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Overview
'In a nutshell, the book offers a much-needed alternative view of transsexuality from a psychiatric and European point of view… Chiland's interesting and well presented book is a valued reminder of how different the same topic can appear in an alternative perspective' - Transgender Tapestry
Colette Chiland exhibits a masterful and encyclopedic knowledge of transsexualism, drawing together the insights of depth psychology, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology and sociology for rethinking transsexualism in terms of identity, subjectivity and the wider socio-historical world. This book is written with considerable precision on complex, technical issues, whilst at the same time keeping the broader question of the relationship between transsexualism and society firmly in mind.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781412902649 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
| Publication date: | 05/29/2020 |
| Series: | Disseminations: Psychoanalysis in Context |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.44(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
TRANSSEXUALISM
Illusion and RealityBy Colette Chiland
Wesleyan University Press
Copyright © 1997 Editions Odile JacobAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8195-6658-6
Chapter One
SexMy sex is a matter of my genital organs. It is the entry in my birth certificate, which follows from the appearance of my genitalia: I belong either to the female or to the male sex (there is no other choice in our culture). It is everything that society assigns to me on the basis of this official record: the places I am required to frequent, the symbolic position I am to occupy in interpersonal exchanges, the clothes I may wear, the attitudes I am to adopt, and the feelings I am supposed to have. It is my lived identity. It is my sexual desires as I feel them.
SEX AND GENDER
Since the 1950s researchers have taken an interest in the experience of human beings for whom these different aspects of sex are discordant. The first discordance to receive attention was that between the various components of biological sex (chromosomes, gonads, internal and external genitalia - in other words, cases of pseudohermaphroditism or intersex); later the focus shifted to the discordance between biological and psychological sex (transsexualism and gender dysphoria). The pioneering work in the field was done by John Money, a psychologist at the world's first pediatric endocrinology unit, under Lawson Wilkins at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Money acquired an exceptional body of experience in this unit, which was attended by a large number of pseudohermaphroditic or intersexed patients. New vistas were opened up by the finding (Money et al., 1957) that the vast majority of these pseudohermaphrodites (100 out of 105) felt that they belonged to the sex assigned to them at birth according to the interpretation of the appearance - ambiguous or otherwise - of their external genitalia provided that their parents had raised them in that sex with conviction, continuity, and coherence, notwithstanding the contradiction with other biological parameters (karyotype and/or internal genital organs). In France, the observations of Léon Kreisler (1970, 1990), a pediatrician specializing in psychosomatic disorders, fully bear out the conclusions of Money and his team. In the event of conflict, then, psychology can get the better of biology - something that would have surprised Freud himself - leading Money (Money et al., 1955) to speak of 'gender roles', and thereby to distinguish between sex and gender (sex having a biological and gender a social or psychosocial connotation).
This distinction was quickly adopted in the English-speaking world. Robert Stoller, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst working with adults and a professor at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles), entitled his first book Sex and Gender (1968). The distinction in effect became de rigueur. Going beyond sexual dimorphism, Gilbert Herdt (1994, p. 21) called the dichotomy of sex and gender into question on the grounds that it was 'probably culturally bound and scientifically misleading'; however, he drew attention to the dangers of 'breaking precipitously with [this] convention'. It may therefore be retained, but on no account restrictively.
It was translation problems that caused me to question this distinction. In German there is only one word, Geschlecht, for both sex and gender. In French, you do violence to the language if you use genre wherever English says gender. You will not be understood even by cultivated people, but only by jargon-happy specialists. Of course, in the translation of Money or Stoller, a literal approach is essential if their concepts are to be respected, and this was the basis on which Yvonne Noizet and I set about the task of rendering Stoller (1985a, 1985b, 1990) into French.
It quickly became evident that translating these terms differently would result in a change of conceptualization. Moreover, this new conceptualization gradually took root in me because it facilitated exploration of the issues and made for more precise description. The use of the two terms sex and gender ultimately leads - in the work of certain sociologists and certain feminists in particular - to a divorce between gender and sex, whereas society would never distinguish genders if biological sexes had not existed. By speaking of biological sex, psychological sex, and social sex, we are not only expressing ourselves more clearly but also avoiding preconceived ideas.
DEFINITIONS: THE DIVISION INTO SEXES; SEXUALITY
The facts must be considered from two different viewpoints, that of the division of human beings into sexes (as a rule, into two sexes on the basis of sexual dimorphism, although there are also intersexed subjects) and that of sexuality, i.e., the coming together of the sexes. In French these two aspects are rendered by two different adjectives, sexué and sexuel respectively, and I would have preferred to use 'sexed' and 'sexual' as direct equivalents; however, because the English language does not, or does not yet, accept a term such as 'sexed identity', I shall conform to English usage and refer to 'gender identity' and 'sexual orientation'.
This distinction is blurred by authors such as John Money and Richard Green - a psychiatrist and lawyer who previously worked with Money and Stoller and is now at London's Charing Cross Hospital - who include sexual orientation (heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality) in the definition of gender identity. Money dislikes psychoanalytic language and rejects the term 'object choice' in relation to sexual orientation; for him, as he pointed out to me at a public discussion (1992), the partner is not an object, a thing. He suggests the use of the acronym G-I/R (Gender-Identity/Role) to denote a unity, which he defines as follows:
Gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public manifestation of gender identity. Both are like two sides of the same coin, and constitute the unity of G-I/R. Gender identity is the sameness, unity, and persistence of one's individuality as male, female, or androgynous, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behaviour. Gender role is everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male or female or androgynous; it includes but is not restricted to sexual and erotic arousal and response (which should not be excluded from the definition) (Money, 1992, p. 12f.).
Note that Money's definition (1) confuses subjective identity with social role, the psychological element being reduced to behavioural and social aspects, while identity can be read from behaviour, for identity and behaviour are two sides of the same coin; (2) distinguishes not two categories (male and female) but three (male, female, and androgynous); and (3) equates sex roles and sexual roles.
A comparable definition, according to which gender identity is the private experience of gender role and gender role is the public expression of gender identity, is to be found in DSM-III (1980), but not in DSM-IV (1994). Such a definition does not accord with certain facts of daily life and of clinical practice. For instance, a 'feminist' woman fighting for equal rights between men and women does not necessarily call into question her female identity. The women who struggled to secure female access to the universities did not want to be regarded as men, but were attacking sex roles: they wanted these to be redefined and in certain cases to be rendered independent of sex, neutralized, and made common to men and women. Again, it is not obvious that homosexuality is always experienced by the subject as a rejection of both his biological and his assigned sex: the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation must be preserved at least as a heuristic tool.
Gender has to do with language and, where gender is concerned, there is a temptation to assume that it is with language that children learn the difference between the sexes. This is illusory on two counts. First, core gender identity is already formed between the ages of 18 months and two years, before a child has acquired a mastery of language and the notion of grammatical gender. Furthermore, it is our Indo-European ethnocentricity that leads us to confer on gender an importance and universality it does not possess: whereas all Indo-European languages have either two genders (usually masculine or feminine) or three (masculine, feminine, and neuter), there are far more languages in which gender distinctions are unknown. Where genders are not distinguished (for example, in Chinese), children nevertheless learn that they are boys or girls. All societies distinguish roles according to sex, whether or not their language has genders.
Older authors (Meillet, 1921a, 1921b, 1936; Jespersen, 1924; Lyons, 1968) had already revealed the truth about gender, an entity that we assume to be universal because of our Indo-European ethnocentric illusion. The subject even became a feminist issue (Yaguello, 1978, 1989), gender being deemed to play a part in the oppression of women owing to the prevalence of the masculine. The linguistic concept of gender was perhaps most tellingly summed up by the British linguist Greville Corbett (1991): gender is a class of nouns that govern grammatical agreements. There are some languages in which gender is unknown, while others have many classes - up to 20 - that determine grammatical agreements (ibid., p. 5). There may be one gender (often the masculine, but sometimes the feminine) to which certain characteristics correspond and another that covers all manner of things that lack them. The gender to which a noun belongs is not solely and necessarily determined by sex, and hence by meaning, but is also a matter of morphology. A girl is das Mädchen in German not because girls are relegated to the status of things, but because all diminutives ending in - chen are neuter. The sun in German is feminine (die Sonne) - but it nevertheless remains a father symbol in the unconscious. This also demonstrates the limitations of women's demands for the feminization of professional designations (see Niedzwiecki, 1993), which have been acceded to in Canada, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and, to some extent, France (this problem arises to a lesser extent in English than in French) - as if things were changed by words, and as if the unequal rights formerly accorded to women resulted from the predominance of the masculine gender in the names of occupations or in grammatical agreements.
It is not enough to distinguish between biological sex and psychosocial gender. In my view, we come closest to the daily reality of human life and to clinical fact by distinguishing three levels - biological sex, social sex, and psychological sex - and two viewpoints - the division into sexes and sexuality. On each level there are aspects relating to the division into sexes and others relating to sexuality, so that two senses of the English word bisexuality must be distinguished: first, the quality of possessing the organs, behaviour, and characteristics of both sexes; and, second, that of having sexual desires for persons of both sexes, or of choosing sexual partners of either sex.
Bisexuality in Freud sometimes has a biological connotation and sometimes refers to a dual sexual orientation - the fact that every human being is both heterosexual and homosexual - whereas he only exceptionally uses the term in a psychological sense. Freud acknowledges the existence of a bisexual element at an anatomical and embryological level: 'For it appears that a certain degree of anatomical hermaphroditism occurs normally. In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex' (1905, S.E. 7, p. 141). However, Freud regards 'bisexuality' as more significant in women because they have two sexual organs: 'the vagina - the female organ proper - and the clitoris, which is analogous to the male organ' (1931, S.E. 21, p. 228). As we know, Freud interprets the clitoris as in effect male because it derives from the same embryonic tubercle as the penis, and clitoral masturbation is similarly deemed masculine. Even where identification is concerned, the twofold identification with father and mother is not with their psychological characteristics but with their positions in sexual desire. The contraposition of male and female is dominated by the polarity between active and passive (or active with passive aims). Freud, we may assert, was interested in sexuality and not in what is nowadays called gender.
As we shall see, the desires of a transsexual are sometimes dual, both homosexual and heterosexual, in orientation. The transsexual rejects any hint of bisexuality (in the sense of the possession of elements of both sexes) in himself; in his aspiration to belong totally to his new sex, he repudiates every vestige of his original one.
THIRD SEXES AND THIRD GENDERS
At the biological level, nature goes beyond dimorphism: there are not just two sexes, for some human beings also fall 'between the two sexes' (the intersexed or hermaphrodites and pseudohermaphrodites - terms that may be deemed synonymous). Héritier (1996), who assigns due importance to the difference between the sexes, fails to grasp the problem posed by these ambiguous cases that are intermediate 'between the two sexes'. They cannot be subsumed under a single heading; they can be classified neither within a continuum - a possibility considered at the Council of Europe Colloquium (1995) - nor in a third group as a third sex. Such a third sex, if it existed, would be a disparate group of 'third sexes' (Herdt, 1994), defined more by exclusion than by characteristics of its own, alongside the two main groups (male and female), which are both more numerous and more important in terms of their biological function of procreation. The intersexed combine characteristics of both sexes in variable degrees, and are often infertile. No human being is a hermaphrodite that is both fully male and fully female, of the kind that exists in certain animal species either simultaneously (for example, in snails - in which, however, cross-fertilization is the rule), or successively (in certain fish and crustaceans) - male first and then female, or vice versa. Intersex is not merely an expression of the anatomical bisexuality common to all human beings in the form of residues of embryonic structures (Wolffian or Müllerian ducts). Nor do intersexed persons fulfil the hermaphroditic ideal as it exists in the psyche or in myth.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from TRANSSEXUALISM by Colette Chiland Copyright © 1997 by Editions Odile Jacob
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