THE TRANSGENDER

Abstract

It’s not often that the editor of a scholarly journal has to keep revising the introduction to a special issue simply to stay abreast of new developments relevant to the topic under consideration, but that indeed has been the case with “The Transgender Issue.” Two recent events, both of which took place between the first and second drafts of this essay, call attention to the timeliness of the work collected in this volume. In her discussion of the politicization of intersexual identity, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” Cheryl Chase notes that the goal of abolishing medically unnecessary cosmetic surgery on infants with ambiguous genitals is a “radical position” that requires “the willful disruption of the assumed concordance between body shape and gender category.” She contends that the pragmatic campaign of intersex activists to alter what they consider to be a harmful surgical practice thus promises a profound destabilization of naturalized heteronormative configurations of gender, embodiment, and identity. When Chase completed her essay in the spring of 1997, her views enjoyed scant support beyond a small circle of queer allies, with most medical practitioners dismissing intersex activists as misguided zealots. But in early September 1997, ABC television’s Prime Time Live newsmagazine ran a story on pediatric genital surgery—in fact, only one of several sympathetic accounts that had appeared in the U.S. national media in the intervening months—that editorialized in favor of the “radical position” advocated by Chase and her fellow activists. It was a stunning indication of how rapidly issues related to queer embodiment have been moving from the margins of U.S. culture into the mainstream. James L. Nelson, in his contribution, “The Silence of the Bioethicists,” offers a comparison and an ethical critique of two different standards of care for the medical treatment of transsexuals. One is the set of standards issued by the