Stryker Susan - The Transgender Studies Reader

The Transgender Studies Reader

Published in 2006 by

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

711 Third Avenue, 8th Floor

New York, NY 10017

2006 Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle

Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group

International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-94708-1 (Hardcover) 0-415-94709-X (Softcover)

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-94708-4 (Hardcover) 978-0-415-94709-1 (Softcover)

No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The transgender studies reader / edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Transsexualism. 2. Transvestism. 3. Transsexuals. 4.

Transvestites. I. Stryker, Susan. II. Whittle, Stephen, 1955

HQ77.9.T73 2006

306.768--dc22 2005037854

Stephen Whittle

Susan Stryker

Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Magnus Hirschfeld

David O. Cauldwell

Harry Benjamin

Robert Stoller

Harold Garinkel

Charles Shepherdson

Donna Haraway

Esther Newton

Janice G. Raymond

Carol Riddell

Lou Sullivan

Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna

Judith Butler

Stephen Whittle

Leslie Feinberg

Sandy Stone

Kate Bornstein

Susan Stryker

Jay Prosser

Jacob Hale

Cheryl Chase

Dean Spade

Bernice L. Hausman

Joanne Meyerowitz

Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte

David Valentine

Nan Alamilla Boyd

Patrick Caliia

Zachary I. Nataf

Jordy Jones

Gayle Rubin

Henry Rubin

Jamison Green

Jason Cromwell

Heather K. Love

George R. Brown

Riki Anne Wilchins

Nikki Sullivan

Rita Felski

Judith Halberstam

Viviane K. Namaste

T. Benjamin Singer

Andrew Sharpe

Marjorie Garber

Katrina Roen

Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan

Helen Hok-Sze Leung

Emi Koyama

Richard Juang

The authors were blessed with an enthusiastic editor at the outset of this project, Karen Wolny, who was unfortunately unable to bring this project to fruition with us at Routledge. We thank Kimberly Guinta for finally bringing this book to press after seemingly endless delays, and Daniel Webb for as-sembling the manuscript and securing permissions for work republished in The Transgender Studies Reader. We also thank Don Romesburg for his intrepid bibliographical assistance, and Texas Starr for administrative support in the preparation of this manuscript. We are indebted to our families for indulging the absences and interruptions occasioned by our work on this project. Most importantly, we would like to thank our friends, colleagues, and other transgender studies scholars for producing the work collected between these pages.

Trans identities were one of the most written about subjects of the late twentieth century. New communities of transgender and transsexual people have created new industries, a new academic discipline, new forms of entertainment; they offer new challenges to politics, government, and law, and new opportunities to broaden the horizons of everyone who has a trans person as their neighbor, coworker, friend, partner, parent, or child. Any Internet search, whether of Web sites, news articles, or academic papers, will produce thousands of results. A recent Google search for transsexual gave 3 million hits. Using the term transgender in an attempt to reduce the number porn sites actually retrieved far more: 7.5 million hits. The sites range from small personal projects to very large ones, such as the U.S. social organization Transgender Forum;

A trans identity is now accessible almost anywhere, to anyone who does not feel comfortable in the gender role they were attributed with at birth, or who has a gender identity at odds with the labels man or woman credited to them by formal authorities. The identity can cover a variety of experiences. It can encompass discomfort with role expectations, being queer, occasional or more frequent cross-dressing, permanent cross-dressing and cross-gender living, through to accessing major health interventions such as hormonal therapy and surgical reassignment procedures. It can take up as little of your life as five minutes a week or as much as a life-long commitment to reconfiguring the body to match the inner self. Regardless of the fact that trans identities are now more available, the problems of being trans have by no means been resolved. In many parts of the world, having a trans identity still puts a person at risk of discrimination, violence, and even death.

A trans person might be a butch or a camp, a transgender or a transsexual, an MTF or FTM or a cross-dresser; they might, in some parts of the world, consider themselves a lady boy, katoey, or even the reclaimed Maori identities whakawahine or whakatane. Some communities and their terms are ancient, such as the Hijra from Northern India, but many are more modern. the word trans, referring to a trans woman or trans man (of whatever subtype of trans identity) is a very recent take on the umbrella term transgender. Although there had been some previous usage in the 1990s (e.g., in the creation of the online group Trans-Academics), trans as a stand-alone term did not come into formal usage until it was coined by a parliamentary discussion group in London in 1998, with the deliberate intention of being as inclusive as possible when negotiating equality legislation. Cultural spaces and historiographies are constantly reframing the community, the identities, the cultures, and the language. We see new language being developed constantly; for example per as a pronoun was developed by UK community members with nonexistent gender identities, and similarly the U.S. term hir for those who have both.

The growth of home computer use in the 1990s, and the encouragement of many trans women at the forefront of information technology and Internet development, was crucial to the development of a new, geographically dispersed, diverse trans community in the 1990s (Whittle, 1998). Online, this newly formed community was able to discuss its experiences of fear, shame, and discrimination, and, as a result, many community members developed newly politicized personal identities. This new politicization forged a determination to change the world, by every means possible, for the next generation of trans youth. Significant changes have indeed taken place. At the very least, where once there was