MALE FEMALING The glamour of transvestite fashion is the epitome of 1990s style, but the significance of cross-dressing and sex-changing goes much deeper than the annals of fashion. Ekins vividly details the innermost desires and the varied practices of males who wear the clothes of women for the pleasure it gives them (cross-dressers), or who wish to change sex and are actively going about it (sex-changers). This unique and fascinating book transforms an area of study previously dominated by clinical models to look instead at cross-dressing and sex- changing as a highly variable social process. Giving precedence to the processual and emergent nature of much cross-dressing and sex-changing phenomena, the book traces the phased femaling career path of the ‘male femaler’ from ‘beginning femaling’ through to ‘consolidating femaling’. Based upon seventeen years of fieldwork, life history work, qualitative analysis, archival work and contact with several thousand cross-dressers and sex- changers, the book meticulously and systematically develops a theory of ‘male femaling’ which has major ramifications for both the field of ‘transvestism’ and ‘transsexualism’, and for the analysis of sex and gender more generally. Male Femaling provides social and cultural theorists with a lively case study for the generation of new theory. Social psychologists and sociologists interested in seeing grounded theory applied to a particular case study will be well rewarded. It will be essential reading for students of gender studies who seek to explore the interrelations between sex, sexuality and gender from the informant’s point of view. Richard Ekins is Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. MALE FEMALING A grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing Richard Ekins Foreword by Anselm Strauss London and New York First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1997 Richard Ekins All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Ekins, Richard, 1945– Male femaling: a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing/Richard Ekins; foreword by Anselm Strauss p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Transvestism. 2. Transsexualism. 3. Social psychology. 4. Sex role. I. Title. HQ77.E45 1996 305.3–dc20 96–16356 CIP ISBN 0-203-42645-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-73469-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-10624-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-10625-7 (pbk) The SI [symbolic interaction] focus on people’s ‘definitions’ and ‘naming’ is not a call for subjectivism, individualism and the rest but rather a ‘respect’ for the subject matter of sociology—the meaningful (to the actors involved) social process. This inductive approach thus calls for emphasis on the experience of the participants in that process and is not a glorification of subjectivity. It seeks to stay on the level of social experience and thereby to exclude ‘foreign matter’ to that experience— such as causes, inferred personality variables, a preset methodology, and an a priori theory. (Warshay 1980 3(1):6) The goal of grounded theory is to generate a theory that accounts for a pattern of behaviour which is relevant and problematic for those involved. The goal is not voluminous description, nor clever verification. (Glaser 1978:93) To Wendy, Matthew and Luke CONTENTS List of Figures xi Foreword xiii PROGLOGUE 1 Part I Introduction 1 THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE FACES OF CROSS- DRESSING AND SEX-CHANGING 11 Part II Mainly theory 2 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE FROM THE STANDPOINT OF GROUNDED THEORY 25 3 THE SOCIAL WORLDS OF CROSS-DRESSING AND SEX-CHANGING 33 4 MALE FEMALING, MASKED AWARENESS CONTEXTS AND THE METHODOLOGY OF GROUNDED THEORY 47 Part III Mainly practice 5 BEGINNING MALE FEMALING 61 6 FANTASYING MALE FEMALING 71 7 DOING MALE FEMALING 86 8 CONSTITUTING MALE FEMALING 107 9 CONSOLIDATING MALE FEMALING 130 10 CONCLUSION 163 viii CONTENTS Notes 167 Bibliography 168 Index 177 ix FIGURES 7.1 Vicky Lee 1995 105 9.1 Tom’s fantasy alter ego, Holli White, c.1968 141 9.2 Gail Hill 1995 153 9.3 Phaedra Kelly with her wife Vanda 1982 160 9.4 Phaedra and her travesti sisters, Athens, 1995 161 xi FOREWORD Questionnaires and government forms always seem to include queries about personal identity that make no sense whatever. ‘Please check the proper answer: Race (White, Black, Yellow), Sex (Male, Female), etc.’ Race reduced to one of three or four boxes! What if you are Hawaiian born, with a Spanish/ Philippine father and a Japanese/Chinese mother, each of whom in turn had mixed combinations of parents? And the bodies of American ‘Blacks’ are constituted of indeterminate amounts of whiteness, but they are asked to ignore that when filling out the questionnaire. As for sex: the assumption here is that we are either male or female, that all life forms, including the human, come down to just those two classes of beings. Life is scarcely that simple—and my own prejudice is anyhow, then it would be boring—but, on the contrary, is immensely complex. To know just how complicated sexual matters are takes both experience and careful research. One of the virtues of this systematically ordered and beautifully written account of what are commonly termed ‘transvestite’ and ‘transsexual’ men is that it is based on meticulous research, done by someone who has spent many years in close contact with the people whom he has studied. Rather than rely on distancing research methods, Richard Ekins has used a combination of methods that have brought him into close and greatly varied contact with what he has written about here. He has used not just interviews and documents, but made close observations in a host of sites that give him the data for his analyses. One of the great virtues of the book is the vividness of that data, some of which he uses as illustrations of analytic commentaries and others which provide extended or focused data that allow for direct analyses. None of those interpretations express moral opinions, either damning or extolling the all too human behaviour about which he is writing. Inevitably you will come away from this book, whatever else your reactions might be, with an appreciation for the enormously varied forms of action that human life takes. Like it or not, condemn it or not, Ekins is saying, that is the way of the world, and he is trying to describe and understand it. xiii FOREWORD His mode of presentation consists largely of descriptions of situations, of quotations both short and extended, of longer case histories that seem less like ‘cases’ than life stories, and of analytic interpretations of these ethnographic and documentary materials. The interpretations are guided by ‘grounded theory methodology’, which is now increasingly being used by social scientists who do so-called qualitative research. The methodology emphasises building systematic interpretations in close interplay between yourself as researcher and the data that you collect, rather than being too much guided or indeed constrained by prior theories. For Ekins the methodology works very well, since the people whom he has studied have very rarely been studied by anyone who has been in such close extensive contact with them nor participated (in his case as a privileged observer) in so many of their social worlds. (Social worlds is one of his major concepts.) Among Ekins’ key ordering conceptualisations is ‘male femaling’, a process he traces in a series of steps from beginning awareness to a consolidating of identity. These steps are ‘ideal types’, for not everybody passes through all of them, nor are they irreversible. People can be quite into cross-dressing, for instance, but then leave the practice totally or in part; nor does everybody have the same sexual career—not at all. Moreover, to the variety of responses and identities a major contributor is which of three issues (or their combinations) is foremost? The first is the matter of sex (that is, the body itself). The second is sexuality (that is, genital feelings and responses). The third is gender (that is, the social and cultural accompaniments, like dress, posture, gesture and speech style). Men can have female sexual responses but be uninterested in feminine styles or in changing their sexual equipment. Or the emphasis may be on gender but not body or sexuality; or on combinations—and not forever, but changeable. All of this is tied to the development of associated identities and selves, in a sophisticated and systematic social psychological analysis. Accompanying this are Ekins’ observations about medical diagnoses and interpretations, of which he is critical but neither sarcastic nor blaming. He is just interested in observing what they are, and why, and their differences to those of the men themselves, and various consequences for medical treatment and for public opinion. Of the latter he is more openly critical not just for its overly simplistic character but because it is unceasingly negative. (Here he does understandably show moral indignation though trying to understand why it exists.) As an additional feature, Ekins makes various suggestions for areas of future research. It struck me, also, that his theoretical framework could just as well be used for studying aspects of [more conventional] heterosexual life, since they too can be viewed as having not so unchanging perspectives on body, sexuality and gender—whatever their actual sexual behaviour or choice of sexual objects may be.