TRANSSEXUAL WOMEN AND FEMINIST THOUGHT:

Towards new understanding and new politics

Raewyn Connell

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2012, vol. 37 no. 4, 857-881.

Abstract

Transsexual women, providing important material for feminist thought, have had a
conflict-ridden relationship with feminism over four decades. A fruitless
preoccupation with identity and exclusion can be overcome, though deconstructionist
theory and 'transgender' discourses are mixed blessings. A richer use of feminist
social science throws light on trajectories that start with contradictory social
embodiment, and involve the full complexity of the gender order, including economic
as well as family relations. With all its trauma, transition allows re-entry; the crucial
point is the ontoformativity of gender, the practical making of social reality through
time. This analysis points to a politics of gender justice and care, from the intimate to
the world scale, engaging transsexual women and feminism on fresh terms.

Acknowledgments

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
journal reviewers. This paper is dedicated to the memory of my partner Pam Benton,
who made it possible.

Introduction

Transsexual women are a small group who have been subject to fierce and extended
scrutiny. The scrutiny includes a feminist literature, which exposes a troubled and
often antagonistic relationship between feminism and transsexual women.

This relationship has recently been reconsidered from starting-points in feminist

theory (Namaste 2009, Salamon 2010), feminist politics (Heyes 2003), and lesbian
communities (Coogan 2006). My argument builds on this work; on recent histories of
transsexuality in the global metropole (Stryker 2008; Meyerowitz 2002); 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 (Perkins 1983; Griggs 1996, 1998; Namaste 2000, 2005a,b;
Solymár and Takács 2007).

Part I of this paper outlines feminism's encounters with transsexual women and the
idea of gender change. Part II looks critically at assumptions within this debate, at the

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impact of transgender ideas, and argues for a stronger input from feminist social
science. Part III offers an account of transition as a gender project, the nature of
transsexual embodiment, and transsexual women's practice in the making and
remaking of a gender order. Part IV connects this analysis with recognition struggles
and material inequalities, and suggests a re-worked relationship of transsexual women
and feminism within in 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 definition as a boy or man towards
the embodiment and social position of a woman - whatever the path taken, and
whatever the outcome. By 'medically assisted transition' I mean the particular path
that uses the package of medical interventions supporting social and legal gender
reassignment (Tugnet et al. 2007). The key idea is transitionality, as Solymár and
Takács (2007) observe. It is therefore helpful to regard 'transsexual' as an adjective,
not a noun.

Transsexual medicine developed mainly in the global metropole, i.e. western Europe
and the United States, where the feminist debates about transsexuality have also
centered. In the global periphery there are also gender-changing groups under many
names: transsexual (Najmabadi 2008), transformista (Ochoa 2008), travesti
(Fernández 2004), kathoey (Winter 2006), hijra (Reddy 2006) and others.
Metropolitan writers on gender issues have often appropriated their experience, with
an appalling lack of care or respect. It is important to acknowledge both their
distinctive situations, and the power of the metropole, which impacts on body politics
everywhere. My main concern in this paper is with debates in the metropole; but the
argument returns necessarily to the global dimension of gender.

I: Encounters of feminism and transsexual women

The thought that the relationship between character and reproductive bodies might
change has long been present in feminism. It was, for instance, the central idea in the
first fully social theory of gender, written by the pioneering German feminist
Mathilde Vaerting (1921). It can be found in the riff on transcendence and justice that
concluded Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex: 'sooner or later they [women] will
arrive at complete economic and social equality, which will bring about an inner
metamorphosis' (1949: 738). But where Vaerting saw change as institutional and
collective, de Beauvoir treated femininity as a project at the level of personal life.
More exactly a set of projects: the heart of The Second Sex is a mapping of paths in
life (the lesbian, the married woman, the prostitute) that represent different
negotiations of women's social subordination.

Thus the most influential text of twentieth-century feminism arrived at a conception

of gender resembling ideas emerging in European and US medicine. The term
'transsexual' was given its modern meaning, a personal project of gender transition, in
an article published in 1949, the same year as The Second Sex. The first attempts at
gender reassignment involving endocrine treatment or surgery, responding to the
requests of desperate patients, had already been undertaken, especially in Germany by
doctors associated with Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science (Meyerowitz
2002: 16-22).

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Soon after The Second Sex appeared, reassignment became a public issue via
Christine Jorgensen, who transitioned with the help of a Danish clinical team and
became the public face of transsexuality in the 1950s. In the glare of the astonishing
publicity around Jorgensen (Stryker 2000), an unexpected volume of gender distress,
and previously unnoticed grassroots projects of gender change, became visible in the
global metropole.

These projects can be recognized if we follow the historical method of Subaltern

Studies and read the situation of the subaltern through the official texts. This
approach can be applied to the main medical texts produced in this moment:
Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), Stoller's Sex and Gender (1968),
and Green and Money's Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969). The people
who moved into the US clinicians' gaze at this time were at different stages of
transition. Most were, in the language of the day, male-to-female transsexuals and
some were already living as women. Most, though not all, were white, and they were
drawn from a spectrum of working- and middle-class backgrounds. They brought
folk understandings of natural gender difference, together with accounts of
devastating contradictions - soul vs body, self vs society, legal status vs personal
reality. They brought narratives of families, working lives and relationships in
turmoil and sometimes shattered.

The clinical meaning of transsexuality was produced in an intricate and uncertain

cultural negotiation around this distress and medical intervention. A treatment
package was evolved - with fierce debate among doctors - and gender identity clinics
began to operate in the 1960s.

The political meaning of transsexuality began to be negotiated in the US new left at

the end of the same decade (Altman 1972, Irving 2008, Stryker 2008). Several small,
radical transsexual/transvestite groups formed, and issued a manifesto calling for
social justice. Self-help transsexual community centres were founded in San
Francisco and New York; in the words of the New York organizer, recalling new-left
rhetoric, 'it was a revolutionary thing' (Rivera 2002: 81). Revolutionary transsexual
themes can also be found in European new-left discussions. Mario Mieli's
Homosexuality and Liberation (1977) proposed a theory of universal trans-sexuality,
partly derived from Freud, and saw transsexual women as bearing the most severe
oppression - and therefore as cutting-edge participants in struggles for liberation.

At first Women's Liberation paid no attention to transsexual women, though some

were in the ranks. Transsexual women do not trouble the pages of Robin Morgan's
famous anthology Sisterhood is Powerful (1970). Only three years later, Morgan
herself launched a public attack in quite violent language against a transsexual woman
who had been invited to perform as a musician at a lesbian-feminist conference in
California (Morgan 1978: 171, 181).

Morgan's theme was picked up by Mary Daly, the theologian then emerging as the
leading theorist of US separatist feminism. In her most famous book, Gyn/Ecology
(1978: 71), Daly attacked transsexuality as a 'necrophilic invasion' of women's bodies
and spirits. Daly's views were elaborated by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual
Empire (1979), which drew a lurid picture of transsexual women as parodies of

3
femininity and male invaders of women's spaces. Raymond's book was widely read
and is still quoted, undoubtedly the most influential feminist statement on
transsexuality. Its arguments were followed to some degree by most other feminist
writers who touched on the subject. To the more hostile, transsexual women should
not exist at all. In a post-patriarchal world, according to Jeffreys (1990: 188),
'transsexualism could not be imagined'.

Even at the 1973 conference, some women defended the singer Beth Elliott's right to
be heard (Meyerowitz 2002: 259-260). Feminist support for transsexual women at the
level of practice and personal relationships never entirely disappeared. Transsexual
women themselves argued back; an excellent early critique of The Transsexual
Empire was published in Britain by Carol Riddell (1980). Yet for two decades an
exclusionist stance dominated the relation between transsexual women and movement
feminism. It was from quite another direction that a kind of engagement emerged.

In the later 1970s, feminist sociologists were transforming the rough-and-ready

liberationist critique of sex roles and patriarchy into a more sophisticated theory of
gender. In the United States this project employed Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, the
sociological technique that explores presuppositions of everyday social categories.
Following an essay by Garfinkel that treated the life of a young transsexual woman as
a kind of natural experiment, feminist sociologists developed a theory of the micro-
foundations of the gender order. A technical book by Kessler and McKenna (1978), a
very influential paper called 'Doing Gender' by West and Zimmerman (1987), and a
debate about Garfinkel's work (Rogers 1992), laid out the argument. Transsexual
women provided key evidence about how gender categories are sustained in everyday
practices of speech, styles of interaction, and divisions of labour.

Here transsexual women figured, not as hostile outsiders, but as striking examples of
processes that affected all women's lives. Ironically - given transsexual women's own
narratives at the time, which usually spoke of unchanging femininity - feminist
sociologists read their lives as proving the plasticity of gender, giving credibility to
agendas of social change.

Transsexual women's experience was then used by a number of other scholars to

ground broad arguments about gender. By far the most influential was Judith Butler.

In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler dispensed with the assumption of a natural basis of
women's identity, and therefore of feminism. Like the ethnomethodologists she
needed an explanation of the solid appearance of gender. This was provided by the
idea of a 'stylized repetition of acts' that brought gender performatively into existence;
which led to the idea of radical gender politics as the proliferation of performances
that subverted existing gender norms. Transvestite drag performance provided the key
example to launch this argument, revealing 'the imitative structure of gender itself'
(1990: 137). In Bodies That Matter (1993: 121ff.) Butler used a film about African-
american and Latina participants in a drag ball to explore how far the event, the
community around it, and the film-making, could be understood as subversive. In
Undoing Gender (2004) Butler wrote at length about transsexuality and transgender,
critiquing the medical diagnosis of 'gender identity disorder' as a site of gender
normativity, and seeing anti-transgender violence as a sign of the ferocity with which
heteronormativity is enforced.

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The most influential oeuvre in contemporary feminism, thus, is significantly engaged
with issues around transsexual women, and Butler's writing was strikingly more
positive than lesbian-feminist writing in the 1970s. It helped to launch a wave of
post-structuralist and queer feminist writing about transsexuality. This started with
Marjorie Garber's (1992) study of cross-dressing and gender ambiguity, and Bernice
Hausman's (1995) Foucauldian study, which also treated gender as part of the
symbolic order, and read transsexual women's actions as the 'engineering' of a
normative subjectivity through their demand for the use of medical technologies. In
due course queer sociologies appeared (Hird 2000, 2002, Hines 2007), in which
transsexual women figure as living the instability of the sex/gender binary.

Transsexual activists, both men and women, were caught up in this movement. The
marker of change was a 'Posttranssexual Manifesto' (1991) by Sandy Stone, a
transsexual woman who had been specifically attacked by Raymond. Stone's witty
essay suggested that transsexuals were not a class, nor a third gender, but a genre, 'a
set of embodied texts' (1991: 296), with the potential for disrupting dichotomous
categories of sexuality and gender.

Stone thus connected transsexual women's lives with the rising tide of cultural studies
in American academic life, and with the emerging queer agenda of breaking down,
rather than mobilizing around, conventional gender categories. The growing visibility
of transsexual men (Rubin 2003), and the re-emergence of an interest in butch
identities and masculinity within lesbian networks (Halberstam 1998), were important
reinforcements. Within a few years a 'transgender' perspective was articulated (e.g.
Wilchins 2002). This perspective was rapidly adopted in other Anglophone countries,
and has now spread globally.

'A huge paradigmatic shift' had occurred, according to More and Whittle (1999: 8).
They were editing a volume that brought together leading US and British writers in
the rapidly-crystallizing field of transgender studies (Stryker and Whittle 2006).
Since the 1990s, 'transgender' and 'trans' have been widely adopted as general terms
covering not only transsexual women and men but also a growing range of non-
normative identities, from 'androgynous' to 'genderqueer transboi' (Couch et al. 2007).

With the change of language came a changed political logic. Transgender politics has
moved towards a focus on rights claims within the existing social order (Currah,
Juang and Minter 2006, Namaste 2005a). This is pursued through a political
alignment, not with women, but with sexual minorities. Discussions of human rights
now often name 'LGBT' - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender - as a minority
group in need of defence. Other initials may be added (for Intersex, Transsexual,
Queer, or Questioning) but 'LGBT' is by far the most common, and has practically
become a word in its own right.

These developments impacted on the relationship between feminism and transsexual

women, though not in a single way. On the one hand gender-changing of various
kinds has become more familiar and easier to accept. A feminist literature is
emerging about the significance of gender plurality, in which transsexual women are
treated with respect (e.g. Heyes 2003, Monro 2005). Butler's work continues to
command attention and to guide current work on transgender (e.g. Salamon 2010).

5
Yet the terms of Butler's engagement with transsexuality are troubling, as Namaste's
(2009) critique shows. It rests on an appropriation of transsexual and transvestite
experience that, in order to focus on the subversion of identity, occludes the economic
realities of drag and prostitution, the gender-specific character of violence, and the
devastation of transsexual women's lives by HIV.

For other feminists, the tools of post-structuralism allowed transsexuality to be seen

as a 'colonizing enterprise' that reproduces sexist stereotypes and can never challenge
the social relations of gender (Wilton 2000). Even moderate post-structuralists such
as Myra Hird (2002a) described transsexuality as 'identification gone awry' and 'a
hyperbolic performance of gender'. Ironically, feminist critics of the post-structural
turn also found a negative case here. The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1994: 207)
used transsexual women - defined as men enmired in illusion - to drive home the
impossibility of escaping corporeality. The sociologist Liz Stanley (2000), in a
presidential address, found transsexual moves simply ludicrous: 'if you don't want to
be a man then why want to be a woman, rather than, for example, a zebra or a
cherub?'

Clearly, the issue of transsexual women's relation to the feminist project has not been
settled. It is time to reconsider the terms in which the problem has been framed.

II: From identity problems to gender dynamics

Most discussions of transsexuality are focussed on identity questions, as Namaste

(2000) and Hird (2002a) observe. Sociologies of 'coming out' (Gagné, Tewkesbury
and McCaughey 1997) have been quite as occupied with this issue as were the studies
of disturbed gender identity that provided the classic psychiatric explanation of
transsexuality (Stoller 1968), and the original rationale for 'gender identity' clinics.

Feminist thought too has persistently dealt with transsexuality in terms of identity.
Morgan's central argument in 1973 was that the musician involved was really a man,
not a woman. In her rhetoric, as with other exclusionist arguments up to the present -
it is necessary to read the originals to get the full flavour of rejection - there is
emotion very like a defence of purity against contamination. As Cressida Heyes
(2003) argues, it was the attempt to define a single feminist subject that justified
exclusion of transsexual women.

Deconstructionist feminism announced 'the subversion of identity' (in the subtitle of

Gender Trouble) as a central project, and its brilliant success opened the floodgates
for a transgender movement. Two forms of identity politics followed. One made
gender-changing the practical demolition or refusal of gender identity. There are now
people trying to live rigorously without gender identities, creating undecidable
mixtures of gender signs, and building queer or de-gendered relationships and
households. A more popular version of transgender - in logical tension with
deconstructionism though often blended with it in practice - collected transgressive
identities in a breathless list:

6
 drag queens and kings, transsexuals, cross-dressers, he-shes and she-males,
intersexed people, transgenderists, and people of ambiguous, androgynous, or
contradictory sex and gender (Pratt 1995: 21)

Assembling identities in this way constructed a heterogeneous 'transgender

community', and added the T to a pre-existing LGB.

Transgender texts often speak of a spectrum, or as Susan Stryker nicely put it when
defining transgender studies, 'myriad specific subcultural expressions of "gender
atypicality"' (Stryker and Whittle 2006: 3). In many texts, a contrast between this
spectrum and a normative binary is the core of the transgender perspective (e.g.
Girshick 2008). Yet through this shift, identity issues have remained the centre of
attention. Stephen Whittle introduced the Transgender Studies Reader with the words
'Trans identities were one of the most written about subjects of the late twentieth
century' (Stryker and Whittle 2006: xi). American feminist philosophers are still
debating 'Sex reassignment and personal identity', to quote the subtitle of a recent
collection (Shrage 2009).

Identity debates arise on a specific terrain, that of meaning, symbolism and

expression. In transgender writing, as represented in recent collections (Nestle,
Howell and Wilchins 2002, Stryker and Whittle 2006, Currah, Moore and Stryker
2008, O'Keefe and Fox 2008), the characteristic genres are autobiographical
narratives, film and television commentary, literary and philosophical essays; the
guiding intellectual lights are post-structuralist thinkers, especially Foucault and
Butler; the central problems are self, subjectivity, voice, discourse, category and
representation. The body is of course present in transgender writing but
characteristically the concern is with body images, marking, meaning and symbolism.

This focus gives great power to recent transgender writing as cultural intervention and
cultural critique. But it comes at a cost. The transgender turn and the rise of
deconstructionist theory have posed difficulties for transsexual women.

Two of these difficulties seem most important. The first is that major issues in
transsexual women's lives, especially social issues, are not well represented by
identity discourses of any kind. These issues include the nature of transition, the
labouring transsexual body, workplace relations, poverty, the functioning of state
organizations including police, health policy, family services, education and
childcare.

The second difficulty is a powerful tendency in transgender literature to de-gender the

groups spoken of: whether by emphasising only their non-normative or transgressive
status; by claiming that gender identity is fluid, plastic, malleable, shifting, unstable,
mobile etc.; or by simply ignoring gender location. A great deal of recent research
and writing, while acknowledging diversity at an individual level, lumps women and
men into a common 'transgender' story (e.g. Hines 2007, Couch et al. 2007, Girshick
2008). Indeed, a current trend is to abstract the 'trans' from gender altogether (Currah
et al. 2008: 12). It is difficult to find in any of this the intransigence of gender
actually experienced in transsexual women's lives.

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We should not give up the intellectual advances of post-structuralism and transgender
studies by retreating to an essentialist transsexual discourse. But we do need to
recognize the specificity of transsexuality at the level of social practice, and its
continuing connection with a problematic that is very different from a problematic of
identity. This is a key to the relationship with feminism, because that problematic
concerns the structure and dynamics of the gender order. As I noted at the start of the
paper, the specificity of transsexuality concerns transition between locations in the
gender order. The intransigence of gender, at both a social and a personal level, is of
course a central problem for feminism, driving the long feminist engagements with
psychoanalysis, marxism and sociology.

Feminist social science, then, is a vital resource - I would even say, the vital resource
- for an understanding of transsexuality and a re-thinking of its politics. In recent
decades feminist sociology has developed sophisticated analyses of gender as social
practice (Poggio 2006). The multi-dimensional structuring of gender relations
certainly includes gender symbolism, but also involves authority relations, the
economy, emotional attachment and separation (Pfau-Effinger 1998, Connell 2009).
Therefore as transsexual women make their way through gendered social landscapes,
their practices are necessarily much more than identity projects. They have to deal
with social institutions ranging from the patriarchal state (Namaste 2000), economy
(Irving 2008) and medical profession (Griggs 1996) to the family (Langley 2002).

Gender orders are formed and re-formed through time, as feminist historiography has
abundantly shown (Rose 2010). The historicity of transsexuality arises within a larger
dynamic of changing gender relations. Gender configurations within these structures
are multiple, not binary, as feminist sociology has shown (Lorber 2005), and there are
patterns of hegemony among different masculinities and femininities. There are
always multiple pathways of gender formation, as children grow up, but these are not
matters of free choice.

Hegemonic gender forms themselves have repeatedly been shown to be deeply

fissured. For instance, in Good and Mad Women the historian Jill Matthews (1984)
traced the conflicting demands placed on women in mid-twentieth century Australia,
which for some, made femininity impossible to live. Nancy Chodorow's Femininities,
Masculinities, Sexualities (1994) showed the emotional contradictions embedded in
conventional heterosexuality, developmentally a tension-ridden compromise
formation, not a simple unity. The multiple pathways of gender formation, we can
expect, normally contain contradictions.

Perhaps the most important point concerns the link between the historicity of gender
structure and the nature of gender practice. To treat gender as performative and
citational is not enough. In feminist social science, gender is ontoformative (Kosík
1976, Connell 1987). Practice starts from structure, but does not repetitively cite its
starting point. Rather, social practice continuously brings social reality into being;
which becomes the ground of new practice, through time. In an influential statement
from feminist organization theory, Martin (2003) names this dynamic by
distinguishing 'gender practices', i.e. the repertoire available at a given time in an
organization's gender regime, from 'practicing gender', the event of enactment, the
means by which the gender order is constituted (and potentially transformed) at work.

8
As I will show, the ontoformative character of gender is central in transsexual
women's lives.

III: Rethinking transsexuality as gender process

Contradictory embodiment

In transsexual women's experience, bodies form the vital arena of contradiction and
change. Prosser (1998), Coogan (2006) and Johnson (2007) are right to emphasise
that transsexuality is embodied, and any attempt to make sense of transition must give
full weight to the issue. For many people - including many transsexual women - this
is one of the hardest things to understand or accept. What is done with bodies in the
course of gender transitions can evoke horror or anger, calling up fears about
castration and monstrosity.

In the gender order as a whole, gendered embodiment establishes relations between

changing bodies and changing structures of gender relations (Connell 2009). This
process is multifaceted and often powerfully conflictual. At the collective level, as
Wendy Harcourt (2009a) shows, there are world-wide and sometimes deadly
struggles over women's and men's bodies, from fertility control to gender-based
violence. At the personal level, the brilliant 'memory-work' research of a German
feminist collective (Haug et al. 1987), tracing the way different parts of women's
bodies acquire sexual meanings within patriarchal culture, showed strong tensions
within this process. Gendered embodiment with non-normative bodies, as
experienced by disabled women, is a notable site of conflict (Meekosha 1998).

Experiences of contradictory embodiment are central in transsexual women's lives.

This is abundantly shown in life stories, and in the phenomenologies of transsexual
women's embodiment undertaken by Claudine Griggs (1998) and Katherine Johnson
(2007). Contrary to older ideas that there is one stereotyped 'official story' (Hausman
1995), there are actually multiple transsexual narratives of embodiment. Masculine
and feminine embodiment sometimes alternate with each other, as described in the
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White's (1979) great transsexual novel The
Twyborn Affair. Sometimes one surges out of the other: for instance the experiences
described by Deirdre McCloskey (1999) and in the recently published life-history of
an older transsexual woman (Connell 2010). Sometimes masculine and feminine
embodiment co-exist over a shorter or longer period of years, as described by Josie
Emery (2009) and Julia Serrano (2007).

As shown earlier, there is nothing unique about contradiction arising in embodiment.

What is distinctive is the shape and scope of the contradiction, since genetically male
bodies are involved and the process of gendered embodiment normally makes men of
them. This is so scandalous that many medical writers, and most transsexual women,
assume there must be a biological cause (a belief also prevalent in the periphery:
Winter 2006).

Transsexual women reach for one metaphor after another to describe their experience:
having a man's body and a woman's body at the same time, or one emerging from the
other, or - the traditional one - being trapped in the wrong body. These figures of

9
speech have aroused scorn from critics (Wilton 2000). Indeed no metaphor is very
adequate. But all these have the merit of pointing to the agency of the body.
Arguably there is no 'cause', in the mechanical sense. It is more helpful to think of the
powerful process of social embodiment as constantly engaging bodies and bodily
agency, as well as social practices and cultural meanings, in a complex 'co-
construction' (Roberts 2000). In almost all women's and men's lives, social
embodiment has minor incoherencies. What we call 'transsexuality' involves the
liminal contradiction, the most severe, that arises in this process.

Recognition

Acknowledging 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 embodiment. They 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, one's place in them, and how to proceed in everyday life, that is so well
described in feminist micro-sociology (West and Zimmerman 1987, Martin 2003).
Other women and men have the same kind of knowledge, without the same level of
contradiction. Transsexual narratives speak of recognition: sometimes a dramatic
moment, sometimes a gradually growing awareness, but centrally a matter of
recognizing a fact about oneself.

But this recognizing is a fearful thing, because the central contradiction in

transsexuality is so powerful. This fact is totally at odds with what everyone around
knows, and with 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 the 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; if middle-class, aided by
psychotherapy. Some kill themselves. Surveys report high rates of attempted suicide
(in two recent US studies of 'transgender' samples many of whom were transsexual,
prevalence was above 30% - 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 towards
transition is an attempt to end this precarious practice and achieve a settlement.

Reassignment

Transsexual medicine in the 1960s and 1970s was, in the global metropole, supplied
by public agencies, i.e. gender identity clinics, but also fiercely rationed by them. In

10
the neoliberal economic climate of the 1980s, gender reassignment shifted to the
private sector in an increasingly de-regulated market. Reassignment became easier to
get - at a price. One surgical entrepreneur, Stanley Biber, was said to be doing more
than half the reassignment operations in the United States (Meyerowitz 2002, Griggs
1996).

The capitalist economy is global, embedding huge disparities of wealth and power. In
the 1960s a reassignment practice was run by a French gynaecologist with a clinic in
Morocco, Georges Burou, outside the restrictive professional controls of Europe.
Middle-class transsexual women from the United States and Europe flew in, and
reassignment became an export commodity for a poor post-colonial country.
Recently, reassignment surgery has boomed in Thailand, interwoven with a cosmetic
surgery industry (Aizura 2009). Low wages, lax controls, and a local gender-
changing tradition, gave a comparative advantage in this field. Thailand is now
(together with Iran, where religious authorities approve of reassignment [Najmabadi
2008]) the most prominent centre of reassignment surgery outside the metropole.

In these developments, transsexual medicine became part of the global bioeconomy

defined in recent research on tissue commodification (Waldby and Mitchell 2006).
This changed the politics of access. Middle-class women with property and steady
incomes can fund international travel and private treatment far more easily than
working-class women, migrant women, young women, or women who lose their jobs
because of transition. Class and global inequality, rather than patriarchal gatekeeping,
has become the crucial filter.

Transsexual medicine is still substantially the package evolved in the 1950s-1960s

(Tugnet et al. 2007), though with refinements, and more variety in which parts of the
package transsexual women adopt. Medically assisted transition is a slow business.
Its effects are limited: no genetic change, no skeletal change, no childbearing
capacity. Parts of it are very painful (electrolysis, surgery of all kinds). Parts of it
have a broad impact on the body (anti-androgens, oestrogens, genital surgery) and
others a local effect (electrolysis, tracheal shave, vocal training). The process is
unavoidably traumatic, as shown in Griggs' (1996) superb narrative of reassignment
surgery. No body is made physically healthier by it, and there are problematic long-
term effects such as osteoporosis. This is the dilemma as medical ethics sees it:
intervening in an apparently healthy body in the hope of gains in mental health.
Evaluation studies provide ambiguous evidence whether such outcomes are achieved
(Sutcliffe et al. 2009).

There is nothing pretty about gender reassignment; these are rough measures and have
rough results. There is no cause to euphemize them as body-modification or
glamorize them as an aesthetic adventure. Reassignment, though slow, has something
of the character of emergency medicine: dealing with a critical situation well enough
to allow life, including social life, to continue. And though media and scholarly
attention have focussed obsessively on the surgery, it is important to remember that
surgery is only part of the medical treatment, and medical treatment is only part of
transition, basically a facilitating part. A huge amount of other work is to be done.

The work of transition

11
'Work' is not a metaphor. There is a complex labour process of transition, visible in
the phenomenological studies (Griggs 1998) and in some of the transgender
sociological research (Hines 2007). This can be undertaken without reassignment, by
transsexual women who are denied medical treatment or who decide against it. Its
focus shifts over time. Getting funds, getting personal support, post-operative care,
legal documentation, finding housing, dealing with relationship crises, dealing with a
workplace or finding work, dealing with bodily changes, gaining social recognition,
and dealing with hostility, may all be uppermost in turn.

This labour process, as the sociology of gender would lead us to expect, engages all
the dimensions of the gender order; it is not only about sexuality or identity. It is
structured by the inequalities of the gender order; the process is not the same for
transsexual women and transsexual men. Transsexual women are shedding the
patriarchal dividend that accrues to men as a group, in labour markets, finance
markets (e.g. housing), family status, professional authority and so on. A small but
path-breaking econometric study by Schilt and Wiswall (2008) in the United States
finds there is an economic penalty in transition for both men and women, but
transsexual men eventually are better paid after transition than before, while
transsexual women lose, on average, nearly one-third of their income.

A changed embodied position in gender relations grounds new practice, relying on the
ontoformativity of gender. That practice may be as basic as survival. More generally
it is a matter of creating everyday life on new terms. The point of arrival, thus, is also
a point of departure. Transition is re-entry into the historical dynamic of gender, an
event in time that launches an interactive social process.

A great deal then rests on the responses of others, in public arenas as well as private.
Gatekeepers for jobs and housing have to be negotiated with. There are risks of
violence from men, which transsexual women learn to judge, and of rejection from
women. In the positive case, recognition as a woman need not involve 'passing'.
Recognition can equally be a matter of pragmatic acceptance by those with whom one
lives and works. In most circumstances, other people do sustain interactions with a
transsexual woman, whatever they take her identity to be. To borrow a phrase from
Tennessee Williams, transsexual women depend on the kindness of strangers.

Weaving new lives: economic and family relations

Dan Irving (2008) has recently argued that gender transition is subject to the logic of
capitalism. The changing economic relations around transsexuality are clearly an
important issue. As transitioning women return to the labour market, they have to
build working lives in the face of gender inequalities and the insecurities of a
globalizing economic order.

Some of the ways they do are shown in new research by Karen Schilt (Schilt and
Wiswall 2008) and Catherine Connell (2010) in the United States. Rich data about
practice after transition show how transsexual women are sensitized to inequalities
and insecurity. Some respond by concealing transition - the 'stealth' strategy - while
others are not only open about their transition, but contest rather than conform to
sexist conventions. These studies, however, had mainly middle-class samples.
Numbers of working-class transsexual women have always survived by sex work.

12
This is a far more precarious milieu, exposing workers to high levels of HIV infection
and violence (Garofalo et al. 2006, Namaste 2005b: 59-70, 2009). Working as a
prostitute may also discredit women, in the eyes of medical gatekeepers, if they seek
reassignment.

A social understanding of transition bears on intimate relationships too. Transition

puts partnerships, especially marriages, at acute risk: a wife's position in the gender
order is seriously changed, and may be traumatically undermined, by a husband's
moves toward transition. The result can be severe conflict (e.g. Cummings 1992,
McCloskey 2000), though some relationships survive well. A transitioning woman's
parents may also have great difficulty with the shift from son to daughter, though
there are notable examples of parents working through the shock to acceptance and
support (Langley 2002).

With transsexual women's children, too, relationships may end at transition. Even
when they continue, both child and parent have to handle the significant loss that
occurs in transition. Gender relations are embodied; here it is embodied fatherhood
being lost, and it is not only the transitioning woman who pays the price. These
issues have become more prominent in autobiographies (Boylan 2003), and are
central in Noelle Howey's Dress Codes (2002: 236-7, 307), written by the daughter of
a transsexual woman - 'I was of approximately five minds on the issue of my father's
impending womanhood' - tracing the complicated family consequences.

Families can be resilient, and partnerships and parent/child relationships can be re-
woven. Indeed family members may be vital supports during transition. Transsexual
women after transition may become further involved with children in many ways, for
instance in blended families, as aunts, grandmothers and carers, in the workplace as
teachers, nurses etc. The extent of care work after transition is highlighted by Sally
Hines (2007). The capacity for care shown in these situations is one of the bases for a
changed politics of transsexuality.

IV: Another politics is possible

I hope the account of practical dilemmas and responses in this paper will help to de-
mythologize transsexual women a little. Transsexual women as such are neither
enemies of change nor heralds of a new world. But they can act in either direction;
and which direction they take is a question of political alliances and strategies.

The queer activism that blossomed in the 1990s changed gender politics in the
metropole, and remains an important source of radical energy. It opened new cultural
spaces and social milieux that are safer and friendlier for transsexual women. Queer
activists have engaged not only in spectacular cultural politics but also in practical
support for women and men in transition. Yet there are limits to this politics, as there
are limits to the LGBT alignment; there is an overlap, but not a complete
correspondence, with the interests of transsexual women. The analysis in the
previous sections shows a continuing link with the broad currents of feminism.
Because transsexual women's lives are shaped by the intransigence of gender, there is
necessarily common ground with feminism. Transsexual women may or may not

13
believe in a fixed gender identity, but do acknowledge in their practice the power of
gender determinations.

Much of what transsexual women need is already contained in feminist agendas:

equity in education, adequate childcare, equal employment conditions and wage
justice, prevention of gender-based violence, resistance to sexist culture, and what
Scandinavian feminists have called a 'woman-friendly state' (Borchorst and Siim
2002). Given the depth and interwoven character of gender inequalities, the best
guarantee of justice for transsexual women is a gender-equal society. However hard
it is to acknowledge, given the antagonisms discussed in the first half of this paper,
transsexual women have a broad interest in supporting feminist causes.

Does feminism have an interest in supporting transsexual women? Opinion has

changed, as Katherine Johnson (2005) shows. The transgender movement has helped
this; the social contributions of transsexual women are more visible. Feminism itself
has changed. Feminists in the metropole have paid more attention to the diversity of
women's situations around the world (Bulbeck 1998), and to groups whose bodily
experiences are anomalous, especially disabled women (Smith and Hutchison 2004).
Feminism that has broadened out in multiple directions - 'feminism without borders',
in Mohanty's (2003) evocative phrase - can more readily see, in relation to transsexual
women, opportunities for learning, gains for imagination, and occasions for solidarity,
that will enrich the movement.

Many feminists are still troubled by the severe bodily interventions involved in
transsexual medicine. It is worth saying that many transsexual women are, too. Most
hesitate, often for years, and only go forward after agonizing debate. Most are well
aware of the limits of bodily change in transition and know the results will not be
normative. If they go forward with reassignment, it is in the hope of enough change
to support new practice and a viable existence. With many more transsexual women
making open transitions, and a wide range of bodily effects being visible, sexist
stereotypes are now perhaps more disrupted than enforced.

The current in metropolitan feminism that hopes to abolish gender or dissolve the
gender order has had strong appeal in the last two decades. But in the long run,
transsexual women will find more relevance in the attempt to create just gender
orders. An agenda of justice and equality has more purchase globally, in the multiple
feminisms of the contemporary world (Bulbeck 1998, Harcourt 2009a), and is more
closely aligned with the logic of transition.

What is involved in action to create a just gender order? Part of this is about
achieving justice for transsexual women. What this means has mainly been defined in
recent writing by a powerful individualism, seen in the 'I did it my way' narrative
(Emery 2009, Serrano 2007) and the 'transgender rights' discourse (Currah et al. 2006)
that treats self-determinations of gender identity as 'individual rights and liberties'
(Sheridan 2009: 24). A very different approach was taken in the remarkable
manifesto by US transsexual and transvestite groups forty years ago (text in Altman
1972: 135). As well as rights, this manifesto demanded state funding for medical
treatment, support services controlled by transsexual people, freeing of transvestite
and transsexual prisoners in jails, and 'a full voice in the struggle for the liberation of

14
all oppressed people'. This moved beyond individualism to collective action and
social struggle.

Nancy Fraser's theory of justice distinguishes claims about recognition from those
about material inequalities (Fraser and Honneth 2003). Both are important for
transsexual women. Recognition is denied in patriarchal ideology, where transsexual
women's embodiment is perfect abjection: the failed, castrated male, the fake female.
The state has typically been an antagonist in recognition struggles, denying or
rationing recognition (Cabral and Viturro 2006, Solymár and Takács 2007).
Nevertheless gains have been won, some by individual action in the courts, especially
in the USA (Kirkland 2003), others by social action, such as the 1996 Transgender
Act in NSW (Hooley 2003) and the 2005 Gender Recognition Act in the UK (Monro
2005). There is evidence of favourable, if limited, shifts in public opinion about
transsexuality (Landén and Innala 2000).

With questions of material justice, it is harder to find gains. For young working-class,
migrant and indigenous transsexual women, housing, income, safety, education and
health are all starkly at risk (Namaste 2000). Arrest can be disastrous, prison is highly
dangerous. The interest of transsexual women sex workers in decriminalization and
an occupational health and safety approach to sex work is clear, placing them on the
less popular side of a long-running feminist debate. Material justice requires equal
access to transsexual medicine, which means public sector provision; but there has
been a shift of transsexual medicine into the private sector, where access is class-
biassed. In these areas, the state is both antagonist and resource for transsexual
women.

A major part of transsexual politics is the pursuit of these claims for justice. Clearly,
collective struggle is important in reaching them, and transsexual women's own
politicization is the core of this. Solidarity from others is also needed. Transsexual
women are a small group, and most are not in a strong social position; the traumas of
contradictory embodiment and transition, the effects of discrimination and contempt,
cannot be waved aside. Support from other feminists is the most strategic resource
for empowering transsexual women.

A politics directed towards a just gender order necessarily has another dimension. In
an era of neoliberal globalization, changes in women's economic situations, and
proliferation of women's claims for voice and power, transsexual politics also has to
turn outwards - without borders.

There are roles for transsexual women in women's workplace and union activism
(almost invisible in the huge literature about transsexuality), anti-poverty activism,
anti-violence work and AIDS prevention. There are specific political roles that can
use transsexual women's strengths, including support and solidarity for other groups
grappling with the politics of embodiment and social exclusion: transgender and
intersex, disability and other forms of bodily difference. There are even possibilities
for transsexual women in feminism's engagements with men, paradoxical as that may
sound. Transsexual feminists are already involved in these arenas - visibly in events
such as feminist protests and conferences, more pragmatically through everyday
involvement in campaigns, policy work, research, and friendship networks.

15
In thinking about such ontoformative transsexual politics, we must come to the global
level, since gender relations are now acknowledged to have a transnational dimension
(Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina 2004, Harcourt 2009a). A certain globalization of
transsexual medicine is now a fact - the 'World Professional Association for
Transgender Health' was created in 2006, out of a US organization set up in 1979.

The interests of transsexual women are not so easily projected on the international
plane. At the start of this paper I mentioned the appropriation of third-world
experience by writers in the metropole engaged in constructing fictions about a
transsexual or transgender continuum. Feminism has been learning not to make that
kind of appropriation (Bulbeck 1998); there are now international meetings, in which
transsexual women are present, that emphasise diversity, South-South networking, the
sharing of skills and stories, and North-South transfer of resources (Harcourt 2009b).

A stronger awareness of imperialism and global power relations is emerging in

transsexual writing (Namaste 2005a, Stryker 2009, Aizura 2009). Solidarity politics,
rather than cultural appropriation, might now link gender-changing groups
internationally. It is clear that the groups called travesti in Argentina, hijra in India
and kathoey in Thailand have different historical trajectories from transsexual women
in the metropole. It is also clear that there are some shared issues about gender
change, and widespread problems of poverty, violence, discrimination and precarious
health (Fernández 2004, Reddy 2006, Winter 2006).

There is a case here for solidarity work in which new forms of activist learning could
occur. Marginalized groups mobilize within different traditions of popular activism
(contrast Latin America with South-east Asia, for instance), and face different
environments of religion, state power, and gender practice. Transsexual women in the
metropole have things to learn from feminism and transsexual politics in the
periphery, as well as things to contribute. No-one with experience of solidarity work
will doubt that this is hard, but this is certainly a main arena for a transsexual politics
directed towards care and justice.

To speak in these terms of 'another politics' is optimistic; but we need some optimism
of the will. The old politics of identity and exclusion drove a wedge between
feminism and transsexual women that has not been entirely overcome. I hope the
analysis in this paper helps to make transsexual women's lives intelligible in feminist
terms while remaining true to transsexual women's 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.

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