Raewyn Connell Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought

Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics
Author(s): Raewyn Connell

Source: Signs, Vol. 37, No. 4, Sex: A Thematic Issue (Summer 2012), pp. 857-881
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Raewyn Connell
Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward

New Understanding and New Politics
T ranssexual women are a small group who have been subject to fierce
and extended scrutiny. This scrutiny includes a feminist literature that
exposes a troubled and often antagonistic relationship between fem-
inism and transsexual women.
This relationship has recently been reconsidered from starting points
in feminist theory (Namaste 2009; Salamon 2010) and feminist politics
(Heyes 2003). My argument builds on this work, on recent histories of
transsexuality in the global metropole (Meyerowitz 2002; Stryker 2008),
on the beginnings of a political economy of transsexuality (Irving 2008;
Schilt and Wiswall 2008), and especially on realist accounts of transition
and the life situations of transsexual women, from Australia (Perkins
1983), the United States (Griggs 1996, 1998), Canada (Namaste 2000,
2005, 2011) and Hungary (Solymar and Takacs 2007).
The first part of this article outlines feminisms encounters with trans-
sexual women and the idea of gender change. The second part looks
critically at assumptions within this debate and at the impact of transgender
ideas, arguing for a stronger input from feminist social science. In the
third part I offer an account of transition as a gender project, of the nature
of transsexual embodiment, and of transsexual womens practice in the
making and remaking of a gender order. Part 4 connects this analysis with
recognition struggles and material inequalities and suggests a reworked
relationship of transsexual women and feminism within a politics of care
and social justice.
By transsexual women I mean women who have been through a
process of transition between locations in the gender order, from earlier
I am grateful for advice, support, and inspiration from feminist comrades Kylie Benton-
Connell, Lingfang Cheng, Miriam Glucksmann, Helen Meekosha, Viviane Namaste, Roberta
Perkins, Patricia Selkirk, Judith Stacey, and Barrie Thorne. I am grateful to my friend John
Fisher for research assistance and to very constructive reviewers for Signs. This article is
dedicated to the memory of my partner Pam Benton, who made it possible.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2012, vol. 37, no. 4]
2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2012/3704-0007$10.00

858 Connell
definition as a boy or man toward the embodiment and social position of

a womanwhatever the path taken and whatever the outcome. By med-
ically assisted transition I mean the particular path that uses the package
of medical interventions supporting social and legal gender reassignment
(Tugnet et al. 2007). The key idea is transitionality, as Bence Solymar and
Judit Takacs (2007) observe. It is therefore helpful to regard transsexual
as an adjective, not a noun.
Transsexual medicine developed mainly in the global metropole, that
is, Western Europe and the United States, where the feminist debates
about transsexuality have also been centered. In the global periphery there
are also gender-changing groups under many names: transsexual (Bento
2006; Najmabadi 2008), transformista (Ochoa 2008), travesti (Fernandez
2004; Lewis 2010), kathoey (Winter 2006), hijra (Reddy 2006), and
others. Metropolitan writers on gender issues have often appropriated the
experiences of these groups, with an appalling lack of care or respect. It
is important to acknowledge both their distinctive situations and the power
of the metropole, which has an impact on body politics everywhere. My
main concern in this article is with debates in the metropole, but the
argument necessarily returns to the global dimension of gender.
Encounters of feminism and transsexual women

The thought that the relationship between character and reproductive
bodies might change has long been present in feminism. It was, for in-
stance, the central idea in the first fully social theory of gender, written
by the pioneering German feminist Mathilde Vaerting ([1921] 1981). It
can be found in the riff on transcendence and justice that concluded
Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex: Sooner or later they [women] will
arrive at complete economic and social equality, which will bring about
an inner metamorphosis ([1949] 1972, 738). But where Vaerting saw
change as institutional and collective, Beauvoir treated femininity as a
project at the level of personal lifemore exactly, a set of projects: the
heart of The Second Sex is a mapping of paths in life (the lesbian, the
married woman, the prostitute) that represent different negotiations of
womens social subordination.
Thus, the most influential text of twentieth-century feminism arrived
at a conception of gender that resembles ideas then emerging in European
and US medicine. The term transsexual was given its modern meaning,
a personal project of gender transition, in an article (Cauldwell 1949)
published in 1949, the same year as The Second Sex. The first attempts at

S I G N S Summer 2012 859
gender reassignment had already been undertaken, especially in Germany

(Meyerowitz 2002, 1622).
Soon after The Second Sex appeared, reassignment became a public issue
via Christine Jorgensen, who transitioned with the help of a Danish clinical
team and became the public face of transsexuality in the 1950s. In the
glare of the astonishing publicity around Jorgensen (Stryker 2000), an
unexpected volume of gender distress and previously unnoticed grassroots
projects of gender change became visible in the global metropole.
These grassroots projects of gender change can be recognized if we
follow the historical method of the journal Subaltern Studies and read the
situation of the subaltern through what the official texts inadvertently
reveal. This approach can be applied to the main medical texts produced
in this moment: Harry Benjamins The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966),
Robert J. Stollers Sex and Gender (1968), and Richard Green and John
Moneys Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969). The people who
moved into the US clinicians gaze at this time were at different stages
of transition. Most were, in the language of the day, male-to-female trans-
sexuals, and some were already living as women. Most, though not all,
were white, and they were drawn from a spectrum of working- and middle-
class backgrounds. They brought folk understandings of natural gender
difference, along with accounts of devastating contradictionssoul versus
body, self versus society, legal status versus personal reality. They brought
narratives of families, working lives, and relationships in turmoil and some-
times shattered. The clinical meaning of transsexuality was produced in
an intricate and uncertain cultural negotiation around this distress and
medical intervention. A treatment package was assembledwith fierce
debate among doctorsand gender identity clinics began to operate in
the 1960s.
The political meaning of transsexuality began to be negotiated in the
US New Left at the end of the same decade (Altman 1972; Irving 2008;
Stryker 2008). Several small, radical transsexual/transvestite groups formed,
and they issued a manifesto calling for social justice. Self-help transsexual
community centers were founded in San Francisco and New York; in the
words of one New York organizer, recalling New Left rhetoric, it was a
revolutionary thing (Rivera 2002, 81). Revolutionary transsexual themes
can also be found in European New Left discussions. Mario Mielis Ho-
mosexuality and Liberation (1980) proposed a theory of universal trans-
sexuality, partly derived from Sigmund Freud, and saw transsexuals as
severely oppressed but also revealing a universal possibility of liberation.
At first the womens liberation movement paid no attention to trans-

860 Connell
sexual women, though some were in the ranks. Transsexual women do

not trouble the pages of Robin Morgans famous 1970 anthology, Sis-
terhood Is Powerful. Only three years later, Morgan herself launched a
public attack in quite violent language against a transsexual woman, Beth
Elliott, who had been invited to perform as a musician at a lesbian-feminist
conference in California (Morgan 1978, 171, 181).
Morgans theme was picked up by Mary Daly, the theologian then
emerging as the leading theorist of US separatist feminism. In her most
famous book, Gyn/Ecology (1978, 71), Daly attacked transsexuality as a
necrophilic invasion of womens bodies and spirits. Dalys views were
elaborated by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire (1979), which
drew a lurid picture of transsexual women as parodies of femininity and
male invaders of womens spaces. Raymonds book was widely read and
is still quoted; it is undoubtedly the most influential feminist statement
on transsexuality. Its arguments were followed to some degree by most
other feminist writers who touched on the subject. To the more hostile
among them, transsexual women should not exist at all. In a postpatri-
archal world, according to Sheila Jeffreys (1990, 188), transsexualism
could not be imagined.
Even at the 1973 conference, some women defended Elliotts right to
be heard (Meyerowitz 2002, 25960). Feminist support for transsexual
women at the level of practice and personal relationships never entirely
disappeared. Transsexual women themselves argued back; an excellent
early critique of The Transsexual Empire was published in Britain by Carol
Riddell ([1980] 2006). Yet for two decades an exclusionist stance dom-
inated the relation between transsexual women and movement feminism.
It was from quite another direction that a kind of engagement emerged.
In the later 1970s, feminist sociologists were transforming the rough-
and-ready liberationist critique of sex roles and patriarchy into a more
sophisticated theory of gender. In the United States this project employed
Harold Garfinkels ethnomethodology, the sociological technique that
explores the presuppositions of everyday social categories. Following an
essay by Garfinkel (1967) that treated the life of a young transsexual
woman as a kind of natural experiment, feminist sociologists developed a
theory of the microfoundations of the gender order. A technical book by
Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna (1978), a very influential paper
called Doing Gender by Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987),
and a debate about Garfinkels work (Rogers 1992) laid out the argument.
Transsexual women provided key evidence about how gender categories
are sustained in everyday practices of speech, styles of interaction, and
divisions of labor.

Here transsexual women figured not as hostile outsiders but as striking

examples of processes that affected all womens lives. Ironicallygiven
transsexual womens own narratives at the time, which usually spoke of
unchanging femininityfeminist sociologists read their lives as proving
the plasticity of gender, giving credibility to agendas of social change.
Transsexual womens experience was then used by a number of other
scholars to ground broad arguments about gender. By far the most in-
fluential was Judith Butler.
In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler dispensed with the assumption of a
natural basis for womens identity and therefore for feminism. As did the
ethnomethodologists, she needed an explanation for the solid appearance
of gender. This was provided by the idea of a stylized repetition of acts
(1990, 141) that brought gender performatively into existence, which led
to the idea of radical gender politics as a proliferation of performances
that subverted existing gender norms. Transvestite drag performance pro-
vided the key example to launch this argument, revealing the imitative
structure of gender itself (1990, 137). In Bodies That Matter (1993,
chap. 4) Butler used a film about African American and Latina drag ball
participants to explore to what extent the events, the community around
them, and the filmmaking could be understood as subversive. And in
Undoing Gender (2004), Butler wrote at length about transsexuality and
transgender, critiquing the medical diagnosis of gender identity disorder
as a site of gender normativity and seeing antitransgender violence as a
sign of the ferocity with which heteronormativity is enforced.
The most influential oeuvre in contemporary feminism, thus, is sig-
nificantly engaged with issues around transsexual women, and Butlers
writing was strikingly more positive than lesbian-feminist writing in the
1970s. It helped to launch a wave of poststructuralist and queer feminist
writing about transsexuality. This included Bernice Hausmans (1995)
Foucauldian study, which also treated gender as part of the symbolic order
and read transsexual womens actions as the engineering of a normative
subjectivity through their demand for the use of medical technologies
(13738). In due course queer sociologies appeared (Hird 2002a; Hines
2007), in which transsexual women figure as living the instability of the
sex/gender binary.
Transsexual activists, both men and women, were caught up in this
movement. The marker of change was a The Empire Strikes Back: A
Post-Transsexual Manifesto (1991) by Sandy Stone, a transsexual woman
who had been specifically attacked by Raymond. Stones witty essay sug-
gested that transsexuals were not a class, nor a third gender, but a genre,

862 Connell
a set of embodied texts (1991, 296), with the potential to disrupt

dichotomous categories of sexuality and gender.
Stone thus connected transsexual womens lives with the rising tide of
cultural studies in American academic life and with the emerging queer
agenda of breaking down, rather than mobilizing around, conventional
gender categories. The growing visibility of transsexual men (Rubin 2003)
and the reemergence of an interest in butch identities and masculinity
within lesbian networks (Halberstam 1998) were important reinforce-
ments. Within a few years a transgender perspective was articulated (see,
e.g., Wilchins 2002). This perspective was rapidly adopted in other Anglo-
phone countries and has now spread globally.
A huge paradigmatic shift had occurred, according to Stephen Whit-
tle (1999, 8). He was coediting a volume, and soon coedited another,
that brought together leading US and British writers in the rapidly crys-
tallizing field of transgender studies (Stryker and Whittle 2006). Since the
1990s, transgender and trans have been widely adopted as general
terms covering not only transsexual women and men but also a growing
range of nonnormative identities, from androgynous to genderqueer
transboi (Couch et al. 2007).
With the change of language came a changed political logic. Trans-
gender politics has moved toward a focus on rights claims within the
existing social order (Currah, Juang, and Minter 2006; Namaste 2011).
This is pursued through a political alignment not with women but with
sexual minorities. Discussions of human rights now often name LGBT
(lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) as a minority group in need of
defense. Other initials may be added (for intersex, transsexual, queer, or
questioning), but LGBT is by far the most common and has practically
become a word in its own right.
These developments affected the relationship between feminism and
transsexual women, though not in a singular way. On the one hand, gender
changing of various kinds has become more familiar and easier to accept.
A feminist literature has emerged about the significance of gender plurality,
in which transsexual women are treated with respect (e.g., Heyes 2003;
Monro 2005). Butlers work continues to command attention and to
guide current work on transgender (see, e.g., Salamon 2010). Yet the
terms of Butlers engagement with transsexuality are troubling, as Viviane
Namastes (2009) critique shows. It rests on an appropriation of trans-
sexual and transvestite experience that, in order to focus on the subversion
of identity, occludes the economic realities of drag and prostitution, the
gender-specific character of violence, and the devastation of transsexual
womens lives by HIV.

For other feminists, the tools of poststructuralism allowed transsexuality

to be seen as a colonizing enterprise (Wilton 2000, 239) that reproduces
sexist stereotypes and can never challenge the social relations of gender.
Even moderate poststructuralists such as Myra Hird (2002b) described
transsexuality as identification gone awry and a hyperbolic performance
of gender (51). Ironically, feminist critics of the poststructural turn also
found a negative case here. The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 207)
used transsexual womendefined as men mired in illusionto drive home
the impossibility of escaping corporeality. The sociologist Liz Stanley (2000,
3), in a presidential address, found transsexual moves simply ludicrous: If
you dont want to be a man then why want to be a woman, rather than,
for example, a zebra or a cherub? Clearly, the issue of transsexual womens
relation to the feminist project has not been settled. It is time to reconsider
the terms in which the problem has been framed.
From identity problems to gender dynamics

Most discussions of transsexuality are focused on identity questions, as
Namaste (2000) and Hird (2002a) observe. Sociologies of coming out
(Gagne, Tewkesbury, and McCaughey 1997) have been quite preoccupied
with this issue, as were the studies of disturbed gender identity that pro-
vided the classic psychiatric explanation of transsexuality (Stoller 1968)
and the original rationale for gender identity clinics.
Feminist thought too has persistently dealt with transsexuality in terms
of identity. Morgans central argument in 1973 (reprinted in Morgan
1978) was that the musician involved was really a man, not a woman. In
her rhetoric, as with other exclusionist arguments up to the presentit
is necessary to read the originals to get the full flavor of rejectionthere
is an emotion present that is very like a defense of purity against contamina-
tion. As Cressida Heyes (2003) argues, it was the attempt to define a
single feminist subject that justified exclusion of transsexual women.
Deconstructionist feminism announced the subversion of identity (in
the subtitle of Gender Trouble; Butler 1990) as a central project, and its
brilliant success opened the floodgates for a transgender movement. Two
forms of identity politics followed. One made gender change the practical
demolition or refusal of gender identity. There are now people trying
rigorously to live without gender identities, creating undecidable mixtures
of gender signs and building queer or degendered relationships and house-
holds. A more popular version of transgenderin logical tension with
deconstructionism though often blended with it in practicecollected
transgressive identities in a breathless list: drag queens and kings, trans-

864 Connell
sexuals, cross-dressers, he-shes and she-males, intersexed people, trans-

genderists, and people of ambiguous, androgynous, or contradictory sex
and gender (Pratt 1995, 21). Assembling identities in this way con-
structed a heterogeneous transgender community and added the T to a
preexisting LGB.
Transgender texts often speak of a spectrum, or as Susan Stryker nicely
put it when defining transgender studies, myriad specific subcultural ex-
pressions of gender atypicality (2006, 3). In many texts, a contrast
between this spectrum and a normative binary is the core of the trans-
gender perspective (e.g., Girshick 2008). Yet through this shift, identity
issues have remained the center of attention. Whittle introduced the Trans-
gender Studies Reader with the words Trans identities were one of the
most written about subjects of the late twentieth century (2006, xi). The
identity framing of the issues continues, as we see in a recent collection
by American feminist philosophers, subtitled Sex Reassignment and Per-
sonal Identity (Shrage 2009).
Identity debates arise on a specific terrain, that of meaning, symbolism,
and expression. In transgender writing, as represented in recent collec-
tions, the characteristic genres are autobiographical narratives, film and
television commentary, and literary and philosophical essays (Nestle,
Howell, and Wilchins 2002; OKeefe and Fox 2008). The guiding in-
tellectual lights are poststructuralist thinkers, especially Michel Foucault
and Butler; the central problems are self, subjectivity, voice, discourse,
category, and representation. The body is of course present in transgender
writing, but characteristically the concern is with body images, marking,
meaning, and symbolism.
This focus gives great power to recent transgender writing as cultural
intervention and cultural critique. But it comes at a cost. The transgender
turn and the rise of deconstructionist theory have posed difficulties for
transsexual women.
Two of these difficulties seem most important. The first is that major
issues in transsexual womens lives, especially social issues, are not well
represented by identity discourses of any kind. These issues include the
nature of transition, the laboring transsexual body, workplace relations,
poverty, and the functioning of state organizations including police, health
policy, family services, education, and child care.
The second difficulty is a powerful tendency in transgender literature
to degender the groups spoken of, whether by emphasizing only their
nonnormative or transgressive status; by claiming that gender identity is
fluid, plastic, malleable, shifting, unstable, mobile, and so on; or by simply
ignoring gender location. A great deal of recent research and writing,

while acknowledging diversity at an individual level, lumps women and

men into a common transgender story (e.g., Couch et al. 2007; Hines
2007; Girshick 2008). It is difficult to find in any of this the intransigence
of gender actually experienced in transsexual womens lives.
We should not give up the intellectual advances of poststructuralism
and transgender studies by retreating to an essentialist transsexual dis-
course. But we do need to recognize the specificity of transsexuality at
the level of social practice and its continuing connection with a problem-
atic that is very different from a problematic of identity. This is key to
the relationship with feminism because this problematic concerns the
structure and dynamics of the gender order. As I noted at the beginning
of this article, the specificity of transsexuality concerns transitions between
locations in the gender order. The intransigence of gender, at both a social
and a personal level, is of course a central problem for feminism, driving
the long feminist engagements with psychoanalysis, Marxism, and soci-
ology.
Feminist social science, then, is a vital resourceI would even say, the
vital resourcefor an understanding of transsexuality and a rethinking of
its politics. In recent decades feminist sociology has developed sophisticated
analyses of gender as social practice (Poggio 2006). The multidimensional
structuring of gender relations certainly includes gender symbolism, but it
also involves authority relations, the economy, and emotional attachment
and separation (Pfau-Effinger 1998; Connell 2009). Therefore, as trans-
sexual women make their way through gendered social landscapes, their
practices are necessarily much more than identity projects. They have to
deal with social institutions ranging from the patriarchal state (Namaste
2000), the economy (Irving 2008), and the medical profession (Griggs
1996) to the family (Langley 2002).
Gender orders are formed and re-formed through time, as feminist
historiography has abundantly shown (Rose 2010). The historicity of
transsexuality arises within a larger dynamic of changing gender relations.
Gender configurations within these structures are multiple, not binary, as
feminist sociology has shown (Lorber 2005), and there are patterns of
hegemony among different masculinities and femininities. There are al-
ways multiple pathways of gender formation as children grow up, while
there are strong constraints, both internal and external, on the pathway
any particular child follows.
Hegemonic gender forms have themselves repeatedly been shown to
be deeply fissured. For instance, in Good and Mad Women historian Jill
Julius Matthews (1984) traced the conflicting demands placed on women
in mid-twentieth-century Australia, which for some made femininity im-

866 Connell
possible to live. Nancy Chodorows Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities

(1994) showed the emotional contradictions embedded in conventional
heterosexuality, developmentally a tension-ridden compromise formation,
not a simple unity. The multiple pathways of gender formation, we can
expect, normally contain contradictions.
Perhaps the most important point from social science concerns the link
between the historicity of gender structure and the nature of gender prac-
tice. To treat gender as performative and citational is not enough. In
feminist social science, gender is ontoformative (Kosk 1976; Connell
1987). Practice starts from structure but does not repetitively cite its
starting point. Rather, social practice continuously brings social reality
into being, and that social reality becomes the ground of new practice,
through time. In an influential statement from feminist organization the-
ory, Patricia Yancey Martin (2003) names this dynamic by distinguishing
gendering practices, that is, the repertoire available at a given time in
an organizations gender regime, from practicing gender, the event of
enactment, the means by which the gender order is constituted (and
potentially transformed) at work. As I will show, the ontoformative char-
acter of gender is crucial for understanding transsexual womens lives.
Rethinking transsexuality as gender process

Contradictory embodiment
In transsexual womens experience, bodies form the vital arena of con-
tradiction and change. Jay Prosser (1998), Berenice Bento (2006), and
Katherine Johnson (2007) are right to emphasize that transsexuality is
embodied, and any attempt to make sense of transition must give full
weight to the issue. For many people, including many transsexual women,
this is one of the hardest things to understand or accept. What is done
with bodies in the course of gender transitions can evoke horror or anger,
calling up fears about castration and monstrosity.
In the gender order as a whole, gendered embodiment establishes re-
lations between changing bodies and changing structures of gender re-
lations (Connell 2009). This process is multifaceted and often powerfully
conflictual. At the collective level, as Wendy Harcourt (2009a) shows,
there are worldwide and sometimes deadly struggles over womens and
mens bodies, from fertility control to gender-based violence. At the per-
sonal level, the brilliant memory-work research of a German feminist
collective (Haug et al. 1987, 14), tracing the way different parts of
womens bodies acquire sexual meanings within patriarchal culture,
showed strong tensions within this process. Gendered embodiment with

nonnormative bodies, as experienced by disabled women, is a notable site

of conflict (Meekosha 1998).
Experiences of contradictory embodiment are central in transsexual
womens lives. This is abundantly shown in life stories and in the
phenomenologies of transsexual womens embodiment undertaken by
Claudine Griggs (1998) and Johnson (2007). Contrary to older ideas
that there is one stereotyped official story (Hausman 1995, 141), there
are actually multiple transsexual narratives of embodiment. Masculine and
feminine embodiments sometimes alternate with each other, as described
in the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Patrick Whites (1979) great trans-
sexual novel, The Twyborn Affair. Sometimes one surges out of the other,
as in, for instance, the experiences described by Deirdre McCloskey (1999)
and in the recently published life history of an older transsexual woman
(R. Connell 2010). Sometimes masculine and feminine embodiment co-
exist over a shorter or longer period of years, as described by Josie Emery
(2009) and Julia Serano (2007).
As shown earlier, there is nothing unique about contradiction arising
in embodiment. What is distinctive is the shape and scope of the contra-
diction, since genetically male bodies are involved and the process of
gendered embodiment normally makes men of them. This is so scandalous
that many medical writers, and most transsexual women, assume there
must be a biological cause (a belief prevalent in the periphery as well as
the metropole; see Winter 2006).
Transsexual women reach for one metaphor after another to describe
their experience: having a mans body and a womans body at the same
time, or one body emerging from the other, or (most traditionally) being
trapped in the wrong body. These figures of speech have aroused scorn
from critics (Wilton 2000). Indeed, no metaphor is adequate. But all these
have the merit of pointing to the agency of the body. Arguably there is
no cause, in the mechanical sense. It is more helpful to think of the
powerful process of social embodiment as constantly engaging bodies and
bodily agency, as well as social practices and cultural meanings, in a com-
plex co-construction (Roberts 2000, 17). In almost all womens and
mens lives, social embodiment has minor incoherencies. What we call
transsexuality involves the liminal contradiction, the most severe, that
arises in this process.
Recognition
If we acknowledge the multiple narratives of embodiment, transsexuality
is best understood not as a syndrome nor as a discursive position but as
a bundle of life trajectories that arise from contradictions in social em-

868 Connell
bodiment. The trajectories may not have a common origin, but they all
arrive somehow at the moment of knowing that one is a woman despite
having a male body.
This is knowledge of a familiar kind: the functional, situated knowledge
of gender arrangements, ones place in them, and how to proceed in
everyday life that is so well described in feminist microsociology (West
and Zimmerman 1987; Martin 2003). Other women and men have the
same kind of knowledge without the same level of contradiction. Trans-
sexual narratives speak of recognition: sometimes a dramatic moment,
sometimes a gradually growing awareness, but centrally a matter of recog-
nizing a fact about oneself.
But this recognizing is a fearful thing because the central contradiction
in transsexuality is so powerful. This fact is in violation of what everyone
around knows, and what the transsexual woman knows too, being also
recognizable as a man (or boy, since this often happens in youth). And
there is no walking away from this terror: gender is intransigent, both as a
structure of society and as a structure of personal life. The contradiction
has to be handled, and it has to be handled at the level of the body, since
it arises in a process of embodiment. So, from contradictory embodiment
and the moment of recognition, a transsexual woman must generate a
practice. What is to be done?
Some try to keep the contradiction inside their skins and ride out the
terror. Some manage to live the rest of their lives this way, aided by
psychotherapy if they are middle class. Some kill themselves. Surveys report
high rates of attempted suicide (in two recent US studies of transgender
samples, which included many transsexual people, prevalence was above
30 percent; Kenagy 2005; Clements-Nolle, Marx, and Katz 2006). As the
phenomenological studies and autobiographies show, a transsexual woman
may have immense uncertainty about what to do. She cycles in and out
of transsexual practice, starts and stops cross-dressing, starts and stops self-
harm. Moving toward transition is an attempt to end this precarious prac-
tice and achieve a settlement.
Reassignment
Transsexual medicine in the 1960s and 1970s was, in the global metropole,
supplied by public agenciesthat is, gender identity clinicsbut also
fiercely rationed by them. In the neoliberal economic climate of the 1980s,
gender reassignment shifted to the private sector in an increasingly de-
regulated market. Reassignment became easier to getfor a price. One
surgical entrepreneur, Stanley Biber, was said to be doing more than half

the reassignment operations in the United States (Griggs 1996; Meyer-

owitz 2002).
The capitalist economy is global, producing huge disparities of wealth
and power. In the 1960s a reassignment practice was run by a French
gynecologist, Georges Burou, who had a clinic in Morocco, outside the
restrictive professional controls of Europe. Middle-class transsexual
women from the United States and Europe flew in, and reassignment
became an export commodity for a poor postcolonial country. Recently,
reassignment surgery has boomed in Thailand, interwoven with a cosmetic
surgery industry (Aizura 2009). Low wages, lax controls, and a local
gender-changing tradition gave Thailand a comparative advantage in this
field. Thailand is now (together with Iran, where religious authorities
approve of reassignment; Najmabadi 2008) the most prominent center
of reassignment surgery outside the metropole.
In these developments, transsexual medicine became part of the global
bioeconomy defined in recent research on tissue commodification (Waldby
and Mitchell 2006). This changed the politics of access. Middle-class women
with property and steady incomes can fund international travel and private
treatment far more easily than can working-class women, migrant women,
young women, or women who lose their jobs because of transition. Class
and global inequality, rather than patriarchal gatekeeping, has become the
crucial filter.
Transsexual medicine is still substantially the package that evolved in
the 1950s and 1960s (Tugnet et al. 2007), though with refinements and
with more variety in which parts of the package transsexual women adopt.
Medically assisted transition is a slow business. Its effects are limited: no
genetic change, no skeletal change, no childbearing capacity. Parts of it
are very painful (electrolysis, surgery of all kinds). Parts of it have a broad
impact on the body (antiandrogens, estrogens, genital surgery) and others
a local effect (electrolysis, tracheal shave, vocal training). The process is
unavoidably traumatic, as shown in Griggss (1996) superb narrative of
reassignment surgery. No body is made physically healthier by it, and
there are problematic long-term effects, such as osteoporosis. This is the
dilemma as medical ethics sees it: intervening in an apparently healthy
body in the hope of gains in mental health. Evaluation studies provide
ambiguous evidence as to whether such gains are achieved (Sutcliffe et
al. 2009).
There is nothing pretty about gender reassignment; these are rough
measures and have rough results. There is no cause to euphemize them
as body modification or glamorize them as an aesthetic adventure. Reas-

870 Connell
signment, though slow, has something of the character of emergency

medicine: dealing with a critical situation well enough to allow life, in-
cluding social life, to continue. And though media and scholarly attention
have focussed obsessively on the surgery, it is important to remember that
surgery is only part of the medical treatment, and medical treatment is
only part of transition, basically a facilitating part. A huge amount of other
work is to be done.
The work of transition

Work is not a metaphor. There is a complex labor process of transition,
visible in the phenomenological studies (Griggs 1998), in personal nar-
ratives (Morgan, Marais, and Wellbeloved 2009), and in some of the
transgender sociological research (Hines 2007). This can be undertaken
without reassignment, by transsexual women who are denied medical
treatment or who decide against it. Its focus shifts over time. Getting
funds, getting personal support, arranging postoperative care, obtaining
legal documentation, finding housing, dealing with relationship crises,
dealing with a workplace or finding work, dealing with bodily changes,
gaining social recognition, and dealing with hostility may all be uppermost
in turn.
This labor process, as the sociology of gender would lead us to expect,
engages all the dimensions of the gender order; it is not only a question
of sexuality or identity. It is structured by the inequalities of the gender
order; the process is not the same for transsexual women and transsexual
men. Transsexual women are shedding the patriarchal dividend that ac-
crues to men as a group in labor markets, finance markets (e.g., housing),
family status, professional authority, and so on. A small but pathbreaking
econometric study by Kristen Schilt and Matthew Wiswall (2008) in the
United States finds that there is an economic penalty for transition for
both men and women but that transsexual men are eventually better paid
after transition than before, while transsexual women lose, on average,
nearly one-third of their income.
A changed embodied position in gender relations grounds new practice,
relying on the ontoformativity of gender. That practice may be as basic
as survival. More generally it is a matter of creating everyday life on new
terms. Transition is reentry into the historical dynamic of gender, an event
in time that launches an interactive social process.
A great deal, then, rests on the responses of others, in public arenas as
well as private. Gatekeepers for jobs and housing have to be negotiated
with. There are risks of violence from men, which transsexual women
learn to judge, and of rejection from women. In the positive case, recog-

nition as a woman need not involve passing. Recognition can equally be

a matter of pragmatic acceptance by those with whom one lives and works.
In most circumstances, other people do sustain interactions with trans-
sexual women, whatever they take their identity to be. To borrow a phrase
from Tennessee Williams, transsexual women depend on the kindness of
strangers.
Weaving new lives: Economic and family relations

Dan Irving (2008) has recently argued that gender transition is subject
to the logic of capitalism. The changing economic relations around trans-
sexuality are clearly an important issue. As transitioning women return to
the labor market, they have to build working lives in the face of gender
inequalities and the insecurities of a globalizing economic order.
Some of the ways they do so are shown in new research by Schilt and
Wiswall (2008) and Catherine Connell (2010) in the United States. Some
respond to gender inequality and insecurity by concealing transitionthe
stealth strategywhile others are not only open about their transition but
contest rather than conform to sexist conventions. These studies had
mainly middle-class samples. A number of working-class transsexual women
have always survived by sex work. This is a far more precarious milieu,
exposing workers to high levels of HIV infection and violence (Namaste
2005, 5970; 2009; Garofalo et al. 2006). Working as a prostitute may
also discredit a woman in the eyes of medical gatekeepers if she seeks
reassignment.
A social understanding of transition bears on intimate relationships, too.
Transition puts partnerships, especially marriages, at acute risk: a wifes
position in the gender order may be traumatically undermined by a hus-
bands moves toward transition. The result can be severe conflict (see,
e.g., Cummings 1992; McCloskey 1999), though some relationships sur-
vive well. A transitioning womans parents may also have great difficulty
with the shift from son to daughter, though there are notable examples
of parents working through the shock to acceptance and support (Langley
2002).
With transsexual womens children, too, relationships may end at tran-
sition. Even when they continue, both child and parent have to handle
the significant loss that occurs in transition. Gender relations are embod-
ied; here it is embodied fatherhood being lost. The child as well as the
parent pays the price, and does the work, of building a parent-child re-
lationship on new terms (see Howey 2002 for a popularized account from
a daughters perspective).
Families can be resilient, and partnerships and parent-child relationships

872 Connell
can be rewoven. Indeed, family members may be vital supports during

transition. Transsexual women may become further involved with children
after transition in many ways, for instance in blended families, as aunts,
grandmothers, and caregivers, or in the workplace as teachers, nurses, and
so on. The extent of care work after transition is highlighted by Sally
Hines (2007). The capacity for care shown in these situations is one of
the bases for a changed politics of transsexuality.
Another politics is possible

I hope the account of practical dilemmas and responses in this article will
help to demythologize transsexual women a little. Transsexual women as
such are neither enemies of change nor heralds of a new world. But they
can act in either direction, and which direction they take is a question of
political alliances and strategies.
The queer activism that blossomed in the 1990s changed gender politics
in the metropole and remains an important source of radical energy. It
opened new cultural spaces and social milieus that are safer and friendlier
for transsexual women. Yet there are limits to this politics, as there are
limits to the LGBT alignment; there is an overlap, but not a complete
correspondence, with the interests of transsexual women. The analysis in
the previous sections shows a continuing link with the broad currents of
feminism. Because transsexual womens lives are shaped by the intransi-
gence of gender, there is necessarily common ground with feminism.
Transsexual women may or may not believe in a fixed gender identity,
but they do acknowledge in their practice the power of gender deter-
minations.
Much of what transsexual women need is already contained in feminist
agendas: equity in education, adequate child care, equal employment con-
ditions and wage justice, prevention of gender-based violence, resistance
to sexist culture, and what Scandinavian feminists have called a women-
friendly state (Borchorst and Siim 2002). Given the depth and inter-
woven character of gender inequalities, the best guarantor of justice for
transsexual women is a gender-equal society. However hard it is to ac-
knowledge, given the antagonisms discussed in the first half of this article,
transsexual women have a broad interest in supporting feminist causes.
Does feminism have an interest in supporting transsexual women?
Opinion has changed, as Johnson (2005) shows. The transgender move-
ment has helped; the social contributions of transsexual women are more
visible. Feminism itself has changed. Feminists in the metropole have paid
more attention to the diversity of womens situations around the world

and to groups whose bodily experiences are anomalous, especially disabled

women (Smith and Hutchison 2004). Feminism that has broadened out
in multiple directionsfeminism without borders, in Chandra Talpade
Mohantys (2003) evocative phrasecan more readily see, in relation to
transsexual women, opportunities for learning, gains for imagination, and
occasions for solidarity.
Many feminists are still troubled by the severe bodily interventions
involved in transsexual medicine. It is worth saying that many transsexual
women are too. Most hesitate, often for years, and only go forward after
agonizing debate. Most are well aware of the limits of bodily change in
transition and know the results will not be normative. If they go forward
with reassignment, it is in the hope of producing enough change to support
a new practice and a viable existence. With many more transsexual women
making open transitions and with a wide range of bodily effects being visible,
sexist stereotypes are now perhaps more disrupted than enforced.
The current in metropolitan feminism that hopes to abolish gender or
dissolve the gender order has had strong appeal in the past two decades.
But in the long run, transsexual women will find more relevance in the
attempt to create just gender orders. An agenda of justice and complex
equality (Walzer 1983) has more purchase globally in the multiple fem-
inisms of the contemporary world (Bulbeck 1998; Harcourt 2009a) and
is more closely aligned with the logic of transition.
What is involved in action to create a just gender order? Part of this
means achieving justice for transsexual women themselves. In recent writ-
ing, this goal has mainly been defined by a powerful individualism, seen
in the I did it my way narrative (Serano 2007; Emery 2009) and the
transgender rights discourse (Currah, Juang, and Minter 2006) that treats
self-determinations of gender identity as individual rights and liberties
(Sheridan 2009, 24). A very different approach was taken in a remarkable
manifesto written by several US transsexual and transvestite groups forty
years ago (see Altman 1972). In addition to rights, this manifesto de-
manded state funding for medical treatment, support services controlled
by transsexual people, freeing of transvestite and transsexual prisoners in
jails, and a full voice in the struggle for the liberation of all oppressed
people (Altman 1972, 135). This moved beyond individualism to col-
lective action and social struggle.
Nancy Frasers theory of justice distinguishes claims about recognition
from those about material inequalities (Fraser and Honneth 2003). Both
are important for transsexual women. Recognition is denied in patriarchal
ideology, where transsexual womens embodiment is perfect abjection: the
failed, castrated male, the fake female. The state has typically been an

874 Connell
antagonist in recognition struggles, denying or rationing recognition (Ca-

bral and Viturro 2006; Solymar and Takacs 2007). Nevertheless gains
have been won, some by individual action in the courts, especially in the
United States (Kirkland 2003), others by social action, such as the 1996
Transgender Act in New South Wales (Hooley 2003) and the 2004 Gen-
der Recognition Act in the United Kingdom (Monro 2005). There is
evidence of favorable, if limited, shifts in public opinion about transsex-
uality (Landen and Innala 2000).
With questions of material justice, it is harder to find gains. For young
working-class, migrant, and indigenous transsexual women, housing, in-
come, safety, education, and health are all starkly at risk (Namaste 2000).
Arrest can be disastrous; prison is highly dangerous. Transsexual women
sex workers have a clear interest in decriminalization and an occupational
health and safety approach to sex work, placing them on the less popular
side of a long-running feminist debate. Material justice requires equal
access to transsexual medicine, which means public sector provision, but
there has been a shift of transsexual medicine into the private sector, where
access is class biased. In these areas, the state is both antagonist and
resource for transsexual women.
A major part of transsexual politics is the pursuit of these claims for
justice. Clearly, collective struggle is important in reaching them, and
transsexual womens own politicization is at the core of this. Solidarity
from others is also needed. Transsexual women are a small group, and
most are not in a strong social position; the traumas of contradictory
embodiment and transition, and the effects of discrimination and con-
tempt, cannot be waved aside. Support from other feminists is the most
strategic resource for empowering transsexual women.
A politics directed toward a just gender order necessarily has another
dimension. In an era of neoliberal globalization, of changes in womens
economic situations, and of the proliferation of womens claims for voice
and power, transsexual politics also has to turn outwardwithout borders.
There are roles for transsexual women in womens workplace and union
activism (almost invisible in the huge literature about transsexuality), anti-
poverty activism, antiviolence work, and AIDS prevention. There are speci-
fic political roles that can use transsexual womens strengths, including
support and solidarity for other groups grappling with the politics of em-
bodiment and social exclusion: transgender and intersex, disability, and
other forms of bodily difference. There are even possibilities for transsexual
women in feminisms engagements with men, paradoxical as that may
sound. Transsexual feminists are already involved in these arenasvisibly
in events such as feminist protests and conferences, more pragmatically

through everyday involvement in campaigns, policy work, research, and

friendship networks.
In thinking about such ontoformative transsexual politics, we must
come to the global level, since gender relations are now acknowledged
to have a transnational dimension (Radcliffe, Laurie, and Andolina 2004;
Harcourt 2009a). A certain globalization of transsexual medicine is now
a fact: the World Professional Association for Transgender Health was
created in 2006, stemming from a US organization set up in 1979.
The interests of transsexual women are not so easily projected on the
international plane. At the beginning of this article I mentioned the ap-
propriation of third-world experience by writers in the metropole engaged
in constructing fictions about a transsexual or transgender continuum.
Feminism has been learning not to engage in that kind of appropriation
(Bulbeck 1998); there are now international meetings, at which trans-
sexual women are present, that emphasize diversity, South-South net-
working, the sharing of skills and stories, and North-South transfer of
resources (Harcourt 2009b).
A stronger awareness of imperialism and global power relations is
emerging in transsexual writing (Aizura 2009; Stryker 2009; Namaste
2011). Solidarity politics, rather than cultural appropriation, might now
link gender-changing groups internationally. It is clear that the groups
called travesti in Argentina, hijra in India, and kathoey in Thailand have
different historical trajectories from transsexual women in the metropole.
It is also clear that there are some shared issues regarding gender change,
as well as widespread problems of poverty, violence, discrimination, and
precarious health (Fernandez 2004; Reddy 2006; Winter 2006). These
are dramatically shown in the life stories collected by Gender DynamiX,
an activist group in South Africa (Morgan, Marais, and Wellbeloved 2009).
These narratives highlight social violence, struggles with religion, and the
distinctive race, community, and gender politics of South Africa, as well
as extraordinary resilience.
There is a case here for solidarity work in which new forms of activist
learning could occur. Marginalized groups mobilize within different
traditions of popular activism (contrast Latin America with Southeast Asia,
for instance) and face different environments of religion, state power, and
gender practice. Transsexual women in the metropole have things to learn
from feminism and transsexual politics in the periphery, as well as things
to contribute. No one with experience of solidarity work will doubt that
this is hard, but it is certainly a main arena for a transsexual politics directed
toward care and justice.
To speak in terms of another politics is optimistic, but we need some

876 Connell
optimism of the will. The old politics of identity and exclusion drove a
wedge between feminism and transsexual women that has not been en-
tirely overcome. I hope the analysis in this article helps to make transsexual
womens lives intelligible in feminist terms while remaining true to trans-
sexual womens experiences. The political direction suggested here has
deep roots in transsexual and feminist history. It is not an easy path, and
it cannot be conflict free. Yet it has the prospect of engaging transsexual
feminists with other feminists in work that can make practical gains for
gender justice and enrich feminism as a whole.
University of Sydney
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Raewyn Connell Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought

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Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics

Author(s): Raewyn Connell

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Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward

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definition as a boy or man toward the embodiment and social position of

Encounters of feminism and transsexual women

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gender reassignment had already been undertaken, especially in Germany

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sexual women, though some were in the ranks. Transsexual women do

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Here transsexual women figured not as hostile outsiders but as striking

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a set of embodied texts (1991, 296), with the potential to disrupt

This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Thu, 1 Oct 2015 10:33:54 AM

For other feminists, the tools of poststructuralism allowed transsexuality

From identity problems to gender dynamics

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sexuals, cross-dressers, he-shes and she-males, intersexed people, trans-

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while acknowledging diversity at an individual level, lumps women and

This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Thu, 1 Oct 2015 10:33:54 AM

possible to live. Nancy Chodorows Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities

Rethinking transsexuality as gender process

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nonnormative bodies, as experienced by disabled women, is a notable site

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the reassignment operations in the United States (Griggs 1996; Meyer-

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signment, though slow, has something of the character of emergency

The work of transition

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nition as a woman need not involve passing. Recognition can equally be

Weaving new lives: Economic and family relations

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can be rewoven. Indeed, family members may be vital supports during

Another politics is possible

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and to groups whose bodily experiences are anomalous, especially disabled

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antagonist in recognition struggles, denying or rationing recognition (Ca-

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through everyday involvement in campaigns, policy work, research, and

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Connell, Catherine. 2010. Doing, Undoing, or Redoing Gender? Learning from

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Harcourt, Wendy. 2009a. Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender

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Theoretical Framework for Cross-National Research. Innovation 11(2):147

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