Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Technology and transexuality: Secret alliances 11
becoming a woman is a more difficult task due to women’s alliance
with acting and performing?
How does Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that ‘one is not born a
woman, but rather becomes one’ fit into the equation? For indeed if
the numbers signify the materiality of ‘becoming’ a woman, then it
seems easier to become a woman than a man. One could speculate
that one does not become a man, but is rather born one or not (in a
correspondence with Freud’s problematic equation of women with
lack). As Marjorie Garber explains: ‘In sex reassignment surgery there
remains an implicit privileging of the phallus, a sense that a ‘real one’
can’t be made, but only born’. 37 In other words, when applied to
becoming women, medical science finds ways to remedy the
predicament of not being born female, but changing a person the
other way around meets with more resistance. It is conveniently
assumed that being born male is an ontological given, while becoming
female is a constant process of renewal aided by technological
interventions. Maleness is, accordingly, constructed in most transsexual
discourses as quintessential and irreproducible and femaleness
as artificial and reproducible. The transcendence of sex only becomes
operative in the case of male-to-female transsexuals, who supposedly
surpass their sexed physicality, while in the case of female-to-male
transsexuals the ‘phallus’ is constructed as invincible and therefore as
unsurpassable and irreproducible. The luxury of ‘transcendence’ is
reserved for certain bodies only, it seems.
4. Rites of passage: to pass or not to pass
In order to pass successfully as the newly acquired sex, transsexuals
have to put on convincing appearances, both in real and virtual
environments. One of the main subjects for discussion on the online
Transgender Forum for 17-23 July 2000, deals precisely with the
theme of passing. In this issue an online participant enquires about
successful voice transformation: ‘Voice is probably the toughest thing
for a MTF to master. Got any advice?’ The logo displayed at the top of
the Transgender Forum, which deals exclusively with male-to-female
transsexual problems and issues, in addition, reveals the type of
femininity aspired to, which is extremely contrived and simulated —
almost a re-embodiment of the screen goddesses of the 1940s and
1950s. The visual message is clear: in order to pass successfully as a
woman, one needs to look like the hyper-feminine goddess sitting on
the globe.
But not only male-to-female transsexuals need to pass: female-tomale
transsexuals, although under-represented and even misre-
37 M Garber Vested interest. Cross-dressing and cultural anxiety (1997) 104.