AS the 2002 Gay Games kick off in
Australia, join us for a gender-bending
discussion with a sexologist, a female to male
transsexual man, and the coeditor of Unseen
Genders: Beyond the Binaries.
We tend to confuse sex with gender, and to
equate our gender with what our genitals look
like. But is this misguided?
Natasha Mitchell: Hello, Natasha Mitchell
here with you for All
in the Mind and thanks for joining me today
for what I hope will be something of an
adventure into the inner workings of our
sexuality.
MUSIC: Blur “Girls and Boys”
Jamison Green:
What we tend to think
it seems like the medical profession tends to
think is that sex is real and gender is not real
because gender is socially constructive,
that’s sort of the classical phrase. But
actually I think that sex is every bit as social
constructed as gender and gender is every bit as
real as sex.
Felicity Haynes:
And they interact with
each other in such a close and intimate
way.
Jamison Green:
We are very, very
complex beings.
Felicity Haynes:
Yes.
Natasha Mitchell: Two of the
participants at last week’s 5th
International Congress on Sex and Gender
hosted in Perth, which brought together people,
transgender, gay, straight and lesbian,
including academics and activists to talk
shop.
With the 6th
International Gay Games on in Australia this
week, there’s been a whole suite of gender
bending forums and discussions like this one
happening right across the continent.
And when it comes to tweaking with gender and
looking beyond the binary that we know as male
and female given that ‘the mind’ is
this program’s turf, today I thought
we’d explore the following question. Is the
sex between our ears more important than the sex
between our legs?
Certainly the polarisation of gender into
‘male’ and ‘female’ is a
powerful division in most societies. But does
‘man’ equal ‘male’ equal
‘masculine’ all of the time? And does
‘woman’ equal ‘female’ equal
‘feminine’ all of the time? When it
comes to sex and gender is one just about
biology and the other just about identity?
Sexologist Milton Diamond is Professor
Anatomy and Reproductive Biology at the
University
of Hawaii and heads up the Pacific
Centre for Sex and Society. He’s most
famous for his work with transgender and
intersex people and it throws up some very
interesting questions about the relationship
between our sex, gender and genitals.
Intersex people are those who have biological
characteristics of both males and females
ranging from ambiguous genitalia, say to even an
extra X or Y chromosome.
100s of people are born this way in Australia
each year but this isn’t openly
acknowledged. And the common practice is for the
well-meaning medical profession to nominally
assign intersex children to one sex or another
soon after birth through surgery and perhaps
hormone treatment.
But this is a practice that Milton Diamond
argues strongly against, not the least because
of his work with the well-known
case of John/Joan.
John was born a boy, but during a messed up
circumcision his penis was removed and it was
decided that he should undergo sex reassignment
surgery and be brought up as a girl, Joan. But
things didn’t go quite to plan.
Milton Diamond:
That case was used as
a justification for the idea that you can change
the individual’s genitals and therefore
reassign how that individual will
think.
In other words the
thinking was the penis was accidentally removed.
An individual without a penis by that primitive
definition has to be a girl.
Natasha Mitchell: Very
Freudian.
Milton Diamond:
Absolutely,
that’s like saying a woman who has a
mastectomy can’t be a woman anymore. A
woman who has a hysterectomy can’t be
– that’s crazy. That’s
society’s imposition on individuals and
people can say well why not reconstruct a
penis.
The unfortunately
simplistic comment that’s usually made is
‘it’s easier to dig a hole than build
a pole’ and again, the physicians are well
meaning so they are trying to do their best but
they were dealing with the idea, “well, I
wouldn’t want to be a boy going through
school without a penis, how are we going to deal
with a pissing contest?” “And how are
we going to do those other things? And in case
he’ll be made fun of.”
Yes they might be made
fun of, first of all most kids don’t show
their genitals to anybody, kids are terrible
about everything. If you wear glasses
you’re four eyes, if your fat you’re
‘fatty’, if you’re 'skinny
you’re ‘beanpole’, kids
can’t hide their glasses, they can’t
hide their fat…but they sure can hide their
genitals and don’t have to show it to
anybody.
Then, as they develop
they say “you know, I do want a
penis”, or “I do want a vagina”
or whatever it is. When the child becomes old
enough usually about puberty then we can so
“OK, you can have the surgery you
want”.
Natasha Mitchell: With John and
Joan though and now David I understand - known
publicly as David, this confluence, if you like,
between sex and gender that we tend to demand
really wasn’t there?
Milton Diamond:
It wasn’t there
because he was being called girl, he was
expected to do girl things and everything in his
inner being was saying this is alien to me.
Remember he didn’t know he was male. It was
poignant, you know the way he would say
“every Christmas I was hoping for a gun or
something and they gave me a doll and I threw
that away and played with my brothers’
toys”.
Natasha Mitchell: It’s a
very confusing scenario though isn’t it
because it also questions the very assumption we
make that gender is socially constructed?
Milton Diamond:
That’s right, I
mean in a way science is fortunate and the
medical community is fortunate that David was
what I would call “Joe Six Pack”. He
is so macho, you know that they probably kept
him in a confined room, a pink room you know, he
never would have turned out.
There were other people
that are much more flexible and much more
malleable and I’m not giving that a good or
bad feature so there are some people who will
accept their impositions, societies’
imposition. The ‘tomgirl’ who is told
you can’t go on the swing or climb you
know, you have to stay home and read or
whatever. But that doesn’t mean
they’re happy doing it.
Natasha Mitchell: I guess the
conclusion that we can come to here from your
observations or certainly your argument is that
we’re not psychologically neutral when it
comes to our sexuality at birth.
Milton Diamond:
Absolutely,
you’re correct we are not. I use the term
we’re predisposed, you have a predisposed
bias, act in certain ways, you accept certain
things and you rebel against others. Some
societies allow you to rebel more strongly than
others. Fortunately in the west we’re
allowed to rebel.
Natasha Mitchell: My concern is
that if we do say then that we are born in a
sense with a gender identity of sorts that we
then go back to those days where that becomes
our limitation, that’s our limiting factor,
we are born this gender and because we attach a
whole series of social roles and expectations to
that gender therein we have our lifelong
role.
Milton
Diamond:That’s
true but that’s the fault of any
stereotype. Whether you say well
‘you’re Chinese you have to act so and
so, or you’re Japanese, you have to act so
and so’ or ‘you’re Islamist you
have to act so and so’, or
‘you’re Australian’ you know. I
mean that’s the fault with any
stereotype.
Natasha Mitchell: Sexologist,
Professor Milton Diamond there from the
University of Hawaii. And you’re tuned to
All in the Mind with me Natasha Mitchell coming
to you on ABC Radio National and internationally
too via Radio Australia and the web.
Today’s gender bending questions –
is the sex between our ears more important than
the sex between our legs? And are sex and gender
the same or different?
And joining me now are two more participants
at the recent international Congress on Sex and
Gender that was held in Perth.
Dr Felicity Haynes is senior lecturer in
Education at the University of Western Australia
and Co-editor of Unseen
Genders: Beyond the Binaries: She’s
also co-director of the International
Foundation of Androgynous Studies.
And visiting Australia from his home state of
California is Jamison
or James Green who’s an internationally
respected writer, speaker, educator and advocate
for transgendered and transsexual people.
Jamison is also on the board of the
non-profit organisation Gender
Education and Advocacy and also of the
Transgender
Law and Policy Institute. And he’s past
president of FTM
International – an organisation focused
on the needs of female to male transgender
people, of which he is one.
Thank you both for joining me on the program
today.
Jamison Green:
Thank you so much
Natasha.
Natasha Mitchell: Now Jamison
Green can I start with you, your own journey has
been an interesting one and as I understand it
you began your transition to be male in 1988
just before your 40th birthday.
Jamison Green:
That’s
correct.
Natasha Mitchell: And was then
identified legally as male three years later but
you started out in life as you describe it
female bodied and male gendered. Let’s
unravel what you mean by that, what did that
feel like?
Jamison Green: I
didn’t feel connected to my female body, I
was much more socially comfortable in male space
if you will. You know when you’re 5 or 6
years old it’s sort of hard to define
what’s male space and female space but I
was more comfortable playing with the boys. And
when I was with all girl groups, I would often
feel not quite one of them. And they often also
felt that I wasn’t quite one of them
either. But because I had a female body there
were expectations that I should be in this other
mental space I guess, that I was supposed to
relate more with them. And people would become
confused about whether I was a boy or a girl.
Sometimes even when I was wearing a dress adults
would ask me, are you a boy or a
girl?
Natasha Mitchell: And how did
you respond to that?
Jamison Green:
Well I knew I was
supposed to say I was a girl so I did. Of course
there were tomboys and that was OK and I
understood that people sometimes thought of me
as a tomboy and I was supposed to outgrow it but
I didn’t feel that that was really going to
happen.
Natasha Mitchell: I wonder if
we fast forward to when the possibility of women
having sex reassignment surgery first became
apparent to you in the 70s I think it was, was
this an option at all accepted amongst your
women friends many of whom identified as
lesbian, or was it considered heresy of
sorts?
Jamison Green:
Well in those days it
was pretty much considered heresy and I think
some people felt that actually there were some
friends of mine who felt that I should go to one
of these programs and present myself and
because-
Natasha Mitchell: As a case
study?
Jamison Green:
Yes, and because I was
so masculine they would go, the people at the
programs would go “oh, this is wonderful,
absolutely you’re a transsexual” and I
would laugh in their faces and say that
“hah, hah fooled you, I’m just a very
strong woman”!
But I didn’t feel
like I could really do that because I thought if
I actually got that close to the possibility of
having my sex changed that I might actually do
it. And at the time I was absolutely terrified
of it.
Natasha Mitchell: Then you were
more comfortable with the label
‘lesbian’ but not with the label
‘woman’. How did you distinguish
between the two in your mind at that time?
Jamison Green:
Well ‘woman’
was sort of an adult person who accepted
themselves as having a female body and accepted
certain things about what that meant and I just
didn’t seem to relate to that at
all.
Natasha Mitchell: Was it about
more than simply who you were sexually attracted
to?
Jamison Green:
Oh yes, much more than
that. Sexual attraction really has very little
to do with it. I did not accept a lot of things
that other women around me, even lesbian women
accepted about their reality. For instance I was
not afraid to go out at night, you know walking
alone, it just didn’t occur to me that
there should be anything to be afraid of. I
didn’t understand how really truly fearful
women are until after I became a man and had
that fear turned on me because I was perceived
as a threat, just because I had a male body
now.
Natasha Mitchell: Right, so how
was it seeing it from the other side so to
speak, feeling it from the other side?
Jamison Green:
You know I still have
continuity in my body in spite of the fact it is
now dramatically different than it was,
it’s still me inside here so I have the
privilege of observing life from those two
angles except that there’s still a
constancy here, it’s not like a reverse 180
degrees for me.
What I see is much of
the way that men actually are hemmed in and
depressed by the prescriptions around their
behaviour. Not that I don’t think that
women shouldn’t be afraid of men because
there certainly are bad men out there but I
think that we, because we don’t examine how
we treat each other, for instance men pretty
much learn not to smile at strangers and to stay
away from children because you’re always
going to be suspect.
Natasha Mitchell: And
acknowledging the continuity within your body as
you just have I wonder how then you relate back
to the experience of the gender that you were
assumed to be from birth – female, where
does that fit in your conception of yourself
today?
Jamison Green:
Well it’s
interesting if you take sort of a Jungian view
that all men have an ‘inner feminine’
and all women have an ‘inner
masculine’. Right now I feel that the
‘outer masculine’ and the ‘inner
feminine’ are perfectly balanced in me.
Whereas when I had a female body I felt that the
‘inner masculine’ was simply too large
to fit in that ‘outer feminine’ space.
And I felt extremely uncomfortable.
Natasha Mitchell: So in a sense
it’s been a real process of matching mind
and body.
Jamison Green:
Exactly.
Natasha Mitchell: Felicity
Haynes if I can come to you, the sexologist
Milton Diamond who’s been in Australia this
past month does a lot of work with intersex and
transgender people and he argues, and these are
his words, that the sex between our ears is more
important than the sex between our legs. What do
you think of that idea?
Felicity Haynes:
Well it seems to me to
be a question that assumes that James’s
identity was gendered identity, and the
continuity that you’re talking about is
between his ears. Now where do we get that from?
I think the gendered identity is there in your
practices, it’s there in the way you
perceive the world. And James just talking then
about how he had to change his perceptions
because he was mirrored in peoples’ eyes as
a male, change the way he sees the world. Now
you could say that’s cerebral but it’s
a physiological thing as well…
Natasha Mitchell: Certainly the
concept of gender for women has been a
liberating one in the idea that gender was
socially defined, or that argument and separate
somehow from biology and that…we’re
not exclusively confined to our so called
biological roles i.e. child birth etc.
Felicity Haynes:
Humans are very
interesting creatures, they are continually
trying to build theories and theories demand
that we make differentiations so we’ve made
a differentiation between male and female and we
have to see yes, there is a difference but we
don’t have to reify it as being essentially
caused by some vital ingredient.
We also make
differentiation between sex and gender because
that’s handy for our discourse, it makes it
easy to think of gender as something that we
believe and feel and sex is something
you’re born with. Caused by hormones or
caused by the size of your hypothalamus,
chromosomes but when you look at the multitude
of variations the causal theories don’t
stand up. We’ve got people with X Y
chromosomes who still identify as female, but
gender and sex and your gender identity and your
body work in tandem. Most of our life we are
trying to find a balance between our gender and
our body and the two are interacting so
constantly dynamically, that you can’t
separate them out as easy as the doctors I
believe and the theoreticians want you
to.
Natasha Mitchell: Well Felicity
Haynes certainly in the mainstream at least many
of us have you know a tendency to go “me
Jane, you Tarzan”, we tick the box male or
female.
Felicity Haynes:
Women are from Mars
and –oh I’ve got that the wrong way
round…
Natasha Mitchell: It’s
totally habitual. I mean do you think we have a
tendency to equate sex and gender, and also to
equate them with where are genitals are at?
Felicity Haynes:
There’s a
tendency and Freud was one of the first people
to say the most important characteristic that
makes us look for is gender identification is
genitalia. We immediately ask ourselves on
meeting a strange person ‘is it a male or a
female’? We’ve picked that up,
it’s part of our cultural history but this
is that peculiar dynamic interaction once again.
Our language constructs the physical reality
that we see and they both have this dynamic
interchange, and this is the thing that really
fascinates me.
Jamison Green:
Yeah, I think so and I
think we in our language we are very, very
sloppy with our use of terminology. We tend to
use gender as a euphuism for the word sex, and
another factor here is that most peoples’
gender and sex do line up. So why shouldn’t
everybody else feel the way they do? And most
people are appalled at the idea that someone
would actually allow a surgeon to touch their
genitalia.
You know it’s just
something that a person who doesn’t match
may need to do. Some people are OK with that not
matching too, and that’s important to
acknowledge I think.
Felicity Haynes:
That’s right so I
don’t think the genitalia are the crucial
thing myself I think for various individuals
different things are important. I should say
that I see myself as a female, I’ve born
children, I’ve had heterosexual
relationships and thoroughly enjoyed them but
I’m 6 foot tall, I’ve got very big
feet and I’ve got facial hair. So some
parts of my physiology are not quite compatible
with my feminine gender identity. However, my
gender identity of ‘woman’ is
comfortable with those things. So, see what I
mean, you can’t pick out features that are
meant to be typical of male and female and so
that they’ve got to all follow a straight
line. They’ve all got to be a compact
parcel in which any variation on the
stereotypical male is a transgression I
suppose.
Natasha Mitchell: Jamison Green
what do you think of this idea, the argument
that the sex between our ears is more important
than the sex between our legs, or is that just a
trivial demarcation?
Jamison Green:
Actually I think that
Dr Diamond is trying very hard to come up with
language that lay people can understand that how
a person feels about who they are is important,
not just that we are what our bodies say we
are.
Natasha Mitchell: Clearly for
you though in the decision to undergo
reassignment surgery all those years ago now and
hormone treatment to become a man, to identify
as a man physically as well as emotionally, the
impression is that the features of your body
were just as important as the landscape of your
mind. What was between your legs was just as
important as what was happening in your
mind.
Jamison Green:
Well I think that is
the case for most people who identify as
transsexual and it is a crucial that their body
reify, to use Felicity’s words, their
identity which is what most people
experience.
Felicity Haynes:
But there will be some
people who don’t need to have a penis
constructed because their identity of
‘maleness’ doesn’t require that
physiological change. There are others for whom
it’s desperately important because they
want to mirror the image of masculinity the
society values. But for lots of those people
it’s impossible to either afford the
surgery, it’s impossible to ‘out’
themselves in that way.
But you see, Milton
Diamond wants to have when he says the sex
between your ears I think he’s right if he
does mean this thing, this sense of self. But,
what I was trying to say is, that in his book on
John/Joan he seems to identify it as a
physiological location perhaps in the
hypothalamus, perhaps in the thickness of the
Corpus Collosom. And when you’re trying
that desperately to find a physical or sensual
cause for gender identity that’s where I
think you’re making a mistake.
Natasha Mitchell: Jamison
Green, this interface between the biological
sciences and the medical sciences and culture
offer some really interesting tensions when it
comes to this discussion about sex and gender.
Now look clearly the medical profession has
shifted in its response to the needs of those
who identify as transgender and surgery is
available for people, complicated and expensive
though it is, but I wonder are there some very
powerful prevailing stereotypes in the
mainstream medical profession when it comes to
gender, and indeed to gender reassignment
surgery?
Jamison Green: I
think there are and I think there are some
certainly enlightened practitioners who are
starting to learn better about this. But I think
one of the prevailing myths that the medical
profession has is that, for one thing, they
think that male to female (MtF) transsexual
people are less emotionally stable that female
to male (FtM) people.
Natasha Mitchell: And
what’s their rationale?
Jamison Green:
Because female to male
people are just becoming men, they are more
stable, they are more rational, they are more
intelligent, you know they are more likely to
have jobs, they are more likely to have
partners, you know all these kinds of things
which I think horrid stereotypes and very, very
sexist.
There was a doctor at
one point who basically would not perform the
final surgery on a male to female person unless
she sexually excited him. That was his criteria
for whether or not he should do surgery and I
think, you know, we’re getting beyond that
now thankfully - in that more of the surgeons
are not looking this as a really important
psychological and social issue for people. And
instead of thinking that ‘these are just
crazy people so we’ll just do a little
cutting on them and they’ll be happy,
we’ll send them away’.
Natasha Mitchell: On the
question of gender Jamison I take it that you
believe that there is something about gender
that is not expressed only in clothing, in hair
styles, in body shapes, in voices or even the
awareness of a body sex. What is that something
else? Can you articulate it for me?
Jamison Green: I
think it has something to do with soul, I think
it’s absolutely ethereal. Just like sex is
one thing it can be genitalia and it can also be
an activity that we do. Gender is
characteristics that we ascribe to bodies, it is
also the deeply felt sense of who we
are.
It is like a language
that we communicate when others meet us. They
don’t see our genitals, they don’t
know what our reproductive capacity is, they get
a sense of who we are based on secondary sex
characteristics, clothing, various social cues
and also, and I know this from my own existence
as a female bodied/male gendered person who was
wearing dresses when people would ask “are
you a boy or a girl” – what are they
getting that from?
Natasha Mitchell: A more
intuitive sense you suspect?
Jamison Green: Right.
Natasha Mitchell: Oh, it’s
a fascinating mind field, Jamison Green and Dr
Felicity Haynes thank you very much for joining
me on the program today.
Felicity Haynes: Thank you.
Jamison Green: A pleasure.
Natasha Mitchell: And I’ve
been speaking to Jamison Green, a California
based but internationally known writer, educator
and advocate for transgendered and transsexual
people. And to Dr Felicity Haynes, senior
lecturer in education at the University of
Western Australia.
And that’s where we leave the program
for today. Don’t forget our website at
abc.net.au/rn just look for All in the Mind
under programs and click your way to a bonanza
of transcripts and audio.
I’m Natasha Mitchell, until next week ta
da for now.
Guests:
Jamison Green
Writer, speaker, educator, & advocate for
transgendered and transsexual people.
www.jamisongreen.com
Professor Milton Diamond
Professor of Anatomy and Reproductive
Biology
Director, Pacific Center for Sexuality and
Society
www.hawaii.edu/PCSS
Dr Felicity Haynes
Senior Lecturer in Education
University of Western Australia
Co-author of the book, Unseen Genders: Beyond
the Binaries
fhaynes@ecel.uwa.edu.au
Publications:
Unseen Genders: Beyond the Binaries
Author: Editors: Felicity Haynes and Tarquam
McKenna
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing (2001)
ISBN: 0-8204-5024-3
More information:
The
Hidden Gender - A feature from ABC Science
Online
Milton
Diamond's Online Publications at the Pacific
Center for Sex and Society
International
Foundation for Androgynous Studies Inc
Includes information about the 5th International
Congress on Sex and Gender held in Perth
Australia, October 2002
FTM
Australia
An Australian organisation for female to male
transexual and transgender people. For "transmen
and those affirming their masculine
identity".
FTM
International
International organization serving FTM
transgendered people and transsexual men.
ABC
TV program explores Intersex issues
Story aired on the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation's TV's science program called
Catalyst about intersex children.
