Undoing Gender (17 page)

This we do not know. And though we are told that in boys this identification is “marked” by a preoccupation with “traditionally feminine activities,” we are not told what this mark consists of. But it seems important, since the “mark” will be what selects the observation as evidence for the thesis at hand.

In fact, what follows from this claim seems to undermine the claim itself, since what the boys are said to do is to engage in a series of substitutions and improvisations. We are told that they may have a preference for dressing in girls’ or women’s clothes, but we’re not told whether the preference manifests itself in actually dressing in them. We are left with a vague notion of “preference” that could simply describe a supposed mental state, or internal disposition, or it may be inferred by practice. This last seems open to interpretation. We are told that one practice they do engage in is improvisation, taking items that are available and making them work as feminine clothing. Feminine clothing is called “genuine clothing,” which leaves us to conclude that the materials with which these boys are improvising is less than genuine, other than genuine, if not ungenuine and “false.” “Towels, aprons, scarves are often used to represent long hair or skirts.” So there is a certain imaginary play, and a capacity to transfigure one item into another through a process of improvisation and substitution. In other words, there is an art practice at work here, one that would be difficult to name, simply, as the simple act of conforming to a norm. Something is being made, something is being made from something else, something is being tried out. And if it is an improvisation, it is not fully scripted in advance.

Although the description goes on to insist on the fascination of these boys with “stereotypical female-type dolls”—“Barbie” is mentioned by name—as well as “female fantasy figures,” we are not really given an account of the place that dolls and fantasy have in the formulation of gender identification. For a given gender to be a site of fascination, or indeed, for a so-called stereotype to be a source of fascination, may well involve several kinds of relations to the stereotype.

It may be that the stereotype is fascinating because it is overdetermined, that it has become the site for a number of conflicting desires.

The
DSM
assumes that the doll you play with is the one you want to be, but maybe you want to be her friend, her rival, her lover. Maybe you want all this at once. Maybe you do some switching with her.

Maybe playing with the doll, too, is a scene of improvisation that articulates a complex set of dispositions. Maybe something else is going on in this play besides a simple act of conforming to a norm. Perhaps the norm itself is being played, explored, even busted. We would need to take play as a more complex phenomenon than does the
DSM
if we were to begin to pose and pursue these kinds of questions.

The way you can tell that girls are having cross-gendered identification according to the
DSM-IV
is that they argue with their parents about wearing certain kinds of clothes. They prefer boys clothing and short hair, apparently, and they have mainly boy friends, express a desire to become a boy, but also, oddly, “they are often misidentified by strangers as boys.” I am trying to think through how it could be that evidence of one’s cross-gendered identification is confirmed by being identified as a boy by a stranger. It would seem that random social assignment functions as evidence, as if the stranger
knows
something about the psychological make-up of that girl, or as if the girl has solicited that interpellation from the stranger. The
DSM
goes on to say that the girl “may ask to be called by a boy’s name.” But even there, it seems, she is first addressed as a boy, and only after being addressed, wants to take on a name that will confirm the rightness of the address itself. Here again, the very language that the
DSM
provides seems to undercut its own arguments, since it wants to be able to claim cross-gendered identification as part of gender identity disorder, and so as a psychological problem that can be addressed through treatment. It imagines that each individual has a relation to its “assigned sex” and that this relation is either one of discomfort and distress or a sense of comfort and being at peace. But even this notion of “assigned sex”— sex “assigned” at birth—implies that sex is socially produced and relayed, and that it comes to us not merely as a private reflection that each of us makes about ourselves but as a critical interrogation that each of us makes of a social category that is assigned to us that exceeds us in its generality and power, but that also, consequentially, instances itself at the site of our bodies. It is interesting that the
DSM
seeks to establish gender as a set of more or less fixed and conventional norms, even as it keeps giving us evidence to the contrary, almost as if it is at cross purposes with its own aims. Just as the boys who were improvising and substituting were doing something other than conforming to preestablished norms, so the girls seem to be understanding something about social assignment, about what might happen if someone starts to address them as a boy, and what that might make possible.

I’m not sure that the girl who seizes upon this stray and felicitous interpellation is giving evidence to a preestablished “disorder” of any kind.

Rather she is noting that the very means by which sex comes to be, through assignment, open up possibilities for reassignment that excite her sense of agency, play, and possibility. Just as the boys who are playing with scarves as if they were something else are already versing themselves in the world of props and improvisation, so the girls, seizing upon the possibility of being called by another name, are exploring the possibilities of naming themselves in the context of that social world.

They are not simply giving evidence to internal states, but performing certain kinds of actions, and even engaging practices, practices that turn out to be essential to the making of gender itself.

The
DSM
offers a certain discourse of compassion, as many psychiatrists do, suggesting that life with such a disorder is a cause of distress and unhappiness. The
DSM
has its own antipoetry on this subject: “in young children, distress is manifested by the stated unhappiness about their assigned sex.” And here it seems that the only unhappiness is one that is created by an internal desire, not by the fact that there is no social support for such children, that the adults to whom they express their unhappiness are diagnosing and pathologizing them, that the norm of gender frames the conversation in which the expression of unhappiness takes place. At the same time that the
DSM
understands itself as diagnosing a distress which then becomes a candidate for alleviation as a result of the diagnosis, it also understands that “social pressure” can lead to “extreme isolation for such a child.” The
DSM
does not talk about suicide, even though we know that the cruelty of adolescent peer pressure on transgendered youth can lead to suicide. The
DSM
does not talk about risks of death, generally, or murder, something that happened only miles from my home in California in 2002 when transgendered Gwen Araujo arrived at a teen party in a dress, and her body was found dead from beating and strangulation in the Sierra foothills.

Apparently, the “distress” that comes from living in a world in which suicide and death by violence remain real issues is not part of the diagnosis of GID. Consider that the
DSM
remarks, after a brief discussion of the euphemistically called “peer teasing and rejection,” that “children may refuse to attend school because of teasing or pressure to dress in attire stereotypical of their assigned sex.” Here the language of the text seems to understand that there may be an impairment of ordinary functioning caused by the pressure of social norms. But then, in the next sentence, it domesticates the distress caused by social norms, by claiming that it is the person’s own preoccupation with cross-gender wishes that often “interferes with ordinary activities” and ends up in situations of social isolation. In a way, the fact of social violence against transgendered youth is euphemized as teasing and pressure, and then the distress caused by that is recast as an internal problem, a sign of preoccupation, self-involvement, which seems to follow from the wishes themselves. Indeed, is the “isolation” noted here real, or are the communities of support eclipsed from the observation?

And when there is isolation, is it, therefore, a sign of a pathology?

Or is it, for some, the cost of expressing certain kinds of desires in public?

What is most worrisome, however, is how the diagnosis works as its own social pressure, causing distress, establishing wishes as pathological, intensifying the regulation and control of those who express them in institutional settings. Indeed, one has to ask whether the diagnosis of transgendered youth does not act precisely as peer pressure, as an elevated form of teasing, as a euphemized form of social violence.

And if we conclude that it does act in such a way, standing for gender norms, seeking to produce adaptation to existing norms, then how do we return to the vexed issue of what the diagnosis also offers? If part of what the diagnosis offers is a form of social recognition, and if that is the form that social recognition takes, and if it is only through this kind of social recognition that third parties, including medical insurance, will be willing to pay for the medical and technological changes that are sometimes desired, is it really possible to do away with the diagnosis altogether? In a way, the dilemma with which we are faced in the end has to do with the terms by which social recognition is constrained. Since even if we are tempted by the civil libertarian position in which this is understood as a personal right, the fact is that personal rights are only protected and can only be exercised through social and political means. To assert a right is not the same as being empowered to exercise it, and in this case, the only recognizable right at hand is the “right to be treated for a disorder and to take advantage of medical and legal benefits that seek its rectification.”

One exercises this right only by submitting to a pathologizing discourse, and in submitting to the discourse, one also gains a certain power, a certain freedom.

It is possible to say, and necessary to say, that the diagnosis leads the way to the alleviation of suffering; and it is possible, and necessary, to say that the diagnosis intensifies the very suffering that requires alleviation. Under present and entrenched social conditions in which gender norms are still articulated in conventional ways, and departures from the norm regarded as suspect, autonomy remains a paradox.
¹⁵

Of course, it is possible to move to a country where the state will pay for sex reassignment surgery, to apply to a “transgender fund” that a broader community supplies to help those who cannot pay the high costs, or indeed to apply for a “grant” to individuals that cover “cosmetic surgery.” The movement for trans people to become the therapists and diagnosticians has and will surely help matters. These are all ways around the bind, until the bind goes away. But if the bind is to go away for the long run, the norms that govern the way in which we understand the relation between gender identity and mental health would have to change radically, so that economic and legal institutions would recognize how essential becoming a gender is to one’s very sense of personhood, one’s sense of well-being, one’s possibility to flourish as a bodily being. Not only does one need the social world to be a certain way in order to lay claim to what is one’s own, but it turns out that what is one’s own is always from the start dependent upon what is not one’s own, the social conditions by which autonomy is, strangely, dispossessed and undone.

In this sense, we must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are. This is surely the paradox of autonomy, a paradox that is heightened when gender regulations work to paralyze gendered agency at various levels. Until those social conditions are radically changed, freedom will require unfreedom, and autonomy is implicated in subjection.

If the social world—a sign of our constitutive heteronomy—must change for autonomy to become possible, then individual choice will prove to be dependent from the start on conditions that none of us author at will, and no individual will be able to choose outside the context of a radically altered social world. That alteration comes from an increment of acts, collective and diffuse, belonging to no single subject, and yet one effect of these alterations is to make acting like a subject possible.

5. Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?

The topic of gay marriage is not the same as that of gay kinship, but it seems that the two become confounded in U.S. popular opinion when we hear not only that marriage is and ought to remain a heterosexual institution and bond but also that kinship does not work, or does not qualify as kinship, unless it assumes a recognizable family form. There are several ways to link these views. One way is to claim that sexuality needs to be organized in the service of reproductive relations, and that marriage, which gives the legal status to the family form or, rather, is conceived as that which should secure the institution through conferring that legal status,
should
remain the fulcrum that keeps these institutions leveraging one another.

The challenges to this link are, of course, legion, and they take various forms domestically and internationally. On the one hand, there are various sociological ways of showing that in the United States a number of kinship relations exist and persist that do not conform to the nuclear family model and that draw on biological and nonbiological relations, exceeding the reach of current juridical conceptions, functioning according to nonformalizable rules. If we understand kinship as a set of practices that institutes relationships of various kinds which negotiate the reproduction of life and the demands of death, then kinship practices will be those that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include birth, child rearing, relations of emotional dependency and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death (to name a few). Kinship is neither a fully autonomous sphere, proclaimed to be distinct from community and friendship—or the regulations of the state—through some definitional fiat, nor is it “over” or “dead” just because, as David Schneider has consequentially argued, it has lost the capacity to be formalized and tracked in the conventional ways that ethnologists in the past have attempted to do.
¹