Customer Reviews

Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It has always bothered me when someone writes a book which attacks the being of people with a different outlook on existence. It frustrates me a whole lot more when the person writing the text does so in the name of philosophy, cultural anthropology or sociology. When that person espouses her opinions without having all the facts, it makes me sad. But when the author doesn't have all the facts because she has failed to do her homework, it makes me angry.

Ms. Hausman has indeed done some homework in writing this tome. Anyone needing to know about the history of gender in the first two thirds of this century will find it quite useful, provided that they can get past the way she has chosen to emphasize certain aspects of the discourse. The problem is that she uses this "history" as she has constructed it to vilify a group of people. Her goal, as near as I can tell, is to contribute to the deconstruction of gender. What is sad is that she truly seems to believe that the way to do this is to destruct the being of transsexual people.

The best thing about this text, from my admittedly biased position as a transsexual woman, is that it is such a difficult read that very few people are going to struggle through it. Ms. Hausman never uses a small word where a big one will do. And none but the heartiest gender theorist is likely to comprehend her chain of logic (or illogic, as the case may be). Unfortunately, that is still too many people in my opinion.

The author's point, I gather, is that if it weren't for the existence of transsexual people and intersexual people (which I will identify as a group by the term "gender variant") and the medical and psychological professionals who studied them in the earlier in this century, the modern concept of gender would not exist. And eradication of the concept of gender and gender stereotypes is considered a Good Thing in Ms. Hausman's view.

Ms. Hausman seems to view transsexualism as some sort of monolithic evil because of the way it reinforces gender stereotypes. The fatal flaw in her vigorous attack, however, lies in her unadulterated stereotyping of transsexual folk. The use of stereotyping to counter the existence of stereotypes hardly seems to be a rational approach. It strikes me rather as an academic way of saying "So's your mama!" Time and again, the author misses the point since she has already decided what her conclusion is going to be and refuses to let anything (such as fairness or facts) stand in her way. I can only hope that other readers find the text as truly distasteful as I did.

I am truly amazed that the author could spend as much time and effort studying the phenomenon of gender variance as she obviously did in producing this work and yet could gain so little insight into actual gender variant people. But the reason why this happened is clear. Ms. Hausman studied gender variance by reading the works of non-gender-variant people which described the phenomenon (she did also attend a conference of the International Foundation for Gender Education and found the tenor to be quite homophobic, but apparently failed to notice that IFGE is primarily an organization by and for transvestites). This is rather like studying the inhabitants of colonized areas by restricting oneself to reading the works of the colonizers.

To be sure, Ms. Hausman did read some autobiographies by transsexual people, but none of these were published more recently than 1979, though she did acknowledge in an epilogue reading Kate Bornstein's book, "Gender Outlaw: on men women and the rest of us." Unfortunately, she did not apparently notice how this last text might have opened the door to a new line of study which might have invalidated some of her major points and allowed the book to be published anyway, including only a weak and defensive argument in the epilog.

The stereotype about transsexual people that the author finds most irresistible is the notion that they change sex to be heterosexual (while at the same time she describes them as primarily asexual ...she never seems to quite get a handle on this paradox). She claims that gender variant folk claiming an identity separate from that of homosexuals is nothing short of homophobic. Her perception of this heterosexism of transsexual people is central to her theory. It was indeed disheartening to discover that the author had spent so much of her time burying herself in theory written by non-transsexual people that she apparently failed to discover the one glaring fault in her logic, a fault that she would surely have discovered had she conversed or corresponded (or wished to know, for this knowledge would certainly have ruined her project) with any actual transfolk: while we don't have any actual figures, it is probable that more than half of transsexual men and women identify post-transition as lesbian, gay or bisexual (indeed the author must have known this from reading Bornstein's book, but she fails to mention it even in the epilogue). This fact is definitely not available from reading the works on her reading list. It was the people who wrote these works that were in large part homophobic. Gender variant people knew it then and know it now. It is the reason that they preferred not to discuss their sex lives and were hence labelled as being asexual by these researchers (which explains the paradox addressed above). After all, a male-to-female transsexual person who identified as a lesbian and a female-to-male transsexual person who identified as gay *would not* be accepted as a patient by these folks. Thankfully, times have changed. Unfortunately, Ms. Hausman's research did not reveal this change.

The author does in truth point out some disturbing trends among transsexual people. It is indeed true that we read whatever we can find about our condition in order to learn about ourselves and all too often we rely on the the conclusions drawn in those writings to describe our own existence, rather than speaking our individual truths. Largely this is because we must develop the vocabularity to discover our commonality, but we sometimes do tend to go overboard. We do not have to all be the same anymore, as was once the case. And some of us are addicted to surgical intervention to change more than our genital morphology. And some of us claim unknown, perhaps even unknowable, biological sources for our condition instead of just accepting that we are the way we are because that is how we feel (which, to my way of thinking, is not a bad thing...since when are feelings and convictions inherently evil?). And some of us, to our shame, *are* probably even homophobic. We are just people, perhaps not like everyone else, but people nonetheless. We have our faults and we have our virtues. It would have be nice if Ms. Hausman had spent some time examining some of those virtues.

We did not construct gender roles. They existed long before we began upsetting the binary gender apple cart. Nor do we monolithically reinforce them. There is no such thing as the typical transperson. While it is true that all too often we are willing to be stereotyped, willing to phrase our truths in the terms that doctors and therapists need to hear in order to get the type of treatment we desire, our lives do not end when we have surgery. To target the period of our lives spent pursuing our dreams against an often unfriendly society is equivalent to blaming us for any maltreatment we may receive. Too often we have seen feminists jump on this bandwagon and Ms. Hausman has seen fit to join in with this transbashing.

That Ms. Hausman does so while purporting to be a truly enlightened academic is truly unfortunate.

Robyn Elaine Serven, Ph. D. University of Central Arkansas

When I first picked up "Changing Sex" I was looking forward to scholarly read on the interaction between transsexualism and intersexuality. I was astounded that author decided that all history of these conditions before 20th Century was irrelevant and not reviewed. With no such history, she creates a beautifully crafted case that that condition transsexualism is a result of the 20th Century technology used to treat intersexed conditions. Her conclusion is people want sex change because they can get one. Therefor, she concludes that sex change surgery for transsexuals is inappropriate.

The history of transsexualism dates to antiquity and recurrences in written history in all cultures. It is not limited to the 20th Century. It is does not require the existence of an enabling technology. The desire to change sex exist even when there is no hope of a sex change procedure.

If you enjoy reading a well crafted book with closed, circular logic with a conclusion that leads nowhere, this is the book for you.

This is one of the first books I read on Transsexualism and, fortunately, I did find other books which were far more useful.

It does provide a good historical narrative and bibliography of what early TS story and theory were. But it's basically a treatise that fails in its goal, unless its goal is very anti-trans.

Bernice L. Hausman
Changing Sex:
Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) 245 pages
(ISBN: 0822316803; hardcover)
(ISBN: 0822316927; paperback)
(Library of Congress call number: RC560.G45H38 1995)

Hausman believes that the technical ability to do sex-change surgery
is the fundamental cause of transsexualism.
Janis Raymond (in Transsexual Empire) proposed a similar thesis.
Both women see the phenomenon of
men turning themselves into woman
thru feminist glasses,
which makes them see a conspiracy of male surgeons
turning men into conventional women.

Because Hausman was very aware
of the cultural causes of such phenomena as sex-roles
(behavior assigned on the basis of one's sex)
and gender-personalities
(traits enculturated into us, making us either 'masculine' or 'feminine'),
she assumes that there must be a cultural cause of transsexualism.
Herein this reviewer believes she is profoundly mistaken.
The phenomenon now called transsexualism
has existed for hundreds of years.
Thus, it was not the result of the technology of sex-change surgery,
which only became possible in the second half of the 20th century.

Hausman especially blames television transsexuals
for planting the notion
that one can solve all one's problems by changing sex.
Clearly many people latch onto the concept of transsexualism
when they first hear about the phenomenon,
but we should not blame the medium for making the concept known.

Hausman is correct about the standard transsexual story.
Because male-to-female transsexuals must convince
(mostly male) doctors that they are women,
they must conform to the stereotypes of what
women look like, how women move, behave, feel, talk, etc.
They must be interested in "women's concerns"--marriage, family, etc.
Some feminists complain that these features constitute
men's ideas of what women are like.

But if transsexualism were a result of a conspiracy of male doctors
to make more women because that pleases men,
they would take all comers:
Every man who wanted a sex-change could get the operation.
Hausman seems unaware that scientific doctors
turn down more applicants than they operate on.

Another major flaw of this book--a revision of a PhD thesis--
is that most of the research upon which it was based
were cases that took place before 1950.
It would need a lot of updating to take recent
facts, discoveries, & theories into account.
Finally, this question: Is working against transsexualism
really a good way to promote the feminist agenda?

Search the Internet for other books using these words: "BOOKS ON TRANSSEXUALISM".

This historically insightful work should be read by those who are interested in a more historicized, grounded approach to transsexuality than currently circulates in many post-modern critical thinkers' works. Hausman demonstrates the medical construction of gender in the last half century. That this book is ultimately hateful towards transsexuals--despite the protested intentions of the author--should serve as a reminder for all non-transgendered authors writing about trans folk. However, the quality of the research in this book should not be ignored.

In my opinion, Ms. Hausman's book is an outstanding read that looks crtitically not at the transsexual community, but at different scientific sectors (beginning with endocrinologists), and the way in which they shaped the concept of transsexualism as it existed at the end of World War II. It seems to me that the other reviewers here failed to actually look at Ms. Hausman's main argument. In her analysis, the author is not villifying transsexuals but rather the scientific and medical communities. Rather than attacking the construct of gender, Ms. Hausman is going a step further and attacking the idea of *sex* as a constricting dichotomy that doctors and scientists put forth as "truth." By deconstructing this hegemonic notion, Ms. Hausman asserts that the scientific and medical sectors created the 'need' for "sex change" as it was understood when the term was created circa 1940. Also, unlike what other reviewers have said here, Ms. Hausman does acknowledge the fact that forms of 'sex change' have existed throughout human history; however, she realizes that the term 'transsexual' is a modern one, as are the concepts now associated with it, and thus a direct comparison between modern sex change and that of antiquity is neither applicable nor appropriate.

I believe it is true that any social idea needs to be analyzed within a historical context, and Ms. Hausman succeeds admirably. She looks specifically at the way in which the evolution of language and understanding within the scientific community have shaped the understanding, and even the identity construct, of transsexualism. Hausman argues that the scientific community has forced transsexuals to adjust to its ideologies; therefore, as a predominantly homophobic community (especially back in the '50s), doctors *required* that their transsexual patients assume a heterosexual lifestyle post-surgery. This is not the case today, nor is this what Hausman is suggesting.

Ultimately, I would say that Hausman views early transsexuals as the victims of the medical hegemony that presents the notion of sex as truth. Although this may still be insulting, it is very different from being "anti-trans" or "hateful toward transsexuals." I find this argument (attacking the notion of sex and the way in which everyone in our society is indoctrinated to accept the body as dichotomous) is much more critical of greater society, and affects everyone who complies with this contructed binary