Yesterday I finally viewed the photos of Caitlyn Jenner—a
65-year-old bionic what? We have no word for her in our country except
transgender. She claims she is a woman and her outer features are female and
beyond the dreams of almost any other 65-year-old woman in the world. She
sports the best body that money could buy and a life of pure athleticism could
have developed. Everything has been transformed into the most beautiful appurtenances
available, bought with a physical and psychological pain that perhaps rivals the
growing pains of the typical adolescence. Anatomy isn’t destiny, nor is it
physical identity. Caitlyn is, she says, a woman with a penis.
In Thailand she wouldn’t call herself a woman. She’d be one
of the third gender, and culturally acknowledged to be that. In the West she
has to choose one of two or use “trans” to define herself. In Thailand she
would be katoey. How narrow and how revealing our English vocabulary is.
The same criticisms that Nora Ephron laid against James/Jan
Morris are cropping up against Bruce/Caitlyn, who seems to look at the state of
being female as a perpetual slumber party with the girls and the life-long right
to wear nail polish. Morris became a gushing, twee version of Miss Marple in
her early interviews but snapped out of it to become a respected writer once
again. Maybe it’s the barrage of hormones that turns newly-minted femmes into
teenage girls, blithering about hair, make-up, guys? God knows we all go
through that stage, even if some of us are smart enough to keep it to ourselves.
And exactly what does Caitlyn mean when she claims her
brain is much more female than male? As one of the world’s leading athletic
competitors, does she believe that urge to compete and excel is part of her
female brain or is that a compensating physical trait developed because she was
denied the joys of shopping? I hope she explains because a lot of her
fellow-females would like to know about that brain concept, as Elinor Burkett
trenchantly inquired in last week’s Sunday NYT.
Burkett seems most annoyed that men are now co-opting the
reality of being a woman. “Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities
are not my female identity.” Well, no, it isn’t and they aren’t. But they are
another sort of female, who in our narrow culture have endured the indignities
of being scorned as “effeminate,” “faggot,” and “sick” if they let their female
identities slip into the open. That’s a rough road to travel by yourself, as
katoey in the West do.
Why can’t we acknowledge that there are more than two forms
of gender? And that if brains are shaped by environmental experience, that the
experiences of a katoey sculpt a brain that is different, separate but equal,
to that of a female and male who grew up in the same culture?
“I was born in the wrong body” isn’t a cop-out, as Birkett
suggests. Amy Bloom’s small and insightful book on gender, Normal, proves that.
For some, being “born female or male” is the result of a rapid decision made by
a doctor who, faced with an infant’s ambiguous genitals, wasn’t really sure. Where
are hormones produced and when do they first begin to manifest themselves in a
growing body? Children in Thai villages often announce their gender when they
are far too young to know about Nong Toom, the katoey boxer, or other social
influences. How do they come to that knowledge?
The rage Birkett displays against the vocabulary—of
transgenders rejecting the term vagina or even woman—is absurd. “Binary views
of male and female” haven’t been smashed at all by Birkett and others as long
as society continues to define people solely as male and female. “Gender
neutrality” isn’t what’s needed here—gender expansion is. Two is obviously not
enough.
