Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism (review)

Sex Change, Social Change is a short volume consisting of essays, speeches, interviews, and letters by Viviane Namaste, a Canadian transsexual activist, sociologist, and semiotician who teaches women's studies at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University, in Québec. Namaste's two main goals in this book are (1) to reveal the shortcomings of discussions about transsexuality limited to questions of identity, and (2) to provide an alternative framework that will enable more useful conversations about transsexuality.

Who is a woman? Are male-to-female transsexuals women? Should they be included in women's spaces? These questions of identity dominate discussions about transsexuality among contemporary Canadian feminists and transsexual/transgender theorists and activists in the English-speaking world, according to Namaste. She grants the importance of exploring the different ways that sex and gender can be defined, but she argues that an exclusive focus on identity obscures other critical issues about transsexuality because it leaves out any real understanding of transsexuals' lives as they are lived. Theorists who measure transsexuality on scales of gender liberation or deconstruction of the hegemonic sex/gender system fail to respect transsexuals because they fail to understand transsexuality on its own terms. Namaste writes that transsexuality "is about the banality of buying some bread, of making photocopies, of getting your shoe fixed." The focus on identity renders invisible the obstacles to buying bread, making photocopies, or getting one's shoe fixed, because it elides the ways in which transsexuals are institutionally oppressed, marginalized, and erased, and the ways in which oppression of transsexuals is linked to other systematic forms of oppression, such as those based on class, occupational status, and race or ethnicity. Sex Change, Social Change draws on the excellent, more extensive analysis of erasure Namaste provides in Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, published in 2000 by the University of Chicago Press.

Namaste is superb when elucidating links among different forms of oppression. Her extensive community work and research on transsexuals and HIV/AIDS, prostitution, and incarceration enables her to provide significant insights into the ways in which predominantly white middle-class discourses of respectability tend to divert attention from those transsexuals who are most marginalized because they cannot get access to health care or shelters, because of the criminalization of prostitution, or because of incarceration in which they are subjected to legally mandated violence.

Namaste recommends that feminists and others integrate transsexual politics and theory into their work, not to speak about gender and transsexuality but to make broader links among the structures that regulate marginalized people. This recommendation is typical of Namaste's "either/or," instead of "both/and," approach. Namaste recounts some transsexual-specific ways in which transsexuals are shut out of the social world; for example, without vaginoplasty, a male-to-female transsexual cannot change sex on legal documents in Québec. As she remarks, this makes it very difficult not only to gain employment or access to health care but also to negotiate mundane tasks like picking up a registered letter from the post office. To remove this particular institutional barrier, activists must speak about transsexuality and might do so without making broader links. A recent court ruling established that a male-to-female transgendered person in Québec may add a female name to her birth certificate just in case she demonstrates that she has lived as a woman for five years. But this is not so easy, as Namaste notes, for those who do not work in the legal economy or go to school. Namaste's insistence that we attend to the lives of the most marginalized of transsexuals, as they are structured by interlocking systems of oppression, is crucial, because activism aimed at achieving the kind of change recently made by the court bolsters the erasure of many transsexuals from social institutions and the everyday social world.

Discussions of different aspects of transsexuality and the various controversies that have arisen around transsexuality provide...