Betsy
10-30-02, 12:35 AM
Beyond Appearances: The Ambiguities of Sexuality
>
> October 29, 2002
> By DINITIA SMITH
>
>
>
>
>
>
> What maketh the man? Is it chromosomes? Or is it genitalia? Or, to
> borrow from Polonius, is it clothes?
>
> In her new book, "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the
> United States," Dr. Joanne Meyerowitz, a professor of history at
> Indiana University and the editor of The Journal of American History,
> examines changing definitions of gender through the prism of
> transsexuality, that most mysterious of conditions in which
> a person is born with normal chromosomes and hormones for
> one sex but is convinced that he or she is a member of the
> other.
>
> Dr. Meyerowitz shows how mutable the words "male,"
> "female," "sex" and "gender" have become, and how their meanings have
> evolved through time.
>
> Hers is one of several new books on the subject of the transgendered,
> an umbrella term to define those whose sexuality is not readily
> characterized as definitely male or female. The flow of books is
> evidence of society's continuing puzzlement and fascination with the
> subject.
>
> The novelist and psychotherapist Amy Bloom has published "Normal,"
> interviews with transsexuals; transvestites, who like to dress in
> clothing of the opposite sex but may not want to change their gender;
> and the intersexed, people born with ambiguous genitalia, in the past
> referred to as hermaphrodites.
>
> The transgendered in Ms. Bloom's book, including the intersexed,
> refuse to be categorized as either male or female, and defiantly
> celebrate their ambiguity.
>
> A third book, "Scanty Particulars," by Rachel Holmes, is a biography
> of Dr. James Barry, a transvestite and the highest ranking military
> doctor under Queen Victoria.
>
> Dr. Barry, a pioneer in public health, is credited with performing the
> first successful Caesarean section. The doctor lived as a man, but on
> her deathbed was revealed to be a biological woman.
>
> Finally, there is "Middlesex," a novel by Jeffrey
> Eugenides, about a character born with 5-alpha reductase deficiency
> syndrome, in which a person is genetically a male, but has ambiguous
> genitalia and may at first appear to be a girl. At puberty, the person
> may develop testes and other male characteristics, including the
> enlargement of the clitoris into a penis.
>
> But in terms of the scientific quandary of gender, the most important
> of the books is "How Sex Changed."
>
> At the turn of the century, Dr. Meyerowitz writes, the word sex was a
> catchall term meaning both biological sex and sexual behavior. Today,
> biological sex usually refers to chromosomes, genes, genitals,
> hormones and other physical markers. Gender usually means male or
> female, or some mixture of both. The word sexuality has come to
> connote sexual behavior.
>
> Of all the conundrums of identity, transsexuality is most imbued with
> the contradictions between physical sex and sexual orientation, and it
> illustrates the difficulty of defining gender.
>
> Until the turn of the century, Dr. Meyerowitz writes,
> gender was defined through a binary taxonomy of opposites: people were
> either male or female. But in the late 19th century, Sigmund Freud,
> the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Wilhelm Fliess, a
> German physician, began putting forth the notion that humans were
> inherently bisexual, and that sexuality existed on a continuum between
> male and female.
>
> In 1910, a Berlin physician, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld,
> published a pioneering work on transsexuality and
> articulated a relatively new modern definition of gender. "Absolute
> representatives of their sex are," he wrote, "only abstractions,
> invented extremes."
>
> The 1920's and 30's were a time of sexual emancipation in Europe, and
> in that atmosphere, Dr. Meyerowitz says, sex change operations were
> performed in Vienna, and at Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science.
> In 1931, Dr. Felix Abraham, a physician at the institute, published
> the first scientific article on human transsexual surgery.
>
> The operations consisted of mastectomy, hysterectomy and in males,
> castration, creation of a vagina and even ovarian transplants.
> Phalloplasty, the creation of a penis on a genetic female, was not
> commonly done until after World War II in the United States.
>
> But until the 1960's sex-change surgery was rarely
> performed in this country, and treatment was largely unavailable.
> Desperate people begged doctors for help. The drive is so "fierce and
> demanding that it frightens me," one man, who had asked a friend to
> castrate him, told Dr. Harry Benjamin, a pioneer in sex-change
> treatment.
>
> According to one review of the medical literature in 1965,
> 18 of 100 male-to-female transsexuals had tried to remove their own
> testicles or penises; 9 succeeded. Dr. Meyerowitz writes that one man
> injected air, hand cream and mother's milk into his chest to give
> himself breasts. A female-to-male transsexual had her breasts removed
> on a kitchen table. A male-to-female transsexual who could not
> afford surgery studied medical texts to learn how to remove
> testicles, ligate, suture and anesthetize. She bought
> surgical equipment and successfully performed the operation
> on herself.
>
> With the publicity received by Christine Jorgensen,
> attitudes changed. Formerly George Jorgensen Jr., an Army private from
> the Bronx, in 1952 he underwent sex-change operation in Denmark. Dr.
> Meyerowitz argues that Ms. Jorgensen, by cultivating the demeanor of a
> lady and by refusing to call herself homosexual, removed some of
> transsexuality's stigma.
>
> From the 1960's on, a handful of courts permitted transsexuals to
> change their names. In 1976, the Appellate Division of the New Jersey
> Superior Court ruled in an alimony dispute involving a male-to-female
> transsexual that the person could be called female in the case of that
> particular marriage.
>
> But the court said that generally, conventional gender definitions
> should apply to marriage, public records, military service, sports
> eligibility and some occupations. In 1977, the New York County Supreme
> Court ruled that Renee Richards, a postoperative transsexual, could
> play in women's tennis tournaments despite being genetically male.
>
> With the growing power of the medical establishment,
> doctors began to assume the right to define sexuality. In 1966, when
> the Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic opened with money from Reed Erickson,
> a wealthy female-to-male transsexual, there were 2,000 applications
> for surgery.
>
> Sex change operations became more frequent, though doctors balked at
> performing surgery for fear of prosecution under obscure statutes
> based on English common law that forbade the maiming of men who might
> serve as soldiers.
>
> Even as the medical establishment was trying to define
> gender through surgery, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and
> psychologists contended that transsexuality and transvestitism
> resulted from psychological conditions.
>
> In 1962, the Gender Identity Research Clinic was founded at the
> University of California at Los Angeles. There, boys regarded as
> "sissies" and "tomboy" girls received behavioral treatment to make
> them conform to traditional definitions of gender.
>
> In one case, which Dr. Meyerowitz glosses over, the distraught parents
> of a boy, Bruce Reimer, whose penis was accidentally cut off during
> surgery for a condition called phimosis, brought him to Hopkins. The
> case was first reported in 1973 by Dr. Milton Diamond of the
> University of Hawaii-Manoa in Honolulu and Dr. H. Keith Sigmundson of
> the Ministry of Health in Victoria, British Columbia.
>
> Dr. John Money, a sexologist at the institute, recommended that the
> boy be raised as a girl. He was given hormone injections, his
> testicles were removed, and surgeons tried to fashion a vagina for
> him. Dr. Money began therapy sessions with him to teach him to be a
> girl. But the boy was miserable, and and at 14, he refused to continue
> living as a girl. He eventually had surgery to refashion a
> phallus, married and adopted children.
>
> The case was was later described in the book "As Nature
> Made Him" by John Colapinto.
>
> In the book, the man, who changed his name to David,
> asserted that Dr. Money had encouraged him and his twin brother to
> play sex games, and to simulate intercourse. In an e-mail message
> recently, Dr. Money wrote: "This is a false accusation. I gave no such
> encouragement."
>
> Today, scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists have reached
> something of a consensus about gender, saying that sexuality is
> determined by "psychological sex" or "gender role orientation,"
> possibly caused by hormones or genes.
>
> As a consequence of the sexual revolution and the Internet, which has
> provided a forum to organize, transsexuals have begun to demand the
> right to define their own sexuality. Some male-to-female transsexuals
> have sex with men and call themselves homosexuals. Some female-to-male
> transsexuals have sex with women and call themselves lesbians. Some
> transsexuals call themselves asexual.
>
> The transgendered have begun to insist that sex, gender and sexuality
> represent "analytically distinct categories," Dr. Meyerowitz says.
> Doctors can alter the physical characteristics of sex, but bodily sex
> does not determine gender.
>
> No one knows how many transsexuals are in the United States today, Dr.
> Meyerowitz writes, though a 1993 study in the Netherlands reported
> that 1 in 11,900 born male and 1 in 30,400 born female took hormones
> to change sex.
>
> Meanwhile, scientists continue to ponder the meaning of
> sex. In 1995 another Netherlands study suggested that a region of the
> hypothalmus may differ in size in transsexuals from ordinary males and
> females. But, despite the studies, and gains in knowledge, all these
> books point out gender's essential mystery. Science is no nearer to
> determining what gender is than it was a century ago.
>
> "The definition of sex," writes Dr. Meyerowitz "was (and
> is) still up for grabs."
>
> October 29, 2002
> By DINITIA SMITH
>
>
>
>
>
>
> What maketh the man? Is it chromosomes? Or is it genitalia? Or, to
> borrow from Polonius, is it clothes?
>
> In her new book, "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the
> United States," Dr. Joanne Meyerowitz, a professor of history at
> Indiana University and the editor of The Journal of American History,
> examines changing definitions of gender through the prism of
> transsexuality, that most mysterious of conditions in which
> a person is born with normal chromosomes and hormones for
> one sex but is convinced that he or she is a member of the
> other.
>
> Dr. Meyerowitz shows how mutable the words "male,"
> "female," "sex" and "gender" have become, and how their meanings have
> evolved through time.
>
> Hers is one of several new books on the subject of the transgendered,
> an umbrella term to define those whose sexuality is not readily
> characterized as definitely male or female. The flow of books is
> evidence of society's continuing puzzlement and fascination with the
> subject.
>
> The novelist and psychotherapist Amy Bloom has published "Normal,"
> interviews with transsexuals; transvestites, who like to dress in
> clothing of the opposite sex but may not want to change their gender;
> and the intersexed, people born with ambiguous genitalia, in the past
> referred to as hermaphrodites.
>
> The transgendered in Ms. Bloom's book, including the intersexed,
> refuse to be categorized as either male or female, and defiantly
> celebrate their ambiguity.
>
> A third book, "Scanty Particulars," by Rachel Holmes, is a biography
> of Dr. James Barry, a transvestite and the highest ranking military
> doctor under Queen Victoria.
>
> Dr. Barry, a pioneer in public health, is credited with performing the
> first successful Caesarean section. The doctor lived as a man, but on
> her deathbed was revealed to be a biological woman.
>
> Finally, there is "Middlesex," a novel by Jeffrey
> Eugenides, about a character born with 5-alpha reductase deficiency
> syndrome, in which a person is genetically a male, but has ambiguous
> genitalia and may at first appear to be a girl. At puberty, the person
> may develop testes and other male characteristics, including the
> enlargement of the clitoris into a penis.
>
> But in terms of the scientific quandary of gender, the most important
> of the books is "How Sex Changed."
>
> At the turn of the century, Dr. Meyerowitz writes, the word sex was a
> catchall term meaning both biological sex and sexual behavior. Today,
> biological sex usually refers to chromosomes, genes, genitals,
> hormones and other physical markers. Gender usually means male or
> female, or some mixture of both. The word sexuality has come to
> connote sexual behavior.
>
> Of all the conundrums of identity, transsexuality is most imbued with
> the contradictions between physical sex and sexual orientation, and it
> illustrates the difficulty of defining gender.
>
> Until the turn of the century, Dr. Meyerowitz writes,
> gender was defined through a binary taxonomy of opposites: people were
> either male or female. But in the late 19th century, Sigmund Freud,
> the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Wilhelm Fliess, a
> German physician, began putting forth the notion that humans were
> inherently bisexual, and that sexuality existed on a continuum between
> male and female.
>
> In 1910, a Berlin physician, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld,
> published a pioneering work on transsexuality and
> articulated a relatively new modern definition of gender. "Absolute
> representatives of their sex are," he wrote, "only abstractions,
> invented extremes."
>
> The 1920's and 30's were a time of sexual emancipation in Europe, and
> in that atmosphere, Dr. Meyerowitz says, sex change operations were
> performed in Vienna, and at Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science.
> In 1931, Dr. Felix Abraham, a physician at the institute, published
> the first scientific article on human transsexual surgery.
>
> The operations consisted of mastectomy, hysterectomy and in males,
> castration, creation of a vagina and even ovarian transplants.
> Phalloplasty, the creation of a penis on a genetic female, was not
> commonly done until after World War II in the United States.
>
> But until the 1960's sex-change surgery was rarely
> performed in this country, and treatment was largely unavailable.
> Desperate people begged doctors for help. The drive is so "fierce and
> demanding that it frightens me," one man, who had asked a friend to
> castrate him, told Dr. Harry Benjamin, a pioneer in sex-change
> treatment.
>
> According to one review of the medical literature in 1965,
> 18 of 100 male-to-female transsexuals had tried to remove their own
> testicles or penises; 9 succeeded. Dr. Meyerowitz writes that one man
> injected air, hand cream and mother's milk into his chest to give
> himself breasts. A female-to-male transsexual had her breasts removed
> on a kitchen table. A male-to-female transsexual who could not
> afford surgery studied medical texts to learn how to remove
> testicles, ligate, suture and anesthetize. She bought
> surgical equipment and successfully performed the operation
> on herself.
>
> With the publicity received by Christine Jorgensen,
> attitudes changed. Formerly George Jorgensen Jr., an Army private from
> the Bronx, in 1952 he underwent sex-change operation in Denmark. Dr.
> Meyerowitz argues that Ms. Jorgensen, by cultivating the demeanor of a
> lady and by refusing to call herself homosexual, removed some of
> transsexuality's stigma.
>
> From the 1960's on, a handful of courts permitted transsexuals to
> change their names. In 1976, the Appellate Division of the New Jersey
> Superior Court ruled in an alimony dispute involving a male-to-female
> transsexual that the person could be called female in the case of that
> particular marriage.
>
> But the court said that generally, conventional gender definitions
> should apply to marriage, public records, military service, sports
> eligibility and some occupations. In 1977, the New York County Supreme
> Court ruled that Renee Richards, a postoperative transsexual, could
> play in women's tennis tournaments despite being genetically male.
>
> With the growing power of the medical establishment,
> doctors began to assume the right to define sexuality. In 1966, when
> the Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic opened with money from Reed Erickson,
> a wealthy female-to-male transsexual, there were 2,000 applications
> for surgery.
>
> Sex change operations became more frequent, though doctors balked at
> performing surgery for fear of prosecution under obscure statutes
> based on English common law that forbade the maiming of men who might
> serve as soldiers.
>
> Even as the medical establishment was trying to define
> gender through surgery, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and
> psychologists contended that transsexuality and transvestitism
> resulted from psychological conditions.
>
> In 1962, the Gender Identity Research Clinic was founded at the
> University of California at Los Angeles. There, boys regarded as
> "sissies" and "tomboy" girls received behavioral treatment to make
> them conform to traditional definitions of gender.
>
> In one case, which Dr. Meyerowitz glosses over, the distraught parents
> of a boy, Bruce Reimer, whose penis was accidentally cut off during
> surgery for a condition called phimosis, brought him to Hopkins. The
> case was first reported in 1973 by Dr. Milton Diamond of the
> University of Hawaii-Manoa in Honolulu and Dr. H. Keith Sigmundson of
> the Ministry of Health in Victoria, British Columbia.
>
> Dr. John Money, a sexologist at the institute, recommended that the
> boy be raised as a girl. He was given hormone injections, his
> testicles were removed, and surgeons tried to fashion a vagina for
> him. Dr. Money began therapy sessions with him to teach him to be a
> girl. But the boy was miserable, and and at 14, he refused to continue
> living as a girl. He eventually had surgery to refashion a
> phallus, married and adopted children.
>
> The case was was later described in the book "As Nature
> Made Him" by John Colapinto.
>
> In the book, the man, who changed his name to David,
> asserted that Dr. Money had encouraged him and his twin brother to
> play sex games, and to simulate intercourse. In an e-mail message
> recently, Dr. Money wrote: "This is a false accusation. I gave no such
> encouragement."
>
> Today, scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists have reached
> something of a consensus about gender, saying that sexuality is
> determined by "psychological sex" or "gender role orientation,"
> possibly caused by hormones or genes.
>
> As a consequence of the sexual revolution and the Internet, which has
> provided a forum to organize, transsexuals have begun to demand the
> right to define their own sexuality. Some male-to-female transsexuals
> have sex with men and call themselves homosexuals. Some female-to-male
> transsexuals have sex with women and call themselves lesbians. Some
> transsexuals call themselves asexual.
>
> The transgendered have begun to insist that sex, gender and sexuality
> represent "analytically distinct categories," Dr. Meyerowitz says.
> Doctors can alter the physical characteristics of sex, but bodily sex
> does not determine gender.
>
> No one knows how many transsexuals are in the United States today, Dr.
> Meyerowitz writes, though a 1993 study in the Netherlands reported
> that 1 in 11,900 born male and 1 in 30,400 born female took hormones
> to change sex.
>
> Meanwhile, scientists continue to ponder the meaning of
> sex. In 1995 another Netherlands study suggested that a region of the
> hypothalmus may differ in size in transsexuals from ordinary males and
> females. But, despite the studies, and gains in knowledge, all these
> books point out gender's essential mystery. Science is no nearer to
> determining what gender is than it was a century ago.
>
> "The definition of sex," writes Dr. Meyerowitz "was (and
> is) still up for grabs."