Transgender

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Abstract

The shifting fortunes of the term transgender since the early 1990s testify to the faultlines and methodological impasses in the theorization of gender across numerous disciplines. At the same time transgender marks the forging and transformation of alliances and collectivities in political activism. Transgender is one of the latest in a series of terms which, in the social sciences, have sought to name counter-normative materializations of gender on individual bodies, through practices of gender-crossing either in matters of dress and presentation, and/or in terms of body modification. Transgender is an umbrella term, which emerged partly in contestation to the hegemonic uses of the term ‘transsexuality’ in both medical and social science discourse. Since the work of Harold Garfinkel, the study of transsexual experiences has become a kind of royal road for the theorization of gender as performance by sociologists espousing a version of what would gradually become identifiable as social constructionism. Garfinkel’s study of ‘Agnes’, a young male-to-female transsexual whom he believed to have been intersexual, was at the centre of his work on gender as a ‘doing’, a skilled choreography of micro-interactions (Garfinkel, 1967). Since Garfinkel, the observation of transsexuals’ ‘doings of gender’ has allowed social scientists a privileged insight into the constructedness of normative gender performances. Feminist sociologists Kessler and McKenna used transsexuality to clinch the argument on the social enforcement of gender norms: for Kessler and McKenna, the diagnosis of transsexuality helps stabilize the social construction of gender and essentially licenses the surgical manipulation of bodies so that their unruly materialities can be aligned with the transsexual’s gender performance (Kessler and McKenna, 1978). A number of essays and booklength studies on transsexuality followed from there, arguing that transsexuality is a medicalization and pathologization of gender deviance. In these arguments, transsexuals were seen to collude with a hetero-normative medical establishment insofar as they were only able to obtain sex reassignment surgery if they could pass successfully through stereotyped gender performances, thus reinforcing the gender binary. In a celebrated 1991 article, transsexual activist academic Sandy Stone called for a resistance to the medicalized normalization of transsexuals and particularly for a refusal to erase their pre-op histories (Stone, 1991). On a similar note others clamoured for a rendering visible of discordant and uneasy histories of gendered embodiment as a retort to the normativity of gender scripts. ‘Transgender activism’ became a site for the making visible of such discordant embodiments. The term ‘transgender’ is usually traced to Virginia Prince, the head of Tri-Ess (a North American cross-dressers’ association): in the 1970s Prince coined the word ‘transgenderist’ in order to differentiate between cross-dressing practices and the then emergent medicalized identity of the transsexual. In its 1990s’ activist reincarnation, transgender came to function as an umbrella term signifying gender non-conformity, so making possible a broad alliance among different gendervariant people, including cross-dressers and transsexuals (see Feinberg, 1992). In the context of postmodern critiques of identity, transgender activism forged a challenge to hegemonic gender binaries and their naturalizing force and invoked the possibility of fluid mobile and provisional enactments of gender. Known for her work on