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T ranssexual women are a small group who have been subject to fierce
and extended scrutiny. This scrutiny includes a feminist literature that
exposes a troubled and often antagonistic relationship between fem-
inism and transsexual women.
This relationship has recently been reconsidered from starting points
in feminist theory (Namaste 2009; Salamon 2010) and feminist politics
(Heyes 2003). My argument builds on this work, on recent histories of
transsexuality in the global metropole (Meyerowitz 2002; Stryker 2008),
on the beginnings of a political economy of transsexuality (Irving 2008;
Schilt and Wiswall 2008), and especially on realist accounts of transition
and the life situations of transsexual women, from Australia (Perkins
1983), the United States (Griggs 1996, 1998), Canada (Namaste 2000,
2005, 2011) and Hungary (Solymar and Takacs 2007).
The first part of this article outlines feminisms encounters with trans-
sexual women and the idea of gender change. The second part looks
critically at assumptions within this debate and at the impact of transgender
ideas, arguing for a stronger input from feminist social science. In the
third part I offer an account of transition as a gender project, of the nature
of transsexual embodiment, and of transsexual womens practice in the
making and remaking of a gender order. Part 4 connects this analysis with
recognition struggles and material inequalities and suggests a reworked
relationship of transsexual women and feminism within a politics of care
and social justice.
By transsexual women I mean women who have been through a
process of transition between locations in the gender order, from earlier
I am grateful for advice, support, and inspiration from feminist comrades Kylie Benton-
Connell, Lingfang Cheng, Miriam Glucksmann, Helen Meekosha, Viviane Namaste, Roberta
Perkins, Patricia Selkirk, Judith Stacey, and Barrie Thorne. I am grateful to my friend John
Fisher for research assistance and to very constructive reviewers for Signs. This article is
dedicated to the memory of my partner Pam Benton, who made it possible.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2012, vol. 37, no. 4]
2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2012/3704-0007$10.00
Recognition
If we acknowledge the multiple narratives of embodiment, transsexuality
is best understood not as a syndrome nor as a discursive position but as
a bundle of life trajectories that arise from contradictions in social em-
bodiment. The trajectories may not have a common origin, but they all
arrive somehow at the moment of knowing that one is a woman despite
having a male body.
This is knowledge of a familiar kind: the functional, situated knowledge
of gender arrangements, ones place in them, and how to proceed in
everyday life that is so well described in feminist microsociology (West
and Zimmerman 1987; Martin 2003). Other women and men have the
same kind of knowledge without the same level of contradiction. Trans-
sexual narratives speak of recognition: sometimes a dramatic moment,
sometimes a gradually growing awareness, but centrally a matter of recog-
nizing a fact about oneself.
But this recognizing is a fearful thing because the central contradiction
in transsexuality is so powerful. This fact is in violation of what everyone
around knows, and what the transsexual woman knows too, being also
recognizable as a man (or boy, since this often happens in youth). And
there is no walking away from this terror: gender is intransigent, both as a
structure of society and as a structure of personal life. The contradiction
has to be handled, and it has to be handled at the level of the body, since
it arises in a process of embodiment. So, from contradictory embodiment
and the moment of recognition, a transsexual woman must generate a
practice. What is to be done?
Some try to keep the contradiction inside their skins and ride out the
terror. Some manage to live the rest of their lives this way, aided by
psychotherapy if they are middle class. Some kill themselves. Surveys report
high rates of attempted suicide (in two recent US studies of transgender
samples, which included many transsexual people, prevalence was above
30 percent; Kenagy 2005; Clements-Nolle, Marx, and Katz 2006). As the
phenomenological studies and autobiographies show, a transsexual woman
may have immense uncertainty about what to do. She cycles in and out
of transsexual practice, starts and stops cross-dressing, starts and stops self-
harm. Moving toward transition is an attempt to end this precarious prac-
tice and achieve a settlement.
Reassignment
Transsexual medicine in the 1960s and 1970s was, in the global metropole,
supplied by public agenciesthat is, gender identity clinicsbut also
fiercely rationed by them. In the neoliberal economic climate of the 1980s,
gender reassignment shifted to the private sector in an increasingly de-
regulated market. Reassignment became easier to getfor a price. One
surgical entrepreneur, Stanley Biber, was said to be doing more than half
optimism of the will. The old politics of identity and exclusion drove a
wedge between feminism and transsexual women that has not been en-
tirely overcome. I hope the analysis in this article helps to make transsexual
womens lives intelligible in feminist terms while remaining true to trans-
sexual womens experiences. The political direction suggested here has
deep roots in transsexual and feminist history. It is not an easy path, and
it cannot be conflict free. Yet it has the prospect of engaging transsexual
feminists with other feminists in work that can make practical gains for
gender justice and enrich feminism as a whole.
University of Sydney
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