Transsexuality

Transsexuality, in which members of one biological sex assume the identity of the other, existed before there was a word for the phenomenon. Transsexuality emerged as a separate identity during the mid–twentieth century when practitioners of medicine and psychology, who had sought to define gender and sexual identities since the late nineteenth century, began to distinguish it from homosexuality (sexual attraction to the same sex) and transvestism (wearing the clothing of the opposite sex). Typically, doctors and psychologists, seeking to maintain gender norms they considered necessary to social order, defined these identities negatively, contrasting with what they considered a normative heterosexual masculinity. The history of transsexuality has therefore been closely intertwined with that of masculinity in American culture.

Transsexuality in Western society has been defined with reference to a sharp gender dichotomy: An individual is understood as either male or female, and a transsexual is one who moves from one to the other of these identities. Yet the earliest Americans, like many other non-Western societies, recognized more than two sexes. In many indigenous American cultures, for example, transsexuality as such does not exist, and individuals regarded as neither “masculine” nor “feminine” are not considered aberrant. At one time, many Native American cultures acknowledged not simply two genders, but also an additional, third gender that anthropologists often refer to as berdache. Such persons, far from being considered abnormal, enjoyed enhanced status. Among the Cheyenne, berdaches served as medicine people. Navajo berdaches were holy people who acted as mediators in community disputes, and among the Crow they were tribal historians. Among Euro-Americans, however, the same bigendered social system that created gender inequalities privileging men and masculinity over women and femininity has also led to a stigmatization of those who, like transsexuals, challenge that system, and are thus perceived as a threat to masculinity and male power.

The growth of medical technology in the twentieth century allowed individuals in the United States to express their identities through a change of anatomical structure. The earliest cases of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) occurred in Scandinavia, and the first known transsexual in the United States, Christine Jorgenson, had to travel there for SRS in 1952. The combination of media attention and the conservative cultural climate of Cold War America—where fear of communism often intertwined with fears of perceived sexual deviance and a self-conscious defense of patriarchal nuclear-family structures—prevented Jorgensen from successfully reintegrating into society. But Jorgensen's high profile did increase Americans' awareness of the difference between transsexuality and transvestism, prompting hospitals in the United States to begin offering SRS, at least to men. Women [Page 459]seeking SRS continued to face strong discouragement, a difference due in part not only to the difficulties of constructing an artificial phallus, but also to cultural resistance to allowing women to claim masculinity and its associated status.

In 1952, George W. Jorgensen, Jr., became Christine Jorgenson, the nation's first known transsexual. Publicity surrounding Jorgenson's operation increased Americans' awareness of transsexuality, but also stigmatized it because most Americans considered transsexuality a threat to “normative” masculinity and to the bigendered system underlying male power. (©

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