Lauren, who is still with us all in spirit, handed me a link to this post about tranny stuff from Oso Raro’s blog.
(No offense to OR, here, who can hardly be expected not to consider all the issues raised by a transgendered person negotiating a queer sexuality in a culture that doesn’t admit either category. Yay thinking! It’s just that the phantom pain in my groin is particularly bad this evening, and it’s making me bitter.)
La Question Trans has been a complicated one for the Ls and Gs in the LGBT universe, as I discovered in conversations following my hosting of a National Coming Out Day event last fall. In the audience were many trans people, including many transmen. After the event, one of these transmen came up to me and started making conversation, flirting actually, with me. I had noticed him before the event, and since I have a sharp eye (see Passing, below, and cruising generally, natch) and am familiar with trans culture from so many years in the Bay Area, where there is a large trans community, I remember thinking at the time it was hard to tell whether he was a “real” man or not (Hips and hands are usually some initial clues, but not always). Of course he let me know he was a transman, and as our conversation proceeded, I remember thinking, “Wow, this is interesting.” He was an attractive man, with a beard that was, quite frankly, nicer than mine, an intelligent post-doc, who was making eye contact, smiling, and touching my arm casually but explicitly. I was bemused (after all, I am a married lady), but also pleased. What girl doesn’t like a little attention, especially from a handsome, intelligent man? At some point, another transman friend of his came up and they started discussing the new politics of the penis in transmen culture, and how they didn’t want or necessarily need a dick to be a man, but rather that they were men who wanted to maintain (i.e. keep) their vaginas. Here is where the Burt Bacharach soundtrack playing in my mind abruptly scratched off the surface of the record. This was certainly, um, new.
I wonder what the transman was thinking.
Something that for me informed these questions was the frisson of being cruised by a transman, I had been attracted to this transman at the lecture, and afterwards was a little freaked out, not necessarily in a bad way, but rather a thinking way. Kissing is fun, petting nice, but when it came down to it, what did it mean to be with a man without a penis? Penises are part of the whole man, and as anyone can tell you, you don’t (if you’re nominally healthy) fall in love with a penis, but with the man attached to the penis (an interesting ordering). But a penis seems, for gay men, as the prelude to a kiss, so to speak. The penis is but one aspect of the masculine infrastructure (body type, voice, facial and body hair, sartorial and manneristic presentation) that we sexualize as well as socialize. In the end, there was no resolution to the conversation that Prancilla, Zilla, and I had, except regardless of what we thought about it, the phenomenon of the gender indeterminacy for those trans folks who choose a non-surgical route was one that challenged us in ways that could be construed as productive, at the very least insofar as they lead us to examine our own lives and desire more closely.
…I fucking hate being a transsexual sometimes.
It’d be nice to not be one big gordian knot of expectation, perception, and desire. It’d be nice not to have to symbolize the bleeding edge of controversy. It’d be nice not to freak anyone out. It’d be nice to hit on some cute person and know–not just hope, but know–that whatever he knows, whatever he sees, whatever he assumes, it won’t matter.
Failing that, it’d be nice to be able to believe that all of those issues will fall neatly to one side or another for at least a few transguys once they figure out how to grow a fully-functioning penis out of the side of a mouse. It’d be nice to believe that it really is just a matter of anatomy. But we all know that’s horseshit, don’t we? Ask a post-op transwoman if there’s any cultural anxiety about her sexual self. It’s not about the body. It’s about the possibility of change. The rule is one gender, one body, one role, no substitutions.
Anyway. He goes on to talk about Transamerica, which I also saw.
It was okay.
It was hard for me to enjoy the movie because of the premise, which was just wrong. Basically, there’s this transwoman named Bree. She’s about to undergo bottom surgery. As the movie opens, she’s collecting letters from her therapist and her physician that okay her for the operation. Then she gets a phone informing her that she (a) has a son who is (b) in jail several states away. Her therapist tells her that she has to go get her son, and resolve this whole thing, or her therapist will not approve her surgery. She has less than a week before her appointment at the surgery center.
First of all, a transwoman in Southern California as desperate for surgery as Bree was would have been able to find a surgeon to perform it. Second, even had said desperate transwoman decided to go the standard route, it’s really unlikely that her therapist would have refused a referral to a transwoman who had transitioned socially and legally, started hormones, and undergone surgery. Third, had her therapist had any doubts about Bree, resolving those doubts would not have involved Bree going on a roadtrip days prior to surgery to track down the son she’s never met. In brief, the care provider writing the referral wants to be satisfied as to the following things:
1) Will the surgery make the patient feel more comfortable in his or her body and in his or her life?
2) Will the patient be able to handle the emotional fallout from surgery?
3) Does the patient have a realistic picture of the results, and a clear understanding of the risks?
Readiness does not involve fixing everything wrong with your life. And if the therapist was seriously worried that Bree was gonna have a post-op meltdown, or that Bree didn’t really want a vagina, the treatment would have involved therapy, not a cross-country scavenger hunt for Bree’s soul. It’s entirely possible, mind, that a transwoman would encounter an evil, abusive, manipulative therapist. That doesn’t mean that Bree had no other options, or that these kinds of marching orders would be good for a transwoman in Bree’s situation.
It was like watching a madcap romantic comedy about a transman’s hilariously ill-starred attempts to get to the post office and retrieve his mail-order penis in time for his wedding.
The storyline, about one transgendered person’s pursuit of both the surgery that will make her a woman and the need to tie up the loose ends of her life as a man (an unknown son makes his appearance at the commencement of the film) has a lot in common with classic American road movies, as Huffman’s character Bree and her son Toby (unbeknownst to him for most of the film), played by Kevin Zegers, travel cross-country to reach LA in time for Bree’s reassignment surgery and her psychologist’s permission, dependent on Bree’s open acknowledgement of her fathering of Toby.
This paragraph sums up every problem I have with structuring the narrative around Bree’s attempt to get The Operation. Surgery doesn’t make you anything but post-op. What if Bree hadn’t wanted SRS (the movie’s conception of transwomen doesn’t even bother with that possibility)? Would Bree never have become a woman? Would Bree have been less of a transsexual? Bree identified as a woman and lived as a woman. Why was she not yet a woman?
The most fraught moment in the film, powerfully portrayed by Huffman and Zegers, is where Bree must tell Toby the truth as Toby makes a sexual move on Bree. Oops! In response, Toby lashes out violently and then disappears.
Yeah. You introduce a tranny in the first act, there’s gotta be a vicious assault by the third.
Bree continues with her surgery, now devoid of the previous joy she associated with the event, in an evocative and coldly filmed montage that ends with Bree comforted by her psychologist (played by the fabulous Elizabeth Peña of Lone Star), claiming through visceral tears (snot included!) that “it hurts!”
This is where the unrealistic premise comes around to bite itself in the ass. A therapist almost certainly would not have required Bree to track down a child. A therapist almost certainly would have been very worried about a patient who doesn’t understand that SRS, being surgery, is painful, exhausting, and debilitating. That is the kind of thing you do cover prior to the referral letter. That is the kind of thing that falls under “realistic expectations.” That is a basic part of informed consent.
And you know what doesn’t help you prepare, physically or emotionally, for major surgery? A madcap roadtrip whose explicit purpose is to reopen as many emotional wounds as possible. Did this licensed professional expect Bree to emerge from the experience tranquil and well-rested? Did she think Bree would not be absolutely devastated? Did she not check in with Bree prior to surgery?
In Transamerica, Bree’s crime is not transgenderism, but rather her failure to fully connect. The film’s message to its viewers as well as to the LGBT community is similar. To live the life we want, the life we seek, we must connect.
…Or no vagina for you!
The Operation is already too fraught. It’s already seen as the dividing line between man and woman, real and fake, in a way that doesn’t really have much to do with us. It was disheartening to see a movie that accepted totally uncritically the idea that a transperson’s life can–or should–be divided in a straightforward way between Before and After. Bree deserved better treatment than that.