Capitalizing on Transsexuality and Intersexuality
A classic example of ungendering can be found in the Emmy Award-nominated HBO movie Normal, which depicts a trans woman named Roy who comes out to her family as trans. The movie focuses on how Roy’s revelation and her ensuing transition affects her relationship with her wife and children in their small midwestern town. In an interview about the film that appeared on HBO.com, writer and director Jane Anderson said that, despite the fact that the subject of transsexuality dominates much of the film, she did not envision Normal as a story chronicling the “adventures of a transgender person,” but rather as a study of one marriedcouple’s love for one another.3
So if the movie is not about transsexuality per se, then why did this non-trans filmmaker go to the trouble of including a transsexual character? Anderson explained that she used transsexuality primarily as a device to challenge the couple’s relationship. In fact, she draws a comparison between the way she employs transsexuality and the way other writers have used extra-marital affairs in the past. While Anderson seems to believe that stories that center on extra-marital affairs have become passé (both because the premise has been overused by writers and because many people continue to love the person who has cheated on them), she views transsexuality as “ultimate betrayal” that can occur within a marriage.4
So, in other words, one of the characters, Roy, is ungendered in order to throw a monkey wrench into the couple’s marriage. And transsexuality is no longer a marginalized identity or a grueling issue that real human beings struggle with; it is merely a literary device—a “metaphor” for the “ultimate catastrophe” that can strike a relationship.
You would think that Anderson—as a woman and a lesbian—would be aware of the troubling way sexual minorities are portrayed (and their voices silenced) by the media, and that she would, at the very least, make a modest attempt to ensure that her character was respectful of the transsexual experience. Unfortunately, this is not the case. When the interviewer asked her if she drew on any sources when researching the movie, Anderson unabashedly answered that she relied solely on her “imagination,” that she made it up all herself.5
Unencumbered by any need to have her character reflect reality, Anderson was free to turn Roy into a transsexual caricature. She explained in the interview that she purposely set out to make sure that the audience would not take Roy seriously as a woman.6 Perhaps this is why Anderson makes no attempt to have any of the other characters come to relate to Roy as female or use female pronouns when addressing her. Roy herself doesn’t seem to protest this fact or assert her female identity at any point; in fact, she is inordinately meek and docile for someone who is in the process of coming out as transsexual. In a pre-movie interview, Tom Wilkinson, who played Roy in the made-for-cable movie, said, “I wanted to retain the kind of innocence about the whole thing that that guy had. He doesn’t know quite what he’s getting into.” (Emphasis mine.)7 Thus, like his director, Wilkinson shows no respect for his transsexual character’s gender identity. As a result, Roy comes off as excruciatingly mousy and confused, presumably because it never occurred to either Wilkinson or Anderson that a man who wanted to be female could be any other way.
For someone who claims to have little interest in making a film about the “adventures of a transgender person,” Anderson sure does fancy her film up in all of the accoutrements of the transsexual transitioning process: The dialogue includes discussions about electrolysis, a play-by-play description of how a vagina is created during MTF sex reassignment surgery, and even talk about what breast size Roy can expect after she goes on hormones. At one point in the movie, close-ups of Roy’s hormone prescriptions—Premarin and Spironolactone—precede an early morning family breakfast scene in which Roy, her wife, and her daughter (who has recently had her first period) all start arguing with each other in an apparent hormone-induced frenzy. (Upon watching that scene, I wasn’t quite sure if I should be more offended as a woman or as a transsexual.)
In the end, the most damaging aspect of Normal is that it gives the impression of being a serious film about transsexuality without ever incorporating the perspectives of real-life transsexuals. There are countless other movies that, on the surface, seem to be more demeaning or insulting toward transsexuals, but I find Normal to be more damaging than most. At least the Ace Venturas and South Parks of the world don’t even bother to pretend that they know what they’re talking about when they create transsexual characters. Anderson, on the other hand, did just enough homework about transsexuality to make her film dangerous. She poached and pilfered the transsexual experience without any sense of respect or responsibility for the very people she exploited in the process.
Another writer who knows just enough to be dangerous is Jeffrey Eugenides. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex centers on an intersex person named Cal, who is raised female until he discovers his condition during puberty. The book follows Cal as he develops male physical attributes and eventually a male identity. So why did Eugenides set out to write a book about an intersex person? In an interview, he explained that he simply “used a hermaphrodite” (a word most intersex people find stigmatizing) as a metaphor for the confusing changes in identity and sexuality that all people face during adolescence.8 So, this time, a main character is ungendered to make a larger point about puberty and metamorphosis.
Eugenides says he was initially inspired to write Middlesex after reading Herculine Barbin, a real-life account of an intersex person who lived during the nineteenth century, published by French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1978. Eugenides was fascinated by the book, but he found that, “as an expression of what it is like to be a hermaphrodite, from the inside, Herculine Barbin’s memoir is quite disappointing. She just tends to go into this moaning, talking about how misfortunate she is and ... it’s sad.”9 Rather than be inconvenienced by the overwhelming depression and isolation that often typifies the lives of gender-variant people, Eugenides set out to invent his own new-and-improved intersex story: “I wanted to write about a real person with a real condition. I did a lot of research on the details, but in terms of figuring out what hermaphrodites psychologically went through, I did that from my imagination. That’s how I work, I try to identify my narrator and my characters as much as I can instead of going out, observing other intersex people and focus[ing] on the details. Hopefully I make the right assumptions and choices about all these characters, so that someone [who] is interested in intersex reads the book.”10
Middlesex is chock-full of descriptions of atypical chromosome combinations, genital configurations, and other highly detailed medical references to intersex conditions, yet it remains remarkably untainted by actual intersex perspectives or voices.11 The book reads like an intersex adventure story, with colorful scenes of Cal’s visit with an eccentric, John Money-esque doctor who wishes to perform nonconsensual genital surgery on him, or his befriending other intersex people (as well as transsexuals) when he fulfills the standard gender-variant-person cliché of working as a performer at a sex club. For a character who is supposedly fourteen years old at the time of these events, Cal’s narration remains remarkably light, humorous, and generally above the fray at all times, as though it had been whitewashed of all of the shame, self-loathing, and self-consciousness that plagues gender-variant adolescents as their bodies, identities, and behaviors are placed under society’s microscope. The way that Eugenides dwells in all of the physical aspects of intersexuality while playing down the emotional trauma and stigma that generally accompanies it gives the book an extraordinarily objectifying and voyeuristic feel to someone who is actually familiar with the subject.
Eugenides and Anderson both claim to use intersexuality and transsexuality merely as metaphors, but this is clearly disingenuous. While Middlesex may be an epic novel that follows a Greek American family through several generations, what consistently grabbed people’s attention in book reviews and interviews was its intersex protagonist. And while Normal may be a film about marriage, it was clearly marketed as a film about transsexuality. The success of Middlesex and Normal was clearly due in large part to the fact that they offered mainstream audiences a glimpse into what are largely considered the mysterious and exotic lives of gender-variant people. Eugenides and Anderson capitalized on the taboo nature of intersexuality and transsexuality without acknowledging the fact that the stigma associated with these conditions forces real people to the margins of society. These writers took two of the most maligned and misunderstood sexual minorities in existence, hollowed them out, and poured in their own non-intersex, cissexual biases, inclinations, and impressions. In a world where transsexual and intersex works of art never get the chance to be seen on HBO, or are not considered mainstream enough to be nominated for Emmys and Pulitzers, the facade presented in Normal and Middlesex profoundly shapes and solidifies a naive audience’s opinions about transsexuals and intersex people. By replacing gender-variant voices with their own, both Eugenides and Anderson ensure that real transsexual or intersex voices are not heard.