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that of a female. The paradox is that he behaves in a stereotypically 'male'
way - by using physical force without any moral restraint or compassion -
against the very sex and gender he himself aspires to become. By fixating
on women's skin, he's seeking to appropriate part of their bodily nature in
order to counterfeit his own. In amacabre way, Demme's film thus reproduces
conventional ideas that sexual and gender identities are ultimately rooted in
corporeal differences between men and women . 20
Challenging dominant representations of trans people, either in main-
stream society or in politically visible (and ostensibly radical) sub-
communities, has been a slow and difficult task. The recent success of 'trans'
studies in the social sciences and humanities arguably reflects the values of
tolerance and free speech that, unusually compared with many other arenas
of life, characterise the academy (however imperfectly). But what sorts of
communicative media and representational genres have been available to
trans individuals to build a better understanding of - and more respect for -
their preferences and aspirations among non-academic audiences? And how
influential have they been?
One answer to the first question is autobiography. The prime example
remains Stone butch blues: a novel (Feinberg, 1993, reissued 2003), writ-
ten by the influential transgender activist and left-wing campaigner Leslie
Feinberg (author of the above-mentioned pamphlet Transgender liberation ).
Originally circulating only within the trans community in the United States,
within a few years the topic's readership extended to people of all stripes
who, for whatever reason, were interested in unfreezing many established
sociocultural norms. Its sub-title announces its fictional status, contrary to
conventional autobiography, which is, of course, a sub-genre of a large fam-
ily of texts that report on 'real' events and people, be they past or present. 21
This sub-genre has, historically, been very important for transsexuals. It's
allowed many of them to record in great detail their experiences, emo-
tions and aspirations when inhabiting bodies that felt somehow 'wrong'.
These personal stories have presented themselves as 'truthful' and 'authen-
tic', reproducing the convention that autobiographies don't involve having
to represent a life story from another person's perspective (as in biography).
However, the American cultural theorist Bernice Hausman (1995) was one
of several critics to point out that 'conventional' transsexual autobiogra-
phies were, in fact, complicit with biomedical discourses prevailing between
the 1950s and 1990s. Knowing what evidence they needed to present to
medical professionals in order to undergo sex reassignment, many transsex-
ual autobiographers, Hausman and others argued, told selective stories that
conformed to a 'biomedical script'. 'What is lost', Sandy Stone argued,
is the ability to represent authentically the complexities and ambiguities of lived
experience . . . Instead, authentic experience is replaced by a particular kind of
story, one that supports the old constructed positions.
(Stone, 1991: 295)
 
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