Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Technology and transexuality: Secret alliances 9
In its reliance on technology the transsexual community does, for the
greater part, privilege the ‘realness’ of gender over the presumed
virtuality and malleability of the sexed body. As Claudine Griggs (a
male-to-female transsexual) claims: ‘My body became my enemy at
an early age. And since the brain is a more important organ than the
penis, it became necessary to change my physiology [...]’. 30 Once
again the rhetoric of the all-pervading brain (mind) dominating the
adversarial body rears its head. Transsexual discourses strategically
overlook their own blind spot regarding the body, for on the one hand
a sexed body is necessary to make the transformation from one sex to
the other visible and materialise it; and, on the other hand, the role
played by the body is eradicated as the ‘true being’ of the transsexed
person resides in his/her gender, which is seen as divorced from the
faulty sexed body. In other words, transsexual debates cleverly
overstep the fact that a sexed body is nevertheless always required to
represent and materialise the transsexed person’s ‘correct’ sex. Both
the severed gender and the surgically corrected sex need to be
embodied in order to display themselves.
This disparity is stretched to its logical extreme by Kate Bornstein,
one of the most visible and outspoken transsexual agents, and author
of the confessional Gender Outlaw: on men, women and the rest of
us 31 who argues in a liberal humanist vein that each person has the
right to align their deviantly sexed body to their true gender.
However, one may debate the validity of the ontological premises on
which Bornstein’s demands for the right to change one’s sex are
based. Is the correct sex something that one can demand? Who
decides what one’s correct sex is? Moreover, if gender, which is
associated with cultural and societal constructions, psychic consciousness,
mind, immateriality and identity, enjoys privilege over
sex, which is associated with the material, temporal and the body, do
Bornstein’s demands not perpetuate a Cartesian mind/body split?
However, challenging the gender system and becoming a
transgenderist in the fullest sense would require more than passing
from one ‘wrong’ sex to the other ‘correct’ one. It would require
allowing and embracing more than two sexes and genders on the
gender continuum and more than one ‘correct’ gender and sex per
body. At the same time I would concede that changing sex may be one
of the proliferating possibilities on the sex and gender continuum,
provided that gender’s supposed superiority over sex is also
challenged.
30
C Griggs S/he: changing sex and changing clothes (1998) 10.
31 K Bornstein Gender outlaw: on men, women, and the rest of us (1994).