Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

14 Amanda du Preez
transsexuality for feminism(s) in general. 44 Unlike Raymond, I do not
find the constructed nature of transsexuality problematic, for in my
view both sex and gender are constructions. The problematic
question, for me, concerns whose constructions they are and how
they are embodied.
In this regard I salute Sandy Stone’s claims to her rightful position as
a transsexual in society without attempting to ‘pass’ as female in
order to console the binary heterosexual sex-gender system. Stone
refuses to be silent about her transsexuality; instead, she
‘reappropriat[es] difference and reclaim[s] the power of the
refigured and reinscribed body’. 45 Although Stone’s obvious transsexuality
may be obnoxious to some, I find it commendable, for she
sincerely challenges a system that has identified her as pathological
by resisting to blend into ‘the binary phallocratic founding myth’. 46
By refusing to become amicably female Stone exposes the flaws of the
heterosexual matrix and the passing parade upheld by transsexuals
struggling to become ‘perfect’ men or women, which is a decidedly
contingent and contentious mould in any case. Stone phrases this
dilemma as an enquiry whether male-to-female transsexuals go from
‘unambiguous men, albeit unhappy men, to unambiguous women’, 47
which is obviously not the case. The fact that societal gender roles do
not permit any ‘territory between’ 48 places too much emphasis on the
end destinations of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and these end goals can
neither be embodied to the full nor do these goals fully signify the
lived real experiences of sex and gender. Does anyone fit the
description of being completely and finally male or female? Are we
not always, rather, on the way towards becoming male or female,
without being completely either one or the other? Are we not always
embodied somewhere in-between, while perhaps gravitating more to
one sex/gender than to the other?
44 This is especially true of the chapter entitled ‘Sappho by surgery: the
transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist’, in which Raymond challenges the
invasion of women’s place, physically and spiritually, by what she terms
‘transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists’ (page 99). Raymond’s argument that
transsexuality should be ‘morally mandated […] out of existence’ (page 178) is
valuable for feminist debates for it challenges patriarchal assumptions about
femininity, as well as re-claiming a position for women. See Raymond (n 2 above)
99, 178.
45 Stone (n 11 above) 12.
46 Stone (n 11 above) 11.
47
Stone (n 11 above) 4.
48 Stone (n 11 above) 4.