Jay Prosser Second Skins The Body Narratives of Transsexuality 1 PDF

the body narratives
of transsexuality
JAY PROSSER
second skins
Gender and Culture Series

Edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun
and Nancy K. Miller
second skins
The Body Narratives of Transsexua/ity
Jay Prosser
Columbia University Press

New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright© 1998 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Prosser, Jay.
Second skins: the body narratives of transsexuality I Jay
Prosser.
p. cm. - (Gender and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-10934-5 - ISBN 978-0-231-10935-2 (pbk.)
1. Transsexualism. I. Title. II. Series.
HQ77.9.P76 1998
97-32529
306.77-dc21
Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are

printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
For my parents
contents
Acknowledgments IX
Introduction: On Transitions-Changing Bodies,

Changing Narratives
Part 1: Bodies
I. Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the
Transubstantiation of Sex 21
2. A Skin of One's Own: Toward a Theory of
Transsexual Embodiment 61
Part 2: Narratives
3. Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography 99
4. "Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of
Transition": The Invert, The Well ofLoneliness, and the
Narrative Origins of Transsexuality 135
5. No Place Like Home: Transgender and Trans-Genre in
Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues 171
Epilogue: Transsexuality i n Photography-Fielding
the Referent 207
Notes 237
Index 261
ackno\vledgments
This book took shape as a dissertation under the direction of Nancy K.

Miller. Her unwavering support, her astute readings, and, of course, the
example of her own work, have been indispensable to every step of my
project's progress. I thank her here for her intellectual and professional
guidance, for her personal generosity, and for providing me with a pro
found, pleasurable, and ongoing learning experience.
Others' interventions have been invaluable at various stages of the
process. Joan Nestle was the first to read transsexual autobiographies
with me as part of a field for my doctoral qualifying exams; her enthusi
asm for their narratives and her question about home served as a crucial
spur to the emergence of this project. Tom Hayes and Gerhard Joseph as
members of my defense committee read the manuscript in dissertation
form. I thank them for their incisive feedback on what was then very
much a tome. My dissertation writing group helped me formulate ideas
in the early stages; other readers to fine-tune those ideas in the all-impor
tant final stages. Of particular help en route have been friends and col
leagues, Deirdre Day McLeod, Clare Hemmings, Deborah Nelson, and
Victoria P. Rosner; my readers at Columbia University Press; and my edi
tor there, Susan Heath. I thank Professor Constance Jordan, the Center
for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and the City University of New York
Graduate School English Department for awarding me fellowships that
allowed me to focus on the writing, and faculty and colleagues through
out CUNY for their continued support of my work and welfare.
x Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the transsexual
authors whose work is its subject. In addition to those who have allowed
their photographs to be reproduced here, I thank especially those trans
gendered and transsexual authors, artists, autobiographers, and activists
who have given time to discuss their work and my engagement with it;
Leslie Feinberg, Zachary I. Nataf, Raymond Thompson, and Del
LaGrace have been particularly treasured interlocutors, inspirations in
themselves. For her generous interest in my work and the continuing
provocation of her own take on transgender, Judith Halberstam has
been a precious recent addition to this list; I have already benefited
greatly from her direction and her camaraderie. I should also mention in
this category my dear friend Katie Wasserman, since she has enabled me
to make vital connections of all kinds-professional and personal. I trust
that our transitions will continue to unfold together in rewarding ways.
Finally, I am grateful to my family-to my brother and his wife for
their insider medical understanding-but especially to my parents; for
it is their undeviating love, above all, that has made this narrative (the
life as much as the book) followable.
second skins
It is a matter of transitions, you see; the changing, the becoming, must be cared for closely.
-Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
introduction
On Transitions-Changing Bodies,
Changing Narratives
Personal
I spent the bulk of the first month of my transsexual transition from
female to male teaching an undergraduate course on the contemporary
American novel. Scheduled over an intensive summer session, the class
met for almost four hours a day, four days a week. My hormone treat
ment, beginning the week before the course, was comparably intensive.
My endocrinologist believed in shocking my body into transition, start
ing me up on massive dosages of testosterone and leveling these off once
my body had adjusted. Under this program not only did I experience
rapid dramatic somatic changes, some of these became immediately
apparent. My face squared off and my neck thickened; accumulating
facial "fuzz" required shaving every few days; and, while it didn't crack,
my voice deepened enough to get me an invariable "sir " over the phone.
Within two weeks of the course ending, after j ust over a month of treat
ment, I was thus able to begin living full-time as a man, documents all
changed to reflect a new, unambivalent status.
2 Introduction: On Transitions
Although the minutiae of these somatic changes might have bypassed

my students, I have no doubt that I failed to cut a clearly gendered figure
in the class. In the world outside academia I was already passing as male
almost consistently. Yet my profile at college would have led students to
expect a female teacher. For the entire month my poor students remark
ably, collectively, assiduously, and awkwardly avoided referring to me
with a pronoun or a gendered title. The two exceptions occurred not in
speech but in writing-in the absence of my body-in the logs students
handed in weekly: one "Miss, " which I circled viscerally; one "he, " which
I left unmarked. Students seemed to sex me individually (how not to
make this most fundamental of identity assignments ? ), so their careful
avoidance must have stemmed from their failure to reach consensus as a
group--perhaps even a collective sense that I was going through some
kind of significant transition.
The group's uncertainty on how to read me earned my immediate
sympathy. Yet in no way did I seek to resolve its predicament. I felt
unable, too caught up in my own predicament, the circumstances of
teaching at this most transitional point in my transition. I did not feel I
could present as a man in a department in which I had been known as a
butch woman for five years and that I was anyway leaving that semes
ter. At the same time I was so relieved to be moving away from female
ness that nothing could have persuaded me to anchor myself back to it,
even provisionally. The obvious alternative-to have come out as a
transsexual-I thought would have rooted rather than alleviated my
students' confusion and discomfort. For, in common perception, to
name oneself transsexual is to own precisely to being gender displaced,
to being a subject in transition, moving beyond or in between sexual dif
ference. So I left them uncomfortably (all of us horribly uncomfortable)
leaving me to my ambivalence; and as the class progressed, this not
attributing me with a gender, in my experience, became more and more
glaring-a kind of deafening unspoken. In this gendered nonzone, I felt
too embodied (only body) yet also disembodied: for what on earth did I
embody ? Not surprisingly, I was massively relieved once the course was
over, and I sensed students felt similarly.
Some breathing space did open up toward the end of the course, how
ever. One student gave a dazzling presentation on Leslie Marmon Silko's
Ceremony, tracing the theme--of all things--of transition. 1 Of the nov
els assigned, Ceremony clearly frustrated students. It made them feel
unconfident, uncertain of how to read. They couldn't place it: its hybrid
Introduction: On Transitions 3
characters; its plot that mixes and yet refuses to merge realistic historical
moment and mythic quest; the novel's genre, its shifting affiliation to a
modern psychological novel and a traditional Native ceremony. Staking
its value to the course topics and to her own reading pleasure precisely
on its treatment of transition, the presenting student mounted an inspir
ing defense of the novel . She argued that it was Ceremony's layered
investment in the theme of transition that the class was making its stum
bling block, even as the importance of understanding and pursuing tran
sition was the novel's very point. An intermediate nonzone, transition
represents the movement in between that threatens to dislocate our ties
to identity places we conceive of as essentially (in every sense) secure.
Transition provokes discomfort, anxiety-both for the subject in transi
tion and for the other in the encounter; it pushes up against the very fea
sibility of identity. Yet transition is also necessary for identity's continu
ity; it is that which moves us on.
Does it even need saying how I heard her presentation as a poignant
metacommentary on my own dislocation in the course ? With uncanny
precision she appeared to cut through (and reveal in cross-section) the
thick layers of anxiety that had coated our discussions. Even when she
added an autobiographical postscript to her presentation, I found it
impossible to disown or disembody transition. Revealing her entangle
ment in her interpretation of the novel and the class reading, the stu
dent described her own status as transitional: in her identity, consciously
and complexly in between Native, Spanish, and Irish cultural heritages;
and at this period of her life. My course marked her transition from col
lege to beginning graduate school the following semester; it was part of
her transition to making this kind of reading and thinking her career.
Instead of moving me away from my personal through hers, my stu
dent's revelation brought into relief (again, in my perspective) my own
silence. My body had brought transition to the surface, embodied it as
transsexual bodies in a disconcertingly literal way not unlike bodies "in
between" racial difference do. Unlike my articulate student, however, I
had remained unable to remark on, to reassure, or to confront others over
my in-betweenness. In part I felt as though my experience of transition,
my very movement in between, obturated any expression of my trans
sexuality, exceeded the grounds of its own speakability. But the differ
ence between us-the fact of my student's "coming out" and my not
was also informed by the relation our respective bodies found to the nar
ratives we were reading: by what we, as a class, had set up as speakable
material. Her autobiographical voicing was patently prompted and sup

ported by our reading of narratives of cultural crossing. If in contrast my
body remained as unspeakable for me as it was unreadable for students,
it was in part because narratives of sexual crossing lay outside our desig
nated subject matter. Indeed, such narratives had yet to be formed into
any kind of equivalent critical tradition.
Reading the narratives that follow here into the beginnings of such
a tradition, this book works as a deferred return in writing to that
absent act of articulation: so much easier with the body framed in nar
rative; so much easier now this body has a clearer gendered location.
The question of how to represent the transitions of transsexuality, of
how to put into narrative its remarkable bodily trajectories, is the pre
occupation of the transsexual narratives examined in the chapters that
follow here-and thus of the theoretical narrative of this project-as
much as it was mine in my summer class. Without doubt, my turning
as critic to write on transsexual narratives represents a displaced auto
biographical act: "I chose to work, academically, on autobiography,
because in a parallel direction I wanted to work on my own autobiog
raphy. "2 But articulating the transitions in these texts is not only an
oblique means of articulating mine; it has also been quite profoundly a
way of working on mine. For transsexuality is always narrative work,
a transformation of the body that requires the remolding of the life into
a particular narrative shape.
Material
Transsexuality consists in entering into a lengthy, formalized, and
normally substantive transition: a correlated set of corporeal, psychic,
and social changes. As the insider j oke goes, transitioning is what
transsexuals do (our occupation, as consuming as a career). While thor
oughly interwoven in the body of my text, five senses of transition in
application to the transsexual trajectory and its inscription in narrative
may be separated here as a means of specifying the task of each chap
ter and of locking together the crucial terms of this book-body and
narrative-in their relation to transsexuality.
My primary purpose in reading transsexual narratives is to introduce
into cultural theory a trajectory that foregrounds the bodily matter of
gender crossings. While theory is grappling with various forms of gen
dered and sexual transitions, transsexual narratives, stories of bodies in
sex transition, have not yet been substantially read. Conceiving of tran-
sition first in a conceptual sense, I contend that we must make changes

to our theoretical paradigms if we are to make room for the materiality
of transsexual narratives. In the second and most substantial sense, I use
transition to denote this ontological condition of transsexuality: the term
transsexuals use to describe the physical, social, and psychic transforma
tions that constitute transsexuality. In this sense I seek to substantiate
transsexual identity, to reveal the materiality of the figure of transition.
Third, I enlist transition in its narratological sense: transition as the
definitive property of narrative, the progression and development that
drives narrative and coheres its form. Reading transsexuality through
narrative, I suggest that the resexing of the transsexual body is made
possible through narrativization, the transitions of sex enabled by those
of narrative. Fourth, in documenting the origins of transsexuality, I use
transition in a historical sense: to describe the developments that take
place in and between discourses of gender that allowed the transsexual
to emerge as a classifiable subject. The specific circumstances of this his
torical emergence underline the investment of transsexual identity
mutually in soma and narrative. Finally, I consider how transition as a
geographic trope applies to transsexual narratives: that is, transsexuality
as a passage through space, a journey from one location to another. In
this sense transition serves as a key means by which transsexuals repre
sent their relations not only to gendered belonging but to sexual com
munities and politics (lesbian, gay, straight, queer, and, most recently,
transgendered). These different meanings of transition-conceptual,
somatic, narrative, historico-discursive, and political-provide the the
oretical scaffold for my critical reading of transsexual narratives and a
frame for each chapter in turn.
First, then, conceptual transitions. This book begins with the argu
ment that queer studies has made the transgendered subject, the subject
who crosses gender boundaries, a key queer trope: the means by which
not only to challenge sex, gender, and sexuality binaries but to institu
tionalize homosexuality as queer. With the focus on the gender-ambiva
lent subject, transition has become the lever for the queer movement to
loosen the fixity of gender identities enough to enable affiliation and
identification between gay men and lesbians. My project takes off from
queer theory's investment in transgender-both sprung by it and begin
ning with it. Chapter I attends to the place of transgender in the early
canon of queer theory-in particular in the writings of Judith Butler,
for nowhere is the pivotal function of transgender in queer studies more
evident or more intricate. Butler's interest in transgender undergoes its

own transition moreover, her work moving from using the transgen
dered subject to "trouble" the naturalization of heterosexuality and sex
to using the transsexual subject, the subject who crosses the bounds of
sex, to mark the limits of the trouble the subject in transition can effect.
While queer theory 's and in particular Butler's focus on transgender
makes my reading of transsexual narratives possible-transgender
wouldn't be of the moment if not for the queer moment-this associa
tion of transsexuality with limits, and queer theory's limitations around
transsexuality, make my project necessary. As Butler exemplifies, queer
theory has written of transitions as discursive but it has not explored the
bodiliness of gendered crossings. The concomitant of this elision of
embodiment is that the transgendered subject has typically had center
stage over the transsexual: whether s/he is transvestite, drag queen, or
butch woman, queer theory's approbation has been directed toward the
subject who crosses the lines of gender, not those of sex. Epitomizing the
bodiliness of gender transition-the matter of sex the cross-dresser has
been applauded for putatively defying-the transsexual reveals queer
theory's own limits: what lies beyond or beneath its favored terrain of
gender performativity.
Second Skins reviews and begins the task of redressing queer theory's
elision of the experience of "trans" embodiment by focusing on trans
sexual narratives. It is imperative to read transsexual accounts now in
order to flesh out the transgendered figure that queer theory has made
prominent. If, for queer theory, transition is to be explored in terms of
its deconstructive effects on the body and identity (transition as a symp
tom of the constructedness of the sex/gender system and a figure for the
impossibility of this system's achievement of identity), I read transsex
ual narratives to consider how transition may be the very route to iden
tity and bodily integrity. In transsexual accounts transition does not
shift the subject away from the embodiment of sexual difference but
more fully into it.
The first part of this book thus concerns bodies. From queer theory's
deployment of transgender to disembody sex in chapter 1, I move in
chapter 2 to my theory of the transsexual body: an examination of the
ontological sense of transition, the actual somatic, psychic, and social
shifts entailed in transsexuality. How do material reconfigurations
enable the transsexual to feel sex-changed ? How do transsexuals repre
sent their experience of their bodies ? Is there a substance to gendered
body image that it can motivate somatic transition ? Transsexuality

reveals the extent to which embodiment forms an essential base to sub
jectivity; but it also reveals that embodiment is as much about feeling
one inhabits material flesh as the flesh itself. In representing the subject's
initial absence of and subsequent striving for this feeling, transsexual
narratives contribute significantly to discussions of what constitutes the
"matter" of the body in cultural theory, suggesting ways in which this
matter may not be commensurable with the cultural construction of
identity. Documenting the claims made by transsexual autobiographers
about gendered embodiment before, during, and after transition, this
chapter is my attempt to read individual corporeal experience back into
theories of "the" body. As such, it is my most tentative chapter; for the
task of addressing how the material flesh may resist its cultural inscrip
tion, because it goes against the flow of theory's insistence on the cultural
constructedness of the body, can only be carried out at first, as Lynne
Segal suggests, "with humbling tentativeness."3
Notions of the body's constructedness have a distinctively literal edge
in the context of transsexuality. The overwhelming tendency in work
that does address transsexual bodies is to isolate medical discourses to the
exclusion of subjective accounts and to emphasize the transsexual's con
struction by the medical establishment. The transsexual appears as med
icine's passive effect, a kind of unwitting technological product: trans
sexual subject only because subject to medical technology. Janice
Raymond's lesbian feminist The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the
She-Male set the precedent by arguing that the transsexual is the gender
stereotypical construct (and support) of a patriarchal medical establish
ment.4 Dwight Billings and Thomas Urban's sociological critique like
wise insisted on transsexuality as medicine's invention: "a socially con
structed reality which only exists in and through medical practice."
Combining theories of the social construction of illness and construc
tionism in postmodern culture with the transsexual's sexed reconstruc
tion, Billings and Urban argued that not only does the medical estab
lishment reify the gender-disturbed into transsexuals, it commodifies
gender, creating the transsexual as consumer of simulated sex who buys
into "an alluring world of artificial vaginas and penises."5 Most recently,
Bernice L. Hausman's Changing Sex: Transsexuality, Technology and the
Idea o/Gender-which represents itself as supplanting Raymond's book
length study only to replicate its key points-has added the Foucauldian
ingredient to this stew of constructionist theories of transsexuality.6
Hausman argues that the transsexual is an historically engineered sub

ject. Her thesis is that the transsexual was produced by endocrinology
from the twenties and thirties and plastic surgery after the second world
war when these developments in medical technology were brought
together with the notion of authentic or true gender arrived at in the
treatment of intersexuality. All of these readings represent the transsex
ual as archetypal constructed subject because of his or her medical con
struction. The literal somatic constructions of sex reassignment have
been shunted all too automatically into the transsexual's culturo-techno
logical construction.
Constructionist theories of transsexuality overwhelmingly fail to
examine how transsexuals are constructing subjects: participants and
actors who have shaped medical practices as much as they have been
shaped by them. Even though in one of its chapters Changing Sex offers
the fi rst focus on transsexual autobiography, like Raymond and
Billings and Urban before her, Hausman attributes unequivocal ideo
logical power to medical practitioners, imaging transsexuals as the
"dupes of gender" (taking literally the invented category of gender
identity) and duplicitous (attempting to convince everyone else that
gender identity is inherent). Consistently, approaches to the transsexual
as a constructed effect-whether figuring her or him as the pawn, vic
tim, or dupe of medical technology-preclude a discussion of transsex
ual agency: that is, the subject's capacity not only to initiate and effect
his/her own somatic transition but to inform and redefine the medical
narrative of transsexuality. While Hausman mentions transsexual
agency (how could she read transsexual autobiography and not do so ? ),
it is always only in conjunction with its being "not unproblematic."7
Since she never commits really to outlining this agency, her gesture
remains specious, lip service to the transsexual as prodigious object of
her study. Indeed, beyond the reaches of the poststructuralist valoriza
tion (its essentialization) of construction, construction in fact connotes
nothing positive. Construction in a more mainstream sense is overtly a
means of devaluing and discriminating against what's "not natural,"
precisely to desubjectivizing the subject and-in the context of trans
sexuality-to invalidating the subject's claims to speak from legitimate
feelings of gendered difference. "Transphobia" (literally, the fear of the
subject in transition), the stigmatization of transsexuals as not "real
men" and "real women," turns on this conception of transsexuals as
constructed in some more literal way than nontranssexuals-the
Frankensteins of modern technology's experiments with sexual differ

ence. Since their arguments merely recycle this popular stereotype into
theory, what feminist Carroll Riddell writes with wonderful directness
of The Transsexual Empire may be said of all of these theoretical narra
tives equally: "My living space is threatened by this book."8
Second Skins attempts to recreate the "living space" of transsexuals
in cultural theory by reading the transsexual as authorial subject.
Prioritizing transsexuals' own accounts over the medicodiscursive
texts, I suggest that transsexual narratives place us in a stronger posi
tion to understand how dynamic and complex are the relations of
authorship and authorization between clinicians and transsexuals and
to reexamine the whole problematic of the subject's construction in
postmodern theory. The second half of this book attends to narrative,
to the ways in which transsexuals have authored their plots in dialogue
with medical discourse. In the third sense of transition as narrative,
chapter 3 considers how transsexuality is a matter of constructing a
transsexual narrative before being constructed through technology.
The transsexual's capacity to narrativize the embodiment of his/her
condition, to tell a coherent story of transsexual experience, is required
by the doctors before their authorization of the subject's transition. As
they remain invested in the therapeutic/analytic origins of the trans
sexual story, published transsexual autobiographies underline the con
tinuing importance of narrative for transsexual subjectivity: where
transsexuality would heal the gendered split of transsexuality, the form
of autobiography would heal the rupture in gendered plots. Narrative
is not only the bridge to embodiment but a way of making sense of
transition, the link between locations: the transition itself.
The transsexual was not officially "invented" until 1 949 when David
Cauldwell diagnosed as a "psychopathic transexual" a female who iden
tified as a man and wrote to Cauldwell seeking treatment with hormones
and surgery.9 In 1 953 Harry Benjamin began to outline what would
become in the psychiatric and medical arena the foundational theory of
"transsexualism." His first formulations emphasize its distinctiveness
from transvestism on the one hand (transsexuality is concerned more
severely with body not dress)10 and homosexuality on the other (trans
sexuality is concerned with sex and gender and not sexuality, in spite of
that misleading suffix). 1 1 Yet was transsexual subjectivity simultaneous
with its discursive naming, as absolutist constructionist theories would
have it? Arguing that it was not, that this naming of transsexuality was
rather a response to preexistent transsexual identity patterns and indeed

embodiments, chapter 4 examines the historical transitions around the
body, gender, and sexuality that made possible the official emergence of
transsexual subjectivity. The discourse of inversion in turn-of-the-cen
tury sexology, its medicalization of transgender in the body, provided the
significant threshold under which the transsexual as a sex-changeable
and indeed sex-changed subject could make his/her first appearance.
Sexology's case histories reveal subjects seeking out (and sometimes
achieving) somatic transitions before the invention of the transsexual as a
discursive subject, before sex hormones and plastic surgery had been
decided by clinicians as treatment for the condition-indeed, before the
condition had even been recognized as such. The first transsexual to
effect a full somatic transition (surgery and hormones) did so several
years before the medical diagnosis was written. Female-to-male Michael
Dillon convinced a doctor to prescribe testosterone pills in 1939; under
went a double mastectomy in 1942; and began in 1945 a series of opera
tions to construct the first female-to-male phalloplasty, effectively har
nessing this technology for transsexuality and shaping the female-to
male narrative. Like other personal accounts, Dillon's story is significant
for demonstrating how transsexuality constitutes an active subjectivity
that cannot be reduced to either technological or discursive effect. 1 2
Lesbian and gay historians have read sexology's cross-gender tax
onomies as the medicalization of homosexuality. In so doing, they have
dismissed as heterocentric constructs for homosexuality both its trans
gendered paradigms and its rendering of identity as embodied and diag
nosable. However, individual case histories validate both the sexologists'
prioritization of the categories of cross-gender identification over those
of same-sex desire and their sense of the embodiment of this transgender
condition; among the case histories of sexual inverts, we find our first
transsexual narratives. If sexology's medicalization represents the bogy in
the modern history of homosexuality, I argue that for transsexuals sexol
ogy in fact represents the crucial medicalization of transgender, the tran
sitional discourse necessary for enabling the transsexual to bring about a
somatic transition. Chapter 4 drives home the transsexual significance of
inversion by recasting the famous invert novel, Radclyffe Hall's The Well
ofLoneliness, from canonical lesbian text to foundational transsexual nar
rative.13 Situating The Well alongside the contemporaneous sexological
case histories, I read the novel to elucidate the problematics of inversion
in the text and the surrounding literary critical debates as transsexual.
In the new discourse of transgender in our own fin de siecle, homo

sexuality and transgender, lesbian and transsexual become significantly
reentangled. Another shake of the discursive kaleidoscope and new rela
tions between sex, gender, and sexuality, some frictional, some intercon
stitutive, allow for yet new identities to be named. Chapter 5 reads Leslie
Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues: A Novel to examine, through the figure of
the transgendered stone butch, the difference of contemporary transgen
dered narratives, the way in which this difference refolds those between
transsexual and queer. 14 In my fifth sense of transition I ask: to what
"home" does the trajectory of transition lead the transitioning subject?
The female protagonist of Stone Butch Blues moves away from a lesbian
origin though somatic transition but without finding refuge in transsex
ual man. Refusing to close on a transsexual transition, she makes of tran
sition itself a transgendered subjectivity--of the movement in between a
destination. Feinberg's departure from conventions is symptomatic of a
larger political transition underway: the creation precisely of a transgen
der movement-a politics and culture of transition. If transsexual has
been conceived conventionally as a transitional phase to pass through
once the transsexual can pass and assimilate as nontranssexual-one
begins as female, one becomes a transsexual, one is a man-under the
aegis of transgender, transsexuals, now refusing to pass through transsex
uality, are speaking en masse as transsexuals, forming activist groups,
academic networks, transgender "nations." No longer typically ending
transition, transsexuals are overtly rewriting the narrative of transsexu
ality-and transsexual narratives-as open-ended.
Ultimately, I understand this refusal to disappear as strategic, its pur
pose to produce transgendered and transsexual as specific and, impor
tantly, allied subjectivities. Transgendered narratives as much as trans
sexual ones continue to attest to the valences of cultural belonging that
the categories of man and woman still carry in our world: what I term
"gendered realness." That is, transsexual and transgendered narratives
alike produce not the revelation of the fictionality of gender categories
but the sobering realization of their ongoing foundational power; and
why hand over gendered realness when it holds so much sway ? While
coming out is necessary for establishing subjectivity, for transsexuals the
act is intrinsically ambivalent. For in coming out and staking a claim to
representation, the transsexual undoes the realness that is the conven
tional goal of this transition. These narratives return us to the complex
ities and difficulties that inevitably accompany real-life experiences of
gender crossing and to the personal costs of not simply being a man or
a woman. In accounts of individual lives, outside its current theoretical
figuration transition often proves a barely livable zone.
In closing this book, I read a selection of photographs of transsexu
als that capture the contradictions entailed in transsexual (self-)repre
sentation in poignantly material ways. Photographs of transsexuals
seek to represent the transsexual's transition, to expose in the photo
graphic image the difference of transsexuality. Yet at the same time
they also work to conceal this difference, their very purpose to show
that, posttransition, we look just the same as you. The transsexual's
doubled bid to the referentiality of sex and to representation as a trans
sexual, to bodily realness and to telling the narrative of this route to
realness, is caught graphically in the photographic medium's own pecu
liar situation between referentiality and representation.
Categorical
If its critical purpose is to introduce transsexual narratives as a set of
texts with shared concerns about transition, the theoretical purpose of
this book is to call for and initiate transitions in our paradigms for writ
ing bodily subjects. My compound "body narrative" is intended to spin
out the broader implications of transsexuality for contemporary theory,
to allow transsexuality through its narratives to bring into view the
materiality of the body. Many theorists have recently expressed discon
tent with contemporary discussions of the body-in particular, with
their tendency to elide bodily materiality. Elizabeth Grosz contends
that the " [t]he body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both
Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory. "15
Her "corporeal feminism" is one attempt to angle the mirror so a s to
bring this blind spot into view. A glance at any number of new titles
shows bodies are everywhere in contemporary cultural theory; yet the
paradox of theory's expatiation upon bodies is that it works not to fill in
that blind spot so much as to enlarge it. That the human body has
become centralized in our theory is a sure sign, as Cecile Lindsay
astutely observes, that "our postmodern sensibility desires to make con
tact with some ground, with the physical stripped of metaphysical pre
tensions. This physical ground would be the body."16 The irony is that
the focus on bodies as effects or products of discourse re-metaphysical
izes bodies, placing their fleshy materiality even further out of our con
ceptual reach.
Is this paradox about the body-the body's materiality slips our

grasp even as we attempt to narrate it--our inevitable poststructuralist
legacy ? Certainly, in Foucault and Lacan, our key legators, materiality
figures only in reference to discourse and signification: in Foucault, to
institutions, technologies, ideologies; in Lacan, to language and the sig
nifier. In neither does materiality refer to the flesh. Materiality is our
subject, but the body is not our object. The body is rather our route to
analyzing power, technology, discourse, language. As Somer Brodribb
remarks in her materialist feminist critique of postmodernism (of
which she conceives Foucault and Lacan along with Derrida as found
ing fathers: disembodying matter for her is a repudiation of the femi
nine, mat(t)er, the mother), "[w]ith the modern alchemists, the flesh is
made word." We have signification without referents, and "genders
without sexes." 17 Tracing the "contemporary fetishization of 'dis
course' " specifically to Lacan's return to Freud, Marcia Ian argues sim
ilarly of Lacanian psychoanalysis that it has effected "the conflation of
soma and seme typical of fetishism": "The body itself, reduced to being
an idea-and somebody else's idea at that-joins the ranks of the un
knowable." 18 The materiality oflanguage in contemporary thought has
taken the place of the materiality of the body-as in Freud's scene of
fetishism the boy mistakes his projection for the referential mother. If
sexual difference is where the body's materiality is most displaced as
these feminist analyses suggest, transsexuality, the attempt to material
ize this difference in the body, may be the matter to recall theory to the
residue of referentiality in the body.
The importance of making transitions in our conceptual paradigms
for thinking bodies becomes particularly clear when we examine how
transsexuals have been represented in cultural theory thus far. Since
the body is conceived as a discursive effect, in terms of signification, the
transsexual is read as either a literalization of discourse-in particular
the discourse of gender and sexuality--or its deliteralization. In oper
ation has been a binary pivoting on the literal-surely the most repu
diated category in postmodernism and poststructuralism, whether in
its association with the body, experience or language. When figured as
literalizing gender and sexuality, the transsexual is condemned for
reinscribing as referential the primary categories of ontology and the
natural that poststructuralism seeks to deconstruct: "Transsexualism
literalizes the loss patriarchy tropes as woman," writes Carole-Anne
Tyler. Lacanian Catherine Millot sees a similar conflation at work: "In
their requirement of truth . . . transsexuals are the victims of error.

They confuse the organ and the signifier. " Marjorie Garber condemns
the identical collapse of signifier into referent in the language of post
structuralist theory : transsexuals "essentialize their genitalia. " And
June L. Reich dismisses transsexuality as retrogressively conformist for
these reasons: "A word about transsexuality: it works to stabilize the
old sex\gender system by insisting on the dominant correspondence
between gender desire and biological sex. "19 If the transsexual is con
ceived as literalizing in accounts that seek to deliteralize the body, it is
not surprising that his/her experience has been deemed worth little
more than "a word " in cultural theory, that the narratives of transsex
uality have yet to be carefully read.
Yet contrarily, contemporary theory has also located the transsexual
on the other side of its literalism binary, reading him/her antithetically as
deliteralizing the gendered body. If in the first mode of reading the trans
sexual is condemned for positing a sexed body before language, in the
second mode the transsexual is celebrated for pushing sex as a linguistic
signifier beyond the body. "[W]hat is more postmodern than transsexual
ism ? " ask Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub. Their rhetorical question
assumes that what is postmodern about transsexuality is self-evident: a
petitio principi. Likewise, for Arthur and Marilouise Kroker transsexual
ity creates sex as it should be in our postmodern age, sex free from the
body: "sex [that] has fled its roots in the consanguinity of nature, refused
its imprisonment in the phallocentric orbit of gender. " And for Judith
Halberstam the transsexual is the apogee of postmodern identity, transi
tion illustrating that the sex/gender system is a fiction: "We are all trans
sexuals except that the referent of the trans becomes less and less clear
(and more and more queer). We are all cross-dressers but where are we
crossing from or to what? There is no 'other' side, no 'opposite' sex, no
natural divide to be spanned by surgery, by disguise, by passing. We all
pass or we don't. . . . There are no transsexuals. "20 We are all transsexu
als and there are no transsexuals. Transsexuals 'r' us, full of postmodern
liberatory promise, their very constructedness encapsulating the essential
inessentiality, what we take for granted as the unnaturalness of the body.
In readings that embrace the transsexual as deliteralizing as much as
those that condemn the transsexual as literalizing, the referential trans
sexual subject can frighteningly disappear in his/her very invocation.
Like the materiality of the body, the transsexual is the very blind spot of
these writings on transsexuality. Juxtaposing both sets of readings, it
becomes clear that neatly superimposed on the literalizing/deliteralizing

binary is another binary, that of the reinscriptive versus the transgressive.
In so much contemporary theory this "fear of the literal"21 (what we
might term referential panic: the enormous pressure to disown, to abro
gate the referent} encodes all literalizing as hegemonic ("bad") and all
deliteralizing as subversive ("good"). It's become an unfortunately for
mulaic way of reading in a body of thought that otherwise purports to
value multiplicity, difference, and the deconstruction of binaries. Indeed,
it's become a way of not attending to the specificity of narratives.
Both of these binaries (literalizing/deliteralizing; reinscriptive/trans
gressive}, and in particular the way in which they shore up the "current
thinking routines of 'theory,' " come in for critique in an essay that
represents an extraordinary moment in poststructuralist theory, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank's, "Shame in the Cybernetic
Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins. "22 Sedgwick and Frank argue that
structuring contemporary theory is a mechanical antiessentialism, oper
ative especially in discourse on bodies. So foundational is this "auto
matic" (512) or "reflexive antibiologism" (513), so much are we accus
tomed to awarding value proportionately according to the "distance of
any such account from a biological basis," they suggest, that " 'theory'
has become almost simply coextensive with the claim (you can't say it
often enough), it's not natura/"(513). What has become most routine in
theory is the evaluation of all representations on the basis of whether
they reveal ("good": antiessentialist) or conceal ("bad": essentialist) their
constructedness. And, as all routines are restrictive, this practice limits
interpretative frameworks, effectively imposing a constraint on the
variety of narratives: we are stuck with an "impoverishing reliance on a
bipolar analytic framework that can all too adequately be summarized
as 'kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic' " (500). T he binary of textual
effect (subversive/hegemonic) is calcified onto the binary of the subject's
relations to referentiality (literalizing/deliteralizing).
Admittedly, poststructuralist theory has always produced self-reflex
ive critiques of its own routines (indeed, this self-reflexive self-subver
sion might be thought characteristically poststructuralist); and the per
vasive antiessentialism on which Sedgwick and Frank fix has been this
type of work's most recurrent concern, surely because "essence" (under
the aegis of the literal} has been poststructuralism's most targeted cate
gory.23 But Sedgwick and Frank's intervention is startling and excep
tional in two ways: first, for the enchanting and quite essentialist affec-
tivity that characterizes their reading of the affect narratives of psychol

ogist Silvan Tomkins, an essentiality that manifests itself in talk of the
experience of sheer joy felt in the rhythms of Tomkins's prose; and sec
ond, for the essay's specific authorial circumstances. As Sedgwick's own
work has been (as the essay acknowledges) significantly "responsible for
[the] popularization [of theory's trends], " her critique of these trends
marks an exquisite folding back of her thinking in on itself, a startling
circumscription of its own former achievements (5 1 2 , n. 1 4). For both
reasons the effect of reading "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold " on those
of us steeped in the practices of poststructuralist theory is precisely that
of the gestalt Sedgwick and Frank wish it to be. And this is especially
true for those of us turning our dissertations into first books, a category
in which I am included. For the dissertation/first book, as Sedgwick
and Frank remark in singling out a scholar's dissertation-revised-as
first-book for their critique of theory's routines, is the "rite of passage
whose conventions can best dramatize the economy of transmission "
that leads precisely to such institutional routinizing of critical practices
(5 1 2, n. 1 4). The dissertation/first book functions in part as a sign that we
recognize and can practice our discipline's "routines. "
If it is within these theory routines that the transsexual has been
caught up and rigidly binarized, I want to use this "disciplinary routine "
to break with some of those routines. It seems clear that it cannot be ade
quate to reduce the complex body of work-sometimes essentialist and
biologistic-that transsexual narratives represent to these two operative
binaries: literal/deliteralizing; subversive/hegemonic. But so thoroughly
do these frameworks imbue our current critical methods that it is
impossible simply to move "beyond " them. Sedgwick and Frank's essay
suggests that, as we need to resist herding our readings into the enclo
sure of these binaries ("binary homogenization "), we also need to refrain
from reading as if they didn't matter, as if they held no sway ("infinitiz
ing trivialization ") (5 12). Perhaps we might begin our conceptual tran
sitions by reading transsexual narratives to rupture the identity between
the binaries, opening up a transitional space between them. This task is
both required and enabled by transsexual narratives precisely as they are
body narratives: texts that engage with the feelings of embodiment; sto
ries that not only represent but allow changes to somatic materiality.
Along the way the category that we will need to reevaluate most is that
of the literal, of what's essential. To the extent that transsexual narra
tives cannot be read without our accounting for the subjective experi-
ence of being transgendered, reading them necessitates our taking at

every step what Sedgwick and Frank term-it's a phrase that's been
much circulated recently-"the risk of essentialism" (513). That is, to
the extent that they are written out of experience, the body, sex, feeling,
belief in an immanent self, reading transsexual body narratives necessi
tates our using these categories that we have come to believe require
deconstructing a priori. Transsexuality might then be valued for pro
viding the recalcitrance of bodily matter-what Sedgwick and Frank
term the "inertial friction of a biologism" (5 12)-that reopens the space
between the strictures of binaries and the meaninglessness of infinity,
the wedge that drives specificity back into our reading of texts. The
transitions of transsexuality are densely layered, unpredictable, so that,
indeed, "the changing, the becoming, must be cared for closely." And in
the context of that reading the anxiety that transitions bring with them
might well prove what is most constructive: the very braking mecha
nism for slowing our critical trajectory to ensure that we read these
and from these, other-narratives of sex and gender closely and articu
late their transitions carefully.
part one bodies
There is little time for grief in the Phenomenology [ofSpirit] because renewal is always close at hand.What
seems like tragic blindness turns out to be more like the comic myopia of Mr. Magoo whose automobile
careening through the neighbor's chicken coop always seems to land on all four wheels. Like such mirac
u lously resilient characters of the Saturday morning cartoon, Hegel's protagonists always reassemble
themselves, prepare a new scene, enter the stage armed with a new set of ontological insights-and fail
again. As readers, we have no other narrative option but to join in this bumpy ride.
-Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France
chapter 1
Judith Butler: Queer Feminism,

Transgender, and the
Transubstantiation of Sex
Transgender and the Queer Moment
Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive-recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word "queer" itself
means across-it comes from the lndo-European root twerkw, which also yields the German quer (trans
verse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart. -Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies
In its earliest formulations, in what are now considered its foundational

texts, queer studies can be seen to have been crucially dependent on the
figure of transgender. As one of its most visible means of institutional
ization, queer theory represented itself as traversing and mobilizing
methodologies (feminism, poststructuralism) and identities (women,
heterosexuals) already, at least by comparison, in institutionalized place.
Seized on as a definitively queer force that "troubled" the identity cate
gories of gender, sex, and sexuality--or rather revealed them to be
always already fictional and precarious-the trope of crossing was most
often impacted with if not explicitly illustrated by the transgendered
subject's crossing their several boundaries at once: both the boundaries
22 Judith Butler
between gender, sex, and sexuality and the boundary that structures
each as a binary category.
Even in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work, which has argued most tren
chantly for "a certain irreducibility" of sexuality to gender, and thus one
might deduce would follow a certain irreducibility of homosexuality to
transgender, homophobic constructions are understood to be produced by
and productive of culturally normative gender identities and relations.1
The implications of this include a thorough enmeshing of homosexual
desire with transgender identification. In its claim that women in the
nineteenth century served to mediate desire between men, Sedgwick's
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire suggests that
the production of normative heterosexuality depended on a degree of
male identification-and yet importantly, the disavowal of this identifi
cation-with woman as the object of desire.2 At the beginnings of queer
therefore, in what is arguably lesbian and gay studies' first book, hetero
sexuality is shown to be constructed through the sublimation of a cross
gendered identification; for this reason, making visible this identifica
tion-transgendered movement-will become the key queer mecha
nism for deconstructing heterosexuality and writing out queer.
Sedgwick's next book foregrounds this methodological function of
transgender explicitly. Epistemology of the Closet presents transgender
as one good reason for the development of a theory of (homo)sexuality
distinct from feminism. The critical visibility of transgender-"the
reclamation and relegitimation of a courageous history of lesbian
trans-gender role-playing and identification"-poses a challenge to
lesbianism's incorporation within feminism: "The irrepressible, rela
tively class-nonspecific popular culture in which James Dean has been
as numinous an icon for lesbians as Garbo or Dietrich has for gay men
seems resistant to a purely feminist theorization. It is in these contexts
that calls for a theorized axis of sexuality as distinct from gender have
developed."3 Exceeding feminism's purview of gender, transgender
demands and contributes to the basis for a new queer theory; paradox
ically, transgender demands a new theory of sexuality. It is transgender
that makes possible the lesbian and gay overlap, the identification
between gay men and lesbians, which forms the grounds for this new
theory of homosexuality discrete from feminism. And it is surely this
overlap or cross-gendered identification between gay men and les
bians-an identification made critically necessary by the AIDS crisis
that ushers in the queer moment.
Judith Butler 23
Most recently in her autobiographical narratives and performance

pieces, Sedgwick has revealed her personal transgendered investment
lying at and as the great heart of her queer project. Her confession of her
"identification? Dare I, after this half-decade, call it with all a fat woman's
defiance, my identity ? -as a gay man " "comes out " with the transgen
dered desire that has been present in her work all along.4 Similarly in its
readings, Tendencies derives its queer frisson openly and consistently
from an identification across genders: a mobility "across gender lines,
including the desires of men for women and of women for men, " a trans
gendered traversal that in its queering (skewing and unraveling) of
apparently normative heterosexuality is simultaneously a movement
across sexualities.5 To summon the queer moment, the book begins with
a figure for transgender-gay men wearing DYKE T-shirts and lesbians
wearing FAGGOT T-shirts.
But Sedgwick is just the tip of the iceberg. The transgendered pres
ence lies just below the surface of most of lesbian and gay studies' foun
dational texts. Early work on the intersections of race, gender, and sexual
identities theorized otherness as produced through a racist, homophobic,
and sexist transgendering, and thus again transgendering became the
means to challenging this othering. Kobena Mercer's work on the
fetishizing/feminizing white gaze of Robert Mapplethorpe at the black
male body; Cherrie Moraga's description of the hermaphroditic conver
gence of the ching6n and the chingada; Gloria Anzaldua's memory of the
mita' y mita' figure in the sexual, gender, and geographic borderlands:
these various cross-gendered figures emerged both as constructions and,
in their articulation by these critics, deconstructions of cultural ideologies
that insist on absolute difference in all identity.6 Other early lesbian and
gay studies work invested in the transgendered subject's "trans " a trans
gressive politics. For Teresa de Lauretis, Sue-Ellen Case, Jonathan Dolli
more, and Marjorie Garber whether appearing in contemporary lesbian
cinematic representations of butch/femme desire, in theatrical cross
dressing in early modern England, or as popular cultural gender-blend
ing icons, the transgendered subject made visible a queerness that, to
paraphrase Garber, threatened a crisis in gender and sexual identity cat
egories.7 Crucial to the idealization of transgender as a queer transgres
sive force in this work is the consistent decoding of "trans " as incessant
destabilizing movement between sexual and gender identities. In short,
in retrospect, transgender gender appears as the most crucial sign of queer
sexuality's aptly skewed point of entry into the academy.
24 Judith Butler
Without doubt though, the single text that yoked transgender most
fully to queer sexuality is Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of ldentity. 8 Gender Trouble's impact was enormous: pub
lished in 1 990, appearing with the decade, it transformed transgender
into a queer icon, in the process becoming something of an icon of the
new queer theory itself. Yet how this actually happened, how Gender
Trouble imbricated queer with transgender, and how the book itself was
imbricated with transgender forms something of an intriguing critical
phenomenon. For the embodied subject of transgender barely occupies
the text of Gender Trouble-a book very much, after all, about subjects'
failure of embodiment. As Butler herself states in remarking her sur
prise at the tendency to read Gender Trouble as a book about transgen
dered subjects, "there were probably no more than five paragraphs in
Gender Trouble devoted to drag [yet] readers have often cited the descrip
tion of drag as if it were the 'example' which explains the meaning of
[gender] performativity." From this later point, her 1 993 essay "Critically
Queer," Butler clearly challenges the equation of transgender and homo
sexuality, or to be precise, the construction of transgender as the only sign
of a deconstructive homosexuality: "cross-gendered identification is not
the exemplary paradigm for thinking about homosexuality, although it
may be one."9 Yet the effect of Gender Trouble was precisely to secure
transgender as a touchstone of lesbian and gay theory. How did Gender
Trouble canonize, and how was it canonized for, a theory of trans gender
performativity that was apparently not its substance ?
In the first essay appearing in the first edition of the first academic
journal devoted to lesbian and gay studies, glq: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies, itself a canonical moment in queer studies, Sedgwick com
ments on Gender Trouble's canonically queer status: "Anyone who was at
the 1 99 1 Rutgers conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies [another can
onizing mechanism], and heard Gender Trouble appealed to in paper after
paper, couldn't help being awed by the productive impact this dense and
even imposing work has had on the recent development of queer theory
and reading." Surmising that these invocations were not indicative of an
uncomplicated loyalty to Gender Trouble however, Sedgwick goes on to
suggest that "the citation, the use of Butler's formulations in the context
of queer theory will prove to have been highly active and tendentious . " 1 0
That Gender Trouble was subject to a set o f reiterations and recitations
proliferating meanings beyond the intention of the "original" might be
considered especially fitting given its own attraction toward Foucauldian
Judith Butler 25
proliferation as the effective means for denaturalizing copies that pretend

to originality. Its argument about recitation lent an amenability to its own
recitation. There's something very campy, very definitively queer, about
readings that refused to adhere to the letter of Butler's argument, that
refused, to use its vernacular, to "repeat loyally." The original underwent
a certain overreading, playful exaggeration, a mischievous adding of
emphasis, yet nevertheless remained a discernible referent.
Camp may in fact be quite fundamental to our reading of Gender
Trouble and our understanding of its transgender import. In his intro
duction to his anthology on camp (one of two anthologies on camp that
appeared soon after Gender Trouble) David Bergman nominates Butler
as "the person who has done the most to revise the academic standing of
camp and to suggest its politically subversive potential." 1 1 Bergman
stakes that her success in queer studies comes in part from bringing to
camp a high theoretical tone-and, we might add, from bringing camp
to high theory. Pushing further on the connections between camp,
queer, and the argument of Gender Trouble, it might be said that Butler's
centrality in queer theory is in part an effect of queer's recuperation of
camp and queer's recuperation through camp. The late eighties/early
nineties, simultaneous with the beginnings of queer theory, saw the cul
tural and political reappropriation of camp, and the history of the term
"queer" is most symptomatic of this. From homophobic epithet desig
nating and reinforcing the other's social abjection to self-declared maker
of community pride, "queer" was reclaimed precisely according to the
transformative mechanisms of camp in which what has been devalued
in the original becomes overvalued in the repetition. In turn, in its queer
reevaluation, camp has proven a key strategy for queer theory's own
institutionalization, a means by which to piggyback into the academy on
(appropriating and redefining) already established methodologies.
Between Men , for instance, deployed a distinctive camp style in subject
ing canonical nineteenth-century literature to deliberate yet wonder
fully subtle overreadings that brought to the surface its sexual subtexts.
In its academic manifestation, camp actually comes to appear a form of
queer deconstruction, not simply inverting the opposition between the
original and the copy, the referent and the repetition but creating,
according to Scott Long, a third space, "a stance, detached, calm, and
free, from which the opposition as a whole and its attendant terms can
be perceived and judged." 1 2 This third space, this queer deconstruction,
is surely queer theory.
26 Judith Butler
It is certainly this camp inversion of the expected order of terms to

elucidate the construction of the original that forms the very pith of
Gender Trouble's theory: the subject does not precede but is an effect of
the law; heterosexuality does not precede but is an effect of the prohibi
tion on homosexuality; sex does not precede but is an effect of the cul
tural construction of gender. Butler's argument consistently reverses the
expected history between the two terms in each formulation to bring
them into a third space where each opposition as a whole can be per
ceived and judged. The binaries of sexual difference that undergird
what Butler terms "the metaphysics of sex" are fragmented and mobi
lized with a Derridean flourish into sexual differance (GT 16). The dri
ving sensibility of Gender Trouble's theory is in this respect an archetyp
ically camp one. Although the embodied transgendered subject doesn't
occupy Gender Trouble in any substantial way, it is this camp reversal of
terms that conveys the sense that the transgendered subject of drag is
always in the margins of the text, the implicit referent (ironically given
Butler's use of camp/drag's function to displace the referent). For it as
the personification of camp-the third/intermediate term that reveals
the constructedness of the binary of sex, of gender, and of the sex/gender
system-that queer studies has anointed the transgendered subject
queer. "Critically Queer" 's reading of Gender Trouble's reception is thus
absolutely right. Transgendered subjects, butches and drag queens, did
come to appear the empirical examples of gender performativity, their
crossing illustrating both the inessentiality of sex and the nonoriginality
of heterosexuality that was the book's thesis. And those five paragraphs
or so where Gender Trouble does explicitly address the subject in drag
certainly do nothing to contradict this conception of transgender as
exemplarily camp/queer/performative: "In imitating gender, drag implic
itly reveals the imitative structure ofgender itself-as well as its contingency"
(GT 137). In this sentence (particularly given that the italics appear in
the original), transgender's function is unambivalently and emphatically
that of the elucidating example of gender performativity.
This chapter charts the achievement of and challenges that associa
tion, transgender/camp/queer/performativity. That transgender can
emerge as a "studies" in the late nineteen-nineties, that the figure at the
center of many of transgender's proj ects is the "gender troubler," is
largely due to Butler's canonization (both the canonization of Butler and
her inadvertent canonization of transgender): "s/he"-the transgen
derist, the third camp term whose crossing lays bare and disrupts the
Judith Butler 27
binaries that found identity-threads prominently through the self

declared first reader in the new field of transgender studies. 13 My con
cern is the implication of this harnessing of transgender as queer for
transsexuality: what are the points at which the transsexual as transgen
dered subject is not queer ? The splits and shifts between the deployment
of transgender and that of transsexuality within Butler's work are reveal
ing on this count. Whereas in Gender Trouble the transgendered subject
is used to deliteralize the matter of sex, in Butler's later Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex, " the transsexual in particular
symbolizes a carefully sustained ambivalence around sex.14 That Butler
chooses to elucidate the limits of the transgendered subject's deliteraliza
tion of sex through the figure of a transsexual is a powerful indicator of
the conceptual splitting between transsexual and queer and, indeed, of
queer theory's own incapacity to sustain the body as a literal category. In
transsexuality sex returns, the queer repressed, to unsettle its theory of
gender performativity. In making Butler the substance of my first chap
ter, I intend both to mark the absolutely generative force her work has
had for this book and to suggest that the limitations over the figure of the
transsexual and the literality of the sexed body in her work make neces
sary my readings of the transsexual body narratives that follow.
Queer Gender and Performativity
To realize the difference of the sexes is to put an end to play

-Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff,"Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real"
Even though it is articulated only in the last of four sections in the final
chapter ("Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions" [GT 128-1 4 1 ]),
that is in less than one-twelfth of the book, it is the account of gender
performativity that is most often remembered as the thrust of Gender
Trouble. Sedgwick illustrates: "Probably the centerpiece of Butler's recent
work has been a series of demonstrations that gender can best be dis
cussed as a form of performativity." More intriguing than the dispropor
tionate emphasis accorded the final section of Gender Trouble in general
remembrance, however, is the way in which gender performativity has
become so coextensive with queer performativity as to render them inter
changeable. Sedgwick, again, exemplifies the way in which "gender" has
slipped rapidly into "queer." "Queer Performativity" (the title of her
essay on James) she writes, is "made necessary" by Butler's work in and
since Gender Trouble; and in Tendencies Sedgwick assigns Butler "and her
28 Judith Butler
important book" (Gender Trouble) a representative function, "stand[ing]

in for a lot of the rest of us" working on queer performativity.1 5 How does
this slippage from gender to queer in the discussion of performativity
come about, and how does Gender Trouble come to "stand in for" it?
While it argues that all gender is performative-that "man" and
woman" are not expressions of prior internal essences but constituted, to
paraphrase Butler, through the repetition of culturally intelligible styl
ized acts--Gender Trouble presents the transgendered subject as the con
crete example that "brings into relief' this performativity of gender (GT
3 1 ). In retrospect we can note that, in concretizing gender performativ
ity with transgender, Gender Trouble inadvertently made possible two
readings that Butler later returns to refute: first, that what was meant by
gender performativity was gender theatricality; and second, that all
transgender is queer is syllogistically subversive. The first assumption,
that gender performativity means acting out one's gender as if gender
were a theatrical role that could be chosen, led to the belief that Butler's
theory of gender was both radically voluntarist and antimaterialist: that
its argument was that gender, like a set of clothes in a drag act, could be
donned and doffed at will, that gender is drag. In this reading Gender
Trouble was both embraced and critiqued. (Even before Gender Trouble,
however, Butler had carefully argued against any conceptualization of
gender as something that could be chosen at will).1 6 In fact, Butler's
notion of performativity is derived not from a Goffman-esque under
standing of identity as role but from Austinian speech-act theory, cru
cially informed by Derrida's deconstruction of speech-act theory. Not
cited in Gender Trouble but implicit throughout in its insistence on the
cruciality ofrepetition as destabilizing is Derrida's reading of J. L. Austin
and John Searle. ' 7 Bodies That Matter wastes little time before citing
Derrida's reading (introduction 13), and in order to clarify this speech
act sense of performativity, the new work emphasizes gender's citation
ality throughout. To some extent in Bodies That Matter, the later term,
"citationality," comes to displace the former of Gender Trouble, "perfor
mativity." Like a law that requires citing to be effective, Bodies That
Matter argues, sex comes into effect through our citing it, and, as with a
law, through our compulsion to cite it. Butler's refiguring of sex as cita
tional law in Bodies That Matter is designed to derail the understanding
of gender as free theatricality that constituted the misreading of Gender
Trouble, to clarify how gender is compelled through symbolic prohibi
tions. The shifts in terms in the books' titles, from "Gender Trouble" to
Judith Butler 29
the "Discursive Limits of 'Sex' " (both the shift from "gender" to " 'sex' "
and from "trouble" to "discursive limits") run as parallel attempts to
account for gender's materiality, its nonsuperficiality, and at the same
time to foreground the "limits" of the "trouble" subjects can effect to its
constitutive prohibitions. That "sex" appears typographically inserted in
citation marks suggests sex precisely as a citation.
It is the second assumption drawn from Gender Trouble's illustration
of gender performativity with transgender that concerns me most: the
assumption that transgender is queer is subversive. For it is this syllogism
that enables Sedgwick to make that slide from gender performativity to
queer performativity and that effectively encodes transgendered subjec
tivity as archetypically queer and subversive. It should be understood
that, although it never makes such an argument, Gender Trouble does set
up the conditions for this syllogism: transgender gender performativ
=
ity queer subversive. We can begin to illustrate the first part of this,
= =
the equation of transgender with gender performativity, by examining

Gender Trouble's reading of Beauvoir's "One is not born a woman, but
rather becomes one." In Butler's reformulation of Beauvoir's famed epi
gram on the construction of gender nearly half a century later, it is
through the suggestion of a possible transgendering that gender appears
not simply constructed but radically contingent on the body. To cite
Butler: "Beauvoir is clear that one 'becomes' a woman, but always under
a cultural compulsion to become one. And clearly, the compulsion does
not come from 'sex.' There is nothing in her account that guarantees that the
'one' who becomes a woman is necessarily female" (GT 8; my emphasis).
And again: "Beauvoir's theory implied seemingly radical consequences,
ones that she herself did not entertain. For instance, if sex and gender are
radically distinct, then it does not follow that to be a given sex is to
become a given gender; in other words, 'woman' need not be the cultural
construction of the female body, and 'man' need not interpret male bodies"
(GT 1 12; my emphasis). In both citations, Butler's suggestion of a possi
ble transgendered becoming (that men may not be males and women
may not be females) not only opens up a conceptual space between gen
der and sex and leaves sex dispensable to the process of gendering; it also
conveys that gender is not a teleological narrative of ontology at all, with
the sexed body (female) as recognizable beginning and gender identity
(woman) as clear-cut ending. In Butler's reading transgender demotes
gender from narrative to performative. That is, gender appears not as the
end of narrative becoming but as performative moments all along a
30 Judith Butler
process: repetitious, recursive, disordered, incessant, above all, unpre

dictable and necessarily incomplete. "It is, for [Butler's version of]
Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman, as if there were a
telos that governs the process of acculturation and construction. Gender
is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a
highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the
appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being" (GT 33 ). 1 8
If transgender now equals gender performativity, how does this for
mulation come to acquire the additional equivalencies of queer and
subversion ? In "Critically Queer," in correcting the tendency to misread
Gender Trouble as about transgender, Butler underscores that there is no
essential identity between transgender and homosexuality : "not only
are a vast number of drag performers straight, but it would be a mistake
to think that homosexuality is best explained through the performativ
ity that is drag." 1 9 That she must return to make this qualification, how
ever, is again precisely because Gender Trouble has already produced an
implicit equivalence between transgender and homosexuality, so that
transgender appears as the sign of homosexuality, homosexuality's
definitive gender style. In one claim key to this imbrication of transgen
der with homosexuality, "parodic and subversive convergences" are
said to "characterize gay and lesbian cultures" (GT 66; my emphasis).
This characterization encodes transgender as homosexual gender dif
ference, a kind of archetypal queer gender.
Where "straight" gender occults its own performativity according to
a metaphysics of substance, queer transgender reveals ("brings into
relief') the performativity of all gender. Transgender "dramatizes" the
process of signification by which all gendered embodiment "create[s] the
effect of the natural" or real; drag's imitative workings parallel the imi
tative workings that structure straight genders, for all "gender is a kind
of persistent impersonation that passes as the real" (GT x). The meta
physics of substance undergirds the naturalization of sex and of hetero
sexuality. What Butler terms the "heterosexual matrix," building in par
ticular on Monique Wittig's analyses of the straight mind's naturaliza
tion of a dimorphic gender system, sustains heterosexuality as natural
and naturalizes gender as sex.20 The naturalizing mechanism works
both ways, shoring up the apparent naturalness of both sex/gender and
heterosexual desire. The claim to "be" a man or a woman is made possi
ble by the binary and oppositional positioning of these terms within het
erosexuality. Sex, gender, and desire are unified through the representa-
Judith Butler 31
tion of heterosexuality as primary and foundational. Female, femininity,

and woman appear as stable and conjoined terms through their opposi
tion to male, masculinity, and man. Gender, in other words, appears as
identity. What stabilizes the association and keeps the two sets discrete
and antithetical is the apparent naturalness of heterosexual desire.
Queer transgender's function in Gender Trouble can be summarized
as twofold: to parallel the process by which heterosexuality reproduces
(and reproduces itself through) binarized gender identities; and at the
same time to contrast with heterosexuality's naturalization of this
process. For whereas the constructedness of straight gender is obscured
by the veil of naturalization, queer transgender reveals, indeed, explic
itly performs, its own constructedness. In other words, queer transgen
der serves as heterosexual gender's subversive foil. Thus in the scheme
of Gender Trouble, heterosexual gender is assigned as ground, queer
transgender as figure, dramatizing or metaphorizing the workings of
heterosexuality's construction. Even in "Critically Queer," in the very
same paragraph that apparently seeks to disentangle homosexuality
and transgender, Butler writes that drag "exposes or allegorizes" the
process by which heterosexualized genders form themselves.21 Queer
transgender is allegory to heterosexual gender's (specious, for it only
veils its performativity) referentiality or literality.
Biddy Martin has described her anxiety in response to Butler's and
Sedgwick's work over this tendency of "antifoundationalist celebrations
of queerness" to represent queer sexualities as "figural, performative,
playful, and fun." Martin's anxiety specifically concerns the way in
which feminism, gender, and, by extension, the female body, are stabi
lized in this dynamic, projected by queerness as "fixity, constraint, or
subjection . . . a fixed ground."22 While agreeing that the category of
woman is often subject to a degree of a priori stabilization in the very
writings that call for its destabilization and proliferation, my concerns,
for the following reasons, are particularly with the effective appropria
tion of transgender by queer. In the first instance, transgendered subjec
tivity is not inevitably queer. That is, by no means are all transgendered
subjects homosexual. While "Critically Queer" itself points this out,
Gender Trouble's queer transgender illustrates a certain collapsing of gen
der back into sexuality that, in the particular process of Gender Trouble's
canonization, has become a tendency of queer studies: a tendency that is,
as Martin suggests, the queering of gender through sexuality (and I
would add of sexuality through gender). And, more crucially in regard
32 Judith Butler
to this first distinction, in the context of a discussion of how gender and

sexual subjects have been taken up in theoretical paradigms, by no
means are transgendered subjects necessarily queer even in the sense that
queer has come to signify in queer studies. That is, although "queer" as
a camp term has to some extent lost that referent "homosexual" and now
signifies not as homosexual stricto sensu but as a figure for the performa
tive-subversive signifier displacing referent-by no means are all
transgendered subjects queer even in this figurative, nonreferential
sense. Butler's reading of Venus Xtravaganza in Bodies That Matter will
work as an attempt to demonstrate just this: the way in which not every
gender-crossing is queerly subversive. Yet it should be pointed out again
that the fact that she must later return to disentangle transgender, queer,
and subversion in Bodies That Matter as she must in the essay "Critically
Queer," is due precisely to their prior entanglement in Gender Trouble.
(Although, given the importance within Butler's theory of the dynamic
of citation, the extent to which her own writing is generated through
such reiterative returns should be noted as richly appropriate.)
My second reason for concern with queer's arrogation of transgen
der is that it allocates to nontransgendered subjects (according to this
binary schema, straight subjects), the ground that transgender would
appear to only figure; this "ground" is the apparent naturalness of sex.
For if transgender figures gender performativity, nontransgender or
straight gender is assigned (to work within Butler's own framework of
speech-act theory) the category of the constative. While within this
framework, this allocation is a sign of the devaluation of straight gen
der, and conversely queer's alignment of itself with transgender gen
der performativity represents queer's sense of its own "higher pur
pose," in fact there are transgendered trajectories, in particular trans
sexual traj ectories, that aspire to that which this scheme deval ues.
Namely there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be nonper
formative, to be constative, quite simply, to be . What gets dropped
from transgender in its queer deployment to signify subversive gender
performativity is the value of the matter that often most concerns the
transsexual: the narrative of becoming a biological man or a biological
woman (as opposed to the performative of effecting one)-in brief and
simple the materiality of the sexed body. In the context of the trans
sexual trajectory, in fact, Beauvoir's epigram can be read quite differ
ently as describing not a generic notion of gender's radical performa
tivity but the specific narrative of (in this case) the male-to-female
Judith Butler 33
transsexual's struggle toward sexed embodiment. One is not born a

woman, but nevertheless may become one-given substantial medical
intervention, personal tenacity, economic security, social support, and
so on: becoming woman, in spite of not being born one, may be seen as
a crucial goal. In its representation of sex as a figurative effect of
straight gender 's constative performance, Gender Trouble cannot
account for a transsexual desire for sexed embodiment as telos. In this
regard Gender Trouble serves to prompt readings of transsexual sub
j ects whose bodily trajectories might exceed its framework of the the
ory of gender performativity.
If Gender Trouble enables the syllogism transgender gender per
=
formativity queer subversive, it stabilizes this syllogism through

= =
suggesting as constant its antithesis: nontransgender gender consta

=
tivity straight naturalizing. The binary opposition between these

= =
syllogisms proliferates a number of mutually sustaining binary opposi

tions between Gender Trouble's conceptual categories: queer versus
straight; subversive versus naturalizing; performativity versus consta
tivity; gender versus sex. The first term in each opposition is ascribed a
degree of generativity that puts in question the primacy of the second.
The value of this intervention lies in our recognition that it is the sec
ond term that is customarily awarded primacy and autonomy over the
first. But the transsexual, as Butler later realizes in Venus Xtravaganza,
ruptures these binaries and their alignment.
Because it constitutes the focal point of the transsexual trajectory (to
be a woman) among these binaries, it is the matter of sex that is of inter
est to me next before Venus, not simply in its conceptually associative
opposition to transgendered subjects in Gender Trouble but as a concep
tual category in itself. Transgender certainly allows Butler to displace
an expressivist model of gender where gender is the cultural expression
or interpretation of sex (consolidated as bedrock) with a performative
model where sex can "be shown to have been gender all along" (GT 8).
But Gender Trouble's most thorough accounting for sex as discursive
effect appears in the discussion of melancholia in the second chapter,
"Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual
Matrix" (GT 35-78). Here, although the transgendered subject is not
explicitly marshaled to exemplify the theory, the figure of transgender
haunts the analyses, and the particular conceptualization of sex as "gen
der all along," as we shall see, certainly has significant implications for
any theory of transsexual subjectivity.
34 Judith Butler
Heterosexual Melancholia and the Encrypting of Sex
To recast the referent as the signified . . . -Judith Butler,"Contingent Foundations"
Butler has suggested that it was the tendency to skip over this central
chapter that led to the conventional (mis)reading of Gender Trouble as
about drag and promoting a "free play" model of gender. On two occa
sions she has stated that this tendency is enabled by the book's structure,
by too great a thematic break between the discussion of drag and the dis
cussion of melancholia: "The problem is that I didn't bring forward the
psychoanalytic material into the discussion of performativity well
enough"; "[W]hat I failed to do is to refer the theatricality of drag back
to the psychoanalytic discussions that preceded it, for psychoanaly sis
insists that the opacity of the unconscious sets limits to the exteriorization
of the psyche."23 Butler's later work has gone on to make these moves
back and forth between drag and psychoanalysis, to work the connec
tions between gender performativity and melancholia. Melancholia later
becomes a way of delimiting the "play" of gender performativity (one
section in "Critically Queer" is subtitled "Melancholia and the Limits of
Performance"), a means for Butler to unstick the notion of performativ
ity from the literal performance (external display) to which it had
become fixed and resituate performativity within the interior workings
of the psyche. If, as Butler later writes, the drag sections of Gender
Trouble "did not address the question of how it is that certain forms of
disavowal and repudiation come to organize the performance of gen
der," drag as it is reworked though melancholia becomes interesting not
so much for what it reveals as for what it reveals as repudiated-or
rather, to follow Butler's specific psychoanalytic distinction, foreclosed.
For although drag is later said to expose or to allegorize heterosexuality,
now elaborated as heterosexual melancholia, melancholia is itself consti
tuted by the "unperformable," by what it reveals as that which cannot be
revealed as such.24
Even without Butler's later underscoring its importance and her
continued reworking of melancholia and gender performativity, how
ever, it is difficult not to conclude that, in its thorough accounting for
the construction of sex via a thorough accounting of the construction of
heterosexuality, this second chapter represents the primary achieve
ment of Gender Trouble. While the construction of gender and sexual
ity is often asserted in poststructuralist theory, this chapter details how
the process of construction actually takes place through the categories
Judith Butler 35
of culture, the psyche, and body, setting up a complex and brilliant

exchange between their domains and, by extension, structuralist and
psychoanalytic theory. The analyses stem from these difficult questions:
If sex is "gender all along," not a prior ontological substance that gen
der interprets but rather gender in masquerade, how is it that gender
comes to pass so effectively as sex ? How does sex appear as biological
bedrock, and gender as its a posteriori cultural interpretation ?
The deft interlocking of theoretical paradigms, namely, Levi-Strauss,
Lacan (and to a lesser extent, Joan Riviere), and Freud gives to Butler's
answering of these questions a comprehensive and authoritative feel.
Her beginning premise, undergirding the work of Levi-Strauss, Lacan,
and Freud-and of course Foucault-is the productivity of cultural pro
hibitions. However, where psychoanalysis and structuralism both posit
incest as the prohibition that produces heterosexuality, Butler argues that
the incest taboo is preceded by the taboo on homosexuality, for it is this
that inaugurates the positive Oedipus complex, that is, the incestuous
desires in the first place. The child's compliance with the taboo on homo
sexuality ensures that his/her obj ect-cathexis is directed toward the
opposite-sexed parent. In a move designed to refute the primacy of het
erosexuality over homosexuality, Butler asks: What then is the produc
tive effect on heterosexuality of the prohibition of homosexuality ? What
happens to the once-desired, now-outlawed homosexual love object ?
Where within the subject does this object-cathexis go ?
Via Lacan, Butler asserts that the lost object is incorporated through
a melancholic strategy of masquerade crucial to the production of sex
ual difference. In Lacan's "The Meaning of the Phallus," women appear
to be the phallus through a masquerade effected by a melancholic incor
poration . Incorporated are the "attributes of the object/Other that is
lost," and significantly for Butler, Lacan exemplifies the lost object with
a female homosexual cathexis (GT 48).25 The lost object, in particular
"the signification of the body in the mold of the Other who has been
refused," is incorporated as a mask via "melancholic identification" (GT
50). Lacan's account enables Butler to locate "the process of gender
incorporation within the wider orbit of melancholy" and to suggest that
the unresolved homosexual cathexes outlawed by the taboo on homo
sexuality effect the production of heterosexually invested genders: sym
bolic sexual difference (GT 50). From Lacan, Riviere's famous refusal of
the distinction between the masquerade of femininity and "genuine
womanliness" (and Stephen Heath's elaboration of this assertion) allows
36 Judith Butler
Butler to consider the mask not as concealing an interior authentic gen

der essence but rather as that which masquerades as this essence; the
mask itself constitutes gender (GT 53). 26
So far in Butler's chapter the argument has stayed within the
bounds of the construction of gender. Butler now begins to account for
the construction of sex, that is how sex is "gender all along." She does
so by turning to Freud's writings on melancholia and incorporation
("Mourning and Melancholia" and The Ego and the Id, particularly its
chapter, "The Ego and the Super-Ego [Ego Ideal]"), and by layering
over these two other sets of psychoanalytic texts: Nicolas Abraham
and Maria Torok's work on mourning, melancholia, and the processes
of introj ection and incorporation; and Roy Schafer's descriptions of
psych ic internalization and the psychoanalytic language of internal
ization.27 My questions here-what happens to the matter of sex in
Gender Trouble and what are its implications for the subj ect of trans
sexuality-can be addressed by our careful retracing and elaboration
of Butler's steps through these texts.
Freud's 1 9 1 7 "Mourning and Melancholia" distinguishes these two
eponymous psychic states . He defines mourning as a normal finite
reaction of grief, which has as its goal the resolution of the death of a
loved object. Melancholia differs from mourning on all counts. First,
the object is lost not necessarily through death but through, for
instance, love. Second, the melancholic does not know for what he
grieves: the loss remains opaque to consciousness. And thus third, in
not knowing what he has lost, the melancholic preserves his obj ect-loss
by encrypting it and incorporating it as an identification. In this incor
poration of the once-desired lost object as an identification, the melan
cholic regresses to an oral phase where object-cathexis and identifica
tion are confused. In 1 923 in The Ego and the Id, Freud returns to this
essay in order to normalize the workings of melancholia. He discards
the opposition between mourning and melancholia and suggests that
the processes distinct to melancholia should now be reconceived as part
of the process of mourning. Depathologizing melancholia, he argues
that its dynamic of substituting an object-cathexis for an identification
is central to the formation of the ego. In fact, "it may be the sole condi
tion under which the id can give up its obj ects." In particular, the
dynamics of substitution and incorporation should be understood to
produce normative-that is nonpathological-gendering; they func
tion to resolve the object-cathexes of the Oedipus complex and to con -
Judith Butler 37
solidate gender positioning. Surely significantly for Butler, although

she doesn 't cite this passage, Freud's example of how identification
through incorporation functions to consolidate gender is one of a
moment of transgendered identification: "Analysis very often shows
that a little girl, after she has had to relinquish her father as a love
object, will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify herself
with her father (that is, with the object which has been lost), instead of
with the mother."2 8
Freud's generalization of the dynamics of melancholia, his under
standing of their role in gendering (through transgendering), allows
Butler to select melancholia as the response to the taboo on homo
sexuality in generating normative (that is heterosexual) gender posi
tions. Heterosexuality is ensured by the cultural prohibition on homo
sexuality, but the once-loved homosexual object must nevertheless be
processed . Because of the cultural prohibition on homosexuality,
because of the cultural unnameability of homosexuality, the lost homo
sexual love-object (always already lost in the sense that it is forbidden)
cannot be mourned-that is, articulated or named. The taboo on
homosexuality effects a denial of its desired status; grief over the loss is
instead turned back in on itself in an unarticulated and unconscious
melancholia. At this point Butler enlists Abraham and Torok's descrip
tion of mourning and melancholia as characterized by two antithetical
dynamics of internalization; where mourning introjects the lost object,
melancholia incorporates it. lntrojection, Abraham and Torok argue,
clearly developing Freud's 1 9 1 7 understanding of mourning as a con
sciousness of loss, works on a recognition or consciousness of the
absence of the obj ect. The void left by the loss of the obj ect is not so
much "filled" by articulation of the loss-that is, language-as it makes
possible language-that is, the expression of loss. The original loss (the
loss of the breast) is resolved through the child's cry. The loss of the real
object (originally the mother's body) is thus displaced into language or
metaphorized; the mouth emptied of the breast makes possible the
mouth filled with words. Melancholia, on the other hand, sets in motion
a fantasy of incorporation . As a means of denying the loss, the subject
imagines or fantasizes taking in the obj ect. When the loss cannot be
acknowledged and articulated via mourning, the subject imagines l it
erally "swallowing" the object, a melancholic fantasy of literalization .
As a refusal to displace loss into language, incorporation, Abraham and
Torok argue, is fundamentally antimetaphoric. In this sense incorpora-
38 Judith Butler
tion is a magical resolution of loss; the loss is actually not resolved at all,
remaining unacknowledged and unspoken . As prohibited desire that
thus cannot be mourned, Butler uses Abraham and Torok to suggest,
the lost homosexual cathexis is incorporated (rather than introjected) as
prohibited identification.
But if this identification is incorporated, where exactly is it incor
porated ? Butler asks: "If the identifications sustained through melan
choly are ' incorporated,' then the question remains: Where is this
incorporated space ? If it is not literally within the body, perhaps it is
on the body as its surface signification such that the body must itself
be understood as an incorporated space" (GT 67). Having established
that melancholia is one psychic effect of the prohibition on homosex
uality in the prod uction of heterosexual identity, this, then, is B utler's
most engaging proposal . Melancholia for the lost homosexual love
object literalizes sex on the (heterosexual) body. Through Freud and
Abraham and Torok, the incorporation that does the work of melan
cholia appears as an antimetaphorical activity "precisely because it
maintains the loss as radically unnamable. In other words, incorpora
tion is not only a failure to name or avow the loss, but erodes the con
d itions of metaphorical signification itself" (G T 68). Incorporation
enacts a l iteralization of the loss . "As an antimetaphorical activity,
incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the
facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear 'sex'
as its literal truth" (GT 68).
This interchangeability between "on" and "in" ("on or in "), this slip
page between, in other words, the surface of the body and its interiority,
is crucial . It sets up an equivalence between surface and interiority that
is absolutely pivotal both to Butler's description of sexing as a fantasy of
incorporation and to her figuring of the body as a psychically "incorpo
rated space." In Abraham and Torok the literalizing dynamic of incor
poration is crucially a fantasy of literalization. Nothing is ever literally
taken in during this process of incorporation. Rather, as a means of deny
ing its absence, the subject fantasizes "swallowing" its loss. Corporeal
interiority, in this case the notion that the body has a sex, is thus indexi
cal of the literalizing fantasy of heterosexual melancholia, its incorpora
tive response to the prohibition of homosexuality. It is only via this fan
tasy of literalization that the body comes "to bear a sex" as literal truth,
that gender gets inscribed on the body as sex and sex appears as the lit
eral embodiment of gender:
Judith Butler 39
The conflation of desire with the real-that is, the belief that it is the
parts of the body, the "literal" penis, the " literal" vagina, wh'ich cause
pleasure and desire-is precisely the kind of l iteralizing fantasy charac
teristic of the syndrome of melancholic heterosexuality. The disavowed
homosexuality at the base of melancholic heterosexuality reemerges as
the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where "sex" designates the
blurred unity of anatomy, "natural identity, "and "natural desire." The
loss is denied and incorporated, and the genealogy of that transmutation
fully forgotten and repressed. The sexed surface of the body thus
emerges as the necessary sign of a natural(ized) identity and desire. The
loss of homosexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted in
the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical factic
ity of sex. Here we see the general strategy of literalization as a form of
forgetfulness, which, in the case of a literalized sexual anatomy, "forgets"
the imaginary and, with it, an imaginable homosexuality. (GT 71)
The denied homosexual love is thus incorporated as the "surface" of the

body that yet masquerades as interior literal sex. Heterosexuals who
believe that their penises and vaginas are the "cause" of their pleasure
or desire literalize them and "forget" an/other body: both the (once
loved) homosexual body, the body of the other, and their own imagi
nary or phantasmatic body (there is an implicit binding of the homo
sexual to the imaginary).
Because she grounds it on a misrecognition, a mistaking of the signi
fier of gender for the referent of sex, of the metaphorical for the literal,
Butler's description of heterosexual sexing through melancholia in
evitably raises mind-boggling questions about what (nonerroneous)
recognition might entail. What imaginary body (parts or surfaces) does
the heterosexual male who literalizes his penis forget? Is the forgotten
imaginary necessarily other than what masquerades as the real ? Does
this body correspond to a gendered one ? Are the imaginary and the
phantasmatic already gendered? Later in Gender Trouble, in "The Body
Politics of Julia Kristeva" (GT 79-93), Butler critiques Kristeva's premise
of a pre-Symbolic body, one situated in the murky maternal space of the
semiotic before the paternal law. Butler reverses Kristeva's temporality,
positioning the semiotic or the imaginary as an effect of the Symbolic, the
(zone of) prohibition again productive of (the zone of) the prediscursive
Kristeva conceives as primary. As this section of the final chapter of
Gender Trouble suggests that no imaginary body can signify outside of
40 Judith Butler
gender, it would follow that the imaginary body in the second chapter is
already gendered. Indeed Butler asserts as much in the final pages of
"Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual
Matrix" when she figures the imaginary or fantasized body as "an altered
bodily ego . . . within the gendered rules of the imaginary" (GT 7 1 ). In
literalizing his penis, then, might the straight man be said to forget an
imaginary or fantasized vagina ? Does he also forget to literalize (invest
sex in) body parts that he might be said to already "have" (more than he
can be said to "have" a vagina)-feet for instance ? And how are these
parts gendered in the imaginary ? What exactly are the "gendered rules"
of the imaginary ? The question of the precise relations between actual
heterosexual subjects and the theory of heterosexual melancholia is
prompted by, though not addressed in, Gender Trouble's description.
For transsexual embodiment, Butler's harnessing psychoanalytic dis
cussions of melancholia and incorporation to the processes of gendering
has two interdependent significant effects: it refigures sex from material
corporeality into phantasized surface; and through this it reinscribes the
opposition between queer and heterosexual already at work in Gender
Trouble, sustaining it by once again enlisting transgender as queer.
First, Butler's deliteralization of sex depends upon her conceiving
the body as the psychic projection of a surface. This conceptualization
derives from a rather eclectic reading of Freud's description of the bod
ily ego in The Ego and the Id. I cite the Freud passage in full:
A person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both
external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen l i ke any other
object, but to the touch, it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which
may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psycho-physiology has fully
discussed the manner in which a person's own body attains its special
position among other objects in the world of perception. Pain, too, seems
to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowl
edge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way
by which in general we arrive at the idea of our body.
The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface
29
entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.
In the apparent periphery of a footnote, Gender Trouble cites from the

second paragraph of this passage Freud's assertion, "the ego is first and
foremost a bodily ego" (GT 1 63, n. 43). But then, in a substitution cru
cially significant to her conceptualization of the body as the psychic pro-
Judith Butler 41
jection o f a surface, Butler replaces the referent "it" in the subsequent

part of the cited sentence, which in Freud clearly refers back to the ego as
bodily ego ("The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it . . . ), with the
word (square bracketed, demoted-in my citation of Butler's note-to
parenthetical) "body." Butler's recitation of the passage reads: "Freud
continues the above sentence: '(the body) is not merely a surface entity, but
is itself the projection of a surface' " (GT 1 63 n. 43; my emphasis). Butler's
reading of F reud's assertion thus figures the body as interchangeable
with the ego. That is, the body appears not only as a surface entity but as
itself the psychic projection ofa surface. Yet that it is precisely Freud's con
cern at this point in his essay to articulate the bodily origins of the ego,
the conception of the ego as product of the body not the body as product
of the ego, is underscored by the explanatory footnote added by his edi
tor James Strachey that appeared first in the 1 927 English translation of
this text immediately following the above passage-a note authorized by
Freud. The note reads: "I.e. the ego is ultimately derived from bodily
sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It
may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body."30
Butler's reading therefore inverts the note's representation of the body as
productive of the psyche ("the ego is derived from bodily sensations")
and, through that square-bracketed substitution, conversely images the
body as a psychic effect. The body itself becomes commensurable with
the psychic projection of the body. Whereas Freud's original assertion
maintains a distinction between the body's real surface and the body
image as a mental projection of this surface (a distinction between cor
poreal referent and psychic signified), Butler's recitation collapses bodily
surface into the psychic projection of the body, conflates corporeal mate
riality with imaginary projection. In so doing, it lets slip any notion of the
body as a discernible referential category.
Her later use in Bodies That Matter of this same passage in The Ego
and the Id repeats and indeed heightens this reading, even though she
here (again in a footnote) addresses directly that 1 927 footnote-and
even though she here reads it directly as Freud's: "Although Freud is
offering an account of the development of the ego, and claiming that the
ego is derived from the projected surface of the body, he is inadvertently
establishing the conditions for the articulation of the body as morphol
ogy" (BTM 258, n. 4). The modifying subordination in her syntax ("al
though") to which her summary of the manifest meaning of the note
is confined makes clear that she recognizes that what she desires the
42 Judith Butler
note to articulate is not deliberate but "inadvertent." Yet in spite of this

recognition, Butler continues to read against the manifest sense of the
note-the description of the ego as derived from the body-in order to
emphasize the antithesis: the body as morphology. This notion of body
as morphology derives from a Lacanian conceptualization of the body
as illusory psychic projection. Indeed, her citation of Freud appears here
in her chapter on imaginary morphology, "The Lesbian Phallus and the
Morphological Imaginary," where Freud's concept of the ego as a bod
ily ego is said to "prefigure" Lacan's mirror stage in which the body is
an "idealization or 'fiction' " (BTM 73). But Freud's configuration of the
relations between psyche and body is quite different from Lacan's. If in
Lacan's mirror stage the body is the ego's misconception, in Freud's The
Ego and the Id the body is the site of the ego's conception.3 1
Butler's inversion of Freud's formulation of the relations between
psyche and body in Gender Trouble may also be influenced by Roy
Schafer's reading of Freud's bodily ego to illustrate the illusory status of
the distinctions the subject makes (and the language of psychoanalysis
sustains) between what is interior and what is exterior to the body. Butler
enlists Schafer's critique of internalization (in addition to Abraham and
Torok's analyses) to argue that incorporation is a fantasy. Schafer pro
poses that, in its language of internalization, psychoanalysis literalizes
the always-imaginary projections on the part of the subject between
what is inside and outside. For Schafer Freud's description of the bodily
ego exemplifies the original way in which the subject deludes itself into
believing in the facticity of corporeal interiority. The bodily ego consti
tutes a perception or rather a construction of the body espoused (falsely)
by the subject, not a product of the body at all but rather a misreading of
it; for via the bodily ego the subject assumes wrongly that the self can be
conceived as occupying a body, a materiality in space.32 My contention is
that it is precisely this point that the 1927 footnote approved by Freud
seeks to emphasize. Freud's bodily ego is designed not to dematerialize
the body into phantasmatic effect but to materialize the psyche, to argue
its corporeal dependence.
In her critique of the queering of gender Martin has remarked on the
tendency in queer studies for "surfaces [to] take priority over interiors
and depths and even rule conventional approaches to them [i.e. , interi
ors and depths] as inevitably disciplinary and constraining."33 Butler's
conceptualization of sex as a heterosexual melancholic fantasy of liter
alization, of sex as the phantasmatic encrypting of gender in the body,
Judith Butler 43
impl icitly designates corporeal interiority as "disciplinary and con

straining" and, conversely, privileges surface as that which breaks up
interiority and reveals its status as fantasy. This prioritization of surface
is emphatically occularcentric, as is Gender Trouble's concomitant
investment in the transgendered subject of the power to reveal sex as
"gender all along" (i.e., interiority as incorporated fantasy). Gender
Trouble's theoretical economy of gender relies heavily on a notion of the
body as that which can be seen, the body as visual surface. This is pos
sibly most marked in its deployment of the transgendered subject to
illustrate gender performativity: girls who look like boys and boys who
look like girls. In this sense then, in its dependence on the visible, on
body-as-surface, the theory of gender performativity does in fact work
out of a definitively theatrical arena. Any claim to a sense of sexed inte
riority, anyfeeling of being sexed or gendered (whether "differently" or
not), along with other ontological claims, is designated phantasmatic,
symptomatic of heterosexual melancholia. Yet, to return to that passage
in The Ego and the Id, Freud underlines that the bodily ego derives not
so much from the perception of the body (an "external perception"),
that is, from what can be seen, but from the bodily sensations that stem
from its touching-touching here in both an active and passive sense
(an "internal perception") : "(A person's body] is seen like any other
object, but to the touch , it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which
may be equivalent to an internal perception."34
The transsexual doesn't necessarily look differently gendered but by
definition.feels differently gendered from her or his birth-assigned sex.
In both its medical and its autobiographical versions, the transsexual
narrative depends upon an initial crediting of this feeling as generative
ground. It demands some recognition of the category of corporeal inte
riority (internal bodily sensations) and of its distinctiveness from that
which can be seen (external surface): the difference between gender
identity and sex that serves as the logic of transsexuality. This distinc
tion is tactically, ingeniously, and rigorously refused by Gender Trouble;
it is this refusal that allows for a refiguration of sex into gender. In its
one mention of transsexuality Gender Trouble uses transsexuality to
exemplify not the constitutive significance of somatic feeling but the
reverse, the phantasmatic status of sex: the notion that pleasure exceeds
material body parts.35 The transsexual's often declared capacity to expe
rience his or her body as differently sexed from its materiality certainly
supports Freud's notion of a bodily ego. But, because the subject often
44 Judith Butler
speaks of the imaginary body as more real or more sensible, I argue that
this phenomenon illustrates the materiality of the bodily ego rather
than the phantasmatic status of the sexed body: the material reality of
the imaginary and not, as Butler would have it, the imaginariness of
material reality. That the transsexual's trajectory centers on reconfigur
ing the body reveals that it is the ability to feel the bodily ego in con
junction and conformity with the material body parts that matters in a
transsexual context; and that sex is perceived as something that must be
changed underlines its very un-phantasmatic status .
Butler's deliteralization of sex, her displacement of sex from mater
ial interiority into fantasized surface, is enabled by the production of a
binary between queer and heterosexual. The second important ramifi
cation for a theory of transsexual embodiment following the refiguring
of the body as visual surface, is the alignment once again of transgender
with queer. Heterosexuality is engendered via the literalizing strategies
of melancholia, strategies that queer through its transgendered perfor
mativity brings into relief. Heterosexuality operates by attempting to
literalize sex in the body; queer transgender reveals this depth as sur
face. It is not that heterosexuality is natural and queer denaturalizing;
rather, heterosexuality is naturalizing, concealing the masquerade of the
natural that queer makes manifest. Even so, heterosexuality and queer
are represented as, respectively, restrictive interiority and playful sur
face. If gay and lesbian cultures are said to be characterized by camp, par
odic subversive-that is, transgendered-performances that deliteral
ize the apparently real of sex, heterosexuality is said to be characterized
by a literalizing of the apparently real: "The conflation of desire with
the real . . . is precisely the kind of literalizing fantasy characteristic of
the syndrome of melancholic heterosexuality" (GT 7 1 ). This attribution
of character effects a certain hypostatization of queer and heterosexual,
simultaneously impacting queer more thoroughly with transgender. In
effect Butler subjects heterosexuality to a certain degree of grounding in
order to read queer through transgender as refiguring this ground. In
operation is a generic antithesis, the queer performative coinciding with
the comedic staging of the impossibility of identity, heterosexual literal
ization with the melancholic attempt to sustain it as absolute ground. As
Butler herself implicitly acknowledges when she considers how trans
gendered subjects also reliteralize the gender norms in her essay on
Paris is Burning, this pivot� ! antithesis of Gender Trouble is too neat.36 If
in Gender Trouble the transsexual is not distinguished from the queer
Judith Butler 45
transgendered subject, in Bodies That Matter the transsexual is specifi

cally elected as the subject who most succinctly illustrates the limitations
of the queerness of transgender. It is to this delimiting and the transsex
ual that I now turn.
Venus is Burning: The Transubstantiation of the Transsexual
I don't feel that there's anything mannish about me except what I might have between me down there. I
guess that's why I want my sex change, to make myself complete.
-Venus Xtravaganza, Paris is Burning.
Because it was released in 1 990, hot on the heels of the publication of

Gender Trouble, Jennie Livingston's film Paris is Burning often got taken
up in discussions of queer identities in conjunction with Butler's book, as
if the subjects of the drag ball-again, the lure of the visual example in
transgendered contexts-illustrated Butler's theory of gender performa
tivity.37 Both texts in their transgendered themes captured what seemed
definitive of the queer moment. For this reason they were subject to a
certain yoking together in feminist/queer studies-in our readings,
course syllabi, conferences, and so on. Butler's chapter in Bodies That
Matter on the ambivalent effects of transgender in Paris is Burning,
"Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion" (BTM
1 2 1-142), serves by association therefore as a return to the subject of
transgender in Gender Trouble to mark out its ambivalent effects. In this
sense "Gender is Burning" functions to complicate those binary syllo
gisms of Gender Trouble. The essay's thesis is that crossing identifications
in the film both denaturalize and renaturalize identity norms: "Paris is
Burning documents neither an efficacious insurrection nor a painful
resubordination, but an unstable coexistence of both" (BTM 1 37).
While Butler uses Paris is Burning in general to document the ambiva
lent significance of performative crossings, she uses Venus Xtravaganza
as the specific lever to articulate this ambivalence: "Venus, and Paris is
Burning more generally, calls into question whether parodying the dom
inant norms is enough to displace them; indeed, whether the denatural
ization of gender cannot be the very vehicle for a reconsolidation of hege
monic norms" (BTM 125). For Butler it is the particular configuration of
Venus's body, gender presentation, desires, and fate that best exemplifies
how transgressive crossings can simultaneously reinscribe symbolic
norms. The film's representation of this Latina transsexual delimits the
subversive possibilities of parodic repetitions. Yet although its argument
46 Judith Butler
about ambivalence pivots on the specific material ambivalence of the

transsexual body, Butler's essay encodes transsexuality as metaphor in a
way that sublimates into theoretical allegory the specific materiality of
Venus's sex and of her death as a light-skinned Latina transsexual.
The revelation of Venus's murder in the second part of Paris is
Burning (filmed in 1989, two years after the first encounter with Venus)
is indisputably the moment that most cuts through any sense of the per
formativity, the fictionality of identities the film provides elsewhere,
particularly in the ball scenes. That Venus is killed for her transsexual
ity, for inhabiting a body which, as that of a preoperative male-to-female
transsexual, is not coherently female, is strongly supported by the film's
narrative. Angie Xtravaganza, the mother of Venus's house, to whom
the film turns to provide an account of the occurrence, firmly fixes
Venus's death in the context of a transsexual narrative: "That's part of
life. That's part of being a transsexual in New York City." The implica
tion is that Venus is murdered in her hotel bedroom on being "read" by
her client, killed for having a body in excess of the femaleness he imag
ined he was paying for; killed, then, as a transsexual. Butler isolates
Venus's death as the most prominent instance in the film in which the
symbolic precludes its resignification: "This is a killing that is performed
by the symbolic that would eradicate those phenomena that require an
opening up of the possibilities for the resignification of sex" (BTM 13 1).
Yet while Butler's isolation of this moment and this citation suggest that
what matters (to the client, to the film, and to Butler the critic) is Venus's
transsexuality and the particular configuration of her sexed body as a
male-to-female, Butler's reading of Venus's killing situates Venus's body
along a binary of queer man/woman of color, in the split between which
Venus's Latina, passing-as-white, transsexual body falls.
Butler attributes Venus's death first to "homophobic violence," stak
ing that it is Venus's "failure to pass completely [that renders her] clearly
vulnerable" to this violence (BTM 1 29-130). By "failure to pass com
pletely," Butler clearly intends Venus's penis; yet the presence of the
penis on Venus's body renders neither her a homosexual man (a literal
ization of gender surely symptomatic of the heterosexual melancholia
Gender Trouble critiqued) nor her death an effect of homophobia.
Venus presents herself unambivalently as a transsexual woman, not as
a gay man or drag queen. Although the only "genetic girl" is behind the
camera, it does not follow that all the bodies in Paris is Burning are male.
Rather, the film presents a spectrum of bodies and desires, heterosexual
Judith Butler 47
and homosexual, in-drag, transsexual, and genetic male, with the sub
jects frequently articulating the distinctions between these categories in
a careful self-positioning. Stating that there's nothing "mannish" about
her except what she has "down there," Venus describes looking forward
to sex reassignment surgery to make her "complete": in other words, a
complete woman. Her identification not as a gay man or a drag queen
but as an incomplete (preoperative transsexual) woman highlights the
impossibility of dividing up all identities along the binary homosex
ual/heterosexual. If it applies to Venus at all, her desire-to be a com
plete woman for a man-is heterosexual, and it is more this desire in
combination with her transsex that kills her: not as a homosexual man,
then, but as a transsexual woman whose desire is heterosexual-or, as
the failure to be (an ontological failure) a biological woman.
It is therefore equally inadequate to read Venus's death as equivalent
to that of a woman of color, as Butler does in the second instance: "If
Venus wants to become a woman, and cannot overcome being a Latina,
then Venus is treated by the symbolic in precisely the ways in which
women of color are treated" (BTM 1 3 1 ). Without disputing that women
(of color or white) can be treated identically to Venus, and while under
lining that it is crucial that Venus's passing be acknowledged as double
leveled-a race and sex crossing-again, it is not for being a woman of
color but for failing to be one that Venus is murdered; it is the crossing,
the trans movement that provokes her erasure. Her death is indexical of
an order that cannot contain crossings, a body in transition off the map of
three binary axes-sex (male or female), sexuality (heterosexual or homo
sexual), and race (of color or white): a light-skinned Latina transsexual
body under construction as heterosexual and female. At work in Venus's
murder is not fear of the same or the other but fear of bodily crossing, of
the movement in between sameness and difference: not homo- but trans
phobia, where "trans" here signifies the multileveled status of her cross
ing. This interstitial space is not foregrounded in Butler's reading of
Venus's death.
If for Butler Venus's death represents the triumph of the symbolic,
"Gender is Burning" discovers the symbolic asserting its norms
through Venus even before this moment-in particular, in her ex
pressed desires to become a "complete woman," to marry and attain
financial security. The second two are of course crucially dependent on
the first: a Latina transsexual's desires for sexed realness and domestic
comfort. It is to set the realization of these desires in motion that Venus
48 Judith Butler
is turning tricks to earn enough for her lower surgery, sex work being
a not uncommon, indeed often the only means by which poor/working
class male-to-females can afford to change sex. For Butler these desires
reveal the extent to which Venus, even before her murder, is subject to
"hegemonic constraint":
Clearly, the denaturali zation of sex, in its mul tiple senses, does not
imply a liberation from hegemonic constraint: when Venus speaks of
her desire to become a whole woman, to find a man and have a house
in the suburbs with a washing machine, we may well question whether
the denatura l ization of gender and sexuality that she pe rforms, and
performs well , culminates in a reworking of the normative framework
of heterosexuality. (BTM 133)
Venus's fantasy as a Latina transsexual of becoming "real" (both achiev

ing coherent sexed embodiment and middle-class security) and her cor
poreal progress in realizing this fantasy mark her out from the drag ball
performers who "do" realness and who "resist transsexuality" (BTM
1 36). Butler's presupposition is twofold here: first, that inherent to doing
realness is an agency resistant to and transformative of hegemonic con
straint that the desire to be real lacks; and following this, that the trans
sexual's crossing signifies a failure to be subversive and transgressive of
hegemonic constraint where it ought to be. Hegemony constrains Venus
through the "normative framework of heterosexuality. " If resisting
transsexuality produces a denaturalizing agency, it is because in Butler's
scheme transsexuality is understood, by definition, to be constrained by
heterosexuality. By extension, to fail to resist transsexuality fully (as
Venus does in hoping for a sex change) is to reliteralize sex (to be rather
than perform it) according to the workings of heterosexual melancho
lia. While Venus's murder symptomizes the triumph of the heterosex
ual matrix, in her desires Venus is duped by this same heterosexual ide
ology into believing that a vagina will make her a woman. The hetero
sexual matrix is therefore already asserting its hegemony in Venus's
transsexuality even before her death.
From this scheme it might appear that the binary of heterosexual =
literalizing/queer performative is still in operation in Bodies That

=
Matter, with transsexuality standing in for the first term. The transgen
dered subject, here exemplified in the transsexual, would accordingly
appear simply to have been switched from one side of the binary to the
other since Gender Trouble. Yet Butler's essay works not to reinforce but
Judith Butler 49
to demonstrate the ambivalence of this binary, to delimit (not negate)

the queer performativity of transgender. It is the literal ambivalence of
Venus's transsexual body that allows for this new theoretical ambiva
lence. Venus's death represents the triumph of hegemonic norms only
as it simultaneously illustrates Venus denaturalizing these norms: it is a
"killing performed by the symbolic that would eradicate those phe
nomena that require an opening up of the possibilities for the resignifi
cation of sex." Venus's body, with penis intact, is such a phenomenon
that would resignify sex. Even in her death, because of her transsexual
incoherence between penis and passing-as-a-woman, Venus holds out
for Butler the promise of queer subversion, precisely as her transsexual
trajectory is incomplete. In her desire to complete this trajectory (to
acquire a vagina), however, Venus would cancel out this potential and
succumb to the embrace of hegemonic naturalization. In other words,
what awards Venus the status of potential resignifier of the symbolic in
Butler's scheme is the fact that Venus doesn't get to complete her narra
tive trajectory and realize her desires, because she still has a penis at her
death. What matters for Butler is the oscillation between the literality of
Venus's body and the figurative marks of her gender. Conversely,
Venus's desire to close down this tension (what I am calling her desire
for sexed realness, for embodied sex) curtails her capacity to resignify
the symbolic. That Butler figures Venus as subversive for the same rea
son that Butler claims she is killed, and considers indicative of hege
monic constraint the desires that, if realized might have kept Venus at
least from this instance of violence, is not only strikingly ironic, it verges
on critical perversity. Butler's essay locates transgressive value in that
which makes the subject's real life most unsafe.
Butler's essay itself is structured on an ambivalence toward transsex
uality in its relation to the literal, caught (twice over), both between read
ing transsexuality literally and metaphorically and between reading the
transsexual as literalizing and deliteralizing. That Butler assigns Venus
the function of ambivalence in her effect on the literal is encapsulated in
the essay's reliance on the theme of transubstantiation, a term that is con
joined to transsexuality twice in the essay, that indeed stands in for trans
sexuality: first, in reference to Venus; and second, in reference to Jennie
Livingston's camera. First, then, Butler writes that Venus's transsexual
fantasy of realness is one of transubstantiation: "Now Venus, Venus
Xtravaganza, she seeks a certain transubstantiation of gender in order to
find an imaginary man who will designate a class and race privilege that
50 Judith Butler
promises a permanent shelter from racism, homophobia, and poverty"

(BTM 130). Venus's desire is here said to represent a transubstantiation
of gender in that her transsexuality is an attempt to depart from the lit
eral materiality of her sexed and raced body (and as her class is intricated
with these corporeal materialities, thus also a move away from her social
materiality) precisely according to a strategy that reliteralizes sex: the
acquisition of a vagina to make her a "complete woman." The term
"transubstantiation" sustains exactly such antinomy: it conveys both lit
eralization and deliteralization, is both performative and constative. In
the Eucharistic sense of transubstantiation, that the bread and wine
stand for Christ's body and blood is simultaneously a metaphorization of
the materials and a literalization of the Godhead. The exchange of
speech during the Eucharist between the priest ("The body of Christ")
and the recipient ("Amen") contracts both into agreeing that the materi
als are literally this body. Thus, to make a connection to my discussion of
melancholia and mourning, the Eucharistic transubstantiation func
tions as an incorporation of the lost object (Christ), which is also an intro
jection: the obj ect is taken in and literalized, yet at the same time the
articulation of its representation ("the body of Christ") ensures its resym
bol ization. If Venus's transsexuality "transubstantiates" in Butler's
account, then, it is because transsexuality is perceived (ambivalently) as
seeking out a heterosexual melancholic literalization of sex (the vagina)
precisely through a queer resignification (the quest for the vagina is the
penis's deliteral ization). The antithesis structuring Gender Trouble is
rendered ambivalent through transsexuality, specifically through the
representation of transsexuality as transubstantiation.38
Butler's essay goes on to displace its discussion of transsexuality and
transubstantiation from the literal transsexual body of Venus to the
metaphorical body of Jennie Livingston. Butler takes up bell hooks's
criticism that Paris is Burning is the product of a white gaze that yet
occults the situatedness of this gaze, that the film is a white scripting of
black bodies into a play(ground) of Otherness for white pleasure. For
hooks Livingston's exclusion of her own white body from the cinematic
frame misrepresents the fact that the film is a white perspective on
blackness and is thereby symptomatic of the dominant cultural produc
tion of whiteness as disembodied:
Jennie Livingston approaches her subject matter as an outsider looking

in. Since her presence as white woman/lesbian filmmaker is "absent"
Judith Butler 51
from Paris is Burning i t i s easy fo r v iewers to imagine that they are

watching an ethnographic film documenting the l i fe of black gay
"natives" and not recognize that they are watching a work shaped and
formed by a perspective and standpoint specific to Livingston. By cine
matically masking this reality (we hear her ask questions but never see
her), Livingston does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness "repre
sents" blackness, but rather assumes an imperial overseeing position that
39
is in no way progressive or counter-hegemonic.
Seemingly driven by the wish to read the film as more ambivalent

than hooks's reading allows (that is both reinscriptive and subversive),
Butler seeks an exception to hooks's premise of the disembodiment of the
white author. Butler suggests that Livingston's body--or at least its alle
gorical delegate-might be discovered in the scene in which the other
transsexual protagonist, Octavia St. Laurent, poses for a swimsuit shoot:
"The one instance where Livingston's body might be said to appear alle
gorically on camera is when Octavia St. Laurent is posing for the cam
era, as a moving model would for a photographer. We hear a voice tell
her that she's terrific, and it is unclear whether it is a man shooting as a
proxy for Livingston or Livingston herself" (BTM 134-135). My viewing
of the film differs strongly from Butler's. In my experience of this scene,
the body that's shooting (and the voice that's shown originating from it)
is quite clearly that of a white male photographer, whose photographic
camera appears in the cinematic frame while Livingston's cinematic
camera and her directorial body continue to remain clearly outside the
frame. Livingston remains omniscient and unsituated. For Butler, how
ever, the photographer's camera metaphorically embodies Livingston's
own desire through the feminization and eroticization of Octavia's trans
sexual body:
What is suggested by this sudden intrusion of the camera into the film is
something of the camera's desire, the desire that motivates the camera, in
which a lesbian phallically organized by the use of the camera (elevated
to the status of disembod ied gaze, holding out the promise of erotic
recognition} eroticizes a black male-to-female transsexual-presumably
preoperative-who "works" perceptually as a woman. (BTM 1 35)
If the camera as subject of the gaze is the phallus, then not only is the
photographic camera's appearance within the cinematic frame the alle
gorical instantiation of Livingston's body, in its eroticization of the male-
52 Judith Butler
to-female transsexual as model perfect, the photographic camera

metaphorically phallicizes Livingston's body. For in representing the
male-to-female transsexual as woman as obj ect of desire, Livingston,
Butler writes, "assumes the power of 'having the phallus.' " (BTM 1 35).
The camera's feminization/eroticization of the male-to-female transsex
ual circulates the phallus from transsexual to lesbian, a circulation that
amounts to a "transsexualization of lesbian desire": "What would it
mean to say that Octavia is Jennie Livingston's kind of girl ? Is the cate
gory or, indeed, 'the position' of white lesbian disrupted by such a claim ?
I f this i s the production o f the black transsexual fo r the exoticizing white
gaze, is it not also the transsexualization of lesbian desire ? " (BTM 135).
Livingston's desire for the transsexual is apparently also her identifica
tion with the transsexual; or rather the moment enacts an exchange of
identities, with the "real girl" acquiring a phallus (becoming transsexu
alized) as she represents the transsexual as a "real girl." Extending her
metaphorization of transsexuality, Butler designates the camera (photo
graphic symbolizing cinematic) the tool of this (s)exchange, the "surgi
cal instrument and operation through which the transubstantiation
occurs" that produces Octavia as woman, which "transplants" the phal
lus from Octavia's body to Livingston's lesbian body.
Transsexuality and transubstantiation are thus brought together for
a second time in Butler's essay, now in a metaphorical context. As in
Butler's discussion of Venus's fantasy, transsexuality is again implicitly
defined as, rendered equivalent to, transubstantiation. How is the dou
ble dynamic of literalization and deliteralization played out in this sec
ond moment of transsexualization as transubstantiation ? I suggest that
Butler's reading here again depends on the literal sexed ambivalence of
the preoperative male-to-female transsexual body (the woman with a
penis). Yet Butler's metaphor of transsexualization, its application to the
lesbian body-and the refiguring of surgery into the camera's look-in
effect displaces the materiality of transsexuality, and thus the material
ity of sex, to the level of figurative. First, in figuring the phallus as cir
culated from Octavia to Livingston, the metaphor of transsexualization
pivots on, and actually originates in, Octavia's penis. We know that
Octavia, like Venus, is indeed preoperative for likewise in her narrative
Octavia speaks of looking forward to the surgery that will make her a
"complete" woman. However, as in its process of circulation in Butler's
essay this penis becomes the phallus (Livingston's camera is said to
accord her the phallus, not the penis), this penis is clearly subject in its
Judith Butler 53
translation to Lacanian sublimation itself. Butler's metaphor of trans

sexualization depends upon this crucial substitution of fleshly part with
symbolic signifier, a confusion between phallus and penis that certainly
does not take place in the film. For while Octavia (like Venus) may yet
have a penis, in no way can she be said to "have the phallus": that is, in
no way is she accorded or does she assume the position of delegate of the
symbolic order. Conversely, while (presumably) Livingston has no
penis, her capacity to represent Octavia, Venus, and the rest of the cin
ematic subjects as embodied others via her authority as disembodied
overseer, as hooks's essay argues so convincingly, situates her precisely
in this position of the symbolic's delegate-the one who appears to have
the phallus. In the context of this film by a white lesbian about black and
Latino/a gay men, drag queens, and transsexuals, the penis and phallus
might be said to remain not only discrete but oppositional. Worlds apart
from her subjects in her whiteness, her middle-classness, her educated
ness, and her "real" femaleness, Livingston's position behind the cam
era is that of an authority with absolute powers of representation.40
Moreover, Livingston appears to wield this phallic power most heav
ily in her representation of the transsexuals, Octavia and Venus, in par
ticular in her representation of their fantasies. The section in the film in
which Octavia and Venus are cataloguing their desiderata stands as the
most explicitly edited and authored moments in the film. Their sen
tences, most of which begin "I want," are rapidly intercut with each
other's and their visual images likewise interwoven. The technique sug
gests an identity of their fantasies-not only that there is a generic trans
sexual fantasy but that the transsexual might be conceived according to
what she lacks; "I want" reveals all that the subject lacks. At the same
time, in its location of these scenes, the cinematic apparatus occults its
own framing/authoring function. Both Octavia and Venus are filmed
reclining on beds in bedrooms (the viewer is led to believe the subjects'
own); Octavia is even dressed for bed. The setting allows the audience to
assume an intimacy with the subjects, to forget the extent to which these
moments are mediated through Livingston's white female gaze
exactly the dynamic of occultation that provides fodder for hooks's cri
tique. Elsewhere in the film it becomes evident how Livingston's camera
mediates what of their lives the subjects reveal. Before her death, for
instance, Venus informs Livingston that she no longer works the streets,
a claim that her death, of course, proves drastically untrue. (The ques
tion of whether Venus would have continued to work the streets to save
54 Judith Butler
for her surgery, of whether Venus would have been killed, had Livingston
contracted her along with the film's subjects as actors is ultimately unan
swerable, though the fatal ending of Venus's narrative demands its ask
ing.) To summarize, then: in having the power to represent the other and
conceal this power, Livingston not only "has the phallus," this having
enables her to represent the transsexual other-Octavia and Venus-as
crucially lacking: not so much in spite of, as because of their penises.
Along with race and class, the crucial structuring difference between
Livingston on the one hand and Venus and Octavia on the other is sexed
coherence or biological realness: the difference between the nontrans
gendered and the embodied transgendered subject.
If phallus and penis are antithetical in Paris is Burning, Livingston's
"phallicization" in no way reveals her embodiment-even allegori
cally-as Butler claims. The difference between reality and the allegor
ical, between the fleshy intractability of the penis and the transcendence
of the phallus could not be more marked. As her position behind it ren
ders her unrepresented, only a disembodied voice popping questions,
the camera is precisely Livingston's means to disembodiment not to her
embodiment. Thus hooks's critique of the filmmaker's bodily erasure
still holds. Indeed, Butler's allegorization of Livingston's body in the
very vehicle for her disembodiment only places further out of reach the
filmmaker's literal corporeality, the notion that Livingston has a "body
that matters . " And although rendering the camera a lesbian phallus
might well disrupt Livingston's identity as a lesbian, it does nothing to
disrupt its transcendent whiteness: the reason why hooks has problems
with its overseeing position in the first place. Indeed, Butler's wish to
curtail hooks's critique of Livingston's disembodiment seems queerly
motivated (in both senses)-that is, until she reveals an identification
with Livingston: both "white Jewish lesbian[s] from Yale" (BTM 133).
This moment-exceptionally autobiographical for Butler-suggests
that perhaps something quite personal is at stake in Butler's discovering
an exception to the disembodied gaze of the auteur representing trans
gendered subjects. For Butler as much as for Livingston the personal
investment in this representation of transgendered subjects may well be
there; but the point is that in neither is it ever shown and in both this eli
sion of whatever autobiographical stakes there are exacts the cost of
objectification and derealization on the represented subjects.
Most significantly, the essay's metaphorical shifting of transsexuality
from Venus's body to Livingston's camera displaces transsexuality to a
Judith Butler 55
realm that has nothing to do with the materiality of the body. In the
context of a discussion of a film during the making of which one of the
protagonists is killed for her transsexuality, for the literal configuration
of her sexed body, this sublimation of transsexuality appears more
prominent and, in my experience anyway, proves the most disturbing
moment in Butler's oeuvre. The critic's metaphorization of the trans
sexual body transcends the literality of transsexuality in precisely a way
in which Venus cannot-Venus who is killed for her literal embodi
ment of sexual difference. Even in the film we might notice that the lit
erality of Venus's transsexual body and the facticity of her death are
already subject to a glossing over. As hooks points out, the film glides
over the reality of Venus's death, the moment is rapidly overridden by
the spectacle of the ball, and, now that she can no longer function in the
service of this spectacle, Venus is abandoned. Indeed, it might be said
that not only does the filmic narrative fail to mourn Venus, it markedly
includes no scenes of others' bereavement over Venus. We simply have
Angie Xtravaganza's terse account of what happened to Venus overlay
ing footage of Venus filmed on the Christopher Street piers while she
was still alive, this montage itself threatening to deny the reality, the
finality of Venus's death. In metaphorizing transsexuality, Butler inad
vertently repeats something of this deliteralization of the subject, her
body, and her death. The substance of the transsexual body is subli
mated in the move from the literal to the figurative. In the critical fail
ure to "mourn" her death, Venus's body (surely the lost object of Paris is
Burning), the most prominent representation we have in this film of the
pain and anguish of embodying the experience of being d ifferently
sexed, is encrypted in Livingston's camera. And what is not kept in
view in the film or the theory on it is the intractable materiality of that
body in its present state and its peculiar sex.41
Queer Feminism and Critical Impropriety: Transgender as Transitional Object?
The institution of the "proper object" takes place, as usual, through a mundane sort of violence.
-Judith Butler,"Against Proper Objects"
In her work since Bodies that Matter Butler demonstrates how the
founding oflesbian and gay studies as a methodology distinct from fem
inism has involved a privileging of subjects and categories to the exclu
sion of others. Her essay in the "More Gender Trouble" issue of differ
ences edited by her in 1 994, "Against Proper Objects," critiques the way
56 Judith Butler
in which lesbian and gay studies has arrogated sexuality as its "proper
object" of study, defining itself through and against feminism by assign
ing gender as feminism's object of study. What comes to appear quite
critically improper in Butler's essay is this very investment in theoretical
property: both the assurance with which that attribution of the object to
the other is made (in effect a restriction of the other to the object) and the
claims staked in the name of this attribution and restriction-namely,
lesbian and gay studies' claims to "include and supersede" feminism.42
Butler's essay implies that it might never be possible to claim method
ological distinctness without bringing into play a degree of aggression,
that every theory that grounds itself by allocating "proper objects" will
be prone to this kind of critical impropriety. Undoubtedly, my attempts
to wrest the transsexual from the queer inscription of transgender-and
here, my criticisms of Butler's writing on Venus-are not free of aggres
sion. From the point of view of this project, what subtends the difference
in such readings is quite primal (theoretical, political, and admittedly
personal): concerns about territory, belonging, creating homes; indeed,
the extent to which identity is formed through our investment in exter
nal "objects"-a fundamental tenet of psychoanalysis, that definition
depends on defining and "owning" objects. The question is perhaps
quite simple: Where (best) does the transsexual belong ? In seeking to
carve out a space for transgender/transsexual studies distinct from queer
studies, inevitably terrain must be mapped out and borders drawn up (a
fact that doesn't render them uncrossable}. Representations, subjects,
and bodies (such as Venus) serve as the all-important flags that mark the
territory claimed. It is additionally inevitable that the establishment of
methodological grounds involves the attempt early on to circumscribe
neighboring methodologies and approaches, the emphasizing of what
they do not as opposed to what we do.
Significantly, "Against Proper Objects" conjures transsexuality in
order to complicate articulations of methodological difference (although
B utler's language of "domestication" suggests not my frontier-scale
struggles but tiffs in the kitchen). Butler presents transsexuality as a cat
egory that, because of its "important dissonance" with homosexuality
(tantalizingly, but importantly for my readings which follow, she does
n't say what this is), falls outside the domain of lesbian and gay studies
("APO" 1 1 ). Insofar as lesbian and gay studies delimits its proper object
to sexuality and "refuses the domain of gender, it disqualifies itself from
the analysis of transgendered sexuality altogether" ("APO" 1 1 ). Trans-
Judith Butler 57
sexuality and transgender are invoked as illustrations of the exclusions

that lesbian and gay studies has performed in fixing its proper object as
sexuality. Transsexuality and transgender number among the categories
of "sexual minorities" Butler rightly understands Gayle Rubin insisting
in 1 984 made necessary a "radical theory of the politics of sexuality."43
These categories, Butler believes, get sidelined, ironically in lesbian and
gay studies' appropriation of Rubin's essay as a foundational text. As I
outlined at the beginning of this chapter, my sense of the role of trans
gender in lesbian and gay studies is quite different: that is, the figure of
transgender has, rather, proven crucial to the installation of lesbian and
gay studies-its installation as queer. Even work purporting to focus
exclusively on sexuality and not gender-I suggested Sedgwick's in par
ticular-implicitly engages this transgendered figure and, correlatively,
the axis of gender. (In her other mention of transgender and transsexu
ality Butler writes of Sedgwick's antihomophobic critique that "[b]y sep
arating the notion of gender from sexuality, [it] narrows the notion of
sexual minorities offered by Rubin, distancing queer studies from the
consideration of transgendered persons, transgendered sexualities,
transvestism, cross-dressing, and cross-gendered definition" ["APO" 24,
n. 8]). Although it strongly suggests that "an analysis of sexual relations
apart from an analysis of gender relations is [not] possible," Butler's essay
does not address how lesbian and gay studies might already be engaged
in gender analyses, if largely unconsciously ("APO" 9). Indeed, toward
the end of Butler's interview of Gayle Rubin in the same "More Gender
Trouble" issue of differences, Rubin provocatively hints that Butler's cri
tique of lesbian and gay studies' exclusion of gender might amount to a
tilting at windmills:
As for this great methodological divide you are talking about, between
feminism and gay/lesbian studies, I do not think I would accept that dis
tribution of interests, activities, objects and methods . . . . I cannot imag
ine a gay and lesbian studies that is not interested in gender as well as
sexuality. . . . I am not persuaded that there is widespread acceptance of
this division of intellectual labor between feminism, on the one hand,
44
and gay and lesbian studies on the other.
That s/he has received considerably less critical attention than the
cross-dresser or drag artist(e), that s/he has not been subject to the same
deliberate and concentrated queer recuperation, and indeed, as is
demonstrated in Butler's own work on Venus, that s/he is more likely
58 Judith Butler
to be deployed to signal the unqueer possibilities of cross-gender identi

fications, suggests that, above all transgendered subjects, the transsex
ual is more of the limit case for queer studies: the object that exceeds its
purview. Yet my sense is that the reasons for transsexuality's exceeding
queer lie not so much in queer's refusal of the category of gender (and
thus transgender), as Butler argues, as in queer's poststructuralist prob
lems with literality and referentiality that the category of transsexuality
makes manifest-particular in relation to the sexed body. Butler's
metaphorical displacement of the literality of Venus's sex can serve to
exemplify just this.
Indeed, according to Butler, it must remain "an open question
whether 'queer' can achieve these same goals of inclusiveness" imagined
by Rubin's radical theory of sexual politics, whether queer studies can
incorporate all of the "sexual minorities" among which transgender and
transsexuality might be categorized ("APO" 1 1). For Butler the concern
is queer's capacity to include, a question about queer's elasticity, about
how far the term "queer" will stretch. What is not a concern is whether
queer should even attempt to expand; expansion, inclusion, incorpora
tion are automatically invested with value. One wonders to what extent
this queer inclusiveness of transgender and transsexuality is an inclu
siveness for queer rather than for the trans subject: the mechanism by
which queer can sustain its very queerness-prolong the queerness of
the moment-by periodically adding subjects who appear ever queerer
precisely by virtue of their marginality in relation to queer. For does not
this strategy of inclusiveness ensure the conferral on queer of the very
open-endedness, the mobility, and-in the language of " Against Proper
Objects"-the very means by which to "rift" methodological "grounds"
that queer has come to symbolize? If, as Butler writes, "normalizing the
queer would be, after all, its sad finish," the project of expansion enables
queer to resist this normalization (what Butler fears will be "the insti
tutional domestication of queer thinking") that would herald its end
("APO" 2 1 ). Yet if we conceive of "finish" and "end" here not as a lim
itation in time but a limitation in institutional space, this limited reach
is inevitable and arguably necessary for the beginnings of other method
ologies, for reading other narratives from other perspectives.
What Butler does not consider is to what extent-and on what occa
sions-transgendered and transsexual subjects and methodologies might
not wish for inclusion under the queer banner. "Against Proper Objects"
assesses inclusion and the resistance to inclusion solely from the perspec-
Judith Butler 59
tive of queer; it does not imagine possible resistance stemming from the
putatively excluded "sexual minorities." Our discussions should address
not only--or perhaps not primarily--queer's elasticity but also what is
gained and lost for nonlesbian and gay subjects and methodologies in
joining the queer corporation. In the case of transsexuality there are sub
stantive features that its trajectory often seeks out that queer has made its
purpose to renounce: that is, not only reconciliation between sexed mate
riality and gendered identification but also assimilation, belonging in the
body and in the world-precisely the kinds of "home" that Butler's essay
holds at bay in its critical troping of "domestication." There is much
about transsexuality that must remain irreconcilable to queer: the speci
ficity of transsexual experience; the importance ofthe flesh to self; the dif
ference between sex and gender identity; the desire to pass as "real-ly
gendered" in the world without trouble; perhaps above all, as I explore in
my next chapter, a particular experience of the body that can't simply
transcend (or transubstantiate) the literal.
Since Gender Trouble, "domestication" has figured as something of a
specter in Butler's work. Domestication appears to represent the assign
ing of subjects and methodologies to specific categorical homes, the
notion that there is an institutional place to which they belong. For the
Butler of 1 990 what was at stake was the domestication of gender, and
concomitantly the domestication of feminism through gender's domesti
cation beyond sexuality. Gender Trouble sought "to facilitate a political
convergence of feminism, gay and lesbian perspectives on gender, and
poststructuralist theory" to produce a "complexity of gender[,] . . . an
interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary set of discourses in order to resist
the domestication of gender studies or women['s] studies within the acad
emy and to radicalize the notion of feminist critique" (GT xiii; my
emphasis). As a means of resisting gender/women's studies' domestica
tion, Gender Trouble marshaled lesbian and gay sexuality and, as I have
suggested, lesbian and gay genders, in effect troubling or queering gen
der. In analyzing the way in which the sex/gender system is constructed
through the naturalization of heterosexuality and vice versa, Gender
Trouble performed its work in an interstitial space between feminism and
lesbian and gay studies, producing a new methodological genre-hence
my term for this: queer feminism. In this sense Gender Trouble consti
tuted an attempt to queer feminism. Yet although Butler's work might be
said to have always conceived of domestication-what we might term
object-constancy to push further on the psychoanalytic metaphor-as
60 Judith Butler
restrictive, it is interesting to note that in 1 994 it is no longerfeminist but

queer studies that she perceives to be under threat of domestication: the
shift indexes the change in values of the currencies of these methodolo
gies, the ways in which queer and gender studies have "circumscribed"
feminism. In "Against Proper Objects" it is (trans)gender that returns as
the supplement to trouble the domestication of (homo)sexuality, gender
that "troubles" queer. This shift in Butler's theoretical "object-cathexis" is
a sure a sign of queer's institutionalization (Oedipalization? with femi
nism as [M]Other ? ) if ever there was one.
To resist queer's incorporation of trans identities and trans studies is
not to refuse the value of institutional alliances and coalitions (in the
form of shared conferences, journals, courses, and so on). But an alliance,
unlike a corporation, suggests a provisional or strategic union between
parties whose different interests ought not to be-indeed, cannot totally
be-merged, sublimated for cohering-or queering-the whole. In
closing, it needs emphasizing that it is precisely queer's investment in the
figure of transgender in its own institutionalization-and above all the
methodological and categorical crossings of Butler's queer feminism
that have made it possible to begin articulating the transsexual as a the
oretical subject. It can be said that, in its very origins and its early
attempts at self-definition, transgender studies is allied with queer.
Jo be oneself is first of all to have a skin of one's own and, secondly, to use it as a space in which one can
experience sensations. -Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego
The layer which I really needed to take off was what can only be described as a second skin. But no matter
how hot or how cold or how uncomfortable it makes you feel, you cannot get it off. I yearned for the pure
relief you get from ripping off some really uncomfortable piece of clothing, except, I couldn't because that
last layer was me. -Raymond Thompson, What Took You So Long?
Why should the a rea of the skin, which guarantees a human being's existence in space, be most despised
and left to the tender mercies of the senses? -Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel
chapter 2
A Skin of One's Own: Toward a Theory

of Transsexual Embodiment
Surface Material
In December 1 993 "Orlan: Omnipresence" brought to the Sandra Gering
Gallery in New York the latest work of the French surgical performance
artist, Orlan. This consisted in the surgical reconstruction of her face to
resemble a computer composite of five canonical representations of beau
tiful women (the Mona Lisa and Botticelli's Venus among them). At the
exhibition a video of the operation, originally relayed live to multiple
international art galleries, showed a surgical team fitted out in black
robes and conical hats performing on Orlan's laid-out body. The video of
the surgery and its live broadcast, as Julia Epstein observes, "literaliz[ed]
the term 'operating theater.' "1 Underlining this theatricality, a surgeon's
bloody robe stretched and pinned to the wall at Gering's bore the legend,
"The body is but a costume." To be sure, by her own account, Orlan
seems to divest herself of her lineaments with an ease in keeping with this
figure: "Skin is a mask of strangeness, and by refiguring my face, I feel
I'm actually taking off a mask." 2 Yet like the robe's disavowal of the
62 A Skin of One's Own
body's materiality, Orlan's image for the superficiality of her face only
raises anxious questions about the meaning of bodily matter for identity.
If skin is a mask, where is the selfin relation to the body's surface ? Deeper
than the skin (underneath the mask) ? Or not "in" the flesh at all ? In her
surgical performance of the body (this was I think her sixth set of proce
dures), in her literalization of the body as a costume, Orlan appeared to
provide an insane personification of the poststructuralist insistence on the
absolute constructedness of the body.
Contrary to the robe's and Orlan's assertions, the body's materiality
(its fleshiness, its nonplasticity, and its nonperformativity) was anyway
much in evidence elsewhere in the gallery: in the gruesome video itself;
in the photographs of Orlan's face, much swollen, bruised, and mis
shapen, which served as a daily record of her very gradual postsurgical
recovery; and (evidently a recovery not yet completed) in Orlan herself,
(omni)present at the gallery the day I went, her face mostly hidden
behind dramatic big dark glasses, what wasn't, still puffy and luminous,
oddly large. In the question and answer session following the artist's talk,
after mentioning the work I was then beginning on transsexuality, I
asked Orlan about the relation of body and identity in her work. Did she
feel any sense of identity transformation, of an internal shifting, as her
face underwent its successive alterations ? Was the transformation really
only skin deep? (I wondered what it was like to wake up to a different
face each morning; I wondered how she sustained her self in the face
literally--of such change). Skimming over the substance of my question
(there were problems in translation) but picking up my reference to
transsexuality, Orlan replied simply that she felt like "une transsexuelle
femme-a-femme." It was a striking reformulation. But what was the
import of transsexuality here ? On the one hand, eliding the element of
sex change but nonetheless suggesting a total identity (ex)change (she
changed from one woman to another), her identification with a substan
tial transsexual transition implied that something of her self was indeed
invested in the surgery, that the transformations were not simply skin
deep. On the other hand, the readiness of her embrace of transsexuality
and the ease with which transsexuality translated into a context that
made of surgery a spectacle brought to the surface a commonplace
assumption about transsexuality: that is, that transsexuality is precisely a
phenomenon of the body's surface. In the cultural imagination that fig
ure of the body as costume is surely welded most firmly to the transsex
ual. The transsexual changes sexed parts like a set of clothes, treats the
A Skin of One's Own 63
body as tractable, provisional, immaterial: "For transsexuals a book may

be read by its cover, and the bodily frame is thought of as another article
of clothing, to be retouched at will."3 If the Orlan/transsexual analogy
could have worked either way-to substantiate Orlan's transformation
or to unsubstantiate (transubstantiate ? ) the transsexual's-what is the
status of the body for transsexuals ? Does sex reassignment suggest the
body as a surface in which the self is substantially invested or conversely
the body's substance as superficial to the self? What does transsexuality,
the fact that subjects do seek radically to change their sex, convey about
sex, identity, and the flesh ?
Upon sex reassignment surgery, upon assumptions concerning its
mechanics and effects, pivot popular attitudes to transsexuality. More
than the potentially dramatic somatic effects of the long-term hormone
therapy that necessarily precedes it, sex reassignment surgery is consid
ered the hinge upon which the transsexual's "transsex" turns: the mag
ical moment of "sex change." At the same time contemporary concep
tualizations of sex make it difficult to believe that surgery, through the
simple excision and restructuring of body parts, can miraculously and
wholly alchemize one sex into "the other." Sex is currently ascribed a
complex of meanings that push the category beyond the surface of the
body. For a start, in science sex is no longer located monolithically in the
genitals but disseminated through the inscrutable parts of the body: the
gonads, the chromosomes, even the brain-parts of the body that can
not be exchanged in sex reassignment. On the basis of this multiplica
tion and encrypting of sex, the transsexual can alter sex only partially
and superficially, only in the limited sense of hormonal and genital sex.
Second, our belief in the importance of the cultural and psychic in iden
tity formation has left us wary of reducing sex to the body tout court.
"Gender" has made it routine to ask how much of sex is socialization,
cultural construction, and personal history. How can surgical interven
tion into biological material alter the accretion of this sociocultural mat
ter, the experiences that make up our lives as men and women ? Third,
since feminism has complicated the status of difference in sexual dif
ference (antithesis or likeness? difference from or difference within ? ),
isn't the naturalization of sexual difference into a binary twoness any
way a cultural construct ? Ann Fausto-Sterling argues that even med
ical narratives of sex reveal the dimorphic sex model as arbitrary.4 The
transsexual would seem to assume a binary difference that doesn't even
exist in biology: how, then, can s/he cross a space that is not clearly
there? Finally-and most important since this constitutes the theoreti

cal zeitgeist-if sex as much as gender is performative, an effect of our
doing not a fact of our being ("gender all along"), how can we conceive
of the transsexual as intervening in sex at all ?5 If there is no sex left over,
no immanent sexed part to the self that is not already gender, what sub
stance is there for the transsexual to change ?
Because sex has become irreducible not only to the sex organs accessi
ble to surgical remolding but to the body itself, the transsexual's
attempted sex reassignment may serve to illustrate the very failure of sex
ual difference. Elizabeth Grosz deploys the transsexual to this effect.
Conceiving of sexual difference as "a problematic . . . entail[ing] a certain
failure of knowledge to bridge the gap, the interval, between the sexes,"
she claims: "At best the transsexual can live out his fantasy of feminin
ity-a fantasy that in itself is usually disappointed with the rather crude
transformations effected by surgical and chemical interventions. The
transsexual may look like a woman but can never feel like or be a
woman."6 Looking like a woman but not really one, yet, after the "crude
transformations" have "disappointed" his "fantasy" of gender, hardly
looking like a man, the transsexual as transmogrified, hermaphroditic
prodigy falls into that very space/time ("gap," "interval") of sexual differ
ence. This "gap" is not only between man and woman but between sig
nifier and referent: it is in this Lacanian sense (the fact that the signifiers
of man and woman can never fully or fixedly inscribe themselves on ref
erential bodies) that sexual difference is said to fail. In her Lacanian read
ing of transsexuality, Catherine Millot argues that the transsexual's quest
for sex reassignment is a psychotic refusal to recognize the law of the
symbolic that makes us subjects-that is, that the referent is symbolic,
that sexual difference is a matter of signification only.7 Following Millot
therefore, Parveen Adams reads Orlan's reformulation of transsexuality
(the exhibition I attended was televised) to suggest Orlan as the better
transsexual. Where the transsexual, in attempting to move substantively
from one sex to the other, would seek to render literal a difference that is
representational, Orlan's performative female-to-female transition
"transform[s] the confident existence of one sex . . . towards the gap in
representation which signifies sexual difference." She keeps open the gap,
or rather reveals that the referent only figures: "(A]n image trapped in the
body of a woman," Orlan demonstrates that "there is nothing beneath the
mask."8 Ironically, this poststructuralist deliteralization of sex (its detach
ment from referentiality) can often seem like a further mystification of
sex. Irreducible to the body, by definition indefinable, sex has become in

excess, that which we cannot "know" about gender; as Grosz illustrates,
"There remains something ungraspable, something outside, unpre
dictable, and uncontainable about the other sex for each sex."9
Yet what is the status of the body's surface that the transsexual in
changing sex reconfigures ? Is our corporeal outside simply a "mask," so
detachable from, so insubstantial for the self? Writing against the grain
of most poststructuralist theories of the body informed by psychoanaly
sis, Didier Anzieu suggests the body's surface as that which matters most
about the self. 1 0 His concept of the "skin ego" takes the body's physical
skin as the primary organ underlying the formation of the ego, its han
dling, its touching, its holding--our experience of its feel-individual
izing our psychic functioning, quite crucially making us who we are.
Bordering inside and outside the body, the point of separation and con
tact between you and me, skin is the key interface between self and other,
between the biological, the psychic, and the social. It holds each of us
together, quite literally contains us, protects us, keeps us discrete, and yet
is our first mode of communication with each other and the world. A
Freudian psychoanalyst, Anzieu derives his skin ego from Freud's
description of the ego in The Ego and the Id as "not merely a surface
entity, but . . . the projection of a surface" and from Strachey's explana
tory note later attached: "I.e. the ego is ultimately derived from bodily
sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It
may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body,
besides, as we have seen above, representing the superfices of the mental
apparatus." 1 1 If in her reading of this passage, Judith Butler connects the
notions of "surface" and "mental projection" to transform the body into
a projected image, Anzieu provides a quite different, non-Lacanian tra
jectory to Freud; Anzieu emphasizes "the projection of a surface" as
"derivedfrom bodily sensations" to represent the image of the body as
derived from the feeling of the body. With a wonderfully uncomplicated
literalism Anzieu renders Freud's "surface" as the skin. The body's
physical surface or encasing provides the anaclitic support for the psy
chic apparatus: the ego, the sense of self, derives from the experience of
the material skin. The body is not only not commensurable with its
"mental" projection but responsible for producing this projection. The
body is crucially and materially formative of the self. Anzieu's means of
demonstrating that all psychic structures stem from the body, the skin
ego returns the ego to its bodily origins in Freud.
According to Anzieu the central tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis,

that "[e]very psychical activity is anaclitically dependent upon a biologi
cal function," has been forgotten in psychoanalysis's structuralist assump
tion: the body has become "the great missing, unrecognized, unacknowl
edged element in education, everyday life, the rise of structuralism" (SE
40, 2 1). Anzieu underwent the trainee-analyst analysis with Lacan, but it
was precisely this experience that prompted Anzieu to develop a critique
of Lacan's work, particularly of Lacan's centralization of language.
Reversing Lacan's substitution of language for body as psychoanalysis's
key material, Anzieu positions his work in direct antithesis: "I myself
would oppose the formula: 'the unconscious is structured like a language'
with a formulation that is implicit in Freud: 'the unconscious is the body.'
The unconscious seems to me to be structured like the body."12 If in post
structuralism (Anzieu seems to date desomatization from the "rise of
structuralism") and in particular in psychoanalysis in the wake ofLacan,
we have recast the body's referentiality as psychic and cultural signified,
Anzieu works to reconstitute and sustain the material body as discrete,
generative, or productive referent. 13
In her bodily ego footnote in Gender Trouble Butler cites Anzieu's The
Skin Ego as "a provocative account . . . which, unfortunately, does not
consider the implications of its account for the sexed body."14 Along with
Grosz's reading of Anzieu (in its inversion of "the primacy of a psychical
inferiority by demonstrating its necessary dependence on a corporeal
exteriority," Grosz's "corporeal feminism" is a model for me here in spite
of its brief deployment of transsexuality), 15 Butler's note prompts my
attempt to read Anzieu to provide such an account. Stories of sex change,
transsexual narratives provide the perfect matter for this task. "Sex
change" entails a transformation of the body's surface. Hormone therapy
begins this process, dramatically contravening the functioning of the
gonads, refiguring the body's contours, altering tissue structure (muscle,
fat, breast, genital), redistributing hair, changing skin texture in body
and face. Surgery continues and radicalizes the transformation: remov
ing sex organs (genital and secondary, internal and external), reshaping
the remains and/or relocating other bodily tissues-nerves, skin, flesh
to form others. The making of these new transsexual parts (vaginoplasty,
phalloplasty, mastectomy) consists in the surgical manipulation of the
body's surface: the grafting, stretching, inverting, splitting, tucking,
suturing of the tissues. How does sex reassignment surgery as a manip
ulation of the body's surface change the transsexual's sex ? Of what does
A Skin of One� Own 67
this "moment" of sex change consist? In its turn Anzieu's skin ego allows
us to consider the significance of sexed embodiment in transsexual
accounts: to explore the feeling and experience of being transsexed.
From the prevalent perspective in gender theory the transsexual's
story of becoming sexed can only appear naively overdetermined. Butler
asserts that if "there is no body prior to its marking [,] . we can never
. .
tell the story of how it is a body comes to be marked by the category of

sex."16 Relating first how the body comes to be marked by sex wrongly,
then how it comes to be marked correctly, transsexual narratives take up
poststructuralism's untellable story. What makes it possible for a female
to-male transsexual to name the somatic material (skin, tissue, and
nerves) transplanted from his forearm or his abdomen to his groin "my
penis," or for a male-to-female transsexual to name the inverted remains
of her penis "my vagina" is a refiguring of the sexed body that takes place
along corporeal, psychic, and symbolic axes. Gendered becoming,
becoming a man or a woman, occurs for the transsexual at these points
of intersection, complex crossings for sure but the investment of sex in
the flesh is undeniable. Narratives that immerse us (subject and reader
alike) in the bodily matter of sexual difference, transsexual autobiogra
phies challenge theory's cynicism over identity's embodiment. In that
s/he seeks to align sex with gender identification; in that the somatic pro
gression toward these goals of sexed embodiment constitutes the trans
sexual narrative, the transsexual does not approach the body as an imma
terial provisional surround but, on the contrary, as the very "seat" of the
self. For if the body were but a costume, consider: why the life quest to
alter its contours ?
Second Skins: Transsexual Body Image

In what is surely one of the most disturbing recent representations of the
transsexual, the psychopathic figure at the center of Jonathan Demme's
1 990 film, The Silence ofthe Lambs, a former psychiatric patient refused
sex reassignment surgery kills fat girls, skins them, and is shown loonily
sewing their skins together to form a costume of womanness to clothe his
own body. 17 Jame Gumb's activity reifies what has become the formula
for transsexual ontology: the subject trapped in-and trying to escape
the wrong (sexed) body. A topos of transsexual autobiographies, the
wrong-body formula is used by transsexuals themselves to express the
sensory experience of transsexuality. The transphobic stereotype in The
Silence ofthe Lambs is particularly noxious because it arrogates and psy-
chopathologizes figures immanently significant to transsexual accounts,

inscribing the somatic trouble of the transsexual into the transsexual as
trouble for the social corpus.
The detail of this Hollywood corruption-its particular focus on the
skin as crucial surface for the fantasy of sex change-further replicates
details from transsexual accounts. Gumb is refused the medical technol
ogy to enable him to throw off his own skin (to escape his "wrong
body"). His recourse is to fabricate (to make up and produce as a fabric)
a layer of female skin to cover his male skin .1 8 Transsexual subjects
frequently articulate their bodily alienation as a discomfort with their
skin or bodily encasing: being trapped in the wrong body is figured as
being in the wrong, or an extra, or a second skin, and transsexuality is
expressed as the desire to shed or to step out of this skin. Fantasies of
excoriation punctuate transsexual autobiographies. Pretransition, Jan
Morris writes that she "began to dream of ways in which I might throw
off the hide of my body and reveal myself pristine within-forever
emancipated into that state of simplicity."19 Leslie Feinberg writes of a
desire for disembodiment in terms of shedding the body like a skin: "I
think how nice it would be to unzip my body from forehead to navel and
go on vacation. But there is no escaping it, I'd have to pack myself
along."20 Shifting from the body as a single piece of clothing to the body
as a suitcase full of clothing with the "self' packed inside, Feinberg's
imagery suggests the true self as en-cased in a restrictive or burdensome
outer layer. And in one oral transsexual account an anonymous male-to
female expresses her alienation from her male body in terms of being
encased, surrounded by a false skin: "I used to look at my body and think
it was a bit like a diver's suit, it didn't feel like me inside."21 The image
of the body as diver's suit suggests that the subject's authentic self might
be revealed if only the outer layer of the visible body could be peeled off,
like a diver's suit. Yet the speaker goes on to interpret her own simile
startlingly: "it didn't feel like me inside." The "me" is not inside, either;
indeed, the "real me" seems to have disappeared from the picture alto
gether-so fundamental is the bodily alienation, I would suggest. One is
left with the disturbing image of the body as a false outer casing with
nothing inside: a hollow shell or empty skin. What is disturbing is the
extent to which identity has truly vacated its "case" (the body).
What is the currency of this genre of body image in transsexual nar
ratives ? Why does it recur and what relation of self to body does it
posit ? Certainly an inquiry into the value of the wrong body formula
should acknowledge at the outset its status as powerful medicodiscur

sive sign. Transsexuality entered the cultural lexicon first as a form of
extreme (body) transvestism, with the body's skin as the "clothing" that
the subject needed changing. Christine Jorgensen, the subject with
whom transsexuality became popularized in the early 1 950s, was diag
nosed and changed sex as a "genuine transvestite" before being reclas
sified as transsexual.22 And as a formula that continues to trope trans
sexuality in its medical narrative version, being trapped in the wrong
body has become the crux of an authenticating transsexual "rhetoric":
language, narratives, and figures that the subject deploys to obtain
access to hormones and surgery. Yet in the history of the subject even
with the category of transsexual in place, and in the individual subject's
history even once the transsexual has achieved sex reassignment, the
figure of being trapped in a wrong body, of being wrongly encased, con
tinues to be evoked in transsexual accounts. A transsexual leitmotif
appearing across transsexual narratives, the proliferation of the wrong
body figure is not solely attributable to its discursive power.
My contention is that transsexuals continue to deploy the image of
wrong embodiment because being trapped in the wrong body is simply
what transsexuality feels like. If the goal of transsexual transition is to
align the feeling of gendered embodiment with material body, body
image-which we might be tempted to align with the imaginary
clearly already has a material force for transsexuals. The image of
being trapped in the wrong body conveys this force. It suggests how
body image is radically split off from the material body in the first
place, how body image can feel sufficiently substantial as to persuade
the transsexual to alter his or her body to conform to it. The image of
wrong embodiment describes most effectively the experience of pre
transition (dis)embodiment: the feeling of a sexed body dysphoria pro
foundly and subjectively experienced.
More dramatically than any other, female-to-male Raymond Thomp
son's transsexual autobiography substantiates this constative dimension
of the image of entrapment in the wrong body. Thompson's narrative
presents him as embodying the image, feeling it; he suffers claustropho
bia in his body precisely as a false outer skin or enclosure locking inside
an authentic "inner body":
I needed to be out of my body, to be free. It felt as if my "inner body" was
forcing itself to the ends of my limbs. It was growing ever larger inside
of me, making me feel I was bursting at the seams and wanting out . . .
out . . . out !
Because this was impossible, this process would abruptly reverse and
I would start to shrink inside myself. My whole inner body shrank until
I became very small inside. It was as if I became so small I had to find
some safe place to hide inside myself. My tiny inner body was in unfa
miliar surroundings, in a place it didn't belong and I felt utterly unsafe.
I became like a little shadow inside my physical body, a shadow running
23
around everywhere trying to find somewhere inside.
This image of an internal body attempting to force its way out of the ref
erential flesh and then of its recoiling is Thompson's attempt to convey
what is obviously an intensely sensory, visceral experience. As Thomp
son's own descriptive term for these sensations underlines-"body feel
ings," a term that comes startlingly close to Freud's "bodily sensations"
the transsexual trope of the subject trapped within the wrong body is
materialized as somatic feeling (253). What Took You So Long? fleshes out
transsexuality into a psychophysiological condition, one that alters the
body's physicality as much as a sickness. Pretransition, Thompson is
struck by moments of semiparalysis in which he is unable to move or feel
his body. Attributed to his transsexuality, these moments stem from the
conflict between the true body within and the false body without,
between sentient body image and insentient visible body. As though
more real and substantial, body image appears to bear the agony and
material body is correlatively dematerialized. Note that the autobio
graphical "I" in the above passage (as in the entire narrative) is located in
the internal body image not in the alien outer body.
The conflict between inner and outer body is incarnated and the fig
ure of authentic body seeking to break out of its outer body prison dra
matically enacted. In an incident lasting several days Thompson takes
to his bed, refuses food and drink, as though body image is driven to
deny body-prison its necessary material fortifications, as if death is its
only means of release from improper embodiment. Only the interven
tion of his family prevents this precipitation into suicide, by which time
Thompson's inner body, in an assertion of its authenticity and domi
nance over visible body, has succeeded in metamorphosing the latter
into a flimsy, barely containing shell: his body is now "positively emaci
ated" (202). Unable to break out of its "prison of flesh and bones" ( 1 65),
bod y image punitively reconstitutes material body into flesh and bones.
When body image transforms fleshly matter and inscribes its strug
gle on the material body, it exteriorizes what is conceived as internal. In
a remarkable instance of quasihysterical symptomization, Thompson's
narrative literalizes this psychic/corporeal inside-out-ness. Rising from
his bed, seeing his reflection in the mirror, Thompson finds his face cov
ered with weeping blisters. As the narrative provides no somatic reason
for their presence, and as Thompson himself presents them as signs of
the externalization of his internal state ("my internal stress [was show
ing] on the outside" [202]), the reader is asked to accept these physical
marks as evidence of his " inside" on his "outside," the trace of body
image acting on material body: symptoms of bodily representation
wounding or punishing the literal body that pitifully fails to embody it.
Not simply marking the dissociation between physical body and body
image, the blisters reproduce in their very microstructure that dynamic
of an inner body pushing up against, trying to escape from the material
outer body: vesicles filled with bodily fluids bursting up .and out from
their internal course through to the body's surface, overflowing their
assigned passage. It is as if the figure of the inner body striving to break
out of its container has erupted on the surface of its container, broken
out literally in blisters on the skin. "Because my body was becoming
more and more alien to me as I developed, there was an urge to rip off
my own skin, for lack of a better description. The frustration and anx
iety were tearing me to bits" (54). In fact, as the blisters literally tear him
to bits, producing the splitting or bursting of the skin as a kind of
unconscious material effect of this "urge," Thompson's description of
this psychic/somatic agon couldn't be better.
But if the trope of being trapped in the wrong body can be material
ized, what are the mechanics of this catachresis--of this figure that is at
the same time a physical experience ? The pivotal connective term is
"surface"; and as Thompson's dermatological condition suggests, the
pivotal connective surface is the skin. In medicine the skin, the material
surface of the body, is a psychic/somatic interface. Psychodermatology
and much dermatology assumes a relation between dermatological dis
orders and psychic upheaval. Many skin conditions are accepted among
medical workers as psychosomatic: not "made up" but somatized, the
body's manifestation of, its bringing to the material surface deep psychic
disturbance. Even skin conditions with certain organic causes are
thought to be exacerbated by psychic stress. In turn skin conditions
bring with them their own psychic distress. Psychotherapy is thus very
often indicated as a treatment to alleviate if not the skin disorders them

selves, at least their psychological costs. On all levels the psyche is firmly
correlated to the skin.24
Sited on the borders between psyche and body, skin appears as an
organ enabling and illustrating the psychic/corporeal interchange of
subjectivity. Formulated first during his training as a psychologist on a
hospital dermatological unit, Anzieu's skin ego is based upon the con
ception of skin as such an interface. Apprehending the figure of the
wrong body as part of a transsexual unconscious according to Anzieu's
concept of the skin ego emphasizes not the imaginariness of the figure
(rhetorical image) but its sensibility (embodied image); for in Anzieu's
topography of the subject the unconscious is isomorphic to ("structured
like") and materially supported by the body through the psychosomatic
surface of the skin. If the urge to break out of one's skin or bodily encas
ing is not simply a metaphor, the skin-as the surface mediating "inside"
and "outside" the body-presents itself as the point of contact between
material body and body image, between visible and felt matter. Anzieu's
skin ego provides an explanation, one that schematically melds the
organic with the psychic, for the purchase of images of wrong embodi
ment in transsexual accounts. That is, the skin is the locale for the phys
ical experience of body image and the surface upon which is projected
the psychic representation of the body. As the skin represents this nexus,
it makes sense that such psychic discomfort as feeling trapped in the
wrong body, first, can be physically felt, and second, may be transcribed
unconsciously and apparently miraculously onto the literal skin as is the
case with the blisters that appear on Thompson's face.
Skin is a sense organ, our most vital, not only generative of touch but
our largest and most multifunctioning: "one can live without sight, hear
ing, taste or smell, but it is impossible to survive if the greater part of
one's skin is not intact." (SE 1 4). Because skin is a psychic/somatic inter
face, not being able to live without one's skin is not just a physical but a
psychic state. If psychic damage can inscribe itself on the skin, conversely
and unsurprisingly, damage to the material skin (such as burning, scar
ring-and we might add, psoriasis, eczema, and acne) is likely to dam
age the subject's body image, to alter his or her bodily sense and presen
tation. From the mutuality of this exchange Anzieu hypothesizes a pre
cise correspondence between material body surface and body image:
"the seriousness of damage to the skin . . . is in direct relation to the
extent, both quantitative and qualitative, of the flaws in the Skin Ego"
(SE 35). According to this proportioning, psychic/corporeal harmony

can be rendered as the feeling of being at home in one's skin: "To be one
self is first of all to have a skin of one's own and, secondly, to use it as a
space in which one can experience sensations" (SE 5 1). Subjectivity is not
just about having a physical skin; it's about feeling one owns it: it's a mat
ter of psychic investment of self in skin.
Ifl feel confined in the wrong body on a fundamental level, it must be
said that I fail to own my skin, to accept it as my own. Thompson cap
tures this sense of having no skin, of being skinless, lacking a proper (that
is not only "right" but "owned") bodily surround or container: "it felt as
if l came into this world with no physical form to protect me. I was not a
solid, tangible human being, like everyone else seemed to be. I felt vul
nerable and alone" (26). He feels this unprotected, uncontained body
image somatically. His "body feelings" are characterized by coldness and
immobility, a semiparalysis. He is unable to get his limbs to function nor
mally, as though his bodily alienation consisted of the physical failure to
"know" his body as his own: "Since my body is not my own I cannot feel
the warmth of it, so I am cold, very cold on the inside . . . . I could simply
never be comfortable and warm in my own skin . . . . There is a sense of
disconnectedness and unreality, of being left out in the cold. Most of the
time I couldn't get my body to move from my chair, whilst panic was rag
ing inside me" (249). The figure of somatic non-ownership is emphati
cally not a metaphor in Thompson's narrative, but constitutes his pre
transition bodily experience. The skin ego marks the point at which self
image meets the grounds of the body.
How does one function without feeling surrounded by a proper
body ? How does the subject survive without a skin of his or her own ?
Anzieu outlines how the subject with a damaged or flawed body
image, the subject who imagines him or herself skinless or with a bro
ken skin, develops defenses-psychic but sometimes enacted-against
this state: means of producing an imaginary skin for rekindling bodily
belonging. Surely the most traumatic of these compensatory measures
consists in producing "[m]utilations of the skin-sometimes real, but
more often imaginary-[ which] are dramatic attempts to maintain the
boundaries of the body and the Ego and to re-establish a sense of being
intact and self-cohesive" (SE 20). As a transsexual who fails to feel
ownership of his skin, Thompson performs repeated acts of real self
directed violence, turning against his pretransition body precisely as if
it were not his own, hitting his head against a wall, punching himself
74 A Skin of One's O wn
in the face, throwing himself down ravines, coating his body with
mud. His skin serves as locus for this self-reflexive aggression. He
inscribes his skin with tattoos (in his words they are "self-inflicted"),
covering the entire area on the backs of his hands, his thumbs, his
knuckles: "This was done by first writing or drawing the tattoo on the
skin with a pen. Then I punctured my skin along the lines with a nee
dle so that it would draw blood. These hundreds of pin pricks were
then stained with paint or indian ink" (52). Following these on his
hands, he acquires chest and neck tattoos.
The ability to give oneself pain, to harm one's own body, surely
depends upon a great degree of bodily alienation; yet the tattoos, like
the self-directed pain more generally, function as part of Thompson's
attempt to feel his body as his own-quite simply, to feel it. In the
absence of feeling his body surrounded and supported, feeling its lim
its and attachment to self (or rather in the feeling of the absence of this
feeling), this self-directed inscriptive violence uses pain to establish
bodily boundaries for the self. Thompson tattoos his skin as if he
would have his body bear/bare the true self hidden within: his authen
tic signature. Such acts of marking the body's surface in an effort to
feel belonging in it prefigure the surgical inscriptions of sex reassign
ment: on a larger and of course medically officiated scale, the trans
sexual's way of (re)making the body/skin in order to feel at home in it.
When Thompson decides to have the tattoos from his neck and hands
removed, this surgery does not erase but exacerbates the skin damage;
the skin is slit and stitched to leave painful and prominent scarring.
One scar on his right hand splits open and becomes infected, leaving
"a large oozing hole in my hand " (83). During later phalloplasty
procedures, when the suture on the underside of Thompson's penis
comes loose and the skin splits, Thompson dreams that the skin on his
hand along the scar of the tattoo removal has reopened, this time
revealing a horrifying ball of fat beneath the skin. Displacing the split
surface from penis to hand, the dream constructs as symbolic parallels
the subject's own interventions on his body's surface and his substan
tial transsexual surgery: both appear as inscriptive attempts at bodily
ownership and belonging, both take place via the psychically rich
material skin. Skin surfaces, Anzieu suggests, are the fabric of many
dreams. Such dreams of splitting and graftable skin here describe a
specifically transsexual desire to get out of the wrong body and into a
new one: a desire to trade skins.
Surely not incidentally, Thompson's attempts to inscribe his own

skin occur before he has begun hormone treatment and testosterone
has androgenized (coarsened, hardened, thickened} his skin. Once
Thompson no longer bears a visibly female skin, this sense of skinless
ness recedes and the direct physical self-abuse, as if correlated to the
gendered appearance of the body, ceases. It is startling to grasp the
extent to which the skin's appearance determines gendered reading, to
which skin is a gendered text. Even so, posthormones and presurgery
constitute a weird transitional zone for the transsexual body, a time and
place in between sexual difference in which its naked sex can be per
ceived as neither/nor or both. Passing during this period entails cover
ing or concealing this nakedness so that the body might be accepted as
uniformly gendered. In Thompson's case passing as a man presurgery
is achieved not only through testosterone therapy but through disguis
ing what is still a female morphology. The daily layerings of binder,
several T-shirts, and thick work shirt, the reshaping his body that still
has a female chest into male contours form a kind of provisional, tran
sitional male skin or surround, protective (it hides the hated body and
prevents his discovery} and at the same time restrictive, stifling (he
can't move without it, it's a skin-tight second skin). The significance of
this second skin is thus (aptly) twofold. As it allows for passing, it also
entraps and prevents being.
Simultaneous with Thompson's successful passing in the narrative,
the images of damaged or disintegrating surfaces and containers are
refracted away from his body and projected onto inanimate objects.
Thompson achieves most of his transition exceptionally early, beginning
hormone therapy at sixteen and undergoing a double mastectomy at
twenty-one. But as a penis is essential to his body image (from late child
hood, he packs the front of his trousers, filling in for what he feels should
be already there}, more than half of the autobiography concerns itself
with his long, distressing wait for this surgery. When his prospects for
phalloplasty appear most tenuous, Thompson directs his urge to rip and
tear up his skin onto his home, smashing furniture, windows, and crock
ery, his narrative itself recognizing the displacement of destructiveness
from self-protection to concrete protection: "The walls of protection that
I had carefully built about myself, I was now breaking down" (248). In
spite of his building skills he lives for some years without adequate mate
rial walls of protection, in the midst of broken windows, collapsed ceil
ings (through which fall rain and snow), piles of dirt and rubble: in other
76 A Skin of One� Own
words within a damaged, fragmented, and inadequate container. Yet

once the course of phalloplasty surgeries gets underway, Thompson sets
to reconstructing the house, confirming that its physical condition is
inextricably tied up with his own, as if this "envelope" of home can be
reintegrated only alongside the envelope of body image.
Selfhood, according to Anzieu, is fundamentally entangled with
images of integrity, of bodily wholeness. Conversely, states of deper
sonalization, of not feeling real, are enmeshed with images of inade
quate containers on which boundaries are blurred, surfaces flawed,
envelopes perforated. "A reality of the order of phantasy" (a psychic
projection of the body derived from the body), the skin ego as the
unconscious "figures in phantasies, dreams, everyday speech, posture,
disturbances of thought" (SE 4). In What Took You So Long? the
images of damaged, broken surfaces before Thompson's phalloplasty
proliferate. Some, like the progressive dilapidation of Thompson's
house, his grandfather's heavily scarred and curled-in hand, and his
father's loss of his fingers in the steel-work machinery, make sense as
significant events in the subject's life-plot. Others-eggs with ruined
"crinkled skin" that Thompson remembers from a TV program ("I
am the crinkled egg that nobody wants . . . but I am as good on the
inside as all the other eggs" (254]), a toad with no legs he finds in the
road as a child and carries with him everywhere-appear more phan
tasmagorically, free-floating oneirically in the narrative, their signifi
cance intimately bound up with Thompson's psychic reality. Onto the
surfaces of such "others," Thompson projects "this ugly, fragmented
body of mine" ( 1 9 1), a body glaringly incomplete when overlaid with
the integrity of his male body image, a body in bits and pieces that only
phalloplasty, as Thompson writes after this procedure, makes "whole"
(309). Pausing over incidents of amputation in others' bodily forms
the legless toad, the father's fingerless hand-the narrative implicitly
refigures Thompson's own female contours as a transsexual man into
a case of amputation, as though his material body has "lost" what his
male body image rightfully possess, namely, a penis: a loss that surgery
will then be represented as restoring.
If the skin is the organ enabling the sense of touch, how does one
touch, how is one touched, in a skin not one's own ? Legendarily, the gen
ital parts of the presurgical body remain for transsexuals untouchable;
genital eroticism, writes Anzieu, is possible only for those who feel a
basic level of security and comfort in their own skins. Male-to-females
Caroline Cossey and Renee Richards both describe their acute discom
fort at having their penises touched pre-surgery. "I found that part of my
body so repulsive that [my lover's] desire for me began to sicken and
repel me"; "I discouraged any fondling of my penis. . . . I felt similarly
about oral sex. Here again, my objections probably boiled down to the
fact that this action represents such an intense focus on my penis."25 The
significance of sex on the pretransition body is then complex for it is both
too real and yet not real enough. On the one hand the delimiting of
touchable areas refuses to sex these areas with feeling: the genitals
remain unsexed, both nonerogenous and not included in the imaginary
"true sex" morphology. On the other hand this nonerogenization implic
itly acknowledges those genital parts as already materially sexed (that is
male or female); it is the substantiality of bodily sex that renders them
untouchable. Regarding this split, we might say that it is what is not
"gender all along" about the body's sex (the fact that that material sex is
not commensurable with gender identity) that drives the transsexual tra
jectory. For Thompson, his female parts are not simply untouchable,
they are inconceivable, blank spaces in body image:
While my body was the way it was, there was no way that anyone would
be allowed to see or touch the parts of it that didn't belong to me. I had
rejected them myself so long ago, and had learned to close off from my
mind the fact that they were there. I never looked at the parts of my body
which were wrong-it was hard enough to wash them . . . . My body did
n't exist in the way it was born; for me it only existed in my inner identity
as a male. Having a woman touch me sexually would not only have
seemed perverse to me, but also it would have broken my detachment.
(75).
This dis-ownership of sex, the untouchability of the body, maintains the

integrity of the alternatively gendered imaginary. As the contours of
body image are outlined as fundamentally noncoincident with material
body, it is this sense of im-proper-ness-the conceptualization of the
sexed morphology as not the property of the subject's body image-that
is captured so succinctly in the wrong-body formula. It becomes a
description simply of the refusal of body ego to own referential body: I
do not recognize as proper, as my property, this material surround;
therefore I must be trapped in the wrong body. Since inappropriateness
is located in the material body, the entire configuration explains why the
subject seeks surgical intervention to alter the flesh rather than psycho-
logical intervention to transform body image. If the body is not owned,

it is in this experience of body-not my body-that surgery intervenes.
"What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the con
trol, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves ? " asks neu
rologist Oliver Sacks.26 Feeling one's body as one's own, Sacks's work on
severe body image disturbances demonstrates, is a core component of
subjectivity, perhaps its very basis. Conversely, the sentient feeling of dis
embodiment, what Sacks terms "bodily agnosia" (a-gnos: the unknown;
here, the body as unknown, that which in our everyday life we take for
granted as the base for perception and knowledge) interferes with basic
bodily functioning. In Sacks's case histories somatic unknowing entails
not only the loss of limbs in the subjects' bodily representation--or on
one occasion, the totality of the body image-but also the loss of control
and feeling in body parts.27 The effect of this erasure in bodily represen
tation is, above all, profoundly, bizarrely, and sometimes comically (in a
blackly humorous way) material, as in the case of "The Man who Fell
out of Bed." Having "lost" his leg in his body image, the patient finds
what he takes to be a foreign leg in his bed: his own. Deciding it to be a
severed limb planted by medical students as a practical joke, he throws
it out of the bed, only to find himself, much to his bewilderment, on the
floor. Such instances of the failure of body image to know the limits of
the physical body graphically reveal not only the material force of body
image in the subject's imaginary but the neurophysiological base of body
image. More than an imaginary construction, more than psychic excess,
the feeling of knowing one's body as one's own, Sacks's neurology
emphasizes, is essential to the body's successful sensorimotor function
ing. It constitutes the "vital 'sixth sense' by which the body knows itself."
For this substantial bodily feeling Sacks uses C. S. Sherrington's "pro
prioception"-a term that retains the notion of ownership (proprio), of
the body as the subject's property.28 While, like Anzieu, Sacks never
writes of sexual anatomy, the transsexual might be grasped via his terms
as a subject who has "lost" sex proprioception: s/he can't feel her or his
sex; it's the felt/unfelt "blind spot."
Yet proprioception is body image residing in the sentient rather than
the visual. Sacks states that the feeling of owning one's body is more
foundational than visual body image to our body's operation: visual body
image is "normally rather feeble (it is of course absent in the blind), and
normally subsidiary to the proprioceptive body-model."29 This sense of
the body thus concerns less body image-the visual, the phenomenolog-
ical-than the feeling of the body: the postural schema. Anzieu likewise
insists on the supremacy of touch over sight in the development of body
image: "Skin is the touchstone (literally) to which the various sensory
data are referred back . . . the skin possesses a structural primacy over all
the other senses"; and it is touch that engenders the skin ego, beginning
at birth ("an all-over body massage"), even perhaps in the final stages in
utero.30 In thinking body image, we seem to have emphasized "image"
at the expense of body, rendering the body equivalent to that which can
be seen (the body in the eye of the other) and omitting to account for the
subjective experience of the body, the body as it is (or is not) felt. It is
surely Lacan's work that lies behind this privileging of sight; he has
already been much criticized for his occularcentric account of the origins
of the subject, most substantially by Luce lrigaray.31 In their inversion of
the conventional privileging of sight over touch, Sacks and Anzieu
recover the bodily "sensations" that form Freud's bodily ego, which, fol
lowing Lacan, have been overlooked (even in Sacks's neurological
model, Freud's psychoanalytic ego is given a foundational place: propri
oception is said to be equivalent to Freud's "body-ego").32 The passage
from The Ego and the Id, in which Freud suggests a nonidentity between
seen and felt body and sustains the importance of feeling, needs to be
understood, therefore, as seminal. Like Anzieu's and Sacks's prioritiza
tion of touch over sight, Freud's distinction between what can be seen of
the body and what it can feel, and his alignment of the sensory with
internal perception, explicates the strange materiality of transsexual
wrong embodiment. Together they suggest why the transsexual's gen
der identity, originally invisible but deeply felt, can wield such a mater
ial force: why "feeling like" in the face of such opposition from the visi
ble body can be experienced as a core self.
Not only do they allow the substantiation of the figure of the wrong
body into a transsexual ontology in which body image, while still a psy
chic projection, is nevertheless deeply felt, Anzieu and Sacks elucidate
the cruciality of the feeling of bodily integrity to successful and happy
functioning in general. In their work splitting and fragmentation in the
body ego (the difference between "perceptions" of the body) are unliv
able states. Sacks underlines that proprioception is "the fundamental
organic mooring ofidentity-at least of . . . corporeal identity";33 Anzieu
likewise underscores the essentiality of feeling identity as one's own. In a
passage that challenges the contemporary theoretical skepticism toward
the grounded, integral subject, Anzieu distinguishes carefully between
the productive theoretical project of interrogating the subject and the

devastating loss of belief in one's self: "Belief is a vital human need . . . .
One is not a person if one does not believe in the identity and continuity
of the self. . . . The human being who holds these beliefs has certainly to
question them. But the person who does not have them has to acquire
them before he can experience his own being and his own well-being"
(SE 1 3 1 ). Appropriating the Moebius-strip configuration from Lacan's
representation of the normative structure of the ego, the torsion and
unborderedness (it has no inside nor outside) of which has meant its pro
motion to an archetypal symbol of the poststructuralist disbelief in the
integrity and continuity of the subject, Anzieu uses this configuration
specifically to denote the ego in impaired, self-destructive psychic states.
His case histories illustrate that the subject's inability to d istinguish
"inside" from "outside" is most often responsible in "borderline" condi
tions for acute psychic suffering: a suffering that Anzieu's psychoanalytic
practice understands as its task to lessen, to smooth out this torsion and
reestablish the boundaries of self and body. The lability and confusion in
the post-Lacanian subject are in Anzieu profoundly negative distur
bances. Operative in Sacks's and Anzieu's practice as clinicians is that
same narrative drive held as most precious in transsexual autobiography:
from fragmentation to integration; from alienation to reconciliation;
from loss to restoration. Both neurologist and psychoanalyst perceive
their patients' discomfort or suffering to be intimately bound up with
some form of corporeally effective loss; recovery consists in an equipol
lent corporeal reappropriation. It is this notion of corporeal reappropri
ation that inhabits the logic of sex reassignment surgery: attaining that
feeling of a coherent and integral body of one's own.
From Mutilation to Integration: The Poetics of Sex Reassignment Surgery

Sharon Olds's poem, "Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change
Doctor," begins with envisioning a tray of severed penises, the imagined
remnants from a series of sex reassignment surgeries. Although mani
festly rejecting the scene's comparability to those of historical locations
world-renowned for their systematization of torture ("This is not
Vietnam, Chile, Buchenwald"), in the very invocation of these sites of
horrific mutilations, the poem conjures up grand-scale barbarism and (in
spite of the refutation of similarity) blurs "sex-change" surgery into their
backdrop.34 The poem's pivotal image of the severed penises, which mis
represents the mechanics of male-to-female sex reassignment surgery
(for the last thirty years these have included orchidectomy---ca stration
but not penectomy-full surgical removal of the penis; rather, the penis
is hollowed out, its skin surround preserved attached, and inverted to
form the vaginal lining), portrays sex reassignment surgery not as the
refashioning of bodily sex but as its literal removal, as if the surgery were
a matter of desexing rather than resexing the body. In keeping with this
position the poem's interest is not with the transsexual bodies recovering
from the surgery but with their severed sex. The body of the poem (so to
speak) goes on to bring to life the seven severed penises, animating them
with their transsexual subjects' thoughts as if these severed parts could
speakfor their former "owners"; as if the truth of the subject lay not with
her postreassignment body but with the severed sex; as if the penis were
the "seat" of her true sex and subjectivity. In this way the poem picks up
on and plays to the cultural stigmatization of transsexuality and the mis
conceptions that underpin this: that transsexuality consists in the brutal
mutilation of healthy bodies, that sex reassignment surgery does not so
much effect sex change as it transmogrifies "normal" men and women
into unsexed or hermaphroditic monstrous others simply through the
excision of their "natural" functioning sex.
Without doubt what renders transsexuality most unnatural in the cul
tural imagination is sex reassignment surgery. The logic of its conception
as mutilation is that if the bodies operated on are not already wounded or
deformed, then the surgery itself must wound or deform. Sex reassign
ment surgery is differentiated from curative reconstructive surgery on
the basis that it is not seen to resolve any physical defect. Like other forms
of perceived "nonfunctional" surgery, but because it meddles with the
intricate, intimate, and rarefied domain of sex to a much greater degree,
sex reassignment surgery on the healthy body can only disfigure. This
association of sex reassignment surgery with the cosmetic enables many
health insurance companies to classify it as such in an attempt to evade
funding responsibilities for transsexual clients-and this in spite of the
fact that transsexuality continues to be classified according to a disease
model by the American Psychiatric Association: an illness requiring a
medical remedy.35 Ironically, the notions of sex reassignment as "superfi
cial" and "mutilating" shore each other up in this catetory of the cosmetic.
As Kathy Davis's work on women and cosmetic surgery reveals, the cat
egory of cosmetic surgery in general is shot through with deeply moral
izing j udgments about the perceived inessentiality of its intervention.
Whereas plastic surgery, which emerged as a specialty from mass warfare
at the beginning of this century, is accepted as necessary for correcting

malfunctioning or disfigured bodies, its offshoot, cosmetic surgery, is
devalued as an elective procedure for "the aesthetic improvement of oth
erwise healthy bodies."36 This devaluation is suggested in the very term
"cosmetic," so named in order to keep it distinct from the substantive
form, "plastic." Even though the procedures for plastic and cosmetic
surgery may be identical, "cosmetic" implies a greater superficiality, as if
cosmetic surgery intervened in an even more "surface" surface of the self.
Hence to elect for cosmetic surgery is perceived as being superficial.
Precisely as it intervenes in the body's surface tissues (a locale that
Anzieu's skin ego shows has a profound importance for sense of self),
the plastic aspect of sex reassignment surgery-the restructuring of
breasts/chest and genitals, the manipulation of surface tissues-is trans
formative. Even in cases of the "cosmetic" surgery described by Davis's
research, the reasons for and effects of reconstructive surgery may run
psychically deep. The realization of identity hoped for and/or brought
about as a result of the manipulation of the material surface of the body
can be substantial; skin is anything but skin deep. For transsexuals
surgery is a fantasy of restoring the body to the self enacted on the sur
face of the body. If the dominant body image pretransition is that of
being trapped within an extraneous "other" skin, sex reassignment
surgery is figured as bringing release from this skin. Of his sense of his
body after mastectomy, Thompson writes: "It was like shedding an
annoying and uncomfortable garment and being back in my own self'
( 1 77). Likewise, female-to-male Martino metaphorizes his "not-me"
breasts as clothing extraneous to bodily self that the surgery removes:
drowsily coming to after his mastectomy, he wonders whether the
surgery has indeed taken place, "[O]r was I still wearing those unsightly
breasts ? "37 Figuratively releasing the female-to-male from this restric
tive second skin, mastectomy also literally gives him freer movement of
body. Both Martino and Thompson indicate that much of their post
surgical relief resides in being able to leave aside the layers of binding
and clothes required to compress and conceal their breasts. The physi
cal experience of being able to wear fewer layers, in addition to and as
the beneficial effect of the surgical removal of the breasts, contributes to
the shaping of the postmastectomy body image as disburdened. Body
image is a product of and produces physical experience.
Surgery strips the body bare to what it should have been. Trans
sexual autobiographies inscribe the event(s) of surgery as a return: a
coming home to the self through body. Given the transsexual's failure
to own material body, surgery appears as an attempt quite specifically
to reestablish the "not-me" body as me; as a restoration of the "proper"
body after the configuration of transsexual wrong embodiment,
somatic transition makes narrative sense. Inverting common percep
tion, transsexual accounts write against assumptions of mutilation
with a poetics of reassignment. Images of wholeness and bodily inte
gration pervade descriptions of sex reassignment surgery and after:
"Elated, completed at last"; "I was all of a piece"; "[A] new life in the
body of a complete man."38 Filling in the gaps, removing the excess,
sex reassignment surgery fleshes out in the visual the transsexual's
already felt body image. Male-to-female Kim Harlow reveals how
surgery directly concretizes and completes her body-picture of herself
as a woman. Before sex reassignment surgery her dreams cut short her
body above the waist. Close to surgery she begins to dream of the oper
ation itself, but still without realizing her female sex: "each time the
operation was interrupted, leaving me sexless." After the surgery,
while still wrapped in bandages and without even having seen her
female genitals, Harlow dreams for the first time of herself "naked
and whole, with my women's sex." Surgery directly intervenes in body
image, immediately integrating its "lost" parts.39
What makes the transsexual able and willing to submit to the knife
the splitting, cutting, removal, and reshaping of organs, tissues, and skin
that another might conceive as mutilation-is the drive to get the body
back to what should have been. What makes possible the psychic trans
lation of the surgical incursions into the body into a poetics of healing is
a kind of transsexual somatic memory. Surgery is made sense of as a lit
eral and figurative re-membering, a restorative drive that is indeed com
mon to accounts of reconstructive surgeries among nontranssexual sub
jects and perhaps inherent in the very notion of reconstructive surgery.
From rhinoplasty to postmastectomy breast reconstruction, the subject
seeks out through surgery an idealized body/face from the past. Lucy
Grealy, for instance, describes the process of some thirty reconstructive
surgeries on her cancer-disfigured face as a "journey back to my face," a
progression toward a face that never grew because as a child most of her
jaw was surgically removed.40 An autobiography concerning psychical
recovery from a disfigured body image (or more precisely facial image)
more than a narrative about surgical recovery from actual facial disfig
urement (for the surgeries fail in succession), Autobiography of a Face
has much in common with transsexual autobiographies: Grealy begins

trapped in her body, feeling intense somatic shame and alienation from
her reflected image. Her struggle is also toward integrity. What the
transsexual wants in remembering an originally felt body image may
therefore be quite unexceptional.
Memory is crucial to how we experience our bodies. In his work on
phantom limbs Sacks has pointed to the key role of somatic memory
in structuring body image. The phantom limb (like transsexuality, also
a phenomenon in which body image is incongruous with its corporeal
referent) may be understood as a sensory memory of the lost body part,
a feeling of presence that remains in its very absence. Cases of phan
tomization reveal the body (the experience is that of an unconscious
involuntary sensation) engaged in the struggle not to forget its origi
nal body image. Phantomization may be grasped as the mirror image
inversion of agnosia. Whereas agnosia represents the forgetting in the
body image of somatically attached, functioning parts, leaving the sub
ject a kind of " 'internal' amputee" (for s/he "loses" limbs from her or
his inner or representational body), the phenomenon of the phantom
limb represents the remembering in the body image of parts actually
lost from the material body.41 In the case of the transsexual the body
constructed through sex reassignment surgery is not one that actually
existed in the past, one that is literally re-membered , but one that
should have existed; sex reassignment surgery is a recovery of what
was not. The body of transsexual becoming is born out of a yearning
for a perfect past-that is, not memory but nostalgia: the desire for the
purified version of what was, not for the return to home per se (nostos)
but to the romanticized ideal of home. Memory annealed in imagina
tion, nostalgia re-collects the fragments of the past and welds them
into an imaginary whole. Grosz also suggests that the phantom limb
phenomenon represents a psychic nostalgia for somatic wholeness:
"The phantom is an expression of nostalgia for the unity and whole
ness of the body, its completion. It is a memorial to the missing limb, a
psychical delegate that stands in its place."42
Based on a double conceptualization--of sex reassignment surgery
as a nostalgic return to the sexed contours that should have been; and of
phantomization as an expression of nostalgia for the idealized somato
type in its physical absence-might the transsexual's postreassignment
body be reconceived as already phantomized prereassignment? Al
though phantom limbs are generally conceived as debilitating in that
the feeling "in" the severed body part's spatial absence remains--often
painfully, uselessly, distressingly after its physical loss-Sacks focuses on
the enabling aspects of phantoms for amputees: positive phantoms. In
order to use a replacement artificial limb, the amputee needs to appro
priate the prosthesis as his or her own, to incorporate it into his or her
body image. To do so, s/he needs to experience a phantom presence in
the physical absence of the somatic limb. As one of Sacks's patients with
a leg amputation explains, it is his positive phantom leg that "animates
the prosthesis, and allows me to walk."43 To use the prosthetic leg, the
subject must "re-member" what it was like to use that leg. Does this not
suggest the means by which the transsexual is able to incorporate the
newly shaped parts into his or her body image, to claim the rearranged
material as "my penis" or "my vagina" ? How would s/he be able to feel
postsurgical constructions as these parts, unless these parts were already
phantomized ? There must already be in a felt imaginary, for the trans
sexual to appropriate the rearranged somatic material as his or her new
sex, a prior phantomization of sex, which is not to undermine but to
underline the felt presence of transsex precisely in the very space of its
physical absence. For if the natal sex represents an agnosic or alien part
for the transsexual (the wrong body), leading him or her to experience
the material body in bits and pieces as s/he dis-(re)members his or her
sexed parts, the transsexual's "true" sex, the body trapped within, real
ized in theory by sex reassignment, might be understood to complement
this agnosia as his or her phantom sex: the parts felt as more real, the
parts that "complete" the transsexual body image. The phantomization
of sex would appear as the concomitant of the not-knowing (the ag
nosia) of the real. Both conditions produce a body image radically non
coincident with the material body, a body image that pushes past the
limits of material contours-and pushes the transsexual past these lim
its. Both conditions combine to produce a body image experienced as
real enough to cause the transsexual to seek the reshaping of his/her
material body. Sex reassignment surgery may then be grasped as heal
ing and changing the transsexual subject in that it serves as the antidote
to both of these body image distortions, simultaneously effecting the
ablation of the disowned organs ("removing everything that didn't
belong" [Thompson 1 6 1 ]) and the realization of the already phan
tomized sexed parts. Surgery deploys the skin and tissues to materialize
the transsexual body image with fleshly prostheses in the shape of the
sentient ghost-body. The surgical grafting of materials endows the
transsexual with the corporeal referents for these imaginary or phan

tomized signifieds, restoring their substance. These parts become name
able for the transsexual only when realized by surgery. For the surgery
opting transsexual, however potent, the phantomized sex is insufficient
in and of itself to transform the meaning of bodily matter. "If I could
have lived in my own inner reality I might have survived without
surgery," Thompson explains ( 1 78). But he cannot. Not residing wholly
in the imaginary, sex must be felt in the body, must find its externaliza
tion, its substantiation, in material flesh. Sex reassignment surgery by
definition recognizes the material body as a substantive and de facto sex
ually significant, although tractable and reconstructible, domain.
This cooperation between surgery as material intervention and body
image as the phantomization of sex is responsible for enabling the trans
sexual to feel transsexed. "How new and wonderful it seemed,"
Katherine Cummings recalls of her feelings after her vaginoplasty, "to be
thinking of 'my vagina' ! "44 "My vagina" becomes thinkable and name
able in response to the surgical construction as the transplanted, restruc
tured tissue is recognized both as self ("my") and sexed ("vagina"). That
Cummings, like other male-to-females can think "vagina" of what is in
fact the inverted skin of her penis reveals how crucial is the dynamic of
mutual enablement between the material and the psychic in the consti
tution of transsex. The surgical procedure for vaginoplasty, by retaining
the erogenous skin of the penis as the vaginal lining and transplanting
the penile glans into position as clitoris, encourages the subject's psychic
investment in the material as erogenous parts. Mimesis is important as
regards not only the appearance of transsexual genitals but their sexual
function; the surgery is designed as much as possible to imitate vaginal
and clitoral orgasm. Yet the restructured penile tissues can be said to
become a vagina/clitoris for the transsexual only inasmuch as she already
imagines and feels these parts as her own. Likewise, contemporary phal
loplasty techniques for female-to-males encourage erotogenicity psychi
cally and materially: the clitoris is typically relocated onto the surface of
the penis or left intact underneath the penis and connected to nerves
transported from the donor site-forearm, thigh, or abdomen-that
form the phalloplasty. Insofar as body image takes as its psychidcorpo
real interface the surface of the body-the skin and surface tissues of the
body-surgery addresses body image precisely through the manipula
tion of these tissues; the transsexual's sex is changed as the subject feels
this surface to be significantly altered.
So potent is the psyche/bodily surface correspondence effected by the

sex reassignment surgery that the investment of body image in trans
sexed parts can begin even while these parts are still under construc
tion-that is, before the part even looks like a vagina or a penis. During
one of the final stages of his phalloplasty Thompson is told he could lose
the penis surgery has so far produced for him. Created from tissues har
vested from his thigh in the form of a pedicle tube flap, the "penis" is
attached at one end to his groin and at the other to his hip, while the cen
tral section, the prospective penile body, is lifted free on its underside
from the abdominal skin. At this stage, it looks like a suitcase handle (as
it is often described in medical literature): a tube joined at either end to
the body. The next stage involves cutting the penis loose from its transi
tional root at Thompson's hip and allowing it to hang free from his groin.
The risk to the penis is necrosis (tissue death and tissue loss), which may
result when it loses its blood supply from the hip end. As the surgeon
explains this, Thompson-not surprisingly, having battled through
three previous operations over some eighteen months-panics. For a
moment he considers halting his quest for a penis then and there and liv
ing with the pedicle tube flap attached to his hip and groin, the "penis" a
piece of flesh slung sideways across the right side of his mid-body, immo
bile, indeployable, and of course looking nothing like a penis. "Even
though it had felt somewhat unnatural to have my penis attached to my
leg, I had grown accustomed to it, and I felt I didn't want to lose even
that. Even in its abnormal position I was more 'me' than I would have
been without it" (300). Even at this stage of the procedure, when the
pedicle tube flap resembles and functions as a pedicle tube flap--a tissue
transplant in transitional attachment on the body on its way to becoming
something else-the surgery has already enabled Thompson to invest in
this thigh material as his penis: as with Cummings's vagina, both his
("more 'me' ") and as a penis. In the circular fashion of transsexual
becoming the suitcase handle has already filled the place of the phantom
penis in the body image, replacing the "packing" with real flesh: " I
already saw m y penis [the flap] a s a n entity with a life o f its own, like a
little human being. It was as if I had to breathe life into this part of my
body, which should always have been there, should have been mine from
birth. This was meant to be, I was a man" (300). Not only is the pedicle
tube flap immediately psychically incorporated into his body image as a
penis, it personifies (almost a being apart) his transsexed self, comes to
stand for his authentically gendered subjectivity. This claiming and
naming of the penis is in stark contrast to the unnamability and incon

ceivability of his female genital parts and functions: Thompson's autobi
ography unfailingly euphemizes vagina, menstruation, and breasts. If
agnosia renders unnameable what is, phantomization renders nameable
what is not--or at least not yet.
In postsurgical scenes the transsexual virtually installs his or her trans
sexed subjectivity in the new tender parts, precisely as if s/he becomes
these parts (in the same sense that Grealy writes that her succession of
facial surgeries leads her to "become" her face). Immediately postreas
signment, the transsexual trajectory itself appears to be at stake in these
organs. The subject's intense focus on them is to be expected, considering
the fact that these organs are most often hard-gained and that these areas
have been subject to such intense surgical attention. However, the con
centration of subjectivity in transsex is also a response to a dramatically
altered physical body that is at this point that which is blatantly most pre
cious about the self. Reassignment is a restoration of body; nevertheless
on a mechanical level the new longed-for organs present themselves as
unfamiliar zones, and the transsexual must undergo--proprioceptively,
gingerly-some adjustment to the remolded contours of this new bodily
geography. Cummings's problems with vaginal dilation following
surgery (required to keep the vagina from closing in on itself) stem from
her unfamiliarity with her new genitals. Frankly, she's at a loss as to what
her vagina feels or looks like. Having no bodily sense of the depth of her
vagina, she's not sure when the dilator is inside; the limits of this new
invaluable flesh are as yet strange. In a comparable moment, once his
penis has been detached successfully from its vascular roots on his thigh,
Thompson finds he must rethink the most automatic of movements such
as getting out of the bath. How is he supposed to "handle" this new fleshy
addition ? Should he let the penis fall naturally, or should he support it as
he stands up? Such postreassignment episodes, common in the autobi
ographies, both comic and frightening, mark the surgical body off as
unfamiliar in a way that echoes its prereassignment unfamiliarity. But
whereas the prereassignment body's unfamiliarity is alien (the foreign, to
be abjected), the postreassignment body is the not yet known that is yet
already most precious about the self.
And thus if gender reassignment is transsexuals' "rite of incorpora
tion," as Ann Bolin suggests in her anthropological study of male-to
females ("Surgery . . . is their access to normalcy. They can finally be
treated as if they had always been women. The value of the rite . . . lies
in the 'incorporation it permits' "), it is so in a layered sense.45 Surgery

is a rite of social incorporation; it promises the ultimate passing-a
passing in the flesh, one that allows the discarding of external passing
devices involving concealing, strapping, wrapping, and padding the
body-sex reassignment enables assimilation into the world of gen
dered realness. The skin itself becomes the article of gendered passing
as gender shifts from doing to being, from performance to the flesh.
Touching her genitals after her vaginoplasty, it is this skin-deep passing
that Dawn Langley Simmons celebrates as the achievement of her
surgery: "Nobody would be able to tell the difference . . . . I knew I was
like all other women . . . Not a blemish, not a scar; the vaginal lips per
fection."46 And in this bodily trajectory one cannot get deeper than the
skin. Not being able to tell the difference on the surface bestows the
security of a profound identity sameness; the fantasy of sex reassign
ment surgery is that it erases the difference of transsexuality, covers its
traces with a seamlessly sexed body. Constructed in the medical narra
tive as the apogee of transsexuality, sex reassignment surgery in theory
allows the transsexual to pass as nontranssexual, to appear as a "real"
man or a "real" woman. One might be said to become most fully a
transsexual through this rite when one is able to leave that identity, that
body, most completely behind.
Yet sex reassignment surgery is a rite of incorporation for the trans
sexual in another sense, in the immediate sense of embodiment, in
corporation: a rite of bodily appropriation, a grappling with the mate
riality of the body itself. Harrowing scenes of near-death experiences
(Richards's tracheal shave, Martino's mastectomy), of botch-job med
ical interventions (Julia Grant's vaginal probe,47 Martino's first phallo
plasty), or simply of some of the routine but nonetheless terrifying
problems entailed in any major surgery (malfunctioning catheters in
Cossey and Thompson); descriptions of the pain, the shock, the dis
comfort to the body; the cycle of suffering and recovery, of the
wounded body healing: in repetition these features give to sex reas
signment surgery a certain ritualized structure, so that it does take on
the form of the definitive transsexual experience, a transsexual rite of
passage, as if it were the surgery that makes the subject most fully a
transsexual. Before he can receive authorization from his psychiatrist
for his phalloplasty, Thompson is required to state his willingness to
tolerate the physical pain and distress that accompanies the surgery. It
is as though the experience of such surgery and the compulsion to
undergo it were the symbolic vehicle for transsexual transformation

the identifying marker of transsexuality-as much as its mechanics;
for this corporeal distress is surely nothing next to that of the prereas
signment body.
Body Politics and Personal Prosthetics

Previous theoretical descriptions of sex reassignment surgery over
whelmingly conceive of the transsexual as fragmenting the sexed body.
Arguing that "transsexualism is fetishization par excellence," Janice
Raymond claims that in their focus on genital parts transsexuals
approach the body in bits and pieces.48 Marjorie Garber similarly con
cludes that transsexuals, both male-to-female and female-to-male,
overestimate the penis: " 'The absolute insignia of maleness' [the penis]
is for them the index of male identity."49 Although from lesbian femi
nism to queer theory, 1 979 to 1 989, the charge against transsexuals has
shifted from fetishism to essentialism (now the problem lies not in
transsexuals' fragmenting the body per se but in their metonytnizing
the fragment-mis-taking the sexed parts for the gendered whole), the
assumption is still that sex reassignment surgery produces the body as
an aggregate of exchangeable and overvalued parts. Most recently, in
the more eccentric regions of postmodern theory, the transsexual has
been celebrated precisely for cutting up the sexed body into detachable
and artificial parts. Figuring the transsexual as a kind of cyberhacker,
his/her manufactured sex wrecking what's real, what's natural about
the body, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker read the transsexual's techno
surgery as the ultimate deconstruction of the sexed body. The Krokers
suggest transsexuality as "transgenic gender," that is "a virus free gen
der," the virus nothing less than the material body itself, living flesh.
Recombinant sex taking place without the body is the "only good sex
today": "Sex without origin, localizing gender, or referential signifier."
Through the transsexual's "morphing" as they understand sex reas
signment, the Krokers glimpse a "new sexual horizon, post-male, post
female," and crucially post-human(ist), the dawning of a new virtual
age of which the transsexual will be hero.50 If the reconstructions of
reassignment surgery secure the transsexual in Raymond's lesbian
feminist paradigm as patriarchal stooge and in Garber's queer theory
as conventionalist, in the Krokers's postmodern vision of bodiless,
originless subjectivity, surgery elevates the transsexual to postmodern
outlaw. Now the material flesh-frighteningly, considering the cur-
rent climate i n which AIDS has made sexed body parts i n and o f them
selves to be feared as infected/infectious-has become the marker of
retrogressive identities; the discourse of transgenics (which in its quest
for purer species ends up resembling that of nineteenth-century eugen
ics) i s deployed against the biological body that has become but an
impurity to be transcended.
For the process of changing sex to be like morphing, for it to be as
systematized, clean, insouciant, and unbloody as the transformation of
data on a computer screen, is surely-at least at one point or another
every transsexual's dream. "If I could j ust snap my fingers . . . "; "If
there was a closet where we could go in one thing and come out
another"; "Beam me up, Scottie": fantasies of immaculate transforma
tion, of immediate materialization, and of perfect sex change are com
monly voiced and exchanged, with self-deprecating humor although
perhaps never without yearning. As medicine fast forwards into the
future, the new biotechnological sciences can surely only facilitate sex
change, making it more successful-that is, more convincing and more
comprehensive. Even now, as a transsexual who religiously keeps tabs
on medical research, I myself look to the new art of tissue engineering
to revolutionize sex reassignment procedures. A masterful interdisci
plinary alliance of chemical engineering, cell biology, genetics, and
surgery, tissue engineering takes human cells from the body, treats
them with tissue-inducing biochemicals to manufacture living organs
and surfaces that are missing or damaged apart from the body on "scaf
folds" (plastic structures of body parts), and transplants the organs back
into the body. Because they share the subject's DNA structure, when
reattached, these artificially manufactured parts immediately adapt to
their environment and grow in proportion to the body. The first organ
to have been successfully manufactured thus is skin (there is an entire
industry in artificial bodily surfaces), but work is already underway on
more complex organs: the liver, the pancreas, and most famously, an
ear for a boy born without one-an experiment responsible for the
recent surreal pictures on British television screens of a laboratory
mouse scurrying back and forth with a human ear the size of its own
body transplanted onto its back.51 It is not difficult to imagine that sex
organs would be included in this manufacture of body parts, if not first
for transsexuals then for burn or accident victims who suffer from lost
or damaged genitals, eventually becoming part of transsexual proce
dures as with plastic surgery in a trickle-down fashion.
More than any contemporary medical practice, tissue engineering

fragments the integrity of the body into a collection of disconnected and
detachable parts. It is a near literalization of what Rosi Braidotti has
conjured with her inversion of Deleuze and Guattari's "bodies without
organs" as "organs without bodies": a nightmarish vision of the bio
sciences' production of an ever more dismembered, fragmented body.
Yet as its goal is bodily integrity, its purpose to restore the body to an
original unity, tissue engineering would promise to fulfill the very task
that Braidotti urges contemporary thought to address in the face of such
technological fetishism: " the urgency to reformulate the unity of the
human being."52 Rendering obsolete the free-flaps and skin grafts that
are the mainstay of current reconstructive surgery, tissue engineering
will erase most effectively the differences of those bodies upon which
surgical work is performed, enabling all bodies to pass as integral and
original: whole. Behind this most cutting-edge technology is the quite
nostalgic aim of restoring lost, absent, or malfunctioning material flesh,
the integrity of the human being.
For the time being, however, changing sex remains very much a
bodily affair: from the patient's perspective, a material intervention into
living flesh that in the process reveals sex as quite real, quite embodied,
and sometimes (especially in the case of female-to-male phalloplasty
procedures as Thompson's account suggests) quite resistant to being
changed. The recurrent problem with theoretical visions of sex reas
signment surgery is their blithe elision of this perspective and of the
experience of sex reassignment. Raymond, Garber, and the Krokers all
argue the implications of sex reassignment surgery for a generic human
body from a nonmedicalized subject position: none consider the body's
surface experientially. Their vision of surgery as fragmenting the body
is therefore not surprising; for from the point of view of the other
watching the surgical procedure, the body laid out on the operating
table is always going to appear as an integrity and surgery as an incur
sion into this integrity: holes made in a whole, rather than (as it is por
trayed in transsexual autobiography) the transformation of an unliv
able shattered body into a livable whole. And surely what has facilitated
the elision of the experience of embodiment (of how bodies actually
feel) in contemporary theories of transsexual and other bodies is such a
splitting between our experience of our bodies and our theory, a failure
to relate our bodily surfaces to our conceptual surfaces. Adrienne Rich's
urging that we turn from an abstracted theory of the body to a situated,
personal account of our own bodies might still prove useful in moving
theory away from the generalized notion of "bodyhood" that charac
terizes bodily discourses to attend to subjective bodily experience:
"Perhaps we need a moratorium on saying 'the body.' For it's also pos
sible to abstract 'the' body. When I write 'the body,' I see nothing in par
ticular. To write 'my body' plunges me into lived experience, particu
larity: I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, as
well as what pleases me . . . . To say 'the body' lifts me away from what
has given me a primary perspective."53
To close by moving more fully into a "primary perspective" on the
body through the autobiographical (and to stay with the lesbian feminist
thread: a nostalgic gesture for this transsexual theoretical trajectory per
haps), I want to suggest Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals as a complex
conjoining of these surfaces: a cultural statement on a particular form of
embodiment drawn from an autobiographical meditation on personal
bodily experience.54 The Cancer Journals is Lorde's attempt to come to
terms with mastectomy for a cancer that was to kill her twelve years after
its publication. As a surgery memoir, an "autopathographical" narrative
like Grealy's Autobiography ofa Face, it also has in common with trans
sexual accounts the experience of emotional and psychic pain around a
body noncoincident with body image-"Any amputation is a physical
and psychic reality that must be integrated into a new sense of self'' ( 16)
although Lorde's somatic journey is the reverse; surgery deals the blow of
psychic and bodily loss. The Cancer Journals seeks to translate this
personal loss into a lesbian feminist politics ofthe body, a politics summed
up in Lorde's clear-cut opposition: "power vs. prosthesis" (55). Lorde
opposes postmastectomy prosthetics for women, whether reconstructive
surgery or cloth padding, on the grounds that they perpetuate the cul
tural fetishization of the female body (again, a reduction of the whole to
the part), woman breast, and discomfit women from working through
=
their changed bodies and the psychic and cultural meaning of the change.
Symptomatic of the sexist "patterns and networks . . . for women after
breast surgery that encourage us to deny the realities of our bodies" (4 1),
"[t]he emphasis upon wearing a prosthesis is a way of avoiding having
women come to terms with their own pain and loss, and thereby their
own strength" (49). Arguing that the "socially sanctioned prosthesis is
merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and sep
arate from each other" ( 1 6), The Cancer Journals urges the monobreasted
or unbreasted woman to come out of the prosthetic closet and allow her-
self to be read as not less a woman but rather as one with a particular his
tory of breast cancer. Only through this act of coming out can there be a
politically mobilized postmastectomy women's community.
If for the transsexual the surgical prosthesis is a marker of bodily
nostalgia, a memory of the somatotype that should have been that
allows for assimilation, Lorde suggests that for postmastectomy women
this prosthetic nostalgia is a systematically validated, even socially
enforced mechanism for disavowing women's bodily experience of can
cer. Nevertheless, she does allow that the desire for prosthesis to recre
ate what was may be quite viscerally felt in postoperative women,
including herself: after a mastectomy, "there is a feeling of wanting to
go back, of not wanting to persevere through this experience to what
ever enlightenment might be at the core of it" (55). Indeed, while The
Cancer Journals as political treatise argues that the bodily nostalgia
enacted and secured by prosthesis serves to veil the postmastectomy
woman's difference, Lorde's personal account of her experience can
didly reveals her struggle to accept this very difference: not only the
cancer and the early death it forebodes but more finely the psychic
effects of the loss of her breast, the impact of changed body on body
image. The loss of a breast is tightly intricated with Lorde's identity.
Notched into the grain of her critique of the cultural representation of
women's bodies as symmetrically breasted is the notion that the breast
as part of her body is absolutely caught up with her self as a woman,
feminist, African-American, lesbian, mother, writer. How to sustain
the continuity of that identity-"a woman, a black lesbian feminist
mother lover poet" (25)-when all its axes, all meeting at womanness in
Lorde's experience of them as she writes about the mastectomy, transect
the breasts ? At points Lorde's body image appears to hold the breast as
most cherished. She wraps the lost breast in the maternal: "The pain of
separating from my breast was at least as sharp as the pain as separating
from my mother" (25-26). The surgery performs a terrible second
birth, cutting the body off from a productive, protective life-source. In
the place of the mother the breast is symbolically entangled in women's
relations with each other; Lorde worries about how the mastectomy
will alter her relations with other women. How will the lesbian other
feel about (and feel) her monobreasted body ? How will she herself feel
(emotionally and physically) loving a woman with her one breast ?
Although she later claims in The Cancer Journals that, "[a] lifetime of
loving women had taught me that when women love each other, phys
ical change does not alter that love" (56), a few days after her mastec
tomy she is less sure:
I was thinking, "What is it like to be making love to a woman and have
only one breast brushing against her ? "
I thought, "How will w e fi t s o perfectly together ever again ? "
I thought, "I wonder if our love-making had anything to do with i t ? "
I thought, "What w i l l it b e like making love t o me ? Will s h e still find
my body delicious ? "
And fo r the first time deeply and fleetingly a groundswell o f sadness
rolled up over me that filled my mouth and eyes almost to frowning. My
right breast represented such an area of feeling and pleasure for me, how
could I never bear to feel that again ? (43)
Yet while this loss of the breast is deeply felt in the absence of the
actual body part, the feeling of the breast's presence proves irrecoverable.
Lorde avows that she could never invest sensory feeling in a supplemen
tary noncorporeal part: "not even the most skillful prosthesis in the
world could undo that reality, or feel the way my breast had felt" (44).
What lies behind her antiprosthetic politics is thus absolutely caught up
in the contours of her personal body image: in what she can and cannot
feel a part of her body (one can imagine, for instance, the male-to-female
transsexual easily investing in a prosthetic breast). Indeed, perhaps it is
because she is unable to phantomize the prosthesis that body image must
be brought into line with the reshaped material body: "either I would
love my body one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself' (44).
Certainly Lorde's political resistance to wearing a breast prosthesis can
not be "cut off' from her initial, visceral psychic refusal (or failure) to
incorporate into body image the cloth prosthesis immediately on offer
a pink lambswool puff. Most striking is the suggestion that Lorde's non
investment in this material padding is as inseparable from a racial body
image as it is from a gendered one. The prosthesis, in all its pinkness, is
immediately unassimilable with her body's surface, with her skin color
as a black woman. Trying the pink puff on before the mirror, Lorde per
ceives it as all the more "not-me" because "it was the wrong color, and
looked grotesquely pale through the cloth of my bra" (44). And indeed,
as the scene urges us to consider, why should a racial body image not be
as sentient as that of sex ? Particularly if skin is as invested with psychic
and social meaning as Anzieu suggests, there is no reason to suppose

why the flesh should not be subject to the same kinds of racial invest
ments as sexed ones.ss
At what point do our body images underlie our theories of the body ?
At what point do our experiences of our bodies resist or fragment our
theoretical generalizations, reveal them as displacements of experience,
and demand from them new formulations? Even Larde does not con
sider that from breast cancer could develop a politics other than femi
nist, that by no means can it be certain that all women will experience
their breast cancer as women. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written her
story of breast cancer to affirm her queer identification with gay men , to
conduit this bodily experience into her queer politics. Hearing the way
in which breast cancer is appropriated by certain women and AIDS repu
diated ("our" disease and "theirs"), Sedgwick reaches out through this
masculine identification and the "loss" that disease brings to embrace,
via transgender, that queer, repudiated, excised part: "as though AIDS
were not a disease of women or lesbians ! . I feel I must refuse to iden
. .
tify [as a woman] on this ground. " A low erotogenicity in the breast
zone; an open desire for and identification with gay men; a nonrepro
ductive feminine identity, Sedgwick's investment in her breasts is clearly
not strong to begin with and thus her body image thoroughly underlies
this identification. Her breasts are, she writes, "relatively peripheral to
the complex places where gender and sexuality really happen."56 While
we should not stop thinking the body as a culturally and politically sig
nificant text, we need to write out such points at which our theories back
onto our personal investments. Not simply costumes for our experience
of our bodies, our theoretical conceptions of the body are foundationally
formed by and reformative of them. To talk of the strange and unpre
dictable contours of body image, and to reinsert into theory the experi
ence of embodiment, we might begin our work through such autobio
graphical narratives.
pa rt two narrat1 v e s
.
Narcissus, contemplating his face i n the fountain's depth, is so fascinated with the apparition that he would
die bending toward himself. . . . The author of a n autobiography masters this a nxiety by submitting to it;
beyond a l l images, he follows unceasingly the call of his own being.
-Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography"
The most sexual act I did at these times was to regard myself i n the m irror. I would stare, longingly I sup
pose, i nto the face of the little girl opposite me. Somehow, i n the m irror my femininity was more real. Like
Narcissus I was fascinated by that unattainable image, and like him I pined.
-Renee Richards, Second Serve: The Renee Richards Story
Like Narcissus, I had fal len in love with the image in the mirror, which showed me that all the dreams of my
life coul d be realised for a few moments now and then. -Katherine Cummings, Katherine'.5 Diary
chapter 3
Mirror Images:
Transsexuality and Autobiography
Transsexual Mirror Stages

In her autobiography, Conundrum: An Extraordinary Narrative of Trans
sexualism, Jan Morris restages her final act before her sex reassignment
surgery. Ensconced in Dr. Burou's famous clinic in Casablanca, anaes
thetized, and with pubes freshly shaven, Morris rises from her bed and
makes her woozy way to the mirror: "[I] went to say good-bye to myself
in the mirror. We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that
other self a long last look in the eye, and a wink for luck . 1 She, this self
that writes, is to emerge "alive, well, and sex-changed in Casablanca in a
new body" ( 1 4 1 ), the old one, not so much that of a man as of a "hybrid
or chimera" ( 1 4 1 ), to be discarded like a snake's skin on Burou's operat
ing table. Morris's mirror scene is memorable for graphically figuring
the specific split of the transsexual subject and prefiguring the passage
or to use the appropriate term, the transition-that heals this split. The
moment is Morris through the looking glass: Morris passes into surgery
one self, an androgyne (a chimera, half male, half female [I 09])-s/he-
100 Mirror Images
and out a new self, an integral subject (normal, clean [ 1 4 1 ])-she. But if
Morris's mirror scene is the transitional point in her transsexual trajec
tory, it is also crucially the transitional point in her autobiographical nar
rative. For from this point on in the narrative, the "me" written about
(James Morris) and the "I" that writes (Jan Morris)-so far separated by
sex-are fused into a singly sexed autobiographical subject, an integral
"I." In joining the split gendered subject, autobiography transmits-in
narrative-the integrating trajectory of transsexuality.
While Morris's is doubtless the most legendary,2 mirror scenes punc
tuate transsexual autobiographies with remarkable consistency. Almost
to the degree of the expected surgery scenes, mirror scenes, we might say,
constitute a convention of transsexual autobiography. They recur across
the texts in strikingly similar fashion. A trope of transsexual representa
tion, the split of the mirror captures the definitive splitting of the trans
sexual subject, freezes it, frames it schematically in narrative. The dif
ference between gender and sex is conveyed in the difference between
body image (projected self) and the image of the body (reflected self).
For the transsexual the mirror initially reflects not-me: it distorts who I
know myself to be. "My life was a series of distorted mirrors," female
to-male Mario Martino metaphorizes his life before transition: "I saw
myself in their crazy reflections as false to the image I had of myself. I
was a boy! I felt like one, I dressed like one, I fought like one."3 The mir
ror misrepresents who I know myself really to be: at an angle to Lacan's
mirror phase, the look in the mirror enables in the transsexual only
disidentification, not a j ubilant integration of body but an anguishing
shattering of the felt already formed imaginary body-that sensory
body of the body "image.''4 Yielding this recognition that I am not my
body, the mirror sets in motion the transsexual plot: it is once it is shat
tered in its visual reflection, once the material body is seen not to be the
felt body that the material body can be approached in bits and pieces
an assembly of parts to be amputated and relocated surgically in order
that subject may be corporeally integrated.
But mirror scenes in transsexual autobiographies do not merely initi
ate the plot of transsexuality. Highly staged and self-conscious affairs, as
Morris's self-staging indicates, mirror scenes also draw attention to the
narrative form for this plot, to the surrounding autobiography and its
import for transsexuality. Looking into the mirror is of course a figure
for the autobiographical act: autobiography is ostensibly anyway the lit
erary act of self-reflection, the textual product of the "I" reflecting on
Mirror Images 107
itself. In transsexual autobiography the trajectories of transsexuality and

autobiography are entwined in complex ways, narrative and bodily
form conducting each other. To begin with, the narrative transitions of
autobiography allow the somatic transitions of transsexuality in an
immediate and material sense. The autobiographical act for the trans
sexual begins even before the published autobiography-namely, in the
clinician's office where, in order to be diagnosed as transsexual, s/he
must recount a transsexual autobiography. The story of a strong, early,
and persistent transgendered identification is required by the clinical
authorities, the psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists who
traditionally function as the gatekeepers to the means of transsexual
"conversion." Whether s/he publishes an autobiography or not, then,
every transsexual, as a transsexual, is originally an autobiographer.
Narrative is also a kind of second skin: the story the transsexual must
weave around the body in order that this body may be "read."
Consequently, the published transsexual autobiographies that we read
are always the transsexual autobiography a second time around. Herein
lies another redoubling, with the written autobiography mirroring,
reproducing, that first oral autobiographical scene. In its published
retelling (after the diagnosis, as a repetition, and in writing) the trans
sexual bios, not surprisingly, typically appears as itself a highly formal
ized narrative. Reproduced in autobiography, transsexuality emerges as
an archetypal story structured around shared tropes and fulfilling a par
ticular narrative organization of consecutive stages: suffering and confu
sion; the epiphany of self-discovery; corporeal and social transforma
tion/conversion; and finally the arrival "home"-the reassignment. In
their formality, in their function as figures of self-reflection, mirror
scenes serve to elucidate this formalization of transsexuality as a plot.
Nancy Hunt's Mirror Image: The Odyssey ofa Male-to-Female Transsexual
frames the transsexual trajectory in autobiography precisely as a pro
gression though a series of mirror stages. Each scene schematically marks
a successive moment in the author's becoming woman. From her failure
to identify as a man; to her crossdressing as a woman; to her decision to
transition and become a woman: the significant turning points in Hunt's
transsexual transition are symbolized in highly stylized fashion with
mirror scenes. Gradually but inexorably and formulaically, transition is
shown to undistort the reflected self and bring into gender alignment
(gendered identity) body and body image. The trajectory (transsexual
and autobiographical) ofMirror Image thus appropriately reaches closure
102 Mirror Images
with a weightily signifying mirror scene: the representation of Hunt's

attainment of full identification with her specular image, a figure
(admittedly schmaltzy) of the transsexual "finding herself'-"! now see
in that reflection a mirror image of the person that I have always been,
no longer distorted by the flickering heat of society or the crazy lens of
masculinity. For better or for worse, at least I am me, a woman."5
In their forms gender and genre mirror each other. The effect of the
autobiographical act on the subject parallels that oflooking into the mir
ror on the transsexual. Autobiography, like the transsexual's first look in
the mirror, breaks apart the subject into the self reflected upon and the
self that reflects; autobiography, like transsexuality, instantiates (or
reveals) a difference in the subject. In transsexual autobiography the
split between the "I" of the bios and the "I" of the graph , the past self
written and the present self writing, is heightened by the story of sex
change. Autobiography brings into relief the split of the transsexual life;
transsexual history brings into gendered relief the difference present in
all autobiography between the subject of the enunciation and the subject
enunciating. I was a woman, I write as a man. How to join this split?
How to create a coherent subject? Precisely through narrative. Over the
course of the recounting, the narrative continuity, the trajectory of auto
biography (tracing the story of a single self), promises, like the transsex
ual transition itself, to rejoin this split into a single, connected "life."
As they mark the successive stages of transition, some mirror scenes
illustrate and indeed participate in this cohering narrative movement
between past and present selves, the "I" of the bios and the "I" of the
graph. As the young girl, Marie, Martino places an enema nozzle over
his (her) clitoris to improvise a penis on his (her) naked body before the
mirror. This act prefigures in the imaginary his acquisition of a fleshly
penis recounted in the penultimate chapter ("Phalloplasty" [252-263))
in the real of the plot. The childhood mirror scene functions simultane
ously as autobiographical and as transsexual prolepsis, foretelling and
naturalizing this plot of sex change, suggesting that, in the imaginary
(the mirror) the penis has been there all along. The scene coheres this
young girl with the male subject writing. Similarly, in Renee Richards's
Second Serve: The Renee Richards Story, a scene of crossdressing before a
hotel mirror in which the young jock, Dick Raskind, transforms him
self into the elegant Renee with a slow and painful set of rituals (tying
the penis back tightly between the legs to get a smooth reflection) at once
looks forward to the equally gradual and painful transformation of the
Mirror Images 103
subject through transsexual transition and looks back to an already fem

inized self. When Richards's autobiographical narrative, following the
identity shifts of the transsexual story and analogously to the mirror in
this scene, begins "to reflect the face of a different character"-that of a
woman not a man, that of Renee not of Dick-the act of self-reflection
in writing produces the narrative transitions that smooth this sex tran
sition.6 The retrospective structure of autobiography, in other words
this look back at the self-like the redressing act of crossdressing, allows
the transsexual to appear to have been there all along.
Drawing formally now on a list of some fifty autobiographies pub
lished between 1 954 and 1 996-a wonderfully engaging, extraordinary
body of work (I'm not uninvolved: reading autobiography is always a
pointed engagement of the self, and these texts on several levels consti
tute my mirror scene)-this chapter examines the intricate fretwork of
transsexuality as subjectivity and autobiography as narrative form. My
concern here is the production of transsexuality both in and through
autobiographical narrative. What are the implications of autobiogra
phy's indispensability to transsexual subjectivity ? Why do (so many)
transsexuals write autobiographies ? What is the relation of the second
published autobiography to the first oral autobiography in the clini
cian's office ? What engenders, what elicits, this textual return ? And
what are the dynamics of reading in each autobiographical situation
how do we read transsexual autobiography and how does this differ (or
not) from the clinician's initial reading of the transsexual ? If transsexu
ality is symptomized in narrative, how do we/they decide who-what
sex(es)-is the subject of this story ? Man, and/or woman, and/or trans
sexual ? In sum, what kind of autobiographical narrative is the trans
sexual ? The conventions of transsexuality are thoroughly entangled
with those of autobiography, this body thoroughly enabled by narrative.
Like two mirrors autobiography and transsexuality are themselves
caught up in an interreflective dynamic, resembling, reassembling, and
articulating each other.
Autobiography as Symptom: Telling Stories

We must begin our reading of autobiography where the transsexual
begins its telling: in the clinician's office. There's an important conjunc
tion of body and narrative here, a strikingly direct way in which narra
tive does the body's work. Although transsexuality concerns the deliber
ate transformation of the material body more than any other category
104 Mirror Images
catalogued by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), transsexuality does not
symptomize itself in the subject's body, at least not visibly or reliably so.
The diagnosis required for this transformation must instead derive from
the patient's narrative: narrativization as a transsexual necessarily pre
cedes one's diagnosis as a transsexual; autobiography is transsexuality's
proffered symptom. If autobiography is transsexuality's proffered symp
tom, the process of diagnosing the subject should be understood above
all as narratological. The primary diagnostic criteria for "Gender
Identity Disorder" in DSM-IV under which transsexuality is now sub
sumed, "strong and persistent cross-gender identification" and "persis
tent discomfort with . . . sex or sense of inappropriateness in the gender
role of that sex," must be substantiated through the subject's life history.7
Boys playing with Barbie, wrapping their heads in cloths to simulate
long hair, and hiding their penises between their legs; girls asking to be
called boys' names, refusing to urinate sitting down, wanting to be
Batman or Superman, and asserting that they will grow up to become
men: such episodes find their place under the "Diagnostic Features" of
Gender Identity Disorder as turns in transsexuality's classic plot. Gender
dysphoria (acute gender discomfort) constitutes the medical narrative's
overriding theme, and assertions of being "trapped in the wrong body,"
as we have seen, its most famous rhetorical trope. The story the trans
sexual tells the clinician must mirror or echo the diagnosis, its details
matching or varying those of this master narrative. Clinicians (the first
of transsexual autobiography's critics and setting a precedent in the
exactingness of their approach) listen as narratologists for the recogniz
able transsexual plot, tropes, or themes, matching the subject's narrative
against the narratemes of this archetypal story of transsexuality.
Given this original and thorough investment of transsexual subjec
tivity in narrative, for the cultural critic to fail to trace the specific
importance of autobiography in the clinician's office is to miss the nar
rative kernel of transsexual subjectivity and the fraught struggle around
plot that comes with being diagnosed. In her chapter describing the
emergence of transsexual subjectivity, Bernice L. Hausman elides the
function of autobiographical narrative to suggest instead that the trans
sexual emerges through demand-a demand for sex change in response
to the existence of the diagnosis and the technology of sex change: "the
demand for sex change is an enunciation that designates a desired action
and identifies the speaker as the appropriate subject of that action . . .
Mirror Images 705
[T]he demand for sex change was instantiated as the primary symptom
(and sign) of the transsexual."8 For Hausman the transsexual's claim to
transsexual subjectivity is performative. The demand is that which, in a
circular fashion, constitutes the subject as transsexual in the eyes of the
clinician. As Hausman also reads demand via its Lacanian conception,
however, the transsexual's demand for sex change paradoxically under
mines this subjectivity (in Lacan demand displaces need and opens up
the subject's desire; it is that about the subject which by nature cannot be
met): "In the demand for sex change, the transsexual stakes a claim . . .
that determines, indeed founds, subjectivity as the 'other sex.' . . . The
demand itself, however, inaugurates in the subject a desire that cannot
be met through the specific surgeries and endocrinological interven
tions that serve to relocate him or her in the opposite sex category"
(1 36-1 37). In Hausman's description one becomes transsexual because
one says one is; and yet the purpose of saying one is transsexual-to real
ize sex change-would appear to be unrealizable. The paradox assumes
(and reproduces) a fundamental incompatibility between the transsex
ual's claims to gender identity made through language and the trans
sexual's need for technology to secure this gender as sex in the body.
My coinage "body narrative"-not an oxymoron but a deliberate con
junction-is intended to reflect, in contrast to Hausman, the ways in
which body and narrative work together in the production of transsex
ual subjectivity. The narrative of a transsexual identification does not
contradict but, rather, enables the realization of a sex-changed body.
Narrative needs to be distinguished from Hausman's conception of
demand on three counts. First, unlike demand, narrative is not coexten
sive with performativity. Narrative is diachronic, not instantaneous but
an organized recounting of episodes of time over time. Second, narrative
does not connote the "lack" of demand but is, rather, bound up with real
ization; in the development of its plot, in the progression of its episodes,
narrative crucially seeks its own telos. Finally, more overtly than demand,
narrative suggests an interlocution between author and reader, a dialog
ics of interpretation. The meaning of narrative is arrived at in a textual
exchange. My description of how transsexuals become transsexuals may
be formulated around these three properties of narrative: the transsexual
must work to author a history of transgendered identification in order to
receive a reading from the clinician directed toward the realization of
transsexual subjectivity. Psychologist Ira Pauly's comments on the neces
sity of retaining the diagnostic criteria of transsexuality in DSM-IV cer-
106 Mirror Images
tainly suggest a dynamic more in keeping with this narratological

description than the simple, instantaneous act of demanding: "[t]he real
issue [of the diagnosis] here is whether the gender dysphoric individual
gives a clear-cut history of 'persistent discomfort and sense of inappro
priateness [of his/her] assigned sex.' "9 Demand omits both the recount
ing of a personal history of "persistent" identification and the intercon
stitutive although thoroughly contestatory relations between author and
reader that characterize the transsexual diagnosis.
Indeed, the clinical literature shows that even before "transsexual
ism" first appeared in DSM-Ill, in 1 980, demanding hormones and
surgery could in fact obstruct treatment; for such demand attempts to
bypass the narrative pas de deux between clinician and patient.10 The
first "standard" in the "Standards of Care," drafted in 1 979 and still the
authoritative guide alongside DSM for clinicians working with trans
sexuals, states categorically that "Hormonal and/or surgical sex reas
signment on demand (i.e., j ustified simply because the patient has
requested such procedures) is contraindicated": that is, demand works
in itself as an indication against treatment. Even though, in presenting
as transsexual, subjects originally self-author their transsexuality, to
access hormones and surgery transsexuals must receive the clinician's
all-important reading-must be authorized as authors. As the standard
goes on, hormones and surgery may be administered only after the clin
ician's "careful evaluation of the patient's reasons for requesting such
services"--evaluation here consisting of a thorough critical reading and
interpretation of the transsexual's narrativization of his or her past life,
of its assessment as transsexual plot. 1 1
The entry of the diagnosis "transsexualism" into DSM-III in 1980 rep
resents the medical formalization of transsexuality into such a plot. Boys
playing with Barbie and girls wanting to be Batman: the description
turns precisely on narrative episodes. This formalization of transsexual
ity has a double-edged significance. On the one hand the diagnosis criti
cally recognizes sex change as a need-and not desire. (In declassifying
homosexuality from DSM-Ill at exactly the moment transsexuality
gained clinical classification, the medical establishment might be said to
have remarked the difference between homosexuality as desire and
transsexuality as dis-ease in need of treatment.) As it recognizes the
patient's narrative as articulating need, the classification of Gender
Identity Disorder (GID) is unique. Unlike treatment for other "disor
ders" (anorexia or schizophrenia for instance), the treatment proposed
Mirror Images 707
for the most serious manifestation of GID (transsexualism) doesn't try to

cure us of the "disorder"; rather, it concurs with our own narrative, pro
pelling us into it as a way of resolving it. As a consequence the diagnos
tic situation creates a narrative setting in which, not insignificantly, the
intelligible transsexual life story is always already understood, not
bizarre and foreign but familiar, anticipated, and-quite crucially
named. It gives us a place to tell and begin to realize our story.
I specify "intelligible," however, because on the other hand the stan
dardization also renders some stories unintelligible, delimiting trans
sexual subjectivity, censoring the number of possible legitimate trans
sexual tales. As Sandy Stone remarks of this restriction, with DSM,
"[e]mergent polyvocalities of lived experience, never represented in the
discourse but present at least in potential, disappear."12 When the sub
ject's story diverges substantially from the clinical genre, when its
details don't fit the specified requisites of what constitutes a transsexual
story, its teller has traditionally had a hard time becoming (being a tran
sitioning) transsexual. The diagnosis acts as a narrative filter, enabling
some transsexuals to live out their story and thwarting others. In short,
if the dependence of the diagnosis on autobiography suggests that one
cannot be a transsexual outside the operations of narrative, transsexual
ity's entry into DSM hones this stipulation to a very set narrative.
The hub of the narrative exchange entailed in diagnosing trans
sexuality is formed by the intake interview. Published autobiogra
phies highlight the delimiting and enabling effects of the narratolog
ical nature of this encounter between clinician and transsexual: some
times at the same time as in Richards's Second Serve. In diagnosing
Richards, Harry Benjamin is shown to be more than familiar with a
transsexual narrative:
As [Benjamin] listened to me reviewing my history, he tilted his head first
one way and then another, sometimes nodding agreeably. Occasionally,
when I would grope for words, he would supply them so casually that I
didn't notice at first. Then I began to realize that the old man really did
understand, so much so that he could probably have told the story with
out my help. The childish exploits, the futile years of psychotherapy, the
driving compulsion, the skulking around-all these constituted a famil
iar refrain that accompanied his daily work. He listened intelligently, and
he understood almost as well as I did. I began to gain respect for this
little man. (164-165)
1 08 Mirror Images
Benjamin relieves Richards, in both senses, of the need to detail her

autobiography, anticipating themes and turns of plot, providing appro
priate phraseology. As its original authority, the so-called "father" of
transsexuality who had by then published the first book-length study of
transsexuality, The Transsexual Phenomenon , he can indeed "tell the
story" without her help. 13 At this point Richards portrays Benjamin's
intimate knowledge as reassuring, a sign of his understanding-and
crucially his authorization does allow her to begin transition. Yet when
this same authority is later wielded to write Richards out of a transsex
ual narrative, it becomes apparent that Benjamin's filling in for Richards
in the intake interview is also in effect a form of silencing her. Benjamin
decides that, as a prominent professional (and with her unambivalently
heterosexual past), Richards's story does not in fact fit Benjamin's pre
conceptions of the "true" transsexual plot. Forcing Richards to discon
tinue hormones and refusing to authorize her surgery, Benjamin inter
rupts the progress of her transition-in his capacity as primary author
curtailing, at least temporarily, the specific plot she would live out.
The clinician's reading thus officially confers and by the same token
may defer transsexual subjectivity. In this context, in which text stands
in for body, everything is at stake in the production and reception of
narrative in the clinician's office. A "misreading" can wreak irreparable
psychological and emotional damage, can even (if a desperate subject is
impeded in transition) indirectly kill or maim. As the past's recounting
is compelled by the knowledge that the future of one's sex is to be deter
mined by what one has to say for oneself, there has probably never been
so much at stake in oral autobiography. Moreover, although this is
never acknowledged in clinical texts, the diagnosis of "true" or "pri
mary" or "core" transsexualism is surely derived not merely from a cer
tain plot codifiable as transsexual but from an account that renders up
this plot clearly and coherently-in other words, from narrative form:
a strong, persuasive avowal of transsexuality, carefully supported by
appropriate episodes presented in an orderly manner, sufficiently but
not overwhelmingly detailed. In effect, to be transsexual, the subject
must be a skilled narrator of his or her own life. Tell the story persua
sively, and you're likely to get your hormones and surgery; falter,
repeat, disorder, omit, digress, and you've pretty much had it, however
"authentic" a transsexual you are. Erica Rutherford's account of her
interview with the clinician in her Nine Lives: The Autobiography of
Erica Rutherford suggests precisely the formal difficulties of rendering
Mirror Images 1 09
one's history in that oral encounter, as Pauly makes that all-important

specification in his comments on the diagnostic criteria, "clear-cut":
[The doctor] leaned back. "Tell me your story," he said.
My mind spun. "My story." That would take all day. I was nearly
fifty. What could he mean, "my story ? " How could I condense it? I ram
bled on in a confused way, as best I could, while the doctor made notes
and sometimes asked me to repeat something. I j umped from year to
year and decade to decade, talking sometimes about my childhood and
sometimes about my recent feelings. I was overwhelmed by the years of
14
misery and the hours and hours of psychiatric sessions.
But it is not merely the vicissitudes of memory, the recursive, asso

ciative structure of oral narrative, and the stakes of reception that
make telling transsexual autobiography a fraught task. For some per
haps the most difficult aspect of the autobiographical requirement is
simply speaking that which may constitute what is most unspeakable
about the self. In his published autobiography Raymond Thompson
returns to the clinical scene of this oral autobiography and underlines
precisely these ways in which, as a compelled representation of the
unrepresentable, it poses a disturbing dilemma. For Thompson trans
sexuality--even acknowledging as a female-to-male who never lives
in the world as a woman that he ever was female-is too painful for
words: "I didn't have the capacity, or the desire to talk about myself or
specifically about my condition. I never described myself or my condi
tion in any way and I could only express myself in monosyllables,
never saying a word over and above what was necessary to anyone."
Yet he must tell his story in order to get help: "Soon however, I was
going to have to talk about myself and my condition, in order to ask
for the help that I needed . . . . in order to get help, I had to speak." How
to re-member the body one would forget-indeed, the agnosic body
one is not? 15
The recognition of what is at stake in self-articulation does not
(unsurprisingly) loosen Thompson's tongue. Faced with the psychia
trist's request, Thompson remains unable to speak his birth name,
choking on its feminine sound, his body (once again) punning on that
which cannot be spoken. Fascinatingly, however, in this case it is
Thompson's very delimiting of this name as unspeakable, his faltering,
that catches the clinician's attention and begins the latter's authorization
of Thompson's transsexuality:
1 10 Mirror Images
[The psychiatrist] was looking at his notes a lot while he was tal king to
me, but his interest picked up when I was unable to say the name given
to me at birth. He had asked me matter-of-factly what the name was, and
no matter how I tried to press it out of my lips, I j ust choked on it. I sim
ply couldn't say it. I was struggling because there seemed to be a reason
why I should say it. I finally agreed to write it down. He looked at the
piece of paper for a minute and took in the name which I so detested, then
looked at me and said, "You could have fooled me." I breathed a sigh of
6
relief. Hearing him say that seemed a definite act of recognition. 1
The clinician's interest is caught by Thompson's ellipses (presumably

he looks up from his notes at this point); he begins to read transsexual
ity specifically only when Thompson cannot speak: the unspeakability
of the female name symptomizes the unthinkability of the female
identity of the subject before him. I n his "act of recognition" ("You
could have fooled me")-a repudiation along with Thompson of any
trace of femaleness-the clinician signals his initial clinical approval
of Thompson's "true" transsexuality. Notably, while Thompson even
tually writes his female name in the clinician's office, his published
autobiography, What Took You So Long?, leaves this name glaringly
unwritten throughout; Raymond is always "Ray," is never given a
female name and rarely a female pronoun. What is too painful for the
spoken word before the clinician remains too painful for the written
word in his book. In reproducing this aporia of what cannot be spoken
in writing, Thompson's autobiography transparently elucidates-pre
cisely through reenacting it-how traumatic may be that first scene of
compelled narrativization of the transsexual past.
For the clinician the dependence of the diagnosis on narrative raises
concerns above all of the autobiography's authenticity. How to be sure
of the true sex of the transsexual body ? How to know (gnosis) distinc
tively or apart (dia) transsexual identity ? The diagnosis is premised on
the belief that autobiography can and should function mimetically
narrative mirror to transsexual nature. While clinicians evidently fear
the deliberate artifice of the transsexual narrator (author as fraudster),
they yet appear to remain quite ignorant of the ways in which the auto
biography is fundamentally constructed as narrative: a telling, a repre
sentation, the life thoroughly contingent on the form. Professional writ
ings frequently contain strategies about how to detect the inauthentic
transsexual via the inauthentic account, how to get the "true story. "
Mirror Images 111
Psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Leslie Lothstein suggests corrobo

rating the patient's account with biographies produced by significant
others; in one of his cases the subject's story comes to him via an unsym
pathetic brother's letter. 1 7 As may be imagined, however, because such
others can have deeply vested interests in the presenting subject not real
izing his or her transsexuality, this stipulation can lead to an even more
vexed situation in which competing narratives tell blatantly different
stories about the same subject, in which narrative appears even more
opaque and the bios less retrievable. (Biography is of course no more
authentic, no more the "life itself' than autobiography.) Along similar
lines psychiatrist and specialized researcher of transsexual accounts
Bryan Tully encourages the professional to use "authenticity checks" to
weed out the "deliberate and skillful deception [that transsexuals may
deploy] to achieve hormones and surgery"; to institute a system of cross
checking between different autobiographical versions. Truth will out in
narrative repetition: "It is very difficult to sustain complex cover stories
over a long time in the face of extended cross-examination. As police
and espionage interrogators know full well, some 'leakage' of what is
being covered up is almost impossible to prevent." 1 8
Tully's policing model o f reading transsexual autobiography, with
the clinician as interrogator/detective, brings to the fore not only the
clinician's fears of fraudulence in transsexual narrative but the peculiar
unspoken violence these fears may structure into the diagnostics of
reading. The patient's position is to confess, the professional's-half
priest holding the key to the patient's salvation, half detective decoding
this clinical narrative-to listen, to take note-and precisely to police
the subject's access to technology. Clinician as policeman is a shocking
equation when we remember this is supposed to be a healthcarer/patient
relation. If we follow through with the analogy, the transsexual occupies
the place of criminal, is assumed to be a "suspect" text. Indeed, Loth
stein's account considers transsexuality a cover for a profound psycho
pathology that can only be resolved psychotherapeutically, with talk and
not transition; Tully's study of transsexual accounts also concludes ques
tioning the necessity of transition. Psychologists Leah Cahan Schaefer
and Connie Christine Wheeler have astutely observed that it is in part
this tendency among some clinicians to approach the transsexual as a
suspect text-a lack of understanding from the medical establishment
of the difficulty in rendering transsexuality as story-that may provoke
transsexuals to "falsify" histories in the first place.19 Certainly, for any
1 12 Mirror Images
subject who experiences transition as essential, the importance of

obtaining the right reading is inestimable. Yet this suspicion toward the
transsexual narrator has a wider resonance outside the clinical situation.
As we will see throughout the second part of this book (beginning with
Hausman), that suspicion is the way to approach the transsexual text is
repeatedly taken for granted, in the history of transsexual subjects and
in contemporary readings of transsexual narratives, by cultural critics as
much as clinicians. It is as if that redoubling of sex and gender, or per
haps the reliance of body on narrative, makes the transsexual an intrin
sically unreliable text in the eyes of the reading other. If the transsexual
narrative as much as the body is a second skin, the encounter with that
very twofoldness seems to slide swiftly into assumptions of the transsex
ual's duplicity. As we move from narrative in the clinical situation to
narrative in the published autobiographies, one published transsexual
autobiography will serve to dramatize and elucidate the effect of this
hermeneutics of suspicion on transsexual subjectivity.
Published during the 1 970s at a juncture when in various disciplines
(anthropology, sociology, and most pertinently in this context, psychia
try) the personal narrative began to be credited as a viable and authentic
source of insider knowledge on institutions, Robert Bogdan's edition of
Jane Fry's transsexual autobiography, Being Different: The Autobiography
ofJane Fry, is transsexual autobiography repackaged as sociological doc
ument.20 Sociologist Bogdan edits from interviews and follows transsex
ual Fry's narrative with a discussion of the clinicians' medical reports on
her case. From this textual layering we read both the transsexual auto
biography and the clinical reading of this autobiography; or, rather, the
clinicians' refusal to read Fry's autobiography. For the professional notes
compete with the autobiographical narrative; the doctors diagnose not
transsexuality but psychosis, finding in Fry a subject in whom gender
identity disorder is not what it seems but symptomatic, a signifier for
something else (the performative demand in excess of the referential
need again). Whereas for the subject feeling like a woman is concordant
with a transsexual self-as Bogdan points out, Fry's narrative reveals
that "Jane accepts her gender feelings 'for what they are,' that is, she
takes them for granted"-for the clinicians Fry's gender feelings func
tion as " 'immature verbalizations,' [symptoms of] a 'character disorder,'
'castration anxiety,' a 'psychotic profile,' and part of a 'repertoire' " (2 1 5).
While they accept that Fry believes herself to be a woman, they them
selves do not believe this, their disbelief radically throwing the truth of
Mirror Images 7 13
her belief into question. Unsatisfied with the literalism of Fry's trans
sexual autobiography, the clinicians seek out another interpretation,
effectively rewriting her narrative: if in Fry's account her father does not
figure significantly, in the clinical reports this very absence becomes key,
a possible etiological cause for her psychic disturbance.
Not surprisingly, Fry's autobiography shows that her very life has, in
a circular fashion, constituted an interpretative battle to shape her his
tory to achieve the right reading and change her sex. The cause of her
particular transsexual struggle rests with her shortcomings as autobi
ographer. Almost exceptionally among transsexual autobiographers,
Fry is a blatantly poor narrator of her life: even if one allows for its sta
tus as transcription from oral recounting, her narrative is disorganized,
repetitive, and defensive-in my experience, the hardest transsexual
autobiography to read. Even the section of Fry's writing that Bogdan
does include in the book proves equally hard to read. It is this narrative
difficulty--or narrative deficiency-I suggest, that is at the root of the
clinicians' delay in diagnosing her transsexuality (Fry does eventually
obtain the diagnosis and subsequently hormone treatment from one
sympathetic doctor; does his brief "case history" supply her with the
narrative frame she needed ? [ 130]). Bogdan, however, uses the juxtapo
sition of transsexual autobiography and clinical text to underscore the
stakes of reading transsexual narratives carefully. Since through read
ing his transcribed interviews with Fry we have "spent more time with
her and [have] more first-hand information about her than all the pro
fessionals whose comments have been presented here, we are in a posi
tion to look at them more skeptically and to give the patient's perspec
tive more credence" (2 1 6-2 1 7). In effect, we are asked to perform the
reading the clinicians didn't and restore meaning to her narrative (to
read her as transsexual); at the same time we are asked to subject the
readings of her to our skeptical reading, to read "the politics of diagno
sis" (220). The hermeneutics of suspicion are reversed and reflected
back on the clinicians themselves.
That narrative is the linchpin of the transsexual diagnosis has one
unforeseen side effect. If the published transsexual autobiographies are
typically so crafted and engaging it is surely because of the narrative rig
ors of this diagnostic situation: because to be transsexual, transsexuals
must be arch storytellers--or if they are not, must learn to become pass
able ones. But, given that transsexual subjectivity originates in this com
pelled narrative situation in all its fraughtness, why would transsexuals
7 14 Mirror Images
make a voluntary return to narrative in writing their autobiographies ?

What is the function of the published return ?
Transsexual Conformity: The Published Return

As expected, narrative has an even more textured presence when the
transsexual writes the life story. Nevertheless, in Hausman's chapter on
published transsexual autobiographies that follows her chapter on the
transsexual's demand for subjectivity, the genre of this form of transsex
ual representation still remains transparent; it is as if (following the clin
ician) one could evaluate transsexuality even in transsexual autobiogra
phy without considering the import of the particular narrative frame.
According to Hausman the autobiographies constitute transsexuals'
attempts to naturalize their gender, to "cover over" their technological
production with claims to always already really be the "other" sex ( 1 73).
(Hausman rightly points out these claims to already really be a man or a
woman are often inscribed in the narratives as a form of psychic or
embodied intersexuality.) Her purpose in reading the autobiographies is
to reveal and critique this cover-up. She suggests that the autobiogra
phies' naturalization of gender effectively undermines the conception of
transsexuality in two parallel ways. First, in the claims they make to
already really be the other sex within the autobiographies-that is to
really be a man or woman-transsexuals contradict their own (prior)
demands for sex change. Second, such claims result in a tension between
transsexual autobiographies and the professional representation of
transsexuality. For if the clinical text lays out transsexuality as a narra
tive of sex change and defines transsexuals as subjects whose gender
identity as different makes necessary this intervention into their sex,
transsexual autobiographers' insistence on always already really being
the other sex subverts this description and unsettles the very etiology of
transsexuality: "transsexuals compromise the official understanding of
'gender' as divorced from biological sex by their insistent reiteration of
the idea that physiological intersexuality is the cause of their cross-sex
identification" ( 1 4 1 ). For Hausman the autobiographies are above all
conformist texts: transsexual autobiographies are of a "closed nature"
(1 47), "monolithic narratives" ( 1 56), texts in which "gendered meanings
are unilinear and very clear" ( 1 58). Indeed, she considers the primary
rhetorical function of transsexual autobiographies to get readers to con
form their lives to the author's: "The purpose of the narratives is to force
the reader to comply with the author's experience, to begin to interpret
Mirror Images 7 15
his or her own life along the same trajectory"-a purpose against which
Hausman admits she finds "resistance" "exhausting" ( 1 56).
The troubling ramification of Hausman's reading is its conclusion
that transsexual self-representation works to subvert not only the narra
tive of sex change offered by the clinician, not only the consistence and
coherence of transsexual accounts but the very feasibility of transsexual
ity. Transsexual identity again appears untenable, founded and immedi
ately unfounded on a contradiction; transsexual autobiography, like the
demand in the clinician's office, a self-deconstructing, self-undermining
opposition. However, in her very attentiveness to the contradictions
within transsexual autobiographies and between transsexual autobi
ographies and the clinical narrative, in her very sense of the texts' "closed
nature" and conformism, Hausman misses the crucial points about the
conformism and contradictions of transsexual autobiographies. First,
transsexual autobiographies conform as narratives to a generic form;
they conform above all as autobiography. Second, the genre of autobiog
raphy operates precisely on a set of reconcilable and constitutive opposi
tions. These oppositions provide the larger framework within which
Hausman's temporal "problematic" (always already and transformation)
not only makes sense but is requisite. Third, the autobiographies' con
formism to the oppositions within the genre of autobiography in turn
plays an indispensable role in actuating transsexual transition. The auto
biographies do not undermine but permit the realization of transsexual
subjectivity. And finally, the autobiographies show the transsexual and
medical narrative in collaboration: a relationship again complicated, but
ultimately consolidated, by autobiographical conventions. In short, crit
ical questions arise from the dependence of transsexuality on autobio
graphical narrative in the clinical situation that Hausman does not
address: How do the particular conventions of autobiography under
write the representation of transsexuality in the published autobiogra
phies ? What is at stake in transsexuals continuing to conform their lives
specifically to this genre ? It is not simply in the clinician's office but in
the very conception of transsexual subjectivity that autobiography sub
tends (supports and makes possible) transsexuality.
Before critiquing transsexual autobiographies for conforming to a
specific gendered plot, for writing narratives in which gendered mean
ings are "unilinear," we need to grasp the ways in which the genre of
autobiography is conformist and unilinear. In that its work is to orga
nize the life into a narrative form, autobiography is fundamentally con-
1 16 Mirror Images
formist. "The original sin of autobiography," writes critic Georges

Gusdorf in his classic description of autobiography's conventions, "is
first one of logical coherence and rationalization."2 1 Autobiography's
primary purpose is to correspond life to textual form, to order the dis
order oflife's events into narrative episodes. In autobiography the desul
toriness of experience acquires chronology, succession, progression
even causation; existence, an author. In other words writing endows the
life with a formal structure that life does not indeed have. Published
transsexual autobiography is no exception to this rule of autobiograph
ical composition. The formality of autobiography shapes transsexual
transition as plot, presenting the transsexual life as narrative mythos. All
life events in the autobiographies seem to lead toward the telos of the
sex-changed self. This gendered coherence is inextricable from the nar
rative coherence of the genre.
Many transsexual autobiographies make explicit the structuring
effect of the genre on the life by drawing out a particular truism about
autobiography as a voyage into the self. Writing the life, the trope evi
dences, inscribes it as a journey: a trajectory in which episodes lead
toward a destination. The life written visibly and inevitably takes on
this same progressive, connective, and destined pattern of the journey:
departure, transition, and the home of reassignment. Most obviously
among the autobiographies, Morris's Conundrum (fittingly, since the
author is also a travel writer) transforms the trope of journeying into a
theme for the life-writing. Morris presents transition as a mystical quest
for the grail of the self: ordered, directed, and driven by the vision of an
end. The use of "odyssey" as a title for a number of the autobiographies
makes explicit how writing turns transition into a mythic voyage.22 The
"odyssey" is as much the writing as the life, for it is the writing that
allows this scripted navigation into the life. One of the most recent
transsexual personal accounts, Claudine Griggs's Passage Through
Trinidad: Journal of a Sex Change, presents transition more prosaically
through an account of an actual geographic trip required for surgery.23
As Griggs's chapter titles succinctly evidence-"Decision," "Arrival,"
"Hospital," "Pain," "Routine," "Visitors," "Progress," "Freedom,"
"Anticipation," "Release," "West," "Home," "Aftermath"-writing the
transsexual self through the literal journey nevertheless lends a diegetic,
successive, and telic structure to transition, this frame inscribing trans
sexuality as schematic. Journeys, like narratives, have points of depar
ture and destination, beginnings and ends; writing allows the transsex-
Mirror Images 1 17
ual to make connections, to trace "how I got here." The pervasiveness of

the journey trope in transsexual writings, of this convention that draws
attention to the self-conscious formality of the story, serves to remind us
that we cannot assess transsexuality's linear plotting outside its stylistic
frame of autobiography.
However, autobiography's structure is not that of simple linear pro
gression. The narrative is founded on a temporal double movement.
While structured as progression-developmental, moving toward a
telos-the life in writing is always a retrospective reconstruction. Auto
biography returns in order to re-present and in so doing, re-vise (rewrite
and see again) the past. The subject's becoming through returning, the
life's progression through revision of the past, is autobiography's struc
tural sine qua non. It is in fact only retroactivity that bestows organiza
tion on the life story. Looking back as the conventional autobiographi
cal omniscient narrator of his or her life, as the subject who knows the
end of the story, the transsexual writes the life as directed. As Gusdorf
states, life's unknownness, that quality of randomness, "cannot exist in
a narrative of memories composed after the event by someone who
knows the end of the story."24
The transsexual autobiography that we read is therefore the life as re
membered by the envisioning, knowing "I." The entire life is filtered
though the present moment of remembering: or in fact several different
moments after the event-remembering in the life and in the writing.
Stephanie Castle's term for moments in the autobiographies when the
transsexual first realizes his or her gendered difference-the Joycean
"epiphany"-suggests j ust this textualized, self-conscious quality of
transsexual time in its autobiographical inscription.25 An instant that
takes its place in a sequence among other moments and thus transcends
its own instantaneity, an epiphany is above all a narrative moment
when what it "epiphanizes" becomes clear. The "epiphany" in Morris's
Conundrum illustrates this textualization of autobiographical narrative
time. Morris claims to be able to fix her recognition of a transsexual self
to a very precise instance when, as the three- or four-year-old James, she
(as he) is "under the piano" his (her) mother is playing; it was then,
Morris writes, that he (she) grasps "that [she/he] had been born into the
wrong body, and should really be a girl" (3). But when does this moment
really acquire this significance of absolute marker beginning the trans
sexual plot? While Morris may well have been aware of a deep-rooted
sense of difference at the time of the experience, this difference does not
7 78 Mirror Images
become schematized as part of a transsexual narrative until that narra

tive is discovered and conceived-and this is surely not in the moment
recounted, not by the young child. Indeed, we might venture that the
episode does not properly acquire its full significance as origin story for
the transsexual self until the moment of recounting, until it is assigned
this place in the writing. It is as the framing vignette for Conundrum (the
episode begins the autobiography, and in the final chapter we are told
Morris is "under the piano still" [ 1 70]) that the memory becomes the
scene that launches the transsexual plot. Meaning is conferred on the
event most completely by this textual location. To remark the essential
retroactivity of meaning in this way in the representation of the trans
sexual life does not invalidate Morris's claims for the scene. Rather, it
underlines the extent to which, in the narrative we read, the life is
absolutely and inevitably shaped by the moment of writing.
The life's directing by the autobiographer secure in knowing the end
of his or her story, is, then, a generic feature of autobiography. Other
forms of life-writing in which the subject writes without knowing the
end of the story present the life as less product than process. Although
journals and diaries are of course also a recounting of the past (writing
can never be absolutely synchronized with the present moment of liv
ing), their dated entries fragment the life into an organization less linear
and coherent, resemble life more closely as it is lived. Typically, if auto
biographical retroactivity narrativizes the life, the continuous present of
the journal creates life as open-ended, less schematic. It is fitting, there
fore, that the two transsexual journals, Paul Hewitt's A Self-Made Man:
The Diary ofa Man Born in a Womans Body and Jerry/Jerri McClain's To
Be a Woman are accounts of the early stages of transition of, respectively,
a female-to-male and a male-to-female. 26 In the present tense, in journal
form, transsexual transitions appear not only a good deal less structured
but in these instances, literally incomplete. By their own acknowledg
ment both Hewitt's and McClain's transitions remain incomplete by the
end of each text (they are still waiting for surgery). While the form is
surely chosen to fit the life (an unfinished form for an unfinished tran
sition), it also in turn shapes (conforms to form) what we read of the life
in these instances, presenting the transsexual narrative precisely as on
going. The bios is thoroughly dependent on the representation.
The temporal "discontinuity" that Hausman finds in transsexual
autobiography-the discontinuity "between the story of surgical sex
change and the story of already being the other sex" (1 73)-between
Mirror lmoges 1 19
becoming and being, like the linearity of the transsexual plot cannot be
understood apart from the temporal dynamics intrinsic to autobio
graphical form. There might seem to be a contradiction between the
work of transsexual narrative-to document change: to say how I
became a woman-and the transsexual's claim to already {truly) be a
woman. Yet within the genre of autobiography this play between trans
formation and the continuity of the self, between conversion and iden
tity, is not a disruptive paradox but a founding dynamic: a dynamic that
in turn, as transsexuality is reliant on the autobiographical form, founds
transsexuality. Conversion-along with confession, thoroughly embed
ded in autobiography's generic origins-is, we might say, autobiogra
phy's story of identity. For if the narrative of autobiography documents
change (why deploy a form, after all, whose very purpose as diegesis is
to trace the passage of time, if the subject does not change?), the autos of
autobiography presumes identity, the continuity of the self, an "I" across
time. Autobiography not only masters these splits between conversion
and identity into a generic form; it necessitates them. Likewise trans
sexuality: its subject sex change of course, transsexuality is an archetypal
conversion story; yet in conversion and change {transition) lies the key
to transsexual identity.
What Hausman identifies as the " internal problematics" ( 1 42 )
"latent" ( 1 4 7) i n transsexual autobiographies (the contradiction between
always-already being and becoming) is, therefore, an overt structuring
principle, not only of transsexual autobiography, not only classically, of
all autobiography but of transsexual subjectivity. Even before the pub
lished autobiography, even before the subject's presentation to the clin
ician, autobiographical retroaction is at work in the subject's conception
of his or her identity as transsexual. The repeated positing of a "true
gender" ab initio, a recasting of the past to produce the present, propels
the story of transsexual change; retroaction as much in the living as in
the writing facilitates the subject's "progress" to and through transition.
I have always/felt/behaved/looked (more) like a boy/girl; I have always
been me. Martino captures how transsexual transformation is fueled by
such a narrativization of subjectivity: "We, as sex-changed persons, are
what we've always wanted to be" (270). The transsexual story, produced
like every autobiography from the hindsight of the present moment but
with transsexual subjectivity itself at stake in autobiographical retroac
tion, is that the subject become what, according to the subject's deepest
conviction, s/he already truly was. In the case of transsexuality such
120 Mirror Images
becoming, it needs emphasizing, can only be accomplished through a

circular revisioning of identity.
Given this positing of identity ab initio, in transsexual autobiography
as in every conversion narrative, the "conversion" entails not so much a
dramatic throwing off of a former self as a recasting of that past to make
sense of and cohere-indeed, I am also arguing to constitute-the pre
sent one. It is in this light, as the necessary friction driving the autobio
graphical narrative and the transsexual transition interconnectedly, that
we need to understand the tendency of transsexual autobiographers to
posit an originally transgendered identity that often appears as a pre
transition psychic or embodied intersexuality. lntersexuality is a con
vention of transsexual autobiography, an effect of transsexuality's narra
tive form. The notion that I was already more like a boy than a girl, that
there was already something of the boy in me, is a characteristic of trans
sexual autobiography as a body narrative. When Mark Rees's Dear Sir or
Madam: The Autobiography ofa Female-to-Male Transsexual opens with
the young Rees as Brenda being asked whether he (as she) is a boy or a
girl, Rees is representing his transsexual narrative as already plotted on
his body: look, he says, my transsexuality was already corporeally legible
to others; I have been me all along.27 The device strives simultaneously
toward coherence of narrative and body-to cohere the body with the
narrative. The autobiographical self, as is its wont, suggests itself from
the beginning as already there. The transsexual self simply follows form.
Autobiography produces identity (sameness, singularity); transsexual
autobiography, we should not be surprised, produces gender identity.
And herein (in narrative's intrinsic capacity to construct identity),
surely, lies the lure of the genre of autobiography for the transsexual, a
key reason why many transsexuals return to the narrative form after their
diagnosis to write their lives. If autobiography in the clinician's office
allows the subject to begin the transition, the published autobiographical
narrative (through the revision of writing even more than the recursion
of speech) allows the transsexual to integrate the self after transition: to
make sense of a dramatic shift in sexed plots, to produce continuity in the
face of change. Narrative composes the self. Conforming the life into nar
rative coheres both "lives" on either side of transition into an identity plot.
This is not simply to remark autobiography as healing (although, partic
ularly given the autobiographical requisite in the clinician's office, the
therapeutic function of the return to narrative does need remarking) but
autobiography as constitutive. Autobiography reconciles the subject to
Mirror Images 12 1
his or her past and in so doing allows a self to be instated in the present.
In the case of Thompson, whose autobiography coauthored with his
counselor literally doubles as psychotherapy (they write the book from
his sessions), although he is unable to speak his life to the diagnosing psy
chiatrist, the act of returning in autobiography to write it has an explic
itly integrating function that allows for this unspeakable-precisely the
transsexual self-to be not only spoken but claimed as self. He now
writes as a transsexual, the implication being that the passage of writing
works through something of the trauma of that transsexual passage.
"The remembering and the telling of his life's events" entailed in the
book's production, his counselor/coauthor claims, "proved as cathartic as
any therapy. At first his story came pouring out in a jumbled and frag
mented fashion, but as we journeyed [again, the revisioning as voyage]
through this life, the memory of events, feelings and conversations sharp
ened." In autobiography's process, Thompson "put[s] together the pieces
of his fragmented life"; narrative has an explicitly cohering function.28
Like surgery, autobiography heals the splits in plot into a transsexual
identity; indeed, like and after surgery's re-membering of the body, the
remembering of the life integrates and fills in for the absences of the nar
rative self. Autobiography melds together a body narrative in pieces. In
short, for transsexual autobiographers, what Gusdorf describes as autobi
ography's "sin" of coherence may be quite explicitly a (second) salvation.
Inevitably, given the onomastic and pronominal shifts that are intrin
sic to transsexual transition, transsexual autobiographies do contain
some startlingly cracked gendered syntax as the subject narrates the
transsexual movement: "A Little Boy Discovers Herself'; "A Girl's
Journey to Manhood."29 The transsexual autobiography, surely excep
tionally among autobiographies, must change its autobiographical sub
ject: from Barry to Caroline, from George to April, from Robert to
Roberta, from Marie to Mario, from - to Raymond, the autobiography
must represent two protagonists. Richards's Second Serve in fact height
ens this difference by creating a dramatic framework out of the see-saw
swing between its two gendered personae, Dick and Renee, as they vie
for the part of protagonist, the "I" of the autobiography. One scene
occurring before Dick's transition to Renee, yet when Renee is beginning
to assert her will to existence, illustrates the dizzying effect in its inscrip
tion in language of the shifts in the transsexual plot-the difference this
body makes to autobiographical narrative. The episode recounts the loss
of Renee's virginity, her first sexual experience as a woman (but is it) ?
122 Mirror Images
The splits in perception-between how Renee desires to be seen and

how she is seen; between this cross-dressed, male-embodied self of the
past and the female-embodied "real" Renee writing now-multiply
(and multiply gender) the autobiographical subject. Auditioning for a
part in a drag show, Renee finds herself the object of desire on the part
of the club owner. Renee wants to be seduced as a heterosexual woman
but the club owner, Jimmy, a gay man, fancies Dick/dick in a dress.
During the first movements of Renee's seduction, "I" recounts the scene
as if it occurred to a third person, as if outside it-which, indeed, not
identical with this cross-dressed Renee from a pretransition past, she is:
"[Jimmy] stroked her thigh and feeling no resistance moved his hand
higher. He ran his fingers between her legs. A warm flush suffused
Renee's person, and she opened her legs a little . . . . All seemed to glow
as she gazed at him and then felt his lips pressed urgently against hers"
(73-74). As the seducer gets down to business, however, and Renee feels
more secure in being desired as a woman, "I" is able to join in identifica
tion and take over Renee's part in the narrative, now speaking both for
and with her: "Jimmy suggested we go upstairs. I agreed, and he led me
to his room. When he removed his kimono he revealed a well-kept body,
completely nude. I was still in my dress, and he came to me with another
languorous kiss. I said I was a virgin" (74).
But as Jimmy undresses Renee and Dick-and crucially dick: for it
is the body that makes the difference to the subject of transsexuality
threatens to disrupt the realization of Renee's (hetero)sexual fantasy, the
narrative slips back into the third person: "Off came the dress, and with
it went some of the dewiness of Renee's perspective. The bra was next
and she began to feel much less secure . . . . Deprived of her accouter
ments, Renee began to fade, and Dick, who had been sent on vacation
to parts unknown, came snapping back" (74). It is finally sex (body and
act)-the sexed difference between that past self and the autobiograph
ical self writing in the present-that brings Dick firmly back onto the
stage and sends Renee along with the again disidentifying "I" scurrying
off into the wings: "[Dick] didn't like what he found. He was taking a
homosexual's penis in his mouth. Renee, however, was not completely
gone, and it was she who insisted that Jimmy penetrate her face-to-face
as a man would a woman. Jimmy, kindly agreed to this ungainly setup.
Dick lay in absolute horror as he felt his anus invaded" (74) At the
moment of penetration (from Renee's perspective, for Dick, penetration
as a male by a homosexual), "I" who identifies in the present as a hetero-
Mirror Images 723
sexual woman can no longer keep up in the description the autobio

graphical identification or coherence: it is Dick's anus and not Renee's
vagina (as of this moment in the plot's recounting "I" 's futural part) that
receives Jimmy's penis. The split of the transsexual autobiographical
subject-the difference between me then and me now in body
becomes starkly inscribed in Dick's different naming in the narrative.
But while the gendered referent of the "I" necessarily changes in
transsexual autobiography as this scene so spectacularly captures, auto
biographical form ensures the continuity of the subject as a signifier.
Transsexual autobiography represents the transformation, but it also
generates the crucial points of conversion to show how the transsexual
splits are rejoined into a singular autobiographical subject. From Renee's
signature on Second Serve and our equation of the signature with the nar
rator and protagonist of the autobiography, we know all along that there
is really only one subject to the narrative; the autograph guarantees the
subject's gender coherence. In Second Serve "I" does finally transfer its
allegiance from Dick to Renee and this doubled subject homogenize
itself as the narrative is brought up to the present. This "sex change"
occurs not during sex reassignment surgery as we might expect, but at a
richly signifying moment in the narrative; for while it may be somatic
transformation that allows the transsexual to feel sex-changed, writing
in the autobiographies may generate its own transitional moments (more
symbolic, more in keeping with the flow of the story) to cohere the trans
sexual subject. Narrative enacts its own transitions. In Second Serve the
primary moment of integration occurs on the transatlantic voyage
Richards must make to Europe on h/er way to Casablanca for the
surgery. Although Richards will return as Richard Raskind, unreas
signed, dick/Dick intact, marry a woman, have a child, and attempt one
more time to live as a man, it is on the crossing from New York to Genoa
that Richards really "becomes" Renee, feels h/erself to be no longer act
ing a woman but to be one. She gives free rein to Renee, cross-dressing
for the first time consistently, abandoning Dick's identity in New York:
"As the Michaelangelo steamed through the quiet Mediterranean waters,
I felt myself sinking more and more into the persona of Renee. It was not
a role anymore. I felt myself to be a woman, and except for the much
atrophied genitals between my legs I really was one" (222). Brilliantly
punning on the words "passage" and "crossing," the narrative exuber
antly spinning out the valences of the trope of journeying in which trans
sexuality and autobiography are both so invested so that transsexuality,
124 Mirror Images
autobiography, and the journey are all richly conjoined, Richards makes
the ship a figure for her transition: "The Michaelangelo was my transi
tional vehicle" (2 1 9). The ship is a "transitional vehicle" in three senses:
literally, according to the geographical trip; transsexually, in terms of the
identity plot; and thus, autobiographically (the split of the "I" is cohered).
In her representation of this entire "voyage" Richards underlines that a
narrative sensibility drives the transition all along so that transsexuality
appears as already narrative-"on the boat it was F. Scot Fitzgerald, in
I taly it was Fellini" (246-247). If transition is always already narra
tivized-novelistic, cinematic-then how can we begin to read trans
sexuality outside of narrative's properties?
Indeed, for the transsexual even to discover the possibility of trans
sexuality-to transform it from private fantasy to realizable identity
plot-takes place "in" narrative. To learn of transsexuality is to uncover
transsexuality as a story and to refigure one's own life within the frame
of that story. The autobiographies' description of how transsexuals come
to name themselves transsexual graphically illustrates that self-knowl
edge as a transsexual requires such a narrativization. Self-naming in the
autobiographies is typically an "instance" (but my point is that as simul
taneously revisionary and visionary, as narrative it is never an instance)
enabled by the reading of other transsexual narratives, sometimes news
papers, but often previous transsexual biographies or autobiographies.
The media coverage of Christine Jorgensen's story in 1 952 and her own
autobiography of 1 967 produced a narrative model for many; even the
biography of the hapless Lili Elbe, another male-to-female who under
went unsuccessful reassignment in 1 933 without hormone treatment
(the surgeons attempted to implant ovarian tissue; she died soon after the
procedure), galvanized transitions, for at least it suggested the right pro
jected trajectory.30 The reading of transsexual narratives allows for the
recognition of one's own bios as a transsexual narrative. In Mirror Image
Hunt describes how her reading of Morris's Conundrum motivates her to
seek out hormones, the other transsexual a mirror image for Hunt to
model herself on: "Morris had faced this dilemma and solved it, and
given the courage and resolution, so could I. Morris had taken hormones
and so could I. . . . Morris had gone to Dr. Harry Benjamin in New York,
starting down the road that would end on the operating table, and I
could do that to."31 Previous transsexual autobiographies provide a nar
rative map: for the writing of the autobiography, of course, but also for
the subject's self-construction as transsexual. The autobiographies have
Mirror Images 725
a central place in what Stone terms the "Obligatory Transsexual File"

the collection of newspaper clippings, articles, photographs, any text on
transsexuality-that transsexuals amass to enable transition.32 Recent
transsexual autobiographies have even begun to display a consciousness
of their self-help function, listing support group/medical help telephone
numbers.33 Transsexuality is thoroughly engineered by autobiographi
cal narrative in this sense also: not only through the oral autobiography
in the clinician's office, not only in the retroactive reconstruction of the
life into a transsexual bios but through the reading of published narra
tives, the latter often engendering both the former. Again, this recycling
of the transsexual narrative from life to text to life (from body to narra
tive to body again)-what we might think of as inter-transtextuality,
both in the autobiographies and in the oral recounting--does not inval
idate the transsexual's gender. Rather, given the dependence of transsex
uality on narrative, given that transitions always requires that narra
tivization of the life, there is no other way in which the subject-indeed,
surely the point is any subject--could come to naming, to realization of
his or her categorical belonging except through some form of narrative.
Clinical narratives in their turn also come to play a role in the subject's
mapping of a transsexual plot. The subject returns to the clinical defini
tion in order to recognize his or her transsexuality for what it is. One of
Richards's earliest moments of self-recognition derives from reading
Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, which she finds in her
mother's (a psychiatrist) study; this nineteenth-century sexologist's case
histories of sexual inversion initially mirror her own gendered displace
ment. In their very naming, published autobiographies are underwrit
ten by the existence of the official medical discourse. "Diary of a
Transsexual," "Autobiography of a Transsexual," "Story of a Trans
sexual": the subject derives his or her autobiographical license from that
designation as a categorical subject. The transsexual is autobiographical
subject (that is, writing overtly under the rubric of transsexuality)
because s/he is medicodiscursive object. If to be a transsexual one must
be an autobiographer, to be a published transsexual autobiographer one
must have been subject to the diagnosis. On this count too, transsexual
autobiography's conventions are formally in keeping with those of auto
biography. Historicizing the origins of autobiography, Gusdorf states
that the genre only emerges when the subject "seizes on himself for
object" (a moment Gusdorf uses the discovery of the mirror-in the sub
ject of history and the history of the subject-to emblematize).34 When
126 Mirror Images
specified, Gusdorf s formulation explains how transsexual autobiogra

phy emerges at a homologous moment: when the transsexual autobiog
rapher seizes on the self as a medicodiscursive object. Again, there is no
stalling contradiction between this doubled location, between medical
discourse and transsexual self-representation, since generically, within
the narrative form, the autobiographer is by definition subject and object
of his or her text, only an autobiographer because a readable subject for
the other.
The clinician's preface attached to many of the autobiographies
explicitly stages the transsexual's medical designation, working the clin
ical narrative formally into the autobiography. Like white abolitionists'
prefaces to slave narratives, the clinician's preface "grants" the autobi
ographer a narrative voice, vouching both for its representationality
(authenticity) and its representativeness (exemplarity). This is the true
story of a slave, of a transsexual; this book has (is) a categorical life. "In
this book," writes Harry Benjamin at the beginning of Christine
Jorgensen's A Personal Autobiography, "Christine has written a docu
ment of great medical value. Her life story should forcefully support all
those institutions and individuals who endorse and provide hormonal
and surgical help for transsexuals." If the transsexual continues to derive
authority (authorship) from the clinician in writing his or her narrative,
the transsexual's autobiography, as a completed trajectory, a kind of
transsexual fait accompli or case history, in turn affirms the success of
the clinician's work. Indeed, the language of Benjamin's preface sug
gests a definitive contract between clinician and transsexual, a contract
that the transsexual in writing her autobiography fulfills. Jorgensen's
personal account is "long overdue," Benjamin writes, "owed" not only
to self, family, and fellow transsexuals but "to science and the medical
profession"; "[she] was in duty bound to supplement the technical report
made by her Danish physicians . . . in 1 953 with her own account of the
inner and outer events in her still rather young life."35 In writing her
autobiography, the transsexual returns the favor of authorization, part
of a reciprocity between clinician and subject that continues to take
place through the conventions of autobiographical narrative.
With the same effect of legitimating the personal story through the
medical narrative, other transsexual autobiographies ventriloquize
these medicalizing voices within their narrative. Canary Conn's autobi
ography begins and ends with the author giving a talk at a medical sym
posium on transsexuality organized by her surgeon-she is his princi-
Mirror Images 127
pal speaker, speaking (like Jorgensen for Benjamin) for him but also for
herself through him. Still shaky and queasy from her surgery only a few
days before, wheeled out into the auditorium in a wheelchair and bun
dled in blankets, Conn is markedly a patient and authority, exponent in
both senses-not only on stage but also, in that the lecture opens the nar
rative, on page, for the reader.36 The opening of Mirror Image employs
an ingenious device for securing the transsexual's narrative subjectivity
through and yet free from objectification from her medicodiscursive
construction. Hunt begins with a long description of the sex reassign
ment surgery of another male-to-female transsexual, using the other as
a mirror to reflect back into the text her image in reverse. While the
other's anesthetized body is laid out on the operating table, her eyes
bound closed with tape, Hunt watches the proceedings from within the
operating theater. The other stands in for Hunt (Hunt reveals that she
underwent the same procedure in the same location with the same sur
geon only six months previously), medical object then in order that
Hunt can be autobiographical subject now. Intercalating into the scene
a history of transsexuality and vaginoplasty, Hunt like Conn masters the
authoritative voice of the clinician (indeed, she defers her own story, the
personal account, until chapter 4), medical discourse overtly providing
the plinth for transsexual autobiography.
The autobiographer's interlocution with the clinical narrative is by
no means always loyal, however, and other autobiographers use their
personal histories not to authorize their account but to rewrite the clin
ician's and produce a better story for the self. The first sections of
Richards's autobiography parodically replay the form of the clinical
"case history": "If I sat down to write a case history of an imaginary
transsexual, I could not come up with a more provocative set of cir
cumstances than my childhood," Richards opens her narrative (5). This
particular case history, we later learn in Second Serve, was supplied by
her analyst during nineteen years of therapy. Freudian shrink Dr. Bak
thinks Richards is really just "a nice Jewish boy from Queens" ( 1 64)
who, like every other man, loves his penis and cross-dresses in order to
assure himself that he has still got it. Breaking up Bak's diagnosis
through a kind of narrative bricolage, using his story (but overreading
it) to structure her narrative, Richards caricatures her mother, "Dr.
Bishop," as the formidable phallic mother, seeking to compensate for
not being the son her own father wanted by becoming more of a man
than the men she scorns. In Richards's parodic replay, Dr. Bishop trans-
128 Mirror Images
forms her daughter into a son, naming her "Michael," and emasculates
her son, Dick, inaugurating his cross-dressing by sending him to a
Halloween party as a convincing pretty little girl: "when I was a girl,
Mommy loved me" ( 1 6). Mommy produces a little boy as little girl. The
plot of childhood in the autobiography turns precisely on key fetishistic
tropes as the game of the "disappearing penis" that Michael plays on her
brother, or as Dick the little boy snuggling up next to Dr. Bishop in bed
in the mornings and then watching her dress, transforming herself
from the "warm, soft" (7) Mommy to the austere Dr. Bishop: "Every
morning I experienced my mother's naked body as she softly went
through her cycle. The slight sag of her breasts, the shape and color of
her nipples, the soft muff of dark fur between her legs, these were as
familiar to me as any of her dark flannel suits" (20). The "life" is not a
reproduction of Dr. Bak's case history, for Richards raids his psycho
sexual discourse precisely in order to break with it. She goes on (in her
life and her life story) to transition, against Bak's prophecies of doom, to
lose her penis and precisely not "miss" it. His case history (indeed, as
with Benjamin's later) does not so much underwrite her autobiography
as it would undermine it-that is, if she had not found the means to
author her own plot (in both senses) differently. It is not insignificant
that, as a star opthamological surgeon with her own medical texts in
print Richards is herself a medical author. The difference between
transsexual as clinical object and medical authority is already broken
down, and the clinical definition appears more rescriptable.
In neat counterpoint to Richards's account, Martino, a transsexual
who as a male nurse likewise has a medical insiderness, unravels a psy
choanalytic account of female-to-male transgender-the little girl who
won't give up her penis (both books interestingly suggest the psychoan
alytic account of transsexuality in particular as in need of rewriting).37
Like Richards, Martino enlists the official discourse to satirical effect.
Tracing through his life an explicitly oedipal thread-his desire to be
better than his father, to love his mother in a mode in which he sees his
father as failing and even calling it such (" A bit of Oedipus, you think ? "
(28))-Martino ironizes the notion of a masculinity complex, using this
narrative in order to fund the humor in his own account, in what would
otherwise be too painful a story to read as it has been "a painful life to
live, a painful story to write" (xi). When his second phalloplasty starts to
go wrong, for example (the first has already been surgically removed as
a failure) and the tip of his penis necrotizes, Martino must sit nightly in
Mirror Images 129
warm baths and "very slowly, cut away at the dead tissue" (262). In his
return to it in writing, the trauma (physical, emotional) of the act-this
literalization of the loss of the end of his desire--can be staved off for
the sake of the reader with a joke on psychoanalysis: "Talk about cas
tration complex ! " (262). The humor works to keep us going past the
trauma, and this most patronizing of clinical plots for the female-to
male is made ridiculous in its autobiographical literalization.
If the transsexual autobiographer perceives a need to establish
authority either through or over the official medical discourse, it is pre
cisely because the "pain" of the classic transsexual story-"scenes" of
childhood cross-dressing and sometimes gruesome surgery-in its very
telling threatens to subvert the transsexual as authorial subject and
transform him or her into absolute other for the reader's horror and/or
fascination. As in the clinician's office, in the published autobiography
the subject faces the question of how to make the transsexual story read
able: a task that again entails not simply making the life visible but
making it processable. This may indeed require some revisioning on
the part of the author, for the subject now addresses an audience, I sug
gest, that is more than likely drawn to reading in expectation precisely
of such scenes. If transsexuals read the autobiographies for identifica
tion, the nontranssexual readership that sustains the market for these
autobiographies is surely motivated primarily by fascination, an inter
est in the transsexual precisely as prodigious other. Ironically, transsex
ual autobiographies depend for their circulation on a certain degree of
objectification of the transsexual, what we might call the tabloidization
of transsexuality: the daytime talk shows, the supermarket tabloids, for
which transsexuality is headline material. Particularly in their packag
ing, transsexual autobiographies may even explicitly court this reader
ship by advertising their own prodigious status: "an extraordinary
story," "an amazing account," "the life of an extraordinary woman."
From this status as bizarre other the autobiographer must yet hew a
coherently gendered authorial subjectivity: s/he must move from the
extraordinariness of transsexuality as a cultural story to the act of self
justification always entailed in writing my story.
Nevertheless the autobiographer patently wants to be read not sim
ply as a coherently gendered subject but as a transsexual. On this count
the conventions of autobiography would appear to be fundamentally at
odds with those of transsexuality. For if the highest ideal of transsexual
ity is to pass, and its antithesis is to be "read" (in the lingo when a trans-
130 Mirror Images
sexual is read, she has failed to pass, she is taken for what she wishes
most strongly not to be), then autobiography allows the transsexual's
reading. If somatic transition allows the transsexual to pass and blend in
as nontranssexual, to be incorporated and not be read as transsexual as I
suggested, autobiography undoes this passing and writes the body back
out. While the purpose of transsexuality is to redesign the body so that
one won't be able to "tell the difference" (the difference, that is, of trans
sexuality), the purpose of transsexual autobiography is to tell this differ
ence. Transsexuality promises to make the transsexual unremarkable;
autobiography re-insists in the face of this (this is autobiography's effect)
on the subject's remarkability. Writing the narrative may indeed be a
mechanism for working though the life; publishing it-putting the life
in a public domain-is a different matter altogether. The paradox of
transsexual autobiography surely rests here: not one between technol
ogy and intersexuality that compromises transsexuality but a paradox
between passing as nontranssexual and writing as an autobiographer
who wants to be read as transsexual.
What are we to make of the autobiographer's desire to be read as
transsexual ? I suggest that in publishing the narrative the transsexual is
not concerned with getting readers to conform their lives to his or her
own, with covering over transsexuality as Hausman insists, but on the
contrary, with declaring and uncovering a transsexual history. For while
sex reassignment surgery brings with it the chance of incorporation as a
man or a woman, an unremarkability (a passing as real that should not
be undervalued), becoming fully unremarkable requires the transsexual
to renounce the remarkable history of transition-the very means to this
unremarkability. The autobiographies are all written from a point post
transition precisely when the past self could be concealed, when passing
makes possible the detachment of the transsexual past; surgery, on the
surface, allows for an "amputation" (Robert Allen's surgical image for
this detachment) of the pretransition past.38 But although it can make
the body seamless in its "new" sex, what history would this body have
postreassignment? At the end of her autobiography Morris insists that
the question posed to her so often-what does it feel like to be a woman
after living so many years as a man ?-is doubly unanswerable: both
because of the felt experience of her transgendered identification (she
never felt herself to be a man) and because of her radically foreshortened
history as a woman. Neither history is really hers. To reconstitute her
past-and what is a subject without a past, what, after all, an identity
Mirror Images 13 1
without a narrative ?-she must write, therefore as a transsexual. In auto

biography, transsexuals meticulously re-member that past. The body
may have been subject to change, but the story is subject to preserva
tion-to recording as transsexual autobiography. As Roberta Cowell's
declaration at the end of her autobiography in fact can only serve to
remind us-glancing at herself in the mirror before her first entrance to
a ball as a woman, she thinks "[tJhe past is forgotten"-the entire pre
ceding narrative is evidence that the past is anything but forgotten.39
Autobiography is very determinedly an act of remembering. In preserv
ing in the autobiography a body of transsexual memory, in not per
forming the renunciation of a transsexual past, all transsexual autobiog
raphers-by dint of their status as transsexual autobiographers-hold
on to transsexuality as a subjectivity.
As well as allowing the transsexual to become a man or a woman in
the clinician's office, autobiography, then, allows the transsexual to
remain (very publicly) a transsexual. The autobiographical act on every
count does not undercut but permits the realization of transsexual sub
j ectivity-indeed, in a way not imagined by the medical narrative.
Autobiography's conventions are both the means to passing through
transsexuality and to passing back into it. There is, in the final instance,
an exquisite tension in transsexual autobiography between body and
narrative (the quest for gendered realness next to the refusal to cede
one's history as a transsexual), a tension that doesn't stall but sustains the
transsexual's capacity to write. Like Narcissus captured by the sight of
his reflection, the transsexual in autobiography neither fully merges
with nor moves away from the image of the changed self. The act of
self-reflection both begins the metamorphosis and prevents the total
mergence of past into present self that would mean the disappearance
of this remarkable narrative.
Reading Back: Toward a Transsexual Canon

As she works to uncover the technology transsexuals putatively "cover
over" in their autobiographies, Hausman's approach to transsexual
autobiography as a suspect text uncannily mirrors that of the policing
clinician who has gone before her: the critic catches us out in our duplic
ity again. Yet in weighing the evidence against us, Hausman and clini
cian fall short as narrative critics, for they fail to take into account the
extent to which transsexuality is organized by the conventions of auto
biography. The layers of concealment attributed to the disingenuous
132 Mirror Images
transsexual are none other than the layers of narrative itself: a layering
that does not invalidate transsexual subjectivity but makes it possible.
Although outside the domain of psychiatry and psychology specializing
in transsexuality (no writer has worked in a sustained way with trans
sexual autobiographical accounts before her), Hausman admits that her
purpose is in fact to work against transsexual accounts. Her agenda is
openly to "subvert the official story put forth by transsexual auto
biographers" ( 1 4 1). Given that transsexual autobiographies have been
so unread in cultural theory, given that they hardly represent an official
story in or beyond gender theory, it is not clear what is at stake in this
urge to subvert, the desire to "work" the contradictions of transsexual
representation and reveal the putatively latent story of transsexual auto
biography before even its blatant story is known. Perhaps the preface to
Changing Sex contains something of a clue.
Here, in her account of how she came to decide on the topic for her
project, Hausman describes how she "fell into" writing about transsex
uality "sideways," inadvertently," while tinkering with the idea of trans
vestism which was "kicking around feminist literary criticism at the
time" (vii). In the library she discovered transsexualism: her response,
"Now that was really fascinating" (vii). Incredibly, Changing Sex sug
gests this "fascination" with the subject of transsexuality from a point
outside of it not simply as one location from which to explore transsex
uality (and surely given transsexuality's entanglement in "fascination,"
this would require some explanation) but the authoritative site from
which to speak. Particularly in the chapter on the autobiographies, the
"critical reader" is set up in opposition to "the reader interested in veri
fying his or her gender confusion" ( 1 56) (i.e., surely, the transsexual).
Whereas the gender-confused use transsexual autobiography to verify
their gender confusion, critical readers (presumably having no gender
confusion to verify) apparently get to see through to the internal prob
lematics of these texts: as if transsexuals were not critical thinkers and
readers; indeed, as if one couldn't be a transsexual and a critic at the
same time. But--even assuming the discreteness of these identities in
the first place-why assume in the second place that the critic can read
more about sex and gender than the transsexual ? Much as she might
use her writing to block it out, Hausman too has a gender, a gender and
a body thoroughly embedded in her narrative, never divorced from her
praxis of reading. Again in her preface (this is where Changing Sex
reveals its "internal problematics"), Hausman writes that she was preg-
Mirror Images 133
nant for most of the year she spent rewriting the book. Her personal
concern at the time was that she might come to bear an unclearly sexed
child: "I am perhaps one of few expectant mothers who worry that they
will give birth to a hermaphrodite" (x). The autobiographical anecdote
reveals more about her critical perspective than any theoretical moment
in the text. Her preoccupation, that her body might contain a body that
resembles too closely her object of study, makes crystal clear that she
views the unclearly sexed body in her study with anxiety and alarm and
that she locates her own body in a clean, unambivalently sexed location
beyond this embodied sexed confusion. The horror in her fantasy of
pregnancy derives from its breaking down-through the imaginary
hermaphroditic child-her sustained antithesis between critic and
transsexual, authority and object of study. Her fear is that she may her
self via her "product" (book/child: here, the fear is that there will be no
dif!erence between body and na"ative) come to reflect the object of her
study, mirror image. No wonder the critical force of her perspective: her
struggle to make sure that the watch-glass of the laboratory through
which she views the transsexual as other does not become the plate-glass
of the mirror in which she might see herself.
It is the omission of autobiographical narrative in the discussion of
transsexuality that has led to a massive overvaluation of technology in
the "construction" of the transsexual. Hausman's project suggests that
it is technology and not narrative that "makes" the transsexual: we are
authored by the medical technologies of plastic surgery, endocrinology,
and the "idea of gender." But if autobiography is transsexuality's prof
fered symptom, the transsexual necessarily authors his or her own plot
before s/he has access to technologies. I have made this argument onto
genetically, but it also needs to be made phylogenetically. As she fixes on
technology as the marker of the transsexual subject, Hausman main
tains that we cannot use the category of transsexual for "subjects
exhibiting cross-sex behaviors prior to the technical capacity for sex
reassignment" ( 1 1 7), that transsexuals did not appear until after sex
change became possible. But Hausman-and to date, other critics-fail
to read the narratives that subjects told to author themselves prior to the
diagnosis of transsexuality. Even without the official discourse of sex
change, the plot lines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century trans
gendered subjects are remarkably consistent with those of contempo
rary transsexuals, the consistence and continuity of this narrative and its
conventions the very factor that produced a medical discourse around
134 Mirror Images
transgender that led to the writing of a transsexual diagnosis in DSM

//!. The diagnosis then stands for a recognition of the "trans-history"
(with all the connotations we can give that coining) of trans narratives.
Reading transsexual autobiography-and reading it back to form a
canon of transsexual narratives-is not merely a critical exercise but a
political enterprise. Indeed, narrative may be our keenest weapon in
these skirmishes over transsexual representation. Narrative is a reflec
tion, above all, of our capacity to represent ourselves.
"Do you think I could be a man, supposing I thought very hard-or prayed, Father?"
-Stephen Gordon, Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
"The negative sides to the book are just as interesting-why the need to be so male-dominated-the
relinquishing of Mary for a safe heterosexual relationship? Should it be seen as the first'invert' novel rather
than lesbian? Should we describe it as a lesbian novel at all?"
-Reader surveyed, Rebecca O'Rourke, Reflecting on The Well of Loneliness
The dullness of the book is such that any indecency may lurk there-one simply can't keep one's eyes on
the page. -Virginia Woolf, Letters
chapter 4
"Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a

Turbulent Age of Transition": The Invert,
The Well ofLoneliness, and the Narrative
Origins of Transsexuality
The Trials of a Lesbian Novel

Since the publication of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness in 1 928
its critics have generally agreed on one thing: that the sexual subject at
the center of Hall's novel is lesbianism.1 Even when the magistrate pre
siding at the novel's obscenity trial denounced its subject without nam
ing it, his invective ("these horrible practices," "these two people living
in filthy sin," "acts of the most horrible, unnatural and disgusting
obscenity") left no doubt that he was talking about female homosexual
ity.2 If Britain had pretended in the nineteenth century that sexual prac
tices between women did not exist (and thus did not warrant prohibi
tion), it could hardly continue to do once the trial had publicly prohib
ited The Well: "As a 'Modern Mother' protested, far from protecting
those whose minds were 'open to immoral influences,' the ban on The
Well had created such a ballyhoo that no young girl or boy could now
'remain ignorant of certain facts which ordinarily would never have
come to their notice.' "3 Broadcasting the unspeakable crime that it set
136 "Some Primitive Thing Conceived"
out to censor, The Welt's trial crucially set in motion its history of being
read as a lesbian novel.
The association of lesbianism with The Well has only intensified dur
ing the history of its reading: The Well has progressed from a lesbian
novel, to the most well-known lesbian novel, to "the lesbian novel," as
Jane Rule put it in 1 976.4 Yet as the last two decades of criticism since
Rule's canonization show, this definitively lesbian novel has also become
the definitively troublesome lesbian novel. The Well is the lesbian novel
least reconciled to its lesbian status. Its very donnee defies a lesbian read
ing: its protagonist is unwaveringly male-identified, its plot dooms les
bian love as tragic and impossible. Depicting the lesbian as a woman
who would be a straight man, perpetuating that most obvious of cultural
stereotypes, The Well is, in effect, lesbianism's most famous representa
tion and its most infamous misrepresentation. The novel's idealization
of masculinity and heterosexuality has, not surprisingly, been con
sidered to make it a bad representation of lesbianism: early lesbian
feminist readers Blanche Wiesen-Cook, Lillian Faderman, and Catha
rine Stimpson certainly thought the novel insufficiently lesbian. The
heterosexual/masculine framework for The Well has been read to recu
perate the novel as a historically accurate representation of lesbianism:
Caroll Smith-Rosenberg and Esther Newton challenged the earlier les
bian-feminist rejection by situating the novel in its historical moment.
Stephen's identifications have even been read to acclaim the novel a dis
cursive reversal of these ideals: Sonja Ruehl and Jean Radford have seen
The Well as transforming the cultural discourses that structure it, and
Gillian Whitlock has read it as at least attempting this endeavor. Most
recently Teresa de Lauretis has recruited its protagonist for a psycho
analytic theory oflesbian desire. But The Well has never been read for its
blatant transgendered narrative, and Hall's novel has remained founda
tionally yoked to lesbianism.5
Yet subliminally, transgender has been the subject of criticism all
along. As even the above lesbian readings suggest, transgender is The
Welt's stumbling block, that which must be "worked" if the novel is to
made sense of as lesbian. Why does Hall portray Stephen Gordon (in
name, body, behavior, and ideals) as so morbidly masculine, on the scale
of mannishness as less a manly lesbian than a man manque? What is
remarkable about previous critical work on the novel is how close it has
come, in the same moment as claiming the novel's subject as lesbian, to
performing that reading where Stephen is a woman who really would be
"Some Primitive Thing Conceived" 737
a man: that is, where she is not lesbian but a female-to-male transsexual.
While no critic has actually performed this reading, transsexuality has
consistently encroached on lesbianism in readings of the novel. It as
though the female-to-male transsexual has required a concerted dis
placement to the margins in order for the lesbian to remain center stage
of the novel's interpretations. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for
instance, note the transsexual possibilities of The Well only to suggest
that transsexuality serves as the medium for lesbianism: Hall was strug
gling "with a sense of lesbianism as tragic transsexuality."6 They argue
that transsexuality represents in part a means for Hall to convey the spe
cific isolation of the lesbian artist in the absence of a community of
women, and in part, analogously to other modernist "sexchanges," a
"metaphor" for the general gender anomie that followed World War I.
Esther Newton also invokes transsexuality in the novel as a lesbian sig
nifier. Although Newton's essay represents the most sustained attempt to
explicate the transgendered plot of The Well-and, exceptionally, recog
nizes transgender as a "real" experience-it similarly recoups the cross
gendered scheme for lesbianism. Transgender is lesbianism's historically
situated erotic drag: Hall "uses cross-dressing and gender reversal to
symbolize lesbian sexuality;" her heroine is a "lesbian in male body
drag"-as "a mannish lesbian," a precursor of the lesbian butch and
emphatically not transsexual.7 In both essays the implication is that les
bianism is the true transhistorical subject, while the transgendered par
adigm is the culturally contingent investiture for this subject.
Critics have anchored this reading of The Well as lesbian novel
through similarly sublimating transgender into homosexuality in the
discourse that provides Hall with her transgendered design: the sexolog
ical discourse of sexual inversion. In spite of the fact that The Well explic
itly and exclusively identifies its protagonist an invert-it is notable that
nowhere does the lesbian novel use the category "lesbian"--criticism has
made a categorical slide from invert to lesbian. Rightly tracing Hall's
debt to nineteenth-century sexologists, critics have wrongly reduced sex
ual inversion to homosexuality. Across the board of history inversion has
been understood as an attempt by the medical establishment to describe
homosexual desire, an attempt that, because it preceded psychoanalysis's
separation of sexuality from gender, egregiously failed. If inversion's
discursive moment imbricated gender and sexuality and naturalized
gender roles, the argument has been: how else to think homosexuality
except through this transgendered scheme in which women who desired
women wanted to be men and men who desired men to be women ?

George Chauncey's reasoning has provided a touchstone: "The Victorian
assertion of male sexual aggressiveness and denial of female sexual inter
est established the logical framework for the earliest medical inquiry into
sexual deviance, and determined the manner in which researchers
defined it . . . . In the Victorian system, therefore, a complete inversion or
reversal of a woman's sexual character was required for her to act as a
lesbian; she had literally to become man-like in her sexual desire."8
Inversion has been rendered synonymous with the "medicalization of
homosexuality," and the masculinized female inverts and feminized
male inverts who crowd sexological works and find their fictionalized
representative in Stephen Gordon have been read as really homosexual,
their sexual inversion-that is their transgendering-as merely symp
tomizing homosexuality. Again, the assumption is of transgender as a
figure for homosexuality, of transgender as homosexuality's heterocen
tric construct. Indeed, in the constructionist work foundational not only
of this approach to sexology but arguably of lesbian and gay historiogra
phy as a whole, Foucault's The History ofSexuality, transgender serves as
the homosexual subject's discursive threshold: inversion is said to mark
homosexuality's origins as a category or "a species."9 It is from this his
torical narrative of sexual inversion as homosexuality's origin that liter
ary criticism has taken its cue, reading transgender in The Well as a
sign-whether loyal or parodic, regressive or transgressive, transgender
nevertheless remains an archetypal homosexual sign-for lesbianism.10
My contention in this chapter is, interconnectedly, with the homo
sexual reading of inversion and with the lesbian reading of The Well,
with context as much as text; for the sublimation of transgender in the
one has enabled its sublimation in the other. In configuring inversion as
a metaphor for homosexuality, we have left out what sexual inversion in
sexology and in Hall's novel are most literally about: that is gender inver
sion, cross-gender identity. Through sexual inversion sexologists sought
to describe not homosexuality but a broad transgendered condition of
which same-sex desire was but one symptom, and not vice versa. The les
bian and gay critique of sexology has sometimes acknowledged this, and
that as a consequence there is substantive gendered matter in inversion
that exceeds homosexual identity. Chauncey for instance concedes that
sexual inversion "did not denote the same conceptual phenomenon as
homosexuality" but "referred to a broad range of deviant gender behav
ior, of which homosexual desire was only a logical but indistinct aspect."1 1
Nevertheless, same-sex desire has continued to dominate "deviant gen

der behavior" in the work uncovering the invert. It has done so, I suggest,
because in pursuing the sexology as a construction of homosexuality
premise, we have focused overly on the theoretical passages in sexologi
cal texts. Reading the invert as the sexologists' constructed effect, we have
examined in detail the sexologists' analyses but have not looked at how
inverts constructed themselves. Contained in the form of case histories,
the narratives of inverts, the stories of their individual lives, make up the
bulk of and basis for sexology's theories, yet they are typically treated as
peripheral to the theory rather than its foundational material. For a sex
ual historiography intent on reconstituting the invert as subject, the case
histories are key; for it is here that inverts make their most sustained
appearance as subjects. The value of those case histories that present the
invert autobiographically is particularly significant, for they evidence
that subjects could conceive of themselves as transgendered, that inverts
identified themselves through cross-gender paradigms. When read via
personal narratives in case histories, transgender in sexual inversion can
not be reduced to the sexologists' figure for homosexuality but must be
seen for some inverts as the grounds for a transgendered identity.
For a transsexual historiography in particular, the transgendered case
histories in sexology are foundational: they reveal inverts, to varying
degrees, identifying with, appearing as, living as, and sometimes seeking
out the surgical means to aid a transition to the "other" sex. Sexology
provided the narrative setting for the transgendered subject to become
medicalized. Without this medicalization of transgendered narratives,
gender deviance would not have been hitched to the medical technology
that "cures" the transsexual through sex change. To become transsexual,
to make that somatic transition from gender deviant to sex-changed, the
transgendered narrative needed to become diagnosable. Sexology pro
vided the discursive space for medicalizing and diagnosing transgen
dered narratives in the form of the case history; and, in fact, through the
case history the diagnosis of inversion can be shown to have relied, like
transsexuality, on a dialogics of narrative between clinician and subject:
if among inverts number the first transsexual autobiographers, among
sexologists number their first "readers." From the perspective of trans
sexual history-in contrast to homosexual history-sexology can be seen
to have been powerfully enabling and productive. Inversion's case histo
ries crucially propelled the transgendered subject-through narrative
toward transsexuality.
Written historically and formally after the case histories of inver

sion, modeled on their plots, The Well is not only thematically but con
cretely caught up in the inception of transsexual subjectivity. Published
on the very horizon of the discursive transition from inversion to trans
sexuality, The Well in its turn also provided something of a narrative
map for transitioning transsexuals. Read in situ, as a fictional conse
quence of inversion's case histories, The Well comes into focus as not
only not a lesbian novel, not only our first and most canonical transsex
ual novel, but a narrative that itself contributed to the formalization of
transsexual subjectivity.
Reading Inversion: The Sexological Case History

In 1 864 a female subject wrote to German sexologist Carl Westphal that
s/he had felt like a man since childhood, had spent much of bier life in
mental institutions, and was now actively seeking medical help: "Ich . . .
mochte gem ein mann sein" (I would like to be a man). Westphal diag
nosed bier under his specific category for sexual inversion, "die kontrare
Sexualempfindung" (contrary sexual feelings). Through the nineteenth
century, bier case was recognized as one of the first descriptions of female
inversion; in the twentieth century, bier case has been recast as a found
ing moment for medical research into female-to-male transsexuality. 1 2
Recycled from harbinger o f inversion to harbinger o f transsexuality,
Westphal's case encapsulates how inversion's narratives have formed a
kind of palimpsest for transsexuality. For twentieth-century sexologists
inversion represents not an outdated misrepresentation of homosexual
ity but a useful first draft of the transsexual diagnosis. The case histories
of inversion-the narrative product of modern medicine's first attempt
to describe transgender-appear to offer up the very stuff of transsexu
ality: the expression of being differently gendered; the recounting of a
plot that pulls toward being the other sex; even sometimes the articulated
desire to change sex. In the project of establishing transsexuality as a con
dition that has not simply come into being as a consequence of available
technology (a project that has been key for justifying the radical inter
vention of contemporary transsexual treatment), sexology's case histories
have been invaluable. They reveal transsexual desire preceding its clini
cal moment of definition; they document that the desire to change sex
existed before it was diagnosed as transsexual.
Of most value to the project of reading transsexuality back through
inversion are cases which describe the transgendered subject as having
"Some Primitive Thing Conceived" 74 7
undergone some form of sex transition; in these cases the transsexual plot
is not merely desired, it is realized. Incredibly, as much as half a century
before transsexuality was officially named as such, transgendered sub
jects used medical science to reconfigure their sex. As endocrinology was
still in its early stages-at the time of sexology's recording of these cases
it was only in the process of discovering sex hormones-the earliest sex
change subjects could only turn to plastic surgery (itself a new science) in
their quest to cross the borders of somatic sex.13 Magnus Hirschfeld's
1 922 report describes a female who had obtained a bilateral mastectomy
to masculinize h/er body; and a German sexological journal at the end of
a decade published the case of a female who had undergone genital mas
culinization, remarkably as early as 1 882. 1 4 Through sexology, sex
reconfigured subjects make their first appearance in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries-well before the development of sex
change technology as such.
Because they precede the medical scripting of the transsexual plot
and the technology that would allow this plot's more successful realiza
tion, such cases were, not surprisingly, exceptional. Yet whether inverts
were actually surgically reconfigured or not, the conception of inversion
as an embodied cross-gendered condition structured transsexing any
way into the very category of the invert. In that s/he was considered con
genitally intersexed, the invert was already sited somatically between
the sexes. Positing the invert's embodiment of transgender, sexology
created the conceptual space to record those sex-changed subjects in the
first place; that inversion was an embodied category allowed such sub
jects to appear exemplary inverts. Sex change then might be seen sim
ply to have carried inversion to its logical extension.
Projecting inversion as transgender onto the body, sexologists at first
sought to diagnose inverts via their bodies. The specific corporeal text
they "read" underscores that inversion was first and foremost a trans
gendered condition. Inversion's somatic markers were essentially cross
sexed characteristics. Any embodiment of gender difference, any degree
of what was considered an erring from the sexed norm, was an indicator
of sexual inversion. Richard von Krafft-Ebing notes as the physical signs
of "viraginity" in a female invert a "deep voice, manly gait [and] small
mammae" (s/he "makes the impression of a man in woman's clothes").
Havelock Ellis likewise finds in his female subjects transgendered symp
toms of inversion ranging from "slight" hirsutism of the body and face,
to more "genuine approximations to the masculine type" in which "the
muscles tend to be everywhere firm, with a comparative absence of soft

connective tissue," to genitalia which are "more or less undeveloped."15
Effectively corporealizing inversion, sexologists practiced a kind of
transgendered anthropometry. They sought to correlate sexed interme
diacy to cross-gender identity in the bodies of their patients. The assump
tion (the hope of sexologist as clinician) was that the inverted body would
render up its own identity narrative.
As a sexual psychopathology, however (sexology both begins modern
psychiatry and spurs the development of psychoanalysis), inversion was
an illness not so much of the body as of the mind. Embodied but innate,
inversion was not inevitably legible on the body's surface. The substan
tive material for diagnosing inversion lay, therefore, not in corporeal
markers but in the subject's speech. The expression of cross-gendered
difference, the production of a cross-gendered narrative came to signify
sexual inversion. It is upon the basis of h/er expression of desire for sex
change that Westphal's subject was diagnosed as inverted and may be
reclassified as transsexual. Narrative constitutes the critical point of over
lap between inversion and transsexuality. As much as transsexuality,
inversion takes autobiography as its primary symptom. This shared
symptomization in autobiographical narrative is the factor that has
allowed current sexologists to read transsexuality back through inver
sion's narratives, even in those cases where somatic sex change did not
take place. As historian of sexuality Vern Bullough suggests in a seminal
essay similarly arguing for the existence of transsexuality before the diag
nosis, it is because "Individuals of the past often expressed themselves in
ways similar to today's preoperative transsexuals" that we can document
transsexual subjectivity in the nineteenth century. 16 In the history of the
transsexual, both as a discursive and individual subject, sex change is not
the diagnostic indicator of the transsexual subject but its "cure," not its
cause but its outcome. Before transsexuality's emergence as such, inver
sion operated similarly as a body narrative, with the subject's narrative
standing in for what the body of the invert could not speak.
In fact, for the sexologist, the body of the invert was by definition an
unreliable text, for the invert's body failed to speak its subject's true gen
der. Krafft-Ebing's "man in woman's clothes" suggests a woman who but
for the mistake of her body would have been, should have been, a man:
h/er body misrepresents the subject's authentic self. In its earliest formu
lation even before its pathologizing in sexology, inversion is represented
as a corporeal mistake, a cross-gendered condition caused by a deceptive
body. In this configuration of the material body as a mistake, the defini

tive transsexual split between sex and gender, between outer body and
inner identity, is opened up. Most notably, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs writing
in 1 860s Germany described his own male inversion as an authentic
womanly identification belied by a male corporeal surround: "Sunt mihi
barba maris, artus, corpusque virile;/His inclusa quidem: sed sum
maneoque puella" ("Have I a masculine beard and manly limbs and
body;/Yes, confined by these: but I am and remain a woman"). 17 As we
have seen, Ulrichs's formula of the "wrong body" will recur identically
as the popular trope for transsexuality a century later in transsexual
accounts, as will his image "anima muliebris in copore virili inclusa" (the
soul of a woman enclosed in a man's body).18 The bodily experience of
inversion is described with exactly the same body image formula as trans
sexuality. The production of transgender through such bodily figures
evoked-and, as they entered a medical setting, crucially came to symp
tomize-the internal gendered difference, the dis-embodiment, consti
tuting first inversion, then transsexuality.
Although he is considered one of the first advocates of same-sex desire,
Ulrichs's description of inversion effectively begins the mapping of trans
gender as an identity in the modern West. While deriving from Plato's
category of "urning,'' his network of inverted subjects-the "mann
ling(e)" and "weibling(e)" (the masculine and feminine) "urning" and
"urningin"-in fact represents a codification of transgender identity. 19
"Urnings" are arranged according to the degree of transgendered split
between soma and gender; it is this split-the difference of transgender
and not homosexuality-that Ulrichs sought to calibrate. Translating
Ulrichs's scheme into a medical frame, Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia
Sexualis similarly measures not homosexuality but transgender: again,
the precise split between sex and gender. Krafft-Ebing's "antipathic" or
"inverted sexual instinct" organizes inverts according to the presence of
cross-gender in varying pathological "degrees": "in the milder cases,
there is simple hermaphroditism; in more pronounced cases, only homo
sexual feeling and instinct, but limited to the sexual life; in still more com
plete cases, the whole psychical personality, and even the bodily sensa
tions, are transformed so as to correspond with the sexual inversion; and
in complete cases, the physical form is correspondingly altered" ( 1 88).
While homosexuality is certainly denoted in Krafft-Ebing's scheme, cru
cially substantiating the transgendered subject of inversion, it accounts
for only one of a number of characteristics of inversion.
In the translation of inversion from identity to pathology, ofUlrichs's

tropology to a systematized typology of disease, narrative proved the
key instrument. Through the form of the case history sexologists such
as Krafft-Ebing were able to typify and specify the various "degrees" or
characteristics of inversion. The personal narrative, rewritten into case
history, provided the clinician with the pathognomonic signs of inver
sion. The case history created the textual space for the clinician not only
to record but to perform the diagnosis, for the "disease" manifested
itself above all in figures of speech. If "[n]arrative is indispensable to
diagnosis,'' as Julia Epstein argues in her study of the emergence of the
form of the case history, nowhere is this truer than in the context of the
emergence of transsexuality through inversion; for here the subject's
autobiography must re-present a body that fails to present its subject's
"true" gender.20 The case history's purpose was to uncover in the sub
ject's autobiography, both in the clinician's office and then again in the
pages of the sexological text, inversion as a pathological condition. It is
via the case history in sexology, then, that autobiography came to be the
vehicle for the medicalization of transgender identity.
Since many of inversion's narratives reached the sexologist already
written as autobiographical accounts, the reading of autobiography
often took place in a quite material sense. And as their case histories
often reproduce them apparently in full, sexologists seemed to have
considered these autobiographical narratives as already possessing the
documentary value and the pathological texture of the case history, as if
the subject's narrative evidenced quite clearly the subject's disease.
Many of the fullest autobiographical accounts in sexology are also the
most transgendered. This correspondence suggests that the more trans
gendered the subject, the more self-evident for the sexologist his or her
inversion and thus the less need for the sexologist's intervention: in
other words, the more evidence for us that inversion was transgender.
The longest invert autobiography in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia
Sexualis (case 1 08), for example, is a fantastic account of a Hungarian
male who feels as though hie has already undergone a sex change. With
a clinical exactness-as a physician himself the invert comes to Krafft
Ebing self-diagnosed, having written h/is own case history-the sub
ject writes of inhabiting an imaginary, sentient female surround at odds
with h/is physical body: "I feel like a woman in a man's form; and even
though I am often sensible of the man's form, yet it is always in a femi
nine sense. Thus, for example, I feel the penis as clitoris; the urethra as
urethra and vaginal orifice . . . the scrotum as labia majora; in short, I

always feel the vulva" (30 1 -302). H/is narrative meticulously locates
inversion not in homosexual desire-importantly, there is nothing
homosexual about his sexual practice-but precisely in h/is embodied
experience of transgender, the physical feeling of being a woman. This
embodied transgender identification structures h/is heterosexual prac
tice. During coitus with his female partner, hie inverts genital mor
phologies, imagining h/imself to have a vagina penetrated by the penis
of the (other) woman. H/is desire even prefigures the transsexual plot
of surgical transformation: "I am sure that I should not have shrunk
from the castration-knife, could I thus have attained my desire" (294).
In formulating the diagnosis and reading the invert, the sexologist
responds to the narrative's dominant motif: Krafft-Ebing here uses the
term "transmutio sexus, " a change of sex (3 1 1 ). Because the function of
the autobiographical narrative of inversion was to inscribe the subject's
symptom, the sexologist's production of a diagnosis was above all a case
of explication de texte. In the most evident transgendered narratives the
explanation required was minimai.21
As with that of transsexuality our reading of sexology has been under
girded by assumptions about how interpretative authority worked in this
medicalized setting. The critique of sexology as a misconstruction of
homosexuality assumes that the transgendered narratives recounted in
the case histories are the products of the sexologist's master narrative, that
the avowed transgendered identifications of the invert are the internal
izations of the sexologists' discourse. With Foucault's concept of "reverse
discourse,'' the subject is at best a respondent. Inverts appear as not the
authors of their own inverted plots but the products-indeed, insofar as
they are really homosexual and not transgendered, the fictional prod
ucts--of a larger medicodiscursive design: hence, surely, the cursory
reading that inverts' actual narratives have so far received. Yet because
sexologists relied on autobiographical narratives for producing their
diagnosis, it can be seen that inverts were not the simple effects of this dis
course but rather that the transgendered pull of their autobiographies
infused and determined the transgendered design of sexology. Krafft
Ebing's case 1 64 dramatizes neatly how the invert's narrative could pre
cede and shape the sexologist's diagnosis. In this case, that of a transgen
dered female who "felt towards other women as a man does" and "be
wailed the fact that she was not born a man,'' Krafft-Ebing paraphrases
what was clearly the subject's own prior diagnosis of h/erself: " 'Her gen-
1 46 "Some Primitive Thing Conceived"
itals could not be right.' " Surely originally "my genitals cannot be right,"
the invert's expression of transgendered wrong embodiment has plainly
authorized (decided and provided the terms of) the sexologist's transgen
dered analysis: Krafft-Ebing diagnoses this case simply as one of "mas
culinity.'' As this case illustrates, the exchange between clinician and
patient is a good deal more dialogic than has been made out, the sexolo
gist's diagnosis here quite literally a citation of the preceding autobio
graphical narrative. The "discourse" of inversion, its transgendered par
adigms, can be seen to have been absolutely dependent upon the subjects'
articulations and identifications. Thus the importance of reading the nar
ratives of inverts carefully in order to reconstitute these identifications.22
It is fitting, therefore, that the invert's case history in Psychopathia
Sexualis that reads as most convincingly transgendered is based on the
formal autobiography of a professional author. The transgendered nar
rative of the invert here appears distinctly self-authored, the clinician
emphatically an unintended {or at least unspecified) reader. Though a
note refers us to another sexologist for "the expert medical opinion of this
case" (4 1 6 n. 1), for his own rendition Krafft-Ebing has "gleaned the . . .
facts" from "the autobiography of this man-woman," the female invert
Count Sandor V, a.k.a. the Countess Sarolta V (4 1 7). Sarolta/Sandor's
case, like Krafft-Ebing's Hungarian doctor, poses a substantial challenge
to the equation of inversion with homosexuality. As its subject never
lived as a woman and was clearly profoundly sex-dysphoric, this case also
reads as one of the most persuasive female-to-male transsexual narratives
in sexology. Born female, raised and educated as a boy, Sarolta became
Sandor and lived full-time as a man (hence I refer to him as such). He
married twice, frequented brothels, and took lovers on the side. In spite
of this evidently profuse desire for women, "Sandi" balked at mutual
sexual relations. While loving the female body of the other, he main
tained his own female genitals as untouchable zones both for the other
and-a key sign that this untouchability was caused by something sin
gularly more deep-rooted than the fear of discovery that Krafft-Ebing
himself suggests as reason-for himself: "She knows nothing of solitary
or mutual onanism. Such a thing seemed very disgusting to her, and not
conducive to manliness" (424). As we have seen, this rejection of bodily
sex (suggested also by the fact of his having found menstruation "a thing
repugnant to her masculine consciousness and feeling" [424]), is a poig
nant indicator of transsexual agnosia. In one of the earliest attempts to
delineate female-to-male transsexuality Ira Pauly writes that this refusal
"Some Primitive Thing Conceived" 1 47
of sex via sexuality is one of the key points on which the transsexual's nar
rative diverges from the lesbian's: the transsexual "avoids potentially
pleasurable stimulation, either through masturbation or in her homo
sexual relations, because it confronts her with her own female anatomy.
This is typical of female transsexualism and distinguishes it in some ways
from homosexuality."23 As characteristic of a transsexual narrative
where dysphoria stems from the body of the subject, in place of his
deceptive body as a female invert Sandor sought to realize an imaginary
male one, padding the front of his trousers with handkerchiefs and
gloves, substituting this soft penile prosthesis for a hard one ("a stocking
stuffed with oakum as a priapus" (425]) in sexual encounters. Though his
sexual practice is ostensibly same-sex, given the profound degree of
cross-gendered identification, behavior, and appearance conveyed in his
case, his narrative cannot be classified as such without erasing the very
logic of its transsexual design.24
Sexologists were apparently quite aware of the deictic power of per
sonal narrative in the case history, its capacity to articulate directly the
transgendered design of sexual inversion. Following Krafft-Ebing with
his definitive work on sexual inversion in 1 897, Havelock Ellis openly
abandoned his predecessor's attempt at typologizing inversion. Instead
of chasing each case with diagnosis, Ellis acts as the case histories' editor,
explicitly allowing them to speak for themselves: "It has seemed best to
me to attempt no classification at all" (235). This tactic is significant for
formally handing authorial control of inversion's story to the subject.
Ellis trusts that his subjects can convey their inversion most powerfully
in their own words-as he introduces History 39, "the narrative is given
in her own words" (235). That History 39 is the most cogent female-ta
male transgendered self-narrative in Sexual Inversion is again no coinci
dence. The more pronounced the speaker's inversion, the more trans
gendered his or her identification and the less supplementation was
deemed necessary by the sexologist to explain or gloss the condition.
As with Krafft-Ebing's Sandor, Ellis's D spins out a thematically
coherent transgendered narrative. S/he begins with childhood feelings
of gendered difference and a poignant description of the invert's sense of
h/er body as a mistake: "Ever since I can remember anything at all, I
could never think of myself as a girl. . . . When I was 5 or 6 years old I
began to say to myself that whatever anyone said, If I was not a boy at
any rate I was not a girl. This has been my unchanged conviction all
through my life. When I was little, nothing ever made me doubt it, in
spite of external appearance. I regarded the conformation of my body as

a mysterious accident" (235). Each episode in hfer narrative substantiates
her nonbelonging in womanhood. Sent to an all-girls' boarding school
in an attempt to "turn [h/er] into a young lady," s/he creates for h/erself
a world of male identification, a complex set of rescue dreams in which
s/he plays male liberator: "I was always the prince or the pirate, rescuing
beauty in distress or killing the unworthy" (239). Underscoring her dif
ference from the homosexual, feelings of attraction toward women only
serve to make D more conscious of the gap between sex and gender, the
"hiatus . . . between my bodily structure and my feelings" (24 1). As a
woman (unlike Sandor, D does not live as a man), s/he is unable to act on
h/er desire for women and explains this "lack" by referring back to her
body: "There was something that I simply lacked; that I never doubted.
Curiously enough, I thought that the ultimate explanation might be that
there were men's minds in women's bodies" (24 1). Indeed, D can only
imagine romantic or sexual relations with women by refiguring h/erself
as a man: "I admired [women] and when I was tired and worried I often
thought how easily, if I had been a man, I could have married and set
tled down with one or the other. . . . I always imagined myself as a man
loving a woman" (242). But the disjuncture between the felt reality of the
imaginary and the fraudulence of physical reality remains too powerful
and painful for such fantasies to become practicable: "What I felt with
my mind and what I felt with my body always seemed at this time apart"
(242); "My life was a sham; I was an actor never off the boards. I had to
play at being something I was not from morning til night" (243). In clos
ing s/he affirms h/er identification with men and hfer difference from
women ("I always feel that I am not one of them" [243)). In its account
of this identification and hfer repudiation of h/er own bodily sex (to the
point where s/he cannot undertake sexual relations), h/er narrative, like
Sandor's, reads as axiomatically transsexual. Transgender is not only
patently not a symptom of her same-sex desire, it stalls any practice of
same-sex desire.
Ellis reveals that the "largest number" of his case histories were writ
ten as autobiographies by inverted subjects either anonymously or with
authors known to him (9 1). Of the latter, Ellis states that he has often
supplemented the original narrative as his relationship with the author
has developed. While we can know neither the extent nor the effect of
Ellis's "fill[ing] in" (he sutures his "editorial" work with the original
narrative), it is evident that as the autobiographical narrative authorized
the sexologist's diagnosis, it was in turn authorized by the sexologist

(91 ). Inverts, like transsexuals, could read their way into an identity plot.
In Ellis's History 38 the female invert's string of transgendered child
hood moments-making everyone call h/er "John"; urinating through
a tube; "shame and anger" over menstruation-draws its narrative
cohesion retroactively from a moment of self-discovery via what must
have been another case history in sexology (23 1): "About this time I read
a book where a girl was represented as saying she had a 'boy's soul in a
girl's body.' The applicability of this to myself struck me at once" (232).
In this case the invert uses sexology (another invert's narrative), in par
ticular that famous "wrong body" trope of inversion, to authorize-that
is both to organize and validate-hfer own narrative mnemonics. The
speaking subject is by no means passive in relation to the discursive
identity, a vessel to be "filled" by the sexologist's content of inversion.
Like the transsexual s/he makes the connection to the other text, actively
borrows the transgendered design for h/er own story, in turn shapes the
sexologist's narrative, and, in this sense, authors or constructs h/er self
through the available intertexts, sexological or otherwise. To represent
the invert as the sexologist's constructed effect does nothing to convey
the complex intertextuality and mutuality of this exchange.
For Ellis as much as for contemporary readers of sexology, the ques
tion of authority-to what extent the subject is the author of inversion's
story-is the ultimate determinant of the case history's validity and the
authenticity of inversion. Startlingly, Ellis reveals that the assumption
that undergirds our critique of sexology (that the subject's narrative was
a product of the sexologists' preexistent identity plots) was already in cir
culation at his time of writing. First suggesting a link between this
assumption and general historical suspicions about the essential unrelia
bility of the speech of sexual others ("Many years ago we used to be told
that inverts are such lying and deceitful degenerates that it was impossi
ble to place reliance on anything they said. It was also usual to say that
when they wrote autobiographical accounts of themselves they merely
sought to mold them in the fashion of those published by Krafft-Ebing"
[89]), Ellis goes on to argue that it is precisely his subjects' familiarity with
past accounts-the very fact of the case histories' intertextuality-that
ensures their narratives' authenticity. Far from encouraging the subject
to plagiarize from other cases and reproduce inversion as a homogenous
narrative, the availability of previous accounts enables the breakup of
any such narrative as it might have been written by the expert under his
classificatory scheme. The more narratives read and written, in other

words, the more ways of telling the story of inversion became possible:
"there is no doubt that inverts have frequently been stimulated to set
down the narrative of their own experiences through reading those writ
ten by others. But the stimulation has, as often as not, lain in the fact that
their own experiences have seemed different, not that they have seemed
identical" (90). The sexologist's text-here Ellis is referring specifically to
Psychopathia Sexualis but presumably he foresees the possibility of this
occurring with his own Sexual Inversion-functions as a vehicle for the
inverts' self-creation (both in the life and in the autobiography). Precisely
because he believes inverts make not only good authors but good read
ers, Ellis finds his subjects' speech to be sufficiently trustworthy to enable
him, as expert/author, to refrain from analysis.
The agreement among historiographers of inversion is that, follow
ing Ellis's Sexual Inversion, the category "invert" began to disappear from
medical literature and that by the 1 900s it was beginning to be replaced
by that of "homosexual." What has not been noted is the extent to which
the disappearance of the invert is correlated with a dramatic devaluation
of the psychopathological subject's narrative as evidence. In Freudian
psychoanalysis-the central vehicle of these shifts-sexual inversion
appears as myth, sexology's false construction of homosexuality: "The
mystery of homosexuality is therefore by no means so simple as it is com
monly depicted in popular expositions, e.g., a feminine personality
which therefore has to love a man, is unhappily attached to a male body;
or a masculine personality, irresistibly attracted by women, is unfortu
nately cemented to a female body . . . the supposition that nature in a
freakish mood created a 'third sex' falls to the ground."25 While trans
gender continues to have a place in psychoanalysis, it is refigured by
Freud from gender identities into phantasmatic and momentary sexual
identifications: pit stops on the way to the development of sexual identi
ties. The narrative of sexual psychopathology does not simply turn from
sexual inversion to sexual object-choice; it refigures this inversion as
(makes it into a figure for) sexual object-choice. In one instance-with
sex change here explicitly a metaphor-transgender is used to figure the
moment of a female subject's homosexual becoming. Of the girl's
exchange of her father as love-object for her mother, Freud writes: "She
changed into a man, and took her mother in the place of her father as love
object." 26 (It is surely in Freud that the lesbian and gay reading of sex
ual inversion as a metaphor for homosexuality takes root.) Simultaneous
with these discursive shifts from transgender to homosexuality, from

sexology to psychoanalysis, and from the body to the unconscious, the
patient's speech becomes a suspicious text. It is no longer what it seems,
a reliable account, but is to be decoded as much for what it does not say
as for what it does. The role of author-ity, of who gets to decide mean
ing, is markedly switched back to doctor as the psychoanalyst does the
work of interpretation. Especially when it is articulated by the subject,
the transgendered narrative is no longer self-evident but abstruse, point
ing back to a story not told by the unconscious. In his most overtly trans
gendered case Freud reads at the root of Schreber's narrative of imag
ined sex change not transgender but a repressed homosexuality: in
Schreber's autobiography transgender figures-by not figuring-a
refused homosexuality.27 It might be said that the story of inversion
disappeared because medical practitioners stopped listening. Psycho
analysis had its own story to tell.
In a striking illustration of the intersection of sexology and psycho
analysis Eilis's Sexual Inversion briefly critiques psychoanalysis's mode of
reading-its tendency to reauthor the patient's personal narrative. Ellis
mounts a defense of the subject's account as "reliable"(88) and "frank"
(90). Writing in the tradition of Krafft-Ebing but contemporaneously
with Freud, on the cusp of these transitions, Ellis is himself ambivalent,
however, about the relation between sexual inversion and homosexuality.
While ostensibly distinguishing between homosexuality and inversion
("Sexual inversion, as here understood, means sexual instinct turned by
inborn constitutional abnormality toward persons of the same sex" [ I ]),
Ellis locates inversion under the umbrella of homosexuality ("It is thus a
narrower term than homosexuality" [ l ]) in a way that prefigures Freud's
subsuming of sexual inversion into homosexuality. Straddling two dis
courses, the sexological and the psychoanalytic, Ellis retains the somatic
essentialized component of inversion and the validation of its personal
accounts but paves the way for the disappearance of the distinct narrative
of the invert. Lesbian and gay criticism has considered Freud's isolation
of sexual object-choice and the disappearance a progression: it meant the
capacity to think homosexuality apart from gender. From the point of
view of transsexuaVtransgender criticism, however, the substitution of
the sexual invert with the homosexual in the early twentieth century sig
nifies a massive discursive loss: it meant a loss of medicine's capacity to
transcribe (and thus diagnose) transgender, a loss of the recording of
transgendered narratives.
The fact that sexology did record transgendered subjectivity is insep

arable from its approach to personal narrative. If psychoanalysis read
the personal narrative of transgender as replete with metaphors for the
unconscious (or unconscious metaphors), sexology took the personal
narrative of transgender literally. In her discussion of psychoanalysis's
practice of reading its first narratives, those of hysterics-a body narra
tive if ever there was one-Mary Jacobus has suggested that "[w]hat the
analyst learns from the hysteric's misreading is how to be a good (that
is, a metaphoric) reader; how to disembody the text and discover what
the picture covers."28 The question of what constitutes a "good read
ing," both in the context of inversion/transsexuality and in this critical
context (not mid-eighties poststructuralist feminism striving to denatu
ralize women's bodies but late-nineties emergent transsexual theory
striving to embody theory's transgendered metaphors), probably could
not be more different. For the transsexual, being diagnosed, being read,
turns precisely on a reader willing to move in the other direction against
the very disembodying metaphoric dynamics of reading. It was because
they literalized transgender, because they read it so corporeally, that
sexology's case histories of inversion were able to begin the medicaliza
tion of transgender that would prove crucial for the later materializa
tion of the transsexual subject.
The Transsexual in Between

Although gender inversion will not become a diagnosable medical con
dition again until transsexuality, there is a crucial intervening period
between the disappearance of the invert in the 1 900s and the writing of
the transsexual diagnosis in 1 949. Despite the fact that transgender did
not prominently occupy medicodiscursive identities, key events in
transgender and transsexual history are concentrated here. The first sex
change cases appear in 1 922 and 1 928/29, recorded within sexology but
now specifically tagged "transvestism"; we have shifted to the category
under which the first renowned transsexual, Christine Jorgensen, will
later be diagnosed.29 More seminally, the first transsexual to complete a
full transition with surgery and hormones combined-thus the first
fully technologically sex-changed transsexual-Michael Dillon, born
female, transformed to male did so during this period.30 How did this
first transition occur in the absence of diagnostic categories ?
A transsexual, a doctor, and an author, Dillon left something of a
narrativization of his transition. His 1 946 publication, Self: A Study in
Ethics and Endocrinology (as its title suggests an eclectic mix of moral
philosophizing and hormonal theories), contains a chapter that repre
sents what is surely the first medicolegal treatise on transsexuality.31
Using a rationale that will be much echoed by later clinicians, Dillon
argues for the right of transsexuals to hormonal and surgical sex reas
signment: "Surely, where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the
body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind" (53).
As transsexuality would not be coined until three years later, however,
Dillon must make this argument without naming the transsexual.
Working in the absences of medical terminology, in between inversion
and transsexuality, Dillon has no choice but to follow psychoanalysis's
story of sexuality and name the transsexual "homosexual" (this pivotal
chapter is entitled "Homosexuality"). His task then entails distinguish
ing the homosexual who wishes to change sex from the homosexual who
doesn't-that is, the transsexual from the homosexual. He performs this
by differentiating homosexual and transsexual gender plots, in particu
lar by distinguishing their relations to transgender realness. Where the
homosexual--or to set up Dillon's nomenclature, the "effeminate" male
and the "mannish" female homosexual-may well perform the other
sex, the transsexual-the "feminine" male and the "masculine" female
homosexual-yearns to become it (44). Where the "effeminate" or
"mannish" homosexual cultivates an incongruity between sex and
gender, the "feminine" or "masculine" homosexual seeks to resolve it:
"Where the one imitates and acquires, the other seems to develop natu
rally along the lines of the other sex" (50). Post-Judith Butler, we might
understand Dillon's distinction between homosexuality and transsexu
ality as between gender performativity and gender ontology. While
Butler's project is to call this distinction into question, for Dillon there
could not have been more at stake in sustaining the differences between
replaying gender as a figure for same-sex desire and the desire to be lit
erally resexed. What was at stake prior to transsexuality in discourse was
precisely Dillon's capacity to call himself a man and distinguish himself
from the mannish lesbian. Only through this distinction could he vali
date his sex change and lay claim to maleness.
So convinced is Dillon by his own distinctions between "mascu
line"/"feminine" and "mannish"/"effeminate" homosexuals that, once
he has established the gendered realness of "feminine" and "masculine"
homosexuals (i.e., transsexuals)-their true identity as the "other"
sex-he refers to them by inserting the category "homosexual" into
querying quotation marks (54). The typography suggests his own sense
of the inappropriateness and provisionality of the category "homosex
ual" for the transsexual subjects it denotes. Moreover, his antitheses
between homosexuality and transsexuality overtly confer on the trans
sexual subject a transgendered naturalness set against the homosexual's
transgendered artifice. The very modifiers he uses suggest this differ
ence: "effeminacy" and "mannishness" connote an ersatz relation to
gender realness next to "feminine" and "masculine." Unlike Dillon's
homosexual his transsexual pulls inexorably toward becoming real-ly
sexed: toward, quite simply, being. The masculine/feminine homosex
ual is marked by a clear-cut transgendered plot from the beginning, a
plot that appears naturally to fit that of the "other" sex: "The pretty
curly-headed boy with pink complexion . . . objects to fights, to mud
and dirt and to sports, and . . . prefers his sister's doll . . . . The girl, on
the other hand, lean and wiry, scorns dolls and girls' games, likes to play
Indians and soldiers, and is ever ready for some risky adventure or a
fight" (50). Dillon's exemplary transsexual subject then gives voice to
his/her difference, shaping his/her life into a transgendered narrative
and thereby offering up that classic symptom of his/her difference:
"Invariably the cry is 'I have always felt as if I were a girl,' or alterna
tively from the girl comes the cry: 'I always felt as if I were a man.' In
these instances the body may approximate in essentials to one sex, male
or female, but the personality is wholly peculiar to the opposite one"
(50-5 1). Although Dillon might employ homosexuality in his terminol
ogy therefore, his delineation of transsexuality through coherent trans
gender plots and, crucially, the symptomization of transsexuality in the
subject's narrativization of this plot, paradigmatically returns to the
symptomatology of sexual inversion and prefigures that of the trans
sexual diagnosis. Dillon's use of endocrinology as the explanatory nar
rative for these gendered differences in lieu of the psychoanalytic/psy
chological theory then dominant further reinforces his affiliation to sex
ology. It recalls--or rather updates-the "glandular" theories of sexual
inversion popular with sexologists: the correlation of sexual inversion to
internal secretions.32
That Dillon's deployment of sexology to articulate transsexual sub
jectivity remains oblique only-that he does not draw on sexology's cat
egories of inversion explicitly-is a sure sign that by the time of his
writing sexual inversion has been outmoded as a discourse. Yet Dillon's
more indirect connection between transsexuality and inversion pro-
duces an intertextual moment far richer and more gratifying for our
purposes. For it is to The Well of Loneliness that the first fully sex
changed transsexual turns for an illustration of the masculine female
"homosexual." While Dillon might name the transsexual a homosexual
and not an invert, it is the invert in The Well that exemplifies his model
transsexual subject:
Some years ago Radclyffe Hall published a novel entitled The Well of
Loneliness. It was a penetrating title and the story was concerned with
this subject, the life of a girl of this type, her difficulties and the attitude
of others towards her. Had the book been handled with more restraint, it
might have done much as a popular novel towards bringing about an
understanding of the situation; but unfortunately, as it was, it was banned
as soon as published. (51)
In the absence of inversion's case histories, The Well stands in as an

inverted case history and stands, precisely in this guise, for a transsexual
narrative. Since Dillon read The Well as a transsexual novel, identifying
his own "masculine homosexuality" with that of the fictional Stephen
Gordon's, it is arguable that The Well, as the fiction of a female invert,
helped actuate Dillon's own transsexual life-plot, its narrative motivating
or supporting the first full bodily transsexual transition. The Welt's nar
rative perhaps filled in for that discursive absence of transgender. Dillon
evidently believed that The Well had all the makings of a representative
transsexual text, its potential to bring about the kind of enlightenment
toward transsexuality his own book attempts some eighteen years later
thwarted only by its banning. But how did Dillon arrive at this reading?
What interpretative grounds did he have for finding a transsexual plot in
The Well? Having established the significance of transsexuality for its
discursive context, it is to the text that we may now turn.
Dreaming Flesh: The Transsexual in 1be Well

Written three decades after the category of sexual inversion had begun
to be displaced by homosexuality and, moreover, after Hall's key sexo
logical influence, Havelock Ellis, had himself rendered the terms
"homosexuality" and "sexual inversion" interchangeable, The Welt's
exclusive and categorical return to sexual inversion appears all the more
deliberate. As with Dillon's resistance to all things "psych-" for explain
ing transsexuality, Hall's eschewal of the more current theories of psy
choanalysis for sexology needs to be understood historically as a rejec-
tion of the conceptual supremacy of the axis of sexuality over gender

and, concomitantly, of homosexuality over transgender. That Hall
skipped over psychoanalysis not out of unfamiliarity but, rather, out of
a belief in its inutility for her project is evidenced by the one reference
to psychoanalysis that appears in The Well. Warning her that her unso
ciability is becoming "unwholesome," that master of irony standing out
in this very unironic novel, Jonathan Brockett, tells Stephen: "You'll be
bagging a shell like a hermit crab or growing hairs on your chin or a
wart on your nose, or worse still a complex. You might even take to a
few nasty habits towards middlelife-better read Ferenczi ! " (30 1 ) .
Brockett's allusion t o Freud's disciple Sandor Ferenczi reveals that Hall
not only knew psychoanalysis, s/he knew enough to be able to reference
and ironize it. With a stroke she flattens psychoanalysis into supersti
tious nonsense: the psychoanalytic notion of the complex is comparable
to an absurd popular myth about the effects of social isolation. The Well
not only refuses psychoanalysis, via Brockett's remark, it makes a point
of showing that it refuses to take it seriously.
Critics who accept Hall's turn to sexology as deliberate nevertheless
read it as strategic, namely, as Hall's attempt to undermine the stigmati
zation of homosexuality by transforming the conception of same-sex
desire from sinful choice to innate condition. As Ruehl writes, sexology is
Hall's "deliberate political intervention" into the representation of les
bianism.33 But if it was Hall's intent to tell a politically transformative
story of female homosexuality, she did not need sexual inversion to do so.
There were other more positive representations oflesbianism available at
the time of her writing, representations, moreover, less likely to rile the
censors and thus more likely to reach her reading public. Martha Vicinus
suggests Natalie Barney's "hedonistic lesbianism" and Renee Vivien's
"self-created tragedy" as possible alternatives.34 Indeed, vitally for our
reading of the subject in this novel, just as she signals her awareness of
psychoanalytic alternatives, Hall indicates her familiarity with at least
one of these models by embodying Natalie Barney in The Welfs Valerie
Seymour: a charming, feminine figure whom Catharine Stimpson iden
tifies as a much more worthy representation oflesbianism, a much better
lesbian, than the novel's congenitally masculine protagonist. And rightly
so; for the whole point of Valerie and her queer circle in Paris is to set off
the difference of Stephen's plot, to elucidate how Stephen stands apart, a
misfit even here. Even though inversion inflects the bodies of these oth
ers-Brockett's fluttering "white soft-skinned hands of a woman"(333),
Pat's "ankles . . . too strong and too heavy for those of a female" (353)
the Paris section underscores that Stephen's inversion is by far the most
"pronounced" (356). Like sexology's most pronounced cases, like Dillon's
masculine female "homosexual," it is not to the lesbian but the transsex
ual that Stephen corresponds. Hall's use of sexology is not a turn (whether
strategic or inadvertent) to homosexuality but a turn away from it, to a
condition unambiguously transgendered and embodied.
Hall patently wished her readers to remark The We/l's investment in
sexology and to factor it into our reading of the novel. She worked hard
to persuade Ellis to write the commentary on the novel that appeared as
its preface. Not content with presenting it simply as her fictional
account of an invert, Hall wanted The Well authenticated by this man
whom she regarded as "the greatest living authority on the tragical
problem of sexual inversion"-authorized as realistic, feasible if not
factual: as if Stephen's narrative could itself stand as an inverted case
history.35 And indeed, with Ellis thus positioned as introducing it, The
Well does formally resemble a case history, the framing device recalling
Ellis's role as editor and authorizer of his own case histories. Within the
body of the novel Hall's two citations of Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing have
a similar effect of authorizing Stephen's narrative as inverted case his
tory. In the fi rst instance Stephen's father, Sir Philip, uses a copy of
Ulrichs to decode a portrait of Stephen with her mother. Making mar
ginal notes in the sexologist's work, he turns from written to visual text,
as if the former's narrative enables him to read the body that he sees in
the latter-"that indefinable quality in Stephen that made her look
wrong in the clothes she was wearing as though she and they had no
right to each other, but above all no right to Anna" (23). In the second
instance Stephen reads herself through a copy ofKrafft-Ebing similarly
annotated by her father. Unlocking her father's "special book case" ("as
she slipped the key into the lock and turned it, the action seemed curi
ously automatic"), like Eilis's inverted reader of sexology, she finds the
key to her difference in its pages: "Krafft-Ebing-she had never heard
of that author before. All the same she opened the battered old book,
then she looked more closely, for there on its margins were notes in her
father's small, scholarly hand and she saw her own name appeared in
those notes" (207). In both episodes the paternal annotations locate the
fictional Stephen in the referential sexological text; Hall is suggesting
that Stephen's difference can be diagnosed via its authority, her narra
tive read as exemplary sexological case.36
The fact that Stephen does not change sex does not obstruct a trans
sexual reading of the novel. As I have been arguing all along, it is the
life-plot rather than actual somatic sex change that symptomizes the
transsexual. In order to achieve the diagnosis necessary to access the
medical technology to change sex, one must recount a transsexual nar
rative; the subject is necessarily a transsexual before changing sex. Thus
Esther Newton's quick dismissal of the applicability of transsexual to
Stephen by delimiting the category to those "who actually have had
surgery to alter their bodies" places the sex-changed corporeal cart
before the transsexual narrative horse, we might say.37 Since narrative
not body is the diagnostic indicator of transsexuality, in fact in return
ing to the transgendered patterns of inversion's case histories, The Well
clearly reproduces this diagnostic indicator of transsexuality. The Welt's
narrative closely echoes the transgendered plots of the case histories.
Stephen's childhood reproduces, for instance, many of the details from
Krafft-Ebing's case Sandor/Sarolta. Like Sandor, Stephen is born to an
aristocratic family, raised and educated as a boy by a sympathetic father.
Like Sandor, Stephen is drawn toward the archetypically masculine
sports of the nineteenth century: fencing, horse-riding (she insists on
riding astride like a man), and hunting. Her childhood describes a life
plot that, as Dillon would say "develop[s] naturally along the lines of the
other sex." And like Krafft-Ebing's female inverts, Stephen's transgen
dered difference is inscribed as a plot on her body, and her plot in turn
is driven by her somatic difference. Stephen exceeds femaleness (in the
portrait above, Anna's beauty, "so perfect a thing, so completely reas
suring," serves to bring into relief Stephen's gendered otherness [23]),
yet falls short of maleness. Stephen resembles ("dare[s] to resemble"
[203]), yet crucially fails to reproduce her father: she is "a caricature of
Sir Philip; a blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction" ( 1 1 )-(at
once, too and not adequately) strong, tall, narrow-hipped, broad-shoul
dered, large-handed, cleft-chinned, big-jawed. This masculinized
body, this legibly transgendered body of the female invert, launches
Stephen's trajectory into a "no-man's land of sex" (77).
Even before Stephen's birth, however, the transsexual plot is out
lined, in the Gordons' certainty of a son and their naming him Stephen.
Their retaining this name sets up the grammar upon which the entire
plot of The Well is predicated: Stephen should have been male. Stephen's
relation to maleness is repeatedly framed as a "should have been," the
conditional perfect of the modal auxiliary (what ought to have been-
the mood of transsexual loss) returning at key moments to remind us of

the sexed absence that undergirds her story. Lady Anna remembers
looking at the Malvern hills, "great with the child who should have been
her son" (93). Stephen envies Martin Hallam's life, "a man's life, the life
that should have been hers" ( 1 00). She longs to fight in the war, the war
that should have been hers to fight. The narrative's pathos, taking up
the sexed regret of the case histories (as in Krafft-Ebbing's case: "she
bewailed the fact that she was not born a man"), stems from this mood,
the inexorability of this failed-sexed imperative. A narrative of what
should have been, paradoxically driven forward by regret for what
might have been, The Well takes place in an equivocal space of trans
sexual regret for a past that never was.
This nostalgia over a maleness that has failed to materialize pro
duces in the novel images of bodily lack for Stephen, the lack of the
female-to-male transsexual . The male body that should have been
haunts descriptions of Stephen's actual body, a phantom morphology in
the text. We have the sense that something-something material-is
missing. Stephen suffers "some great sense of loss, some great sense of
incompleteness" ( 1 0 1 ); she is "defrauded" ( 1 2 , 1 63), her body "maimed"
( 1 04), "maimed and insufferable" (2 1 7), and "sorely afflicted" (2 1 7); she
feels "bodily dejection" ( 140), she is a "genius . . . in the chains of the
flesh, a fine spirit subject to physical bondage" (2 1 7). The implication is
that, as a female who ought to have been a man, Stephen is incomplete.
No moment conveys this sense of Stephen's corporeal incompleteness,
her wrong embodiment, more poignantly than the novel's mirror
scene, a scene that knits into The Well the trope of contemporary trans
sexual narratives:
That night she stared at herself in the glass; and even as she did so she
hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts,
and its slender flanks of an athlete. All her life she must drag this body
of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. This strangely
ardent yet sterile body that must worship yet never be worshipped in
return by the creature of its adoration. She longed to maim it, for it made
her feel cruel; it was so white, so strong and so self-sufficient; yet withal
so poor and unhappy a thing that her eyes filled with tears and her hate
turned to pity. She began to grieve over it, touching her breasts with piti
ful fingers, stroking her shoulders, letting her hands slip along her
straight thighs-Oh, poor and most desolate bod y ! (1 87-188)
1 60 "Some Primitive Thing Conceived"
Teresa de Lauretis has recently suggested this mirror scene as a figure for
lesbian desire. She argues that what Stephen wants to see in the mirror is
a more feminine body: "The body she desires, not only in [her lover] but
also autoerotically for herself, the body she can make love to and mourns
for, is a feminine, female body."38 But the mirror scene is not a moment
of sexual perversion-the perverse desire of the mannish lesbian-but of
sexual inversion; the inverted body of the pretransition female-to-male
transsexual is caught and split by the mirror. Far from being a represen
tation of masturbatory pleasure as de Lauretis suggests, the mirror scene
captures a corporeal alienation powerful enough to produce in the sub
ject the desire to maim her body. Ironically, it is the "maimed" state of
Stephen's maleness-what's missing, what's not there-that produces in
Stephen the desire to maim it further. The mirror scene stems from
Stephen's failure to be male. It reflects not her "phallic self-sufficiency,"
but its antithesis: inadequacy, lack, in a projected image of maleness.39
Masculinized through lifting weights and fencing ("its muscular shoul
ders . . . its slender flanks of an athlete"), her body yet remains a legibly
female body ("its small compact breasts"). Masculine yet female, it is the
transgendered ambivalence, the very gendered doubleness caught by the
mirror, that Stephen hates, and the thrice repetition of "yet" in the short
passage underscores precisely this ambivalence. "[Y]et . . . yet . . . yet": the
syntax (itself a doubling back, a nostalgic return) casts a catena of regret
back to the male soma that "should have been."
It is notable that for de Lauretis to recoup the scene for a fetishistic
theory of lesbian desire, the critic must perform some disavowals and
substitutions of her own. First, to claim it as a scene of masturbatory
pleasure she must read past that final sentence, "Oh, poor and most des
olate body ! " to harness the phrase "this bitter loving" from a sentence in
the subsequent paragraph in order to claim this moment as one of a bit
ter loving, of disavowed masturbatory pleasure: "Stephen in front of the
mirror, 'touching her breasts with pitiful fingers, stroking her shoulders,
letting her hands slip along her straight thighs . . . (and if we might fan
tasize along with the text, watching in the mirror her hands move down
ward on her body) even unto this bitter loving."'40 Second, to claim the
scene as a figure for lesbian desire de Lauretis must remove the scene
from its sexological context and read it through the psychoanalytic para
digm that Hall opted against. To take note of that all-important cri de
coeur at the end of this paragraph, in which the narrative joins most fully
with Stephen's bodily abjection, and to read the scene in the context of
the anguish over wrong embodiment i n sexual inversion's case histo

ries-to read this body in its narrative, then-is surely to be struck with
the absolute unpleasure that infuses the entire passage.
The "frame" of the mirror scene, the context in which the passage
occurs (mentioned by de Lauretis but, again, crucially not factored into
her reading), works to affirm this syntax. The episode takes place
toward the end of Stephen's affair with Angela Crossby, when Stephen
senses she is being usurped by the "real" man, Roger Antrim. Feeling
herself "no match for the "calm, self-assured, insolent and triumphant"
( 1 88) Roger whose "right to be perfectly natural" (44) she has envied
since a child, Stephen resorts to the only potent tool she does have
money-to try to buy Angela's love with gifts. It is at the end of one day
of such desperate shopping that Stephen returns home to enact the scene
before the mirror. In confirmation of Stephen's fears, Angela herself has
already suggested Stephen's not being a man as the reason for their fail
ing relationship:" 'If you were a man-' She stopped abruptly, and burst
into uncontrollable weeping" (1 77). Like all of her erotic investments in
the novel, Stephen's relationship with Angela stalls precisely on this syn
tax of the failure of the present indicative: quite simply, the failure to be.
If like Eiiis's D, Stephen can only imagine herself "as a man loving a
woman"-as she says to her mother of Angela, "If I loved her the way
a man loves a woman, it's because I can't feel that I am a woman. All my
life I've never felt like a woman, and you know it" (204)-the mirror
scene reveals the shattering of this illusion and the reality of her failure
to be a real man.
While the split between her gendered imaginary and sexed reality is
captured graphically by the mirror scene, this transsexual difference has
been structured into the narrative from the beginning. As a child
Stephen initially experiences herself as identical to the masculine image
she projects, the male body image she experiences. When dressed as a
boy, in response to the observation that she "look[s] exactly like a boy,"
Stephen insists that she is a boy: "Yes, of course I'm a boy. . . . I must be a
boy, ' cause I feel exactly like one" ( 1 6). As she discovers to her frustration,
however, neither looking like nor feeling like constitute being. When she
dresses up and acts like Nelson, it is "only pretending or playing" (38);
"being a girl spoilt everything--even Nelson" (33). Performing boyness
only serves to drive home not being a boy, to bring into relief the dis
crepancy between being and seeming. Performing gender for Stephen
does not defuse but enunciates the power of gender ontology, a failure to
1 62 usome Primitive Thing Conceived#
be real.41 Stephen "dressing up" reveals the pathos of her lack of realness:
"she was conscious of feeling all wrong, because she longed to be some
one quite real, instead of just Stephen pretending to be Nelson. In a quick
fit ofanger she would go to the cupboard, and getting out her dolls would
begin to torment them. She had always despised the idiotic creatures
which, however, arrived with each Christmas and birthday" ( 1 7).
The split between seeming and being, between reflection and self
conception, causes Stephen to turn against what she is. Not being "real"
leads to an enraged acting out against the feminine-in this scene, sym
bolized by the dolls, which are more real in their artificial gendering
than Stephen will ever be. As strongly as she identifies with the mascu
line/father, the feminine/mother constitutes the site of a violent disiden
tification in the novel. This rage against the feminine-a rage in which
the narrative partakes by prolonging Stephen's alienation from her
mother-should be understood as a displacement of Stephen's rage
over her female body, over her ontological sex. In this instance the dolls
refer obliquely to what she is (female) and isn't (in alignment with the
feminine). Precisely because there is no affirmation or loving of the fem
inine in herself, the feminine is not treated with the fetishistic disavowal
de Lauretis suggests. Rather, at root of the desire to torment the femi
nine is Stephen's very unambivalent repudiation of her female corpore
ality. This rejection of femaleness is clearly what drives Stephen to
direct her frustrations toward a dress with which her mother has sought
to refeminize her in the following scene, the feminine here doubled up
in the conjunction of dress and mother:
She wrenched off the dress and hurled it from her, longing intensely to
rend it, to hurt it, longing to hurt herself in the process, yet filled all the
while with that sense of injustice. But this mood changed abruptly to one
of self pity; she wanted to sit down and weep over Stephen; on a sudden
impulse she wanted to pray over Stephen as though she were someone
apart, yet terribly personal in her trouble. Going over to the dress she
smoothed it out slowly; it seemed to have acquired an enormous impor
tance; it seemed to have acquired the importance of prayer, the poor,
crumpled thing lying crushed and dejected . (72)
The slippage in the first sentence between dress and self ("longing
intensely . . . to hurt it, longing to hurt herself in the process") clarifies
that Stephen's desire to "rend" or "hurt" the dress symptomizes her
desire to rend or hurt her own body. The dress functions metonymically
for the female body, and the desire to hurt the former at once reveals and
sublimates the desire to hurt the latter. Preceding the mirror scene, this
dress passage closely foreshadows that scene's description of Stephen's
desire to maim her body. In the mirror scene Stephen is undressed, her
desire like her body naked, her rage not displaced onto an object. But
both passages track the same emotional shift from rage to pity; and in
both Stephen's pity is aroused for her body/dress as if for an other, "as
though she were someone apart": "Oh poor and most desolate body";
"the poor crumpled thing lying crushed and dejected." The female body
is alien, horribly dislocated from self. In the gap between the morphol
ogy of her masculine body image and her duplicitous material female
body, Stephen's alienation is engendered, and transgendered.
Unlike transsexuals with access to technology Stephen does not get
beyond her mirror stage. There are no subsequent mirror scenes in the
novel to dramatize integration, and her bodily alienation remains frozen
in the plot. Yet in spite of sustaining this anguish over Stephen's disem
bodiment as a female invert, The Well does offer one moment of bodily
healing, deferring Stephen's somatic refiguration from the real of The
Welt's plot to a dream. That it is the sole dream, a phantasmagoric narra
tive embedded in this otherwise realistic novel, makes it especially signif
icant, yet it has received no previous critical attention. The dream occurs
during Stephen's childhood love for the housemaid Collins. It is sparked
and framed by the "housemaid's knee" episode, in which Collins's knee
has swollen with fluid as a result of polishing floors. In her infatuation
with the housemaid Stephen desires this swelling to be transferred from
Collins to herself so that she can undergo the "'orrible operation" that
Collins fears ( 1 7). It is in the midst of her prayers for this fleshly transfer
ence that Stephen slips into the dream:
"Please, Jesus, give me a housemaid's knee instead of Collins--do, do,
Lord Jesus. Please Jesus, I would like to bear all Collins' pain the way
You did . . . . I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus-and
I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins-I love her, and I
want to be hurt like You were . . . . Please give me a knee that's all full
of water. " . . .
This petition she repeated until she fell asleep to dream that in some
queer way she was Jesus and that Collins was kneeling and kissing her
hand, because she, Stephen, had managed to cure her by cutting her
knee with a bone paper-knife and grafting it on to her own. The dream
was a mixture of rapture and d iscomfort, and it stayed quite a l ong time
with Stephen. (18)
Like the dreams told Ellis by his female invert, D, Stephen's dream fol
lows the plot of the rescue fantasy: she occupies the place of subject,
ostensibly saving her beloved from bodily harm.42 The dream is shot
through with erotic charge; indeed, it is aroused by what is surely the
most sexual scene in this very unsexual novel. Collins exposes her
swollen knee for the young Stephen to touch:
They were standing alone in the spacious night-nursery, where Col l ins
was limply making the bed. It was one of those rare and del icious occa
sions when Stephen cou l d converse with her goddess undisturbed, for
the nurse had gone out to post a l etter. Co l lins ro l led down a coarse
woollen stocking and displ ayed the a ffl icted member; it was b l otchy and
swollen and far from attractive, but Stephen's eyes filled with quick anx
ious tears as she touched the knee with her finger. ( 1 7)
The syntax of the dream originates in this prior real moment. Stephen's
observation-her perception governs both the scene and the dream rep
resentation�f the bodily debasement of Collins as she "limply" makes
the bed is signified in the dream by Collins in a kneeling posture. Most
significantly, Collins's revelation and Stephen's touching of her
"afflicted member" are responsible for the shift in Stephen's subsequent
dream identification from Jesus ("she was Jesus") to Collins, of Stephen's
final positioning herself in the place of Collins by grafting Collins's
swelling onto herself.
These identificatory shifts in the syntax of the dream are crucial for
through them Stephen takes on for herself both the afflicted body and
the healing of this body. Within this fantasy of healing via substitution
Stephen's own "afflicted member"-the maimed and defrauded body of
the mirror and dress scenes-becomes the knot of the dream. Her own
body is displaced onto and rescued through the beloved's. In rescuing the
woman and establishing her difference, Stephen effectively rescues her
self from her own womanhood. The chain of substitution (Stephen =
Jesus = Collins) is suggested in the syntactic confusion in the description.

Subjects and objects are ambiguous; pronouns quickly lose their refer
ents and properties are left unspecified. It is clear that Collins is kneel
ing and Stephen is curing. Yet whose knee is being cut and what part of
the body is receiving the grafted swelling (her own what? ) remains won-
derfully obscure. Might not this ambiguity allow the dream to stand as a
transsexual fantasy of flesh grafted from one part of the body to heal the
female invert's own "afflicted member" ? Particularly given its thematic
skin substance and its moment of writing only ten years before the first
female-to-male phalloplasty was performed on Dillon, the dream res
onates powerfully as a reassignment dream, a fantastic prefiguring of
the healing possibilities of surgical grafting of the flesh. Cutting through
the flesh with a bone paper-knife (the tissue as bloodless and pliant as
paper, the body as rearrangeable as text), The We/l's dream of transfer
able flesh omits the as yet unrealized details of surgical intervention,
passes over the surgery by placing it in the past tense ("had managed to
cure her"). The moment of surgery has already occurred; the flesh has
already been transplanted; the healing has been performed. The dream
in The Well-Stephen's transsexual body narrative embedded in the
novel-takes the plot of transsexuality phantasmagorically to its "nat
ural" conclusion of somatic transformation.
The dream additionally elucidates how Stephen's transsexual lack,
her failure to transition, structures her relationships in the plot, the way
in which her erotic investment is directed consistently by her desire for
some form of "hetero" relation to the socially debased feminine other.
As subservient, both socially and physically, the kneeling Collins pro
vides a literalized template for Stephen's later erotic interests. These
both fall short of her own landed gentry status. Angela Crossby is stig
matized in at least three ways-by her louche past, as an American, and
as the wife of a nouveau Birmingham trader. Mary Llwellyn is poor,
orphaned, uneducated, and simply too Welsh to be English. These class
differences between herself and her love-object stand in, work as a sub
stitute, for the sexed differences that she, Stephen (and the narrative)
imagines should have existed. Social opposition takes the place of "nat
ural" sexed opposition, as Stephen's repeated investment in the declassee
other struggles to reenact the healing of her own dismembered body
that she fantasizes Collins's "ample" body can afford her ( 13).43
Yet in the real of the plot this class substitution, the "love of a good
woman," if you will, proves inadequate, the difference insufficient to
make up for Stephen's lack. If the narrative of the dream allows for the
healing of the maimed body of the invert through a form of surgical
grafting from the housemaid, the plot fails to realize this healing through
the series of socially inferior female lovers. As in the most transgendered
of case histories the bodies of Stephen's lovers plainly fail to compensate
the invert's wounded body. Her "lesbian" relations are infamously unsuc
cessful. The plot repeats Stephen losing the woman to the real man three
times-a triple triangulation in which Stephen is uncoupled, always the
odd one out. She first loses Collins to the footman; then Angela to Roger
Antrim; and finally, as the novel ends, Stephen herself pushes Mary to
Martin Hallam. It is this repeated failure of lesbian relations more than
any other feature that thwarts the attempt to read the novel as lesbian.
The difference between butch lesbian and transsexual is most pro
nounced here, in this refusal of desire. While female-to-male transsexu
als appear to share many similarities with lesbian butches, Newton
writes, the key or "most impressive difference is the rejection or accep
tance of homosexual identity."44 Thus, even according to Newton's own
criterion The Well is not a butch text, for the novel patently allows no rep
resentational space for the "lesbian" love-object. Stephen is left at the end
of the novel as once again lacking in respect toward real men.
Other critics reading the novel as lesbian have rightly found this
failure to sustain an erotic connection between women a problem for a
lesbian reading of the novel. For Stimpson such "structural logic" ren
ders The Well a "narrative of damnation" of lesbianism;45 Radford and
Whitlock see it as the novel's investment in heterosexual romance; and
Ruehl reads it as depicting lesbianism as sterile and barren. Even de
Lauretis reads Stephen's sacrifice of Mary finally as "a repudiation of
lesbianism as such."46 Concurring with lesbian critics most fully on
this point, I believe that we need finally to acknowledge what the novel
affirms in this very repudiation of lesbianism. That Stephen gives up
Mary to Martin Hallam in spite of Mary's devotion to her indicates that
the invert functions not as a figure for lesbianism-a lure or a con
struct-but precisely as its refusal. Through her passing over Mary
(both passing over her and passing her over to Martin), Stephen af
firms her identification with the heterosexual man. More powerfully
than any moment in the novel-and certainly more troublingly for the
transsexual critic recuperating The Well as a transsexual novel-this
act highlights her disidentification with women and locates her in a
masculinist economy in which women are to be exchanged (given up/
sacrificed/courted).
Transitional Ages
In her discussion of the points of overlap between the identities oflesbian
and female-to-male transsexual Gayle Rubin speculates on the transsex-
ual potential of lesbians in history: "It is interesting to ponder what . . .

lesbian forbears might be considered transsexuals; if testosterone had
been available, some would undoubtedly have seized the opportunity to
take it."47 Although Rubin makes no reference to Hall or The Well, the
sole photograph in her essay is of Hall in 1 936: at her most passing-pro
filed unsmiling in suit and tie, one hand straightening her lapel, the
other rigidly holding a cigarette, cropped hair slicked back-Hall
appears like an incarnation of this speculation. If the narratives of homo
sexuality and transsexuality are entwined as Rubin's essay indicates, the
writing of transsexual history will surely depend upon performing
retroactive readings of figures and texts that have been central to the les
bian and gay canon.
Nineteenth-century sexology represents a particularly entangled
moment in the history of sexual and gender subjects. Categories were
defined and rapidly refined, the invert-"that primitive thing conceived
in a turbulent age of transition" (49), as Hall describes Stephen-prolif
erating into the identities of homosexual, sadomasochist, transvestite,
fetishist, cross-dresser, intersexual, bisexual, and transsexual. But as the
governess Puddle's remark to Stephen cautions-"you're unexplained as
yet-you've not got your niche in creation" ( 1 53)-simply because the
transsexual had not yet been named or fully explained does not mean that
transsexual experiences did not exist or that transsexual stories were not
related under another rubric; or, as illustrated so effectively by Dillon's
case, that transsexuals didn't continue to exist even when the invert dis
appeared off the discursive map. In a cogent and refreshing critique of
the construction theory of homosexuality, Terry Castle demonstrates
how literature can provide evidence of "lesbian self-awareness well
before the so-called invention of the lesbian around 1 900."48 If lesbian
and gay historiography needs to think back over texts written before the
putative construction of homosexuality as Castle's work suggests, trans
gender studies (particularly now, at its moment of inception) ought to
consider how much more is at stake in not taking the invention hypoth
esis too literally with regard to the transsexual-especially since the dero
gation of transsexuality has turned on this axle of transsexuals as not the
authors of our own narratives. The value of sexology's case histories and
of The Well is in intervening in this representation and demonstrating
otherwise: that not only did transsexual desires and sex-changed subjects
exist prior to medical terminology but the stories inverts told brought
forth the medical narrative of transsexuality.
168 ''Some Primitive Thing Conceived"
That the transsexual novel has proven so deeply disturbing and trou
blesome in the lesbian canon-the most "obscene" novel for criticism
too--makes perfect sense. In recasting Hall's novel as transsexual, we
can see that our dogged attempts to read it as lesbian in spite of its nar
rative have been a case of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. But
in this failure to reconcile The Well to a lesbian context lies the novel's
value for a transsexual canon: for it is those narratives that don't quite fit,
which exceed or resist their homosexual location that (perhaps like trans
sexuals themselves) might find belonging in a transsexual context.
At the trial of The Well in November 1 928 Virginia Woolf was mull
ing over similar concerns about the relations between identity and nar
rative, substance and form: "What is the difference between the subject
& the treatment ? "49 Woolf's question was especially pertinent because
her own Orlando had been published but one month before The We/l's
trial, and had not only escaped the obscenity law but met with critical
acclaim; this in spite of the fact that, with its dedication to and photo
graphs of the renowned sapphist Vita Sackville West and its sex change,
Orlando is surely the more sexually illicit book.50 While critical tendency
has attributed the different fates of these novels to their different aes
thetic treatment of the same lesbian subject-Orlando's comedy versus
The Welt's "aggressively polemical stance"51-Woolf's question at the
trial suggests the very difficulty in making this distinction between aes
thetics and subject, narrative and identity; it suggests, I think, an intri
cacy of treatment and subject, of body and narrative. If the histories of
these two novels, Orlando and The Well, have been so antithetical, not
only in 1 928 but in their subsequent critical history (again, Orlando feted
where The Well has met with disapprobation, at best ambivalence), it is
because at root in each novel is a different subject. For in spite of its fan
tastic sex change Orlando is emphatically not about transsexuality.
Indeed, Orlando is not about the sexed body at all but the cultural vicis
situdes of gender. As hfer narrative propels hfer through four centuries
of history, Orlando is free to move beyond h/er body--quite queerly, to
break through the limits of the flesh; The Welt's protagonist, by contrast,
remains as trapped in her sexually inverted moment as she is in her
body.52 That it was Orlando and not The Well that was adapted for post
modern cinema is hardly surprising: because it is not embedded in med
ical discourse, because it is ultimately the queerer text, it is Orlando that
makes the better transition to contemporary configurations of gender
fluidity.53 Imprisoned in her sex, caught in her narrative, embedded in
her moment, Stephen is barred from the frisson of sexuality and the res
olution of the couple and-as a consequence-the embrace of contem
porary queer representation that result from Orlando's easy androgyny.
In our own fin de siecle age of transition, in which Orlando resur
faces as film-the contemporary transgender moment-transsexual
ity and homosexuality become complexly re-enmeshed. The parallels
between The Well and the transgendered narrative of my next chapter,
Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, between their masculine protago
nists and their respective struggles with female embodiment in the
world are powerful, and the texts are worthy of j uxtaposition. 54 Yet
even though Stone Butch Blues is the text that contains the technologi
cally enabled somatic transition and explicitly draws on the plot of sex
change, it is by far the less unambivalent transsexual narrative of the
two. The protagonist's journey in Stone Butch Blues is structured on an
ambivalence in relation to transsexuality, taking her through somatic
transition and back again; her narrative traces a return from the male
ness for which Stephen only longs as an end. It is this difference of
ambivalence, a wavering around transition-or rather a transforma
tion of transition into a new identity-that characterizes contempo
rary transgender. That lesbian and transsexual are reconfigured into a
new subject, that they prove not quite as irreconcilable as they do in
Hall, is what distinguishes Feinberg's transgendered story. The trans
gendered story is the transsexual's story, only not quite.
Home is the natural destination of any homeless person . . . . A homeless life has no storyline.
-Lars Eighner, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets
Keep lthaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you're destined for. -C. P. Cavafy,"lthaka"
Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home.
-Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
Traitors to our sex, or spies and explorers across the boundaries of what is man, what is woman?
-Minnie Bruce Pratt, S/he
chapter 5
No Place Like Home: Transgender
and Trans-Genre in Leslie Feinberg's
Stone Butch Blues
The Transgender Moment

In the summer of 1 994 a group of transsexuals and their supporters set up
camp opposite the lesbian-feminist Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.
Since 1 99 1 , when Nancy Burkholder was escorted off the land after com
ing out as a postoperative male-to-female transsexual, the festival's insis
tence on originary female sex as the qualifying home grounds for gen
dered membership, its "womyn-born-womyn-only" entrance policy, had
been used openly to exclude transsexual women. A facet of what Gayle
Rubin describes as the "xenophobia" of lesbian culture toward transsex
uals, such metaphoric territorializing of gender and literal territorializa
tions of physical space have often gone hand in hand. 1 Most infamously,
Janice Raymond's The Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
represents male-to-female transsexuals as agents of a medical empire sent
out to colonize women's community and somatic home: not natives to an
originary femaleness but latecomers, aliens, and thus not bona fide
women.2 The image of the transsexual as outsider appeared to naturalize
172 No Place Like Home
the literal exclusion of transsexuals from lesbian spaces such as Michigan.

Because it was correspondingly catachrestic, the transsexual intervention
of 1 994, "Camp Trans," was richly appropriate. Simultaneously asking
for transsexuals to be allowed entry to the festival land and questioning
the festival's definition of woman, the activists challenged both physical
and identity territorializing. The mere presence of transsexuals on the
borders of the festival posed a profoundly theoretical question about the
symbolic borders of gender: the question, where did the "real" festival
end and the other begin ? also meant, what exactly are the limits of
authentic womanhood ?
Published first in 1 979, The Transsexual Empire was reissued the
same year as Camp Trans took place. While it would be nicely ironic if
the reissue of this polemic against transsexuality could be shown to have
catalyzed Camp Trans, The Transsexual Empire's 1994 addendum, the
"New Introduction on Transgender" with its critique of "the politics of
transgenderism," evidences that "trans" and "politics" had already been
conjoined, that the new "transactivism" that Camp Trans symbolized
was already underway.3 Indeed, the work that first brought "trans" and
politics together, Sandy Stone's "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Post
transsexual Manifesto," appeared as early as 1 99 1 . (As the first part of
its title suggests, Stone's essay was a riposte to The Transsexual Empire,
which had singled Stone out as archetypal male-to-female transsexual
lesbian-feminist marauder. Raymond may still be seen to have fueled
the developments she opposed). Stone's essay provides what has become
the crux of the transgender movement, and its effects were visibly at
work in Camp Trans. Namely, Stone argues, if the ideal of transsexual
ity is to pass, and its antithesis to be read, a trans politics requires an
inversion of these practices; for in passing and assimilating as nontrans
sexual, transsexuals effectively fail to challenge representations such as
Raymond's that allow the transsexual no literal or figurative space as
subjects: "It is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is pro
grammed to disappear."4 In order to counter this discursive erasure,
Stone suggests the transsexual trade in passing as a woman or a man
and-punning on the textual terminology of reading-that s/he read
and write him/herself into existence as a transsexual. In spite of the echo
Stone's posttranssexuality is not a mere restatement of transsexual auto
biographers' desire to be read as transsexual. Juxtaposed with her cri
tique of their conventional narratives-indeed with this manifesto
drawn out of a critique of their conventional narratives-the difference
No Place Like Home 173
of Stone's "post" prefix becomes clear. As the coinage suggests post

transsexuality pushes past a conventional narrative of transsexuality,
displacing passing altogether and reading transsexual history back out
to unfound the very gendered integrity transsexual autobiographies
seek to establish. Most significantly, Stone hopes that, in being read,
transsexuals might come to constitute a gender-disruptive ''genre-a set
of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of struc
tured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored."5
It was in its production of a gender-disruptive, legibly transsexual sub
ject position that Camp Trans seemed to fulfill Stone's posttranssexual
vision. Trading passing for reading out their pasts, transsexual activists
staked a subjectivity and a politics not by insisting on transsexual belong
ing within sex/gender borders (but we are real women) but by challeng
ing the criteria used to make up those borders (what is a real woman ?).
One transsexual, originally sexed female but now embodied as a man
(thus satisfying the festival's requirement of natal femaleness but looking
nothing like a woman), asked if the festival policy allowed him entry;
another self-identified transsexual man born with male and female gen
italia asked if the policy meant that "only half of [him] could come in."6
In revealing these sexed crossings, Camp Trans in practice, like Stone's
posttranssexuality in theory, encapsulated the new transgendered poli
tics. The intent of narrating trans was not simply to instate transsexuality
as subject position but to unsettle gender's stable grounds.
One commentator legendizes Camp Trans into the founding of a
political movement: "a Stonewall for the rest of us."7 In her analogy of
Camp Trans to the queer movement's originary moment lies the key to
transgender's difference from transsexuality, the reason why Stone's
"post" -transsexuality needs to be understood as a configuration of trans
gender rather than a simple extension of transsexuality. I f, as I have
argued, the embrace of transgender constituted the threshold between
lesbian/gay and queer in the early nineties, the transgender movement
has in turn entailed an attempt to queer transsexuality. Stone's enlistment
ofJudith Butler's Gender Trouble to produce the transsexual as a gender
troubling figure makes clear this genealogy back to queer. Coming out;
pride in marginality; a politics that deconstructs identity: many of trans
gender's tenets are queer. As transgendered or posttranssexual, the trans
sexual claims that queer place in the borders: gender troubler now oppo
sitional gender outlaw. If passing is intrinsic to transsexuality, in the
transgender movement passing has become a marker of cultural abjec-
7 74 No Place Like Home
tion. "The fundamental building block of the whole [transgender] move

ment," as one community figure is cited in a landmark report on trans
gender, "is the willingness of transgender folk to put themselves out there
and be visible."8 Leaving the haven of assimilation achieved in transsex
ual passing, the queer/posttranssexual/transgendered transsexual comes
out and creates home in the transgendered community. This is the sig
nificance of transgender's trade-in of passing for being read: the comfort
of genetic-sexed belonging for the platform of a political subjectivity.
According to queer models therefore, transgender has radically
questioned transsexuality's body narrative, calling for an overturning of
many of its features. The transactivist group Transexual Menace is cam
paigning to have the diagnosis "Gender Identity Disorder" removed
entirely from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
"Gender Euphoria NOT Gender Dysphoria": its slogans invert the
pathologizing of transgender, offering pride in queer difference as an
alternative to the psychiatric story.9 The closure of most of the gender
clinics in the United States in the 1 980s (in large part an effect of pro
fessional research that questioned the efficacy of the narrative of sex
change) has already loosened transsexuality's medical strictures. 10 There
are fewer demands that the transsexual fit a conventional narrative in
order to get treatment as the categories "nonoperative" or "nonsurgery"
transsexual gain credence in the medical community. 1 1 Concomitantly,
the need, even the desire to head toward recognizably sexed homes
(male or female, man or woman) can no longer be assumed. Vitally
named by these new medical labels along with "transgendered," sub
jects are transitioning partially, intermediately-for instance, taking
hormones to reconfigure their secondary sex and choosing to retain
their genital sex. Alongside these discursive and somatic shifts, inspiring
and reflecting them, new forms of transsexual expression are emerging:
new narratives for new bodies and identities. Most prominently, Kate
Bornstein's Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us opposes
transsexuality's telic narrative structure (that it has a gendered outcome)
precisely as it rewrites the telic structure of conventional autobiograph
ical narrative. Our first "postmodern" transsexual (thus posttranssex
ual) autobiography, Gender Outlaw fragments continuous and connec
tive narrative into deliberately disjointed vignettes. Bornstein doesn't so
much narrativize her transsexual life as (a performance artist) she per
forms it, acting out-without integrating into a singular stable gen
dered identity-its parts: "My identity as a transsexual lesbian . . . [is]
based on collage. You know-a little bit from here, a little bit from
there ? Sort of a cut-and-paste thing. And that's the style of this book. It's
a transgendered style, I suppose."12
Yet even as the style of transgender cuts and pastes bits and pieces of
queer to produce a troubling performativity, the very fact of transgen
der's naming-a transgender studies, a transgendered movement, a
transgendered subject, and so on-still marks transgender's irreducibil
ity to these queer correlates. Most obviously, as the term "transgender"
suggests, this irreducibility pivots on the category of gender and an
approach to transgender as the grounds of an identity. The event often
considered, with Michigan, to have crystallized the transgendered move
ment clarifies transgender's distinction from queer discourse on this axis:
in December 1 993 a young female-embodied subject who passed as a
man without the aid of hormones or surgery was killed in Humboldt,
Nebraska, on discovery as a female. While the murder of Brandon Teena
was in itself deeply disturbing (another transitional body "erased" off the
discursive map), it was the representation of Teena in the press as a cross
dressing lesbian that channeled anger into politically mobilizing action.
That mainstream and gay press alike used female pronouns for Teena,
although Teena had lived as a man and articulated his desire for sex
reassignment surgery, was experienced by many as a second erasure of
the subject. Donna Minkowitz's article, "Love Hurts. Brandon Teena
Was a Woman Who Lived and Loved as a Man. She Was Killed For
Carrying It Off' (the title of which encapsulates the author's stance on
Teena's "true identity" as a woman: "the wonder boychick," "the hand
somest butch item in history-not just good-looking but arrogant, auda
cious, cocky--everything they, and I, look for in lovers"), for example,
spurred a seminal incident: the forming of the first transactivist group,
Transexual Menace, whose members gathered to protest outside the
offices of New York's Village Voice.13 The protesters alleged a queer coop
tion of a trans story in Minkowitz's reading: what had happened to the
trans plot in her lesbian retelling? If Camp Trans represented transgen
der as a queering of transsexuality, the Teena case complicated this queer
affiliation, suggesting that transgender was not only irreducible to but on
occasion needed deliberately to be separated from a generic queerness.
Moreover, Teena's death demonstrated the limited capacity of the transi
tional subject as "gender outlaw" to change gender conventions. Like
Venus, the outlaw was himself subject to outlawing, murdered precisely
because of his outlaw status before he could even change himself.
The etymological history of the term "transgender" certainly reveals

the threads of transgender connecting to and separating from queerness
as much as from transsexuality. "Transgenderist," from which "trans
gender" derives, was coined in the late 1 980s to describe a male subject
with a commitment to living as a woman more substantial than that
denoted by "transvestite" or "cross-dresser."14 The terms available for a
committed cross-gendered identity-"transsexual" and that personifi
cation of queer, "drag queen"--did not capture the specificity wanted
for a transgendered identity. In contradistinction to the transsexual, the
transgenderist crossed the lines of gender but not those of sex; in con
tradistinction to the drag queen, the transgenderist's feminine gender
expression was not intrinsically bound up with a homosexual identity
nor could its livedness be made sense of through drag's performativity.
As much a rescription of queer performativity as transsexual narratives,
then, transgender emerged steering a careful path between transsexual
ity's investment in the materiality of sex and a queer refiguration of gen
der into sexuality. What complicates the task of specifying transgender
apart from queerness and transsexuality, however, is that the threads of
difference between these projects and subjects are rewoven in the sec
ond sense in which "transgender" has come to be used, often (confus
ingly) concurrently with the first. "Transgender" now also functions as
a container term, one that refers not only to transgenderists but to those
subjects from whom it was originally invented to distinguish transgen
derists: transsexuals and drag queens, transvestites and cross-dressers,
along with butches and intersexuals and any subject who "trans-es" sex
or gender boundaries. This collective sense underlies the coalitionary
politics of transgender, assembling into a movement subjects previously
dispersed if not assimilated in straight and queer worlds. In sum, if it
was specification that allowed its naming in the first place and this
umbrella sense that has enabled the affiliations of transgender, at the
heart of transgender's project lies a contradictory dynamic in relation to
queerness and transsexuality: both differentiating against and inclusive
of them. From this bi part history of the term it makes sense to assume
that "transgender" needs to be read in relation to, but not reduced to,
transsexual and queer narratives.
This chapter examines the emergence of transgender on the fault
lines and tensions between transsexual and queer. As Camp Trans and
the Teena/Minkowitz case suggest, the relations between these projects
often get played out in debates about narrative and territory--debates
that create narratives about territory: about what it means to cross gen
der or sex, to share or distinguish identity space, to establish, differenti
ate, and affiliate plots and movements. Within this project, home may
prove a powerful organizing trope. If the drive of conventional trans
sexual narratives is nostalgically toward home-identity, belonging in
the body and in the world-and that of queer performativity away from
it-resisting domestication, upturning the grounds ofidentity politics
then transgender would seem to contain important ambivalences about
home and territory, belonging and political affiliation. To explore these
ambivalences, I turn to a figure also at the Camp Trans protest, one
whose configuration of body, desire, and identification perhaps most
concretely challenged the festival's entrance policy. A female-born sub
ject who has masculinized hir body with testosterone and a double mas
tectomy, thus often passing as a man in the world, and yet who broke off
hormone treatment and now locates in hir work as a "transgendered les
bian," Leslie Feinberg uniquely embodies transgender ambivalence.
Minnie Bruce Pratt's slashed pronoun for Feinberg, her partner
"s/he"-and Feinberg's own use of this form and the third person "hir"
provide an index to the remarkable difference Feinberg poses, in body
and language, not only to conventional gender, sex, and sexual narra
tives but to both transsexuality and queerness. 1 5 Feinberg's own writings
and hir life create transgender out of interstices. Overlapping, intersect
ing, but ultimately marking out a specific location apart from both trans
sexuality and a generic queerness, Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues: A
Novel-a text that for many represented the voice of the new transgen
dered movement-heads toward liminality on all fronts; yet idiosyn
cratically and poignantly Stone Butch Blues makes of liminality a trans
gendered home. 16 Most significantly for thinking about the future of
affiliations in and around the emergence of transgender, Feinberg rec
ognizes a crucial irony about home: although home is a place we make
up, recognizing its fictionality only fuels its mythic lure. Specifying our
locations even while we question the grounds for our distinctions may
provide the very mobilizing force for a transgendered movement.
A Dislocated Subject and the Dream of a Transgendered Community

"Autobiographies of those who might have been transsexuals, but did not
become so," remarks Bryan Tully with palpable regret for this absence of
what he imagines would be a textual wrench in the machine of transsex
ual reproduction through autobiography, "are not usually written. " 1 7
Stone Butch Blues is the exception, the story of a transsexual who turned
back; or, rather, of a subject who, like Feinberg hirself, halts her transi
tion through surgery and hormones to found an embodied transgen
dered subjectivity. Although not a transsexual autobiography, Stone
Butch Blues does not abandon but refigures the conventions of transsex
ual autobiographies: like the subjects of transsexual narratives Feinberg's
protagonist remakes her body with hormones and surgery; unlike trans
sexual autobiographers she refuses the refuge of fully becoming the other
sex and the closure promised by the transsexual plot. Jess Goldberg
chooses instead an incoherently sexed body in an uneasy borderland
between man and woman in which she fails to pass as either. Her deci
sion to start and to stop transitioning, to live an embodied transgender
and not transsexuality, is informed at all points by a longing for home. It
is her repeated displacement from and desire for home that leads her to,
and then diverts her from, the transsexual plot.
Jess overtly disidentifies with transsexuality, rejecting that famous
rhetorical formula she admits she received from TV-"I don't feel like a
man trapped in a woman's body. I just feel trapped" (1 58-1 59). Yet like
the transsexual's, her narrative is driven by her sense of not being at home
in the sexed body. The identity Jess does embrace, that of the stone butch
or the "he-she," denotes this bodily displacement. The stone butch expe
riences her female body as that which is most unheimlich in herself: as
with the transsexual the body that should be home is foreign, the famil
iar felt as most strange. Conventionally, the "stoneness" of the stone butch
lies in her sexual untouchability, an untouchability that is the very basis
for her sexuality. Stone butch may well constitute the critical difference
between female-to-male transsexual and lesbian butch. The transsexual's
transgendering lies in his actualized rejection of sex; the touchable lesbian
butch's is at all points contained in her sexuality. Stone butch is a strikingly
"rigid" gender identity, yet this rigidity is "softened" and the stone butch's
female sex made livable by her sexual practice. The touch of Jess's lovers
never moves above her thigh. Like the transsexual she fears feeling a sex
she cannot own. But the dildo she straps on to make love enables her to
displace internal female bodily sex to an imaginary male projection with
out the need for genital surgical intervention. Sex, as Jess's first lover tells
her, "[h]er mouth . . . very near my cock, . . . 'is an act of sweet imagina
tion' ": " 'If you're going to fuck me with this,' she said, stroking it, 'then
I want you to feel it' " (71). For Jess the "lesbian" "dildo" never is one; it
is always felt as a "cock" in a profound sense, a part of her stone-butch
body. Thus her sexuality sustains her gender displacement and her gen
der displacement transforms the meaning of her desire: her stone butch
masculinity transgenders the symmetry of same-sex sexuality. If, as
Rubin has argued, "the boundaries between the categories of butch les
bian and female-to-male transsexual are permeable," no narrative subject
"permeates" more fully than Feinberg's Jess Goldberg, a stone butch who
refigures her sex, crossing and recrossing those boundaries. 1 8
While gendered contradiction has played a key role i n making visi
ble queer pride, Feinberg's stone butch filters this contradiction through
shame, conveying it as an acute discomfort, an affect to be resolved.
Shame is a profound grappling with the selfs location in the world
the feeling of being out of place, of not being at home in a given situa
tion, combined with the desire to be at home. "No other affect" writes
psychologist of shame Gershen Kaufman "is more central to identity
formation . . . . Answers to the questions, 'Who am I ? ' and "Where do I
belong? ' are forged in the crucible of shame."19 At root in gender iden
tity disorder is a shame that has rightly been described as "existential":
gender dysphoric shame develops not from what one does but from who
one is.20 Born of the self watching the self, shame reflects a split in the
subject. In the split, gender-dysphoric subject shame is felt specifically
over the body; and perhaps body image and shame are generally inti
mately related. Shame is most often expressed somatically-blushing,
lowered face; and shame is often thought to originate in a consciousness
of genitals.21 In Feinberg and in lesbian folklore the stone butch remains
at least partially clothed when making love because of her shame over
her female parts. Her sense is of a mismatch between her masculine
desire and her female sex; her unspeakable wish is to bring these into
alignment. That she does not speak this wish where the female-to-male
transsexual docs is an indicator that the stone butch, unlike the trans
sexual, finds a way (I am suggesting her stone sexuality, that act of sweet
imagination) to manage the split, to balance in a refigurative desire the
difference between material body and body image.
The account of Jess's childhood and early adult life is steeped in an
almost insufferable shame. Jess repeatedly claims to be out of touch
with her feelings, unable to express them, yet she frequently articulates
feeling shame. Although the social reading of Jess's gendered difference
(from her own body in conjunction with her difference from others
around her), of her not belonging in a recognizable gendered place,
inscribes this sense of shame, the recurring question of Jess's life-"[a]re
you a boy or a girl ? " ( 1 6)-reveals that Jess's gendered difference is

already corporeally legible to those around her and in fact invites this
reading. Like transsexual autobiography Stone Butch Blues suggests
transgender as a core gender identity helplessly writ large on a body, not
produced by a culturally determined way of looking but, rather--espe
cially in its accounts ofJess's alignment with nature in childhood-nat
ural: "Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me" ( 1 7).22
Yet as a transgendered text Stone Butch Blues is suitably ambivalent
about the course of shame's production. While representing the sub
ject's gender difference as natural, the narrative makes clear that the
experience of this difference is filtered through cultural constructions of
gender. Others' anxieties raised by her ambivalence as a child and an
adult generate and are seen as rationalizing the sexual violence against
Jess, a sexual violence that in a circular fashion reinscribes her shame.
In the first instance Jess is stripped down and locked in a coal bin by a
gang of neighborhood boys: " 'Let's see how you tinkle,' one of the boys
said as he knocked me down and two of the others struggled to pull off
my pants and my underpants. I was filled with horror. I couldn't make
them stop. The shame of being half-naked before them-the important
half-took all the steam out of me" ( 1 8). Shame is the naked transgen
dered body on public display. That "half' is important for it reveals
Jess's sexed difference both from the boys and from what she herself
appears not to be. Similarly, on both subsequent occasions when she is
raped, first by schoolboys and then by the police, and when men urinate
on her bed in the psychiatric ward, the sexual violence against Jess is
both caused by and reinforces her difference, her "unnaturalness."
These incidents centralize and subjugate Jess's body, exacerbating her
shame over its abjection and her identificatory distance from it. During
the second rape, for instance, Jess displaces the real event and leaves her
body behind by focusing on an imaginary place, a desert surrounded by
mountains. This "place" will increasingly become a lure, symbolizing a
natural home and an escape from the persecution and unbelonging she
faces in the real world.
Shame fuels her desire to get out--0ut of the body and out of the
world that stigmatizes her body. But it is only once the discrepancy
between feeling and being is inflected through the cultural insistence
on belonging, on continuity between body and identity, that the sub
ject even makes sense of not belonging as shame. The feeling of not
being at home in the body unreconciled with the desire to be at home
only becomes shameful in a world that normalizes being in place.

Next to her "normal" feminine sister whose "dream was a felt skirt
and an applique poodle and rhinestone-studded plastic shoes," Jess
feels out of place and longs to belong: "I wished I could find a way to
be good. Shame suffocated me" ( 1 9). Likewise, her failure to fit in to
charm school serves to highlight her "shameful differences" (23). And
while working in the bindery, Jess fears starting the round of singing,
ashamed of the difference her voice will make among the native
women workers: "I realized I felt ashamed of my own voice" (79). In
childhood the shaming of difference is reinforced by Jess's mother
who confesses her own shame over Jess's refusal to wear a d ress to
temple. And this in spite of the narrative making clear that a 1 950s
upstate New York blue-collar town renders all kind of d i fference
shameful-in the Goldbergs' case, their working-class Jewishness:
Shabbas candles are lit behind closed curtains, an ethnic and religious
difference that, like Jess's different desires, is shamed into secrecy. Jess
claims, "Everyone in my family knew about shame" ( 1 9). But unlike
Jess's gender-dysphoric shame, her family's shame about nonbelong
ing does not originate in or increase the abjection of the body.
If the concepts of being at home and not being at home in one's sexed
body take on meaning in a culture that emphasizes identity belonging,
Jess's change of context-her move to Buffalo to seek out a place as a
stone butch within its butch/femme community-represents an attempt
to change the meaning of her ambivalence. And, temporarily, she suc
ceeds: in this space her gendered difference is her passport to belonging.
Correlatively, shame is generalized, structured into the community. In
Feinberg's representation of its 1950s/1960s working-class manifestation,
butch/femme code expects stone butches to conceal the femaleness of their
bodies, bind their breasts, wear men's clothes, and remain untouchable in
bed. At moments the community even manages to invert the values of the
dominant culture that shames them, resulting in scenes, such as Butch
Ro's funeral, which are among the most powerful in the text. At the
funeral shame lies in the "burly, big-shouldered he-shes who carried their
womanhood in work-roughened hands" wearing dresses ("outdated,
white, frilly, lace, low-cut, plain"); it lies in their not concealing their sex:
"Wearing dresses was an excruciating humiliation for them . . . . This
clothing degraded their spirit, ridiculed who they were" ( 1 1 7). Never
theless, the home offered by this community ultimately proves transitory
and, in the seventies, Jess finds herself again displaced. The end of the
Vietnam War brings men back to their jobs in Buffalo, putting Jess and
the other butches out of work in the plants and factories. Lesbian femi
nism rewrites butch/femme erotics as heterosexual/sexist role play, com
ing to replace Jess's community in the bars with evenly gendered, middle
class lesbian couples, performing acts of exclusion that were part of the
real historical process of reshaping and redefining the lesbian community
as feminist. While the transgendered texture of the butch/femme com
munity housed and valued the gendered contradiction and bodily shame
in the figure of the stone butch, the new lesbian-feminist ideology has no
place for the non-woman-identified woman.
As it describes this historical shift, the narrative underlines how Jess's
identification as a stone butch profoundly dislocates her from the cate
gory "woman." When her femme lover, Theresa, begins to identify as a
lesbian feminist, herself finding no bar between femme and lesbian fem
inist, Jess as a butch proves unable to take on either modifier, lesbian or
feminist. Theresa shows Jess a campaign poster of two naked embracing
women, bearing the legend "Sisterhood-make it real" (138). In visceral
reaction perhaps to their very nakedness (their "lesbian" likeness, the
shamelessness of their unclothed female bodies touching), Jess claims not
to "feel [the women's movement] so much . . . [m]aybe cause I'm a butch"
( 138). Rejecting Theresa's suggestion that "Butches need women's liber
ation, too" and that as butch Jess is a woman (138), Jess steadfastly insists
on her transgendered difference: " 'No I'm not,' I yelled back at her. 'I'm
a he-she. That's different' " (14 7). As cultural feminism validates female
ness and seeks to tone down the gender "difference" of the lesbian from
other women (the lesbian becomes archetypal "womyn," in that new sig
nifier emptied out of any trace of the masculine), Jess correspondingly
finds herself once more not at home, out of place.
It is this social unbelonging that Jess represents as the manifest reason
for her decision to begin hormone treatment. Jess externalizes her tran
sition, suggesting that passing as a man is the only thing for a stone butch
to do at this historical crossroads when "real" men and "real" women
became dominant in her public and private cultural picture. Somatic
transition would appear to be an economic, a social, but not a psychic
necessity. And, certainly, more than transsexual texts, Stone Butch Blues
demonstrates cogently the cultural significance of passing: how the stone
hutch's taking hormones to pass is a passing up the ladder of social
acceptability-importantly, not so much from female to male as from
queer-looking butch to clean-cut straight young man. Yet in this atten-
No Place Like Home 7 83
tion to cultural locatedness lies the crucial tension in the transgendered

plot of this text. For as it naturalizes Jess's transgendered difference,
Stone Butch Blues naturalizes the transition that embodies this difference;
it represents passing for Jess as a coming home to her body: a resolution
of bodily shame. In its description of her transition the narrative suggests
that Jess's move away from femaleness is emphatically not a case of a "les
bian's" or a "woman's" going under cover as a man to escape stigmatiza
tion but part of one stone hutch's attempt to embody her transgender.
Passing for Jess (in spite of how the plot turns out) is emphatically not a
woman's or a lesbian's passing phase. Elsewhere, in hir history of trans
gender, Feinberg argues that to understand the specificity of transgender
identity, we must read the transgendered "gender expression" behind
such passages and challenge the pervasive notion that (here female-to
male) transgendered identities are simply a "disguise" for women's or
lesbian's stigmatization: "I just don't believe that the debate about why
'women pass as men' can be understood only in the light of women's, or
of lesbian and gay, oppression. It has to be viewed in the context of trans
history in order be make sense."23 Stone Butch Blues makes the same case
in fiction. It requires us to understand Jess's transition as part of her
transgendered identity, in the context of her "transhistory."
Complicating Jess's own social rationale for her transition, then, Fein
berg reveals that through transition Jess becomes reconciled to her body.
Jess takes great pleasure in the physical changes she undergoes, hor
mones and surgery creating a body more appropriately hers. This con
ception of transition brings Stone Butch Blues into dose alignment with
transsexual narratives. It is fitting, therefore, that Feinberg conveys Jess's
increasing pleasure and relief in transition most evidently in a mirror
scene. In this scene of reconciliation to the body Feinberg's transgen
dered narrative intersects most visibly with the transsexual's:
As I brushed my teeth, I glanced in the mirror and had to look a second
time. Beard stubble roughed my cheeks. My face looked slimmer and
more angular. I stripped off my T-shirt and my Bvo's. My body was lean
and hard. My hips had melted away. I could actually see muscles in my
thighs and arms I never knew I had . . . . I took a hot soapy shower, enjoy
ing the feel of my hands on my skin. It had been so long since I'd been at
home in my body. (1 71)
In contrast to the body-concealing strategies of herself as female

embodied stone butch (painful breast-binding, wearing suits), Jess on
hormones stands before the mirror unclothed and without shame: not
only now able to look but to touch and find pleasure in her nakedness.
This reconciliation to her naked sex stems from her being no longer a
naked female. The hormones have masculinized that femaleness. The
narrative's metaphorizing of transition as a coming home, the notion of
transition as somatic repatriation, underscores that femaleness is a for
eign land and masculinization a journey toward home; Jess describes
her double mastectomy similarly as "a gift to myself, a coming home to
my body" (224). And as Jess comes home in her body, she not surpris
ingly also finds a niche in the world. She discovers for the first time an
unambivalent place to get her hair cut, a place to go to the bathroom
without trepidation. She becomes acceptable to the world: in short, cul
turally locatable.
The question Stone Butch Blues poses, then, is why Jess does not con
tinue in her transition. If Jess achieves such happiness at being at home in
her body, why does she stop taking the hormones? Why does she give up
the protection and security provided her in passing as a man for the dan
gerous intermediacy of the gender-ambivalent? For while her lowered
voice, her masculinized facial structure, and her body without breasts
remain irreversible effects of female-to-male somatic transitioning, com
ing off testosterone does refeminize her, restarting her period, thinning
her beard, widening her hips, and softening her face somewhat-"blend
ing gender characteristics" (224). In direct correlation to this embodied
intermediacy Jess finds herself once more out of place in the world, the
cycle of violence against her resparked by her visible difference: after her
move to New York City, she is stared at, beaten up, chased, fired, taunted.
In effect, in ending hormone treatment, Jess ends up in the world in a
place of neither-nor/both, her cultural unbelonging literalized by her
being unable to ride her Norton motorbike into Canada with her driving
license listing her sex as female. Why this return or doubling back in and
of the narrative into this zone of dangerous intermediacy ? This is the
crucial turning point, for it is here that the transgendered story splits off
most dramatically from the transsexual plot.
The difference of this transgendered narrative-both from a trans
sexual and a queer trajectory-the reasons for Jess's unique decision,
can be explained through Jess's unique experience of passing. For the
transsexual, passing is becoming, a step toward home, a relief and a
release: it aligns inner gender identity with social identity; one is "taken"
in the world for who one feels oneself to be. In the queer deployment of
transgender, passing is conversely identity's unbecoming: passing deon

tologizes sex and gender, the "doing" of gender profoundly destabiliz
ing the reality of an "is." Although passing for Jess keeps separate the
feeling of being gendered from the world's perception of this gendering
(Jess is what she feels, not-as in much queer theory-what she seems),
in distinction to transsexual narratives, passing ultimately reopens in
Jess a painful split between inner and social identity that undoes the ini
tial relief the hormones brought. If, in beginning hormone treatment,
Jess states, "the hormones are like the looking glass for me. If I pass
through it, my world could open up," half-way through the mirror, it is
Jess (her gender/sex split) and not her world that opens up ( 1 5 1). In pass
ing as a man, Jess realizes that being a man is not-home but in fact "bor
ders that will never be home" (1 1).
The split that passing brings on in Jess is captured in-what else ?-a
series of mirror scenes, their similarity with and difference from those in
transsexual narratives (like but not quite) articulating the specificity of
the transgendered narrative. Jess sees reflected in the mirror not what the
subject of transsexual narratives sees, the not-me; before her transition
Jess invariably sees herself, a transgendered woman looking back at a
transgendered woman. As a child cross-dressing in her father's suit, Jess
sees reflected not a man but an "uncatalogued" woman (not pictured in
Sears), the transgendered woman she expects to become. After giving
herselfher first shot of testosterone, Jess reassures herself that in the mir
ror she still sees "me, looking back at me" ( 1 64). Even after having sex
with Annie, a heterosexual woman who takes her (in both senses) as a
man, while trading dildo for sock in her BVDS (hard on and off again) in
Annie's bathroom, Jess sees "me looking back at me" in the bathroom
mirror ( 1 92). During this, the most schizophrenic moment in the text
("She put her hand gently between my thighs and squeezed the sock. 'I
got a lot of pleasure out of this tonight, she said' "[192]), when what Jess
passes for is most divorced from what she feels herself to be, the mirror
makes clear that Jess has maintained to herself while passing as a man the
stability of her identity as a masculine woman, that transgendered ambiva
lence-"lt's one thing for the magician to reveal the art of illusion. It's
another thing to tell a straight woman that the man she slept with was a
woman" (195). What Jess sees in the mirror is now notably gendered
not simply me looking back at me-yet this gendering is clearly not male
although neither it is unambiguously female; it is instead a transgender
ing. Passing for Jess has involved the production of an illusion-a pro-
jection, not a reflection-of being a man; it is not a stage in the process to

becoming one as it is in transsexual narratives. Yet now in contradistinc
tion to queer theory's version of transgender, it is Jess's inner (trans)gen
der identity that determines her sense of herself not her passing, her "per
formance"-sexual and social-as a man. The masquerade does not
constitute her identity; it is simply that: a masquerade concealing her
sense of her real self. It is this distinction on both sides that determines
her transgendered trajectory in between.
Once Jess reaches the point where her passing is so successful that she
no longer sees "me looking back at me" in the mirror, once the contra
diction between what she appears to be and what she feels herself to be
has reopened (this time on the other side), Jess decides to end her testos
terone injections. Jess's "me" after her experience with hormones turns
out to be the space of gendered contradiction and ambiguity, neither
woman nor man but in fact both. In describing the moment of her
return Jess displays the peculiar splitting-the "double consciousness"
(as she quotes Du Bois)24--engendered by passing:
I d rew one cc of hormones into a syringe, lifted it above my naked
thigh-and then paused. My arm felt restrained by an unseen hand. No
matter how I tried I could not sink that needle into my quadriceps as I'd
done hundreds of times before. I stood up and looked in the bathroom
mirror. The depth of sadness in my eyes frightened me. I lathered my
morning beard stubble, scraped it clean with a razor, and splashed cold
water on my face. The stubble still felt rough. As much as I loved my
beard as part of my body, I felt trapped behind it. What I saw reflected
in the mirror was not a man, but I couldn't recognize the he-she. My face
no longer revealed the contrasts of my gender. I could see my passing
self, but even I could no longer see the more complicated me beneath my
surface . . . . I hadn't just believed that passing would hide me. I hoped
that it would allow me to express the part of myself that didn't seem to
be woman. I didn't get to explore being a he-she though. I simply
became a he-a man without a past.
Who was I now-woman or man ? . . . What if the real me could
emerge, changed by the journey ? Who would I be ? . . . I searched the
apartment for a cigarette, but as I picked up the pack I watched my hand
crush it. (22 1-222)
The gendered contradiction in Jess in this scene is at its most powerful.

Not only does Jess for the first time in the narrative not recognize her
reflected self in the mirror, the "real me" now concealed "beneath my
[reflected] surface," a mask of passing, her bodily gestures contest each
other in a complex embodiment of this split subjectivity. Watching her
self crush the pack even though she had wanted a cigarette, unable to
inject the testosterone in spite of habit (restrained by a seemingly exter
nal force), Jess experiences her desires as multiple and contradictory: a
sign of this double consciousness that passing has installed, a disjunc
tion between psyche and body again. In these careful details Feinberg
demonstrates how Jess's body negates itself to a point of stasis, necessi
tating the end of her transsexual trajectory: after this she can go no fur
ther. The moment is the embodiment of negation in Jess's story.
What has been negated in Jess's passing are "the contrasts of [Jess's
sense of her] gender," her embodied gendered difference, her transgen
dered ambivalence: above all, her stone butch self. Always bringing
with it some loss of the past, floating the subject only in the present or
shrouding him or her in a fictionalized past, passing in Jess necessitates
a concealment of her transgendered history: Jess simply became "a he, a
man without a past." As a subject who continues to identify as a trans
gendered woman in the present, Jess remains bound to her actual past.
She chooses to keep with her and to make visible-to make consistently
readable-the strange familiarity, the ambivalence and liminality of the
transgendered, sex-reconfigured stone butch: "No matter how painful
it was to be a he-she, I wondered what kind of courage was required to
leave the sex you'd always known" (95). Holding off from the transsex
ual's future destination of integral sex, in not passing on, Jess in effect
locates identity in the passage itself. Her "real me" can emerge only at
this point in her transition: she is "herself" only after her experience
with hormones and surgery has somatically transgendered her, but only
before they have transsexed her. Trading in passing as a man for being
read as a he-she--or rather making the knot of contradiction between
passing and being read into the grounds for her transgendered iden
tity-Jess ends up passing neither as man nor woman and being read as
both. She makes the fantastic transformation, the intermediate space of
crossing, her lived reality.
Passing might bring Jess home to her body, but assimilating as a man
means the loss of specific community. Yet the transgendered intermedi
acy she ends up embodying hardly provides Jess with a haven in the
world. In effect, if Jess trades in a sexed home to prevent the disappear
ance of her transgendered past into the larger culture, this desire for a
culturally specific home leaves her visibly transgendered body with no

place like home in the world: no sexed home to which it would seem to
belong. The final chapter of Stone Butch Blues seems to want to resolve
Jess's sustained cultural unbelonging and to provide the text with some
kind of narrative resolution: it is with the question of where Jess might
find a community home that Stone Butch Blues closes. The chapter begins
with Jess's return to the lesbian and gay community, her taking the mike
at a lesbian and gay rally in New York City, and her emergence from the
subway stairs at Christopher Street symbolizing her reemergence in the
lesbian and gay world. At the rally Jess speaks her transgendered history,
coming out with the self passing has concealed: "I'm not a gay man . . . .
I'm a butch, a he-she" (296). Reading her body back out, Jess's autobio
graphical act represents her attempt to find a home in queerness, where
the concept of home, as she suggests to her lesbian and gay audience,
might be loosened to allow for affiliations across difference, where the
"we [might be] bigger" (296). Yet this real place of the West Village and
the acceptance that Jess receives here from lesbians and gays is displaced
by the location with which the text closes: the mythic transgendered place
of Jess's final dream. This dream echoes two preceding dreams; read
together as a staggered narrative within the text, the dreams stage the
fantasy of finding a specifically transgendered home not defined or con
tained by the queer space symbolized in the West Village.25
The first is a daydream that Jess produces during her rape by the
police. It figures Jess alone and apparently lost in the desert, heading
toward mountains, "seeking sanctuary" (63). The second dream occurs
immediately before Jess's decision to transition. The landscape is still
mythic, now a deserted town from which Jess is walking away, looking,
significantly, for people. Following a trail of smoke to a hut in a clearing
in a forest, Jess finds inside the drag queens Justine, Peaches, and
Georgetta, the butches Al and Edwin, and Jess's mentor, Rocco, who had
taken hormones and had breast surgery before her. While in the real of
her narrative at this point Jess has not begun to transition, in her dream,
her body is already transformed: "I touched my own face. I felt the rough
stubble of beard. I ran my hand across the flat of my chest. I felt happy in
my body, comfortable among friends" ( 1 42). On waking, Jess describes
her sense of her relation to the people in the dream: "I felt like I belonged
with them, you know ? " ( 1 42). She specifies a different configuration of
gender as the criterion for belonging among the characters of her dream:
"But in the dream it wasn't about being gay. It was about being a man or
a woman," claiming, "I didn't feel like a woman or a man, and I liked
how I was different"{l43).
In the third and final dream Jess returns to the hut in the field, dis
covering a circle of people inside. Now it is clear that it is transgenderism
that links these people, that forms the ring: "There were people who
were different like me inside. We could all see our reflections in the faces
of those who sat in this circle. I looked around. It was hard to say who
was a woman, who was a man. Their faces radiated a different kind of
beauty than I 'd grown up seeing celebrated on television or in maga
zines" (300). Haunting this space are the Dineh women who, in raising
Jess as a child, gave her a ring as a mythic signifier of her difference. The
ring was taken from her during the police rape, the incident that precip
itated the first dream of being lost in the desert. In the final dream Jess
finds the ring. The woman/man who beckons Jess shows her how the
ring as object is now refigured in the circle of transgendered people sur
rounding her. The final dream neatly returns what was taken from her
during the first dream, this belonging now serving as a recovery of that
loss. Looking around the circle, Jess is urged by her guide to acknowl
edge that the circle of people around her is as "real" as the ring.
In this recovery of the ring as community Jess's d reams chart the
finding of a home in transgender. This home is not only more bounded
and more specific than the real queer community of the West Village
but has different criteria for belonging. Whereas in the queer commu
nity Jess's gender matters-" 'Good for you, sister,' she whispered in my
ear. No one had ever called me that before"-in the transgendered
space of her dreams, the question of what she is, "woman or man ? "
must remain, precisely, a question (297). Belonging here is the reward
for gendered unbelonging elsewhere, the grounds for home in this
transgendered space the sustained ambivalence between passing and
being read. If the queer space of Christopher Street is a kind of com
munity stopgap, then the text suggests that her "real" home is this trans
gendered space-as of the moment only representable in her dreams.
Insofar as the figure of home stands for the concept of community,
Stone Butch Blues in its final pages suggests the importance of holding
out for a community based on the specific differences of transgender
differences in trans history and embodiment. "Transgendered people,''
writes Feinberg in the earliest collective sense of transgender, which is
simultaneously an attempt to distinguish it from a generic queerness,
are not "the cusp of the lesbian and gay community. In reality the two
huge communities are like circles that only partially overlap"26 Moving
from the West Village to the transgendered home of her dreams, Jess
crosses the overlap to locate in the circle organized around her specific
difference on the other side: as of the moment fictional but, precisely
because of that, a lure.
Generic Displacements: Fictional Autobiography

As Jess is a sex that, in the most literal sense, is not one, so Stone Butch
Blues is a transsexual autobiography that in every sense is not one. That
is, not only is Stone Butch Blues not a transsexual story, it is also not auto
biography. Or rather, it is not quite one, for Stone Butch Blues presents
itself as fictional autobiography on two levels. It is a first-person narra
tive fiction, a fictional character's autobiography; and it is a novel that,
when the details of both trajectories are juxtaposed, appears to be out
lined on Feinberg's own life, the author's autobiography in fictionalized
form. Like Jess Goldberg, Feinberg grew up differently gendered and
working-class Jewish in the fifties, came out as butch in the butch/femme
community in Buffalo, worked in the factories until they closed in the
seventies when s/he began testosterone treatment in order to pass as a
man. And like Jess, Feinberg came off testosterone after four years, feel
ing trapped in her passing, never identifying comfortably as a man; s/he
moved to New York to become a prominent speaker in the lesbian, gay,
and transgender communities (a move that might be thought symbol
ized in Stone Butch Blues with Jess's arrival and speech at the Christopher
Street rally).27 The basic outline of the narratives-the fictional one of
Stone Butch Blues and the real one of Feinberg's life-would thus appear
to be the same. Yet if the lives of transgendered author and narrator are
similar, the text's fictional frame prevents us from reading them as iden
tical. In its narrative surround, Stone Butch Blues insists on its fictional
status. The subtitle ofStone Butch Blues, "A Novel," and the inside cover
disclaimer ("This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between characters
and people, dead or alive, is a coincidence") fix the text's status as fiction
(n. p.). Moreover, although the narrative is written in the autobiograph
ical first person, in not giving her narrator-protagonist hir own name,
Feinberg further grounds the text in fiction. The life recounted is mani
festly not that of the real author, Leslie Feinberg, but that of the fictional
character, Jess Goldberg.
Feinberg's comments on Stone Butch Blues similarly suggest an am
bivalence over the text's generic status. In response to my paralleling the
narrative ofStone Butch Blues and hir own life, Feinberg underlines the
text's status as fiction:
Stone Butch Blues is a total and complete work of fiction. It's in no way a
version of my own life. It's certainly fair to say that the protagonist and
I both grew up Jewish and differently gendered in Buffalo. I certainly
drew on my knowledge of what industries and avenues were open or
closed to a trans individual over a period of 4 decades. And the parallel
of Jess Goldberg speaking at a rally is an interpretive one and therefore
fair enough. But the emotional and situational path, transgender path
choices and consciousness of the character is a work of fiction. 28
The narrative draws on Feinberg's knowledge; but the work is a total

and complete work of fiction, in no way a version of the author's life.
Yet in a previous interview Feinberg suggests Stone Butch Blues as "a
very thinly disguised autobiography."29 As thinly disguised autobiogra
phy the fiction would then appear to be based on the life-but the life
"disguised" as fiction.
What are we to make of the ambivalence in and around Stone Butch
Blues regarding the text's generic status? Critically, in the above inter
view, even when Feinberg suggests Stone Butch Blues as autobiography,
s/he carefully underlines the fictional framework for the narrative: the
autobiography is disguised as fiction. She never suggests, in other
words, that Stone Butch Blues is clearly not fiction. Juxtaposed, her com
ments on the genre of Stone Butch Blues do not produce a contradiction
so much as a sustained ambivalence between genres. This ambivalence
in and around Stone Butch Blues over genre constructs the text as a form
between fiction and autobiography, a trans- or intergeneric space. As
Leigh Gilmore writes of the similar intermediate generic space of auto
biographical fiction (fictional autobiography's mirror image, the
emphasis in this category falling on fiction with autobiography as the
qualifier), this intergeneric form between fiction and autobiography "is
situated at a boundary and calls attention to its hybrid form by lacking
a distinct generic name."30 Reading Stone Butch Blues via feminist auto
biography criticism's important work on the significance of the corre
spondence between gender and genre, we might say that in recounting
the alternative trajectory of hir transgendered subject, Feinberg pro
duces an alternative generic form-a trans-genre: a text as between
genres as its subject is between genders.31 What is remarkably, indeed
satisfyingly identical in Feinberg's response to gender and genre is this
calling attention to hybridity on both counts: the author's resistance to

going home to either side of either boundary, hir positioning of hir pro
tagonist's gendered subjectivity and her text's generic form symmetri
cally in between. Beyond the critical pleasure to be reaped from this
mirroring between transgender and transgenre, what is the practical
significance of the transgendered text's occupying such an equivocal
generic position ? How do we read such a transgeneric text?
In the same interview in which s/he describes Stone Butch Blues as
"thinly disguised autobiography," Feinberg hirself connects hir genre
choice to the transgendered subject's gendered choice. S/he analogizes hir
autobiography's thin fictional disguise with the transgendered subject's
lack of disguise-that is, the generic form with the transgendered sub
ject's incapacity to pass safely, the fact that the transgendered subject, like
the autobiography, may be read through. Paraphrasing Dorothy Allison
(whose fiction is also "thinly disguised autobiography"), Feinberg
describes fiction as "less than autobiography but more than lies":
[U]sing fiction gives you the ability to tell a very painful story that's filled
with all the shame ofgrowing up different in this society. I felt, by telling
it autobiographically, that I would pull back in a lot of places. I also felt,
as transgendered people, that we're always being told who we are, either
physically or emotionally-strip or be stripped , you know ? There's a
way that we get dehumanized. "Let's see your body. We'll find out who
you are. Let's hear what your innermost thoughts and feelings [are]." I
feel we've each found our own boundaries of dignity which we will not
go beyond; that we deserve. I really felt that by fictionalizing the story,
that I would be able to tell more of the truth; be more brutally honest
32
than I would if I were telling my own story.
Weighing fiction against autobiography ("less than . . . but more than"),

Feinberg suggests that the genres might be distinguished on a kind of
scale of truth. Fiction is less factual than autobiography but truer, for
truth and facts are not identical in hir usage. While this may appear the
old adage that fiction is truer than fact, Feinberg enlists it only to refig
ure it. S/he claims she chose fiction as the frame because of fiction's con
cealing or disguising effect. Concealing the facts allows hir to recount
"more of the truth." To spin out the striking image that extends hir fig
ure for Stone Butch Blues as a "thinly disguised autobiography," fiction
clothes the naked body narrative of the transgendered subject in a kind
of truth while autobiography strips it down to the facts and in the
process strips off the truth. Autobiography seeks to "find out who you
are," to reveal the naked facts of the subject; fiction conceals enough of
the facts so that the truth can be read.
Feinberg's description of autobiography's generic effect as stripping
the subject down to the facts echoes the work of the pre-Stonewall
police within the plot of Stone Butch Blues and needs to be understood
in this context. The police strip down Jess and other butches in the name
of a law that insists that they must be wearing at least three items of
"correctly gendered" clothing. Although the police's stripping of the
transgendered subject is always the threshold to greater physical and
sexual violence and humiliation, the removal of clothes is represented in
and of itself as a violent act and shaming act: "The cops picked out the
most stone butch of them all to destroy with humiliation, a woman
everyone said 'wore a raincoat in the shower.' We heard they stripped
her, slow, in front of everyone in the bar, and laughed at her trying to
cover up her nakedness. Later she went mad, they said. Later she hung
herself'' (8). The police's stripping attempts to refeminize the butch, to
reveal (more to the subject than to her onlookers) the "true sex" (the
facts of her body) of the transgendered subject: "The cops dragged Al in
j ust after Mona left. She was in pretty bad shape. Her shirt was partly
open and her pants zipper was down. Her binder was gone, leaving her
large breasts free" (35). But stripping her strips her of her "true" trans
gendered difference, for once the "facts" of her body are seen to be just
the same, the stone butch without clothes is no longer visually different
from other women. With Jess, as the cops strip her before they rape her,
their sexual violence is an attempt to enforce on the transgendered butch
the indisputable fact of her femaleness against their maleness, her essen
tial and antithetical bodily difference from them. They treat her trans
gendered subjectivity as superficial, a comic, removable covering: "One
of the cops loosened my tie. As he ripped open my new dress shirt, the
sky blue buttons bounced and rolled across the floor. He pulled up my
T-shirt, exposing my breasts . . . . As one cop pulled off my trousers, I
tried to calm the spasms in my stomach so I wouldn't choke on my own
vomit. 'Aw, ain't that cute, Bvo's' " (62).
Given the desubjectivizing effect that stripping has within the plot
of Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg's analogy for generic form-autobiog
raphy strips the transgendered narrative down to the naked facts
suggests autobiography's capacity to reveal the facts of the subject with
out the "disguise" of some fictional layer as powerfully violent, inva-
sive, and fundamentally desubjectivizing of the author. Autobiography

may lessen the "truth" of the transgendered subject in its very revela
tion of the facts. If a key reason why nontranssexuals read transsexual
autobiography is to get at the facts of the transsexual's body/narrative,
and if, as we have seen, the reader's desire for the facts of transsexual
autobiography does tend to have the effect of a desubjectivizing "inter
rogation," Feinberg's metaphor suggests fiction as a tactical means for
the transgendered writer to deflect such fascination with the literal.
Fiction interposes a distance between the potentially policing reader
and the transgendered author, skewing the relation of identity between
Feinberg and her narrator protagonist. Within Stone Butch Blues
Theresa's act of placing clean white underwear out for her raped stone
butch lover in its repetition takes on the significance of an act of heal
ing, the Bvn's restoring Jess's true transgender identity, reclothing her
after her stripping to the facts of her sex. Like the femme's act, fiction
would appear to offer the protection of a truth that heals and clothes
the greater difference of the transgendered subject. A "thin disguise,"
the fictional dimension of Stone Butch Blues thwarts the transparency,
the naked literalism that characterizes the scene of reading autobiog
raphy (the book = the life): a literalism that would otherwise be redou
bled when the scene involves reading that even more exceptional spec
imen, the transgendered subject.
Stone Butch Blues's investment in fiction prevents us from pinning the
facts of the transgendered subject Jess to Feinberg. Not only can we not
legitimately and accurately read a "novel" as a reproduction ofFeinberg's
life, we cannot demand (as we tend to think we can from ostensibly less
mediated autobiography-although I have of course questioned this)
that it reproduce reality. A novel is fiction: not the facts but explicitly a re
presentation. Although she ostensibly accepts Stone Butch Blues's self
description as a novel, in her reissued The Transsexual Empire Raymond
makes the mistake of not reading Stone Butch Blues as enough of a fic
tion. She criticizes Stone Butch Blues for "fail[ing] to extend [its] personal
insight into a political analysis of gender," for failing to reflect what she
is convinced is the truth of gender: that men are male and women are
(antithetically) female. What Raymond wants from Stone Butch Blues is
a plot in which Jess doesn't transform herself ".from being woman-identi
fied to being other-identified," in which Jess doesn't transition and "dis
avow . . . her own womanhood" by crossing to the polarized other side,
manhood.33 Of course it is precisely this polarization of gender differ-
ence-this "fact" of gender as originally and inevitably equivalent to a

binary of sex-that Feinberg's transgendered intermediacy reveals as fic
tional. Raymond's desire for a mimetic reproduction of this cultural
given can only seem a "bad" reading of Stone Butch Blues as a "novel": a
failure to engage with the narrative that Feinberg has actually written
that throws these given "truths" into question.
Nevertheless, the fictional disguise of Stone Butch Blues is "thin."
Thus, at the same time as we acknowledge it as fiction, inevitably we do
attribute to the text a dimension of the literal that we do to all autobi
ography-although without rendering the text identical to autobiogra
phy. This attribution comes in part from the presence of autobiograph
ical features in Stone Butch Blues. Much of the enormous power of this
narrative resides in the credibility and strength of its first-person nar
rative form, in the capacity of Jess's voice to authenticate transgender
experience. The other contributing factor to the autobiographical tex
ture of the "novel" is the trajectory of the life itself. Jess's story is so
extraordinary and exceptional, how could it not in some way be "a life" ?
It is precisely because the "transgender path" of Jess is unique, that
Stone Butch Blues "reads like" autobiography. As the only representa
tion so far of this experience (whether read as the story of a transsexual
who turned back or of a stone butch who pushed on), Stone Butch Blues
wields a powerful representational and representative force that is hard
to resist. Feinberg hirself has encountered the effects of hir writing's
force: s/he receives letters from readers addressed to the characters in
the novel for hir as author to deliver.34 In other words, even when read
ers concede that the protagonist is not the author (duly noting the dif
ference of proper names), they continue to believe in the real-life exis
tence of the "fictional" characters, displacing this reality from Feinberg
to people Feinberg must have known-displacing, that is, autobiogra
phy into biography. While we cannot fix the story to a particular life,
therefore, Feinberg's interweaving of the autobiographical form into
hir fiction encourages us to read Stone Butch Blues as truthful, authen
tic, authoritative, and-on some level-indexical of its subject: all of
the values we expect from autobiography (although of course, as good
readers who recognize autobiography as representation we also claim
no longer to have those expectations).
Stone Butch Blues wears its translucent guise of fiction in subtle,
clever ways. Most important, although Feinberg does not assign hir
protagonist-narrator hir own name, the name s/he does give encourages
1 96 No Ploce Like Home
us to question the difference and partially read through the "novel" to

a fictional autobiographical narrative. In the ambivalent gendering of
the first name (Jess) and the implicit Jewishness of the last (Goldberg),
the narrator-protagonist's proper name resembles the authorial signa
ture. Jess Goldberg repeats Leslie Feinberg not differently or identically
but similarly. According to Philippe Lejeune's first formulation of the
"autobiographical pact," identity between author's and narrator-pro
tagonist's name is the primary requisite of autobiography. Lejeune
argues that even if, as would seem to be the case with Feinberg, the basic
plot of the story with reference to other texts may be shown to be the
same as the author's life, if the authorial and narrator-protagonist's
names are different, the text cannot be categorized as autobiography.
While he acknowledges that a fiction written as if it were autobiogra
phy is no different internally from autobiography (both are first-person
narratives in which the narrator is the protagonist), the absence of iden
tity between the proper names inside and outside the cover will radi
cally change the way in which we approach the text-that is, we will
read it as fiction instead of autobiography. Autobiography cannot
involve degrees of truth or identity: "it is all or nothing"; identity equals
absolute truth, nonidentity equals fiction; the genres are antithetical.35
In his chart laying out how the difference or identity between author's
and narrator-protagonist's names formulaically determines the genres
of fiction and autobiography and the reader's approach to the text (read
ing according to the autobiographical or the fictional pact), Lejeune
blacks out the square for the case in which the story appears to be based
on the author's life but the narrator-protagonist's name is not identical
to the author's. He allows no place for fictional autobiography, for the
trans-genred text. There would thus seem to be no place for telling
one's story without baring all.
Yet, as Lejeune was to realize in his virtuoso return nearly a decade
later to this 1 973 essay, his chart ends up demonstrating precisely "the
existence of ambiguities and degrees" involved in genre.36 The black
ened spaces in the chart lay bare to Lejeune's reader his exclusion, and
this absent supplement challenges not only the comprehensivity and
accuracy of his theory but its very premise: the binary of fiction/autobi
ography. Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues is such a supplemental text. It
disturbs both Lejeune's initial absolute generic distinctions and his con
comitant conceptualization of identity structured through difference.
The proper name in Stone Butch Blues functions according to neither
identity nor difference but to resemblance. The narrator-protagonist's

name is clearly a "bad" pseudonym for the author's: it reveals more
than it conceals the relation. A "thin disguise" it calls for us to read
through the apparent fiction, to assume that the text has some form of
autobiographical body. At the same time, however, the nonidentity, this
relation of resemblance, prevents us from closing the autobiographical
pact and reading protagonist and author as identical, from reading the
story as fact.
Feinberg's acknowledgments further destabilize the split between
autobiographical and fictional contracts, complicating the subtitle's and
the inside cover's declaration of the text's fictionality. They reveal a rela
tion of resemblance between Feinberg's life and the text: "There were
times, surrounded by bashers, when I thought I would not live long
enough to explain my own life. There were moments when I feared I
would not be allowed to live long enough to finish writing this book"
(n. p.). In part because of the meaning of the statements and in part
because "my own life" and "this book" occupy identical positions in
each sentence-the syntax of which is almost (not quite) identical-it is
strongly implied that "this book" is the explanation of "my own life,"
that the two are interchangeable. The packaging or context of the nar
rative (authorial signature and narrator-protagonist's name, text's sub
title, inside disclaimer, and acknowledgments) provides a contradictory
picture about the text's generic belonging; it discourages the reader
from taking a certain either/or stance. Even the front and rear cover
photographs create this effect of ambivalence, of generic irreducibility.
The faces they represent obviously "belong" to the same person: as writ
ten under the rear cover photograph is a blurb about Feinberg's life,
they belong clearly to Feinberg. Yet although the inside publication
information page states that the illustration on the front cover is a pho
tograph, this photograph has been colored and retouched so that its
photographic realness is concealed and it looks more like a drawing.
Mirroring the narrator-protagonist's name, then, the cover photograph
is apparently fictionalized yet simultaneously reveals a relation of
resemblance between fictional subject and real author that subverts
both absolute fictionality and absolute autobiographic realness.37
More than any other literary genre autobiography, like the transgen
dered subject, raises anxieties in the "reader" about genre, about belong
ing. What is "it" ? How shall we categorize "it" ? "Are you a boy or a
girl ? " Paul de Man famously concludes that "the distinction between fie-
tion and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but . . . undecidable."

Autobiography "is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading."38 This
figure de Man names prosopopoeia: literally, a face-making. Our read
ing of autobiography embodies and disembodies the human form (auto
biography suggests presence and yet absence). The narrative re-presents,
and veils the absence of, the absent body. "One's name . . . is made as
intelligible as a face. [Autobiography] deals with the giving and taking
away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfigura
tion."39 As a mechanism that allows the reader to constitute the "face" of
the transgendered subject while preventing him or her from pinning the
facts to a designated body (splaying the body of this "rare" butterfly for
our collection), the genre ofStone Butch Blues is finally undecidable. The
generic figure of the transgendered narrative mimics that of transgen
der, repeats Jess's relation to gender. This figure is resemblance: like, but
not quite; on both counts a resistance to reinforcing categorical identity.
The text refuses full autobiographical or fictional belonging as Jess
refuses full transsexual becoming: the either/or of genre and gender
fiction or autobiography, woman or man-remains either an unmade
choice or a both. Stone Butch Blues passes as fiction in the same way that
Jess finally passes as a man: neither really does, both intentionally fall
short, both refuse full cover.
In practice the figure of resemblance does not mean that we read
Stone Butch Blues as neither fiction nor autobiography. Rupturing the
conventions of genre as s/he ruptures those of gender, bypassing the
interdiction on mixing pronounced by the "laws" of both, Feinberg
holds out to the reader a fictional autobiographical pact in which we, if
we want, can have it both ways.40 While the text with its aura of autobi
ography has the capacity to speak the truth for an emergent community,
to represent a subject, in its fictional disguise we are made aware of the
complexities entailed in this act of representation: the problem of reveal
ing the "facts" of transgender. Not only are not all transgendered sub
jects represented by Stone Butch Blues, neither can they speak or be
heard to the same degree, in relation both to each and other autobio
graphical subjects. The fact that Feinberg refrains from fully signing
Lejeune's autobiographical contract in her narrator-protagonist's proper
name conveys that, for the transgendered even more than for the trans
sexual subject, autobiography, owning one's story, is not so clearly an
option. Given the generic unbelonging of the transgendered story, its
not-quite difference, how would Stone Butch Blues have announced
itself as autobiography: "Not (quite) a Transsexual Autobiography" ? As
transgendered, the text could hardly have circulated as transsexual auto

biography. Nor could it have joined the ranks of lesbian autobiography.
Stone Butch Blues is not simply-indeed, I have argued, not even-a les
bian story. In the story of transgender Feinberg's transgenre makes clear
that not all autobiographers can sign the autobiographical contract.
By the same token Feinberg also highlights and challenges the
assumption that the author can only sign the autobiographical contract:
that is, the belief that s/he could not produce anything other than autobi
ography. S/he suggests that the fixing of Stone Butch Blues as fact, as sim
ply autobiography, is thoroughly bound up with another set of binary
assumptions-those concerning class: "an elitist bias has been revealed to
me by some who have conveyed their assumption that a blue-collar per
son, who lacks extended formal education, could not possibly write about
anything except their own life."41 To read Stone Butch Blues as simply
autobiography is to perpetuate the fiction that the working-class author
can only tell hir story, that is that s/he cannot craft anew but can only
mechanically reproduce. If the apparent "nakedness" of autobiography
(its revelation of the facts) signifies to the reader "working-class" and the
layers of the imaginary in fiction that distance the real signify "educated,"
Stone Butch Blues's fictional autobiography stymies yet another pair of
categorical absolutes, neither embracing "educated" to jettison "work
ing-class" nor allowing the reader to remain unchallenged in his or her
assumptions of an uncreative working class. This neither/nor of Fein
berg's style provides an index to hir unique approach to hir audience and
is one of the key effects of hir transgeneric mode. Hir continued crossing
of the personal story and theoretical truths about the complex embodi
ment of sex and gender has made hir the author, surely, who has most
managed to reach audiences typically treated as distinct: academic and
"community." Feinberg continues this crossover style in Transgender
Warriors: Making History From Joan ofArc to Ru Paul. Here s/he unfurls
the history of transgender though the frame of hir own personal discov
ery of transgender history, making the historical narrative accessible
through hir own story. Transgenre is again a deliberate attempt to bring
"theory," through the story, to a larger readership. Feinberg's comments
on Stone Butch Blues illuminate reaching a larger unaddressed audience
as the goal of this stylistic crossing: "I had read a great deal of gender the
ory that I felt was so abstracted from human experience that it did not
speak to or about my life and the lives of other trans people. I wanted to
contribute my voice to the discussion of gender theory in a way that was
accessible, particularly to working class readers."42
Feinberg has written one explicitly autobiographical text, in which

s/he does come out as transsexual. Published in 1980, the pamphlet is enti
tled Journal ofa Transsexual, even though Feinberg tells us in this text that
s/he left the sex change program s/he was in and came off hormones in
1974. The pamphlet represents a day in the (extremely violent) life of a
non-passing female-to-male: the violence and bathroom trouble the nar
rator recounts in hir experiences are products of hir being read as gender
ambivalent, neither a "real" man nor a "real" woman. Contradictions
abound not only sexually but, as in Stone Butch Blues, textually. While
entitled Journal ofa Transsexual, the pamphlet is published under what is
evidently Feinberg's female name, Diane L. Feinberg. The title of the
text and the authorial signature enact gendered contradiction, further
refusing any degree of passing. In the text of the pamphlet Feinberg fig
ures moments when s/he passes as a man as losing ground. S/he finds it
harder to be read (hir desire is to be read) as a masculine woman in the
winter when hir body is concealed under heavy clothing than in the sum
mer when hir gender-ambivalent body is exposed: "In winter, once I'm
covered by a coat, I could argue that I'm a woman 'til I'm blue in the face.
It gets me nowhere. In winter I lose ground. Territory liberated in the
summer is often overturned by bigotry in the winter. . . . As long as I do
not argue that I'm a woman, I am treated more like a human being."43
Being read is equivalent to liberating territory, making new space; pass
ing to losing ground.
That Feinberg claims here to be a transsexual and a woman empha
sizes trans as an ongoing process: not as a necessarily transitional state
prior to the resolution of gender ambiguity but an identity site-a cat
egorical home-in which the contradictions of the somatic and psychic,
both within each and against the other, are sustained but sustained
painfully and complexly. Reclaiming transitioning to the status of iden
tity, Journal of a Transsexual captures with precision how this subject's
demands to have hir body's narrative read make hir a threatening (and
threatened) figure, keen enough-both desirous and brave enough-to
keep moving through, at the very same time as s/he creates home in, the
unstable grounds of gender ambivalence.
Transgender and Transsexual Locations: The Politics of Home

At the end of the millennium such gender ambivalence has come to
trope this very moment of historical turning. As Rita Felski notes, the
transsexuaVtransgenderist has been elected by contemporary theory to
figure our century's favorite ends: the end of history, and of course the
end of sexual difference. S/he, as we might say, has become a "semioti
cally dense emblem in the rhetoric of fin de millennium," his/her sex
transition easing us through this epochal transition.44 Constructing
trans into the very "fin" of the millennium, postmodernism has chal
lenged the key binaries of modernist identity grand narratives by ideal
izing the middle ground-the "/" or transition itself. But as it is the pur
pose of Felski's essay to argue, this promotion of trans comes at a price:
the use of the trans figure to erode the borders between male and
female, sex and gender, past order and future disorder, blurs local dif
ferences between embodied subjects and their variegated narratives; it
leaves unattended differences that continue to matter on either side of
the slash. For example, Felski writes, "Baudrillard's elevation [of trans
sexuality] to the status of universal signifier ('we are all transsexuals')
subverts established distinctions between male and female, normal and
deviant, real and fake, but at the risk of homogenizing differences that
matter politically: the differences between women and men, the differ
ence between those who occasionally play with the trope of transsexu
ality and those others for whom it is a matter of life and death."45
The differences between women and men, those who play with
transsexuality figuratively and those who live it in the flesh-the dif
ferences, in other words, of sex-continue to matter politically for fem
inists above all. For reasons consistent with its methodological focus and
continuity, most feminism continues to recognize sexual difference as
crucially structuring of the world: a difference that has not been trans
figured so much as obfuscated by work that declares its end.46 If trans
gender locates in an interstitial space between sexes and transsexuality
remains invested in the sexed body as home, is this differing approach
to sexual division a way of distinguishing between transgender and
transsexuality: a distinction that would then seem to bring transgender
into closer affiliation with queer theory on the one hand and transsexu
ality with feminism on the other? That Felski's essay itself does not dis
tinguish between transgendered and transsexual certainly suggests the
need for their distinction. Her own non-differentiation serves to illu
minate part of the problem she critiques: the theoretical assumption of
trans as trope has overridden even the difference between trans trajec
tories. The value of Felski's essay (what should make it a landmark for
emergent transgender studies) is precisely to suggest this universaliza
tion of trans as reason for the existence of transgender studies at the end
of the millennium. It indicates why it is crucial that, as transgender

studies makes its specifications, it needs to steer clear of reinscribing
transition as the grand signifier of a generalized, disembodied, nonref
erential transgression-how we need to avoid scuttling our differences
as we navigate them on a transcendental differance.
The remarkable transitions in and within Feinberg's life and work
the fact that, as s/he shows, transsexuals can chose not to pass and indeed
fail to pass; that transgenderists can decide to pass or find it difficult not
to pass; that transsexuals may remain nonoperative under the diagnosis;
and that self-identified transgenderists can reconfigure their bodies sur
gically with or without the diagnosis-are key to this project. Feinberg's
complication of the significance of transition prevents a simple distinc
tion between transsexuality and transgender that would consolidate
those binaries of contemporary theory by aligning transgender and
transsexuality with them: deliteralizing/literalizing; transgressive/rein
scriptive. (This is crucial when we recall that these binaries stall the
specifying of such narratives in the first place.) The problem in the rep
resentation of transgender's significance for transsexuality in cultural
theory thus far has been precisely this tendency to be neat, the urge to
avoid the ambivalent overlap with transsexuality that I have suggested
is transgender. For if by its detractors transgender is typically folded
back into transsexuality (Raymond, for instance, reads transgender as "a
repackaging of the old gender roles" she criticized in transsexuality),47
transgender's defenders can end up inadvertently erasing the specificity
of transgender and transsexuality to similar effect-ironically even
while they dramatize the absolute difference of these projects.
In her essay "Transcending and Transgendering: Male-to-Female
Transsexuals, Dichotomy, and Diversity," for example, Ann Bolin
contrasts transsexuality's conventional binary gendered past with the
promise of a brave new transgendered binary-free future. Where "[t]en
years ago . . . transsexualism supported the binary gender schema," "[t]he
transgenderist harbors great potential either to deactivate gender or to
create in the future the possibility of 'supernumerary' genders as social
categories no longer based on biology.''48 As Bolin's title suggests, trans
gender comes to stand quite precisely for diversity, transsexuality for
dichotomy. In other words, transgender gets to play the postmodern sec
ond term (deliteralizing, transgressive) that puts in question transsexual
ity's outdated modernism (literalizing, reinscriptive) simply by following
it. This form of differentiation in effect serves to specify neither transsex-
uality nor transgender. First, reading transsexuality as history ignores the

ways in which transsexuality is very much an ongoing narrative (vide the
most recent autobiographies); it does nothing for transsexuality's presence
to read transgender as transsexuality's putative demise. Second, render
ing transgender a symbol for a postmodern future does nothing to show
how transgender has been historically embodied and lived by transgen
dered subjects (vide Feinberg). Such chrono-troping of transgender ren
ders transgender equivalent to this moment that surely-as a moment
(post-postmodernism ? after the "fin" of the millennium ?)-must pass.
Will we not then be left to discard transgender in looking for the next
transgressive thing? In sum it seems clear that for transgender studies to
concretize these trajectories in the midst of theory's universalization of
trans, transgender's relation to transsexuality cannot be explained with so
neat and evolutionary a narrative.
Six years after its formulation, Stone's posttranssexuality-though key
for spurring transgender as a movement-with its suggestion of an
"after" to transsexuality for these reasons appears more troubling. Even
though a "post" prefix is supposed to signify an interrogation into rather
than a simple negation of what follows, implicit in "post" is always the
notion of a throwing off, a departure from, and some element of dismissal
of, its suffix. (Consider, for instance, postfeminism, which Stone unfortu
nately invokes as companion piece to posttranssexuality.) Fundamental to
posttranssexuality is the belief that political subjectivity for transsexuals
requires not simply a revision but a refusal of sexual difference--of what
has been transsexuality's very purpose: passing, belonging, attaining real
ness in one's gender identity. In Stone's posttranssexuality there is no
space for transsexuality as a progressive narrative-for continuing to
value belonging, for an ongoing desire for sexed realness and coherent
embodiment: precisely the desire for a sexed place that galvanizes trans
sexuality's narrative in the first place. In similar vein the current cam
paign to remove gender identity disorder entirely from DSM does not
consider that, for some transsexuals, gender identity disorder may be
experienced precisely as a disorder, a physically embodied dis-ease or dys
phoria that dis-locates the self from bodily home and to which sex reas
signment does make all the difference. Stone urges transsexuals to deploy
their transsexuality to refigure the binary of sexual difference, to use that
position "outside the binary oppositions of gendered discourse . . . to
speak from outside the boundaries of gender."49 Yet it may be because
transsexual narratives originate in an unhomely relation to sexual differ-
ence that makes publicly claiming that "outside" home such a fraught act.
While "outside" may be spoken from occasionally, for those whose very
purpose is sexed assignment its continued occupation may be intrinsically
paradoxical. Even transgendered narratives such as Feinberg's elucidate
how uninhabitable is sexed dislocation.
While I value the possibilities for affiliation transgender has brought
(between queers, feminists, and the "gender community"), I am still
skeptical about what that "post" in posttranssexuality signifies. I con
tinue to find unrealistic-and question the political implications of
claims that somatic transitions project gender identity beyond the body
in a way that reveals that sex does not matter. That transgender as much
as transsexual personal accounts continue to center on sexed crossings
is, in my mind, a sure sign of the ongoing centrality of sexual difference
in our world: a marker of the limits of its refigurability, and as a conse
quence of many subjects' yearning to locate in a stable position at least
at some point in relation to this difference. Recognizing this sign need
not constitute an arrest of politics, however; rather, it may lay the foun
dation of a new one. This "politics of home" would analyze the persis
tence of sexual difference for organizing identity categories. It would
highlight the costs to the subject of not being clearly locatable in rela
tion to sexual difference. Above all, it would not disavow the value of
belonging as the basis for livable identity. The practical applications for
such a politics of home are immediate, multiple, and, indeed, transfor
mative. They might include, for instance: enlisting the binary of sexed
assignment to argue for total health insurance coverage for sex reas
signment; using the state's own insistence on sexed belonging to argue
for the right to it of those subjects currently denied it-the right of
those who change sex to also change their birth certificates so that they
may legally live, work, marry, and die in their reassigned sex. In the
United Kingdom none of these latter are yet possible; in the United
States, although reassigned sex is legally recognized, sexed belonging is
undermined in other, subtle ways-the denial of child custody to trans
sexual parents for instance. In pushing past a transsexual narrative
("post"), in ceding our claims to sexed location, we relinquish what we
do not yet have: the recognition of our sexed realness; acceptance as men
and women; fundamentally, the right to gender homes.
That the figure emerging in debates within as much as around trans
gender is so often that of border-crossing reveals that the stakes of loca
tion and movement in transition (of all kinds) are high. Perhaps the
ambivalence in that cliche about home may provide a productive tension

for the current transgender moment, a way for us to negotiate the real
differences between our trajectories at the same time as we widen trans
gender into a methodological field. That there is no place like home
home is where we long to belong; there is no place better than home
conveys the value of realness and belonging. As Odysseus's journey clas
sically illustrates, the point of every narrative is, after all, to return home.
(And if every narrative is driven by home, what would a narrative be
without one? ) That there is no place like home, however-home doesn't
exist; there is no place that is home-recognizes that home is, on some
level, always a place we make up, that belonging is ultimately mythic
for all of us perhaps unreachable without some act of sweet imagination.
The positions of man and woman are indeed not free of fabrication, are
never given facts. But, for some, acknowledgment of this fictional
investment makes desire for their locations no less powerful.
I first heard Feinberg speak in the late eighties when I was presenting on
a panel on butch/femme desire. At the end of our presentations Feinberg
stood up from within the audience of butch and femme lesbians to offer
a comment, hir flat chest, hir masculinized face, and above all hir deep
voice drawing hir difference out from theirs (ours). Who is this gay man ?
I thought. For even in this space, surrounded by the gender difference of
other butches, there seemed something both more substantial and yet
unassimilable about what I thought for sure was hir maleness.
Last summer I went with another transsexual man to hear Feinberg
read from hir new Transgender Warriors. As we squeezed ourselves into
the small Bleecker Street bookstore packed with an all-women crowd,
our voices thick and low as we tried to find space, I was conscious of our
difference (our maleness). Before beginning Feinberg spoke of battling
illness; and indeed s/he looked tired. Hir face was drawn, hir body slen
der-almost frail. Yet, as always, hir reading was inspiring, hir voice
resonant and strong, its difference again brought into relief, now by
others who asked hir questions at the end. From the other side of the
mirror I became much more aware that perception of the other's loca
tion is above all a question of where you're looking from. The primary
effect of an exchange of looks (and indeed a shift in homes) is to keep
turning over your own freshly firmed grounds.
In photography there are no unexplained shadows.
-August Sander, poster advertising photography exhibition, London Underground, May 1 997
epilogue
Transsexuality in Photography
Fielding the Referent
Below the final photograph in Mario Martino's autobiography the cap

tion reads: "Emergence accomplished, at last I'm free to live as I wish and
to tell my story." Showing a man with full beard and pipe writing at a
desk, the photograph illustrates this "emergence" as man and autobiog
rapher. The pipe and pen serve as evidence for the life as a man and the
story, synechdoches for the body and the narrative that substantiate both
aspects of Martino's "freedom." Yet the autobiography's preface reveals
this freedom is circumscribed. We learn that "Mario Martino" is a pseu
donym, the real authorial subject "clinging to a hope of anonymity"
behind it because, as he writes, "[t]he merciless shadows of contempt and
tragedy still fall on transsexuals."1 This tension between revelation and
concealment, between emerging from the shadow of a hidden gendered
self to shelter under the shadow of a disguised written self, is also cap
tured in the photograph. Shot from an awkward angle to the rear of the
subject's right shoulder, the portrait masks Martino's identity as it evi
dences his manhood. In testimony to the truth of the posttransitioned sex
208 Epilogue: Transsexuality in Photography
Emergence accomplished, at last I'm free to live as I wish and to tell my story. FROM EMERGENff:A TRANSSEXUAL AUTO
BIOGRAPHY BY MARIO MARTINO WITH HARRIET. COPYRIGHT Cl 1 977 BY MARIO MARTINO WITH HARRIET.REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION Of CROWN
PUBLISHERS, INC.
of the female-to-male transsexual that yet doesn't reveal its subject, the
photograph places most of the face out of the reader's line of vision while
positioning beard and pipe prominently within it.
Autobiography and photography, notes Timothy Dow Adams in an
issue of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to their intersection, are equally
haunted by the presence of the referent. 2 Both appear to represent their
subject in a strikingly unmediated fashion; both appear to reveal the real.
Nevertheless, as forms of representation, both are not the subject itself
but its imaging, reproductions of the referent. Occupying similar ground
between referentiality and representation, transsexuality might be con
ceived as a parallel "form." As a transformation of the material body,
Epilogue: Transsexuality in Photography 209
transsexuality is inextricably hooked into the register of the real. Yet as

this corporeal reconstruction is made possible though narrative and,
indeed, as the transsexual selfmust be represented before it is realized in
the flesh, transsexuality is equally bound to representation, dependent on
its symbolization to be real. Photographs of transsexuals appearing in
transsexual autobiography-an overlaying of three forms of representa
tion that yet cannot do without the referent-triple our sense of the pres
ence of the literal. If the theoretical figuration of transgender has left out
the ways in which transgender is literally embodied and lived, pho
tographs of transsexuals in the autobiographies promise, even more than
the texts themselves, to recover what has been transubstantiated.
And yet the referentiality of transsexuality proves particularly hard to
capture in photography. For if the aim of transsexual reassignment is to
erase the visible markers of transsexuality from the body, to erase the
trace of the former sex so as to leave the body unremarkably resexed, how
can transsexuality as such be represented through the medium of the
photograph ? Photographs of transsexuals are situated on a tension
between revealing and concealing transsexuality. Their primary function
is to expose the transsexual body; yet how to achieve this when transsex
uality on the body is that which by definition is to be concealed ? While
the intersection of these forms may provide a veritable pile-up of the ref
erent, catching transsexuality as referent itself requires some fielding.
The effect of photographs in any autobiography, transsexual autobi

ographies included, is immediately referential. Autobiographical pho
tographs serve to embody the subject of the narrative. This is the real
body of the autobiographer, they declare; the text you read refers to this
subject you see here. Even in the most willfully anti-representational of
autobiographies, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the photographs of
Barthes appearing in the text work to override Barthes's fragmenting of
his self into a medley of writerly codes, underscoring instead the con
substantiality of the subject in the represented body.3 In spite of the
writing's antithetical pull, the photographs establish Barthes as a con
tinuous, unified, and above all real (that is, existing, embodied, and not
merely textual) subject.
The scene of writing in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes would seem
to provide an archetypal poststructuralist description of the subject: that
is, not only can writing not simply refer to the subject but subjectivity
itself is an effect of signification. This conception of the subject as non-
2 70 Epilogue: Transsexuality in Photography
referential is encapsulated in Barthes's famous question: "Do I not know

that, in thefield ofthe subject, there is no referent?"4 This question would
render impossible the book's very status as autobiography. For if there is
no referent in the field of the subject, then autobiography cannot-as
can no form of representation-represent or refer to the self. However,
by reading Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes alongside Barthes's next
and final work, Camera Lucida, Paul John Eakin has shown that the last
stages of Barthes's thought were very precisely a quest for the referent in
the field of the subject.5 Barthes conducted this quest through photog
raphy, begun as we have already noted with the inclusion of pho
tographs in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and culminating in his
"reflections on photography," Camera Lucida. Eakin summarizes the
substance of Camera Lucida-the fact that, as an essay on photography,
its subject is substance: "In the field of the lens, we might say, there is
always a referent, and Barthes beholds in photography the truth that
these referents have really existed: 'Every photograph is a certificate of
presence.' "6 Barthes presents photography as a form that overrides the
equivocation around the referent in autobiography; the former book's
fetishistic question ("Do I not know that," etc.) is recast into an unequiv
ocal assertion about the existence of the referent and the capacity of pho
tography to capture it: "It is reference," he now writes, "which is the
founding order of Photography" (CL 77). According to Camera Lucida
the photograph doesn't simply authenticate the referent in the most
unmediated fashion; the photograph is in fact "never distinguished
from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately
or generally distinguished from its referent" (CL 5). The photograph
appears as the referent. Thus, Barthes writes, "the Photograph . . . has
something tautological about it"; identical to the referent, in represent
ing it, the "sign" appears to disappear (CL 5). In photography the
medium becomes invisible, and only "the referent adheres" (CL 6).
With three exceptions, all of the photographs in Camera Lucida take
their subject as the human form; they are studies of bodies and faces. And
in the writing of this essay Barthes's thought repeatedly follows this same
trajectory: from photograph to subject to body. In pursuing the referent
Barthes consistently ends up with the body. For instance: "Photography's
inimitable feature . . . is that someone has seen the referent (even if it is a
matter of objects) in flesh and blood, or again, in person . Photography,
moreover, began historically, as an art of the Person: of identity, of civil
status, of what we might call, in all senses of the term, the body's.formal-
ity" (CL 79). In the photographic "field" of the subject, we might say, the
referent (what the camera seeks to evidence) is the body. And if Barthes
turned to photography for "solace when the austere tenets of poststruc
turalist theory about the subject came into conflict with the urgent
demands of private experience," as Eakin so finely argues,7 the solace he
searches for in a style less and less mediated by theory and more and more
immediately personal, is his recently dead mother. Sifting through pho
tographs of her, he looks for her flesh and blood being, a way to fill the
absence of her body. From structuralism to poststructuralism to this sign
ing off with the referent, the personal, and the search for his mother's
presence (mater, matter): is there not something of an allegory in the final
trajectory of Barthes's writings, a story for our specific theoretical time ?
In the field of the transsexual subject the photograph functions as an

incarnation; the photograph appears co-natural with the body, and may
even begin as more referential of the self than the body. Inasmuch as
the immediate purpose of transsexuality is to make real the subject's
true gender on the body, the visual media are highly valued, for they
promise (like transition itself) to make visible that which begins as
imperceptible-there but underexposed, we might say. With less
mediation than writing between signifier and soma, the visual media
realize the image of the "true" self that is originally only apparitional.
Katherine Cummings recounts how as a teenager beginning to cross
dress, she constructs a self-timing mechanism out of cotton thread and
a wind-up key for a cheap Kodak camera, allowing her to take self
portraits. The photographs serve to provide "some concrete evidence of
my rare moments of femininity": "Cumbersome and slow but for the
first time I could make permanent images of my stolen moments."8 A
painter, Erica Rutherford paints self-portraits based on photographs
she first takes of herself dressed as a woman-also concretizations of an
imperceptible self. Like Cummings's photographs these portraits begin
by envisioning the woman Rutherford wishes to become and are grad
ually transformed as she transitions into a record of that becoming. In
one photograph that appears in her autobiography, a painted self-por
trait is situated behind the photographic Rutherford. In the painting
the seated figure is feminized through body contour, posture, and
clothing, but the face is featureless-a blank space as undetailed by the
feminine as the still-masculine face of the photographic Rutherford
seated before it. Yet the photographic Rutherford repeats the conven-
FROM ERICA RUTHERFORD, NINE LIVES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ERICA RUTHERFORD (CHARLOTTETOWN,
P.E.1.,CANADA: RAGWEEO, 1993).REPRINTEOWITH PERMISSION Of RAGWEED PRESS
tionally feminine pose of the pictorial Rutherford (knees jammed, legs

tightly crossed, hands clasped), so that the painted self-portrait appears
as a model for the transsexual body to follow, this self triply textual
ized-a painting within a photograph within the autobiography
nevertheless reflecting more of the real transsexual self than the sub
j ect's visible body. For both Cummings and Rutherford the self
portrait is a blueprint for the transsexual subject in transition: like the
photographs in the autobiographies for readers, visual means of mak
ing the transsexual's gender real.
The self-portrait (whether written or pictorial) appears to represent
the subject in the present moment; this appearance is deceptive, however,
for writing and painting can only ever re-present the moment in multi-
Epilogue: Transsexuality in Photography 2 13
pie moments after the fact. Nevertheless, freezing the representation at

that instant (or the subsequent split second), photography is the most
instantaneous medium. It is this apparent synchronization of image with
the object's presence that produces the photograph's referential, tauto
logical texture: the subject was actually there (is still there) in that instant
of the photograph. As the original body for the transsexual is that which
is to be changed and left behind, however, photographs of transsexuals
from the past represent that which is blatantly no longer there: an
absented presence. In transsexual autobiographies past photographs are
arranged with present ones to form a narrative of the changing body up
to the present. The effect is double: as narrative, photographs demand
that we concede that transsexuality makes a thorough difference to the
body and yet-part of the autobiography-that we discover consistent
and continuous identity in that very place of alterity. Four shots appear
ing on a single page ofKatherine's Diary: The Story ofa Transsexual clearly
perform this double function. The photographs convey the empirical
differences between male and female personae, John and Katherine:
John stalwart and squinting in the sun in crisp white naval uniform;
Katherine, wide-eyed, slinky, and seductive in a black dress. And yet, in
the way that these differently gendered personae are interspersed on the
page (Katherine/John, John/Katherine), the photographs insist on conti
nuity in spite of change. The chronology of dates in the captions asks us
to read the photographs across the page into a narrative of transsexual
transition and to pay close attention to the differences of their detail:
"Katherine at seventeen dressing behind locked doors, 1 952"-posing
gawkily with rather heavy make-up--g raduates to, simply, "Katherine,
aged twenty-six, 1 96 1 "; the implication of the elision of a descriptive
being that she is no longer dressing as Katherine but simply being her.
Indeed, the low-cut top in the final photograph draws the eye to the
beginnings of a breast cleavage, and later shots in Katherine's Diary reveal
a progressively feminizing body by progressively revealing more of this
body (via the backless dress to the bikini). Voluptuous in her bikini,
Katherine is so "there" in a later photograph, "In the raging surf, Christ
church, New Zealand," so evident in her reassigned sex, that she no
longer even requires naming.
Why these images? What of the self does the transsexual autobiogra
pher consider representable? The question is especially poignant for the
transsexual when s/he no longer is that self, when presenting the photo-
214 Epilogue: Transsexua/ity in Photography
( 1 ) Katherine at seventeen, dressing behind locked doors, 1 952; (2) John aged eighteen, defending the nation,
1 954; (3) S ub-Lieutenant Cu mmings, RANR, 1 960; (4) Katherine aged twenty-six, 1 96 1 . FROM KATHERINE
CUMMINGS, KATHERINE'S DIARY: THE STORYOFA TRANSSEXUAL (PORT MELBOURNE, VICTORIA:HEINEMANN, 1992). REPRINTEOWITH PERMISSION Of
KATHERINE CUMMINGS
In the raging surf, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1 975. FROM KATHERINE CUMMINGS,
KATHERINE'S DIARY.· THE STORY OF A TRANSSEXUAL (PORT MELBOURNE, VICTORIA: HEINEMANN, 1991).
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF KATHERINE CUMMINGS
graph within the autobiography is (more than the autobiography even)

an act of incarnating what one is not. How to represent in the visual the
body to which one's self no longer (indeed never) refers ? Captions clue us
in to reasons for the choice of photographs. They reveal the trace of the
subject's re-vision, what s/he sees in looking back at him- or herself. In
Paul Hewitt's A Self-Made Man: The Diary ofa Man Born in a Woman's
Body, the author's caption, "I was already acting the role of the protective
brother," brings out as masculine the bodily posture of the ambiguous
child sitting on a tree stump--one arm around twin sister, the other
propped on a firmly parted knee. Martino's "My ambiguity was evident
at an early age" has the same effect: again, as in the narrative but more so
because photography is so evidentiary, "I was (already) there ! " Challeng
ing the evidence of the transsexual photograph (in effect: "no he was
not ! "), Bernice L. Hausman finds the caption unsubstantiated by the
I was already acting the role of the protective brother. PAUL HEWITT WITH JANE WARREN.A SELF-MADE MAN. THE DIARY OF A
MAN BORN IN A WOMAN'S BODY (LONDON: HEADLINE, 1 995). REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF PAUL HEWITT
image; she writes of this and another of Martino's photographs ("Boy's

Face in Banana Curls"), "For [Martino], these pictures undeniably docu
ment her childhood masculinity (as the captions confirm), yet both
merely offer the reader images of a child whose sex is largely indicated by
clothing. A three-year old child with short hair is generally somewhat
asexual; that is why children's, even infants', clothes are so conspicuously
sex-coded. Some children maintain this sexlessness until puberty."9
Through the minimizing force of that "merely" and the universalizing
impact of that "generally" (still putting the transsexual in the dock),
Hausman abrogates not only the specific evidence of the photograph for
Martino but the knot of pain and contradiction entailed in representing
one's transsexual past in this most unmediated of forms. If Martino's cap
tions cope with the pain of return to the pretransition body by incorpo
rating the photograph and smoothing over the difference, April Ashley's,
for instance, perform its severing, a detachment of the unwanted past
that leaves the difference starkly remarkable. Representing herself as a
woman, April, Ashley's captions summarize the photographic event:
"The blind leading the blind: in Rome with Sarah Churchill, 1 964." But
Epilogue: Tronssexuality in Photography 217
M y ambiguity was evident a t an early age. FROM EMERGENCE:A TRANSSEXUAl
AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY MARIO MARTINO WITH HARRIET. COPYRIGHT © 1977 BY MARIO MARTINO
WITH HARRIET. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC
when the boyhood self is pictured, invariably, he is formally and doggedly

named, disowned by Ashley the autobiographer, as though his body were
really another's, as though this representation were too not-me to be
owned: "V.E. Day, May 1 945, George Jamieson at St. Theresa's Primary
School, Liverpool"; "George Jamieson, aged thirteen, with brother Ivor
(nine) and sister Marjorie (seven) at home, Norris Green."
And indeed, when we turn from April to this boy, is George Jamieson
not an other? For when the photograph is not a likeness, when it no long
er represents the self, surely it ought to be said that then it is not a portrait.
In every photograph, writes Barthes, because of the apparent presence of
the referent, there is "that rather terrible thing . . . the return of the dead"
(CL 9). Photographs of a pretransition self threaten to incarnate a "dead"
self that one is not. In the case of Leslie Feinberg, as a subject whose tran
sition doubles back, this reincarnation is twice over for hir parents:
The blind leading the blind: in Rome with Sarah Churchill, 1 964. FROM
DUNCAN FALLOWELL AND APRIL ASHLEY, APRIL ASHLEY'S ODYSSEY (LONDON: CAPE, 1 982).
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF ERIC GLOSS LTD.
When I first entered a sex change program a decade ago, in order to

avoid embarrassment my parents disposed of all pictures of me, a little
girl or young woman growing up with the tenseness of puberty etched
on my face. When I later took back control of my body after four years
of being on the program, my parents discarded all the pictures of me
0
living as a man. 1
Most representational of forms, talisman of the subject, the photograph

must be seen to represent the subject. Its spectral power is huge. The
haunting feeling of at once self-recognition and self-alienation we all
experience when we see ourselves in the photograph (both "So that is
me ! " and at the same time "That cannot be me ! ") is redoubled for the
transsexual looking at the pretransition portrait-that doppelganger of
( 1 ) V. E. Day, May 1 945, George Jamieson at St. Theresa's Primary School, Liver
pool; (2) George Ja mieson, aged thirteen, with brother Ivor (nine) and sister
Marjorie (seven) at home, Norris Green. FROM DUNCAN FALLOWELL ANO APRIL ASHLEY.
APRIL ASHLEY'S OOYSSfY (LONOOH:CAPE, 1982). REPRINTEDWITH PERMISSION Of ERIC GLASS LTD.
the subject that is yet not a double. In the "return of the dead," surely,
the particular fear at work is that the image is more real than the sub
ject; that the photograph is the referent. Is there not an unconscious fear
that (like a legendary encounter with a self-portrait in the attic) an
encounter with the image one is not might change the body back to
what "nature" decrees it should have been ? In the case of the theatrical
Coccinelle, most famous of Paris's travestis, the way to avoid such an
exchange is to "kill" the image-a killing that is not of just an image but
of that "dead" self itself:
When I got up, I had only one thought-to destroy Jacques Dufresnoy,
who had stolen my real "ego," to get rid of this interloper who had made
me assume a false outer covering. On the chest of drawers I saw a pho
tograph of myself-myself as a boy. How revolting ! I snatched up the
frame, threw it down and trampled on it. Pieces of glass were scattered
all over the floor. I picked up the photograph and tore it up . . . . Then I
opened a drawer and took out a whole pile of photographs and negatives
dealing with my childhood, my family and my life as an effeminate boy.
Oh how I hated him, that creature of a sex that was not really mine ! . . .
I set to and destroyed them all. . . . In the end there wasn't a single pho
tograph of me left in the house. I had burned them all. 1 1
In fact, one photograph of this "false outer covering" boy remains. Inter
loping his way appropriately as an inset onto the cover of Coccinelle's
"interview" with Mario Costa, "Jacques" appears as a melancholic pier
rot-type figure, as himselfbarely substantial. Within the text, by contrast,
there is a mass of photographs of the very substantial Coccinelle next to
him-the true self within. This thick wad of mostly nude pictures of the
Bardot-look-alike Coccinelle-Coccinelle in the bath, Coccinelle in the
shower, Coccinelle stepping out of a mink at her bar ("Strictly Adult
Sale": to be read only at the front desk of the British Library under the
librarian's scrutinizing eye)-is in fact the text's raison d'etre. The func
tion of the photographs is to reveal all; the camera, they suggest, cannot
lie: "An impromptu strip-tease, beautiful, slender, and completely fem
inine, Coccinelle proves in this delightful sequence . . . that she can face
the camera from any angle. Proof beyond doubt of this living miracle of
Man Made Woman."12 Is this not realness ? the photographs demand.
And is not realness a turn-on: what everyone desires ?
If the photograph insists on itself as documentary evidence, who is to
decide if the referent is "there" or not? Hausman's reading of Martino
COVER, MARIO COSTA, "C()(ONELLE': REVERSE SEX,TRANS.JULES J. BlOCK (LONDON, CHALLENGE, N. D.)
FROM MARIO COSTA, "COCCINEll E': REVERSE SEX, TRANS. JULES J. BLOCK (LON DON, CHALLENGE, N. D.)
brings into focus (it's a self-focusing we might say, the critic's lens turn
ing on itself) the problematics of reading the transsexual in the photo
graph. Barthes suggests that "because of its evidential power" (CL 1 06)
the photograph in fact cannot be read: "It is precisely in this arrest of
interpretation that the Photograph's certainty resides" (CL 1 07). The
more evidentiary the photograph, the less of a reading it requires--or
allows: "it is in proportion to its certainty that I can say nothing about
[the] photograph" (CL 1 07). Some photographs of transsexuals blatantly
refuse a reading. Of two pretransition shots of Caroline Cossey as Barry,
first as a child and then at sixteen (next to a posttransition shot of Cossey
as "Tula" as her model self was better known, shown in the Smirnoff
campaign whose slogan--once Cossey was outed as transsexual-itself
was fabulously literalized); of images of Raymond Thompson, first
tracing his childhood, then three years into hormone treatment at nine
teen; because of the certainty in my eyes of what they evidence (the cer
tainty that Barry is already really Caroline-the combinative effect of
those eyes, those lips, and that nose; the conviction that Ray has never
As a young boy with a horrendous short-back-and-sides In London at sixteen. FROM CAROUNE COSSEY.MY sroRY (WINCHES-
that did me no favours. FROM CAROLINE COSSEY, MY STORY (WIN- TER, MASS.: FABER, 1 992). REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF CAROLINE COSSEY
CHESTER, MASS.: FABER, 1 992) REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION Of CAROLINE
COSSEY
been anyone else), I find I have literally nothing to say. For do they not
speak the transsexual's true gender for themselves?
More than the written text of transsexual autobiographies, the pho
tographs bring into relief the reader's gaze. Asking us to consider what
nuances of gender we see in these images in looking at the transsexual,
they also ask: how do we look ?-where "look," as Teresa de Lauretis
has suggested in the context of lesbian and gay film theory, should be
heard as both transitive and intransitive verb.13 That is, how do we look
at the other and what look do our own bodies cast to the world ? How is
our reading of the transsexual invested in and produced by own gen
dered and sexual subject positioning, our own identifications and
desires ? Photographs of the transsexual, particularly of the transsexual
in transition, push us up against the limits of gendered representation:
the limits of what about gender we can consign to representation, of
what we can process as identity in the visual. A series of photographs
from Second Serve charting Dick Raskind's transformation into Renee
Richards captures the subject's body in the most transitional moments of
The famous Smirnoff shot. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION Of INTERNATIONAL DISTILLERS & VINTNERS LTD.
( 1 ) Stil l pinning hopes on Father Christmas, aged 7; (2) Rebel with a cause, aged 1 3; (3) At 1 6, a precious pic
ture of early days with Loretta (aged 21). FROM RAYMOND THOMPSON WITH KITTY SEWELL, WHAT TOOK YOU 50 LONG? A GIRL'S
JOURNEY TO MANHOOD (LONDON: PENGUIN, 1995). REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION Of RAYMOND THOMPSON
her transition, during which the subject's gender is quite indeterminate,

when Richards appears, as she writes in her autobiography, as a "man
woman," "a hermaphroditic spirit."14 There's a precarious androgyny to
her body and face in these central images that makes it difficult to read
her as either a man or a woman, that makes it difficult to read her alto-
226 Epilogue: Transsexua/ity in Photography
Ray, aged 19. FROM RAYMOND THOMPSON WITH KITTY SEWELL, WHArTOOK YOU
SO LQl/(j? A GIRL'S JOURNEY TO MANHOOD (LONDON: PENGUIN, 1 995). REPRINTED WITH
PERMISSION OF RAYMOND THOMPSON
gether. If the photographs before this series evidence Richards as a man

and those after as a woman, do these intermediate photographs repre
sent her at her most transsexual ? What does transsexuality in fact look
like ? Photographs that establish gendered realness do not reveal trans
sexuality, for in them the subject passes as nontranssexual. The problem
of reading the transsexual in the photograph heightens the tension
around reading and passing that inhabits all transsexual representation.
Bettina Rheims's photographs of French male-to-female transsexual
Kim Harlow engage exactly this problematic. 15 Rheims's photographs,
together with Harlow's own autobiographical fragments, make up the
brief text, Kim, but although Harlow is listed as the text's first author,
Rheims is Kim 's real author. Her photographs are stylized and finished
while Harlow's writings have an abbreviated quality (indeed, the note
opening the text states that Harlow "was unable to finish her story" as
( 1 ) Featured on the cover of a Long Island newspaper supplement, September 1 973;

(2, inset) With Andy in 1 973. FROM RENEE RICHARDS WITH JOHN AMES, SECOND SERVE. THE REN{£
RICHARDS STORY (NEW YORK:STEIN, 1 983)
AIDS "cut short this work, her work" [5]). And of Kim the photographic
subject, Rheims is sole author, her images producing the transsexual as
model-perfect, killer-sexy. Kim is presented wearing little, but just
enough: plunging-front sequined and cutaway fishnet bodysuits, lace
bra, panties, stockings, and suspenders; these clothes serve to reveal per
fect breasts and, in one photograph, the top of a perfect crotch.
Yet herein lies the problem for Rheims. Kim is so real, so passing, how
to represent her as a transsexual ? She won't reveal herself as a boy. That
is, not only does her "boyness" not show on her transsexual body, Rheims
notes that Kim "had always refused to show me photos taken of herself
when she was still Alexandre" (24). Rheims attempts to make legible
Kim's transsexuality, therefore, by restaging her transsexual history;
except that, starting out with Kim's gendered realness as her representa-
tional material, Rheims can only create her as transsexual by moving

back from female to male. In Harlow's description, "Bettina does tell my
story but backwards. First you see me looking really feminine and sen
sual, going out, walking around in a big hotel, then in my room in a neg
ligee, in my lingerie, then naked, then bit by bit you see me gradually
lose my composure and cry. You see me taking off my make-up and at
the end I'm dressed as a boy" (16-19). From woman to "boy"-notably,
not "man": the transsexual narrative proves irreversible; in spite of the
implication of the photographic sequence, it cannot "go either way."
Indeed, do not the last shots of Kim cross-dressed as "male" show a still
beautiful, sexy (now boyish) woman ?
Even so, there is something in this reversal of the narrative that subli
mates transsexuality even as its purpose is to capture it. Alexandre has
passed; he is not there in the photographs. As Harlow notes: "The pictures
are very beautiful-they're not autobiographical, but they all have some
thing in them that I've lived through. When I saw them I said to myself
that they were a kind of sublimation of everything I' cl experienced, it was
really . . . I can really see myself in them. A wonderful gift from Bettina"
(8; ellipses in original). Given Harlow's realness as a woman and her
refusal to show past photographs of Alexandre, Rheims must resort to
her imaginary in order to represent Kim as a transsexual, as Alexandre.
Reversing the narrative and representing the somatic transitions of trans
sexuality as a quick change of clothes-from difficult body narrative to
palatable gender performative-Rheims's imaginary sublimates the real
FROM KIM HARLOW/BETTINA RHEIMS,K/M,TRANSPAUl GOULD (MUNICH: KEHAYOff VERLAG, 1994)

experience of transsexuality: the referent of transsexuality is elided

(hence, surely, Kim's ellipses) in Rheims's recreation. Even in her fiction
alization of Kim as Alexandre, Rheims fails to create a passing woman
a woman who passes successfully as a man.
The middle shots in the series are particularly disturbing. They rep
resent Kim in the stages of reverse "transition." She faces the hotel bath
room mirror, her top now off and jewelry gone, her eye make-up
streaking her face; remember, she notes crying during this scene. In
some images, as she scoops her hair back, she tries to conceal her breasts.
These gestures look as awkward as they sound: Kim appears uncom
fortable, almost gawky. These central shots represent Kim at her least
posed, most naked-her most "real." Yet as the camera would appear to
capture the transsexual real, the mirror serves to displace it. Only in one
photograph can we see its frame; but all seven "transition" pieces are
shot of the reflection in the mirror, the specular image, and not of Kim,
the referential subject. There are two clues: the radiator, which remains
in the bottom right corner of every shot, including the one that reveals
the mirror's frame (if Rheims had shot Kim directly in any of the oth
ers, the radiator would have appeared on the bottom left); and the fact
that, in two of the shots, Rheims catches the subject's nonspecular arm
within the photographic frame, a blur partially concealing the reflec
tion. Rheims must have shot all these photographs from some point to
the right of (the referential) Kim, focusing on the reflected image. As
well as reversing the narrative, therefore, when this body is at its least
posed and most expressive-at its most "real"-the mirror serves to
refract our gaze and to displace the real transsexual. While Kim's beau
tiful transsexual body is the object of the camera's gaze throughout the
book, the double in the mirror holds at bay the real subject without
blocking our view, framing the transsexual in a doubled specularity that
prevents her from returning the camera/viewer's look. Like Medusa's
head in Perseus's shield, this sequence before the mirror suggests, in
Rheims's photographs, the "real" transsexual can only be looked at and
"captured" in her reflection, in the imaginary. The specular creates Kim
as the object of our look (the mirror doesn't prevent our looking via the
specular image), yet it dislocates and confuses its site of production, dis
couraging that all-important question: how do I look ?
What does it mean to consign transsexuality to the imaginary, to sub
limate its narrative to reversible performance and let slip its referent in
this most referential of forms ? Doubtless the strength of my response to
these images of Kim has everything to do with how / look. My "fierce
protectiveness" over Kim's body, as one colleague termed it after I gave

a talk on the photographs, is admittedly a product of my identification
with Kim: against the odds of my narrative, my identification with the
"all-woman" Kim, and my corresponding anguish over that figure of
the pretransition boy. 16 As transgender studies makes its entry into the
academy, however, the two questions Rheims's photographs raise
how to represent transsexuality and who is representing transsexual
ity-are of massive general significance. The importance of sustaining
the experience of transsexuality in the midst of theory's sublimation of
what's real about this experience-and the concomitant question of
whether transsexuality itself can reveal the strings behind the disap
pearance of the referent in theory-strike me as paramount.
Photographers Loren Cameron's and Del LaGrace's recent work
intersect the autobiographical, the photographic, and transsexual rep
resentation in ways that contribute important responses to these ques
tions. Cameron's Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits, as he writes, is
"the first photodocumentation of transsexual men from within our
community," and as such, a work documenting female-to-males by a
female-to-male, his project is groundbreaking. 17 Presenting his subjects
as looking "just like men" against the backdrop of their real-life situa
tions ("Fellas"), Cameron sustains the value of gender realness. At the
same time in his "Our Bodies" series, in the close-ups of surgical recon
struction, he conveys the material differences of the female-to-male
body. But while Cameron lets us look at this referential difference, he
also captures how we look. In his self-portraits in the "Distortion" series
near the beginning of the book, Cameron's inscriptions of address to the
viewer ("You're so exotic ! May I take your photograph . . . . Do you have
a penis ? ") literally frame the viewer's gaze, reflecting back, here, that
look of fascination, objectification and desire s/he may cast. We can only
look at the transsexual, then, if we look at how we look.
Del LaGrace's photographic work-in-progress of female-to-male
Zachary Nataf similarly allows an encounter with the referentiality of
transsexual experience while foregrounding point of view. 1 8 Like Kim
this is a work designed to capture the transsexual in transition; but
LaGrace's set-up with Nataf couldn't be more different from Rheims's
with Harlow. As Nataf initiated the project, the transsexual's represen
tation is self-authored: as LaGrace so nicely puts it, the work is Natafs
"visual transsexual autobiography." Seen together the photographs do
indeed have the quality of a document or a record. Meeting every few
FROM BODYAlCHEMY:rRANSSEXUAl PORTRAITS (SAN FRANCISCO,CLEIS, 1996) .PHOTOGRAPH Cl LOREN CAMERON. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION Of
CLEIS PRESS, SAN FRANCISCO
months to capture the body in the process of its changing, photographer

and subject preserve the narrative structure of Nataf"'s transsexuality.
The photographs convey with scientific precision the actual somatic
progressions entailed in Natafs becoming a man: the changes in body
contours, tissue structure, skin texture; and most recently his chest's
recovery from surgery. Moreover, the photographer's investment in and
identification with his transsexual subject is indicated in how much we
get to see of Natafs transitioning body. Nataf appears naked in many
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DEL LAGRACE
images and is happy to let LaGrace in as close as he can get: a marker of

the subject's absolute trust that LaGrace's regard, both as a transgen
dered subject himself and someone whose work over the past fifteen
years has broadcast his desire for transgendered subjects, will carry how
he-LaGrace-looks. (When LaGrace began taking the images, she
was a "hermaphrodyke," now he identifies as an intersexual female-to
male; his analysis of the complex role played in his transition by this
looking cogently suggests the essential role played in all transitions by
representation.) Criss-crossed with his identification and desire, repre
senting Nataf so intimately in every sense, LaGrace's photographs pass
this trust on to their viewers; in their very revelation they demand that
we continue its exchange.
What stands out in the series so far are the close-ups of Natafs geni
tals. Nataf describes this focus as deliberately ethnographic, anthropo
metrical, its purpose to reveal graphically the difference of the transsex
ual body. And indeed, the primary effect of the startling detail of these
images is to demand that the viewer take the full measure of the trans
sexual body-in this shot quite literally. In this regard for size, the photo
graphs make knowing reference to a cultural tradition of phallicizing
black male bodies, turning that history of racial fetishization in on itself
(since Natafs male body is evidently different, this representation inter-
rupts that history) to challenge the fetishization of transsexual bodies. For

while by no means identical or historically proportionate to the fetishiza
tion of black bodies, the fact that trans is simultaneously everywhere
subject of contemporary cultural projections-and nowhere-in reality
absent, missing in the flesh-is the result of a similar fetishistic splitting
between the subject and object of the look, a comparable dearth of self
representations in an abundance of representations of this body as other. 19
LaGrace and Natafs project directly intervenes into that fetishization of
trans by redistributing the look. The fact that Natafs bodily revelations
are his deliberate self-authoring and LaGrace's observation is participant
blurs the difference between looking subject and seen object, and as a
result the distinctness of the transsexual body emerges clearly into view
without disavowal.
What remains of fetishism within the image-and the absolute focus
on the genitals does constitute a deliberate attention to these parts apart
from the rest of the body-remains in provocative affirmation of the
transsexual's bodily difference. Paradoxical as this may seem, the close
up of the transsexual body works to close up the difference between
PHOTOGRAPH BY DEL LAGRACE

viewer and transsexual subject-not simply between LaGrace and

Nataf but between Nataf and the viewer of the photograph. This
dynamic of intimate looking is immediate and unmediated (LaGrace
describes it as "physical"), almost-though not quite-beyond narra
tive: looking so closely at the photograph of this bodily difference, you
cannot help but wonder first, surely, what you are looking at. You're
looking at a body part, that much is clear. Yet what body part? Failing
to recognize it, you must search for a reference point in the flesh you
know best (your own), quickly envisioning how you look: how you look
next to Nataf's body, alongside his body, even as his body. In this way, in
its very representation of the adamantine difference of this flesh, the
photograph draws you inexorably into its picture. Arresting your look
that is, not only holding your look but rooting it (locating it), it demands
from your body a narrative: How do you look ? What do you see here?
And what does what you see here reveal about you?
For those unfamiliar with transsexual bodies, these shots of Nataf's
clitoris-turning-penis certainly require a double-take. When I first
showed these images, some in the audience not surprisingly at first
thought Nataf already had a penis. And this, I think, is the ultimate
achievement of these photographs: to hold these moments of its turn
ing, to capture without sublimation and objectification the details of the
transsexual's transition. Nataf's genitals reveal him as no longer female
(there is no reading) but neither as a genetic male {there is no passing);
rather they represent him as a transsexual man in the process of becom
ing. Capturing this flesh as the referent of his narrative, LaGrace's pho
tographic field overturns the transubstantiation and, indeed, the very
otherness of the transsexual body.
What needs to be sustained as we write transsexuality into theory is
precisely the embodied specificity of the point of regard. Translating
Adrienne Rich's politics of location into her poetics of location, Nancy
K. Miller suggests that the autobiographical act, "one's own body"
what I understand as some kind of positioning of one's own body in the
regarded picture-"can constitute an internal limit on discursive irre
sponsibility."20 Taking her literally here, I blow my cover, and embody
my narrative with this photograph.
PHOTOGRAPH BY OEL LAGRACE

notes
Introduction: O n Transitions-Changing Bodies, Changing Narratives

l . Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York : Penguin, 1 992).
2. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography , ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine
Leary (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1 980), p. 1 32 .
3. Lynne Segal, Straight Sex: The Politics ofPleasure (London: Virago, 1 994), p . 228.
4. Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making ofthe She-Male ( 1 979);
reissued with a new introduction on transgender (New York: Teacher's College
Press, 1 994 ).
5. Dwight Billings and Thomas Urban, "The Socio-Medical Construction of
Transsexualism: An Interpretation and Critique," Social Problems 29 ( 1 982),
reprinted in Blending Genders: Social Aspects ofCross-Dressing and Sex-Changing, ed.
Richard Ekins and Dave King (London: Routledge, 1 996), pp. 99, 1 1 2 .
6. Bernice L . Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea
of Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1 995).
7. Ibid., pp. 1 40, 1 1 0, 1 1 8.
8. Carroll Riddell, "Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice Raymond's
The Transsexual Empire" in Blending Genders: Social Aspects ofCross-Dressing and Sex
Changing, ed. Richard Ekins and Dave King, (London: Routledge, 1 996), p. 1 89.
9. D. 0. Cauldwell, "Psychopathia Transexualis," Sexology 16 ( 1 949): 2 74-280.
1 0. Harry Benjamin, "Transvestism and Transsexualism," International Journal
ofSexology 7 ( 1 953): 1 2-14.
1 1 . Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon (New York : Julian Press,
1 966), p. 28.
1 2 . Liz Hodgkinson, Michael Nee Laura (London: Columbus, 1 989).
1 3 . Radclyffe Hall, The Well ofLoneliness ( 1 928; reprint, London: Virago, 1 982).
14. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues: A Novel (New York: Firebrand, 1 993).
1 5 . Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Theory of Corporeal Feminism

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 994), p. 3.
1 6 . Cecile Lindsay, "Lyotard and the Postmodern Body," I.:Esprit Creatur 3 1 ,
no. l ( 1 99 1 ): 33, cited i n Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and
Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 1 995), p. 1 80.
1 7. Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
(Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex, 1 993), pp. 136, 1 43.
1 8. Marcia Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalytic Modernism and
the Fetish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 993), pp. 1 78, 1 85.
1 9 . Carole-Anne Tyler, "The Supreme Sacrifice ? TV, 'TV,' and the Renee
Richards Story," differences l, no. 3 ( 1 989): 1 63; Catherine Millot, Horsexe: An Essay
on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton (Brooklyn: Autonomcdia, 1 990), p. 143;
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York:
Routledge, 1 992), p. 98; June L. Reich, "Gcndcrfuck : The Law of the Dildo,"
Discourse 15, no. l ( 1 992): 1 2 l .
20. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds., introduction, BodyGuards: The
Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 1 99 1 ), p. l l ; Arthur
and Marilouisc Kroker, eds., introduction, The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw
Bodies (New York: St. Martin's, 1 993), p. 1 5; Judith Halberstam, "F2M: The Making
of Female Masculinity," in The Lesbian Postmodern , ed. Laura Doan (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1 994), p. 2 1 2 .
2 1 . I owe this turn o f phrase t o Nancy K . Miller.
22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold:
Reading Silvan Tomkins,'' Critical Inquiry 2 1 , no. 2 ( 1 995): 5 1 1 . Page numbers of
further citations will appear directly in the text.
23. On the problematic of anticsscntialist critiques, sec, for instance: Teresa de
Laurctis, "The Essence of the Triangle; or, Taking the Risk ofEssentialism Seriously:
Feminist Theory in Italy, the US, and Britain,'' differences l, no. 2 ( 1 989): 2-37, and
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York:
Routledge, 1 989).
1 . Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex

1 . Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: California
University Press, 1 990), p. 1 6.
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 985).
3. Sedgwick, Epistemology ofthe Closet, pp. 37-38.
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies {Durham: Duke University Press, 1 993),
p. 256.
5. Sedgwick , Tendencies, p. 9. Judith Butler emphasizes instead the contrast
between Sedgwick's theoretical formulations on sexuality versus gender and her
reading practice: "Although Sedgwick appears to defend this methodological
separation [of gender and sexuality], her own readings often make rich and bril
liant use o f the problematic of cross-gendered identi fication and cross-sexual
7. Judith Butler 239
identification" (Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects," differences 6, nos. 213

[ 1 994]: 24, n. 8).
6. Kobena Mercer, "Looking for Trouble," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,
ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David Halperin (New York: Routledge,
1 993), pp. 350-359; Kobena Mercer, "Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of
Robert Mapplethorpe," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and
William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 99 1 ), pp. 307-330; Kobena Mercer,
"Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary," in How
Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle: Bay, 1 99 1 ), pp.
1 79-2 1 0; Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years (New York: South End, 1 983);
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt
Lute, 1 987).
7. Teresa de Lauretis, "Sexual Difference and Lesbian Representation," Theatre
Journal 40, no. 2 ( 1 988): 1 55- 1 77; Sue-Ellen Case, "Toward a Butch-Femme
Aesthetic," in Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women 's
Theatre, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1 989), pp.
282-299; Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to
Foucault (Oxford University Press, 1 99 1 ); Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross
Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1 992).
8. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1 990). Page numbers of citations will appear directly in the text
after GT.
9. Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," glq: A Journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies 1 ,
no. 1 ( 1 993): 24, 25.
1 0. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of
the Novel," glq: A Journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies 1 , no. 1 ( 1 993): I .
1 1 . David Bergman, ed., introduction, Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality
(Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 1 993), p. 1 1 . See also Moe Meyer, ed.,
The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London: Routledge, 1 994 ).
12. Scott Long, "The Loneliness of Camp," in Camp Grounds, ed. Bergman, p. 79.
13. Richard Ekins and Dave King, eds., Blending Genders: Social Aspects ofCross
Dressing and Sex-Changing (London: Routledge, 1 996); see their introduction, p. I .
1 4. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New
York: Routledge, 1 993). Page numbers of citations will appear directly in the text
after BTM.
1 5 . Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity," p. 1 ; Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 1 1 .
1 6. Judith Butler, "Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and
Foucault," in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1 987), pp. 1 2 8- 1 43.
1 7. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1 988). Biddy Martin has also noted the importance of speech-act theory-although
not of the Derridean deconstruction of it-to both Butler's and Sedgwick's theory
of performativity (Biddy Martin, "Sexualities Without Genders and Other Queer
Utopias," Diacritics 24, nos. 213 ( 1 994]: 1 04- 1 2 1). Butler's most recent book Excitable
240 1. Judith Butler
Speech: A Politics ofthe Peiformative (London: Routledge, 1 997), just out as I go to

press, is a thorough exploration of the significance of speech acts (of the relation
between "speech" and "act") in the contemporary cultural sphere. Since its concerns
are not primarily sex or gender, I omit discussion of it here.
1 8. For Butler's genealogy of Beauvoir's understanding of becoming to Sartre
and Hegel and a prefiguring of key arguments in Gender Trouble, see Judith Butler,
"Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex," Yale French Studies 72
( 1 986): 34-49.
1 9. Butler, "Critically Queer," p. 25.
20. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1 992).
2 1 . Butler, "Critically Queer," p. 25; my emphasis.
22. Martin, "Sexualities Without Genders," p. 1 04.
23 . Liz Kotz, "The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interv iews Judith Butler,"
Artforum 31 (November 1 992): 89; Butler, "Critically Queer," p. 24.
24. Judith Butler, "Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification," Constructing
Masculinity, ed . Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, Simon Watson (New York, Rout
ledge, 1 995), pp. 32, 34.
25. Jacques Lacan, "The Meaning of the Phallus," in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques
Lacan and the Ecole freudienne, ed . Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York:
Norton, 1 982), pp. 74-85.
26. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade,"in Formations of Fantasy, ed.
Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1 986), p. 3 8;
Stephen Heath, "Joan Riviere and the Masquerade," in Formations of Fantasy, ed.
Burgin, Donald, and Kaplan, pp. 46-6 1 .
27. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" ( 1 9 1 7) The Standard Edition
ofthe Complete Psychological Works, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth,
1 968), pp. 239-258; Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id ( 1 923), trans. Joan Riviere,
ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1 989); Nicolas Abraham, "Notes on the
Phantom: A Complement to Freud's Metapsychology," in The Trial(s) of Psycho
analysis, ed. Fran�oise Meltzer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1 988), pp. 75-80;
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, "Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or
Melancholia,"in Psychoanalysis in France, ed. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlocher
(New York: International University Press, 1 980), pp. 3-1 6; Roy Schafer, Aspects of
Internalization (New York: International University Press, 1 968); Roy Schafer, A
New Languagefor Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 976).
28. Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 24, 28.
29. Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 1 9-20.
30. Ibid., p. 20, n. 1 6.
3 1 . As I understand this influence, while Lacan's imago certainly derives from
Freud 's concept of the ego, its debt is not so much to the ego of The Ego and the Id
as to Freud's second model of the ego in "On Narcissism: An Introduction": the
ego as distinctly nonbiological and crucially split ("Lacan's Mirror Phase," talk
given by Bice Benvenuto, Center for Freudian Psychoanalysis and Research,
London, October 2 1 , 1 995). See Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist
7. Judith Butler 24 1
Introduction (London: Routledge, 1 990), pp. 24-49, for an account of the differ
ences between Freud 's two egos and the genealogy of only one to Lacan.
32. "The child seems to organize its earliest subjective experience around bodily
sensations with their varying pleasure-pain properties. This early subjective experi
ence is the 'bodily ego' that, according to Freud ( l 923a [The Ego and the Id]), is the
first ego. Thus, from its very beginnings, the organization of experience implies
physical referents such as are later subjectively defined as being inside and outside"
(Schafer, A New Languagefor Psychoanalysis, p. 1 7 1 ). The "physical referents"-the
"bodily sensations" that Freud posits as generating the ego--are in Schafer's scheme
granted only retroactively and subjectively.
33. Martin, "Sexualities Without Genders," p. 1 06.
34. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 1 9-20.
35 . "Transsexuals often claim a radical discontinuity between sexual pleasures
and bodily parts. Very often what is wanted in terms of pleasure requires an imag
inary participation in body parts, either appendages or orifices, that one might not
actually possess, or, similarly, pleasure may require imagining an exaggerated or
diminished set of parts. . . . The imaginary condition of desire always exceeds the
physical body through or on which it works" (GT 70-7 1 ) .
3 6 . Arguing with lesbian feminism i n particular, Lynne Segal makes a case fo r the
non-normativity of heterosexual practices, their potential (for straight feminists) for
putting in question gender hierarchies: "Straight sex . . . can be no less 'perverse' than
its 'queer' alternatives" (Lynne Segal, Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure [London:
Virago, 1 994 ], p. 3 1 8). That straight should thus aspire to queer is a sure sign of the
success of queer theory's "grounding" (of running aground) heterosexuality.
37. Paris is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston, Miramax, 1 990.
38. The queer/poststructuralist investment in figures of transgression might be
read as a similar (unconscious ? ) appropriation of Catholic rhetoric.
39. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1 992),
p. 1 5 1 .
40. Livingston's powers o f representation extend beyond the cinematic. That
Livingston knowingly and intentionally entered the drag ball world of Harlem as
an authority is evident from the legal cautions she took before filming, including
requiring all the participants in the film to sign a release. Two years after the film's
success, all but two of the participants filed legal suits against Livingston, staking a
claim in her profits. Their signatures on the release ensured the dismissal of their
suits. For a discussion of the significance of this case to the circumscribed agency of
the ball participants beyond the realm of the ball, see Philip Brian Harper, "The
Subversive Edge: Paris is Burning, Social Critique, and the Limits of Subjective
Agency," Diacritics 24, nos. 213 ( 1 994): 90- 1 03.
41. Although precisely for these reasons in current transgender studies, Venus
(and Butler's reading of her) is proving seminal. Ki Namaste's critique of queer the
ory's representation of transgender-which appeared after my writing this-simi
larly argues that Butler "reduce[s] Extravaganza's transsexuality to an allegorical
state" (" 'Tragic Misreadings': Queer Theory's Erasure ofTransgender Subjectivity,"
242 7. Judith Butler
Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, ed. Brett Beemyn
and Mickey Eliason [New York: New York University Press, 1 996], p. 1 88). While I
emphasize the literality of sex and the cruciality of narrative for the transsexual,
Namaste's essay goes on usefully to reinstate something of the sociological context of
transgender and transsexual lives in which queer's "tragic misreadings" take place.
42. Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects," p. 2. Page numbers of further cita
tions will appear directly in the text after "APO."
43. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality," Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality ( 1 984; reprint, London:
Pandora, 1989), pp. 267-3 19.
44. Gayle Rubin, with Judith Butler (Interview), "Sexual Traffic," differences 6,
nos. 2-3 ( 1 994): 88.
2. A Skin o f One's Own: Toward a Theory ofTranssexual Embodiment

1 . Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling (New
York: Routledge, 1 995), p. 2.
2 . Cited in Louise Gray, "Me, My Surgeon, and My Art," The Guardian, 2 April
1 996, p.8.
3. Catherine Millot, Horsexe: An Essay on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton
(Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1 990), p. 1 1 6.
4 . Ann Fausto-Sterling, "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not
Enough," The Sciences 33, no. 2 ( 1 993): 20-25. See also Ann Fausto-Sterling, Myths
of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men (New York: Basic, 1 992).
5 . Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
6. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1 994), pp. 208, 207.
7. Millot, Horsexe.
8. Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual
Difference (London: Routledge, 1 996), pp. 1 58-159, 1 43-144, 1 59.
9. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 208.
1 0. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self, trans.
Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 989); page numbers of further
citations will appear directly in the text after SE. Didier Anzieu,A Skinfor Thought:
Interviews with Gilbert Tarrab (London: Karnac, 1 990).
1 1 . Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id ( 1 923), trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James
Strachey (New York: Norton, 1 989), p. 20 and p. 20, n. 1 6; cited in Anzieu, SE, p. 85.
1 2 . Anzieu, Skin for Thought, p. 43. Anzieu's difference with Lacan on the body,
language, and the centrality of the ego is most clearly articulated in this collection of
interviews: see especially pp. 33-79, and for his description of training with Lacan
pp. 2 6-32.
1 3 . It is in fact a measure of Lacan's role in cultural desomatization that in her
most recent surgery/exhibition, Orlan's "surplus" tissues were mounted on texts
from Lacan, her flesh refigured as his text. "This My Body, This My Software,"
Newcastle, UK, April 1 996.
2. A Skin of One's Own 243
1 4. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 1 63 , n. 43.

1 5. Grosz, Volatile Bodies p. xiii.
1 6. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 11Sex11 (New
1 7. The Silence ofthe Lambs, dir. Jonathan Demme, Orion Pictures, 1 99 1 .
1 8. Terming the film a "skinflick," Judith Halbe rstam has read the conjoin
ing of skin, horror, and gender trouble in Silence ofthe Lambs, although she states
that Gumb is not reducible to the transsexual. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows:
Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke University Press: Durham,
1 995), pp. 1 6 1-1 77.
1 9. Jan Morris, Conundrum: An Extraordinary Narrative of Transsexualism (New
York : Holt, 1 986), p. 88.
20. Diane Leslie Feinberg, Journal of a Transsexual (New York : World View,
1 980), p. 20.
2 1 . Cited in Bryan Tully, Accounting for Transsexuality and Transhomosexuality
(London: Whiting, 1 992), p. 76.
22. Christian Hamburger, Georg K. Stiirup, and E. Dahl-Iversen, "Transvestism:
Hormonal, Psychiatric, and Surgical Treatment," Journal of the American Medical
Association 52, no. 5 ( 1 953): 391-396.
23. Raymond Thompson with Kitty Sewell, What Took You So Long? A Girl's
Journey to Manhood (London: Penguin, 1 995), p. 200. Page numbers of further cita
tions will appear directly in the text.
24. The field of medical writings on what might be called the psychology of the
skin is vast. Most current issues of the dermatology journals Journal of the
American Academy of Dermatology , British Journal of Dermatology , and Inter
national Journal of Dermatology contain research on the psychosocial significance
of skin disorders. As I intend to explore in my next project (a cultural history of
skin), skin is a massively significant text: an organ that has been subject to dense
and fascinating psychosocial narratives.
25. Caroline Cossey, My Story (Winchester, Mass.: Faber, 1 992), p. 74; Renee
Richards with John Ames, Second Serve: The Renee Richards Story (New York:
Stein, 1 983), pp. 8 1 -82.
26. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wifefor a Hat (New York: Harper,
1 990), p. 43.
27. Sacks, Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. See "Hands" (pp. 59-65);
"Phantoms" (pp. 66--70); "The Man Who Fell out of Bed" (pp. 55-58); and for the
case of loss of total body-image ("pithing," as the patient herself so perfectly puts
it), "The Disembodied Lady" (pp. 43-54).
28. Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (London: Picador, 1 99 1 ), p. 46.
29. Sacks, Man Who Mistook His Wifefor a Hat, pp. 48-49.
30. SE, p. 6 1 . Anzieu's biological explanation for why the skin is so caught up in
psychic reality, this conj unction of skin with the brain (skin and the brain are
formed from the same ectodermal material, are j uxtaposed in utero, and share the
same double-layered organization) provides an interesting connection to the most
recent biological research into transsexual etiology. Positing a transsexual brain,
244 2. A Skin of One's Own
this research would seem to indicate a neuroscientific genesis for transsexual body
image. In one much publicized study the part of the brain considered essential for
sexual behavior, the stria terminalis, was shown to be female-sized in male-to
female transsexuals. As the stria terminalis is not influenced by hormone adminis
tration in adult life, this study claims to "show a female brain structure in geneti
cally male transsexuals and [to support] the hypothesis that gender identity devel
ops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones"
(Jiang-Ning Zhou, Michael A. Hofman, Louis J. G. Gooren, and Dick F. Swaab,
"A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality, Nature
378 [ 1 995]: 68).
3 1 . Luce I r igaray, This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1 985).
32. Sacks, Man Who Mistook His Wifefor a Hat, p. 52.
33. Ibid.
34. Sharon Olds, "Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor,"
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and
Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1 983), p. 300.
35. American Psychiatric Association, "Gender Identity Disorder," in Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (Washington, D.C.: American
Psychiatric Association, 1 994), pp. 532-537.
36. Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma Of Cosmetic Surgery
(New York: Routledge, 1 995), p. 1 6.
37. Mario Martino with harriet, Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography (New
York: Crown, 1 977), p. 1 85, my emphasis.
38. Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley, April Ashley's Odyssey (London: Cape,
1 982), p. 89; Jan Morris, Conundrum, p. 1 4 1 ; Thompson, What Took You So Long ? ,
p . 299.
39. Kim Harlow/Bettina Rheims, Kim , trans. Paul Gould (Munich: Kehayoff
Verlag, 1 994), p. 42.
40. Lucy Grealy, In the Mind's Eye: Autobiography of a Face (London: Arrow,
1 995), p. 1 60.
4 1 . Sacks, Leg to Stand On , p. 50.
42. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 73.
43. Sacks, Man Who Mistook His Wifefor a Hat, p. 69.
44. Katherine Cummings, Katherine's Diary: The Story of a Transsexual (Port
Melbourne, Victoria: Heinemann, 1 992), p. 223.
45. Ann Bolin, In Search ofEve: Transsexua l Rites ofPassage (New York: Bergin
and Garvey, 1 988), pp. 1 82, 1 83 .
4 6 . Dawn Langley Simmons, Man Into Woman: A Transsexual Autobiography
(London: Icon, 1 970), p. 1 24.
47. Julia Grant, Just Julia: The Story of an Extrao1·dinary Woman (London:
Boxstreet, 1 994 ).
48. Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making ofthe She-Male ( 1 979;
reissued, with a new introduction on transgender, New York: Teacher's College
Press, 1 994) , p. 3 1 .
3. Mirror Images 245
49. Marjorie Garber "Spare Parts," differences l , no. 3 (l 989); reprinted in Garber,
Vested Interests (New York: Routledge, 1 992), p. 98.
50. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds., introduction, The I.Ast Sex: Feminism and
Outlaw Bodies (New York: St. Martin's, 1 993), pp. 15, 1 9.
5 1 . For an overview of the mechanics of tissue engineering by those pioneering
the field, see Robert Langer and Joseph P. Vacanti, "Tissue Engineering," Science
260 ( 1 993): 920-926; for a discussion of the BBC's "Tomorrow's World" special that
televised the "ear-mouse" ("Test Tube Bodies, BBC I, October 24, 1 995), see Sandra
Goldbeck-Wood, "Brave New World of Transplant Technology," British Medical
Journal 3 1 1 (1 995): 1 235-1 236; for a sense of how tissue engineering might revolu
tionize plastic surgery, see John 0. Cucan and C. Raphael Lee, "Plastic Surgery,"
Journal ofthe American Medical Association 275 ( 1 996): 1 844- 1 845.
52. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 994), p. 56.
53. Adrienne Rich, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," Blood, Bread, and
Poetry: Selected Prose 1 979-1 985 (New York: Norton, 1 986), p. 2 1 5.
54. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1 980). Page
numbers of citations will appear directly in the text.
55. Using Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Kaja Silverman has recently
explored the possibility of a "black male bodily ego." Following Anzieu (Silverman
cites The Skin Ego in a footnote but does not read the significance of skin in Fanon),
Fanon's notion of "epidermalization" would certainly seem to be the place to begin
to account for the psychic and cultural materiality of racial difference (Frantz
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann [New York: Grove,
1 967], p. 1 1 ). My attempt to think transsexual embodiment here runs parallel to
Silverman's chapter entitled "The Bodily Ego," in which her reading of Fanon
appears: Kaja Silverman, The Threshold ofthe Visible World (New York, Routledge,
1 996), pp. 9-37. Beginning with Freud's definition of the ego as a bodily ego,
Silverman "elaborate[s] and problematize[s]" Lacan's account of the bodily image
though the work of Schilder and Wallon to produce a conception of the bodily ego
as similarly sensational and "proprioceptive."
56. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1 993),
pp. 262, 2 83, 262. For Sedgwick 's account of how her baldness as a result of her
chemotherapy treatment for the cancer made her read conversely as a lesbian (the
experience was indeed apparently one of crossing identifications), see Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, "Gosh, Boy George, You Must be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity ! "
Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, Simon Watson (New
York: Routledge, 1 995), pp. 1 1-20.
3. Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography

I . Jan Morris, Conundrum: An Extraordinary Narrative of Transsexualism (New
York: Holt, 1 986), p. 140. Page numbers of further citations will appear directly in
the text.
2. Morris's mirror scene is satirized in other male-to-female accounts: see Nancy
Hunt, Mirror Image: The Odyssey ofa Male to Female Transsexual (New York: Holt,
246 3. Mirror Images
1 978), p. 20 1 , and Sandy Stone, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual

Manifesto," in BodyGuards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia
Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1 99 1 ), p. 30 1 , n. 2 1 .
3 . Mario Martino with harriet, Emergence: A Tramsexual Autobiography (New
York: Crown, 1 977), p. xi. Page numbers of further citations will appear directly in
the text.
4. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," in
Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1 977), pp. 1-7.
5. Hunt, Mirror Image, p. 263.
6. Renee Richards with John Ames, Second Serve: The Renee Richards Story
(New York: Stein and Day, 1 983), p. 68. Page numbers of further citations will
appear directly in the text.
7. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental
Disorders IV (DSM-J V) (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association,
1 994), p. 537.
8. Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Tramsexualism, Technology, and the Idea
ofGender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1 995), p. 1 1 0. Page numbers of further
citations will appear directly in the text.
9. Ira B. Pauly, "Terminology and Classification of Gender Identity Disorders,"
in Gender Dysphoria: Interdisciplinary Approaches in Clinical Management, ed.
Walter 0. Bockting and Eli Coleman (New York: Haworth, 1 992), p. 5.
1 0. For transsexualism's first entry in DSM, see DSM-III (Washington, D.C.:
American Psychiatric Association, 1 980), pp. 261-266. For its first revision, see DSM
III-R (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1 987), pp. 71-78.
1 1 . Paul A. Walker, Jack C. Berger, Richard Green, Donald R. Laub, Charles
L. Reynolds, Leo Wollman, "Standards of Care: The Hormonal and Surgical Sex
Reassignment of Gender Dysphoric Persons," appendixed in Dallas Denny,
Gender Dysphoria: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1 994), p. 639.
1 2 . Stone, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back," p. 293.
13. Harry Benjamin, The Tramsexual Phenomenon (New York: Julian, 1 966).
1 4 . Erica Rutherford, Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford
(Charlottetown, P.E.I., Canada: Ragweed, 1 993), p. 209.
1 5 . Raymond Thompson with Kitty Sewell, What Took You So Long? A Girl's
journey into Manhood (London: Penguin, 1 995), p. 98.
1 6. Ibid., p. 99.
1 7. Leslie Lothstein, Female-to-Male Transsexualism: Historical, Clinical, and
Theoretical Issues (Boston: Routledge, 1 983). For Lothstein's disturbing rendition of
this case (he reads with the brother against the transsexual), see pp. 1 1 0-1 13.
1 8. Bryan Tully, Accountingfor Tramsexuality and Transhomosexuality (London:
Whiting, 1 992), p. 24.
1 9. Leah Cahan Schaefer, Connie Christine Wheeler, and Walter Futterweit,
"Gender Identity Disorders (Transsexualism)," in Treatments of Psychiatric Dis
orders, vol. 2, ed. Glen 0. Gabbard (Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Press),
p. 2027.
3. Mirror Images 247
20. Jane Fry, Being Different: The Autobiography ofJane Fry, collec., comp., and
ed. Robert Bogdan (New York: Wily, 1 974). Page numbers of citations will appear
directly in the text.
2 1 . Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," in Auto
biography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1 980), p. 4 1 .
22. Hunt, Mirror Image: The Odyssey of a Male-to-Female Transsexual; Duncan
Fallowell and April Ashley, April Ashley's Odyssey (London: Cape, 1 982).
23. Claudine Griggs, Passage Through Trinidad: Journal ofa Surgical Sex Change
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1 996).
24. Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," p. 40.
25. Stephanie Castle, Feelings: A Transsexual's Explanation ofa Baffling Condition
(Vancouver BC: Persephone, 1 992), p. 38.
26. Paul Hewitt with Jane Warren, A Self-Made Man: The Diary ofa Man Born
in a Woman's Body (London: Headline, 1 995); Jerry/Jerri McClain, To Be a Woman
(Provincetown, Mass.: Different Path, 1 992).
27. Mark Rees, Dear Sir or Madam: The Autobiography of a Female-to-Male
Transsexual (London: Cassell, 1 996).
28. Kitty Sewell, "Introduction," in What Took You So Long?, by Raymond
Thompson with Kitty Sewell, p. viii.
29. Canary Conn, "A Little Boy Discovers Herself," in Canary: The Story of a
Transsexual (Los Angeles: Nash, 1 974), p. 29; Thompson, What Took You So Long?
A Girl's Journey to Manhood.
30. Christine Jorgensen, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography (New
York: Eriksson, 1 967). For reference to Jorgensen see, for instance, Hunt, Mirror
Image, pp. 74-75; Martino, Emergence, pp. 40, 5 1 , 1 63; Dawn Langley Simmons,
Man Into Woman: A Transsexual Autobiography (London: Icon, 1 970), p. 94. Lili
Elbe's biography is recounted in Neils Hoyer, ed., Man Into Woman: An Authentic
Record of a Change of Sex-The True Story of the Miraculous Transformation of the
Danish Painter, Einar Wegener, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: Popular Library,
1 953), a book cited in Castle, Feelings, p. 44; Morris, Conundrum , p. 45; Richards,
Second Serve, p. 55.
3 1 . Hunt, Mirror Image, pp. 1 39-1 40.
32. Stone, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back," p. 285.
33. See for instance Julia Grant, Just Julia: The Story ofan Extraordinary Woman
(London: Boxstreet, 1 994); Rees, Dear Sir or Madam.
34. Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," p. 32.
35. Harry Benjamin, introduction, in Christine Jorgensen, pp. xi-xii, p. xii, p. ix,
my emphasis.
36. Conn, Canary.
37. If Richard's narrative comes close to reading as a critique of Robert Stoller's
psychoanalytic account of male-to-female transsexuality as the product of a mas
culine mother and an absent father, Martino's comes close to Lothstein's of female
to-male transsexuality as-mirror image--engendered by the little girl taking the
248 3. Mirror Images
place of the father (an unsurprising parallel between the clinical texts considering
that Lothstein cites Stoller as his mentor). See Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender: The
Transsexual Experiment (New York: Aronson, 1 976) and Sex and Gender: The
Development of Masculinity and Femininity (London: Karnac, 1 974); Lothstein,
Female-to-Male Transsexualism.
38. Robert Allen, Butfor the Grace (London: Allen, 1 954), p. 77.
39. Roberta Cowell, Roberta Cowell's Story (London: Heinemann, 1 954), p. 1 54.
4."Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age ofTransition": The Invert, The Well of
Loneliness, and the Narrative Origins ofTranssexuality
l . Radclyffe Hall, The Well ofLoneliness ( 1 928; reprint, London: Virago, 1 982).
Page numbers of citations will appear directly in the text.
2. Transcript of the appeal, cited in Michael Baker, Our Three Selves: The Life of
Radclyffe Hall (New York: William Morrow, 1 985), p. 243.
3. Time and Tide, 23 November, 1 928, cited in Baker, Our Three Selves, p. 246.
4. Jane Rule, Lesbian Images (London: Davies, 1 976), p. 50.
5. Blanche Wiesen-Cook, " 'Women Alone Stir My Imagination': Lesbianism
and the Cultural Tradition," Signs 4, no. 4 ( 1 979): 7 1 8-739; Lillian Faderman,
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the
Renaissance to the Present ( 1 98 1 ; reprint, London: The Women's Press, 1 99 1 ), pp.
3 1 7-323; Catharine Stimpson, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces
(New York: Routledge, 1 984), pp. 97-1 1 0; Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly
Conduct: Visions ofGender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1 985), pp. 245-296 passim; Esther Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian:
Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman," The Lesbian Issue: Essa ys from Signs, ed.
Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara C. Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson, Kathleen M. Weston
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1 985), pp. 7-26; Sonja Ruehl, "Inverts and
Experts: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Identity," in Feminism, Culture, and Politics,
ed. Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan (London: Lawrence, 1 982), pp. 1 5-36; Jean
Radford, "An Inverted Romance: The Well of Loneliness and Sexual Ideology," in
The Progress of Romance: The Politics ofPopular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London:
Routledge 1 986), pp. 97-1 1 1 ; Gillian Whitlock, " 'Everything is Out of Place':
Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Literary Tradition," Feminist Studies 13, no. 3 ( 1 987):
555-582; Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice ofLove: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse
Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 994), pp. 203-256. Claudia Stillman
Franks alone produces a nonlesbian-centered reading of the novel as about a woman
coming to writing. Claudia Stillman Franks, Beyond The Well of Loneliness: The
Fiction ofRadcly.ffe Hall (Avebury, England: Avebury, 1 982), pp. 97-1 14.
6. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Sexchanges, vol. 2, No Man's Land: The
Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1 989), p. 220.
7. Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian," pp. 2 1 , 23.
8. George Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine
and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance," Salmagundi 58/59
4. usome Primitive Thing ConceivedH 249
( 1982/1 983): 1 1 7-1 1 8. For other significant renditions of sexology as about homo
sexuality, see Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men , pp. 239-253; Smith
Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, pp. 245-296; David F. Greenberg, The Construction
ofHomosexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1 988) pp. 397-435; and Gert
Hekma, " 'A Female Soul in a Male Body': Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion
in Nineteenth-Century Sexology," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual
Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone, 1 994), pp.
2 1 3-240. Even though its stated purpose is to elucidate sexual inversion as a dis
course of gender inversion, Hekma's essay nevertheless follows its precursors in
reading gender inversion as the sexologists' conceptual frame for homosexuality
rather than a specifically transgendered paradigm.
9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 , An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1 990), p. 43.
1 0. Stephen's inversion has been read successively as the projection of "homosex
uality as a sickness" (Stimpson, Where the Meanings Are, p. l 01 ); a "congenitalist trap"
for conceiving love between women (Faderman, Surpassing the Love ofMen, p. 322);
lesbian "self-hating" (Wiesen-Cook, " 'Women Alone Stir My Imagination,' " p. 72 1 );
an attempt to transform sexological object into self-designating lesbian subject
(Ruehl, "Inverts and Experts"); "the New Woman('s] lay[ing] claim to her full sexu
ality" (Newton "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian," p. 23); a lesbian feminist strategy for
insisting on the "homosexual's right to existence" (Radford, "An Inverted Romance,"
p. 97); a bid to create "space for lesbians to speak for themselves" (Whitlock, "
'Everything is Out of Place,' " p. 560) and a "fetish, the signifier of [lesbian] desire"
(de Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 242). None of these readings doubts that the
female invert is lesbian, even if some of them criticize her roundly as a bad or out
moded one.
We might see the sublimation of inversion into sexuality at work in the very
publication of The Well. Hall's publisher, Jonathan Cape, clearly mindful of the
obscenity trial that in 1 898 had beset the sexologist's own Sexual Inversion, modified
Havelock Eilis's original praise for the novel that appeared as the preface to the first
edition as realistically presenting "various aspects of sexual inversion," to "one par
ticular aspect of sexual life." Eilis's remarks on the novel's specific contribution to
sexual inversion were thereby transmuted into a vague assertion about sexuality.
Original commentary cited in Baker, Our Three Selves, p. 205; published version in
Havelock Ellis, Commentary, The Well ofLoneliness, Radclyffe Hall (Paris: Pega
sus, 1 928) n. p.
1 1 . Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality," p. 1 1 6.
1 2 . Carl Westphal, "Die Kontrare Sexualempfindung," Archiv fur Psychiatrie
und Nervenkrankheiten 2 ( 1 869): 73-108, cited in Leslie Lothstein, Female-to-Male
Transsexualism: Historical, Clinical, and Theoretical Issues (Boston: Routledge, 1 983),
pp. 2 1 -22. (Thanks to James Hall for help with translation.) For its citation in the
context of inversion, see Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With
Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct, trans. from the 1 0th German edi
tion by F. J. Rebman (London: Rebman Ltd., 1 90 1 ), p. 326; and Havelock Ellis,
250 4. "Some Primitive Thing Conceived"
Studies in the Psychology ofSex, vol. 2, Sexual Inversion (New York: Random, 1 936),
p. 65; and, in the context of transsexuality, Ira Pauly, "Adult Manifestations of
Female Transsexualism," in Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, ed. Richard
Green and John Money, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 969) p. 59,
and Lothstein, Female-to-Male Tramsexualism, pp. 2 1-22.
13. Nelly Oudshoorn (Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology ofSex Hormones
[London: Routledge, 1 994]) dates the beginning of endocrinology to the 1 900s but
describes how the isolation and the manufacture of sex hormones took the best part
of the next three decades.
14. Hirschfeld's case, originally published in Sexual Patho/ogie: Ein Lehrbuch Fur
Artze und Studierende ( 1 922), is cited in Lothstein, Female-to-Male Tramsexualism, p.
22 and Pauly, "Adult Manifestations of Female Transsexualism," p. 59. The genital
masculinization of Herman Karl (born Sophia Hedwig) is mentioned in Hans
Houstein, "Transvestism and the State at the End of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries," Zeitschrififor Sexual Wissemchaft 15 ( 1 928-29): 353, and is cited by Vern
Bullough and Bonnie Bullough as "[t]he earliest known case of modern surgical
intervention" (although the Bulloughs add that it is not clear whether the surgery
entailed sex change or corrective treatment for pseudohermaphroditism) (Vern
Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross-Dressing, Sex, and Gender [Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania University Press, 1 993), p. 255).
15. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 4 1 0; Ellis, Sexual Inversion, pp. 255,
25 l. Page numbers offurther citations to both works will appear directly in the text.
According to Ellis, most female inverts are marked by transgender: "It appears to
me that the great majority of inverted women possess some masculine or boyish
traits, even though only as slight as those which may occasionally be revealed by a
normal woman" (25 1 ).
1 6. Vern Bullough, "A Nineteenth-Century Transsexual," Archives of Sexual
Behavior 1 6 ( 1 987): 8 1 .
1 7. Ulrichs writing a s Numa Numantius, "lnclusa," Anthropologische Studien
uber mannmiinnliche Geschlechtsliebe (Leipzig: Matthes, 1 898), cited and translated
in Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs: The Life and Works ofKarl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of
the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1 988), p. 56.
1 8. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Forshungen uber das Riitsel der mannmiinlichen Liebe,
vol. 2, p. 4, cited in Hugh C. Kennedy, "The 'Third Sex' Theory of Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs," in Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality, ed. Salvatore J. Licata and
Robert P. Petersen (New York: Haworth, 1 98 1 ), p. 1 06.
1 9. Numa Numantius, "Formatrix," Anthropologische Studien uber urnische
Liebe (Leipzig: Matthes, 1 898), cited in Kennedy, Ulrichs, p. 73. In spite of recount
ing incidents in Ulrichs's life that if not indicators of the desire to be differently
sexed are at least evidence of a transgendered identification ("he recalled that as a
child of three and four years old he wore girls' clothes and found it painful when
he first had to put on boys' clothes. He protested, 'No, I want to be a girl' " [ 1 5)),
Ulrichs's main commentator, Kennedy, reads him unproblematically as "the first
self-proclaimed homosexual" (U/richs, p. 9).
4. "Some Primitive Thing Conceived" 25 1
20. Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling (New
2 1 . Early on in modern transsexual research, psychiatrist Richard Green
also reads this case as precursory transsexual: Richard Green, "Transsexualism:
Mythological, Historical, and Cross-Cultural Aspects," in The Transsexual
Phenomenon , Harry Benjamin (New York: Julian Press, 1 966), p. 1 78.
22. The case does not appear in the tenth edition. Citations are taken from the
English translation of the twelfth edition, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York:
Stein, 1 965), p. 282.
23. Pauly "Adult Manifestations of Female Transsexualism," p. 83.
24. Krafft-Ebing's case of Sandor/Sarolta is cited by Ellis, Sexual Inversion, p.
195, n. l, and Lothstein, Female-to-Male Transsexualism , p. 52. Lothstein makes a
similar argument (though through psychoanalysis) about the transsexuality of
Krafft-Ebing's transgendered female inverts, including Sandor: "While it may
[seem] compelling to explain these patients' 'male identity and role' disorders as
stemming from a stigmatized homosexual condition, it [is] also clear that, for some
of the women, their 'sexual inversion' was ego syntonic and acceptable" (5 1).
25. Sigmund Freud, "Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman"
( 1 920); reprinted in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New
York: MacMillan, 1 963), pp. 1 57-1 58.
26. Ibid., p. 1 45, my emphasis.
27. Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account
of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)" ( 1 9 1 1 ); reprinted in Three Case
Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: MacMillan, 1 963), pp. 1 03-1 86.
28. Mary Jacobus, Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Bristol: Methuen,
1 985), p. 2 1 7.
29. The category "transvestism" was coined in Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites:
The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress ( 1 9 1 0), trans. Michael Lombardi-Nash (Buffalo, N.Y.:
Prometheus, 1 99 1 ).
30. Liz Hodgkinson, Michael, Nee Laura (London: Columbus, 1 989).
3 1 . Michael Dillon, Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics, (London:
Heinemann, 1 946), pp. 39-56. Page numbers of citations will appear directly in
the text.
32. See, for instance. Ellis, "Sexual Inversion," p. 3 1 6.
33. Ruehl, "Inverts and Experts," p. 2 1 .
34. Martha Vicinus, " 'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong': The Historical
Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity," The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed.
Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge,
1 993), p. 445.
35. Radclyffe Hall, letter to Havelock Ellis, April 1 8, 1 928; cited in Baker, Our
Three Selves, p. 203.
36. That Krafft-Ebing has the same function for Renee Richards in her
mother's study, highlights the remarkable continuity and stability of what, for
transsexuals, has constituted a recognizable transsexual narrative: Renee Richards
252 4. "Some Primitive Thing Conceived"
with John Ames, Second Serve: The Renee Richards Story (New York: Stein and Day,
1 983), p. 54.
37. Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian," p. 24, n. 4 1 .
38. D e Lauretis, The Practice ofLove, p . 2 1 6.
39. Ibid., p. 2 1 3.
40. Ibid., p. 2 1 1 . De Lauretis herself acknowledges the contrariness of her read
ing in the context of the novel: "a word of warning: my reading of a crucial passage
in the text--crucial because it inscribes a fantasy of the female body that works
against the grain of the novel's explicit message-is likely to appear far-fetched.
This is so, I suggest, because my reading also works against the heterosexual coding
of sexual difference (masculinity and femininity) which the novel itself employs and
in which it demands to be read" (The Practice ofLove, p. 209, my emphasis). While de
Lauretis appears to take her lead from Newton in reading Stephen as butch, my
interpretation of this scene is actually much closer to Newton's at this point. Newton
writes, "In one of Hall's most moving passages Stephen expresses this hatred [for
herself] as alienation from her body" ("The Mythic Mannish Lesbian," p. 20).
4 1 . Adam Parkes's recent attempt to read these Nelson passages as illustrating
a Butlerian "theatricality of social roles" thus strikes me as absolutely wrong for it
fails to consider the contextual significance of the gender performance, to address
Stephen's relentless desire to be real: Adam Parkes, "Lesbianism, History, and
Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the 'Suppressed Randiness' of Virginia
Woolf's Orlando," Twentieth-Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 40,
no. 4 ( 1 994): 443.
42. And thus even according to a psychoanalytic reading, Stephen's dream
returns her to an identification with men. Of the rescue fantasy in a female subject,
Freud wrote in "Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman" that it
resembled those of the heterosexual men he had described ten years earlier in "A
Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men." Although Freud names his case
homosexual therefore, her fantasy returns her (like Stephen) to an original identifi
cation with heterosexual masculinity. Freud, "Psychogenesis of a Case of Homo
sexuality in a Woman," and "A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men"
( 1 9 1 0); reprinted in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Rieff, pp. 49-57.
43. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have shown the significance of the kneel
ing maid to the development of bourgeois childhood sexuality at the beginning of
the century. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 986), pp. 1 25-1 40.
44. Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian," p. 24, n. l .
45. Stimpson, Where the Meanings Are, pp. 1 02, 98.
46. De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 2 1 1 .
47. Gayle Rubin, "Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and
Boundaries," in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, ed. Joan Nestle (New
York: Alyson, 1 992), p. 474.
48. Terry Castle, The Apparational Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 993), p. 1 0.
5. No Place Like Home 253
49. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3 ( 1 925- 1 930), ed. Anne
Olivier Bell with Andrew McNellie (New York: Harcourt, 1 980), p. 207.
50. Virginia Woolf, Orlando ( 1 928; reprint, London: Vintage, 1 992).
5 1 . Parkes, "Lesbianism, History, and Censorship," p. 434.
52. Other critics have compared the novels similarly but have failed to conclude
from their difference a distinction between the novel's subjects: "[T]hroughout
Orlando, clothes, not genitals or personality, symbolize gender change. The body
remains amorphous, Orlando's character beyond gender. . . . Tying gender to dress
rather than dress to gender, Woolf inverts Krafft-Ebing's dark vision of the 'Mannish
Lesbian' " (Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, p. 289); "Unlike Orlando, Stephen
is trapped in history; she cannot declare gender an irrelevant game" (Newton, "The
Mythic Mannish Lesbian," p. 20).
53. Orlando, dir. Sally Potter, Adventure Pictures, 1 993.
54. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues: A Novel (New York: Firebrand, 1 993).
5. No Place Like Home: Transgender and Trans-Genre in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues
I . Gayle Rubin, "Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and
Boundaries," in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, ed. Joan Nestle
(Boston: Alyson, 1 992), p. 474.
2 . Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making ofthe She Male (1 979;
reissued with a new introduction on transgender, New York: Teacher's College
Press, 1 994).
3. Ibid., pp. xi-xxxv.
4. Sandy Stone, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," in
BodyGuards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed . Julia Epstein and
Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1 99 1 ), p. 295.
5. I bid., p. 296.
6. Cited in James Green, "Camp Trans," FTM Newsletter 29 (January 1 995): 7.
7. Beth Elliot, "AND? AND? AND ? A Stonewall for the Rest of Us," Transsexual
News Telegraph 3 ( 1 994): 1 0-13, 28.
8. Barbara Warren cited in Carey Goldberg, "Shunning 'He' and 'She,' They
Fight for Respect," New York Times, September 8, 1 996, p. 24. Prominent writers
in the transgender movement all emphasize passing as politically incapacitating:
"Passing becomes silence. Passing becomes invisibility. Passing becomes lies" (Kate
Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us [New York :
Routledge, 1 994], p. 1 25); " I t is passing that is a product of oppression" (Leslie
Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Ru Paul
[Boston: Beacon, 1 996], p. 89); "Being out and proud versus passing has become the
measure of the political consciousness and commitment of transgendered people"
(Zachary I. Nataf, Lesbians Talk Transgender [London: Scarlett, 1 996], p. 29).
9. Dallas Denny, "APA Target of 2nd Demonstration by Transactivists," Aegis
News, 2 August, 1 996, Online, Internet.
10. The key research that brought about the closure of the pioneering Johns
Hopkins University Gender Identity Clinic and others following is presented in J.
254 5. No Place Like Home
K. Meyer and D. Reter, "Sex Reassignment: Follow-Up," Archives of General

Psychiatry 36, no. 9 ( 1 979): 1 0 1 0-1 0 1 5.
1 1 . Leah C. Schaefer and Connie Christine Wheeler, "The Non-Surgery True
Transsexual: A Theoretical Rationale" (paper presented at the Eighth International
Symposium on Gender Dysphoria, Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association,
Bordeaux, France, October 1 983).
12. Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, p. 3.
1 3 . Donna Minkowitz, "Love Hurts. Brandon Teena Was a Woman Who
Lived and Loved as a Man. She Was Killed For Carrying It Off," Village Voice,
April, 1 994, pp. 24-30. For transsexual criticism of the representation of Teena as
lesbian see FTM Newsletter 26 (February 1 994): 3 and TNT (Winter 1 994): 6. For
the popular rendition of Teena's story that also describes how the transgender
movement emerged from it, see Aphrodite Jones, All She Wanted (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1 996).
14. Virginia Prince, founder of Tranvestia magazine and prominent figure in
the cross-dressing community, has been credited with the coining of "transgen
der": see Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, p. x.
15. Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, p. 67; Minnie Bruce Pratt, S/he (New York:
Firebrand, 1 995). In referring to Feinberg I follow the author's practice.
1 6. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues: A Novel (New York: Firebrand, 1 993).
Page numbers of citations will appear directly in the text.
1 7. Bryan Tully Accountingfor Transsexuality and Transhomosexuality (London:
,
Whiting, 1 992), p. 254. The following section is a rewriting of my essay "No Place
Like Home: The Transgendered Narrative of Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch
Blues," Modern Fiction Studies 4 1 , nos. 3/4 ( 1 995): 483-5 14. I am grateful to Judith
Halberstam who, in dialogue with this essay's critique of her work on female-to
male transsexuality, has in turn urged me to pay more attention to the transgen
dered specificity of the stone butch.
1 8. Rubin, "Of Catamites and Kings," p. 473. For a review of modern stone
butch identity that addresses this permeation with transsexuality, see Heather
Findlay's "Modern Stone: What is Stone Butch Now ? " Girlfriends (March/April
1 995): 20, 2 1-22, 44-45. Halberstam's concept of the "transgendered butch" in her
exploration of female masculinity promises to further our thinking of this intersec
tion dramatically. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (forthcoming, Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1 998); see especially her chapter "Transgender Butch:
Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum," also forthcoming in
1 998 in glq: A Journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies.
1 9. Gershen Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of
Shame-Based Syndromes (London: Routledge, 1 993), p. 5.
20. Leah Cahan Schaefer and Connie Christine Wheeler have written eloquently
on the etiology of "existential" shame in gender identity disorder in their "Guilt
and Gender Identity Disorders and Condition: Understanding, Recognizing,
Diagnosing and its Treatment," Journal of the International Society for the Study of
Personal Relationships (forthcoming).
2 1 . Freud locates shame at the moment at which man stood upright and "made
his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection"
(Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey
[New York: Norton, 1 962], p. 46, n. 1 ), and psychologist Donald L. Nathanson has
connected adult shame to infantile genital shame (Donald L. Nathanson, "A
Timetable for Shame," in The Many Faces of Shame, ed. Donald Nathanson
[London: Guildford, 1 987] p. 2 7), cited in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer
Performativity: Henry James's The Art ofthe Novel," glq: A journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies 1 , no. 1 ( 1 993]: 1 2). For a thorough account of shame that bridges psy
choanalysis and biological theory, see Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride:
Affect, Sex, and the Birth ofthe Self(New York: Norton 1 992). Sedgwick's own work
has recently explored the productive possibilities of shame in theory. In addition to
Queer Performativity, see her essay on Silvan Tomkins (to whom most of this psy
chological work on shame-Kaufman's and Nathanson's included-is openly
indebted), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, "Shame in the Cybernetic
Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins," Critical Inquiry 2 1 , no. 2 ( 1 995): 496-522.
22. Feinberg similarly naturalizes hir own childhood gender difference through
the other's question: "My own gender expression felt quite natural. I liked my hair
short and I felt most relaxed in sneakers, jeans and a t-shirt. However, when I was
most at home with how I looked, adults did a double-take or stopped short when
they saw me. The question 'Is that a boy or a girl ? ' hounded me throughout my
childhood. The answer didn't matter much. The veryfact that the strangers had to ask
the question already marked me as a gender outlaw" (Feinberg, Transgender Warriors,
p. 4, my emphasis).
23. Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, p. 85.
24. From The Souls of Black Folks given Jess by her friend Edwin, an African
American butch who also takes hormones to pass. When Edwin kills herself she
leaves Jess this page marked in Du Bois to speak for her: "It is a peculiar sensation,
this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes
of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls,
two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" ( 1 78). Through
Edwin's parallel-and abbreviated-plot, Feinberg grapples with the complex
intersection of race and gender passing (Edwin can only pass along one axis). On
racial passsings and their intersection with those of gender and sexuality (but not
of transsexuality and with no mention of Stone Butch Blues), see Elaine K.
Ginsberg, ed., Passing and the Fictions ofIdentity (Durham: Duke University Press,
1 996). The essays in this volume suggest that that mirror scenes are also paradig
matic in narratives of racial passing. Compare, for instance, the remarkable coin
cidence of textual tropes and concerns (mirror scenes, the question of home, even
the undecidability of genre) between Sami ra Kawash's essay on James Weldon
Johnson ("The Autobiography ofan Ex-Colored Man: [Passing for] Black Passing for
White," pp. 59-74) with my reading of Feinberg here. Perhaps this striking cross-
over of critical concerns hints at a literary influence of narratives of racial passing

on Stone Butch Blues.
25. As in The Well ofLoneliness the dreams constitute the dis-placed body nar
rative of the text: the kernel that is the narrative's signifying "home."
26. Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Mo11ement Whose Time Has Come
(New York: World View, 1 992), p. 6. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty
suggest that home is a prominent trope particularly in lesbian autobiographies by
women of color because such writers "cannot easily assume 'home' within feminist
communities as they have been constituted" ("Feminist Politics: What's Home
Got to Do with I t ? " in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 1 92). The significance ofhome for
transgendered subjects who come from within the lesbian and gay community may
be powerfully parallel. For other discussions of home and departure in autobiogra
phies by lesbians and/or women of color, see Leigh Gilmore and Marcia Aldrich,
"Writing Home: 'Home' and Lesbian Representation in Minnie Bruce Pratt,"
Genre 25 ( 1 992): 25-46; Julia Watson, "The Politics of Gender in Lesbian and
Heterosexual Women's Autobiographies," in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics
of Gender in Womens Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minne
apolis: Minnesota University Press, 1 992), pp. 139-1 68; Caren Kaplan, "Resisting
Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects," in
De/Colonizing the Subject, ed. Smith and Watson, pp. 1 15-137.
27. Feinberg's life can be gleaned both from her nonfictional writings-the pam
phlet, journal ofa Transsexual (New York: World View, 1 980), the autobiographical
frame of Transgender Warriors-and from various reviews and interviews. See in
particular: Victoria A. Brownworth, "Stone Butch But Not Blue: Leslie Feinberg
and Transgender Liberation," Deneu11e (July/August 1 993): 24-26, and the excel
lent, revealing, three-part interview by Kevin Horwitz, "Politics & Gender: An
Interview with Leslie Feinberg," FTM Newsletter 23 (May 1 993): 1-3, FTM
Newsletter 24 (July 1 993): 1 0-1 1 , FTM Newsletter 26 (February 1 994): 1 3-14.
28. Leslie Feinberg, E-mail to the author, 15 September, 1 996. I am grateful to
Feinberg for hir generous engagement with my writings on hir work, for hir per
mission to reprint hir comments here, and above all for hir indulgence toward my
reading Stone Butch Blues on the subject of genre.
29. Horwitz, "Politics & Gender," FTM Newsletter 26, p. 13; my emphasis.
30. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self
Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 994), p. 96. For other work on
this generic border, see Janice Morgan and Colette T. Hall, eds., Redefining
Autobiography in Twentieth -Century Women's Fiction: An Essay Collection (New
York: Garland, 1 99 1 ).
3 1 . If early feminist autobiography criticism emphasized the differences between
women's and men's autobiographies (see, for instance, Estelle Jelinek, ed., Womens
Autobiography: Essays in Criticism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 980]),
and later work examined how these differences had constructed the very canon of
autobiography (Domna C. Stanton, "Autogynography: Is the Subject Different ? " in
Domna C. Stanton, ed., The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice ofAutobiography
from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1 987],
pp. 3-20), more recent work has questioned the costs of continuing to polarize genre
according to gender. In this last category Nancy K. Miller's call for the development
of "a way of thinking flexible enough to accommodate styles of self-production that
cross the lines of the models we have established" resonates in the context of the dou
ble-leveled crossings of Stone Butch Blues (Nancy K. Miller, "Representing Others:
Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography," differences 6, no. 1 [ 1 994]: 1 7).
32. Horwitz, "Politics &; Gender," FTM Newsletter 26, p. 13. In the preface to her
Trash (London: Penguin, 1 990), Dorothy Allison describes how she came to pro
duce about her comparably painful life a kind of writing that is "not biography and
yet not lies" (6).
33. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, pp. xxx, xxxii, xxx.
34. Leslie Feinberg, E-mail to the author, 24 September, 1 996.
35. Philippe Lejeune, "The Autobiographical Pact," in On Autobiography, ed.
Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis University Press, 1 989), p. 13.
36. Lejeune, "The Autobiographical Pact (bis)," in On Autobiography, p. 125.
37. In a wonderful illustration of the alternative autobiographic fictional pact
Feinberg draws up with hir readers, undergraduate students at Hunter College,
CUNY, found in this front-cover photograph justification for reading Stone Butch
Blues as autobiographical even while acknowledging its fictional surround. They
discovered a scar above Feinberg's eyebrow, correlating this with a scar in the same
place that the fictional Jess acquires (see Stone Butch Blues, p. 57). In the absence of
identity between authorial and protagonist's names, the apparent identity of the
scar (the photograph as mug shot) functioned as their "proof' that the text must
have been (in spite of its fictionality) the "true story" of Feinberg's life. Thanks to
Lorna Smedman for inviting me to visit her dazzling class.
38. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric ofRomanticism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1 984), p. 70.
39. Ibid., p. 76.
40. See Jacques Derrida's "The Law of Genre," Critical Inquiry 7 ( 1 980): 55-8 1 :
" 'Genres are not to be mixed' . . . 'Do,' 'Do not' says 'genre,' the word 'genre,' the
figure, the voice, or the law of genre" (56). Turning the law in on itself, Derrida's
essay isolates a moment of mixing in Maurice Blanchot's La Fo/ie du four in which
the masculine "I" apparently shifts into or passes for a feminine subject: a display
of grammatical, genderic, and generic translation to which Derrida refers signifi
cantly as "transsexuality" (76). Derrida's critique of the interdiction on mixture will
become key to Stone's vision of posttranssexuality.
4 1 . Leslie Feinberg, E-mail to the author, 24 September, 1 996.
42. Ibid.
43. Feinberg, Journal ofa Transsexual, p. 6.
44. Rita Fclski, "Fin de Siecle, Fin de Sexe: Transsexuality, Postmodernism, and
the Death of History," New Literary History 27 (1996): 34 1-342 .
45. Ibid., p. 347
46. On this subject see Rosi Braidotti's conception of sexual difference feminism
versus the recent "turn to gender" symptomized by Judith Butler's work (Rosi
Braidotti with Judith Butler [interview], "Feminism by any Other Name," differences
6, nos. 213 [1994): 27-61 ). On what would seem to be the most obvious split between
these two projects, Braidotti remarks: "The starting point for the project of sexual
difference is the political will to assert the specificity of the lived, female experience.
This involves the refusal to disembody sexual difference through the valorization of
a new allegedly 'postmodern' and 'antiessentialist' subject; in other words, the pro
ject of sexual difference engages a will to reconnect the whole debate on difference to
the bodily existence and experience of women" (40). Braidotti's denotation "female
feminist" appearing throughout her Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 994)
(not therefore a tautology in the current theoretical figuration of gender-crossing)
should be understood as an example of the "political will" of the sexual difference
project to reembody the feminist subject.
47. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, p. xxix.
48. Ann Bolin, "Transcending and Transgendering: Male-to-Female Transsex
uals, Dichotomy, and Diversity," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorph
ism in Culture and History ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone, 1 994), pp. 482, 485.
49. Stone, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back," p. 295.
Epilogue: Transsexuallty in Photography-Fielding the Referent

1 . Mario Martino with harriet, Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography (New
York: Crown, 1 977), p. xii.
2. Timothy Dow Adams, "Introduction: Life Writing and Light Writing;
Autobiography and Photography," Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 3 (Fall 1 994):
459-492.
3. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes ( 1 975), trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Farrar, 1 977).
4. Ibid., p. 56.
5. Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1 985), pp. 3-23.
6. Eakin, Touching the World, pp. 1 8-19; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida ( 1980),
trans. Richard Howard, (London: Vintage, 1 993), p. 87. Page numbers of further
citations to Camera Lucida will appear directly in the text after CL.
7. Eakin, Touching the World, p. 4.
8. Katherine Cummings, Katherine's Diary: The Story of a Transsexual (Port
Melbourne, Victoria: Heinemann, 1 992), pp. 13, 14.
9. Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea
of Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1 995), p. 1 54.
l 0. Leslie Feinberg, journal of a Transsexual (New York: World View, 1 980),
p. 1 0.
1 1 . Mario Costa, "Coccinelle": Reverse Sex, trans. Jules J. Block (London,
Challenge, n. d.), pp. 47-48.
12. Ibid., p. 38.

13. Teresa de Lauretis, "Film and the Visible," in How Do I Look? Queer Film
and Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1 99 1 ), pp. 223-263.
14. Renee Richards with John Ames, Second Serve: The Renee Richards Story
(New York: Stein and Day, 1 983), pp. 1 89, 228.
15. Kim Harlow/Bettina Rheims, Kim, trans. Paul Gould (Munich: Kehayoff
Verlag, 1 994). Page numbers of citations will appear directly in the text.
1 6. Clare Hemmings, E-mail "to the author, 20 March, 1 996.
1 7. Loren Cameron, Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (Pittsburgh, Cleis,
1 996), p. 12.
1 8. I a m indebted t o LaGrace and Nataf fo r sharing and discussing their work
with me.
1 9. If Robert Mapplethorpe's investment in the black penis is the obvious artis
tic intertext for this genital focus of LaGrace and Nataf, Kobena Mercer's layered
reading of Mapplethorpe's photographs-his complication of the antitheses
between subject and object, black body and white auteur in his brilliant revision of
his critique of fetishism-is the critical precedent for my reading here. Kobena
Mercer, "Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe," in
Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1 99 1 ), pp. 307-330.
20. Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Auto
biographical Acts, (New York: Routledge, 1 99 1 ), p. xiii; Adrienne Rich, " Notes
Toward a Politics of Location," Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1 979-1 985
(New York: Norton, 1 986), pp. 2 1 0-23 1 .
i n d ex
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, Barthes, Roland, 209-1 1 , 222

36-38 Beauvoir, Simone de, 29-30, 32-33
Adams, Parveen, 64 Benjamin, Harry, 9; in Nancy Hunt's
Adams, Timothy Dow, 208 Mirror Image , 1 24; preface to
Allen, Robert, 130 Christine Jorgensen's A Personal
Allison, Dorothy, 1 92, 257n32 Autobiography, 126-27; in Renee
Anzaldua, Gloria, 23 Richards's Second Serve, 1 07-8
Anzieu, Didier: The Skin Ego, 6 l , Bergman, David, 25
65-67, 72-74, 76, 79-80, 243n30; Billings, Dwight, and Thomas Urban,
A Skin for Thought, 242n l 2 7-8
Ashley, April, 2 1 6-19; cited, 83 Body: agnosia, 78, 84-85, 88, 1 09, 1 46;
(244n38), 1 1 6 (247n22) as constructed, 7, 62; ego/image,
Autobiography: conversion and 4 1 -44, 65, 78-80, 83-84, 94-96;
identity in, 1 1 9; feminist criticism materiality of 6-7, 62, 66, 86, 89;
of, 256n 3 1 ; and fiction, 1 9 1 -92, phantom limb, 84-85, 88; in post
1 96-98; by lesbians of color, 256n26; structuralist theory, 7, 1 2-13, 66,
narrative coherence of, 1 1 5- 1 7, 1 2 1 ; 92-93, 96; and proprioception, 78,
parallels with photography, 208- 1 0; 245n55; see also Fetishism; Sex;
retrospectiveness of, 1 03, 1 1 7; in Transsexuality
sexual inversion, 1 42, 144; split Body narrative: hysteria as, 1 52; and
subject in, 1 00-2, 1 2 5-26; as trans photography, 234; sexual inversion
sexual symptom, 9, 1 0 1 , 1 03-7; see as, 1 42; and Stone Butch Blues, 1 94,
also Transsexual autobiographies 256n25; transsexual autobiography
as, 120; transsexuality as, 12, 1 6,
Barney, Natalie, in The Well of 1 03-5; in The Well ofLoneliness,
Loneliness, 1 56 1 65, 256n25
262 Index
Bogdan, Robert, 1 1 2-13 Davis, Kathy, 8 1-82

Bolin, Ann, 88-89, 202 De Lauretis, Teresa, 23, 223; on The
Bornstein, Kate, 1 74-75, 253n8 Well ofLoneliness, 1 36, 1 60-6 1 , 1 66,
Braidotti, Rosi, 92, 258n46 249n 1 0, 252n40
Brodribb, Somer, l 3 De Man, Paul, 197-98
Bullough, Vern, 142 Derrida, Jacques, 13 , 28, 257n40
Bullough, Vern, and Bonnie, 250n l4 Dillon, Michael, 1 0, 1 65, 1 67; Self: A
Burkholder, Nancy, 171 Study in Endocrinology and Ethics,
Butler, Judith: on feminism and 1 52-55
lesbian and gay studies, 55-60; Dollimore, Jonathan, 23
on sex, 28-29, 33-45, 67, 258n46; Drag, 24, 26, 28, 30, 34; and trans
theory of gender performativity, sexuality, 48, 57-58, 1 76; see also
27-33, 1 53; and transgender, 5-6, Butler, Judith; Camp
24-27, 43, 56-57; and trans Du Bois, W. E. B., in Stone Butch
sexuality, 6, 27, 33, 43, 45-57, Blues, 1 86, 255n24
24ln35, 24 ln41
-- Works: "Against Proper Objects," Eakin, Paul John, 2 1 0
55-60, 238n5; Bodies That Matter, Eighner, Lars, quoted, 1 71
27-29, 32, 41-42, 44-55, 67; Ekins, Richard, and Dave King, 26-27
"Contingent Foundations," quoted, (239n 1 3)
34; "Critically Queer," 24, 26, 30-32, Elbe, Lili, 1 24
34; Excitable Speech, 239n 1 7; Gender Elliot, Beth, quoted, 1 73 (253n7)
Trouble, 24-36, 38-45, 59, 65, 66, Ellis, Havelock: "Commentary" in The
1 73, 240n l 8; Gender Trouble, quoted, Well ofLoneliness, 1 57, 249n I O;
64 (242n5); "Melancholy Gender/ Sexual Inversion, 1 4 1 , 147-5 1 , 1 55
Refused Identification," 34 (240n24); Epstein, Julia, 6 1 , 144
Subjects ofDesire, quoted, 2 1 Epstein, Julia, and Kristina Straub, 14
Cameron, Loren, 230-3 1 Faderman, Lillian, 1 36, 249n l 0

Camp, 25-26, 32, 44 Fallowell, Duncan, and April Ashley,
Camp Trans, 1 71-73, 1 75-77 see Ashley, April
Case, Sue-Ellen, 23 Fanon, Frantz , 245n55
Castle, Stephanie, 1 1 7, 247n30 Fausto-Sterling, Ann, 63
Castle, Terry, 1 67 Feinberg, Leslie; 1 77, 1 90, 202-3;
Cauldwell, David, 9 journal ofa Transsexual, 68, 200,
Cavafy, C. P., quoted, 1 7 1 2 1 7-1 8; Transgender Liberation,
Chauncey, George, 1 38 quoted, 1 89-90 (256n26); Trans
Coccinelle, 220-22 gender Warriors, 1 99, 253n8, 255n22;
Conn, Canary, 1 26-27; quoted, 1 2 1 Transgender Warriors, quoted, 1 77
(247n29) (254n 1 5), 1 83 (255n23)
Cossey, Caroline, 77, 89, 222-24 --Stone Butch Blues: genre of,
Cowell, Roberta, 1 3 1 1 90-99; transgender in, I I , 1 7 1 ,
Cummings, Katherine, 86-88, 99, 1 77-90; and The Well ofLoneliness,
2 1 1-1 5 1 69
Index 263
Felski, Rita, 200-2 Hamburger, Christian, Georg K

Ferenczi, Sandor, in The Well of Stiirup, and E. Dahl-Iversen,
Loneliness, 1 56 quoted, 69 (243n22)
Fetishism: and medicine, 92-93; and Harlow, Kim, 83, 226-30
poststructuralist theory, 13; and Hausman, Bernice L.: constructionist
race, 23, 232-33, 259n20; and trans theory of transsexuality, 7-8; rela
sexuality, 90, 232-34 tion to transsexuality, 1 1 2, 1 32-33;
Foucault, Michel, 13, 35, 1 38, 145 on transsexual autobiographies,
Franks, Claudia Stillman, 248n5 1 1 4-15, 1 1 8-19, 130-3 l ; on trans
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 35; Civilization sexual diagnosis, 1 04-5; on trans
and Its Discontents, 255n 2 1 ; The Ego sexual photographs, 2 1 5- 1 6, 220-22
and the Id, 36-37, 40-43, 65, 79, Heath, Stephen, 35
240n3 1 , 24 ln32; "Mourning and Hekma, Gert, 249n8
Melancholia,'' 36; "On Narcissism,'' Heterosexuality, 30-3 1 , 39-40, 44,
240n3 1 ; "Psychoanalytic Notes 24 ln36; and transsexuality, 48
Upon an Autobiographical Hewitt, Paul, 1 1 8, 2 1 5-16
Account of a Case of Paranoia," Hirschfeld, Magnus, 141, 1 52 (25 ln29)
1 5 1 ; "Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality: medicalization of, 1 0,
Homosexuality in a Woman,'' 1 50, 137-38; and transgender, 1 1 , 22, 24,
252n42; "A Special Type of Object 3 1 , 1 37-38; and transsexuality, 9,
Choice Made by Men," 252n42 1 06, 1 46-47, 1 53-54
Fry, Jane, 1 1 2-1 3 hooks, bell, 50-5 1 , 54, 55
Hunt, Nancy, Mirror Image: and Jan
Garber, Marjorie, 1 4 , 2 3 , 90, 92 Morris, 1 24, 245n2; mirror images
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, 137 in, 101-2 ; as an odyssey, 1 1 6
Gilmore, Leigh, 191 (247n22); opening of, 1 2 7
Grant, Julia, 89
Grealy, Lucy, 83-84, 88 Ian, Marcia, 1 3
Green, Richard, 2 5 l n 2 1 lrigaray, Luce, 79
Griggs, Claudine, 1 1 6
Grosz, Elizabeth, 1 2 , 64-66, 84 Jacobus, Mary, 1 52
Gusdorf, Georges, 99, 1 1 6-1 7, 1 2 1 , Jelinek, Estelle, 256n3 1
125 Jorgensen, Christine: diagnosed as
transvestite, 69, 1 52; introduction
Halberstam, Judith, 14, 243n l 8, and preface in A Personal Auto
254nn l 7, 1 8 biography, 126-27; narrative model
Hall, Radclyffe, The Well ofLoneliness, for transsexuals, 124, 247n30
1 0; lesbian criticism on, 135-37,
249n l 0; and Orlando, 1 68-69, Kaufman, Gershen, 1 79
253n52; role in emergence of trans Kawash, Samira, 255n24
sexuality of, 1 40, 1 55 ; sexology in, Kennedy, Hubert, 250n l 9
1 5 5-58; and Stone Butch Blues, 1 69; Krafft-Ebing, Richard von,
as a transsexual narrative, 1 5 5-68; Psychopathia Sexualis, 1 4 1 , 142, 1 44-
trial of, 135-36, 1 68 47, 1 50; in Renee Richards's Second
264 Index
Serve, 125, 25 ln36; in The Well of activity in, 1 1 7-18; transition as a

Loneliness, 157 journey in, 1 1 6; and transsexual
Kristeva, Julia, 39 history, 1 30-3 1
Kroker, Arthur, and Marilouise, 14,
90-9 1 Namaste, Ki, 24 ln4 l
Narrative: and diagnosis of trans
Lacan, Jacques, 13, 35, 42, 79, 80, 1 00, sexuality, 9, 1 13; role in emergence
1 05, 240n 3 1 , 242n l3; and Didier of transsexuality of, 1 0, 1 58; and
Anzieu, 66, 242n 1 2 transition, 5, 1 02, 1 1 6-1 7; see also
LaGrace, Del, 230-35 Autobiography; Body Narrative
Lejeune, Philippe, 1 96; quoted, 4 Nataf, Zachary I., 230-34, 253n8
(237n2) Nathanson, Donald, 255n2 1
Lindsay, Cecile, 12 Newton, Esther, on The Well of
Livingston, Jennie, 50-55, 24 ln40; see Loneliness: and history, 1 36, 249n 1 O;
also Paris is Burning and lesbian butch in, 1 37; and
Long, Scott, 25 mirror scene in, 252n40; and
Lorde, Audre, 93-95 Orlando, 253n52; as not transsexual,
Lothstein, Leslie, 1 1 1 , 246n 1 7, 247n37, 1 58, 1 66
25 1n24
Olds, Sharon, 80-8 1
McClain, Jerry/Jerri, 1 1 8 Orlan, 61-64, 242n l 3
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 23, 259n20 Orlando (Virginia Woolf and Sally
Martin, Biddy, 3 1 , 42, 239n 1 7 Potter), 1 68-69
Martin, Biddy, and Chandra Talpade O'Rourke, Rebecca, citation from, 135
Mohanty, 256n26 Oudshoorn, Nelly, 250n 13
Martino, Mario, Emergence: clinical
narrative in, 128-29, 247n37; mirror Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston),
images in, 1 00, 1 02; photographs in, 44-55
207-8, 2 1 5-17; sex reassignment in, Parkes, Adam, 252n4 1 ; quoted, 1 68
82, 89 (253n 5 1 )
Merce� Kobena, 23, 259n20 Passing: and coming out, 1 1 ; and the
Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, see loss of the past, 130-3 1 , 1 87-88; pre
Camp Trans operative, 75; reconstructive surgery
Miller, Nancy K., 234, 257n3 1 ; quoted, as the ultimate, 89, 92; reevaluation
1 5 (238n 2 1 ) of, in transgender, 1 72-74, 1 84-87,
Millot, Catherine, 1 3-14, 64; quoted, 253n8; and Venus Xtravaganza, 46,
63 (242n3) 49; see also Reading
Minkowitz, Donna, 1 75, 1 76 Pauly, Ira, 1 05-6, 1 09, 146-47
Mishima, Yukio, quoted, 6 1 Photography: and the body, 2 1 0-1 1 ; as
Moraga, Cherrie, 2 3 evidence, 220, 222; as referential,
Morris, Jan, Conundrum: body image 12, 209-1 0, 2 13, 2 1 8, 220; see also
in, 68, 83 (244n38); cited in other Transsexual autobiographies
transsexual texts, 1 24, 245n 1 2 ; Poststructuralist theory:
mirror image i n , 99-1 00; retro- antiessentialism in, 1 6; the body in,
Index 265
12-13, 66; and referentiality, 1 5, Schafer, Roy, 36, 42, 24 ln32

209-1 1 ; transsexuality in, 1 3-14 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 3 1 , 57;
Pratt, Minnie Bruce, 1 77; quoted, 171 Between Men, 22, 25; Epistemology
Prince, Virginia, 254n 1 4 ofthe Closet, 22; Judith Butler on,
238n5; "Queer Performativity," 24,
Queer theory: and camp, 2 5; and 27, 255n2 1 ; Tendencies, 2 1 , 23, 27-
transgender, 5-6, 2 1 -24, 26, 29, 57, 28, 96
24 ln4 l; and transsexuality, 6, 56-57; Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam
see also Butler, Judith; Sedgwick, Frank, 1 5- 1 7, 255n 2 1
Eve Kosofsky Segal, Lynne, 7 , 2 4 ln36
Sex: deliteralization of, 38-40, 43, 63-
Radford, Jean, 1 36, 1 66, 249n 1 0 65; materiality of, 43-44
Raymond, Janice: on Stone Butch Blues, Sex reassignment surgery, 63-64,
1 94-95; on transgender, 202; on 66-67, 80-92; earliest forms of, 1 0,
transsexuality, 7-9, 90, 92, 1 7 1 -72 1 4 1 ; male-to-female, 80-8 1 , 86;
Reading: photography's resistance to, mastectomy, 82, 89; phalloplasty, 1 0,
222-23, 226; Sandy Stone on, 1 72- 74-75, 86-89, 92, 1 02, 1 2 8-29, 1 65
74; and transgender, 1 87; during Sexology, see Ellis, Havelock;
transition, 2; and transsexual auto Hirschfeld, Magnus; Krafft-Ebing,
biographies, 129-3 1 ; and trans Richard von; Sexual inversion;
sexual diagnosis, 1 08, 1 52 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich
Rees, Mark, 120 Sexual inversion: in Freud, 1 50-5 1 ;
Reich, June L., 14 i n lesbian and gay history, 1 0, 137-
Rheims, Bettina, 226-29 38; transgendercd paradigms of,
Rich, Adrienne, 92-93, 234 1 3 8-50; in transsexual history, 1 0,
Richards, Renee, Second Serve: body 140-4 1
image in, 77; clinical narrative in, Silence ofthe Lambs (Jonathan
1 2 5, 127-28, 247n37; diagnosis in, Demme), 67-68
1 07-8; mirror images in, 99, 1 02-3; Silko, Leslie Marmon, 2-3; quoted, 1
photographs in, 223, 225-27; Silverman, Kaja, 245n55
surgery in, 89; transition in, 1 2 1-24 Simmons, Dawn Langley, 89
Riddell, Carroll, 9 Skin; as interface, 65, 7 1 -73, 75,
Riviere, Joan, 35 243n24; and race, 95-96, 245n 55;
Rubin, Gayle, 57, 58, 1 66-67, 1 7 1 , 1 79 second, 75, 1 1 2; and v ision, 78-79;
Ruehl, Sonja, 1 36, 1 56, 1 66, 249n 1 0 see also Anzieu, Didier; Sex re
Rule, Jane, 1 36 assignment surgery; Surgery
Rutherford, Erica, 1 08-9, 2 1 1-12 Smith-Rosenberg, 136, 253n52
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White,
Sacks, Oliver, 78-80, 84-85 252n43
St. Laurent, Octavia, 5 1 -54 "Standards of Care," 1 06
Sander, August, quoted, 207 Stanton, Domna C., 256n 3 1
Schaefer, Leah Cahan, and Connie Stimpson, Catharine, 1 36, 1 56, 1 66,
Christine Wheeler, 1 1 1 , 17 4 249n l 0
(254n l l ), 254n20 Stoller, Robert, 247n37
266 Index
Stone, Sandy, 1 07, 1 25, 1 72-73, 203, tionism, 7-9, 1 33, 145, 1 49, 1 67; and
245n2 cross-dressing, 1 02-3, 2 1 1 ; in
Surgery: cosmetic, 8 1 -82; mastectomy, cultural theory, 7-8, 1 3-14, 63-64,
93-95; plastic, 81-82; reconstruc 90-92; in Diagnostic and Statistical
tive, 83-84; and tissue engineering, Manual ofMental Disorders, 8 1
91-92; see also Sex reassignment (244n35), 1 04-7, 1 34, 1 74, 203,
surgery 246n 1 0; distinct from queer, 59;
emergence of, 9-1 0, 1 33-34, 139-
Teena, Brandon, 1 75 52, 1 67; and feminism, 2 0 1 ; and
Thompson, Raymond, What Took You homosexuality, 9, 1 53-54, 1 66, 1 67;
So Long? body image in, 6 1 , 69-77; and hormones, 66, 75, 1 4 1 ; impor
diagnosis in, 1 09-1 0; photographs tance of autobiography for, 9, 1 0 1 -
in, 222, 225-26; sex reassignment 14, 1 20-2 1 , 1 24-25, 1 4 2 , 1 44; mate
in, 82, 83 (244n38), 85-90; and riality of, 6, 1 2 , 1 7, 66-67, 79, 89;
therapy, 1 2 1 and narrative, 5, 9-1 1 , 46, 1 20, 1 24-
Transexual Menace, 1 74, 1 75 25, 1 74; nonperformativity of, 27,
Transgender: etymology of, 1 76; as 32-33, 1 53-54, 1 6 1 -62, 252n4 1 ;
figure, 2 1 -24, 26, 32, 44, 137-38, popular conceptions of, 62-63, 67-
1 50-5 1 , 1 52, 200-2; and homo 68, 8 1 ; and race, 3, 46, 47, 50-54,
sexuality, l l , 1 46-48; medicaliza 232-33; and realness, 1 1-12, 47-49,
tion of, 1 0, 1 39-40; movement, 1 1 , 1 62, 227; and transgender, l l-12,
1 7 1 -76; and race, 23, 255n24; I 73-77, 202-4; and transition, 1 -5,
relation to queer, 3 1-32, 56, 1 73-77, 75, 99-9 1 ; transubstantiation of,
1 79, 1 89-90, 201; and shame of 49-50, 52, 54-55, 62-63, 227-30,
gender dysphoria, 1 79-8 1 ; studies, 234; and transvestism, 9, 69, 1 52
26-27, 56, 60, 201-2, 205; see also (25 ln29); see also Passing; Reading;
Feinberg, Leslie; Queer theory; Sex reassignment surgery; Sexual
Transsexuality inversion; Transsexual auto
Transphobia, 8, 47, 67 biographies
Transsexual autobiographies Transvestism, see under Transsexuality
(published), 8, 9; body in, 67-77, Tully, Bryan, l l l , 1 77; citation from,
82-83, 85-90, 92-93; and clinical 68 (243n 2 l )
narrative, 1 14-1 5, 125-29; con Tyler, Carole-Anne, 1 3
formity of, 1 0 1 -3, 1 1 5- 1 7, 1 20-2 1 ;
i n journal form, 1 1 8; mirror scenes Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 1 43; i n The
in, 99- 1 03; photographs in, 1 2 , Well ofLoneliness, 1 57
207-9, 2 1 1-29; readership, 1 29, 1 94;
and retroaction, 1 1 7-20; transition Vicinus, Martha, 1 56
in, 1 2 1-24
Transsexuality: and body image, 7, Warren, Barbara, quoted, 1 74 (253n8)
43-44, 67-79, 82-83, 1 00, 1 42-43, Wegener, Einar, see Elbe, Lili
1 46, 1 63, 243n30; and case history, Westphal, Carl, 1 40, 1 42
1 1 3, 127-29, 139-52; and construe- Whitlock, Gillian, 1 36, 1 66, 249n l 0
Index 267
Wiesen-Cook, Blanche, 1 36, 249n I O 53-55, 56, 57, 58, 24 ln4 l ; see also
Wittig, Monique, 3 0 Paris is Burning
Woolf, Virginia, 1 68-69; quoted, 1 3 5
Zhou, Jiang-Ning, Michael A.
Xtravaganza, Angie, 46, 5 5 Hofman, Louis J. G. Gooren, and
Xtravaganza, Venus, 32, 33, 45-50, Dick F. Swaab, 243n30

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the body narratives

Gender and Culture Series

Columbia University Press

Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are

Introduction: On Transitions-Changing Bodies,

This book took shape as a dissertation under the direction of Nancy K.

Although the minutiae of these somatic changes might have bypassed

material. Her autobiographical voicing was patently prompted and sup­

sition first in a conceptual sense, I contend that we must make changes

evident or more intricate. Butler's interest in transgender undergoes its

body image that it can motivate somatic transition ? Transsexuality

Hausman argues that the transsexual is an historically engineered sub­

Frankensteins of modern technology's experiments with sexual differ­

rather a response to preexistent transsexual identity patterns and indeed

In the new discourse of transgender in our own fin de siecle, homo­

Is this paradox about the body-the body's materiality slips our

their requirement of truth . . . transsexuals are the victims of error.

becomes clear that neatly superimposed on the literalizing/deliteralizing

tivity that characterizes their reading of the affect narratives of psychol­

ence of being transgendered, reading them necessitates our taking at

Judith Butler: Queer Feminism,

Transgender and the Queer Moment

In its earliest formulations, in what are now considered its foundational

Most recently in her autobiographical narratives and performance

proliferation as the effective means for denaturalizing copies that pretend

It is certainly this camp inversion of the expected order of terms to

binaries that found identity-threads prominently through the self­

Queer Gender and Performativity

To realize the difference of the sexes is to put an end to play

important book" (Gender Trouble) a representative function, "stand[ing]

the equation of transgender with gender performativity, by examining

process: repetitious, recursive, disordered, incessant, above all, unpre­

tion of heterosexuality as primary and foundational. Female, femininity,

to this first distinction, in the context of a discussion of how gender and

transsexual's struggle toward sexed embodiment. One is not born a

formativity queer subversive, it stabilizes this syllogism through

suggesting as constant its antithesis: nontransgender gender consta­

tivity straight naturalizing. The binary opposition between these

syllogisms proliferates a number of mutually sustaining binary opposi­

Heterosexual Melancholia and the Encrypting of Sex

To recast the referent as the signified . . . -Judith Butler,"Contingent Foundations"

of culture, the psyche, and body, setting up a complex and brilliant

Butler to consider the mask not as concealing an interior authentic gen­

solidate gender positioning. Surely significantly for Butler, although

The denied homosexual love is thus incorporated as the "surface" of the

In the apparent periphery of a footnote, Gender Trouble cites from the

jection o f a surface, Butler replaces the referent "it" in the subsequent

note to articulate is not deliberate but "inadvertent." Yet in spite of this

impl icitly designates corporeal interiority as "disciplinary and con­

transgendered subject, in Bodies That Matter the transsexual is specifi­

Venus is Burning: The Transubstantiation of the Transsexual

Because it was released in 1 990, hot on the heels of the publication of

about ambivalence pivots on the specific material ambivalence of the

Venus's fantasy as a Latina transsexual of becoming "real" (both achiev­

literalizing/queer performative is still in operation in Bodies That

to demonstrate the ambivalence of this binary, to delimit (not negate)

promises a permanent shelter from racism, homophobia, and poverty"

Jennie Livingston approaches her subject matter as an outsider looking

from Paris is Burning i t i s easy fo r v iewers to imagine that they are

material. Her autobiographical voicing was patently prompted and sup

Hausman argues that the transsexual is an historically engineered sub

Frankensteins of modern technology's experiments with sexual differ

In the new discourse of transgender in our own fin de siecle, homo

tivity that characterizes their reading of the affect narratives of psychol

binaries that found identity-threads prominently through the self

process: repetitious, recursive, disordered, incessant, above all, unpre

suggesting as constant its antithesis: nontransgender gender consta

syllogisms proliferates a number of mutually sustaining binary opposi

Butler to consider the mask not as concealing an interior authentic gen

impl icitly designates corporeal interiority as "disciplinary and con

transgendered subject, in Bodies That Matter the transsexual is specifi

Venus's fantasy as a Latina transsexual of becoming "real" (both achiev

translation to Lacanian sublimation itself. Butler's metaphor of trans

to be deployed to signal the unqueer possibilities of cross-gender identi

there? Finally-and most important since this constitutes the theoreti

should acknowledge at the outset its status as powerful medicodiscur

often indicated as a treatment to alleviate if not the skin disorders them

transsexual with the corporeal referents for these imaginary or phan

naming of the penis is in stark contrast to the unnamability and incon

undergo it were the symbolic vehicle for transsexual transformation

subject through transsexual transition and looks back to an already fem

But it is not merely the vicissitudes of memory, the recursive, asso

Psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Leslie Lothstein suggests corrobo

become schematized as part of a transsexual narrative until that narra

sexual woman can no longer keep up in the description the autobio

a central place in what Stone terms the "Obligatory Transsexual File"

specified, Gusdorf s formulation explains how transsexual autobiogra

without a narrative ?-she must write, therefore as a transsexual. In auto

transgender that led to the writing of a transsexual diagnosis in DSM

Nevertheless, same-sex desire has continued to dominate "deviant gen

Written historically and formally after the case histories of inver

body. In this configuration of the material body as a mistake, the defini