Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa

Chapter 1: Prescribing Gender and Enforcing Sex

One Prescribing Gender and Enforcing Sex Under apartheid, many South African transsexuals had access to publicly funded sex reassignment surgeries and were allowed to legally alter the sex listed on their birth certificates. But since the end of apartheid, most public sex reassignment programs have ceased, and while the new South African Constitution promises freedom from discrimination based on sex and gender, from 1993–2003 it was impossible to change one’s sex legally. What circumstances led to this apparent paradox and what does it tell us about the constitution of gender in South Africa’s political transition? Apartheid allowed for a category—transsexual—that the post-apartheid state did not. This chapter explores reasons for this through an examination of the medical and legal treatment of transsexuals in South Africa from 1948 to 2003 and concludes that this apparent paradox is integral to ideas about the constitution of sex and gender as inseparable from South African politics and alliances. In short, the emergence of “transsexuality” as a medical and legal entity can be related to efforts to maintain apartheid order. To facilitate this consideration, I elucidate histories of medical sex reassignment procedures and their racialized and historicized sanction for particular groups of South Africans.1 I compare these histories to legal developments concerning transsexuality in South Africa under apartheid and during the transition to democracy. Through this analysis, transnational discourse about the emergence of the category “transsexual” in South Africa is revealed, as is the temporality of this category itself. Temporality provides a useful framing of the movement and mobility of this category in conjunction with the politico-historical forces, considering how what it means to be a transsexual has changed over time. This chapter also explores ideological differences about the fixity of gender versus the fixity of sex. These differences are reflected in dissimilar yet overlapping medical and legal histories and change over time through apartheid and the transition to democracy. Through this 43 44 / Sex in Transition examination, Edward Said’s notion of “traveling theories” is analytically useful to articulate the ways South African gendered and sexed categories work with theories emanating from the global North and South. The slippery importance of the idea of sex and its raced connection to heteropatriarchy are paramount here. The medical and legal treatments of transsexuality and their contradictions must be mediated through an analysis of the co-production of sex, gender, race, and class. Like Foucault, who finds a “spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirements of political ideology and those of medical technology” (Foucault 1973: 38–9), I believe that certain forms of subjectivity can be explicated by understanding their genealogies. Consequently, tracing medico-legal discourses of gender liminality in apartheid and transitional South Africa exposes complementary and contradictory ways that challenges to sex and gender binaries were understood and policed. Following apartheid’s adherence to order and simultaneous contradictions, discourses around transsexuality demonstrate conflicts over the raced constituition of gender.2 I. Foundations of “Transsexual” As discussed in the introduction to this text, a number of recent and related works have traced the history of ideas and concepts. Within African Studies, Marc Epprecht’s attention to the manifestation and movements of “heterosexuality” (2008) and Neville Hoad’s focus on the production of “homosexuality” (2007) over time and space are particularly instructive . Epprecht explains the conceptual and methodological difficulties he faced this way: Charting the history of an idea that is often unspoken and unrecorded is inherently more difficult than uncovering evidence of human activity. I acknowledge that my principle sources leave significant gaps that often require extrapolation from scant and geographically uneven evidence. (2008: 26) The challenges of Epprecht’s work were replicated in constituting this chapter. However, this kind of project is also quite valuable in that it eschews potentially troublesome topical analyses of communities based on concepts or identities that may not be uniformly adopted or appli- Prescribing Gender and Enforcing Sex / 45 cable. In this vein, anthropologist David Valentine explains how he began to rethink his project initially focused on “transgender communities” in New York City marginalized by race and class “in terms of examining the idea of transgender itself and how it is setting the terms by which people come to identify themselves and others” (2007: 21). Unpacking conceptions of “sex” and, more explicitly, “transsexual,” can be politically salient in illuminating the borders, stability, and movement of this concept under apartheid...