AQueerTheory of Below the Belt: Deconstructing Gender says
The notion that gender is performative and artificial has become popular among sociologists, critical theorists and feminists. They have often objectified trans women by using their lives and experiences to prove the socially constructed nature of gender. For example, in West and Zimmerman’s famous 1987 article, “Doing Gender,” the authors use a study of a trans woman (Agnes), who actively learns stereotypically feminine behaviors as part of her transition, in order to demonstrate that gender is a social achievement and not something that emerges naturally in a person. What they failed to note is that Agnes and other trans women had to (and still have to) adopt such an archetypal feminine gender expression in order to convince doctors that they are ready to have surgery. The Harry Benjamin Standards of Care basically require trans women to portray themselves as stereotypical women in order to be eligible for a vaginoplasty. While academics are happy to use trans women’s lives in order to demonstrate the artificial nature of gender, they rarely ask trans women themselves to reflect on their experiences or study trans women for long periods after their transitions.
I particularly appreciate this paragraph because it actually preserves gender as a construction, on the one hand, while clarifying how it’s constructed: you feel like “a man” or “a woman” at the identity level and you’re either instructed implicitly by culture or expressly by doctors, parents, or teachers/coaches/trainers how that should be expressed, i.e. it’s constructed and impressed on you.
(Something very similar happens, obviously, when you feel like “a straight” or “a homosexual” or for that matter “an asexual” at the level of orientation… and are then instructed — sometimes brutally — as to how that should be expressed.)
The effect is only exaggerated with trans men and women: the statement “you only get reassignment surgery if you construct your assigned gender” is miles apart from “only those who construct their assigned gender seek reassignment surgery!”
This necessarily implies, by the way, that there are plenty of trans people who don’t, won’t, or can’t complete their reassignment because they don’t conform to (or perhaps identify with) the gender standards constructed for them. (Final note: that some trans people collude with gender construction doesn’t invalidate the point. All trans people are part of the society they live in; not all are going to have critical consciousness about it.)
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Two other great elements that make it worth reading Julian’s post. First there’s an excellent summary of Julia Serano’s discussion of the interplay between “oppositional sexism,” which I first discussed here and “traditional sexism.” Second, there’s a nice summary of the only two standard stereotypes about trans people: the “deceptive” trans (see Jaye Davidson as Dil in “The Crying Game” and the “pathetic” trans (see John Lithgow in “The World According to Garp.”) Here too the externally-imposed stereotypes make a hash of real trans existence.
