Reading Transgender, Rethinking Women's Studies

Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue by Leslie Feinberg.Boston: Beacon Press, 1998, 147pp., $20.00 hardcover, $13.00 paper.

Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998, 329pp., $49.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper.

Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality by Jay Prosser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 270pp., $47.50 hardcover, $17.00 paper.

Representing the best popular and scholarly contributions to transgender/sex studies, and with their mutual concern with female-to-male sex and gender crossing (among other topics), these three books mark an important shift in scholarship on gender and sexuality. Trans studies has reached a level of autonomy and sophistication that firmly establishes it as a field with its own theoretical and political questions. Of course, connections to feminist and queer theory are still very apparent in these texts, and all three authors are committed--to varying degrees--to reading trans identities against the backdrop of male dominance and heteronormativity. It's no longer enough, however, for feminist readers to dismiss the projects of trans theorists and activists as epiphenomenal to feminist discourses or even queer theory, or to view trans studies as an optional extra in discussions of sex and gender. These books represent the best arguments against this position, and thus offer a new challenge to the inclusivity, scope, and terms of "women's studies."

"Transsexual" and "transgender" are essentially contested terms within and outside trans communities, and part of what is at stake in these texts is the relation between established sex, gender, and sexuality labels on the one hand, and these emergent categories on the other. "Trans-" terms capture various kinds of sex and gender crossing, and various levels of permanence to these transitions: from medical technologies that transform sexed bodies, to cross-dressing, to passing, to a certain kind of "life-plot," to being legible as one's birth sex but with a "contradictory" gender inflection. For some, the adjective "transsexed" captures the specific project of changing one's sexed body through surgery and hormones, while for others it more broadly describes a distinctive form of narrative. "Transgendered" might describe any project of gender crossing or blending that eschews medicalized interventions, or the term might be used as a catch-all that includes anyone who disturbs established understandings of gender dichotomy or its mapping to sexual dimorphism. The authors of these books epitomize the complexity of trans identities: Judith Halberstam identifies as a masculine woman, Jay Prosser as an FTM (female to male) transsexual, and Leslie Feinberg as a trans person who sometimes uses the shorthand "masculine female" but whose life and work are actually not assimilable to any extant category. These authors all seek to write their own experience as part of their intellectual projects. They all build novel perspectives on what is erased, omitted, or glossed over in existing scholarship and political activism, and all try to initiate new theoretical paradigms and recast political movement. As I hope to show here, there are also tensions within and among these three texts, marking out a conceptual terrain where trans studies is established as a diverse field of inquiry within which protagonists disagree about how various identities should be understood and what political projects they imply.

Leslie Feinberg: Trans Liberation

Feinberg's Trans Liberation is the popular book of the three. Clearly oriented toward a general audience, it is short, pithy, and represents diverse trans voices in a pastiche of speeches and commentaries by Feinberg and friends. The book's project is to present trans liberation as a political movement "capable of fighting for justice" (5). This movement, in Feinberg's account, includes "masculine females and feminine males, cross-dressers, transsexual men and women, intersexuals born on the anatomical sweep between female and male, gender-blenders, many other sex and gender-variant people, and our significant others" (5). Indeed, in the short "portraits" by other contributors, an impressively wide range of queer identities and stories inflected...