Geoscience Reference
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Given this, it's perhaps no wonder that many gays and lesbians were
suspicious of transsexuals. By 'authentic' Stone was referring to autobi-
ographies that might represent transsexual experience and aspirations in a
different way.
Stone butch blues
met her call within three years. Feinberg's
insistence that it's a
fictional
autobiography was arguably significant: it was
an intentional subversion of the claims to authenticity of putatively 'factual'
transsexual autobiography. 'Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell
the truth,' Feinberg intoned in the Afterword to the reissue of
Stone butch
blues
(Feinberg, 2003: 303). Though based heavily on Feinberg's experience
of growing up as a working-class Jew in upstate New York after the Second
World War, the 'autobiography' is of a fictional character ( Jess Goldberg)
whose rejection of her femininity (in both sexual and gender terms) is
recounted using all the imaginative resources usually associated with creative
writing (see
Plate 5.2
). '[Using] fiction', Feinberg has written,
gives you the ability to tell a very painful story that's filled with all the shame of
growing up differently in [a]
society. I felt, by telling it autobiographically,
that I would pull back in a lot of places. I really felt that by fictionalizing the
story, that I would be able to tell more of the truth
...
....
(Cited in Prosser, 1998: 190)
So much for the genre blending and bending features of
Stone butch blues
.
What representation of Feinberg's life, and by implication of other trans
people, did the novel seek to convey? At the considerable risk of oversim-
plifying a complex story, let me make three summary observations. First,
in
Stone butch blues
, Jess Goldberg tries, for much of the story, to 'pass'
as a male. Her choice of clothes, her double mastectomy, her decision to
undergo hormone therapy: these and other things show her conforming to
'normal' transsexual behaviour and to conventional gender roles rooted in
'sex reassignment'. Second, Jess suffers the usual humiliations at the hands of
men who discover her transsexual proclivities and gender-bending appear-
ance. In one scene, for example, she's raped by policemen who deliberately
remove all her clothes, 'their sexual violence . . . an attempt to enforce on
the transgendered butch the indisputable fact of her femaleness against
their maleness, her essential and antithetical bodily difference from them'
(Prosser, 1998: 191). The rape is a brutal act of heternormativity (see
Box 5.4
again) designed to reinforce sex and gender 'purity'.
If these elements of
Stone butch blues
repeat the narrative conventions of
earlier transsexual autobiographies, the third most certainly does not. Jess
stops her hormone treatment halfway through; she has no further 'correc-
tive' surgery; she takes no additional measures to 'pass' as a man or to hide
her female characteristics. She chooses to inhabit the borderlands between
male and female: 'I'm a he-she,' Jess declares towards the end of the novel,
'That's different' (Feinberg, 1993: 147). Her journey doesn't have the 'usual'
destination of a 'conventional' trans person. Jess decides to be unique.
