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explained as follows: first, most people are born with male or female
sex organs (their 'biological sex' is thus either/or); second, this disposes
them to find members of the opposite sex desirable (their 'sexuality' is
thus hetero); third, this then conditions their sense of self (they identify
as 'man' or 'woman' in various ways); and finally, this sense of self
conforms to and reproduces socially recognised subject-positions (i.e.
specific 'gender roles' that people are invited to play).
One of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the feminist and
queer movements of the 1970s was to show the
non-necessity
of causal
alignment. It was argued that biological sex did not determine any sex-
ual preference, gender identity or gender roles. Instead, belief in the
necessity of this causal alignment was shown to be a powerful social
convention. It was a convention that had caused many people great
unhappiness in their lives. It obliged them to play gender roles and
engage in sex acts that were not those they wished for. The argument
was that while biological sex may be natural, sexual preference, gen-
der identity or gender roles are all socially contingent, variable and
malleable.
Notable here was Janice Raymond. Her book
The transsexual empire: the
making of the she-male
argued that transsexuals, especially those who have
medical help to 'reassign' their sex, were both victims and agents of patri-
archy (Raymond, 1979). According to Raymond, the gender ideals of many
male-to-female transsexuals reflected regressive stereotypes that did little to
empower women. By placing such emphasis on
physical
change (superficially
clothing but, more profoundly, sex reassignment surgery and pharma-
cology), many transsexuals, in Raymond's view, perpetuated the mythic,
unidirectional link between anatomical sex, gender roles and self-identity.
Indeed, such emphasis gave encouragement to a medical establishment that
had long classified transsexualism as a 'condition' that could be 'cured'
In what became a foundational text in the then nascent 'trans' polit-
ical movement, Sandy Stone's essay 'The empire strikes back: a post-
transsexual manifesto' (Stone, 1991) challengedRaymond's uncompromising
interpretation. Stone criticisedmany of the transsexual autobiographies upon
which Raymond's representation of the 'trans community' was based. These
self-descriptions, Stone argued, reproduced the belief that transsexualism is
(and should only be) a
temporary
state of affairs before an individual 'passes' to
tialist
belief that it should be possible to identify a 'real' man or woman
underpinned the expulsion of a post-operative male-to-female transsexual,
calledNancyBurkholder, fromtheMichiganWomen'sMusicFestival in1991.
This lesbian-feminist event ejected Burkholder on the grounds that she was
'actually' a man, and in the process conflated and simplified anatomical sex,
