Ftm: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society
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Ftm: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society
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Overview
In this ground-breaking study, Aaron Devor provides a compassionate, intimate, and incisive look at the life experiences of forty-five trans men. Emerging into 21st-century political and social conversations, questions persist. Who are they? How do they come to know themselves as men? What do they do about it? How do their families respond? Who are their lovers? What does it mean for everyone else? To answer these and other questions, Devor spent years compiling in-depth interviews and researching the lives of transsexual and transgender people. Here, he traces the everyday and significant events that coalesce into trans identities, culminating in gender and sex transformations. Using trans men's own words as illustrations, Devor looks at how childhood, adolescence, and adult experiences with family members, peers, and lovers work to shape and clarify their images of themselves as men. With a new introduction, Devor positions the volume in twenty-first century debates of identity politics and community-building and provides a window into his own self-exploration as a result of his research.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023346 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/29/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 740 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Aaron Devor, PhD, FSSSS, FSTLHE, is the Founder and Academic Director of the world's largest Transgender Archives, the world's first Research Chair in Transgender Studies, a former Dean of Graduate Studies (2002-2012), and a professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Read an Excerpt
FTM
Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society
By Aaron Devor
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Aaron DevorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02334-6
CHAPTER 1
Have Female-to-Male Transsexuals Always Existed?
Have transsexual people always existed? This is an impossible question to answer because the concept of a transsexual as a distinct type of person has had currency only since the latter half of the 20th century. Perhaps there have always been people who, if they lived today, would call themselves transsexual and would request sex reassignment. Perhaps there have been people in other times and places who would have said that they felt "trapped" in a body of the wrong sex. We can only speculate on the basis of the very incomplete historical record available to us today.
The issue becomes especially difficult when the question is narrowed to focus specifically on female-to-male (FTM) transsexuals. The lives of women throughout history have been less well recorded than those of men. The reasons for this are myriad and have been well argued by historians of women. Sexism must be attributed with the lion's share of responsibility for this silence, but a long tradition of a lack of regard for the social history of everyday life must also be held accountable. The few stories which survive from antiquity have largely been in the form of myth, some of which may have been embellished from fact. The surviving accounts of females who lived some parts of their lives as men in the centuries between the time of the ancients and now have been recorded largely because those females were somehow publicly chastised for living as men. For each person who was found out, there were no doubt many more whose gender transformations were never discovered.
I have searched for predecessors of today's female-to-male transsexuals in historical records of females who lived their lives as men. Some of them left behind indications of their motivations. Others were discovered to be female on the occasions of their deaths, and so we may only guess as to their reasons for recasting themselves so successfully as men. Even so, those who went on record explaining their reasons for passing as men usually were doing so as part of some sort of legal defense. The price of answers unacceptable to the authorities of their day was often high; sometimes the accused paid with their lives. Hence even what we know from those persons who were able to voice reasons for their transformations may tell us more about what they thought would be acceptable to the authorities of their day than about their own actual motivations.
It is therefore crucial to have some understanding of what gender meant to players in their particular time periods. The bifurcated concept of gender that the Western world holds dear today and upon which the definition of transsexualism is based has not always been ascribed to by the peoples whom the West claims as cultural ancestors. This means that although we may be tempted to retrospectively name behaviours by today's standards, if we wish to begin to understand their meanings for those who lived them, we must peer at them through the lenses of their times as best we are able.
I have chosen to cite, as the precursors of today's female-to-male transsexuals, those female-bodied persons of other times and places who lived at least several years of their lives as men. I have included in this catchment those who would today be called heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered crossdressers. I have also included those who, by the standards of their day, might have been attributed with "slight" hermaphroditism but who would probably not be so designated today. I have therefore included female crossdressers of other cultures who took on many of the characteristics of the men of their society but who may or may not have felt the need, as do transsexuals of today, to be considered to have become males as well as men. By modern definitions, probably only some would be classified as transsexual, while in their own worlds they may well have been afforded the full social status of men.
I have, for the most part, restricted my investigations to people of Western European extraction and those whom they claim as ancestors. I have therefore included discussion of the female cross-gender practices of Greeks and Romans of the classical period, ancient Hebrews, and early Christians. This discussion is followed with tales of early Christian cross-dressing saints who lived during the classical period. The next section looks at the medieval period in Western Europe. The sixteenth and seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries are then reviewed. I have closed my investigation in the 1950s, when the case of Christine Jorgensen was splashed across the headlines of newspapers in Europe and North America and brought transsexualism to the attention of the general public. I have also noted some of the female cross-gender practices of the Native peoples of North America and briefly mentioned those of some African and Asian cultural groups which have either influenced or been influenced by Western European culture.
Ancient Greeks and Romans
The ancients believed that the world had been created and was guided by a multiplicity of gods and goddesses. Richard Hoffman has argued that gender was a fluid concept in polytheistic societies such as those of the ancient Greeks and Romans (or in the polytheistic societies of many contemporary indigenous people). The basis of his contention lies in the religious beliefs of such peoples. Polytheistic pantheons are made up of many different visions of godliness. Societies based on polytheistic cosmologies tend to see the world as having come into being through sexual interactions between gods, or between divine personages and humans, or between deities and animals. It is not uncommon in such creation myths to encounter supernatural beings who change sex or gender, who incorporate aspects of both male and female in one being, and who change themselves or others from humanlike creatures into beasts and back again. In such societies, the gods are taken as divine examples after whom earthly mortals might model themselves. If there are no clear demarcations between the sexes or genders in the heavens, Hoffman argues, the dividing lines on earth will be likewise blurred and permeable.
Thomas Laqueur has presented a somewhat different but not altogether conflicting perspective. He argued that from antiquity until the eighteenth century there was really only one sex but that the number of genders varied through the centuries. That one sex, of course, was male. Females were seen as essentially males who lacked sufficient "vital heat" to cause their reproductive organs to become external to their bodies. As Laqueur argued, it was believed that what we now know as vaginas were (not analogous to, but were) inverted penises, that labia were the female foreskin, that uteri were scrotum, and that ovaries were testicles. Further, it was believed that bodies could change from female to male as a result of raising the body temperature through vigorous exercise or that if females spread their legs too widely their internal organs might fall out of their bodies and they would thus become males. Sex changes could also be wrought by miracles performed by saints. Note, however, that all such transformations always proceeded from female to male, or, in the parlance of the time, from less to more perfectly developed. Due to the fact that all people were seen as essentially male, it was not possible for males to turn into females, although there was always the dreaded danger that they might become womanish. Thus there was only one sex — male — which manifested itself in the variations of gender called women and men.
Theoretical distinctions notwithstanding, practical social distinctions were made between women and men in the ancient world. Each had clearly defined appropriate social roles in the world of everyday life. Flesh-and-blood women (as opposed to goddesses) in classical Greece and Rome were considered to be profoundly inferior to men. Aristotle, for instance, wrote in the fourth century B.C.E. that it is a permanent and unchangeable state of affairs that "the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules and the other is ruled." Women were protected and cared for within the family, but they had no formal power in the larger society. Women were ruled first by their fathers, later by their husbands or older brothers, and eventually by their sons. Their socially prescribed reason for existence was the production of children and keeping of the household for the paterfamilias. Few women were ever allowed to run their own lives.
Commoner women who were dissatisfied with their approved social roles had few choices outside of the relative safety of the family. They could only become fallen women. They could survive through prostitution or as concubines; there were no other options. Slave women also served their masters in these sexual capacities. Some aristocratic women fared better. If there were no male heirs in their families, they were allowed to inherit wealth in their own right. If a family had produced scholars for generations and a daughter showed an aptitude for study, she too might be allowed to become a scholar and have some independent life of the mind. But the only route out of their restricted roles imaginable to most women was simply to become men through the interventions of goddesses who had many and great powers.
Surgically created transsexuals clearly did not exist in classical times, but stories of female-to-male sex changes and of women whose lives mimicked those of men have survived. One Greek tale which has survived to this day involved the birth of a girl child to the woman Galatea, whose husband, Leucippus, had threatened to kill any female children she bore. In order to save the life of her daughter, Galatea dressed her as a boy until she began to reach puberty. Galatea then appealed to the goddess Leto to change her daughter into a son. Leto obliged, thus saving the life of the doomed female child.
Several Roman authors also recounted tales of female-to-male sex changes. Martial, for instance, told of a woman who ate, drank, played sports, and was sexually active with women in a way that outdid most of her male contemporaries. Lucian described the woman Megilla as having shaved her head in the fashion of men and then boasted that she was "a man in every way." Pliny reported on several instances of female-to-male sex changes, one of which he claimed to have witnessed with his own eyes. He flatly stated that "transformation of females into males is not an idle story," an opinion which seemed to be shared by many of his compatriots. These gendered values and belief systems of the Greeks and Romans stood as the basis for Western European cultural values throughout the dark ages and for several hundred years beyond.
Jewish Thought and the Early Christian World
The creation myths of monotheistic Judaism and hence also of early Christianity were in conflict with those of the Greeks and Romans. The Hebrew God was not born of any kind of sexual union; nor did the God of the Hebrews create the world by sexual intercourse. Furthermore, there were no sexual liaisons of any kind between gods, nor between deities and humans. Hebrew monotheism demanded clearly delineated and permanent differences between both the sexes and the genders. Humans who worshiped a monotheistic God and wished to act "in God's image" therefore created a society in which there were strict divisions between all things: between heaven and earth, between holy and profane, between the divine and humans. In such a world view, the sexes and the genders were kept as cleanly demarcated as possible at all times, with men holding the highest spiritual ground.
The early Christians built much of their theology on a mixture of Greek and Roman philosophy and Jewish law. For the early Christians, like the Greeks and Romans among whom they flourished, sexes reflected the social character of persons' actions and beliefs rather than immutable biological facts. The early Christians also elaborated on the Jewish concept of spiritual gender crossing, which held that females' acquisition of certain masculine traits improved them spiritually. The Christian Saint Jerome expressed a philosophical truism and a social reality of his time when he proclaimed in the fourth century C.E. that as "long as woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and be called a man." Thus women could elevate themselves spiritually by renouncing their flesh and devoting themselves entirely to their religion. It was believed that those women who did so with the greatest fervor could thereby transform themselves into men.
Although the early Christians believed female-to-male sex changes to have been possible, the stories which have been told and retold over the ages have been of gender rather than sex changes. Quite a few pious early Christian females, it would seem, took Saint Jerome literally and made themselves over as men: Anastasia Patricia, Athanasia, Dorotheus, Eugenia, Euphrosyne, Marina, Pelagia, Perpetua, and Theodora, to name a few. Even though such religiously zealous women were officially prohibited from disguising themselves as men for the purposes of joining male religious communities, many of those who did so were later revered as saints.
The story of Pelagia is illustrative of this phenomenon. In one version, Pelagia started out as a dancing girl and prostitute in Antioch. Upon her conversion to Christianity she became ashamed of her past and departed Antioch to start a new life disguised as a man. In his new identity as Pelaius, he lived out the remainder of his life in Jerusalem as a dedicated Christian. It was only after his death that the sex of Pelagius was discovered to have been female. In another version, Pelagia was a marriage resister who fled her fate before her marriage could transpire. She dressed herself as a man and took up residence in a monastery; later, as Pelagius, he was elected to the position of prior of a convent. Unfortunately, the portess of the convent got pregnant and condemned Pelagius as the perpetrator. Pelagius, who offered no credible defense, was expelled from the convent and died in disgrace. Pelagius's femaleness was discovered only after death.
The story of Marina contains similar themes. Marina's story started out when her father entered a monastery. As long as she was a daughter he could not bring her with him, but by disguising her as a son he was able to continue to care for his offspring. The "son" Marinus lived on at the monastery after the father's death. As in Pelagius's story, Marinus was accused of seducing a woman and making her pregnant. Marinus and the infant were thrown out of the monastery, whereupon they lived as beggars until finally readmitted some years later. It was only after the death of Marinus that the body was found to be female.
The values of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and early Christians dominated the societies of the medieval European period. For hundreds of years, few intellectual advances were made by Christian thinkers beyond the state of knowledge and philosophy reached by the ancients.
The Middle Ages
The early Middle Ages were a time of social disintegration in the Western world. The trade, commerce, and cities of the Roman Empire fell into disrepair, and the overarching state institutions established by the empire devolved into decentralized idiosyncratic rule by local small-scale despots. The Christian Church grew in importance as a governing body because it retained a centralized but widely arrayed, more orderly communications network and a hierarchical system of agents strategically deployed in every village and town.
Over the course of the thousand years following the fall of the Roman Empire, Christian Europe initially languished in a shambles, then gradually began to rebuild. Agricultural methods improved production sufficiently to support a larger population base, a ruling class, and the growth of feudalism. Larger towns, trade and commerce, and governments were once again established. But as civilization grew in Europe, millions of people lost their lives to wars, the crusades, and the Black Death. Throughout most of this highly unstable period, the Christian Church and Jewish religious institutions provided the only learned intelligentsia. It wasn't until the fifteenth century and the Renaissance that the new humanism began to flourish.
The lives of most women in medieval Europe were dominated by the cycles of reproduction and agricultural production. Survival for peasant women usually meant marriage. Marriage meant an entire adult life spent either pregnant or nursing a baby while working at all labours of agricultural production except the sowing of fields. Sometimes, when not enough was produced on the land to support a woman's family, peasant women would also hire themselves out to work for others at half, or less, of the wages which a man might make. Those women so unlucky as not to become married or so unfortunate as to become widowed found themselves in dire straits. Honest work for single peasant women paid too poorly to support life. Their only options were prostitution or thievery. Some women, knowing their limited choices as women, chose instead to become men. Then, at least, they might be able to remain independent, alive, and ostensibly honest.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from FTM by Aaron Devor. Copyright © 2016 Aaron Devor. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword, 2016 / by Jamison Green
Foreword, 1997 / by Jamison Green
Acknowledgements
New Introduction
Original Introduction
Part I: First Questions
1. Have Female-to-Male Transsexuals Always Existed?
2. Theories about Transsexualism
Part II: Childhood Years
3. Finding Out about Gender: Theories of Childhood Gender Acquisition
4. Family Scenes
5. Who Would Want to Be a Girl?: The Women (and Girls) in Participants' Families
6. Men Rule: The Men (and Boys) in Participants' Families
7. Lessons Learned at Home: Summary of Family Relationships
8. Childhood Friends and Foes: Relationships with Non-Family Members
Part III: Adolescence
9. Adolescence Is about Change
10. Crises at Puberty
11. Adolescent Friendships
12. Women Are Different: Relationships with Female Relatives
13. Access Denied, Restrictions Apply: Relationship with Male Relatives
14. Looking for Love, Groping for Identity: Adolescent Sexuality
15. Concluding Adolescence
Part IV: Pre-Transition Years
16. Finding Identities
Part V: Changing Over
17. A Long Road
18. Making the Decision
19. Making the Changes
20. Coming Out Stories
21. Are We There Yet?
Part VI: Life after Transition
22. Nature Calls: Toilet Traumas and Medical Necessities
23. The Naked Truth about Sexuality
24. Visions of Genders
25. Lessons from the Journey
Part: VII: Concluding
26. Conclusions and Questions
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Subject Index
Participant Index
What People are Saying About This
I often say that I decided to pursue a gender transition despite what I read in the books that were available to me—a handful of harsh, challenge-filled biographies about trailblazing transgender pioneers. With the notable exception, that is, of 'the trans man's bible'—Devor's big red hardcover that still sits, 20 years later, prominently on my bookshelf. FTM was hot off the presses right when I needed it most. Devor—gently, insightfully, starkly, and respectfully—put forth a beautifully written illustration of how life could be for me, made evident by those who bravely chose to share their lives for this book. I like to think this book provided me with the how-to for grabbing my amazing transgender life by the balls!
In this new edition of FTM, Devor, who so brilliantly previously captured the remarkable stories of transsexual men, continues to illuminate the need for insight into the transsexual man's life experience. Years ago, as a transsexual man searching for a reflection of my experience and guidance on my impending journey, I found what I was seeking in the pages of this book. In this day of increasing trans visibility there still remains a lack of trans male images, histories and experiences leading to a continued lack of visibility and opportunities for mentorship, which Dr. Jamison Green so eloquently states in his pointed new foreword. Perhaps the time has come for a more equitable representation of transsexual men in the movement for trans justice.