The book
Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category by David Valentine looks at the question of how this phenomenon, that we call transgender, is understood by other cultures.
QuoteDavid Valentine conducted ethnographic research among mostly male-to-female transgender-identified people at drag balls, support groups, cross-dresser organizations, clinics, bars, and clubs. However, he found that many of those labeled "transgender" by activists did not know the term or resisted its use. Instead, they self-identified as "gay," a category of sexual rather than gendered identity and one rejected in turn by the activists who claimed these subjects as transgender. Valentine analyzes the reasons for and potential consequences of this difference, and how social theory is implicated in it.
Valentine argues that "transgender" has been adopted so rapidly in the contemporary United States because it clarifies a model of gender and sexuality that has been gaining traction within feminism, psychiatry, and mainstream gay and lesbian politics since the 1970s: a paradigm in which gender and sexuality are distinct arenas of human experience. This distinction and the identity categories based on it erase the experiences of some gender-variant people—particularly poor persons of color—who conceive of gender and sexuality in other terms.
This is the sort of thing I was talking about. It casts into doubt whether people born and raised in such cultures-- who we would call transgender-- think of themselves as such.
Research like this indicates that the gender status of trans people is highly dependent on social construction. Our gender as transsexual men or women would not have been a given in a culture that constructed it differently. This has been hard for me to accept, because I feel so strongly that my own womanhood is innate and definite. After all, I had to fight against my family's insistence that I'm male, my upbringing in a social context that never admitted any other construction to my gender, but from within myself I somehow asserted my womanhood. How is it that trans people in other cultures than my own don't affirm gender the way we do here?
I had a discussion with my friend who is an American LGBT activist of Iranian origin. I mentioned the recent movie
Be Like Others about people in Iran who are getting SRS in record numbers. There has been alarm in the Western LGBT world because many gay and lesbian Iranians feel pressured to get sex changes in order to become heterosexual. My friend insisted that the issues in that cultural context are different from what we would think: in Iran they don't separate gender identity from sexual orientation the way we do. She said in Iran all gay people are seen as inherently gender-variant, because sexual orientation is encoded as essential to the definition of gender, therefore what we call transgender is seen in Iran as an integral part of the same phenomenon as homosexuality. Or something like that, it wasn't entirely clear to me because it's so alien to how my mind constructs gender and sexuality. Valentine's research likewise says in the cultures he studied how gender is subsumed into sexuality.
I came of age in a culture informed by the above-mentioned paradigm from "feminism, psychiatry, and mainstream gay and lesbian politics." With my privileged white middle-class upbringing, I was given a college education and encouraged to read widely. I didn't develop any understanding of my true gender identity until after I'd come in contact with the dissemination of such modern paradigms in my culture. I just wonder how this paradigm arose in the first place; it's been so influential in making us who we are. It certainly isn't universal.
