Why I'm not Transgender

From 1998 to 2014 thru today: My Seminal Essay

“Transgender” gives me a slightly nauseous feeling – I sense a touchy-feely malevolence lurking.  It’s a nice, safe word that desexes and defangs the term, “transsexual” just as that other hideous PC euphemism, “significant other” desexes the hot, sticky, and passionate reality of being somebody’s lover.  I would never want to go to bed with a person called a significant other.  It sounds like an AA or therapy word, more of the psychobabble and pop therapy that waters down our passions and homogenizes our intentions.  

I have never felt that the word “transgender” describes the very real and vital biological sex change process at the core of transsexuality.  Now, this literally desexed word (taking the “sex” out of transsexual) has become the umbrella term for all people who transgress or transverse gender boundaries.  It is spawning a pantheon of hyphenated identities, a hyperventilation of male and female combinations.  The term was originated by Virginia Prince to describe the male-to-female cross dresser who lived as female most of the time, but didn’t have sex change surgery or take hormones.  Virginia Prince, a dedicated cross-dresser, was apparently not too jazzed about transsexuals, and openly referred to us as “losers”.  Transgender is now used to describe everyone:  Female-to-male transsexuals, guys who occasionally enjoy wearing a tight fitting pair of panties, lesbians who paste on bushy mustaches for a wild weekend and even biologically female lesbian femmes with attitude.  It has even been suggested that the entire lesbian and gay movement should just call itself the transgender movement and forget the terms gay and lesbian.  After all, the reason that gays and lesbians are oppressed, this line of reasoning contends, is because they transgress the gender boundaries that prevent people of the same sex from getting sexually, erotically or romantically entangled.  

I am a transsexual man, and I will grudgingly accept the umbrella identification of transgender in order to better communicate or work with others.  After all, I’m already in the larger tent of sexual orientation and gender freaks.:  Queers.  Ultimately, it is to our greater benefit if we try and work towards common goals, like equal rights and the benefits of a just and equitable society. 

However, I did not change my core gender identity, I changed my biological sex.  True, I cannot entirely alter it, but I decisively shifted the rudder of my biology from female to male, most importantly through the use of testosterone, but also through surgery and the unequivocal daily living in the world as a man.  I dislike the use of the word transgender because it increasingly lumps me in with any number of other people who might be transgressing gender boundaries, people who might actually have very little in common with me.  While I’m not against these people expressing their gender, I do have a real fear:  The word transgender has the potential to entirely erase who I am. 

Transgender makes my identity a little more palatable to some.  Transgender doesn’t remind people of the cutting and sewing of flesh during sex change surgery.  It doesn’t conjure up images of the regular injection of a potent hormone that has lowered my voice, altered my distribution of body fat, made my bones more massive and enabled me to grow an Adam’s apple.  The same testosterone that has sprouted thousands of coarse hairs on my legs, abdomen and face has also created flashing thoughts of women in various sexual positions in my mind at odd hours of the day. Transgender doesn’t conjure my top surgery, or the fact that I intend to have a set of large, bull-like balls surgically constructed to fill out my basket. Finally, transgender doesn’t connect me decisively to my spiritual ancestors, the other transsexuals of the latter half of the twentieth century, who have endured ostracism, loneliness and intensive struggle to transform their bodies and lives.  Transgender ignores the medical aspect of my transition that has enabled me to create my life. I have made use of the medical tools available to me, against all the odds and the voices that told me I couldn’t do it – and that I shouldn’t want to. 

At one time, not so long ago in feminist history, a woman who wore men’s clothes was simply called a butch, and after that, a woman-identified woman.  That is, if a woman wore what was considered to be a man’s suit, it was now a woman’s suit, and she was a woman-identified woman for wearing it.  The theory went that by breaking a gender role boundary, she was situating herself outside the patriarchy – a culture constructed by men to contain the free expression of women’s  identity.  Paradoxically, this act of wearing men’s clothing made her more of a “real” woman, than a male-identified woman who wore traditionally female clothes.  Perhaps that’s what Valerie Solanas was thinking when she wrote the line, “I’m so female, I’m subversive,”  which her alter-ego character utters during her play “Up Your Ass”. 

Times change, and so does the lens.  Many gender transgressors don’t even remember this one radically feminist idea put forward by the Radicalesbiens in 1970.  Currently, the same subversive woman might identify as a boy or an FTM, simply by wearing that same suit.  Today, that act of gender transgression makes her transgender, not a woman-identified woman.  At the 2^nd Femme Conference, a non-transsexual femme stated that she was transgender, since she transgressed gender definitions for feminine women in straight culture by dating women, and for lesbians in lesbian culture by looking and dressing feminine.  The arena continues to expand even as the lens shifts. 

I have no argument or grievance with anyone transgressing any boundary – in fact, I celebrate it.  There’s nothing I like better than chaos and subversion.  However, my very distinct experience as a transsexual person who has undergone a biological transformation in order to live as the sex opposite to the one I was born with is in danger of being unheard.  If transsexual and transgender become completely equivalent, then subsequently, my identity becomes equivalent to that of this newly declared transgendered genetic nontranssexual femme or the boy-identified lesbian wearing a suit coat.  We may or may not have things in common – but these people cannot speak for me. 

Although connected with gender expression and rooted in the mystery of gender identity, transsexuality is really about the larger miracle of changing sex.  Anne Ogborn, one of my favorite transsexual woman pioneers, pointed out to me that people are never really sure if we transsexuals are flaming radicals and revolutionaries or complete reactionaries.  There is an essential and defiant tension in our decision to change our biological sex that defies casual pigeonholing.  Are we buying into the binary gender system, or transforming the rules altogether by proving that the exact biology of one’s birth is not one’s ultimate destination or destiny?  Take your pick. 

For me, the word transgender does not convey enough of the magic and danger associated with the transformation and identity of transsexuals – the fact that we change sex.  It’s a concept that’s far too irrational and far-fetched for many people to grasp.  Transsexuality is not only beyond the true and the real, it’s beyond the nice and polite.  Transgender can be said safely in mixed company.  Like that other trend of always substituting “gender” for “sex”, the word “transgender” softens and smooths out the rough edges. It isn’t as threatening, but it also has less charge. 

Unfortunately, for many who now call themselves FTMs, particularly those who have a lesbian or feminist background, there is often a very palpable shame about becoming a man.  I have become a man.  I have taken on that word – not boy, not FTM, not any hyphenated male/female combination – I am a man.  Although I use the modifier of transsexual, these two terms do not cancel each other out.  I am not only relating the reality of my experience, I am also taking on full responsibility for my decision to change my biological sex.  Part of that responsibility is accepting the historical and cultural onus of masculinity.  

Stepping off into a parallel dimension that’s filled with risky endeavors and vital forces – that’s what doing transsexuality is all about.  Transgender doesn’t even begin to describe it.  

Note: This essay was first published online in 1998 on Gay.com in the Trans Gazebo. Later publication was in the 2014 trans male anthology Manning Up: Transsexual Men on finding Brotherhood, Family, and Themselves ed. by Zander Keig and Mitch Kellaway.

Photo of me reading in the panel is from a San Francisco event held for the publication of the essay in Manning Up in 2014.