CROSSING OUT: TRANSGENDER (IN)VISIBILITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CULTURE by SEAN SAUNDERS B.A., The University of Waterloo, 1990 M.A., Queen’s University at Kingston, 1991 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA December 2007 © Sean Saunders, 2007 ii Abstract Spanning the period from the early years of the Cold War to the early twenty-first century, Crossing Out argues that medical theories of gender variance which emerge in the middle of the twentieth century are bound by the Cold-War–era discursive limits within which they were articulated, and that the ideological content of those theories persists into late-century research and treatment protocols. I parallel these analyses with interrogations of literary representations of transgendered subjects. What emerges most powerfully from this analysis of literary works is their tendency to signify in excess of the medical foreclosures, even when they seem consistent with medical discourse. By reading these two discursive systems against each other, the dissertation demonstrates the ability of literary discourse to accommodate multifaceted subject positions which medical discourse is unable to articulate. Literature thus complicates the stories that medical culture tells, revealing complex and multivariate possibilities for transgendered identification absent from traditional medical accounts. In tracing these discursive intersections the dissertation draws on and extends Michel Foucault’s theory of subjugated knowledges and Judith Butler’s writings on the formation of gendered subjects. Chapter One establishes the Cold War context, and argues that there are significant continuities between 1950s theories of intersexuality and Cold War ideology. Chapter Two extends this analysis to take in theories of transsexualism that emerged in the same years, and analyzes the discursive excesses of a 1950s pulp novel representation of a transsexual. Chapter Three establishes that the ideological content of the medical theories remained virtually unchanged by the 1990s, and argues that multivalent literary iii representations of transgenderism from the same decade promise the emergence of unanticipated forms of gender identity that exceed medical norms. Chapter Four is concerned with transgendered children, as they are represented in medical writing and in young adult and children’s literature. Interrogating fiction which negotiates between established medical discourse and an emergent transgender discourse, the chapter argues that these works at once invite and subvert a pathologizing understanding of gender- variant children while simultaneously providing data that demands to be read through the lens of an emergent affirmative notion of trans-childhood. iv Table of Contents Abstract.............................................................................................................................. ii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ vi Dedication ........................................................................................................................ vii Introduction — Disciplining Fictional and Medical Discourses ...................................... 1 Narrative and medicine................................................................................................. 3 Disappearing voices.................................................................................................... 10 The necessity of possibility......................................................................................... 13 Theory and methodology, and their application ......................................................... 15 From sexual chaos to gender variance........................................................................ 28 Embodied gender ........................................................................................................ 37 Chapter 1 — Chaos Contained? Intersex Research and the Cold War ........................... 41 “The attainment of heterosexual maturity is one of life’s main objectives”............... 42 “Would you have to remove that vagina?” Containing sexual chaos......................... 58 “He would pass anywhere as the advanced graduate student that he was” ................ 68 Chapter 2 — Buried Knowledges: Cold War Transsexualism and Taxonomic Crises... 89 I Fantasy Foreclosed.............................................................................................97 “What kind of a girl could she be?”............................................................. 97 “Miss Neutral Zone of 1953”..................................................................... 104 The instabilities of the era.......................................................................... 108 “A dame with a rod is like a guy with a knitting needle”.......................... 115 II A Morbid Impulse............................................................................................ 129 American transvestites: “Senseless, silly and asinine”.............................. 129 Christine Jorgensen: “Genuine transvestite” ............................................. 150 III Harry Benjamin................................................................................................ 158 Sex: “Dubious and ambivalent”................................................................. 158 “Fixed boundaries cannot be drawn”......................................................... 162 “The Symphony of Sexes”: Harmony........................................................ 171 “The Symphony of Sexes”: Dissonance .................................................... 175 v Chapter 3 — Expansive Gender: At the Close of the Twentieth Century .................... 185 I Disrupting the “real”........................................................................................ 192 Becoming gendered ................................................................................... 192 The “missionary position” ......................................................................... 199 From “missionary position” to “unanticipated juxtapositions” ................. 213 II Enforcing the “real” ......................................................................................... 216 Trans-Sister Radio and “the old patterns of desire” .................................. 216 “Faggot cunts” ........................................................................................... 220 “Missionary position” (redux) ................................................................... 223 III Exceeding the “real” ........................................................................................ 233 Pathography and transgendered experience............................................... 235 A monstrous pathographer......................................................................... 240 “I keep trying to integrate my life”............................................................ 246 “Without the scars”.................................................................................... 262 Chapter 4 — Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls Will Be…: Sorting the Children .......... 283 “Orienting him to his biologically and culturally acceptable gender role” .............. 284 Fully human children ................................................................................................ 296 Genderqueer kindergarteners share EVERYTHING! ................................................ 302 Tyke Tiler: Neither schoolboy nor tomboy .............................................................. 306 Tyke Tiler: A case study in “gender identity disorder”? .......................................... 318 Tyke’s “unsuitable companions” .............................................................................. 327 Tyke’s cry of protest ................................................................................................. 332 “I’m a choirboy. I don’t know what I’m going to turn into” .................................... 336 Everything is show: Choirboy performativity .......................................................... 339 “Fuck me, yours are bigger than mine”: Genderqueer choirboy affirmations.......... 344 Conclusion — “To Rewrite This Body”........................................................................ 364 Notes............................................................................................................................... 379 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................413 vi Acknowledgments For his enthusiasm for this work from the outset, for his dedication to it while it was in progress, for his commitment to bringing it to fruition, and, above all, for the intellectual and scholarly attention he has so generously given to me, I sincerely thank and acknowledge my supervisor, Richard Cavell. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the others on my committee, Janet Giltrow and Tom Kemple. Their commentary on my work has been generous and stimulating, and their keen engagement with it has made it better. vii Dedication This is for Tasha, who makes everything possible. 1 Introduction — Disciplining