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Transgenderism and the Question of Embodiment: Promising

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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
TRANSGENDERISM AND THE

QUESTION OF EMBODIMENT
Promising Queer Politics?
Patricia Elliot and Katrina Roen
In “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias,” her contribution to

the special issue of diacritics on “Cross-identifications,” Biddy Martin raises
provocative questions about recent directions taken in some feminist and queer
theories, questions that have important implications for transgender theories.1
“Transgender theories” are those ideas and arguments that are articulated by
transgenderists, ideas that inform and are informed by transgender political move-
ments. To a large extent, these theories draw on human rights discourses to argue
for the rights of transpeople. These theories also articulate ideas about sex, gen-
der, bodies, and sexuality that constitute transgender theorizing as part of queer
theorizing more broadly. Our interest in this topic is to challenge transgender the-
orists to learn from the pitfalls into which feminist, gay, and lesbian theories have
occasionally fallen, as described well in Martin’s article.
Focusing primarily on the theories developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
and Judith Butler, Martin welcomes aspects of their work that: (1) address the
relationship of the body to the psyche, instead of making the body a biological
given or irrelevant; (2) question the inevitability of apparently stable oppositions
between male and female sexuality; and (3) problematize the relationship between
gender (i.e., femininity) and the category “women” (104 – 5). Moreover, queer the-
ory is praised for challenging “hegemonic assumptions about the continuities
between anatomical sex, social gender, gender identity, sexual identity, sexual
object choice, and sexual practice,” as well as for effecting a shift in focus from
“biological and psychological determinisms to analyses of social norms and their
complex roles in the formation of gendered identities” (105). Insofar as the trans-
gender theories developed by Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Gordene Olga
GLQ 4:2
pp. 231–261
Copyright © 1998 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press

232 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
MacKenzie, and Sandy Stone embrace these theoretical innovations — and for the
most part they do — then they also contribute to the critique of conventional and
problematic assumptions about gender and sexuality.2 In this respect, we find
transgender theories valuable, apart from whatever role they play in the political
movement to address the oppression of transgendered persons. Not surprisingly,
though, transgender theories encounter problems similar to those of some femi-
nist and queer theories and are therefore subject to the critical assessment Mar-
tin brings to bear on the latter. Although Martin does not address transgender
theories herself, we believe there is much to be learned through applying her cri-
tique of queer and feminist theorists’ work to transgender theory. Her critique,
plus the more complex theory she recommends, both inspire and inform our dis-
cussion here.
In what follows, we outline the limitations Martin cites in the work of
Sedgwick, Butler, and several lesbian feminist theorists, and we explore Martin’s
suggestions for overcoming these limitations. Second, we discuss the extent to
which these limitations also apply to transgender theories. Third, we outline how
psychoanalytic theory might contribute to the complexity Martin seeks, given its
emphasis on addressing internal as well as external dynamics when theorizing
gendered and transgendered subjects. Finally, we draw upon interviews with some
transgendered and transsexual participants to ascertain their relationship to con-
cepts that are central to Martin’s critique and to psychoanalytic and transgender
theorizing.
Martin’s Critique of Feminist, Queer, and Lesbian Theories
Although we will be focusing in this section on the limitations Martin finds in the
work of Sedgwick, Butler, and some lesbian feminist theorists, we would like to
note Martin’s extraordinary generosity as a reader and the care she takes to point
out the many valuable features of the theories she examines. This generosity can
be seen, for example, in Martin’s critique of how Sedgwick collapses the concepts
of sex and gender. Instead of attributing this problem exclusively to Sedgwick,
Martin proposes that “the lack of conceptual clarity in our efforts to distinguish
between sex and gender lead her to collapse these two terms.”3 Nonetheless, Mar-
tin exposes the consequences of such a move. On the one hand, gender is con-
strued by Sedgwick as fixed, miring, stagnant, and as subjecting one to the body
(105). On the other hand, escape from gender is rendered conceptually possible
either through “disembodiment” (fantasized, perhaps, by an imaginary negation of
specific bodily parts) or through visible gender crossing (105). Moreover, Martin

TRANSGENDERISM AND THE QUESTION OF EMBODIMENT 233

claims that sexuality, construed by Sedgwick as not only irreducible to gender but
distinct from it, appears to be “exempt from the enmeshments and constraints of
gender” (107).4
These theoretical formulations are contested by Martin on the following
grounds. First, the collapse of gender and sex and the alignment of both with con-
formity to convention means no positive take-up of gendered identity (i.e., a femi-
nine woman, a masculine man) is possible. Second, the question of how people
take up identities is rendered straightforward instead of complex. Third, Sedg-
wick’s (unintended?) association of gender with stability and with femininity, plus
her association of sexuality with excess and with masculinity, lends weight to the
idea that femininity is necessarily a trap.5 Fourth, Sedgwick’s valorization of cross-
ing as one means of “destabilizing problematic boundaries” tends to glorify those
who cross and to devalue those who do not. Martin points out that while women
who cross are often oppressed (Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues provides good exam-
ples),6 so too are those who do not cross. Fifth, Sedgwick’s view that sexuality has
“the capacity to collapse conventional gender definitions and distinctions,” as
opposed to engaging them in all their complexity, is a utopian one. Martin’s view
(discussed in more detail below) is that “identifications and desires that cross
traditional boundaries do not efface the complexities of gender identities and
expressions.”7
According to Martin, Butler avoids both the effacement of gender and the
conception of sexuality as “pure excess.”8 For Butler, gender identity, sexuality,
and sex, including the way we perceive all of these, are effects of historically spe-
cific discursive practices, especially those that insist upon binary gender (role)
divisions and that render sex the natural ground of everything else.9 Martin
remarks that “if for Sedgwick gender becomes sex . . . for Butler, sex becomes gen-
der,” since in Butler’s account both are read as effects of social norms and prac-
tices.10 Martin has mostly praise for Butler, who theorizes the effect of gender dis-
courses on psyches and bodies and who postulates that altering or challenging
those discourses will also alter or challenge psyches and bodies. In fact, Martin
appears almost reluctant to criticize Butler, attributing (curiously) to her “the cru-
cial ground-clearing work of opening the analysis of interiority to its construction
in and through relations of power” (119).11
However important Butler’s efforts to explore the social and historical con-
struction of subjectivity might be, Martin’s main critique of Butler, and the only
one she directs explicitly at her, is that she fails to conceive of the body as consti-
tuting a “drag” or a “limit on signification.”12 Since this is a contentious point, it
is useful to note Martin’s qualification that “the kind of drag it is cannot and

should not be predetermined, given a shape or content. But too little emphasis on
the difference it makes risks the elimination of difference in a kind of postmodern
humanism of (im)possibility” (119). In other words, although Martin does not
wish to specify how one’s embodiment as female or male matters, she believes it
does matter. For Martin, bodies and psyches are never purely effects of discursive
practices or of power relations; invested with the historicity of lived experience,
they have the potential to “exert pressure” on the normalizing processes through
which they are constructed. Beyond the effects of normalization emphasized by
Butler, Martin proposes that gender might also be “an expression of more funda-
mental psychological and social dynamics” (119).
True to her project of reconfiguring gender in its external productions
(norms/practices) and its internal productions (the way we perceive ourselves and
live out our relations to power), Martin’s critique of recent lesbian feminist theo-
ries is far-reaching. Her three major concerns all have implications for transgender
theorizing as well.
First, Martin challenges the supposedly subversive value of parody (in the
context of butch-femme roles) because it reinforces the norm of heterosexuality.
Instead of drawing attention to the primacy of a supposedly natural heterosexual-
ity and maintaining the gay/straight division, Martin suggests emphasizing the
“permeabilities of gay/straight boundaries” (113). Martin’s emphasis constitutes a
radical challenge to those who elevate visible crossing from one position of sex/
gender to another and who devalue “passing,” because both crossing and passing
unwittingly reify positions of sexual and/or gender identity. It is a different sort of
crossing that Martin refers to with the concept of the permeable boundary — a
boundary that is permeable still marks a difference between two sides, yet is capa-
ble of being passed through. If we understand the boundaries between sexed and
gendered positions to be permeable instead of rigid, they may be traversed and the
positions themselves apparently destabilized.
Second, Martin argues persuasively that insofar as the heterosexual norm
is a fictional ideal, its “structuring presence” does not determine heterosexual
relations any more than it does gay/lesbian relations (113). Moreover, once this
nondetermination is extended to heterosexuals, it seems that an avant-garde les-
bian claim to occupy “the site of a role-free, disembodied higher consciousness”
is misguided (116). Rather than construing sexual relations as either totally deter-
mined by the prevailing norms or wholly escaping those norms, Martin suggests
sexual identifications occupy differing relationships to the heterosexual norm or
engage it in various ways. This view coincides with our own conception of sexual
identities as spokes on a wheel that has the heterosexual norm in the center. That


is to say, we conceive of every sexual identity (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, hetero-
sexual) as having a relationship to dominant heterosexual norms or as represent-
ing different ways of responding to those norms.13 Our conception contrasts with
the pathological model (conformity/deviance) implied in the passing /crossing divi-
sion, where some people are seen to fit neatly into fictional norms and others are
seen as “outside” those norms. It also contrasts with the continuum model, which
measures distance from the norm (see below).
Third, in her discussion of lesbian theorizing about butch/femme identities,
Martin objects to two tendencies. The first is the location of butch as a point on a
continuum of gender dysphoria that extends from the butch to the transsexual. Mar-
tin points out that this move, however politically useful, makes it more difficult to
appreciate the complexities produced by various enactments of gender/sexuality.
The continuum model blurs crucial differences in amalgamating quite distinct
expressions of sexuality. The second problem in recurring depictions of butches as
defying normative gender roles and femmes as accepting them is that they create
“a role division that makes comfort or defiance seem the two apparent options in
relation to gender.”14 It is this narrowness of perception that creates in many con-
temporary theories an overvaluation of those who defy (or cross) gender and a
devaluation of those who seem to remain within conventional boundaries (or who
pass). The appearance of these two options, and only two, replicates the conformity/
deviance model mentioned earlier.
We now turn to Martin’s suggestions for overcoming the limitations she
finds in the works of Sedgwick, Butler, and lesbian theorists. Martin is clearly
calling for more complexity in theorizing the relations between body, psyche, and
society, but what does this complexity entail? Martin’s primary contribution to
contemporary debates about how to understand the differences sex, gender, and
sexuality make in human subjectivity is to insist that differences can never be
attributed to one of these concepts alone or to any external (or internal) normaliz-
ing process believed to dictate consistency between these concepts. Arguing for a
“displacement” of both Sedgwick’s and Butler’s views, Martin suggests gender is
both “more than a fixed ground that can be easily overridden by what we call ‘sex-
uality’ . . . [and] less than that which structures everything” (120). In other words,
subjectivity is more complex than, and not determined by, anatomical sex or gen-
der identity or sexual identity taken alone. The fact of embodiment matters, as
does the way we live in and with those bodies, always with reference to socially
and historically defined meanings for the positions we take up.
Martin claims both feminism and queer theory err in overestimating the
strength and impact of gender’s grasp on us (119). Both those feminists who mea-

sure their feminist identity by the distance traveled from conventional femininity
and those queer and/or lesbian feminists who measure their identities by the
degree to which femininity is defied are engaged in the reification and devaluation
of femininity. Moreover, insofar as these tendencies represent political positions,
those who adopt them privilege one sort of identification and disparage other iden-
tities as conformist, without seeing the demand for conformity implied by their
own positions. (The equally popular assumption that feminist identity can be
based on some unitary notion of womanness —“even at the level of how we inhabit
our bodies”— is also dismissed by Martin as simplistic [118].)
Martin praises Butler for challenging the assumption of a fixed, binary
division of gender through her concept of the lesbian phallus and for challenging
the assumption of a fixed core gender identity. But she does not believe Butler
therefore dispenses with either gender identity or the subjective capacity to exert
pressure on the external world. That is, although a person’s gender identity and
expression are not separable from socially and historically dominant representa-
tions of gender, neither are they reducible to those representations of gender. For
Martin, “gendered expressions or manifestations are often secondary to conver-
gences of organism, psyche, and social realities that exceed the grasp or reach of
gender divisions or differences, even if they are accessible only by way of those
differences” (119).
In Martin’s view, a revolution in the way gender is conceived, theorized,
and/or politically mobilized involves neither downplaying it nor glorifying it as
defiant crossing but grasping that gender is not the sole determinant of our sub-
jective identities. More crucial is an exploration of how the psyche and the social
interact to create various capacities for feeling, acting, and being. Martin is not
interested in (false) claims of escaping gender or in exaggerating its hold on us.
Rather, she calls for an exploration of the psychic and social dynamics that gender
“identities and expressions both obscure and illuminate” (120).
To what extent do transgender theories further this project of complicating
our understanding of how gender both obscures and illuminates psychic and social
dynamics? Does Martin’s call for greater complexity compromise transgender pol-
itics (or feminist politics, for that matter) and if so in what ways? Do transgender
theorists address what Martin calls psychic dynamics, or are social dynamics priv-
ileged? How do Martin’s proposals for conceptualizing gender/bodies/psyches
affect transgender theorists’ claims to be leading a gender revolution?

Transgender Theories
Our aim in addressing the questions posed above is not to disparage transgender
theorists, whose enthusiasm for “the complexities and ambiguities of lived expe-
rience” we share,15 but to promote a reading of their theories that extends com-
plexity and ambiguity to all identities and all human experience. Transgender the-
ory, like much feminist theory, raises crucial questions about how dominant
conceptions of the body, gender, and sexuality reduce what are complex and
ambiguous processes to simple or natural “givens.” As Jeffrey Weeks points out,
an initial task of any new sexual movement is to “upset the dominant cultural
codes, and reveal their irrationality, partiality and illegitimacy as products of
power and domination.”16 We understand that the dominant claim that women
must have female genitals and men must have male genitals is one of the central
targets for transgender theorists. That the transsexual body becomes “a hotly
contested site of cultural inscription” is not surprising given the potential of the
transsexual body to contradict the dominant claim and despite the enormous
medical and ideological resources devoted to covering up that potential.17 The
transgender theorists we examine here all speak to the potential of the transsex-
ual (or transgender) body to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about what
constitutes legitimate (gendered) subjects. These theorists also demand and cre-
ate a space for other possibilities.
While we support many of the goals of transgender movements, we are also
concerned that in drawing a line between those who cross traditional gender
boundaries and those who do not, transgender theorists succumb to many of the
limitations Martin describes. In so doing, they weaken support for the valuable
demand that the variability and diversity of gender and sexuality be recognized
and respected.18
Sandy Stone’s essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Mani-
festo” presents one of the first transgender arguments for “reclaiming the power of
the refigured and reinscribed body.”19 Critical of her transgender sisters’ tendency
to pass as women, Stone decries the missed opportunity to reveal the falsity of gen-
der discourses that require correspondence between anatomy and gender identity.
Stone is critical of social and medical discourses that erase the history of trans-
sexuals and that discourage their potential contributions to theorizing bodies and
gender. She urges transsexuals to develop a “counterdiscourse” drawing on their
experiences and histories. Such a discourse would need to analyze “desire and
motivational complexity in a manner which adequately describes the multiple con-
tradictions of individual lived experience” (297).

There is much to admire in Stone’s proposals and in a theory that does not
confuse discursive possibilities with subjective identities. Transsexual discourse
is located “outside the boundaries of gender” instead of in transsexuals them-
selves, who might be located firmly within gender boundaries. Furthermore, such
a counterdiscourse is expected to reveal not some truth about transsexuals but
some aspect of subjectivity hidden by dominant discourses: “the identities of
individual, embodied subjects [are] far less implicated in physical norms, and far
more diversely spread across a rich and complex structuration of identity and
desire, than it is now possible to express” (298). In our view, Stone is careful not
to glorify visible crossing and devalue transsexuals who pass, although she does
address the “necessity for passing” as an oppressive cultural demand that is taken
up at considerable personal and political cost.
Published three years after Stone’s article, Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw pur-
sues many of the same goals as Empire, but the author is much less careful and
much less forgiving.20 Instead of reading transsexuality as a potential position
from which dominant discourses may be criticized, Bornstein links the production
of radical discourse to the existence of politically conscious transsexual or trans-
gendered persons. Bornstein’s central concern is to distinguish groups of individu-
als said to support the gender order (“gender defenders”) from those who contest it
(“gender outlaws”). Unlike Stone, Bornstein almost seems to read a person’s poli-
tics off the body, so that either one is visibly queer or one supports the status quo.
Even transsexuals who pass are devalued for appearing to conform to the rules of
gender they have otherwise transgressed.
Bornstein embraces two models of gender identity (which she defines as a
sense of belonging to the dominant classifications “woman” and “man”). On the
one hand, there is a conformity/deviance model by which gender defenders and
gender outlaws are distinguished. On the other hand, the outlaws, who are posi-
tively valued for their “fluidity”—for not remaining one gender or the other (52)—
are seen as occupying a continuum of transgression. The outlaw group ranges from
those “preferring to be somewhat less than rigidly-gendered, to [those] preferring
an entirely nondefinable image” (51). Although Bornstein claims “the correct tar-
get for any successful transsexual rebellion would be the gender system itself”
(83), most of her energy is devoted to praising those groups who cross and devalu-
ing those who do not. There are two problems with this emphasis, problems raised
by Martin in relation to lesbian feminist theory.
The first problem concerns the theory of normalization as a way of explain-
ing the assumption of hegemonic gender identities. Bornstein believes that “most
. . . people continually struggle to maintain the illusion that they are one gender or


another”(65). Insofar as norms are seen in this account to coincide neatly with
desires, the process of eradicating a potential gender fluidity requires little expla-
nation. Of course, this means that gender norms determine only the lives of those
who want to fit in or belong. And even though such belonging requires compliance
with narrowly defined, appropriate behavior, “most people” allegedly find the
wholesale adoption of such behavior acceptable. Gender outlaws, by contrast, do
not appear to be affected by the dominant gender norms or desires. Not only are
they free from the desire to conform, but in them the capacity for gender fluidity
has not been reduced. But to see the outlaws as virtually genderless — a term
Bornstein applies to herself — is to position them as free from processes that are
imagined to rigidly determine others.
A second, related problem is that, even if we accept Bornstein’s categoriza-
tion of “gender conformists” and “gender outlaws,” it does not follow that individ-
uals in the former group necessarily support dominant assumptions about the ori-
gins or stability of gender or that individuals in the latter group necessarily contest
them. The opposition Bornstein constructs for the purpose of privileging the out-
laws denies the complexity and fluidity of identity she hopes to affirm and denies
the possibility of a sexual politics that might find support in either group.
A final point about Bornstein concerns her view of the relationship among
bodies, gender, and sexuality. Although Bornstein found it necessary and desir-
able to take on a female body (both as image/psychically and as flesh/somatically),
she argues that the body does not constitute any kind of limit on signification. The
role of the body is to signify gender identity to others and is treated as otherwise
irrelevant. A person’s identity concerns only his or her gender, an identity taken on
or shed at will and to which the body can be made to conform. Sexuality tran-
scends both gender and the body (35). Although Bornstein makes a useful dis-
tinction between being and having an identity (243), a distinction that calls into
question the assumed natural link between anatomy and gender identity, her own
assumption that identities can be shed like snakeskin implies they possess no psy-
chical or historical weight. However much we share her view of “the gendered
body as an accomplishment”(152) we question her view of that accomplishment
as a more or less conscious achievement that can easily be undone.
Like Bornstein, Gordene Olga MacKenzie, author of Transgender Nation,
seems to assume a division between transsexuals who buy into medical technol-
ogies and attempt to pass and those who do not and who are politically active
and visible in their fight against “gender oppression.”21 MacKenzie, however,
is more lenient toward actual transsexual persons, implying that it is not their
fault when they opt for sex reassignment surgery (SRS) because they have been

“indoctrinated into essentialist gender beliefs that insist on body and gender
matches” (24).
Like Stone, MacKenzie is also sympathetic to the difficulties faced by
transsexuals around the question of when, whether, and how effectively it is nec-
essary to pass. She applauds the move she perceives in transsexual groups in the
1990s away from a strong emphasis on passing and toward the “relaxation of outer
signs of gender like clothes and hair,” which she regards as a “reflection of new
inner attitudes of self-acceptance” among the transgendered (161). She also states
that the “tendency to rigidly categorize the self and others is eroding,” since with
“self-acceptance comes the acceptance of others” (161).
We believe that MacKenzie’s goal in writing Transgender Nation is primar-
ily to support what she calls “the Gender Movement.” She spends considerable
time critiquing medical institutions and various psychomedical responses to trans-
sexuality that construe it as a personal disorder. She also points out the impor-
tance of sexual and gender minorities forming political alliances for the purpose of
changing attitudes and fighting “sex and gender oppression.” She does not, how-
ever, engage extensively with queer and feminist theorists’ uses of the terms “sex,”
“gender,” and “sexuality.”
MacKenzie expresses a strong belief that, if it were not for gender oppres-
sion, transsexuals would not be likely to seek SRS. For her, the Gender Movement
challenges the assimilation of gender minority groups into the dominant culture,
which insists upon contiguity between anatomy and lived gender. “Freedom for
transgenderists and cross-dressers is a step toward freedom and justice for all
those oppressed by gender bipolarism” (168). In this formulation of freedom,
visibility — the refusal to pass — is everything. To emphasize this, MacKenzie
draws on the ACT UP motto: “Silence = Death.”
Finally, MacKenzie cites the work of Walter Williams to support a rethink-
ing of sexuality and gender categories. Instead of focusing on hetero/homo and
male/female dichotomies, she proposes a “gender-transcendence theory in which
gender categories are no longer linked to biological sex” (172). MacKenzie argues
that this would constitute a gender revolution and would acknowledge greater
diversity than do current conceptualizations of gender. It appears that she is sup-
porting a theoretical stance in which the body is of minor importance in the under-
standing of subjectivity, compared with what she calls “gender identity and gen-
der roles.”
Leslie Feinberg, in Transgender Warriors, takes an approach similar to
MacKenzie’s.22 Her focus is on transgender political movements rather than on the-
orizing the terms upon which such movements are based. She makes some effort to


extend her view of the effects of transgender politics beyond transgender commu-
nities, writing that every individual “has a stake in trans liberation” (92), and she
begins to make links between the transgender and women’s movements. She
reflects upon how important it was in her life when feminists brought into public
view the idea that there could be a distinction between anatomical sex and lived
gender, and she thus acknowledges the relevance of feminism to transgenderism.
We regard this as an important break from some other transgender writings, in
which transgender politics is assumed to be much more radical than other aspects
of gender and sexuality politics.
From her understanding of the connections between the transgender and
women’s liberation movements, Feinberg formulates what she perceives to be key
tasks: first, to “strip away the discriminatory and oppressive values attached to
masculinity and femininity”; and, second, to defend “the right of each individual
to express their gender in any way they choose. . . . And that includes the right to
gender ambiguity and gender contradiction” (103). The main challenge presented
here has less to do with how sex/gender/sexuality are understood and more to do
with the limitations on how many genders and sexes there may be and how they
may be expressed, combined, lived. She appears to draw from interactionist dis-
courses to develop an understanding of the relationship between sex and gender,
stating that neither is simply socially constructed or learned, nor are they simply
biologically determined. Instead, she supports the idea that both arise out of a
complex interrelationship between biological and cultural effects.
Feinberg writes about the connections between sexual identities and gen-
der identities, arguing that they are aspects of a person’s identity that are “tightly
braided” together. From this point, she articulates her transgender politics as
being about fighting for her “right to be whole” (92). Feinberg also asks how many
sexes/genders exist and draws variously from historical writings and personal
experience to formulate an answer. Importantly for us, she states, “Gender theo-
rists can’t just function as census takers who count how much sex and gender
diversity exists: they must be part of the struggle to defend our right to exist, or
most of us will be forced to remain underground” (102).
Feinberg’s position on the body is challenging to medical discourses. She
articulates an argument that is not uncommon within transgender theories. Fein-
berg is particularly adamant about the issue of the right of each person to control
his/her own body, arguing that intersexed infants should not be altered surgically
until they are old enough to decide for themselves how they want their bodies to
be. Her point, with regard to intersexuals as well as transsexuals, is that if indi-
viduals do not get to make this decision about their bodies, then it is left to the

church, the state, and medical and legal institutions — possibilities that Feinberg
finds most undesirable. Feinberg also supports the idea that all references to
sex/gender categories should be removed from identification papers, “and since
the right of each person to define their own sex is so basic, it should be eliminated
from birth certificates as well” (125).
Because it is clear to us that Feinberg and MacKenzie have not set out to
produce exclusively theoretical texts where concepts are carefully defined in terms
of the kinds of theorizing around sexuality and gender discussed above, we wish to
be cautious in critiquing their approaches to transgenderism. On the one hand, it
is most important to us to applaud them for their groundbreaking work in this
political field. Each of them draws together historical information that is important
for those involved in transgender movements, and each makes some challenging
propositions for social and political changes. On the other hand, for transgender
movements to be successful in working toward these political goals, it is important
that they not fall into the same theoretical “traps” that feminist and other queer
political movements have encountered or are encountering. Therefore, for the pur-
pose of learning from past mistakes, it might be useful to offer an academic cri-
tique of the ways in which these transgender writers articulate their politics.
In the light of the concerns that Martin expressed about the work of Butler
and Sedgwick, it is possible to see that MacKenzie, like Sedgwick, privileges
crossing. This is somewhat ironic, given her insistence on the importance of work-
ing with other gender and sexual minorities, not all of whom are engaged in cross-
ing. As Martin pointed out, the risk of privileging crossing is that it will inevitably
generate terms mired in the position of not crossing, such as the femme lesbian,
the feminine woman, or any number of sexuality and gender combinations that are
not “as transgressive” as transgenderism supposedly is. Therefore, our concern is
similar to the one we expressed in response to Bornstein’s categorization of “gen-
der conformists” and “gender outlaws.” Such a categorization seems to be opposed
to the “Gender Revolution” that MacKenzie otherwise supports.
Another thing that emerges from MacKenzie’s writing is that she seems to
want to make the body disappear.23 For her, what is important is “erotic attraction”
and “gender,” and anatomical sex should not be a defining feature of a person. To
suggest foregrounding sexual attraction and lived gender at the expense of the
body — that is, to claim that bodies do not matter — strikes us as unsubstantiated,
both theoretically and experientially.
Of central concern to us in Feinberg’s writing is her understanding of the
body as simply a material “thing” that one can have control over. First, this is
problematic in that it overlooks various aspects of sexed embodiment (which will

be discussed below) and, second, it is problematic as it leads to an “anything

goes” approach to SRS. Although it is extremely important to be critical of medical
approaches to the body and to transsexuality, we share Martin’s view that the
“complex relations between the body and psyche [must not] disappear.”24 That is,
treating the body as a manipulable thing suggests there are no psychic invest-
ments in it that require consideration. We do not believe that working from a
human rights discourse to argue for complete “individual choice” over issues such
as SRS will necessarily benefit all transsexuals. However, we do support the per-
sistent critique of medical discourses around transsexuality and the project of
seeking alternative approaches.
Some Psychoanalytic Distinctions
It seems to us that the complexity Martin seeks and that transgender persons
attempt to articulate is not adequately accounted for in theories that read gender
identities and bodies as effects of historically specific constructions or that valorize
crossing as a way to escape historical constructions. Perhaps bodies do matter
more than these theories acknowledge or in ways they cannot adequately account
for. It is certainly difficult for many feminists today (including us) to think outside
the boundaries of the hegemonic historicist view that renders every aspect of
human existence contingent on historical specificity.25 Psychoanalysis is often
rejected by feminists because it does not fit into the historicist worldview,
although, as Charles Shepherdson points out, psychoanalysis is not antihistori-
cal.26 Recently, however, Foucauldian theorists have turned to psychoanalysis to
supplement an overly determinist reading of gender and sexuality as effects of
social relations. Thus, Jeffrey Weeks writes, “There is a psychic realm — the
unconscious — with its own dynamic, rules and history, where the biological pos-
sibilities of the body acquire meaning.”27 Judith Butler claims psychoanalysis “is
the best account of the psyche — and psychic subjection — that we have. I don’t
think one can offer an account of how sexuality is formed without psychoanaly-
sis.”28 Clearly one can offer accounts of how sexuality is formed without psycho-
analysis; our point is that such accounts tend either to idealize sexuality (as that
which escapes regulatory processes through crossing or falling outside normative
boundaries) or to reify it (as that which conforms to norms). And however sympa-
thetic Butler might be toward psychoanalysis, we are unsure she manages to
escape the cultural determinism she explicitly hopes to avoid.29
For purposes of comparison with Shepherdson’s views, we begin this sec-
tion with a brief summary of Butler’s understanding of sexed embodiment. Then

we introduce two distinctions Shepherdson makes: (1) that between sexed embod-
iment and gender role, and (2) that between historicist and psychoanalytic con-
ceptions of the subject. We discuss how Shepherdson uses these distinctions to
clarify the dilemma with which some transsexuals are confronted. We argue that
these distinctions contribute to a more complex understanding of gendered and
transgendered subjects.
For Butler, bodies are materialized through a process of identification with
“regulatory norms.” It is a compulsory process of subjection that creates two legit-
imized positions — the masculine and the feminine — outside of which lie the
delegitimized or excluded other bodies. Sexed embodiment in this view is “orches-
trated through regulatory schemas that produce intelligible morphological possi-
bilities. These regulatory schemas are not timeless structures, but historically
revisable criteria of intelligibility which produce and vanquish bodies that mat-
ter.”30 Thus, we have bodies that are produced through a process of reiteration of
heterosexual norms and bodies that are produced as whatever falls outside those
normative boundaries — abjected bodies. The latter are said to render the process
of sexed embodiment itself unstable because as a “constitutive outside” they
haunt the normative identities.
Butler’s is a very different reading from that offered by Shepherdson, who
works from the Lacanian tradition. Peng Cheah suggests this difference is due to
the fact that Butler’s project is to “synthesize” Foucault, who is concerned with the
“causality of social-historical forms in producing the materiality of bodies,” and
Lacan, who is concerned with “the ontological conditions of possibility” for the
emergence of the human subject.31 Cheah’s claim is that Butler’s account makes
Lacan’s description of the process of becoming a human subject into an effect of
specific historical concepts of intelligibility.32 We suggest that a concept of sexed
embodiment that is analytically separate from those historically specific norms
through which subjects are positioned as normative or abject would be helpful.
Furthermore, one of the possible dilemmas expressed by transsexuals appears to
concern not the question of whether one has a culturally intelligible or an abject
body but the question of how to assume an embodiment at all. Shepherdson’s the-
ory provides concepts and distinctions that might be useful in theorizing the com-
plexity Martin and others call for but do not develop.33
In “The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex,” Shepherdson sets out to
clarify a number of terms used in contemporary debates around sexuality, subjec-
tivity, and gender. The careful sorting out of psychoanalytic from nonpsychoana-
lytic terminology accompanies a sympathetic reading of Catherine Millot’s Hor-
sexe: Essay on Transsexuality and helps explain why it is misguided to read


transsexuality as a radical example of the social construction of gender. We find
this essay compelling both in its respect for transsexuals and in its ability to
explain the difference between psychoanalytic and historicist interpretations of
sexual difference.34
The first distinction Shepherdson makes is between sexual embodiment
and gender role, where gender refers to the “contingent, historically constituted
forms of life” and sexual embodiment refers to an inevitable human imperative.35
Gender, then, concerns the historically specific norms and roles that bodies
marked masculine and feminine are expected to take up. The marking of bodies,
however, does not refer to this or that human convention or to “natural” anatomi-
cal distinctions but to a distinctively human process of representation Shepherd-
son calls a “structural inevitability” (161– 62). Since, according to Freud, human
“drives” are not natural “instincts” but are “constitutively denatured” by virtue of
requiring representation, human sexuality is not the expression of some natural
essence but always a matter of representation. For Shepherdson, sexual difference—
the representation of subjects as feminine and masculine — can be said to have a
history, both of the subject’s acquisition of a body and of how different cultures
respond to or make sense of sexual difference. But sexual difference itself is not
understood as a dispensable human convention. From this perspective, discourses
of sexuality that are limited to the concepts of “sex” (as given by nature) and “gen-
der” (as historically contingent roles) miss the dimension of sexed embodiment
altogether.
The question of a missing dimension brings us to the second distinction
Shepherdson makes between the “constructed subjectivity of historicism” and “the
subject in psychoanalysis.” The subject conceived by psychoanalysis is the prod-
uct of a process of signification —“an effect of the symbolic order, a kind of ‘by-
product’ or ‘residue’ ” (162). We understand Shepherdson to be describing an
unconscious process through which one becomes a subject at all, a process that
involves the negation of immediacy, the loss of phallic identity, and the marking of
the body as feminine or masculine. This marking of the body is not based on the
existence of two natural anatomical sexes but is the result of two responses to phal-
lic loss. In Lacanian terms, one imagines having or lacking the phallus after hav-
ing given up the fantasy that one is the phallus. This theory of the unconscious
response to phallic loss explains how masculine signifiers of the body can be taken
up by anatomical females and how feminine signifiers can be taken up by anatom-
ical males.36
The historicist conception of the social construction of subjectivity, by con-
trast, refers to the historically specific construction of the roles or positions made

available to men and women and the rules and regulations surrounding who can
occupy which. Although complicated by the fact that one always occupies “multi-
ple, often conflicting, positions that social practices construct,” the view of the sub-
ject as equivalent to those positions means that “the ex-centric, or equivocal, rela-
tion of the subject to those discourses is never made visible.”37 Shepherdson’s
point is that the historicist conception of subjectivity is concerned with the social
regulation of subjects, not with the subject’s ambiguous relationship to the process
of signification itself. The questions or concerns of psychoanalysis and historicism
are therefore different but not opposed. Where psychoanalysis asks about the “role
of the unconscious in the formation of subjectivity,” historicism asks about the role
of society in legitimizing and regulating particular forms of subjectivity.38
When the major concern of feminist, queer, or transgender theorists is with
the ways in which a given society stigmatizes, oppresses, or excludes its nonnor-
mative others, it is necessary to employ a sociological or historical analysis. What
poses problems for Shepherdson (and perhaps for Martin, too) is that sexuality
and psychic life cannot be understood with historical tools alone. To do so is to
produce a limited reading that cannot adequately theorize a given subject’s rela-
tion to his/her own embodiment, to unconscious desire, and to the particular his-
tory of a subject’s own psychic life. Psychoanalysis offers us the tools for another
kind of reading, a reading that does not make other readings irrelevant or wrong
but that does pose other sorts of questions. We believe psychoanalysis offers a way
to address the complexity Martin and Stone seek and that transsexuality demands
we consider.
In Shepherdson’s account, those transsexuals who seek SRS pose questions
not about anatomical sex nor about gender but about sexed embodiment. Shep-
herdson is not concerned with those who “have a relation to sexual difference, are
identified with ‘the other sex,’ and will consequently benefit from an operation.”39
However rare it might be, the possibility of males unconsciously assuming a fem-
inine identity and females a masculine one is always present (according to psy-
choanalytic theory) because embodiment is not tied to anatomical sex. The prob-
lem, for both Shepherdson and Millot, concerns those whose identifications rest on
a “fantasy of ‘otherness’ which, in fact, amounts to the elimination of sexual dif-
ference, its replacement by the fantasy of a sex that would not be lacking” (175).
This is a fantasy Millot calls “horsexe”: the unconscious conviction that one is the
object of desire (the phallus) and therefore unable to give or to receive it. Phallic
identification eliminates desire and “the symbolic ambiguity that accompanies
sexual difference, replacing it with the immobility of a ‘perfected’ body,” with the
demand “for a position in which nothing is lacking” (176, 177).


One can certainly read this theory, as Bornstein does, as a hostile response
to transsexuals. On the one hand, we agree that the effect of being denied surgery
might prove more detrimental than the predicted hazards of having surgery. On the
other hand, both Millot and Shepherdson believe that for the phallic-identified
transsexual, granting the demand for SRS constitutes a violation of the subject
through playing into a fantasy. Thus, it is inaccurate to accuse the psychoanalyst
of hostility toward the transsexual when the opposition is to a particular demand
and to a particular fantasy. For the (Lacanian) analyst, granting the transsexual
demand closes down rather than opens the question of desire, and so meeting that
demand is contrary to the ethics of psychoanalysis. Opposition to complicity with
a fantasy that offers the illusion of a position where nothing is lacking and that is
believed to be a sacrifice of the subject is to be expected here. This opposition
occurs not because all psychoanalysts are genderphobic (though some are) but
because they cannot condone a fantasy perceived to be punitive to the subject.
From another perspective, one based on a belief in conscious decision making and
on the assumption that people always know what they desire, the unconditional
right to SRS appears to be self-evident. Although we do not embrace wholeheart-
edly either of these positions, we are interested in exploring the possibilities of
psychoanalytic theory in providing the more complex articulations of sex, gender,
and sexuality of the sort that Martin calls for.
Important to us in Shepherdson’s theorization of sexed embodiment is the
level of complexity that considerations of the unconscious, psychical dimension
introduce. Neither “sex” nor “gender” nor “organism,” sexed embodiment con-
cerns the symbolic inscription of lack on the body. The body is not equivalent to
the organism but only comes to take on form and meaning through representation:
“Psychoanalysis . . . shows how human sexuality is inevitably historical, in that
the body itself cannot take form without undergoing this subjection to representa-
tion. Born as an organism, the human animal nevertheless has to acquire a body,
come into the possession of its body . . . through the image and the signifier”
(170). According to Shepherdson, then, the body materializes through an uncon-
scious process of representation that might or might not “correspond” with
anatomical sex. Social expectations that masculine subjects behave one way and
feminine subjects another will be imposed as social and personal attempts to
make sense of sexual difference. But human sexuality is diverse, according to
Shepherdson, not because of the (gendered) meanings generated by a social order
(which might be quite limited) and certainly not because “nature” prescribes it
but because taking up a psychic identity as a man or a woman allows for “ambi-
guity, uncertainty and symbolic mobility” (175). The process of representation

enables the subject to assume or pursue his/her own desire rather than be pro-
grammed by instinct or by social norms. It is a psychical process responded to by
the social order, which seeks to control, regulate, and limit how women and men
ought to be. Sexual uniformity, then, is always undermined not by the return of
some repressed human desire but by the necessity of making sense of the lack/loss
taken on as masculine/feminine embodiment.
The psychoanalytic reading therefore provides us with a way to address the
psychical acquisition of sexual difference apart from, and as something quite other
than, the social norms of gender. This does not mean social analyses of gender are
misguided or unnecessary; it just means they are not sufficient to account for the
complexity of human lives. Accounts of embodiment that fail to ask about the role
of fantasy and unconscious representation are likely to omit the dimension of sex-
ual difference psychoanalytic theorists like Shepherdson find indispensable.
We have seen how transgender theorists call for the social acceptance of
sexual diversity, sometimes construing the transgendered as people whose rejec-
tion of gender norms is revolutionary. There is a complicated politics involved
here, according to which those transsexuals who want to possess the genitals and
hormones of the “other” are disparaged as conformists, whereas those who simply
choose to live as the “other” become the self-proclaimed radicals. Shepherdson’s
theory renders this politicization of passing versus crossing more complex. On the
one hand, it is true that those who challenge existing gender norms through iden-
tification with the other (the masculine woman, the feminine man) are creating
new subject positions and are expanding the boundaries of what it means to be a
man or a woman. To some extent, we share their enthusiasm and we acknowledge
the risks involved for those engaged in this project. However, we are also sympa-
thetic to those transsexuals who search for embodiment through surgery (whether
or not this search is fueled by an untenable fantasy of the Other).40 Our under-
standing of embodiment as a necessary precondition (Shepherdson’s “imperative”)
for any kind of gender play implies that all human subjects are capable of the
diversity claimed by transgender theorists. The phenomenon of transsexuality
teaches us that anatomical sex does not dictate gender, nor does it dictate the form
of embodiment taken up by the subject. The transgendered person’s visible gender
crossing reminds us that normative assumptions about the relationships between
anatomical sex, gender, and bodies are in need of revision. Although transgender
activists make this point into a political goal, we do not believe they are alone in
their commitment to diversity.
As a way to connect these ideas with those of transsexual and transgender
people, we will conclude with a discussion of how a number of research partici-


pants regard their relationship to gender, to the body, to the question of passing,
and to the demand for surgery.
Transsexual/Transgendered Participants
The concepts of sex, gender, sexuality, and the body are obviously of central
importance to the very construction of transsexuality. Knowing how these concepts
are understood is crucial both for interpreting what it means when people identify
themselves as transsexual and for grasping the basic assumptions on which trans-
gender theories are premised. What we explore in this last section, then, are some
interpretations of key concepts offered by transsexual and transgendered interview
participants.41 Although often fascinating in their own right, their interpretations
are important to us for the ways they connect with those made by the transgender
and psychoanalytic theorists discussed above.
Prior to the interviews, each participant filled out a questionnaire where
he/she indicated which (if any) of the following words he/she identified with or
would use to describe him/herself: man, woman, transsexual, transgendered,
male, female. During the interview, each person was asked to talk about the words
he/she had highlighted and to explain what those words meant. There was a ten-
dency for the participants to use these words readily to describe themselves, but
they then found it particularly difficult to articulate what these terms actually
meant to them.
Babe, a Pacific Islander living and studying in New Zealand, provides a
clear example of a participant who stated adamantly and repeatedly, “I am a man”
and “I see myself as a man.” When he was asked what it meant to him to “be a
man,” however, he stopped and said: “Well, being a man is . . . that’s a very tricky
question.” After some hesitation, he went on to illuminate various contradictions
between how he understood “being a man” and how he understood his sexed body
(presurgical FTM) and his gender. On the one hand, Babe defined being a man in
terms of having to “have the genital part of a man . . . and [having] to function as
a man [physically].” But, on the other hand, when it came to the fact that he had
not had genital reassignment, he had to shift his position slightly and say, “I see
myself as a man. The only thing that makes me . . . feel incomplete is because I
haven’t gone to the final stage of the change where I can confidently say to you that
I am a man, but in my thoughts . . . I see myself as a man.” So being a “man”
shifted within a few sentences from the necessity of being physically male to the
notion of seeing oneself as a man and having the “thought pattern” of a man. Yet,
a moment later, when asked what there was to being a “man” apart from anatomy,

Babe found himself unable to answer. When he was asked what there was about
“not being a woman” that he related to, Babe referred to heterosexuality and his
lifelong experiences of being sexually attracted to women and not to “other males.”
So the understanding of “man” shifted from being entirely attached to anatomy, to
having to do with gender identity, to being completely dictated by sexual attrac-
tion; the possibility that gender might include social, emotional, or psychological
processes was barely mentioned. Babe subscribes to the idea of being “trapped in
the wrong body,” and he finds it extremely difficult to have to wait indefinitely to
gain access to genital surgery. For Babe, the body one is born with is not consid-
ered to be an indicator of who or what one “really is”; the essential element is how
one “feels inside” or how one “sees oneself,” and the body is a mere aberration
that needs to be “corrected” through the wonders of medical technology. This is
the attitude that some transgender theorists are critical of and that MacKenzie
strongly criticizes the medical institutions for fostering in transsexual people who
have high hopes for the possible outcomes of surgery.
At the same time, it is important to ask just how relevant and fair it is to
apply (predominantly white) U.S. transgenderists’ arguments to this man who
faces the possibility of going back to his home island and being told by Christian
family members that he is a woman because that is the body God gave him, and he
cannot use the (communal) men’s toilets because if he does it will become obvious
to the men there that he has not got a penis. Sadly, Babe concludes, “But you can’t
really tell the medical people that.” And, from the ferocity with which some trans-
genderists express their arguments, you cannot tell them that either. It is possible
to perceive Babe as being caught painfully among these opposing discourses:
medical discourses that hold out a promise of surgery that might never actually be
available; transgender discourses that challenge him to live as a man, or better, as
a transgendered person, without relying on the promise of surgery; and the Chris-
tian discourses of his home and family, which encourage him to love and respect
his (female) body as a creation of God. It is little wonder that the Cartesian view
of oneself as “trapped in the wrong body” is of greatest comfort and therefore of
immediate use to Babe.
For Ami, at approximately one year after SRS, “woman” described how she
felt “inside.” In her words, “woman [is] . . . how I’ve felt all my life . . . how I
choose to live. . . . It’s just a knowing too. . . . [It’s] how I feel inside.” “Woman”
might be an internal thing that almost defies description, but it is certainly some-
thing that can be “known” and felt strongly as a central aspect of the self. Ami
reinforced this by saying, “It’s not about the clothes. . . . It’s not even so much
about the external. . . . It’s a really deep thing—like who you are,” which led her to


the conclusion that “surgery is a cosmetic plus really nowadays.” It was evident
that Ami was trying to make sense of the relationship between her gendered expe-
riences and her body without having a concept of sexed embodiment. She knew
that her identity as a woman is something “deep” to do with the self, and she
knew that somehow it was important to her to alter her physical appearance, but
she could not make the connection between that which is “deep” and her physical
“exterior” without being able to draw on the distinction (made by Shepherdson)
between the body and the organism. The change to her organism was truly cos-
metic, but the change to her body was not.
Ami’s comments could be read as an interesting contradiction of some
transgender discourses that position surgery as a vital thing that should be acces-
sible to all (as in Feinberg’s argument). Ami seemed to concur on this point with
an idea of gender as somewhat removed from the body and yet connected inti-
mately with the very constitution of the self. There is a link here with Feinberg’s
perspective, insofar as thinking of surgery, and therefore the body, in terms of a
“cosmetic plus” means thinking of the body as something extra to the “self,” as
something that might or might not be adjusted to represent the gender that the self
“feels” it “is” “inside.” The implication here is that the body is merely an inert
thing that can be manipulated at will. As we might expect, this idea is in line with
dominant discourses about the mind controlling the body but contrasts with dom-
inant beliefs about anatomy determining the subject.
Jean, who is Ami’s senior by thirty years and has not had SRS, described
herself as “female” on the questionnaire because “I am a woman, mentally and
emotionally, although” she immediately conceded, “OK, I know I’m not physi-
cally.” She then qualified her statement about not being a woman physically and
ended by saying that “the vast majority of transsexuals never ever will be truly
women . . . for the simple reason they can’t have children. They’ve got an artificial
vagina, but they are as close to being a woman as they can mentally and emotion-
ally perceive themselves to be.” So, within the space of a few sentences, Jean
demonstrated that she does distinguish clearly between the mental/emotional
aspects of a person and physical aspects, but she does not use the words female
and woman differentially to make this distinction clear. That made it rather diffi-
cult to interpret how Jean perceives the relationship between bodily and mental/
emotional aspects of the sexed subject. However, she did say that “sex is between
the legs and gender is in the head, but a lot of people put the two together — get
them muddled up.” This seems to be an articulation of a dominant understanding
of the relationship between sex and gender, yet it also seems to contradict the
notion of “woman” that Jean had just outlined, where to be truly a “woman” one

has to conform to both the physical and the psychological dimensions of femininity/
femaleness. The ways in which Jean talked about sex and gender indicated that
she was in complete disagreement with the perspectives of the transgender theo-
rists discussed here. Rather than valuing diversity, choice, transgression, and vis-
ibility, Jean seemed to work from fairly essentialist notions in her understanding
of gender generally and herself specifically. This is interesting, given that within
her own immediate community Jean has been quite visible and politically active
in promoting social change for transsexuals.
At nine years younger than Jean and approximately ten years post-SRS,
Mimi provided an interesting demonstration of social constructionist discourses
being put to use in order to make sense of (trans)sexed subjectivity. When asked
what she meant by describing herself as a “woman,” she replied that she identi-
fied more closely with “the attributes that are assigned to women . . . than those
attributes that are defined as being male attributes.” And to make sure that her
point about these “attributes” not being essential characteristics had been grasped,
she reiterated, “I see them as being defined attributes.” Soon after this, she con-
ceded that “woman” could not be reduced to attributes such as “gentleness” or
“considerateness” but that “the problem is that it’s such a nebulous . . . thing.”
However, in the next sentence, she emphasized once again that “these character-
istics which are defined as being male characteristics and female characteristics
are just socially defined characteristics.” A presumably central question for Mimi
in making sense of her own gendered experience was how to see herself as a
woman but still acknowledge that she had both “masculine” and “feminine” char-
acteristics. Mimi suggested that attributes can be taken up or put down at will as
we construct our gendered selves. This is consistent with the voluntarist concep-
tion of social constructionism exhibited, for example, in Bornstein’s approach to
gender. And, like Bornstein, Mimi had lived post-SRS long enough to learn the
importance of accepting characteristics of herself that were not simply “woman” or
“man” but combinations of both. In Mimi’s words, “When I first started going
through the change, I perceived that I would have to seriously play down my mas-
culine aspects of myself. Over time I’ve learnt that that’s actually not good for me.
Other people might have difficulty handling it — that’s their problem.” This
approach might be an important part of learning to resist the controlling gaze of
other people. However, we are skeptical of it insofar as it reinforces an overly vol-
untarist position.
When Tracey was asked what she meant by describing herself as “woman”
and “female,” she listed a range of activities and interests that she enjoyed and
that are coded as “women’s things”— such as wearing “women’s clothes,” being


welcomed into “women’s spaces,” and discussing “women’s issues.” Tracey’s asso-
ciation with femininity had two sources: one was a political connection that Tracey
made between her own investment in the politics of physical disability and femi-
nist politics; the other had to do with expressions of sexuality. Having been visibly
physically disabled throughout her life, Tracey would never have been perceived
as “macho” or stereotypically masculine, and therefore would not have had an
easy time expressing “male sexuality” as it is conventionally understood. Tracey
commented that part of being a “woman” for her had to do with a sexual image
attached to notions of beauty and femininity. For Tracey, presenting herself as a
woman might serve to attract a kind of appreciation from others that she might not
otherwise experience. She acknowledged that “this may be a bit superficial,” and
then went on to explain, “I go into shops . . . as a woman and they would say, ‘Oh,
thank you, ma’am,’ and . . . one day a woman said to the other assistant, ‘Doesn’t
she look beautiful!’ ” Tracey also talked about being attracted to the idea of a
romantic involvement with a man but immediately added that that seemed a bit of
a strange fantasy to be having, since “I don’t really see myself as being sexually
attracted to guys.”
Tracey seems to fall into MacKenzie’s category of transgendered people
who would not opt for surgery if it were not for the effects of gender oppression
and the prejudiced gaze of others. Tracey certainly supported Feinberg’s goal of
defending “the right of each individual to express their gender in any way they
choose,” including “the right to gender ambiguity and gender contradiction”42 —
a right that Tracey currently exercises every time she steps out the door cross-
dressed. We can see how Tracey’s sense of her embodiment and her external expres-
sion of gender go hand-in-hand in the constitution of her (trans)gendered subjec-
tivity. Her embodiment has been a central point of attention and a stimulus for her
political activity around the issues of disability and transgender politics. Unlike
some transgenderists, Tracey did not launch into fantastical theories that leave the
body behind. Perhaps because of her lifelong physical disability, Tracey seemed to
have a stronger sense of the body as a constraint. Nevertheless, she did work from
the notion that “I’ve been able to construct myself” to the point that “when I dress
up and look at myself in the mirror, I think of myself as a good-looking woman.”
For Tracey, then, wanting surgery was about finally being able to “come out and
tell people that I’m not a man, I’m a woman.” Tracey hoped SRS would validate
her as a woman, which meant having her political views taken seriously and being
seen as an embodied sexual subject. Tracey’s quest is couched within the frame-
work of being able to construct oneself as one wants, which brings her ideas into
an interesting relationship with those of the transgender theorists we have been

discussing. While she does not leave the body behind, as MacKenzie, Bornstein,
and Feinberg tend to do, she does subscribe to Bornstein’s notion that one can
(re)construct one’s (embodied) self to some extent as one likes.
Tania, a preoperative Maori MTF, described transgenderism as “a sort of
twilight zone where you can [be] either/or.”43 Tania did not try to argue that she
was “really” a woman (“I know that I can’t be female. . . . My psyche is different”)
but acknowledged that her womanness was something she had had to develop by
watching other women:
I can’t claim to be female in the sense that you would understand it

because I haven’t been encultured in, and I haven’t had the benefit of the
experiences that you have had growing. . . . So I draw my sense of my fem-
inine self from the role models I had as I grew up. So my femininity is an
expression of a little bit of my mother, a little bit of my aunt, a little bit of
all these different people, but couched in a male, within a male’s con-
straints. In effect I had to function as a male.
Tania talked about gender specific behaviors and how she had always enjoyed
doing “feminine things.” This was not because she was unaware of the feminist
critiques of the social coding of activities such as child care and cooking as femi-
nine. As Tania explained, “Yeah, those jobs, they’re not gender specific, if you want
to be p.c. about it, [but] I wanted them. They were gender specific for me because
they gave me an avenue. . . . They provided me some sort of discourse [in which] I
could express it . . . because everyone around me told me that it was the feminine
thing to do these things.” Tania provided an excellent example of an attempt to
move away from simplistic explanations of behavior as an indicator of gender (I
enjoy doing “feminine” things, therefore I “am” a “woman”). From what Tania
said about her childhood, it appears that she could now reflect on her childhood
activities and interpret them as an attempt to make sense of her gender within the
symbolic system that prevailed in her home — where women did the cooking and
men played rugby — even though she was aware of the critiques of such stereotyp-
ing. Tania did not use these examples from her childhood to provide “evidence” of
a woman inside herself trying to get out; rather, they gave her a language through
which she could express her sexed embodiment. Talking about being forced to
play rugby, Tania said laughingly, “So I went onto a rugby field and I had the most
ironed outfit there and I had an ironed hanky and to me that was expressing my
femininity in a male domain and being able to get away with it and trying not to
get dirty.” She offered some insight into the role that childhood fantasy played in
helping her deal with the disparity between her sexed embodiment and the gender


role that her family expected their “son” to perform, explaining that she could
even get away with cross-dressing under certain circumstances: “I used to dress
up in sheets, get away with calling it a toga party. Ha ha, but it was always a
sweeping chiffon-type gown which I could only see, ha ha. No one else was gifted
enough to see my taffeta gown!”
Tania’s understanding of gender allows for many more than two ways of
being gendered. She does not expect to “become” a woman but perceives herself
as a unique combination, “neither male nor female, but a mix of both.” Yet she
puts enormous amounts of effort into learning to pass as a woman and intends to
go through the pain, expense, and risk of SRS. In explaining this, Tania said: “I
know that I’m a combination of both [genders], but it’s not as if I’m going to go
around with a sign on my head with transsexual. All they are going to perceive me
as out there is one or the other. To them, there is not any (transgender) option. For
them, there’s just the two choices, but for me there is a private third choice and
that’s a combination of the two.” So, on the one hand, she justified many of her
efforts by referring to the social intolerance of ambiguity. But, on the other hand,
Tania made some definitive statements about her relationship to her penis: “[MTFs
have] always been at odds with our penis[es] anyway. . . . It’s sort of like a congen-
ital defect . . . and so you learn a lot of ways to disregard the penis.” Unlike some
transsexuals who talk of “always knowing” or “always feeling different,” Tania
described a process of transition or realization that occurred to her as an adult,
when she was living in her family as a father and husband.44 She talked about this
process as involving first a sense that “something’s wrong,” which then grew into
an understanding that “it’s something of a sexual nature,” and, at some point, “you
might become impotent along the way because somewhere in the back of your
mind there is this sense that it’s something to do with your penis, but it’s not clear.”
She explained that there are various ways in which people going through this
process can hide or disregard their penises or go into denial:
A lot of us are big and we often choose to be big because you have a stom-
ach that hangs down and hides your crutch [sic]. You get some who tape
and tuck, you get some who try to chop it off, and you get some who push it
in and internalize it . . . and then you just slip into denial and just say it’s
not there. A lot of people would cut it off if you didn’t need it for surgery.
You have this sort of unique relationship with your penis in that you deper-
sonalize it.
This statement is a far cry from Tania’s claim that she is interested in presenting
herself as a woman for the sake of what “other people” perceive. Perhaps Tania’s

denial of her penis has more to do with her sense of herself as a woman, a position
that does not accept ambiguity at the level of embodiment.
Jim, a postoperative pakeha FTM, seemed to be aware throughout the inter-
view that questions of gender involved complexities that he could not articulate
easily.45 When asked how he understood the term transsexual, he said doubtfully,
“I could say [a transsexual] is a man trapped in a woman’s body.” He immediately
qualified that by saying his previous statement “seems a little oversimplified” and
represents an “easy way to describe it to someone who doesn’t know.” When encour-
aged to move past a simplistic definition of transsexuality, Jim struggled with vari-
ous approaches that centered around the idea of “having feelings . . . of what we’d
term as a man” but having been “born a female and . . . brought up as a girl.” While
saying this, Jim kept acknowledging that there was still something missing—
something that is “very hard to put into words.” This difficulty could be attributed
to unconscious aspects of sexed embodiment and processes of signification that
few people have the vocabulary to express. While some participants skimmed over
these complexities, their general hesitation and difficulty in answering questions
could be interpreted as evidence that these processes are very hard to articulate
and might be impossible to articulate without a working understanding of psycho-
analytic concepts. Jim referred to these processes simply as “feelings inside”: “I
was brought up as a girl. I was dressed in dresses. I was conditioned as a girl, yet
at the same time I had these feelings inside,” making it sound as though there is
some essential thing “inside” each of us that determines our gender. This per-
ception coincides with Shepherdson’s claim that one’s symbolic position as man
or woman is not determined either by anatomy or by gender role conditioning.
Perhaps Jim’s comment that “we actually become what we are despite the con-
ditioning” refers to this concept of sexed embodiment that is neither “sex” nor
“gender.”
Bringing together the issue of decisions about SRS and the difficulty of
“putting into words” aspects of transgendered experience, Jim talked about the
feelings that pressed him toward deciding to go for phalloplasty. He said: “I do
honestly admit that to have a penis and to penetrate is quite important to me,
because that is the way that I feel like I want to behave. And I’ve felt like that even
from a very early age. . . . It comes back to before I knew what sex was and that
boys had penises and girls didn’t; I still had this urge. So . . . where it came from,
I don’t know. Who knows? Who knows?” This is certainly a puzzling question, a
question of desire Jim responded to by acquiring a penis. Whether Jim had uncon-
sciously identified with men or whether he occupied a position outside sex is not
possible (for us) to know. It does appear that SRS enabled Jim to pass as a man


and assume a symbolic identity. Much like Bornstein, Jim described himself as
“both [sexes] and neither,” suggesting there are positions that cannot be repre-
sented simply by “man” and “woman.”
When asked to talk about how he came to his decision to go ahead with
phalloplasty, given that he sees himself as “both and neither,” he said that,
although there have been many difficulties and disappointments, he “wouldn’t not
have done it.” It appears to us that there are enormous complexities involved in
such a decision, complexities that are not explained by the availability of medical
technology or by existing gender ideology. As with all the participants considered
here, Jim’s case demonstrated that psychical dynamics interact with social dynam-
ics and with medical potential.
We have included material from research participants here in order to
highlight difficulties that we believe transgendered theories tend to oversimplify.
Such difficulties include the desire to pass as the other, the demand for anatomical
congruity with gender through surgical intervention, and the reluctance to politi-
cize what is also an intensely personal experience. Although these difficulties are
not shared by all our participants, they surely indicate differences within the
transgender community, and the way these differences are addressed will play an
important role in shaping the transgender movement.
While it is clearly politically useful to bring transgenderism out of the
closet, and while we wholeheartedly support the project of demystifying and
politicizing transgenderism, we believe transgender theorists also need to address
issues raised by Martin, Shepherdson, and our transgender participants. Martin’s
warning that “gender” is intricately tied to both psychic and social processes mil-
itates against any facile glorification of “crossing.” Shepherdson, who elaborates
these dynamics by distinguishing between sexed embodiment and gender role, has
helped us to understand that aspect of identity which is “neither sex nor gender”
and which the research participants struggle to articulate. We suggest that one way
to respond to the complexities of transgenderism would involve addressing the
unconscious dynamics of subjective identity and sexed embodiment. Our main
goal has been to contribute to debates around transgender theories, to complicate
dominant conceptions of gender, and to engage constructively with ideas that
inform the transgender movement.
Notes
The authors thank the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of Canterbury
in Christchurch, New Zealand, for facilitating the coauthorship of this article. Encour-

agement and critical comments provided by Victoria Grace have been much appreci-
ated. We are grateful for Susan Stryker’s interest in our work and her helpful sugges-
tions for improving it.
1. Biddy Martin, “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias,” diacritics 24,
nos. 2 – 3 (1994), ed. Judith Butler and Biddy Martin, 104 – 21. For the purposes of
this paper, we distinguish between transgender theories, which are those written by
and for people who identify with transgender issues, and feminist, lesbian, and gay
theories, whose proponents might or might not identify with transgender issues. We
take “queer theory” to be a broader category that seeks to encompass a variety of dif-
ferent identities and political goals.
2. For the purposes of this article, we take Bornstein, Feinberg, MacKenzie, and Stone to
be major spokespersons for the transgender movement. We do not assume that theirs
are the only valuable contributions, but they enjoy a popularity that makes them
accessible and widely read.
3. Martin, “Sexualities without Genders,” 107.
4. While Martin engages in a rigorous critique of Sedgwick’s and Butler’s usages of key
terms (sex, gender, sexuality), she does not provide definitions of these terms herself.
This suggests to us that she is raising the question of what they ought to mean — the
question of definition itself. Our intention is to explore the potential of their various
definitions for transgender theories. In their introduction to the diacritics issue, Butler
and Martin describe “crossing” as “an appropriation, assimilation, or even a territori-
alization of another site or position . . . or . . . a movement beyond the stasis attributed
to ‘positions’ located on a closed map of social power” (Judith Butler and Biddy Mar-
tin, “Cross-Identifications,” diacritics 24, nos. 2–3 [1994]: 3). Two concepts of cross-
ing are involved here: (1) a visible movement from one fixed position to another (which
contrasts with the invisible movement of “passing”) that demonstrates that a person
can move from one to the other without disturbing the boundary; and (2) a visible
movement beyond a supposedly fixed position that demonstrates that the positions
themselves are unstable and hence that the boundaries are not fixed. It is this second
concept of crossing that we believe Martin finds useful.
5. In a later, much less sympathetic discussion of queer theory, Suzanna Danuta Walters
develops this critique. See Suzanna Danuta Walters, “From Here to Queer: Radical
Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace (Or, Why Can’t a Woman Be
More Like a Fag?),” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1996):
830–69.
6. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1993).
8. Ibid., 111.
9. This means Butler’s own reading is also an effect of particular discourses and espe-
cially subject to the new historicism that has assumed a dominant place in recent fem-

inist theory. See Charles Shepherdson, “The Role of Gender and the Imperative of
Sex,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994): 164.
11. Martin defines “interiority” as a person’s relationship to “power, autonomy, attachment,
and vulnerability” (“Sexualities without Genders,” 106). Privileging Butler here
seems odd given the kind of work feminists have been doing for at least the last thirty
years. For an extended discussion of earlier feminist contributions, see Susan Bordo,
“Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body,” in Up against Foucault, ed. Caro-
line Ramazanoglu (New York: Routledge, 1993), 179 –202.
13. This means that relationships between sexual identities are not self-evident but
require being made. This tends to occur in coalition politics where, for example, gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons join forces to combat oppression.
15. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body
Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina
Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 280–304, quotation on 295.
16. Jeffrey Weeks, Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), 104.
17. Stone, “Empire Strikes Back,” 294.
18. We understand gender to encompass both an institutionalized interpretation of what it
means to live as a woman or a man (including rules of belonging) and individual inter-
pretations of what it means to live as a woman or a man. Sexuality we define as the way
we represent and enact bodily pleasures and desires, a term that engages concepts of
the body (both real and symbolic) and concepts of gender, if only to negate them, and
which is not reducible to them. Sex we define as the mostly anatomical features by
which social designations of female, male, and intersexed bodies are made.
19. Stone, “Empire Strikes Back,” 298 –99.
20. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1994; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
21. Gordene Olga MacKenzie, Transgender Nation (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1994).
22. Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul
(Boston: Beacon, 1996).
23. The desire to make the body disappear occurs elsewhere as well. See Judith Halber-
stam, “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity,” in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed.
Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 210–28.
25. Charles Shepherdson argues that assuming a sexed embodiment is a human impera-
tive, not a social convention. Although the meanings attached to that imperative have a

history, as does the process of acquiring it, it is not considered dispensable. Psycho-
analysis is, of course, a theory developed in a particular historical and cultural milieu,
but this does not necessarily make its account of the constitution of subjectivity false,
nor does it necessarily limit its applicability to a particular time and place. For a dis-
cussion of this problem in terms of the impasse in psychoanalysis and feminism, see
Teresa Brennan, “An Impasse in Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” in A Reader in Femi-
nist Knowledge, ed. Sneja Gunew (New York: Routledge, 1991), 114–38, and Patricia
Elliot, “Politics, Identity, and Social Change: Contested Grounds in Psychoanalytic
Feminism,” Hypatia 10, no. 2 (1995): 41–55.
26. Shepherdson, “The Role of Gender,” 165.
27. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1986), 61.
28. Quoted in Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Gender as Performance: An Interview
with Judith Butler,” Radical Philosophy 67 (1994): 32 – 39. Susan Stryker, in a mov-
ing account of her own transgender experience, draws on Butler to offer a theory of
how compulsory gender attribution constitutes a violation of the subject. See “My
Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender
Rage,” GLQ 1 (1994): 237–54.
29. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993), x.
30. Ibid., 14.
31. Peng Cheah, “Mattering,” diacritics 26 (spring 1994): 113.
32. Ibid., 115 –16.
33. Cheah offers another view of embodiment based on a Derridean concept of différance
and a “nonanthropologistic” theory about the “dynamism of the given” (ibid., 132).
34. Catherine Millot, Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton (New York:
Autonomedia, 1990). Many transsexuals will claim that no psychoanalytic theorization
of transsexuality can be respectful of transsexuals. Although psychoanalysts are not
always immune to the moralism that reinforces a normal/pathological paradigm, most
subscribe to a rather different model of psychic life in which norms require explanation
and “deviations” are an inescapable part of sexuality. In our research, we have found
only one transsexual who directly addresses the question of the role of fantasy and the
unconscious in her life. See Terri Webb, “Autobiographical Fragments from a Trans-
sexual Activist,” in Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross Dressing and Sex-
Changing, ed. Richard Elkins and Dave King (New York: Routledge, 1996), 190–95.
35. Shepherdson, “The Role of Gender,” 161.
36. This theory also means that performing surgery on intersexed persons serves the social
requirement for conformity but will not in itself guarantee that the subject’s sexed
embodiment will “correspond” to the anatomical sex constructed.
37. Joan Copjec, quoted in Shepherdson, “The Role of Gender,” 162.
38. Penley, quoted in ibid., 163.

39. Ibid., 175.

40. Most of the accounts we have read involve this fantasy at some point or another. We
believe the fantasy is often given up after the surgery fails to realize it but that in the
process one gains a body and a relationship to sexual difference that the fantasy had
precluded. On this issue, we disagree with Shepherdson and Millot, who fear that
surgery for this group of transsexuals is necessarily dangerous.
41. This research project consisted of a series of one-on-one interviews conducted by Kat-
rina Roen in 1996. Participants identified themselves as “transsexual” and/or “trans-
gendered” and are referred to pseudonymously. Interviews were conducted in Aotearoa
(New Zealand) in the course of doctoral research.
42. Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, 103.
43. Indigenous people of Aotearoa.
44. See especially Jim’s comments below on having the urge to have a penis to penetrate
with, even before he “knew” that boys have penises and girls do not.
45. White person living in Aotearoa.

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Some Psychoanalytic Distinctions

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I can’t claim to be female in the sense that you would understand it

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