional years of South Africa’s new democracy (1993–2003) it was legally impossible to change one’s sex.2 What circumstances led to these apparent paradoxes, and what do they tell us about the materialization of sex and gender with race? This 1 2 / Sex in Transition question is the foundation for Sex in Transition and its exploration of the raced and classed contradictions constituting gendered boundaries. To date, gender liminality and transgender in South Africa, particularly their concurrence with South Africa’s political transition from apartheid to democracy, have been largely unexamined. Sex in Transition exposes and analyzes cracks in the man/woman binary by investigating raced and classed challenges to dichotomous gendered norms. It does so through explication of the medical constitution of gender and sex, legislation under the apartheid and transitional states, specific instances of social discrimination, and narratives of gender liminality. This book focuses centrally on concepts of transition. Dr. William Bridges begins his well-known series of books on life’s transitions with an observation that transitions usually constitute three phases—an ending , a period of confusion and distress, and a new beginning (1980: 9). This formation is also replicated in understandings of transition in the social sciences. The political transition in South Africa has been welldocumented over the past two decades, with the ending of apartheid, the simultaneous euphoria and panic that followed, and the promise of the new South Africa that has yet to be actualized. William Spurlin argues that the disruption of normalized social and political categories offered by the ending of apartheid, “. . . marks the transition as a queer space of analysis” (2006: 19). Gender transitions, while usually explained in medical terms, have much broader manifestations. During a group meeting of contributors to the important recent anthology, Trans: Transgender Life Stories in South Africa, participants described their understandings of this concept: We had a lengthy discussion at one of our meetings defining what transition means and when this process begins. Robert felt that transitioning starts, “the moment you have confessed to yourself that your body doesn’t match your gender identity,” and ties with the permission to think and feel about yourself in a different way. Tebogo felt that transitioning starts, “when a person starts to change living as their biological gender, when they start living as the opposite gender . . . maybe by binding and cross-dressing.” Robert reflected that in the stories we have collected, “all these people are living it, not thinking it. Living is a nice word, because living can be in a closed space Introduction / 3 or an open space, it can be in your home.” (In Morgan et al. 2009: 11, emphasis in original) It is the broadest sense of transition on which I focus in Sex in Transition . I am not interested in replicating medical models of linear and temporally-bound movement from one gender to another; instead I focus on the space of transition and its parallels and connections to South Africa’s political transition. One psychologist I interviewed who works with transsexuals explained the impetus for understanding gender during this...