Support Groups/minor

I am still surprised at how often people tell me that they feel they don’t fit the gender designation of their own bodies, or that the little ‘F’ or ‘M’ which appears on their driver’s license doesn’t seem to be entirely accurate. Perhaps people feel safer bringing up this delicate subject with me than they might with other people. I am, after all, a transsexual woman—someone who has crossed the forbidden line.

As a person who spent much of my life as a “full-time male-impersonator,” hiding the reality of my own inner identity, I used to wonder that more people did not question the monolithic, impregnable, apparently never-to-be-questioned specter, of a binary gender system, that has maintained that you must be either a masculine/male/man or a feminine/female/woman. I now realize that it is not so much whether people had questions, but whether they felt safe voicing them.

Outside of feminist and queer communities, and apart from the occasional gender-bending icons of the past few decades—David Bowie, Michael Jackson—there is remarkably little public discussion of this binary system. “Is it a boy or a girl?” is the first question asked when someone is born. When we meet someone for the first time we automatically look for the clues that will determine their gender. If there is any uncertainty, most of us become extremely uncomfortable.

More disturbing are the accounts of physicians surgically altering the genitalia of ambiguously sexed infants; as well as the daily violence perpetrated against ambiguously gendered and otherwise queer folk.

For years, I bought into that same binary system. As a male-child who felt that she did not fit either the body she inhabited, or the social identity she imagined was projected onto her, I believed that I was doomed to a shadow life of confusion and hidden desire. When I emerged into transsexual identity I thought, as did the professionals I turned to for help, that my best and only hope was to conform to society’s idea of what a woman is supposed to be. I bought into that same heterosexist system.

Heterosexism and intolerance are by no means universal. In Navajo culture there is said to be at least forty-nine genders and gender designations. Well into the twentieth century, in places as far apart as Central Asia, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, and Africa, people with varieties of gender expression and sexual preference were accepted in the community, and often held respected positions—as healers, shamans, oracles, and leaders.

But today, on the anniversary of 9/11/2001, what I really want to say is this: we live by constructed identities-of gender, sexuality, class, race, culture, and religion. Though it is assumed that we live in a materialistic society, we have little respect for material things. We respect the constructs of power, and the money by which we measure them. We are afraid of our bodies. We deny their process, as we deny our own loving, aging, and dying. We hide our desires and fears, imagining that they would otherwise consume us. The violence of our denial erupts into the violence that is perpetrated in our names, and which we have come to tolerate in our society and in our lives.

My experience as a transsexual has radicalized me in ways I never expected. In this time of deception and fabricated war I have come to see, more clearly than ever, how we use constructs of ‘difference’ and ‘other ‘ to marginalize those who do not conform to the status quo—“queer,” “transgendered,” “Muslim,” “liberal,” “terrorist,” “immigrant,” “homeless,” “welfare recipient” “black,” “white,” “brown,” etc.

For all the lip service we pay to individuality, we are extremely wary of the ‘other’. Unwilling to accept complexity and difference, we settle for oversimplifications—personally, politically and spiritually—that perpetuate division, dehumanize people, and create real suffering in real lives.

I sometimes tell people that I underwent surgery to become a middle-aged virgin. In truth, by being transsexual, I became ‘other’. That experience has led me to a far deeper awareness of racism, violence, economic exploitation, the manipulation of public opinion, and the perpetuation of mythologies that distance us, as individuals, and as a society from our experience of life and from our responsibilities. I shifted my own personal identity to align myself, and the work that I do, not with women, or with queer communities, but rather with oppressed communities and individuals, wherever they are, whoever they are. My experience has become a doorway to a larger world.

But my experience is not unique. I took a risk in order to embody my own personal authenticity. It is something anyone can do. In Buddhist terminology we talk of ‘Dharma Doors’ as anything that catalyses awakening and compassion. There are said to be ten thousand Dharma Doors. Perhaps there are as many doors as there are people to pass through them.

My interest is in embodiment. I maintain that the body, and the body of the world, is sacred, and given to us in sacred trust. What I have learned as a transsexual woman is that life reveals itself and that I can always trust the revelation, beyond the categories by which I seek to define them.

. . . and so, in writing this, if I identify as just your average radicalized bi-lesbian white femme transsexual Buddhist sista, with attitude and a passion for social justice, you know that that’s just a construct, just a way of talkin’. And we both know it could all change in a heartbeat!

Originally Published in Vision Magazine, San Diego. September 2002