Complex Gender Alignment
How do transgender issues and feminism overlap?
By Sarah C. Stein Lubrano
Published: Wednesday, April 04, 2012
http://www.thecrimson.com/column/exodoxa/article/2012/4/4/harvard-stein-transgender/ (http://www.thecrimson.com/column/exodoxa/article/2012/4/4/harvard-stein-transgender/)
One of the small additions to the Harvard University Health plan this year covers staff and students' gender-realignment surgery. (In previous years, "top" surgery was covered, this year "bottom" surgery will also be covered.) This is excellent news. Such surgery is very expensive (thus requiring insurance), and it has an overwhelming rate of post-operation satisfaction. In other words, it works: It improves the lives of those who very firmly believe that they are not the gender their body once expressed. For a population with a 41 percent suicide rate, this is incredibly important.
The remarkable success of such surgery is a medical and humanist victory. But interestingly, it presents, at least at the surface, a challenge to some models of traditional feminism. This stems from the contradiction between the idea that people are innately a certain gender and the traditional feminist view that gender is—at least in large part—socially created and imposed. The most famous intellectual proponent of this idea is Judith Butler, who writes in her work "Undoing Gender" that gender is simply "doing, incessantly performed." In other words, it is not one's genitalia that make one a particular gender, but rather one's behavior, constructed through some combination of unconscious absorption of societal standards, embodied performance, and conscious personal choice. Butler's theory is liberating in many ways. It discards the notion that seemingly effeminate men or masculine women are unnatural or wrong; it opens all avenues of gender-related self-expression to all people. But the existence of transgender people, and the success rate of realignment surgery, does not square with the idea that gender is simply a social and personal construction. If so, why would some people in the same society not be constructed into conformity with their physical form like the rest? Why would they choose to construct themselves as something so agonizingly deviant that it would make them suicidal? Why would surgery almost never cause regret if gender can be constructed and thus re-constructed?