WHEN

MONSTERS
SPEAK
ASTERISK: Gender, Trans-, and All That Comes After
A series edited by Susan Stryker, Eliza Steinbock, and Jian Neo Chen

Duke University Press Durham and London 2024

 A SUSAN STRYKER READER

WHEN
MONSTERS
SPEAK
Susan Stryker / Edited by McKenzie Wark
© 2024 Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞

Project Editor: Bird Williams

Designed by Courtney Leigh Richardson
Typeset in Minion Pro and Futura Std by Copperline
Book Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stryker, Susan, author. | Wark, McKenzie, [date] editor.
Title: When monsters speak : a Susan Stryker reader /
Susan Stryker ; edited by McKenzie Wark.
Other titles: Susan Stryker reader | Asterisk
(Duke University Press)
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2024. | Series:
Asterisk | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2023040704 (print)
lccn 2023040705 (ebook)
isbn 9781478030478 (paperback)
isbn N 9781478026259 (hardcover)
isbn 9781478059462 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Transgender people—Study and teaching. |
Gender identity—Political aspects—California—San Francisco. |
Sexual minority culture—California—San Francisco. |
Transgender artists—California—San Francisco. | Queer theory. |
Feminist theory. | bisac: social science / lgbtq Studies /
Transgender Studies
Classification: lccn hq77.9 .s78 2024 (print)
lcc hq77.9 (ebook)
ddc 306.76/80979461—dc23/eng/20240124
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040704
lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040705

Cover art: Portrait of Susan Stryker by Loren Rex Cameron,

reproduced with permission of the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell
University. From the Loren Rex Cameron Papers box 1, file 10.
 Contents

Introduction, by McKenzie Wark / 1

Part I. Trans SanFrisco

1. TRICK DIVE / 23

2. THE SURGEON HAUNTS MY DREAMS / 30

3. RENAISSANCE AND APOCALYPSE:

Notes on the Bay Area’s Transsexual Arts
Scene / 34

4. ACROSS THE BORDER: On the

Anarchorporeality Project
A Discussion between Kathy High
and Susan Stryker / 41

5. LOS ANGELES AT NIGHT / 51

6. DUNGEON INTIMACIES: The Poetics of

Transsexual Sadomasochism / 58

7. PERFECT DAY / 72

8. KETAMINE JOURNAL / 83

9. SEE BEAMS GLITTER / 87

Part II. Trans Theory as Gender Theory

10. THE TIME HAS COME TO

THINK ABOUT GAYLE RUBIN / 93

11. TRANSGENDER FEMINISM:

Queering the Woman Question / 98

12. TRANSGENDER HISTORY,

HOMONORMATIVITY, AND DISCIPLINARITY / 109

13. LESBIAN GENERATIONS:

Transsexual . . . Lesbian . . . Feminist / 123

Part III. When Monsters Speak

14. MY WORDS TO VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN

ABOVE THE VILLAGE OF CHAMOUNIX:
Performing Transgender Rage / 133

15. TRANSGENDER STUDIES:

Queer Theory’s Evil Twin / 151

16. TRANSING THE QUEER (IN)HUMAN / 155

17. MORE WORDS ABOUT “MY WORDS

TO VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN” / 159

Conclusion. Interview, McKenzie Wark and Susan Stryker / 165

Bibliography / 179 Index / 189

INTRODUCTION
McKenzie Wark

The Nineties
I was a little nervous about meeting Susan Stryker for the first time. It was
a cool October morning in New York City. We sat outside at the Hungarian
pastry shop on the Upper West Side. I needn’t have worried. It was a delight-
ful conversation ranging from the medicinal uses of ketamine to John Lil-
ly’s experiments in dolphin communication. And, of course, we talked about
transgender stuff.
In transgender time one has at least two ages: the number of spirals around
the sun since birth, and another, younger age, since coming out. Meeting Su-
san, I was a newly hatched trans woman meeting a revered elder. And not just
any elder. She literally wrote the book, Transgender History. And she coedited
The Transgender Studies Reader. And she cofounded the journal, tsq: Trans-
gender Studies Quarterly.1
At the same time, I was meeting a contemporary. We were both born in
1961. For all I know, I might be a month or two older. We both grew up in the
mass broadcast age, finding hints of who we could be through popular media,
whether it was Bugs Bunny cross-­dressing as Brunhilda or imagining our-
selves as “tall and tan and young and lovely” in Astrud Gilberto’s “Girl from
Ipanema.”2
 For both of us, our thirties were in the nineties, and as writers we were
shaped by and responded to the nineties as a world-­historical context: The
Soviet Union collapsed. China took the capitalist road. The anti-­Apartheid
movement in South Africa prevailed. The United States went to war in the
Persian Gulf. In the nineties, we learned new acronyms like nafta and wto.
The internet was still fun, but its commercialization was gathering speed.
Since we are talking about queer people, the nineties needs a soundtrack:
the sounds drifting from car stereos from Sydney to San Francisco were Ma-
donna and Prince, Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston. In classically Ameri­
can segregated fashion, there was both gangsta rap and grunge. In the gay
clubs there was house music, and in the more forward-­leaning straight(ish)
ones, techno — both of which you might get on a compilation cd. By the end
of the nineties, Napster would suggest a whole other model of media con-
sumption. Meanwhile, talk shows were all the rage on cable tv and featured
repeated segments about trans people, mostly awful.
Our more local contexts ran in parallel, too. For much of the nineties,
Stryker was in San Francisco, and I was in Sydney, two of the gayest towns
on the Pacific rim. Both had lively urban enclaves of the kind one used to call
“bohemian,” where people gathered to shape their lives around self-­creation
and to invent new collective modes of being.3 Rising rents had not yet driven
us out of our playgrounds. The start of the aids pandemic had hit both cities
hard, but at least by the mid-­nineties the antiretroviral drug “cocktail” started
working for people living with aids.4
I mention this by way of situating how I read the writing that I have se-
lected and arranged here. This writing is anchored in a time I know well, as
Stryker’s contemporary and as a writer also formed by the nineties in a bohe-
mian milieu. And yet, at the same time, it is writing that I approach in trans
time: as that of an elder speaking of an era I missed. I didn’t come out until
the 2010s. In trans time, I’m very green.
Like many trans people, I absorbed the language and perspectives of those
who had transitioned just before me and were my teachers, mentors, and
guides. In my case, mostly millennial trans women. Trans sensibilities are
constantly remaking themselves. For example, we will see how the word
transgender became important for Stryker for defining a way of being that
took some distance from the older language of the transvestite and transsex-
ual. By contrast, I came up in an era when, at least in my Brooklyn milieu, we
started calling ourselves transsexuals again, investing the term with different
meanings, and using the term as a way of distinguishing a sensibility different
from what transgender came to mean as a liberal institutional marker. Trans

2 / m c kenzie wark
people, not unlike other tiny minorities, have only tactics in and against the
languages applied to us by dominant cultures and institutions.
As a trans woman, I’m a product of 2010s-era discourse.5 But as a writer
and theorist, I started working in my own voice in the 1990s — as did Susan
Stryker. I think she asked me to edit this collection in part because we share
that moment. We both witnessed how languages, ways of being, forms of al-
ternate life, were appropriated into dominant cultures and institutions, in-
cluding higher education. And we both have a sense that what the selective
tradition retained from those times of creation has narrowed.6
I don’t think either of us is interested in nostalgia. Rather, it’s a matter
of rewinding to find some less familiar sounds to sample in order to fast-­
forward somewhere else. Maybe there are possibilities, ways of being queer,
of being sexual, of being trans, of being a writer or artist, of living one’s life
as collective creation that were left behind. Maybe there are possibilities also
for adding some textures and colors to the kinds of academic discourses that
institutionalize the memory and teaching of such ways of life.
This is where my other perspective comes into play: not just a veteran of
the nineties but a participant-­observer in this much more recent trans milieu.
One reason I stayed in the closet throughout the eighties and nineties is that
it was unthinkable to me that, if I came out, I could get any sort of job that
would be part of intellectual life — in academia or the media or anywhere. I
thought the choice was to stay closeted so I could get work and write, or to
come out and do survival sex work.7 This was a fair estimation, although the
life and work of Susan Stryker is the counterfactual. I could not have done
what she did, though. If I tried it, I don’t think I’d have made it. I imagine I’d
be dead.
The situation for trans people can’t be said to have improved all that much,
frankly. Particularly for trans people of color, or whose family rejects them,
or who are deprived of education and community support, or get caught up
in the carceral system. I’m not a liberal optimist. And yet for that tiny sliver
of educated and supported trans people, there’s at least some slim possibility
of working professionally and having some version of a middle-­class life. Or
there would be, were it not for the casualization and proletarianization of so
many formerly “middle-­class” trades, including academia.
I see this among the millennial trans people who are my contemporaries
in trans time. Thanks to the struggles won and work created by Stryker and
others, some things are different. Queer and trans studies have a toehold in
the academy. All sorts of social and cultural institutions now feel obliged to
at least acknowledge that we have a right to work and live in the world of for-

Introduction / 3
mal liberal equality. The chances of living and working in general are under
continual downward pressure, although there’s some irony in that the one in-
dustry in which trans people have carved out new possibilities for financially
stable lives is tech.
One of the most powerful tendencies to emerge from the nineties, and
largely in the San Francisco Bay Area, was the commodification of the inter-
net. It is now transforming the whole of the economy and rendering a lot of
intellectual labor precarious and casual. There are other drivers, but the in-
ternet is one of the sources of the adjunctification of the university. Just when
trans intellectuals might get their chance to have a niche in the academy, the
academy itself is reneging on its commitment to sustainable intellectual lives
within its doors.
At the same time, several generations of trans people have discovered
each other, and themselves, via the internet. Access to the internet was so re-
stricted for so long, that the ability to express and negotiate trans-­ness, and
to organize, was skewed toward the sensibilities of affluent, white trans peo-
ple.8 Traces of this linger in today’s era of far more generalized social media.
Meanwhile, there are certainly still queer and trans bohemian milieux to be
found — I am living in one here in Brooklyn, New York. These milieux have a
different texture now that so much of our existence is mediated through on-
line social media rather than zines and newsletters.
I was there for the online world of gender play and community of the
nineties.9 But unlike Stryker, I missed the formation of a trans version of
queer everyday life. When I came out, I found an everyday life already shaped
both by the trans avant-­garde to which Stryker belonged and by decades of
online culture. I hear Stryker’s voice in stereo, then: as a contemporary and
an elder. And I listen through both channels when selecting and editing the
texts for this book.
I wanted to make a book rather than just a collection of pieces. Each of
the three parts can be read through in order and has its own story to tell. The
parts are each more-­or-­less sequential within themselves, but each operates
on its own timeline — rather like trans time itself. What follows is a guide to
further points of interest.
Part 1, “Trans SanFrisco,” puts into sequence texts that emerged out of
the Bay Area queer and trans milieu, particularly its s/m culture.10 Part 2,
“Trans Theory as Gender Theory,” builds on the practices and languages de-
veloped in the Bay Area, and it tackles questions of the politics of knowledge,
memory, and inter-­and intra-­community alliance. I held back Stryker’s best-­
known piece, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” until the last arc, part 3,

4 / m c kenzie wark
“When Monsters Speak.” I want the reader to become familiar, first, with the
milieu from which it emerged and, second, with the kinds of patient political
negotiations that came after — before confronting trans rage. We then follow
that text’s career across twenty years through Stryker’s commentaries on it.

Trans SanFrisco

In part 1, I have grouped together Stryker’s writings that emerged mostly out
of the Bay Area, starting in the nineties. The space of the city appears as one
for the possibility of reinventing what everyday life could be like.11 It is hard to
overestimate how traumatizing the start of the hiv/aids pandemic was, par-
ticularly in places that had high concentrations of gay people, trans people, sex
workers, and intravenous drug users. A whole generation— mine, Susan’s —
who had been sexually active before anyone knew what aids was had to confront
the loss of many loved ones in an atmosphere of panic, stigma, and isolation.12
The hiv/aids pandemic never ended. What changed in the nineties was
the reconstitution of ways of life that, for want of a better term, I’m calling
bohemian. Styrker emerges from the milieu of Trans SanFrisco as a trans
woman who refuses to accept trans-­ness as a mental illness or a medical diag-
nosis. She looks for other practices and other languages. The language of
transition can instead be aesthetic or spiritual. One might learn how to be-
come transgender through sexual or artistic practices.
We start with the short story “Trick Dive.” It’s set in an archetypal water-
front dive bar. Being from a port town, I can confirm that such places used
to exist and contained people not unlike these characters. The story is told
from the point of view of a trans sex worker confronting a man who wants
something from her — knowledge. The knowledge he will pay for might just
be whether she still has a dick or not. And it might be something more. “Trick
Dive” sets up a major theme of this book: What knowledge might the trans
person have?
“The Surgeon Haunts My Dreams” is writing one might now imagine as
autofiction: the narrator seems close to the author, although it’s not the con-
fessional voice of autobiography.13 It’s more speculative. The trans woman’s
body appears here via two regimes of knowledge. One is that of the surgeon.
Far from being a benevolent Man of Science, he has his own desires. Perver-
sity, if that’s what it is, belongs not only on the side of the body under the
knife. The other regime of knowledge is that of the sado-­masochistic prac-
tices encountered in “Trick Drive.” What can a body come to know viscerally
by taking the knife into its own hand?

Introduction / 5
 The piece also has a masturbation scene in which the narrator has to find
a way to extract pleasure from what one might think of as her dick, although
the word is hardly adequate. Here and elsewhere in these autofictional pieces,
Stryker is less interested in psychoanalytic language, with its assumptions
about gendered bodies, than in exploring the phenomenology of the ambi-
guities of the trans body and its “many-­handed hunger.”14
“Renaissance and Apocalypse” sets the scene for the emergence of distinc-
tively trans artists and art practices within a wider queer culture. Renaissance
implies rebirth, and the essay hints at pasts in which something like what we
now call transgender people may have had forms of cultural continuity and a
place in the culture at large. The nineties was not the first, nor the last, “tip-
ping point” for trans people, where we might begin again to make our own
art after our own desires, and where that work might start attracting the at-
tention of a wider audience.15 Stryker is already warning of the dangers of
sanding off the edges of our experiences for wider cultural consumption.
Stryker points to the structural homology between the slave narrative and
trans autobiography. It’s a parallel one would not want to draw out too far. A
reparative reading might start from how the struggle to build a sustainable
and cumulative trans existence has both political and cultural dimensions
and connecting both is the problem of pluralizing the kinds of narratives we
get to have.16 There’s a hope, in many ways fulfilled, that if our struggle for
liberation makes any headway, it both enables and draws upon trans creative
expression in new forms, which is something these autofictional pieces are
already doing: finding a form for writing that can hew closer to the experi-
ences of the trans body in the world when thought outside of our “medical
colonization.”
“Across the Border,” cowritten with Kathy High, proposes just such a work
of art — an unrealized creative project documenting an orchiectomy.17 The
class and race dimensions of orchiectomy as a transition path are noted, as
removing the testicles is cheaper and simpler than vaginoplasty. It also makes
a unique kind of body: distinctively trans.18 “Renaissance and Apocalypse”
experimented with a religious language for trans culture. Here we are in the
language of contemporary art. High’s contributions note the formal problems
of making visual art about the trans body, Such art, when not voyeurism, can
become surveillance. The problem of the cis gaze has arrived.19
“Los Angeles at Night” is my favorite piece of Stryker’s. It pulls together
beautifully an autofictional style of narrative while allowing concepts to
emerge organically out of situation and story. Autofiction becomes auto­
theory.20 Stryker takes the blade back from the surgeon as a tool for practic-

6 / m c kenzie wark
ing presence in the flesh as a kind of art, or ritual. What s/m and trans-­ness
might have in common is that the body can’t be ignored, but neither is it sim-
ply given. The “language of the body,” as Kathy Acker called it, can be felt
through an art that gives it occasion to speak.21 Besides its beauty as a piece of
s/m writing, “Los Angeles at Night” also asks what a trans erotics would be
like if made not only about us but by us and for us.
“Dungeon Intimacies,” like “Renaissance and Apocalypse,” pulls out to
give us a wider view, but now of a Trans SanFrisco that is disappearing. It
stresses the agency of the local as something more than merely reactive to
globalization. It documents the s/m scene of the time and its innovations in
forms of corporeal becoming-­together. Stryker learns the language of queer,
transgender, and genderqueer in the chill-­out moments on the scene.
Here knowledge merges with and emerges from avant-­garde practices
within a bohemian psychogeography nestled within the larger urban possibil-
ities and constraints of the Bay Area.22 Stryker draws from a phenomenology
of experimental corporeal experience rather than relying on psychoanaly-
sis, which takes gender categories as given. Through practices, of which s/m
is only one example, bodies emerge from the ambiguity of being into a lan-
guage all their own.23 Or so it was in Trans SanFrisco, for a time. Before the
tech boom changed the city and before its sexual avant-­gardes became the
raw material for an internet porn industry.24
“Perfect Day” brackets the nineties in a longer arc, ending in a more set-
tled life of kids, partners, blended families, and all that. It starts by winding
back to Stryker’s teen years. “Living as a man was nonconsensual,” she writes
of her teenage self. Looking for knowledge about gender, the library didn’t
help. I had the same experience with that. The only books I could find talked
about whatever was going on with my gender and sexuality in terms of medi-
cal diseases and mental illnesses, when all I wanted was a pointer to where I
could find people like me to befriend.
Pre-­transition trans women who love women are sometimes good at sex.
We pay very close attention. But we are maybe not great at it.25 It is hard for us
to be in our own bodies. We can be attractive because we are “not like other
guys.” But also frustrating to our partners — because not like other guys. “Per-
fect Day” steps nimbly through many of these tensions, making a valuable
contribution to the conversations trans women have about our sexualities.
This section concludes with two appreciations of younger artists, Char-
lotte Prodger and Cooper Lee Bombardier. The key to the former is the
art of modified embodiment.26 Ketamine was one of the things Susan and
I discussed when we first met. I’m “out” as a recreational user but was also

Introduction / 7
low-­key jealous that her k is on prescription. Its dissociative, out-­of-­body
qualities might be especially appealing to trans women.27 “Ketamine Jour-
nal” uses diary entries as a mediating form between body and text, as Stryker
does elsewhere.
I chose to end this section with Stryker’s introduction to Bombardier’s
Pass with Care.28 It registers the formation of the next generation of trans
writers and artists in Trans SanFrisco. There’s an intimation here that trans
culture might begin to be cumulative rather than always fugitive.

Trans Theory as Gender Theory

In part 2, the story moves away from the Trans SanFrisco milieu. It deals less
with cultural or spiritual or sexual languages for trans existence and more
with the political and academic “micropolitical practices through which the
radical implications of transgender knowledges can become marginalized.”
“Trans Theory as Gender Theory” tells a story about negotiating with the
power of normative institutions of gender, sexuality, and history.
We start with Stryker’s tribute to Gayle Rubin. Appropriately enough, they
met at a queer fundraiser at the Eagle, a gay leather bar. Rubin is impor-
tant as an example of a scholar whose work is “grounded in her own bodily
acts.” Stryker presents Rubin not only as a role model but also as one of those
invaluable people who has written letters of recommendation and in other
ways enabled out trans and queer people to get toeholds in academia.
Like many feminists, Rubin was interested in the conceptual double of sex
and gender; only for Rubin this was a historical and institutional structure.29
Rubin was one of those feminists who stood apart from the dominant ten-
dency to reify and dehistoricize the category of “woman.” Her intervention
in the famous, or perhaps infamous, Barnard conference of 1982 was to stick
up for the feminism potentials of s/m practices, sex work, and porn against
the rise of “good-­girl feminism.”30 This was the text by Rubin that seized my
attention in the mid-­eighties, when I was an undergrad minoring in women’s
studies. (I know, that should have told me something.)
Since “trannies were lumped in with all the other perverts” in the mor-
alistic strain of feminism, the lines of alliance for Stryker were clear —
even if Rubin was not always particularly helpful on trans stuff in her influen-
tial early writings. Even for writers coming at trans-­ness sympathetically, the
perspective of queer sexualities tended to see trans-­ness as if it was another
kind of kink. They kept the structural association of trans with deviance, then
flipped the value of deviance from bad to good — and us with it. While some

8 / m c kenzie wark
of us — Stryker and myself included — experience trans-­ness in part through
a deep connection to sexuality, many do not.
Trans-­ness is not reducible to sexuality, and indeed, the sexualization, par-
ticularly of trans women, can be part of the problem. Still, the path toward
trans studies was clear. Second wave feminism that took the “natural” sexed
body as a given was not adequate for dealing with queer sexuality, and so
queer studies had to strike out from its maternal feminist home. Further, to
imagine the figure of the trans person independently from sexuality, trans
studies had to take a little distance from queer studies — how much is still up
for debate.31
Once we posit trans embodiment as its own distinctive kind of politics,
knowledge, and politics of knowledge, then we can work through its conse-
quences for feminism. Trans makes the category of “woman” more interest-
ing and might even “queer the woman question.” Gender might no longer
be just a mimetic double of sex as a “biological” given — as it has become
in much of Trans-­Exclusionary Radical Feminist (terf) discourse. Instead,
we might all practice nonmimetic ways of experiencing and conceiving our
becomings. Stryker experimented with both gender as lived, and genre as
written.
Interestingly, for Stryker, the concept of trans-­ness is not limited to trans
people. It is present as that which the sex/gender system controls. Whether
in gay or straight life, there are sanctions for doing gender “wrong.” One of
the agents of control of trans-­ness ended up being a certain kind of feminism
that set itself up as the police of good womanhood. It treats the “biological”
body, or rather a fantasy of it, as if it were a “natural” given that could ground
a politics and a culture of womanhood across time and space.32 In doing so,
this trans-­exclusionary feminism bought into colonial formations of knowl-
edge and power through which white women became the agents of “proper”
gender expression, both in the colonies and against working-­class women at
home.33 An influential strand of second wave feminism repeated the patriar-
chal notion of woman as close to nature and simply reversed its value, mak-
ing this the source of the good, the beautiful, and the true. This conceit of
naturalism was then treated as the reason for rather than against the agency
of women in public life.
Third wave feminism brought a much-­needed critique of the essentialism
and Eurocentrism of this project as well as new concepts such as the perfor-
mativity of gender, which in Judith Butler’s view retroactively produces the
fiction of embodied sex as its origin.34 And yet transsexuality often appears
in both second and third wave feminism as a kind of allegorical point of con-

Introduction / 9
centration for thinking about everything but the trans body itself. Despite its
claims to progress, even in third wave feminism, a long-­standing tradition
of transsexuality as allegory for modernity finds itself repeated somewhat
uncritically in academic drag.35 Trans-­ness is the sign of “gender trouble”
or — one might even say — of “sex trouble.”
Trans feminism makes trans-­ness its own experiential site rather than a mere
allegory for other people’s gender anxieties.36 Trans feminism might neverthe-
less connect to struggles other than around trans-­ness. Drawing on her own
experiences, Stryker points toward a range of social struggles around disability,
mental health, undocumented labor, workplace discrimination, privacy, access
to health care and housing, policing, and mass incarceration. Stryker: “How we
each live our bodies in the world is a vital source of knowledge.”
Trans-­ness also troubles queerness. Homonormativity, or what Jasbir
Puar will later call homonationalism, might be concepts describing how cer-
tain ways of being a gay man or lesbian are incorporated into models of the
good citizen and consumer.37 Homonormativity might also mean the ways in
which gay and lesbian communities and organizations themselves police the
boundaries of queerness against other expressions of it, particularly gender-­
variant and trans ones. It’s disappointing, to say the least, when queer people
accept the straight world’s models of gender. Hence re-­emergence of “lgb
without the t” politics and sensibilities. The move to sever us is not with-
out a certain perverse logic. Trans-­ness is not an equivalent identity cate-
gory to being a gay man, or a lesbian, or bisexual. Trans people can be any
of those things, or be “straight.” In the sensibility of liberal identity politics,
the t functions more as a supplement, or as the “containment mechanism for
gender trouble.”
Leslie Feinberg popularized the idea of transgender as a kind of political
umbrella category that could include transsexuals, transvestites, and other
gender-­variant or gender-­expansive people, including what in more recent
language one might call nonbinary and agender people.38 Across much of
Stryker’s writing the term transgender has that valence. Now that trans-
gender has become a liberal political identity category, I venture that one
might even speak of a kind of transnormativity. In moments of transnorma-
tivity, certain expressions of trans-­ness appear as acceptable and redeemable.
This respectable trans-­ness is then worthy of consideration as the basis for
rights-­bearing subjects. Not surprisingly the face of transnormativity is often
white, or at least well-­spoken, not publicly sexual, and at some remove from
sex work.39

10 / m c kenzie wark
 There are now even sanctioned historical narratives of trans-­ness, which
highlight certain figures and moments as formative struggles that endow cer-
tain trans people with the potential to claim to be rights-­bearing subjects.
Stryker reminds us that Nietzsche once dissected historical thought into
three kinds: antiquarian, monumental, and critical.40 Antiquarian history
gives us a lineage and connection. Monumental history seeks heroic stories
to inspire great things. Critical history is more steely-­eyed and focuses on
past injustices. Now that Marsha P. Johnson has a waterside park named after
her, it’s timely to revisit this intervention into questions of what kind of his-
tories serve what purpose for trans people today.
How are we to remember the moment of August 1966 at Compton’s Cafe­
teria in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco? Was it a riot or a revolt?
How does it relate to what happened at Stonewall a few years later? What are
we to remember: That we suffered? That we struggled? Or that we endured?
Who exactly is that “we”? Stryker did much to bring Compton’s into focus as
a moment in trans history — to the extent that in the 2019 version of the mini-
series Tales of the City (based on the characters from Armistead Maupin’s
much-­loved books), Compton’s becomes the key to the backstory of the cen-
tral character Anna Madrigal.
The general concept of normativity emerges as a key theme across these
texts. Whereas the writings in part I attempt to find a form outside of nor-
mative literary forms, those in part 2 take on normativity, particularly that of
feminists, gays, and lesbians, as a topic. At the level of form, they also ques-
tion normativity in historical studies. Historical writing that centers the body
of the writer, as trans writing sometimes must, can find itself relegated to the
margins by a normativizing disciplinarity. Scholarship that insists on a sub-
jective neutrality as a way of simulating objectivity is for trans people part of
the problem. It is exactly this epistemology that handed power over our lives
to medical and psychiatric Dr. Frankensteins.
One of the most fraught kinds of normativity for trans women to negotiate
is lesbian culture. As Stryker puts it, we are neither its object nor subject but
often its abject: that which is pushed aside with disgust.41 She asks, provoca-
tively, what it would mean to think lesbian feminism as structured around its
transphobia. Lesbian feminism, like second wave feminism, is too often a ver-
sion of Eurocentric modernization discourse. It is a certain model of wom-
anhood, posed as the most liberated, most advanced, most befitting of the
claim to rights. It’s critical attention turned against other women. That can
include working-class butch and femme dykes, women of color, trans women,

Introduction / 11
or trans men — all of whom supposedly perpetuate oppressive gender roles.42
The personal is political, but the political can also get very, very personal.
What’s striking to me about the essays I grouped together under “Trans
Theory” is Stryker’s patient and controlled tone. She shows the contributions
trans people can make by drawing on the knowledge gained from encoun-
tering the world through our particular bodies. And at the same time, she
shows how those to whom we appealed for solidarity and support did not al-
ways have our backs.

When Monsters Speak

I’ve arranged the book so that we start with the formative experiences of
cultural and political knowledge-­making in “Trans SanFrisco,” followed by
the application of that knowledge to the politics of institutional alliances in
“Trans Theory,” before returning, in part 3, to Stryker’s most famous piece:
“My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Perform-
ing Transgender Rage.” Hopefully, those to whom the depth and breadth of
transgender rage seemed opaque will now have some sense of what it feels like.
Another context for this text, highlighted maybe a little more than in some
of the others, is transgender political organizing. It deals with the politics of
emotions and the emotions of politics. Here the affinity with queer experi-
ence and organizing, whatever our tensions with it, is worth stressing. Trans
politics, like queer politics, might entail the recognition that certain emotions
are not private, isolated experiences. That shame, fear, despair, and rage are
social and political.43
At the same time, the piece works through aesthetic questions as to what
trans writing might become. Sandy Stone had already shown the limits of the
conventional trans memoir, where transition is the culmination of a personal
journey facilitated by doctors.44 The concluding emotion of transition is sup-
posed to be living happily ever after in one’s “real” gender. Stryker imagines
transition otherwise: as an art of the body, which of necessity is also a politics
of the body, due to the infuriating obstacles put in the path of our individual
and collective self-­transformation. She creates, out of parts, a genre for this
theory and practice of gender. The raging tone feels akin to that of act-­u p,
with all its survival-­driven urgency.45
The structuring conceit of Stryker’s text is the unnaturalness of the trans
body. All human bodies are in some way unnatural, in the sense that they all
require some kind of technics to endure and thrive.46 But some have to be held
as abject — as unassimilable, as other — to sustain the fiction of the normative

12 / m c kenzie wark
body as natural. Finding this scapegoating not just from the straight world
but also from feminists, lesbians, and gay men pushes the narrator to embrace
alterity, to become the “leatherdyke from hell.” Gayle Rubin on steroids —
but where the steroid happens to be estrogen.
But here is the risk this self-­fashioning runs: How to “lay claim to the dark
power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others
or being wounded by it myself?” This is both personal and political work: to
create ways of existing with, even drawing on, this powerful affect without
self-­harm. If you are trans, you have very likely lost sisters and brothers and
others who died by their own hand, sometimes as much from rage as from
sadness. But there’s more: one also has to deflect oneself from inflicting this
rage onto other trans people, something I see constantly in the community
drama among the trans people around me.
When trans people create themselves, it’s both a personal and communal
act.47 The theme of creation in this text draws on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Once upon a time, only God was a creator, and the best humans could do is to
imitate His handiwork. A hierarchy of perfection stretches down from God, via
the angels, to Man, and to his imitations as a poorly realized representation.48
When I first read this text, years before I could even contemplate the need
to transition, I read it through Raymond Williams and what, for him, was the
long history to the struggle to democratize creation.49 A key moment is that
of the romantic poets, Mary Shelley’s contemporaries, for whom the poet
is a special kind of human endowed with creative capacities. For Williams,
the long revolution of socialism had the aim of freeing not only the labor of
working peoples but their creative capacities as well.
In Mary Shelley, and in Susan Stryker, we find a complication on the way
to the democratization of creation: What happens when the desire to create
takes the bodies of others as its material? When Christine Jorgensen became
famous in 1952 as the first celebrity trans woman, one of the things being cele-
brated was the creative power of the men who made her.50 The surgeon still
haunts our dreams.
The more common critical path taken in second wave feminism is to cele-
brate womanhood as natural, which ironically enough returns us to the ar-
chaic idea of the world as God’s creation.51 Woman is aligned with nature,
purity, and the good against masculinity as the Frankensteinian will to cut
the world into reasonable shape. The result is the spectacle of middle-­class
white women taking themselves to be the apotheosis of naturalism. And so,
we arrive at health authorities issuing warnings against putting wasp’s nests
into vaginas.52

Introduction / 13
 Stryker takes the other path: rather than become natural and good, be-
come artificial and bad — become monstrous. Monsters, like angels, are mes-
sengers, not from God but from elsewhere. Perhaps from creation itself, from
an entirely different conception of “nature” in which it has no author or mas-
ter but is change, difference — variation itself.
On this other path, “nature” is no longer a stick with which to beat oth-
ers for failing to conform to some arbitrary virtue smuggled into the con-
ceit of being ordered by God. If “nature” still exists as a concept, it might
mean something more like that which unfolds into some capacity — existing
or novel — to be materially ongoing in the world. Nature is not virtue; it is
the virtual. It’s virtual in the sense Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari gave the
word. It’s not an ideal, it’s real. It’s just not actual. It’s what is not but could ac-
tually be. It’s all the things the actual could become or, rather, the capacity of
their becomings.53
From the point of view of nature as the virtual, the other concept of nature
as virtue is, ironically enough, an artifice or — less politely — a lie. It is merely
the transposition of some component of a historical social order as a meta-
phor into a state of nature as a means to justify it. This is what Marx said hap-
pens when bourgeois economics sees the market as a natural order. Or what
Haraway says happens in the primate sciences when the bourgeois family be-
comes a given of the natural order.54 One way to think the Anthropocene is
as the failure of such a concept when implemented as a tool of domination
on a planetary scale.
Stryker is still interested in how gender saturates the world, but not along a
nature/artifice binary. She makes use of a reading of Mary Shelley that distin-
guishes the male gaze (and cis gaze) from the auditory space as feminine. The
latter is ambient, unbounded, animated, and dialogic. The former treats the
world as objects that — if they can be seen — can be cataloged and controlled.55
Alongside a critique of visibility, what are the powers and tactics of invis-
ibility, of the ambient and audible?56 It’s a theme across the Trans SanFrisco
writings. For Stryker, it’s the darkened spaces of the s/m club, where the vi-
sual is turned down and the array of other bodies can enter all the senses. It’s
the sounds of quivering flesh, or dialogues in the chill-­out space, where other
talk comes into play. Tactics that can be very selectively deployed in the light
of day to talk back to power. Capacities I was finding, at that time, on the
other side of the Pacific — in raves.57
Talking back is, among other things, a trans power of survival in the street,
when we fail to register as “natural” bodies to the cis gaze. The derogatory
term among trans women for a sister who doesn’t pass is a brick. For many,

14 / m c kenzie wark
the only tactic that seems to offer any safety is to mimic cis womanhood, to
pass, to be unclockable, to accept the codes of gender as given as if they were
a natural order, which in the parlance of trans women is to be fish.
In 2021, at least fifty trans people were murdered in the United States,
mostly trans women of color.58 No wonder many trans people modify and
present their bodies as cis-­passing. This is gender as more than performa-
tive, given that it takes more than negotiating dominant language-­like codes
to pull it off. One had to cut and temper flesh itself. All to appear in the vi-
sual field — just so — in a way that accepts the lie of nature rather than chal-
lenging it. Many trans people do not have the luxury of queer gender play.
Stryker rescues even these transsexual bodies from abjection. They too seize
the powers of creation. That might matter more than the style in which the
gender of the body is then fashioned.
In “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” Stryker issues a trans challenge
to “nature” itself. The piece opens with a description of appearances that in-
tentionally presents the bad object to the controlling gaze, which is itself re-
vealed to be a gaze that is shared not only by men but also by many women
who think they are feminists, and by many queer viewers who think they are
somehow radical. And then this anomalous vision speaks of what it knows,
of what it not only sees but also senses.
“My Words” speak — in the plural — back to the sciences that made trans-
sexual bodies possible but did so out of weird unacknowledged desires and
with a controlling instinct. They also speak back to both feminist and queer
communities who have not heard the challenges trans-­ness poses to the
worldview that seeks to make us in their image through their fantasies of
mastery. “My Words” propose an alternate queer ecology59 — or better — a
trans ecology, in which we will not be that terrifying image of what we are to
all the Dr. Frankensteins: a body without a mouth.60
Ten years after “My Words,” Stryker reflects on them in “Queer Theory’s
Evil Twin.” Like Frankenstein’s monster, the evil twin is a common narra-
tive trope found everywhere from daytime soaps to Pier Paolo Pasolini.61 As
queer theory’s evil twin, transgender studies brings trouble into the family.
Stryker names three writers with whom she is in dialogue — Judith Butler,
Sandy Stone, and Leslie Feinberg — for whom trans-­ness is already a kind of
gender trouble, needling at some corner or other of what is not yet ready to
be named cis normativity.
Out of those texts, Stryker draws possibilities for “enacting a new nar-
rative,” and in that, she is writing in parallel to the Bay Area writers of the
New Narrative movement.62 The world of New Narrative writers is a kind of

Introduction / 15
literary “family by choice,” which is something akin to what Stryker wants
from queer writing: a space within which trans writing can find commonal-
ity. Some years later, trans writing will start to feel the need for its own space,
at some remove from queer literature and theory.63 Just how close its relation
to queerness ought to be is still up for debate.
Some twenty years after “My Words,” in “Transing the Queer (In)human,”
Stryker offers a different kind of intertext for it, gesturing toward Gayatri Spi-
vak on subaltern speech, Jean-­François Lyotard on language games, and Mi-
chael Hardt and others on affective labor. “My Words” enacts speaking rather
than being spoken to or of, crafting moves in a rigged discursive game. It
vents the surplus feelings that performing all that work generates.64 With the
hindsight of twenty years, “My Words” is not only situated in multiple exist-
ing language games. It is also a key move in starting a new one — transgender
studies. One might wonder, however, what other possibilities were left be-
hind. For instance, what might it have looked like if this text was as central to
a trans literature as to a trans scholarship?
Beyond that, what might be at the far horizons of what “My Words” articu-
lated? To me, the essay speaks also to media theory and its interest in the hu-
man as a byproduct of the technical rather than as its author.65 If the human is a
special effect of technics, then it might at least be interesting to consider those
versions of the body that are deemed to have failed to be human because they
are too marked by technics, of which trans people are just one example.
At the twenty-­five year mark, Stryker is writing in a context in which
queer theory has expanded into, and linked up with, a critique of the biopo-
litical, in which forms of life are categorized, ranked, and valued — or treated
as waste.66 Against which various new materialisms emphasize a scaleless, in-
terconnected universe continually in process, often charged with what looks
suspiciously like old-­fashioned vitalism.67 I have written elsewhere against
these kinds of contemplative worldviews that seem to forget the praxis from
which any worldview extends.68
What I appreciate about Stryker’s writings is that they are more than a
merely contemplative worldview upon universal trans-­ness. The texts write
from their own situatedness, from moments of struggle to become. They
write from practices — writerly, political, artistic, sexual — from which these
particular concepts emerge. Concepts, it turns out, that have all sorts of uses
beyond transgender studies, but which have their limitations as well.
In responding to Katrina Roen and Karen Barad, Stryker acknowledges
these limitations, which are also those of the whiteness of the networks of
trans people within which they were in part generated. More generative, per-

16 / m c kenzie wark
haps, is Marquis Bey’s reading of Stryker in which Blackness and trans-­ness
are adjacent ways of naming what was and is fugitive, unfigured, uncaptured,
in racial capitalism. Scholars such as C. Riley Snorton and Jules Gill-­Peterson
have done much to show how in the United States and beyond, the categories
of the sexed body, as they appear in that medical science (which supposedly
grounds its “naturalness”) have always been racialized.69 Jian Neo Chen, mi-
cha cárdenas, Francisco Galarte, and others have brought trans of color lives,
arts, and culture into the dialogue, or rather the polylog, on trans-­ness, put-
ting pressure on it as a category, even within American life.70
Unlike Stryker, I never felt all that strong a need to trouble queer discourse
as a means to affiliate with it. I read queer theory at the time of its initial
boom as if I was a cis bisexual. It bothered me for different reasons. For in-
stance, the way that in Volatile Bodies Liz Grosz treated bisexuality as a vector
of disease.71 Or the way that the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras tried to
control access to its popular annual ball by mandating that all members sign
a declaration that offered only two options: lesbian or gay man. I showed up
to the public debate at the Tom Mann theater with the bisexuals rather than
the transsexuals to see about that.
By the time I eventually came out, queer theory, with its celebration of the
ineffable, indeterminate play of gender appeared to me as one of the obstacles
to my own transition. It often treated actual trans people, and trans women in
particular, as the bad object for taking it all too literally (on which, see all the
inexcusably bad takes on Paris Is Burning). By contrast, I had what Stryker
did not: networks of trans people who might overlap with queer networks
but did not depend on them. It must be said, however, that like everything
else in America, these networks were often segregated.
I had that, in part, because of Styker’s work across the nearly thirty-­year
period this collection covers. When monsters speak, their voices echo.

Notes
1 Stryker, Transgender History; Stryker and Whittle, The Transgender Studies
Reader; Stryker and Aizura, The Transgender Studies Reader II.
2 On the broadcast age, see Spigel, Make Room for tv.
3 Lucy Sante is one of my favorite writers of bohemia. Sante, The Other Paris;
Sante, Low Life.
4 See “Trans in a Time of aids,” special issue edited by Che Gossett and Eva Hay-
ward, tsq: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7, no. 4 (2020).
5 See the fictional account of this subculture in Fitzpatrick, The Call Out.
6 On selective tradition, see R. Williams, The Long Revolution.

Introduction / 17
 7 Perkins, The Drag Queen Scene. The late Roberta Perkins studied sociology with
R. W. Connell at Macquarie University, just a few years before I did.
8 Here I’m indebted to the as-­yet-­unpublished work of Cass Adair.
9 To get the flavor of that, see Sullivan and Bornstein, Nearly Roadkill; Horn,
Cyberville.
10 On which, see also Califia, Macho Sluts.
11 Compare with Tea, Valencia.
12 Here I know the New York accounts best: Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives; Shul-
man, Rat Bohemia.
13 Gasparini, Autofiction.
14 Fleishmann, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through.
15 The tipping point is named after Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point.” It
might also include the public reception of Janet Mock’s autobiography, Redefining
Realness, and the model Geena Rocero’s very public coming out in a TedTalk. See
Rocero, Horse Barbie.
16 On reparative reading, see Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.
17 On the work of Kathy High, see https://www.kathyhigh.com.
18 Monir, Napkin.
19 A short piece by Cara Esten Hurtle got me thinking about this concept. See
Wark, “The Cis Gaze and Its Others.”
20 There are many versions of autotheory. See, for example, Fournier, Autotheory as
Feminist Practice.
21 Acker, Bodies of Work.
22 Solnit, Infinite City.
23 Salamon, Assuming a Body.
24 On San Francisco gentrification and housing struggles, see Tracy, Dispatches
against Displacement.
25 A point made by Peters, Detransition, Baby.
26 Prodger, Selected Works.
27 Baer, Trans Girl Suicide Museum.
28 Bombardier, Pass with Care.
29 G. Rubin, Deviations.
30 Vance, Pleasure and Danger.
31 For the case against queer theory, see Namaste, Invisible Lives.
32 Repo, Biopolitics of Gender.
33 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes; Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality.
34 But see also Prosser, Second Skins.
35 Heaney, The New Woman. On third wave feminism, see Gillis, Howie, and Mun-
ford, Third Wave Feminism.
36 See “Trans/Feminisms,” special issue edited by Susan Stryker and Talia M. Bet-
tcher, tsq: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1 (2016); and “Trans/Feminisms,”
special issue edited by Talia Bettcher et al., Sinister Wisdom (Spring 2023).
37 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.
38 Feinberg, Transgender Warriors.

18 / m c kenzie wark
39 Jean et al., Revolution Is Love, documents the struggle to define a practice of
trans liberation outside of transnormativity. See also Meronek and Major, Miss
Major Speaks.
40 Nietzsche, Untimely Mediations.
41 Kristeva, Powers of Horror.
42 Kendall, Hood Feminism.
43 Subsequent work on transgender “bad affect” includes Malatino, Side Affects; and
Awkward Rich, The Terrible We.
44 Stone, “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back.” For selections from classic trans memoirs, see
Ames, Metamorphosis.
45 Schulman, Let the Record Show.
46 Preciado, Testo Junkie.
47 Gleeson, “How Do Gender Transitions Happen?”
48 Wark, “Trap Metaphysics.”
49 R. Williams, The Long Revolution.
50 See Jorgensen, A Personal Autobiography, with its introduction by Stryker.
51 Although here we might mention how the work of the late Rachel Pollack com-
plicates the women’s spirituality tradition. See Pollack, The Body of the Goddess.
52 Miller, “Why Are Women Putting Wasp Nests in Their Vaginas?”
53 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus.
54 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.
55 One could connect this to a parallel development in studies of Blackness and
sound. See Weheliye, Phonographies.
56 Gossett, Stanley, and Burton, Trap Door.
57 St. John, Technomad.
58 Carlisle, “Anti-­trans Violence and Rhetoric.”
59 Wölfe Hazard, Underflows.
60 Vividly pictured in the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix (1999).
61 Pasolini, Petrolio.
62 Killian and Bellamy, Writers Who Love Too Much.
63 Cugini, “The Troubled Golden Age of Trans Literature.”
64 Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader.
65 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
66 Stryker, “Biopolitics.”
67 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism.
68 Wark, General Intellects.
69 Bey, Black Trans Feminism; Snorton, Black on Both Sides; Gill-­Peterson, Histories
of the Transgender Child; Gill-­Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny.
70 Chen, Trans Exploits; cárdenas, Poetic Operations; Galarte, Brown Trans
Figurations.
71 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 197.

Introduction / 19
This page intentionally left blank
TRANS I.
SANFRISCO
This page intentionally left blank
 1
TRICK DIVE

The Albatross was a sea-­goers’ dive on the working end of San Francisco’s wa-
terfront. Years of grime grayed the derelict two-­story building, so it blended
easily into the fog that often masked the neighborhood from all but know-
ing eyes. Locked doors and boarded windows faced the street, and nothing
directed the merely curious down the back alley toward the sign of the bird
painted on an otherwise unmarked entrance. Inside, the few bikers and leath­
erdaddies cruising rough trade stood out like black islands in the sea of sex-­
hungry sailors who elbowed past the slumming navy boys for their chance
to be hustled by one of the whores who worked the crowd. Sometimes these
sailors got that chance with me.
Karl stood at the pinball machine. A row of quarters lined the glass above
the plunger, a row of empty brown bottles lined the floor beneath. How long
since I’d seen him — two years? Two and a half? He stopped spending nights
here after Maya moved in, and I came now only when business slowed. I hung
back, waiting for him to drop more of his tip money into the slot, kill his lat-
est beer, and launch another ball before I slid my hand between his thighs to
pinch his leg. I pinched harder than I intended, and he yelped angrily as he
spun around.
It took him longer to make me than was good for my vanity. When recogni-
tion welled up in his eyes at last, he leaned back against the machine, work-
ing the style of every tough guy in every B-­movie he’d ever seen. Coal black
eyes beneath bushy brows scanned me while he fished for something impres-
sive to say.
“Of all the gin joints in all the world,” he said, finally giving up, “she walks
into mine.”
“She,” I repeated. “That word used to stick in your throat when you talked
about me.”
“Just something about the way you look tonight, big guy. No offense.” His
lingering gaze contradicted the contempt in his voice. As his eyes raked me,
I saw in them the confused anger and inarticulate need on which I loved to
feed. Then he turned coolly back to his game.
I studied myself in the big mirror behind the bar to our right. My calf-­
length black linen dress was slit nearly to the crotch. Its neckline plunged in
a deep vee to reveal the scalloped edges of my bustier. Stainless steel sheathed
the toes of my stiletto-­heeled black leather pumps. Nice legs, subtle make-­up
and miles of curling blond hair said “femme” so convincingly most people
failed to notice the masculine angularity of the body.
No woman, and certainly no man, would come into the Albatross adver-
tising like that without having something to sell. I wore my shop sign over
my left breast—­a discreet bar-­shaped pin from which small charms dangled:
a noose, a pair of tiny handcuffs, a little leather whip. A roomy pouch slung
over my right shoulder harbored working versions of the jewelry.
Once in this bar some dumb fuck of a tugboat pilot thought that just be-
cause I looked pretty and seemed available he could take me without asking
or paying. He grabbed me in the john, and while he groped clumsily under
my bra, I pulled thirty-­six inches of piano wire from beneath my belt. I left
a scar around his neck he’d be explaining for the rest of his life. The dumb
fucks were bad, but the smart ones were worse, especially officers. Their con-
descension rankled me. They assumed that if I could cheek a rubber, I’d never
read a book. It never occurred to them that a person with other options could
choose to live this way. Fuck ’em, I’d tell myself. They can keep their attitude.
I keep their money.
I turned back to my mark and slid my hand inside Karl’s pants. I throt-
tled his limp dick and squeezed rhythmically to make it waken and pulse. I
leaned into him and peered around his bulk to watch him play. Before long,
his meat stood rigid in my hand, demanding more attention than his game
could spare, and the last ball rolled away. His breathing was ragged, and he
put no more money into the machine.

24 / Chapter One
 “Cut your dick off yet?” The agitation in his voice was obvious.
“Now, Karl,” I cooed, dipping my head coyly to peer up at him, “what
makes you think I’d tell something that personal to a lover who left me for
another skirt?” When he didn’t answer I dropped my voice into the male reg-
ister and asked, “Besides, honey, how badly do you want to know?”
Without a word he thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out a wad of
bills. “Unless you’ve stopped fucking for money?”
“Of course, I’m still fucking for money, you asshole. What else would I be
doing here? But tell me something, sweetie, before we do this deal. What ex-
actly are you trying to buy?”
He became genuinely thoughtful. “Knowledge.”
“Not very specific, dear. Try harder.” He got huffy.
“I just want to be with you again, goddamn it, for one night. You can do
whatever the fuck you want.”
“Sold.”
I grinned as I took what he offered. I hadn’t expected this biz tonight, but
I wanted something from the bastard and was pleased to think I would get
it. Dropping the money into my bag, I took out a chain leash attached to a
spiked choke-­collar and whipped it around Karl’s neck. Yanking the chain
to jab the prongs into his throat without breaking the skin, I dragged him,
an incarnation of sputtering rage, through the crowd and down the street to
my car.
He sat stiffly in the passenger seat, hands cuffed behind him, leash locked
to an eyebolt in the door. It was a quick trip to Karl’s warehouse in west Oak-
land, but long enough for him to brew one of the unspeaking furies that
always fueled our scenes. Leaving Karl cuffed and collared, I got my ropes
out of the trunk, then we entered the apartment. Neither of us spoke as I
slapped him down to the floor, stripped him, screwed clamps on his nipples,
and readied the bondage equipment. I thought of the histories that carried
us here.
We met in the Albatross, where Karl tended bar by day and stayed nights
to drink his wages, shoot pinball, and spout philosophy like some improb-
able beat poet. When he drank, he found a voice for the intricate ideas bot-
tled up in his head. He would rant brilliantly until the alcohol slurred his
thoughts, then drift into a sullen silence that begged to be broken. I loved
to break it, pierce it with clarifying pain. He screamed the loveliest things. I
started our little fling mostly male, though my tits were coming in, and hus-
tling was just beginning to seem more challenging than college. He was fresh

Trick Dive / 25
from the sea, a working-­class boho with a big hungry brain, holding down a
day job and sucking up San Francisco counterculture like a thirsty sponge.
Kinky went with cutting edge in his understanding of the world, and I was
the most temptingly bent thing he’d ever seen. We made a striking couple.
Each found in the other the smart sleaze and social mobility we’d looked for.
Karl was moving up, I was moving down, and we met on common ground at
the Albatross, where my fall from middle-­class respectability came under my
control. I made it a trick dive, falling with grace and precision.
Now I had the scene laid out. Concrete slab steps climbed the back wall of
the apartment to a loft perched fifteen feet above the living area. I anchored a
rope to the banister near the top of the staircase, tested its ability to bear weight,
then turned my attention to Karl. He sucked air as I tore off the titclamps, but
otherwise remained defiantly silent as I put him in a rope harness connected to
leather ankle restraints, trussed his legs together, and tied his arms to his sides.
“All right, you motherfuckin’ maggot, pay attention. Crawl first; then
you’re gonna fly.”
I backhanded him viciously across the face, then picked up a riding crop
with one hand and a switchblade with the other. A sudden torrent of blows
from the crop drove him quickly toward the stairs. Karl pushed with his
knees and shoulders to climb the steps and evade my aim. The rough con-
crete tore his skin, and the crop raised stinging welts across his back. At the
top step I ordered him to stop. I had tied a rapid-­release snap into the rope
on the staircase, and I hooked it to his ankle restraints.
“Get up, shithead. And pray I measured right.”
With the knife I snagged the underside of his scrotum and lifted, forc-
ing him to rise precariously to his feet. I inched him back against the railing.
For one second of perfect terror he balanced on tiptoe, scarlet wetness seep-
ing around the knife point, then he toppled over the banister with a scream.
The rope snapped taut and stretched under his weight. I felt the bloodlust
rise in me and hurried downstairs. Karl’s head swung a foot above the floor.
He panted, and panic filled his eyes. The heavy smell of his sweat wrenched
open in me hidden reservoirs of hate. Had he really wounded me that much?
I lost myself for a while in hurting him: cat, cane, quirt, blade, like old times,
his body and mind tight surfaces ripe for laceration. I raved; he surrendered;
I burst him and drowned myself in his pain.
Afterward, Karl hung unconscious. Blood stained the ropes, laced his ribs
and matted his hair, dripped from his shoulders and nose and pooled brightly
on the bare cement floor. I checked his pulse and his breathing, and knew he
needed to come down soon. But first I had to catch my breath and remember.

26 / Chapter One
 One night, in a playfully bitchy mood, I had tried something new with
Karl, told him to kneel before his Goddess. The single malt scotch we’d worked
on all night wanted out of my bladder, and my piss was too good for the toilet.
“Strip naked, dog, and open your mouth,” I snarled, peeling off my gaff
and lifting my skirt. Karl warily obeyed. I took him by the ears and drove
his mouth down onto the soft little cock nestled between my slick thighs. He
sucked it well back into his throat, and I let loose the kidney-­filtered booze.
He instantly started to moan and bob. I looked down to see his hand wrapped
around his own stiff dick, stroking it frantically. His cum exploded onto my
bare legs before I finished peeing, and he fell sobbing to the floor.
Blubbering words and raw emotion poured from him for an hour after-
ward as he lay curled on the floor, his head cradled in my lap. Only whores
had ever done that to him, he cried, whores who pressed their stinking cunts
against his face and took his money for spewing out filth, those goddamn
fucking bitches. I wasn’t like the rest, was I? Didn’t my cock make me dif-
ferent? Wasn’t I like him? How could I treat him the way women did? How
could love be so vile?
Things quickly turned ugly between us, but some kind of sick momentum
kept us fucking. One day he mounted me, his weight between my splayed legs
pinning my hips to the mattress. His rod began to probe the hole between my
cheeks, but it quickly drooped, and he flung himself from me.
“I don’t want this anymore,” he spat. “You used to be a man who could
look like a woman and that was so fine. Very pure. But now you’re a woman
with a cock and it’s all fucked up. I knew that when you pissed on me. That’s
what made you a woman to me. That’s when you really turned into a whore.
Women are whores. You’re nothing I want. So you just keep fucking away
from me.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll just keep fucking. Away from you.”
The next day I rented a room in the Tenderloin and when I came back for
my things, I found them in the dumpster where Maya, a college friend I had
introduced to Karl, had thrown them. I watched them watch me from the
window as I climbed into the cab and drove away. Fuckers. They deserved
each other.
I thought that was all in the past, until I saw Karl again. But transsexual
rage dies slowly, if ever at all. It’s kept alive by every self-­deluded prick who
buys my time to cloak his homosexual desire with my petticoats, or who
craves a woman and can’t admit he hates and fears the smell of cunt. It threat-
ens to explode whenever lovers, strangers, friends, or tricks try to make me
something that I’m not — just a woman, just a man — or blame me for my dif-

Trick Dive / 27
ferences, refuse to see me as a whole person, use me to avoid working out
their own bullshit about themselves or the other sex. But as I swim the dark-
ness between the shores of male and female, my rage warms me with its fires
at my core. It moves me.
I was through with him. Finally. A weak moan escaped Karl’s lips as I
clipped a rope to his bound wrists, climbed the stairs behind him, and hauled
his arms upward, bending him at the waist. I tied the rope off on the banister
before slowly playing out the other line to right him, then lowered him gen-
tly to the floor. An hour later his wounds had all been cleaned and dressed,
his fluids replenished, my tools put away. I flopped into a chair, and he sat
wrapped in a blanket at my feet, absently stroking my legs, nursing a bottle of
Gatorade. Neither of us spoke for a long while.
“I asked Maya to, you know,” he mumbled, staring into space, “piss. Like
that. On me.”
“She did?”
“And then she left me.”
“Like I ‘left you’?”
The irony was lost on him. “Yeah, like you left me.”
Another long pause followed, then he asked, “Would you do it to me
again?”
“How? As your friend, or as your whore?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I pushed him onto his back and pulled a gooseneck lamp down to his face
so that he saw only the blinding whiteness of electric light. I straddled him,
my crotch above his mouth.
Taking my knife from the nearby bag and pressing it against his throat, I
hissed, “Move, and I’ll rip you up.”
He held still and I felt myself let go. Piss strained through the fabric of my
underwear, dribbling down on his upturned lips. His Adam’s apple rose and
fell as he swallowed. What would it mean to him? His eyes remained closed
against the harsh light, and his face held no answers. I finished and stood up,
turning away to step out of my panties.
“So,” he said suddenly, “I still haven’t got what I paid for. What I asked you
about in the bar.”
It was the trick’s getting-­back-­on-­top voice, and I knew what it meant.
There’s a saying in this business: piss tricks can’t handle their own trips. Sad
but true. Well, that was his choice; now I made mine. I picked up my bag,
composed my face in a look of cruel indifference, and wheeled around to
face him.

28 / Chapter One
 “You can’t let go of your own shit, and I know how to take it out of you.
That’s knowledge. You wanted to be with me again, and you were. For a night.
You offered me whatever the fuck I wanted, and I took it. I wanted your pain
for the pain you once gave me. Sounds like you got exactly what you paid for,
Karl. Was it more than you bargained for?”
“But did you cut off your dick yet?!”
“Why does it matter if I have a cock or a cunt? Will knowing that tell you if
you’re straight or queer? Good or bad? Clean or dirty? If that’s what you really
wanted, you should’ve said so. But that’s information I’m not willing to sell.”
I left Karl wiping his face, still needing to know, wondering why it made a
difference, knowing only that it did. There’s another saying in this business:
always leave them wanting more. He’d want to see me again. I knew where to
find him if I needed the money.

Notes
First published in Taste of Latex, no. 8 (1992): 8 – 11, 46.
Susan Stryker would like to thank Dani Stuchel, Samantha Bounkeua, and Muffy
Koster for assistance with manuscript preparation.

Trick Dive / 29
 2
THE SURGEON HAUNTS
MY DREAMS

I’d rather lift my hips to meet His knife as it enters me than lie there uncon-
scious with my legs apart. I’d rather Him see in my open eyes that nothing
other than my desire brings Him here. I know it will not be that way, and it
scares me to have a need so fierce that I will let myself become completely
powerless in the hands of someone I do not completely trust.

I can do nothing about the fact that He is a man, and that I must deal with
Him. There are no women who do sex-­reassignment surgery, not one in all
the world. There are no transsexuals who do it, either.

Every now and then I slip off into the fantasy of some pussy-­loving amazon of
a surgeon, a bulldyke doctor who’ll turn me outside-­in with a welcoming smile.
“It won’t be long now, dear,” she’ll say to me as she drops my balls into the
biohazard bin. “Next, let’s flay that awkward little dick of yours, and whittle
the erectile tissue down to a reasonable size. We’ll tuck it neatly into this new
crevice here and dress it in this darling little hood. Your scrotal skin folds up
quite delicately, and I’ve arranged it into such exquisite labia that I’m almost
tempted to go down on you myself.”
But this woman doesn’t exist anywhere other than in my mind — and He
is all too real. I know His name, where He works. And I know, too, that He
thinks more about how deep and fuckable He can make my cunt than
He does about whether I’ll be able to feel anything when I rub myself against
a slick, wet thigh.

This small dark woman’s vagina fits around my fist almost as tightly as the latex
glove that comes between her flesh and mine. We’ve drawn a circle of admirers
around the waterbed at the party, who watch her writhe gracefully at the end
of my dancing forearm. It’s the first day of her period and she’s bleeding so dra-
matically. Her blood runs down my forearm and drips onto the plastic sheet; I
should have worn latex up to my elbow, and not just to my wrist.
The thought occurs to me that I’ll bleed just once — for Him — and then no
more. Will He squander the sight of it?

The coals in the fireplace at the end of my lover’s bed glow red in the warm
darkness. Before we lie naked together for the rest of the night, I pause for a
moment in shy self-­consciousness to push my genitals away behind me, back
between my legs. When I wrap my arms around her and snuggle close, I want
the curve of her ass to caress my bush — and nothing else.
The deep purple cane marks across her butt cheeks seem to radiate as
much heat to the surface of my skin as the fireplace across the room does. My
tits are still so tender from her clamps that it’s almost too much sensation to
bear when the tiniest rotation of shoulders or hips drags my nipple against
the edge of a whip-­welt on her back.
Her breathing is regular and relaxed now. I open my eyes and look past her
to see Him watching us through the window. He scribbles His observations
in a notebook, then looks in the mirror behind me to see my penis lying soft
and warm against the back of my thigh. I smile at Him and He smiles back.
We both know I’ll give my penis to no one else but Him.

The Surgeon Haunts My Dreams / 31

6

I listen to the click of my heels on the sidewalk, feel the hem of the short tight
dress and the stockings on my freshly shaved legs, smell the delicate scent
of my perfume. I usually wear jeans and T-­shirts, but today I’m dressing for
Him. On the way to His office, I stop and look at my reflection in a store win-
dow. I look at the make-­up. I look at the hair. No, I confess, this isn’t all for
Him. Femme can be fun when you feel like it, sexy when it catches a woman’s
attention, subversive when it turns back the straight gaze, powerful when it
gets you what you want.
I sit in the chair in front of His desk and pretend to listen as He moves His
lips. I cross and uncross my legs. I smile at Him. If He thinks I’m the girl He
wants me to be, I’m sure I’ll get what I want. He tells me once more how much
it will cost, and I give Him the cashiers’ check. We make a date.
“Just remember,” He says with a wink, “I get to use it first.”
I laugh politely before I leave. How come I feel like I just turned a trick
when He’s the one who kept the money?

I’m alone in the bathtub, fucking my asshole with the two middle fingers of
my left hand. My left thumb circles the spot I think of as my clit. While I work
that bit of gristle against my pubic bone, my breasts sway gently in water set
in motion by the movement of my hand.
For the first time since becoming a woman I feel the stirrings of an erec-
tion. The hormones make this almost impossible, but here alone, where my
body does not have to be a social body, I coax the sensation along. It feels
uncanny, deeply familiar and utterly strange all at the same time. I’d like to
be able to touch myself anywhere and find a special pleasure there, but that
ability eludes me here at this conflicted site. I don’t know what to do with this
thing that rises up to vex me. How can I love that which defies my ability to
define myself?
I take the matter firmly in hand and struggle with it, vainly invoking dif-
ferent names to change its shape, but it resists all transformation. Materi-
ality always resists the symbolic frame. I beg it, then, to throw all language
off and become ungendered flesh, but language clenches this meat between
its teeth in a death-­grip. Words and things together taunt me. Though each
downward stroke of my right hand tries to push them apart, they refuse to be

32 / Chapter two
unjoined. I know that I will find my pleasure in the pursuit of their estrange-
ment, or I will not find it anywhere at all.
Finally, in my need, I call out for Him to help me. The bolted bathroom
door slams open and He looks down upon me.
“You shouldn’t have to think so much,” He says. There is more cruelty in
His voice than I have noticed before; there is a trace of threatened malice
when He says, “Just lie there with your legs apart and I’ll straighten out this
mess.”
He scares me, but I’m ready. I’ve been waiting for Him so long now. As He
falls upon me, I see the knife glinting in His hand, and I know this water will
soon be turning red. When I lift my hips to meet Him as He enters me, He
will surely see that nothing other than my desire brings Him here.

Note
First published as “Preoperative,” tnt: Transsexual News Telegraph (Spring 1996):
21 – 22. This piece was originally performed at The Illustrated Woman: The Sec-
ond Annual Conference on Feminist Activism in the Arts, Yerba Buena Center
for the Arts, San Francisco, California, February 1994.

The Surgeon Haunts My Dreams / 33

 3
RENAISSANCE AND APOCALYPSE
Notes on the Bay Area’s Transsexual Arts Scene

Dishing Up San Francisco’s Transsexual Arts Scene

For those of you who don’t get out much, I want to make the following public
service announcement: transsexual art, literature, and attitude are the hottest
things to pop out of the San Francisco’s underground since Modern Primi-
tivism entered the mainstream.
Pick up any funky-­cool queerzine (like the most recent Brat Attack, for
instance), and you’re likely to find some friendly neighborhood transsexual
pontificating about the complexity of fin-­de-­siècle identity. On a glossier note,
the next issue of Deneuve — San Francisco’s slick, high-­profile lesbo mag — will
include a story on dyke-­identified mtfs that features a couple of Bay Area
homegirls. Local gender talent has been providing a lot of grist for the straight
national media mill, too. The New Yorker (yep, swankier-­than-­thou New
Yorker) is doing a piece scheduled for mid-­July on female-­to-­male transsex-
uality that relies heavily on a few of the guys you’re likely to bump into at the
local ftm group. Mother Jones ran an article on transsexuality back in May
based on Bay Area writer Richard Levine’s forays into our community (and a
book by him is in the works). Closer to home, the June 15 issue of the Guard-
ian featured a story on the transgender liberation movement that quoted sev-
eral Bay Area gender activists. It’s not just schlock TV for us transies anymore.
 This burst of media attention represents something more than the fact that
transgenderism has become a chichi topic in fields as disparate as high fashion
and academe. Increasingly, transsexuals are speaking for themselves about
their own experiences, interpreting the world from their own perspectives —
and nontranssexuals are listening.
A burgeoning number of local transsexual writers, artists, activists, and in-
tellectuals are beginning to make their marks in the broader Bay Area culture —
and beyond. Hard-­working mtf playwright Kate Bornstein has finally hit the
big-­time with her latest one-­woman show, Virtually Yours. The multimedia
performance piece played to packed houses on two coasts in the spring of ’94,
and her new genre-­busting book, Gender Outlaw, has men, women, and the
rest of us eagerly turning pages all across the country. The ambiguously gen-
dered (but obviously altered) body of California Academy of the Arts’s Jill St.
Jacques took the stage several months ago during the San Francisco run of
the transgender technodrama Umbilical Thom. Meanwhile, at 848 Commu-
nity Art Space on Divisadero, local ftm playwright David Harrison staged
a trial run of his promising work-­in-­progress, the appropriately titled ftm.
Also at 848, ftm photographer Loren Cameron presented his tour-­de-­force
exhibit, Our Vision, Our Voices: Transsexual Portraits and Nudes. All the crit-
ics raved about it; the opening night crowd was so huge some people waited
hours outside the door for their chance to get in — and inquiring minds have
learned that Cameron is pursuing a book project based on his work.
Last summer another exhibit featuring transgender photographs and
prose by transsexual subjects, Crossing the Line, opened at the now-­defunct
aru Gallery on the Duboce Triangle before moving to Red Dora’s Bearded
Lady Cafe, the hippest boy-­tolerant dyke hang-­out in the known universe.
Red Dora’s also hosted a night of readings last August, Over and Out: Dis-
patches from the Gender Front by Openly Transsexual People. T-­type per-
formers appear regularly in the café/art space’s cutting-­edge cabaret shows,
thanks largely to the trans-­positive attitude of impresario extraordinaire Kris
Kovic.
There’s more. Sultry ts torch singer Veronica Klaus pulls in big crowds
at Bay Area nightclubs with her blues and soul revue. Pop the right video by
stylish German film-­maker Monika Treut into your vcr and you just might
find yourself staring at ftm poster boy Max Wolf. Marin County native Hank
Rubin was the subject of Trans, a short film by Sophie Constantinou that pre-
miered at the 1994 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festi-
val. I even made a few waves myself at the Illustrated Woman conference at
the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this past February, when I read a short

Renaissance and Apocalypse / 35

piece of experimental prose about how a sex-­change surgeon insinuates him-
self into all of a preoperative transsexual lesbian’s erotic relationships with
other women.
The list could go on. Just about any literary-­minded transsexual you meet
these days has notes for a novel stuffed in his/her back pocket. ftm commu-
nity leader Jamison Green is currently looking for a publisher for his auto-
biography, while mtf Christine Beatty recently self-­published her collection
of sex-­worker short stories and poems, Misery Loves Company. On July 20
at Kimo’s, globe-­trotting transsexual activist Anne Ogborn screened roughly
edited video footage of her recent stay in a Hijra community in India, which
we can only hope will reappear in a more polished form in the near future.
Finally, newcomer Philippa Garner is definitely a womanoid to watch out for.
In a previous incarnation she landed on the Tonight Show with her whimsical
spoofs of American consumer culture; now that she’s settling into this trans
thing, we shouldn’t be surprised to see something delightful from her soon.

A Renaissance?

Modern transsexual surgical techniques have been around at least since 1931.
Most people have known about transsexuality since Christine Jorgensen
grabbed headlines with her sex-­change back in 1952. Gender clinics at major
universities have been riding herd on the transsexual population since the
late ’60s. Oprah, Geraldo, Phil, Joan, Sally, Montel, and the rest of the talkie-­
tabloid pack have been functioning like a well-­oiled transsexual pr machine
since the mid-­’80s. The numbers of transsexuals have been steadily increas-
ing for decades. So why all this hullaballoo now?
Having spent way too many years in grad school studying American his-
tory, I start to salivate at the slightest suggestion of a long-­term, multicausal
explanation for anything, and have learned to draw pointed analogies be-
tween any two seemingly unrelated cultural phenomena. But such Pavlov-
ian behaviors actually seem appropriate at this moment. Part of the answer
to the question I posed above lies in everything described in the preceding
paragraph — the current explosion of artistic expression is directly related to
the growth, maturity, and historical development of transsexual identities and
communities.
Some people in most cultures around the world and in all periods of his-
tory have “changed sex,” sometimes physically altering their genitals. But
transsexual surgery and hormones are unique to the twentieth century:
transsexuality is a novel, historically specific way to assert an identity con-

36 / Chapter three
trary to the one we were handed at birth. Since the practice is so distinctive,
it’s taken awhile for a critical mass of transsexual people to build, for trans-
sexuals to get to know one another and start building social networks as well
as start recovering our history. It’s taken a while for us to begin to under-
stand the relationship of this new identity — the transsexual — to the rest of
human culture and to lay the groundwork for political mobilization. It’s taken
awhile to find our voices in the public arena. We are just beginning to grasp
the implications of the fact that we have experiences without parallels among
other kinds of people — and to insist that these differences are not best under-
stood by labeling them a sickness. We are just now discovering transsexual
pride and starting to make it self-­conscious and based on our situation in the
world.
This all reminds me of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ’30s. After
the Civil War, most of the former slaves stayed put for a few years, too poor to
go elsewhere and cautiously optimistic about the prospect of achieving racial
equality in a “reconstructed” South. By the late 1870s, that prospect had failed
to materialize, and African Americans began leaving for the North in num-
bers so vast that the movement is still known as the Great Migration. It de-
mographically transformed the old industrial cities of the Northeast, where
Southern Blacks went in search of jobs. By the early twentieth century the
New York City neighborhood of Harlem had become the cultural capital of
African America.
Harlem in the ’20s and ’30s was full of young Black people whose parents
had never been slaves — they had a new kind of American identity. Harlem
was smack in the middle of one of the most cosmopolitan places on earth,
and the people who lived there were constantly exposed to an endless vari-
ety of stimulating cultural cross-­fertilizations. More importantly, Black art-
ists, musicians, and writers began to express their understanding of their own
particular experiences in a manner that succeeded both in terms of the domi-
nant white American culture and according to their own cultural aesthet-
ics. They had hand-­me-­down stories of oppression and resistance, fragments
of African memory, a rich legacy of song, the multifaceted lived experiences
of racial discrimination. From them, they fashioned a literature, a new kind of
music, new ways of interpreting the world through dance or painting that
altered the very meaning of literature, music, and art up until that point in
time.
I have to wonder: Will there be a transsexual equivalent of jazz? Can we
see its dim outlines today in the streets of San Francisco? Are we feeling the
birth pangs of a Transsexual Renaissance?

Renaissance and Apocalypse / 37

Slave Narratives and Transsexual Autobiography

African American literature is built upon the bedrock of the classic slave nar-
rative, which recounts the paradigm of a uniquely African American histori-
cal experience. It begins with African freedom, includes a “middle passage”
of enslavement, and culminates in a new kind of freedom after slavery. The
middle passage is crucial. It is transformative; it is what separates African
Americans from Africans as well as from other Americans, even while it
links them inextricably with both. The middle passage is occupied by no one
other than the African Americans themselves. The legacy of that occupation
is part of the meaning of African American identity, but it is not the entire
definition. And African American literature is more than an artistic reaction
against the history of slavery; it is a powerful demonstration that the fullness
of one’s human experience cannot be mastered by an outside force.
Like the slave narrative, the classic transsexual autobiographical narra-
tive has three parts: an account of pre-­transitional feelings about identity,
the “middle passage” of transition, and post-­transitional life experiences in a
new gender. And as in the slave narrative, the transsexual middle passage is
the part of the story that makes it uniquely our own. Whatever myth of ori-
gins we graft that experience onto, whatever plot line we follow into the un-
known future, the transition from one sex to another is the single experience
that no one other than transsexuals will ever have. Having that experience
makes you one of us.
The transsexual autobiographical narrative is the bedrock of our future lit-
erature, the map of our past. Almost every one of us has had to sit down with
a psychological evaluation questionnaire and seriously address some version
of the question, “How did you develop your sense of gender identity? Please
give a brief personal statement.” The very fact of our medical colonization in-
cidentally produces a composite record of our lives. How many tens of thou-
sands of these sketches have now been written? How many more stories are
buried in case studies and other medical or psychological treatises? A hand-
ful of our autobiographies have been published, but where is the vast bulk of
the raw documentary material of our culture? How are we ever to grasp the
rich diversity of transsexual human experience that is our legacy if we cannot
learn about the lives of our brothers and sisters?
We need to think hard, individually and collectively, about the meaning
of our transitions, and ask if the stories we use to explain that life-­passage are
sufficient to voice the complexities of what we have experienced. Why is it
that we are content to answer the questions others put to us rather than de-

38 / Chapter three
vise a story of our own? Perhaps, like Africans Americanized through slavery,
we must define ourselves partly by claiming the full content of our historical
experience and partly by opposing the narrative that has been imposed upon
our flesh. The tale of gender dysphoria and its cure is the medical/psychiatric
narrative of transsexuality. Must it also be our own? If we stop asking non-
transsexuals to explain our lives and emotions to us, can we fashion the phe-
nomenology of our experience into a radically different account of who we
are, where we’ve been, where we’re going?
We need to get beyond thinking of our desires and self-­perceptions as the
symptoms of a mental disorder and start thinking of them as the raw mate-
rial for a new story about transsexual identity. We need to stop sanding away
the rough edges of attitudes, moods, styles, opinions, and responses that don’t
fit somebody else’s interpretation of what our lives are about. We need to be-
come a confederate band of starry-­eyed yarn-­spinners. We’re ripe for a Trans-
sexual Renaissance.

Apocalypse: Fragment of a Work in Progress

to Be Completed by the Reader

I have a dream that is older than heaven, keener than wisdom, more pointed
than a sword of vengeance.
Seven trumpets sound; seven seals are broken, and we the shapechang-
ers unbind our masks. We step from our prisonstriped bodysuits to launch
our bioplasm against the locked drawers of psychotherapists’ file cabinets.
We seep through the cracks and ingest every transsexual client’s file, taking
upon our communal selves their every written word as the skin of our own
new flesh. We leach every syllable of whispered confession from the office
wall­paper and reabsorb it into our mass. We flee on a thousand legs into the
desert and dance, rubbing our dung into each letter on the surface of our cor-
porate form until we transmute into shimmering gold. We expand, our rup-
tured exoskeleton spilling jewels and diadems across the hot sand. We glisten
in the searing sunlight, blinding all who dare approach us.
On the second day of the Anarcorporeal Dispensation we reconvene as
myriad individual mammals. In this mode we maximize our spatio-­political
efficacy and gain control of certain areas between, as well as within, our bod-
ies. We surround and besiege all gender clinics, psychiatric hospitals, and
surgical centers. During our encampment we feast on autocastrated testicles,
and warm ourselves at night with the burning fat of amputated breasts. In
passing through the gate of carnal transit, we have shed the primal fear of me-

Renaissance and Apocalypse / 39

atification and now comprehend the full range of embodiment’s usefulness.
We are more resourceful than the monomorphs who would bury us in their
static image. They abandon their citadels in confusion, and we gaily bedeck
ourselves in the costumes of their cast-­off uniforms. We take up their sober
workthings as the ecstatic tools of our play.
The paired principles of homosemblance and xenogenesis shall hence-
forth govern the consolidation of our fluidflesh until the Chronoterminal
Decree. We now disappear and reappear at will among the ankylotic ones.
We shall repeat with fond attention any form that gives us pleasure, taking
delight in shapeliness itself and vanishing into identity with that which we
adore. Likewise, shall we unharness content from its material constraints.
We shall become a menagerie bursting suddenly into sight to stop traffic on
a whim with any nightmare-­mocking guise. Having thus fully accomplished
the twin ideals of incorporation, we announce the evening of the last day
in a machine language to the bloody-­throated multitudes. We shall plunge
our animal tongues like justice against the barestripped bosombones of the
people. The blessed plastiphiles shall receive our lips like honeywine, while
all others shall be cast out — broken mirrors, swept without reflection into
darkness.

Note
First published in TNT: Transsexual News Telegraph (Summer 1994): 14 – 17.

40 / Chapter three
ACROSS THE BORDER
4
On the Anarchorporeality Project
A Discussion between Kathy High
and Susan Stryker

Dear Kathy:
It was great to talk to you the other day. I’m really looking forward
to working with you.
I’ve enclosed several items to give you a sense of what I’ve been up
to for the last year or so of my life . . .

Project Overview

The way I envision what I’ve tentatively labeled the Anarchorporeality Proj-
ect is as a series of transsexual surgical operations performed upon me and
documented/interpreted in various media by other artists as well as by my-
self. I intend to accomplish several goals in undertaking this project.
The first is simply to chart the contours of contemporary transsexual ex-
perience from a transsexual perspective. Not only do I want to record the
surgical procedures that most nontranssexual fixate on, I want to document
the bureaucratic process of actually getting access to surgery to show how the
current medical system imposes some tough choices on transsexuals about
how we exercise power over our own bodies.
Second, I want this to be overtly political work — not in the sense of being
didactic or moralizing, but at a more sophisticated level. Transsexuality is of-
ficially pathologized the way homosexuality was officially pathologized until
1973, and I see the project I’m undertaking as part of a broader effort to alter
public perceptions of transsexuality as well as to dismantle the oppressive le-
gal, medical, and psychiatric regime that currently regulates transsexuality. I
feel this is important work not just for my own special interests but because
it involves a critique of a biomedical establishment that operates coercively
on most people.
The deep rationale for undertaking this project is to shift the grounds on
which a transsexual project justifies itself. I’ve chosen to do gender politics in
the arts field because I see in body performance artwork a set of precedents
that can be harnessed to my broader purposes. I want to see exactly how far
I can push a claim — that I’m changing the shape of my genitals and second-
ary sex characteristics for aesthetic and artistic reasons, not because I am eli-
gible to receive a dsm-­IIIR diagnosis of 302.5(c) gender identity disorder. I
consider making a viable claim for transsexual body art to be a major step
toward depathologization.
In a forthcoming essay on the photography of ftm transsexual Loren
Cameron, I suggest that

transsexuality itself increasingly needs to be considered an art form.

The more we pry body-­alteration technologies away from their pathol-
ogizing rationales, and the more we divorce them from futile attempts
to shore up the bankrupt notion of a “true sex,” the more the decision to
reconfigure one’s flesh relies on purely aesthetic criteria. “What’s your
pleasure?” rather than “What’s your gender?” could well become the
operant question for transsexuals in the rapidly approaching twenty-­
first century.

This suggests that “transsexuality” as we know it could easily become a relic

of the twentieth century, a label designed to incarcerate and stigmatize the
transformational potential of all human identity, as well as the capacity for
its technologization. This is not to say that genital reconstruction and other
surgical techniques will disappear in some imagined future of proliferated
possibilities for meaningful expressions of identity; desire cannot be so eas-
ily detached from the form of one’s flesh. That is why the political struggle
currently being waged by the population consolidated under the transsex-
ual sign — the so-­called transgender liberation movement — is so crucial. It is
but one of the initial cultural arenas in which the ability to practice consent
over the technological means of our own embodiment is being fought for. Of

42 / Chapter four
course, pursuing this project means actually doing work of artistic and criti-
cal merit, but I am capable of that, at least as a writer and conceptualist. My
lack of skill in other media is the primary motivation for wanting to collabo-
rate with other artists. At the very least, photography, film, and video would
play an important part in documenting the project’s unrepeatable work in the
medium of living human flesh; I imagine, however, that visual arts could play
a much larger interpretive role.
Transsexuality (to my way of thinking about it) is intricately bound up
with the manifestation of gender in the visual realm. Visualization and gender
identification are in fact explicitly inked in several psychoanalytic theories —
the gendered subject is consolidated through recognition of its projected
mirror image. Through its disarticulation and redistribution of the consti-
tutive elements of gender, transsexuality offers an opportunity to witness the
temporality of this gender construction, while the visual arts — especially film
and video — supply a means to investigate gender’s temporal performativity
through the representation and manipulation of gender’s spatial display.
The project that I’ve envisioned would necessarily entail a critique of some
contemporary body artwork that uses plastic surgery, especially that of Orlan
(and especially since she is the person whose project most resembles what I
propose and the person to whom I have been most pointedly compared). I
want to show how the kinds of fleshly alterations Orlan undertakes uphold
rather than undermine dominant standards of embodiment — she is not con-
testing the regulation of the most heavily policed regions of the body. My
project would allow me to do precisely that.
Finally, I find the conceptual and intellectual terrain my project ventures
into fascinating in its own right — the intersection of gender, sexuality, femi-
nist politics, biomedical technology, and media. This is a terrain we all live in
and contend with, and I would look forward to contributing something novel
and provocative to the cultural discourses on these issues.

Stage One

The initial part of the project is, to put it as bluntly as possible, for me to cut
my balls off, and to make a short film about the process that explores the is-
sues surrounding the procedure.
Castration alone is not a routine part of male-­to-­female transsexual sur-
gery for most middle-­class white transsexuals; most surgeons prefer to do the
orchidectomy (or orchiectomy, as it is sometimes called) at the same time they

Across the Border / 43

do the genital reconstruction. It is more common among transsexuals from
lower socioeconomic positions because it is a relatively simple and cheap
body-­alteration technique that can be fairly readily obtained. Castration is
also medically advised upon occasion, primarily because removal of the tes-
tes permits the administration of lower doses of estrogens (which can cause
liver damage and other adverse effects after prolonged high-­dosage use). I’m
interested in exploring the class issues around the procedure — poorer people
must often content themselves with a bodily “disfigurement” that the middle-­
class can afford to renaturalize and erase.
I’m also interested in looking at geography and the physical location of the
body, which are always pertinent issues in the cultural construction of iden-
tities. Location profoundly affects the points at which one exercises choice
about one’s body, and where one loses it. In the United States, castration re-
quires a psychiatric approval letter, a three-­month waiting period, and costs
upward of $3,500 — but the medical care is generally quite good. There is an
unlicensed clinic in Tijuana that will do castration on demand for a thou-
sand dollars — but the quality of care is considerably less. There is also an un-
derground circulation of pornographic home movies of castrations and thus
an underground knowledge of how to do castrations outside of (or covertly
within) medical settings. I want to examine the trade-­offs involved in these
three different routes to castration and the kinds of “border-­crossings’’ they
entail.
I would be interested, as well, in investigating the differences between acts
and identities. Historically and cross-­culturally, the act of castration has been
associated with several different identities — the Hijra, the Galli, eunuchs, and
the castrati, to name a few. What is the relationship between these histori-
cally and culturally specific identities and the late twentieth-­century West-
ern European male-­to-­female transsexual? What is the difference between a
man castrating himself and a preoperative mtf transsexual castrating her-
self? What are the implications of any answers I come up with for current
theorizing about the Foucauldian distinction between acts and identities in
the history of sexuality?
Finally, I would be interested in the theoretical — especially poststructur-
alist feminist psychoanalytic — aspects of castration and its role in the for-
mation of the gendered subject. On the one hand, “castration” functions
metaphorically as the definitive gesture of consolidating a feminine subject
position in the signifying economy. On the other hand, physical castration
is the only surgical manipulation I can think of practiced by mtf transsex-

44 / Chapter four
uals that deforms (rather than reconsolidates) a dominant morphology of
the body — that is, transsexual surgeries are about making part of one kind
of body look like a part of another kind of body rather than simply break-
ing a form. Theorizing from the situation of the castrated mtf transsexual
body would provide an uncommon vantage point from which to examine
some of the most hotly contested problems in critical theory, feminism, and
cultural studies about the relationships between sex and gender, body and
identity.

Practical Considerations

The bare bones of the matter is that I want to have somebody film me being
castrated. How all the issues I’ve outlined above get addressed are open for
discussion. Perhaps they, too, will be part of the film; perhaps they will be ad-
dressed in other media — lecture, photography, panel discussion, whatever.
I’ve talked to the surgeon in Tijuana, who is fine with us doing photography/
video during the procedure. I’ve also begun investigating the possibility of
getting the surgery locally (as well as cheaply and clandestinely), through
some contacts I have in the s/m community. I also have contact information
for surgeons in the Bay Area and Los Angeles who require psychiatric recom-
mendations. I do have my official diagnosis letter proclaiming me a bona fide
transsexual and know psychotherapists who would write the surgery letter. If
all goes well, I’d like to do the surgery in early 1995.
On the noncorporeal front, I have a public lecture scheduled for Novem-
ber 16, 1994, at the Art Institute of Chicago to discuss this project and am cur-
rently working on a proposal for a performance/presentation at The Lab in
San Francisco for the 1995 – 96 season. I am also beginning to write grants and
explore other means of funding the project. Finally, I am contacting other
artists with whom I can collaborate.
I hope you’re interested in what I’ve outlined above. Please let me know
what you think. Feel free to use any of the material I’ve sent, including this
letter, in any way you think might further the project.
Looking forward to seeing you in the not too distant future, and talking
again before that,
Sincerely,
Susan Stryker

Across the Border / 45

October 26, 1994

Dear Susan,
It was good to hear from you and to hear about this project. It brings
up a lot of issues for me. I will try to explain what I am thinking about
it and also how I am envisioning this project.
As I was pondering the identity of a mtf transsexual and what that
actually means to me, I ran across this citation in an article by Judith
Butler where she talks about the relationship of gayness to straight-
ness:
“Imitation does not copy that which is prior but produces and in-
verts the very terms of priority and derivativeness. Hence, if gay iden-
tities are implicated in heterosexuality, that is not the same as claiming
that they are determined or derived from heterosexuality, that is not
the same as claiming that heterosexuality is the only cultural network
in which they are implicated. These are, quite literally, inverted imita-
tions, ones which invert the order of imitated and imitation, and which,
in the process, expose the fundamental dependency of ‘the origin’ on
that which it claims to produce as its secondary effect.”1
Although this quote deals with the areas of hetero/homosexuali-
ties, and does not touch upon transsexual issues, I found it useful. I
acknowledge the invisibility of transsexuality within many homo­
sexual/bisexual contexts and am wary of the dissing and othering
of transsexuals and their preferences. But, for me, the subversive/
inversive relationship between straight and gay in looking at cultural
definitions of identity was useful in clarifying gender and transsexual-
ity. So, please allow me to refer to Butler here.
Rather than an imitation of “womanness,” perhaps another interpre-
tation of woman is being produced with mtf transsexuality. Perhaps
transsexuality is an inversion of the natural parts, a redoing of nature
per se. What does it mean to “perform” as a woman in this culture, any-
way? In your transsexual womanness I see your development of a new
woman, an inverted woman. The “monster,” which some may consider
being created here, is much more a hybrid, a synthesis of the essence
of dualisms: nature and culture perhaps. But if we step outside of those
binary situatings and consider the overlaps, the combinations, as essen-
tial, I can begin to see your interpretation and mine as charged and rich
for exchange. As you quote in your letter: ‘“What’s your pleasure?’ rather

46 / Chapter four
than ‘What’s your gender?’” But also, “What’s your pleasure?” rather than
“What’s your pathology?”
I am excited about doing this project with you because it challenges
me as a maker and a viewer as well. I have wanted to propose working
together since we met at The Illustrated Woman conference last Febru-
ary. The investigation around gender and medical technologies needs
to include a discussion of transsexuality. There are so few videos that
look at the topic of transsexuality in a way to include recordings of mtf
operations. This video could be an important inclusion in an ongoing
dialogue about both transgender issues and the discourse of medical
technologies or the critique of technological determinism and hierar-
chies. I believe your participation in this project is to define the po-
litical groundwork of the theory of gendering and transsexuality, and
mine is to determine the use of the video, the politics of the “handling”
of the pictures, and the choices inherent to the medium.
I have to admit I am experiencing a fair amount of resistance to
the idea of taping your castration operation. I don’t believe what I am
experiencing is resistance to your change or to the fact that you are a
male-­to-­female transsexual. This is something I am wary of and have
thought about a lot. As you have said: “The attribution of unnatu-
ral monstrosity remains a palpable characteristic in most lesbian and
gay representations of transsexuality, displaying in unnerving detail
the anxious, fearful underside of the current cultural fascination with
transgenderism. Because transsexuality in particular represents the
prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of fixed gen-
ders upon which a politics of personal identity depends, people who
have invested their aspirations for social justice in identitarian move-
ments say things about us out of sheer panic that, if said of other mi-
norities, would see print only in the most-­riddled, white supremacist,
Christian fascist rags.”2
But I believe my resistance is toward the act of cutting to alter your
body. I have resistance to cutting in general (I have never had surgery
and have gone to great lengths to avoid having it). And maybe it is the
fact that you are choosing to cut off your balls that presents a problem
for me. (And the notion of cutting off the “penis” is so closely married
with the notion of castration especially in psychoanalytic associations
that I tend to trip up on it all the time.) So, if that is the source of my
resistance, am I ultimately resisting your choice and your change in

Across the Border / 47

 gender identity? I can’t separate it right now. Is it the cut or what is be-
ing cut? Why am I focused on this aspect? (I suspect my reactions are
typical of those of a nontranssexual.) This I must examine some more
with your help.
I don’t see this resistance as an overwhelming problem. I think that
my resistance can be used to our advantage in the tape. I suspect that
other people who come to this tape will be experiencing similar re-
sistance, and if we can successfully explore this area, we can present a
shift from a judgmental viewing to one that remains open. “Just as the
words ‘dyke,’ ‘fag,’ ‘queer,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘whore’ have been reclaimed, respec-
tively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-­assimilationist sexual minori-
ties, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers,
words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by
the transgendered.”3 I would like to work with you in your “transgender
rage” to make a tape that will positively call attention to transsexuality, to
make that which is presently invisible much more visible.
This notion of “heroic doctors still endeavor[ing] to triumph over
nature” is intriguing to me. This notion of medical science conquering
the body, mapping and charting its terrain, is a history I am familiar
with critiquing. But this instance gives different possibilities. Where
did this surgical practice come from? When and where was it practiced
first? References to the history of transsexual surgery would be useful
to include in this tape to give a context to the medical establishment’s
control over the genderization of the body as well as its reproductive
capacities and so-­called “well being.”
If we do go the Tijuana route, I would like to consider the possibil-
ity of talking to the doctor before (or after) you have the surgery per-
formed. I would like to discuss with him why he is involved in this kind
of work: for the money, because of the fall-­off of US clients who are, like
you, skirting the regulations of the system; or is there a particular re-
search he is interested in around genital surgery? Or perhaps there is
a politic behind his practice that engages with the transsexual experi-
ence. Perhaps he only deals with a certain class of people and is com-
mitted to that socialist practice?
The surgery itself is the most challenging to consider shooting be-
cause, surgery in general is difficult to watch. I think it is a political act
to show this surgery in this context. But how to present it to depathol-
ogize it, without spectacle, without sheer sensationalism sending the
audience into fits of convulsions? This is my question. It seems a de-

48 / Chapter four
finitive act, but ultimately it is really only one part of the entire process
for you. So, that bigger process must also be shown as well as this “act.”
I propose that I come to visit San Francisco and that we spend some
time together. Perhaps we can map out some other ways to trace this
history from your psychological involvement in your girlfriend’s birth-
ing, through the decision for your surgeries, and beyond.
To be successful, I would like to see this tape move people to under-
stand how you have become involved in the pleasure side of the issue
rather than simply the gendering. Rather than depict you “at war with
nature,” I would like to have you claim your gender, “constituting your-
self on your own terms.”4
I am not so concerned about shooting the surgery for myself. I know
what happens to me as I shoot—I distance myself through the lens and
worry about banal details like keeping things in focus and composition
of the frame. Also, my viewfinder is black and white, so I will be further
distanced from the color of the blood, etc. But many questions remain:
How to shoot this surgery? Do we want a spectacle? Should I shoot it as
a dance where I circle the surgeon and you on the table; or as a detailed
microscopic shot with the lens in macro-­focus; or as a unmovable still
tripod shot with medium framing? What does each framing and move-
ment within the frame suggest? How will it further distance the audience
or include them in this process? Do we want them to “feel” pain, to ex-
perience nausea and discomfort? Or to be a witness and a collaborator,
aligned with you, or the surgeon, or surgical assistant?
Lately, I have been really worried about the preponderance of cop
shows on TV. What concerns me mostly is the identification of the cam-
era with the cops themselves. The audience begins to adopt the posi-
tion of the authority themselves, the viewer policing with the police.
This psychology I would like to try and subvert and use to our advan-
tage. I would like to identify the surgery not as an invasion, a mutation,
but as an extension of your power and a transformation, much like the
birth of a baby transformed from its inside world to the exterior with
such force that it must be agile to survive. I want to demonstrate your
agility and your survival.
To be continued and continued. When shall we get together to work
some of this all out? Look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best,
Kathy High

Across the Border / 49

 Notes
First published in Felix: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication 2, no. 1
(1995): 228 – 36.
1 Butler, “Decking Out,”22.
2 Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.”
3 Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.”
4 Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.”

50 / Chapter four
 5
LOS ANGELES AT NIGHT

The sky’s as dark as it ever gets in Los Angeles at night. His feet are spread
apart, ankle restraints fastened around his biker boots and chained to the
railing of the redwood deck behind the house in Silverlake I’ve borrowed for
the weekend from a friend. He’s leaning forward against the rail on his fore-
arms, hooded, half naked, a big broad-­shouldered guy with thick hairy legs
but a smooth backside and clean-­shaven head. The black cotton T-­shirt ad-
vertising some gay leather bar is hiked up around his armpits so he can ex-
pose more target area but shyly cover the fresh scars, still too raw to show,
from his mastectomies.
Trees to either side of the deck screen the neighbors’ views of us, while the
Ice-­T tracks booming on the stereo drown out all other noise. I stand there
idly puffing one of his cigarettes, holding a heavy flogger loosely in my left
hand and watching his body sway absentmindedly in time with the music.
I’m wearing serious play clothes — leather pants and black Docs. My shirt’s
off because the night’s warm and I’ve worked up a sweat; I enjoy feeling the
trickle of moisture running between my breasts. I like the pungent smell of
me and the sight of him.
Beyond him I can see the fabulous City of Angels spreading out in every
direction, enveloping us, creeping up hillsides encrusted with overlit houses,
disappearing into the dull orange glow of early summer haze. Downtown of-
fice towers peek from behind the silhouetted palm trees and low-­rise build-
ings that punctuate the broken horizon. I pan the city: a police helicopter
hovers in the middle distance, the spotlight tracing search patterns on the
ground below. He’s still so lost in sensation it would be pointless to hit him
again right now.
I enjoy these quiet moments in the middle of heavy scenes, when a part-
ner’s physical limits offer a contemplative respite from the concentration
required for a methodical whipping. My nipples are hard, but I’m turned
outward at the moment and don’t really want to focus on my own sensations.
I feed one nipple a short sharp twist to appease its distracting hunger and feel
a jolt of electricity shoot down to my crotch.
Pleasure’s never a simple thing. It always makes me stop and think — a habit
that eventually gets me in trouble with tricks and lovers. As my hand returns
to my breast, I pause to consider a formal question: is the link I’ve made so ef-
fortlessly between nipple and crotch anything other than the violent installa-
tion of a fantasy that organizes sensation for a reproductive economy? These
breasts were artificially induced at a point well into my adulthood. They’re
prosthetic extensions of a will to translate transsexual identifications into in-
teractions with others, generators of material effects that sustain a desired
remapping of corporealized space. They have nothing to do with the physi-
ology of milk, birth, crotch. What then is this genital-­mammary connection
I’ve made for myself if not a dream of natural womanhood carved upon my
unnatural flesh? Is it the fantasy of coerced unity that arouses me, the dream
of conquering unruly embodiment with an imaginary idea? Maybe it’s hope-
lessly nostalgic, but I find pleasure in the fact that he and I can cite the forms
of those fictively unified political aggregations we call “man” and “woman”
even as we work to consign their current configurations to history. I take in
the sweeping vistas of the city and tweak my nipple again. Fuck theory.
I return my attention to my trick’s flanks and buttocks, visually slicing him
into parts that matter in the moment. I can’t help but dwell on the difference
between my distant visual enjoyment of the scene and the overwhelming
phenomenological intensities that so recently played themselves out across
his skin. I have been in his position before, when the point of subjective pres-
ence flees inward from the surface with such force that it breaks down and
breaks through to another space and time. Remembering such psychic im-
plosions, desiring that sense of release and transformation for myself, try-
ing to open him up and connect with him, I find myself wanting to literalize
the experience of breakthrough. I want to cut him and turn a metaphor into
something real.

52 / Chapter five
 Transsexuals have such emotionally loaded relations with surgical instru-
ments. Triumph and pain, visibility and erasure, self-­determination and in-
scription by others wrestle fitfully along the scalpel’s edge. Sometimes it feels
so good to take the blade firmly in your own hand.
I retrieve alcohol, latex gloves, and scalpel from the med kit waiting in the
wings of the scene and begin carving a new erotogenic zone of shallow incisions
along his rib cage. As if the cuts promise some fresh new avenue of escape, he
returns from his inward mental journey to reencounter the volatile wonder of
his own skin. The surface is lumpy, knotted with hardened lymph and discol-
ored by subcutaneous blood. His neurons still fire frantically, relaying wild in-
formation about the energy transferred from the supple leather of my whip.
He cries out. I know this sensation too, as the painless pressure of steel
slicing through flesh gives way to sting and burn. I douse his wounds with al-
cohol then flick open a lighter. The spark produces a magic moment of flesh
and flames and blood, an abject, sacred conflagration of contraries that lasts a
fleeting instant. I smother the burning alcohol quickly and watch him writhe.
Fire at night is always a thing of terrible beauty. I wonder if he experiences
cutting the way I usually do. Being cut forces me to confront the inescapabil-
ity of my embodiment. It validates my decision to change shape as my means
of continuing to live as an embodied subject, forbids me to deny the pain of
the body’s necessary failures, rewards me with the body’s accomplishments.
Cutting reminds me that I am always meat first.
He’s back now, summoned to full presence by the fire and the knife like some
familiar spirit. He laughs raggedly and blows air heavily through his mouth. He
sighs and groans, shrugs excess energy off his shoulders, and shakes it from his
fingertips before adjusting his stance. He reaches a hand to his side to smear it
in blood, then settles back down with forearms flat against the railing as I start
the whip swirling again in lazy figure eights. He sticks his fingers through the
hood’s mouth hole one by one, licking them clean, body still swaying slightly. I
time the whip’s circuit to the tempo of his movements and the bass line of the
music, catching his ass on alternating sides with each downbeat. We haven’t
spoken, or needed to, for at least an hour. I’m beginning to tire, though, and de-
cide this will be the cool-­down set before we quit. I tell him so, then slow-­dance
the cat languidly across his haunches and let my thoughts drift.
We’d met several months earlier at some insane cocktail reception in a
city neither of us called home. He was standing alone, looking out of place in
the hotel lobby next to a potted fern, one hand shoved into the pocket of his
tweed slacks and the other wrapped around a bourbon and water. He wasn’t
living as a man yet, but the combination of oxford shirt, tie, and sports coat

Los Angeles at Night / 53

with his platinum blond flattop and facial piercings gave him a faggish sort
of flair. The way he cross-­cut different styles of masculinity somehow com-
municated the aesthetic sensibility of a gay man rather than a butch dyke, in
spite of his female form. That sophistication of presentation, leaning the eye
against the grain of the visible body to express an immaterial sense of self, is
what caught my attention.
I’m drawn to people who do gender with style. I don’t much care what
their anatomies look like, which pronouns they usually get called or which
they prefer, who they tend to fuck, or how they get off. I just love a good show.
He was the most provocatively gendered person in the room that evening, a
female-­bodied faggot who suggested economies of pleasure that existed no-
where else in sight. I felt a very queer sort of attraction for this other trans-
gendered person — a desire making only the most perfunctory gesture toward
the homo/hetero binary.
He was surveying the crowd with a look of utter boredom, clearly on the
verge of leaving as soon as he finished his drink, when I walked over with a
blunt announcement that I liked the way he did his gender. Soon we were
deep in conversation about the semiotics of clothing and how to use the ki-
netic language of bodies to negotiate a public identity. He told me he was a
transfag and a bottom, I described myself as a “male-­to-­female trans­sexual
lesbian faghag femme top who likes to cruise ftm leather boys and very
butch bottoms.” Fifteen minutes later we were in his rented Ford Bronco,
looking for a more congenial place to be a couple of gender queers.
We wound up at the only drag bar within driving distance, where we sat
in a corner to talk and drink. A relatively good female impersonation show
played on the tiny stage, but it failed to hold our attention for long. We began
to compare notes on s/m: leather sex, rather than drag, was the subculture in
which we had both first approached the issue of transgender identities. We
both had discovered that like transsexuality, consensual s/m practice made
it impossible to ignore the body: it provided exquisitely intense and intimate
bodily experiences that didn’t necessarily involve genital sexuality. But it had
also helped each of us figure out exactly which parts of embodied subjectivity
we could exercise agency over, which we could decide to live with, what we
had to change. s/m, we agreed, offered a far better conceptual framework for
exploring these life-­changing choices than any scientific discourses on trans-
sexuality we’d found. Changing sex is very heavy play.
By the time Patsy Cline handed the mike over to Diana Ross, we’d moved
from shop talk to theory and back, flitting giddily from one critical form of

54 / Chapter five
reference to another. We were such intellectual perverts; we never did get
around to fucking that night.
A few months later, he came to San Francisco, and we made a date. His
appearance had changed now that the testosterone had started kicking in:
his voice was deeper, his smell subtly funkier, his body denser. The flattop
had been replaced with a buzz cut, and except for the lack of beard on some-
one his age, he appeared unremarkably male. The incongruously smooth face
worked nicely against the severity of his biker cap, leather vest, and motor-
cycle chaps, giving him a kind of charming vulnerability. I was wearing a
short, tight, backless black velour dress that night, with heels so high I had to
take his arm to steady myself. I guessed that he might be scared beneath that
cocky veneer, and I wanted to offer him the security of a masculine role in re-
lation to my ultrafemme image.
There was no way I could know what it felt like for him, transitioning to
male, but a wave of empathy, a fierce desire to connect, swept over me as I
clung to his arm. I remembered what early transition had been like for me,
when the hormones were first coming on like a strong dose of acid. The estro-
gen coded and recoded reality, sculpted flesh like putty, blurred the contours
of intelligible human forms by layering one gender schema on top of another
until I appeared as a shimmering moiré pattern in the eyes of others. People
interacted differently with me, depending on which part of the pattern they
saw at any given moment, and then grew confused or hostile when I failed
to continue sending the signal they just picked up. The input from the world
around me became as capricious as the shape of my own body, as if my en-
tire life were some vast television monitor and somebody else was channel
surfing. I began to think some essential part of myself might fly away into the
ether, like a balloon that’s slipped its string.
I’d eventually learned to play with that sort of reality hacking as one of the
peculiarly compelling effects of mtf embodiment, but I remembered with
clarity when it had been a frightening and out-­of-­control experience. His ex-
perience with testosterone was undoubtedly different from mine with estro-
gen, but part of my pleasure that night, I decided, would be helping this man
find the channel changer for himself.
I took him to the Motherlode, a transgender dive bar in the Tenderloin
where most of the women are sex workers earning their surgery money. It’s
a surprisingly straight-­looking place in spite of the fact that all the women
there used to be men and all the men want to fuck women who have dicks:
you don’t see much that visually contests heteronormativity. But I wanted to

Los Angeles at Night / 55

go there precisely because we’d be slightly out of synch with the scene and
thus harder to slot into identifying categories.
Half of identity is what you put out, and half is how you’re read. We were
both obviously making statements, yet walking into the bar together we were
damnably difficult to read. Butch-­femme dykes? A drag and her daddy? A
couple of straights? We stood out in the Motherlode, inviting interpretations.
We could practically feel the gazes swirl around us, trying and failing to gen-
der us. Woman/man, man/woman, woman/woman, man/man — we changed
identities, orientations, and pronouns in every set of looks we exchanged
with others.
I looked hard at him, wondering whether our self-­identification as dyke
and fag were going to bend enough for us to connect sexually this time. “Let’s
cut to the chase, girl,” he finally whispered leaning over the table to nibble
my ear. “I’m a bottom first and a faggot second. What you call yourself has
no bearing on what I call myself. All I want is to get fucked. And as far as I’m
concerned, I’ve just got three fuckholes instead of two.” Grinning, I took his
hand. We left the Motherlode for an s/m party South of Market, where I tied
him down, beat him up, and took advantage of every orifice he had to offer.
Standing behind him again now on the deck in Silverlake, slapping my
cat lazily against his thighs, I find myself replaying that previous time and
wanting his cunt again. Desire, like pleasure, is never a simple thing, and like
pleasure it makes me stop and think. Is my desire for him just curiosity about
an exotic Other? How much am I like the trannie hawks prowling places
where women like me sometimes sell our difference to strangers? Or is he the
T-­Bird, and I’m one of those women for him?
The endless struggle to reclaim transsexual erotics from the uses that non-
transsexuals make of us angers me. But I know that sex between transsexuals
is different from what happens in the Motherlode. At least neither is using
the other to shore up a more normative sense of self. We’ve both refigured
the identifications and partial objects others cobble together in ways that pass
as normal. Object choice ceases to have much relevance as a concept here in
this new space, because the objects at which desire might take aim have shat-
tered into bits.
For me to enter him like this, mtf fist inside ftm vagina, is for us both
to acknowledge the new reality we each locally materialize by our practice.
So, it’s not the partial object of his hole that I want but, rather, the excess that
erupts there through his transsexual form, the surplus value of the codes that
regulate gendered embodiment. His excess mirrors the archaic disarticula-
tions from which “I” myself am fashioned and through which “I” perpetually

56 / Chapter five
refashions itself. Maybe this is the transhomonarcissitic wellspring of my de-
sire. Having traversed the territories of perversion and fetish, we have arrived
at last at a realm beyond objects, a world of phenomenal flows. The deterrito-
rialized flow itself is what I long to stick my hand in.
I am fisting his cunt hard, striving against the thin membrane of his flesh
and the distance of the stars to touch the night sky over Los Angeles. Self
crumbles here into the force that structures it, glittering shards of memory
shedding like viruses into the blackness. I’m lifting him off his feet with the
thrust of my forearm, wanting to reach beyond our bodies to grab hold of a
new space where bodies matter differently.
There’s a whip dangling by its strap from a wrist, the knot at its butt end
slapping rhythmically against the crack of an ass as a fist disappears, reap-
pears, disappears. I have almost lost sight of him. I hear his labored breathing
beneath the black hood, think of the smooth-­shaven head it covers. On one
of the memory shards: the platinum blond flattop he wore when we met. On
a second: Rutger Hauer in the rooftop scene in Blade Runner, in another fan-
tasy of Los Angeles at night. I watch Hauer morph into Daryl Hannah before
the two cinematic cyborg bodies merge with his and mine. Media-­saturated
memory fragments combine. They achieve ambience with our corporealized
present and project us into a desired future produced through this very pro-
cess of subjective transformation.
It is too often impossible to be transsexual in this world, too easy to be
worn away by all the petty stigmata of daily living. Elsewhere, on the hori-
zon, another prospect hovers at the vanishing point. Straying into the City of
Night, hip-­hop sex music carrying us from Sunset Strip to Times Square to
the Tenderloin, each of us as tangible and phantasmatic as the urban dream-
scape spread before us, we pause only long enough to spray-­paint our names
on the walls of the sensorium before we disappear into the darkness.
Somewhere, smooth muscle spasms around my fist, and I’m happy. I have
no idea what made him come. He reaches for a postcoital cigarette, smoke
rising into the night in a parody of movie clichés. I bask in his glow. In the
distance, more police helicopters are circling, watching the horizon. It’s al-
most time to go.

Note
First published in Opposite Sex: Gay Men on Lesbians, Lesbians on Gay Men, ed-
ited by Sara Miles and Eric Rofes (New York: New York University Press, 1998),
252 – 62.

Los Angeles at Night / 57

 6
DUNGEON INTIMACIES
The Poetics of Transsexual Sadomasochism

Site Survey
From Bernal Heights, the city of San Francisco spreads north and west, a
slow-­moving accretion in steel and glass, brick, and concrete, of the human
desire unleashed and focused upon this terrain by the gold rush of 1848 — an
alchemical transformation of precious metal into philosopher’s stone upon
which I sit and think.
Ian sits behind me on the grassy slope, his fingers anchored into my shoul-
ders, his thumb expertly digging at the lump of knotted muscle between
shoulder blade and spine where my keystroking and mousing actions ac-
cumulate. We’ve scarcely seen each other these past fifteen years and never
known each other well in the ways that conventionally count as knowing
someone well. But since he’s been back, we’ve fallen into a practical famil-
iarity with one another’s bodies, rooted in our shared history of a particu-
lar subculture at a particular place and time that I think of as our “dungeon
intimacy.”
The physical landscape is made of memories. Over there, to the right,
a few hundred feet away, Del shot Cooper for the cover of The Drag King
Book.1 Extending my line of sight past that point toward the city’s eastern bay
shore, I see the place by the abandoned steel foundry where Texas Tomboy
and Monika Treut filmed some scenes for Gendernauts.2 Turning my head
counterclockwise, I see the live-­work lofts near the Bay Bridge, where Ian
and I once watched Raelyn pierce and cut Cathy Opie for one of her bloody
self-­portraits. There’s my house, down at the foot of Bernal Hill, where my
partner and I now live. Ian, after years in New York, now lives with his fam-
ily over there in Marin, north across the Golden Gate. We point out to each
other various places we’ve each lived since the 1980s: around Berkeley and
Oakland in the East Bay; Potrero Hill and half a dozen places in the Mission
District here in the city. He says he sat in this very spot before, smoking pot
with our friend Edward, back when he helped him run the links s/m play
parties, which I attended regularly for several years.
Off in the middle distance, west of downtown and south of Market Street,
stands a large brick building — a fortress, really — built in Moorish Revival
style, complete with crenelated turrets and deeply recessed apertures in the
thick walls, from which cannons and rifles could be fired. It is the old San
Francisco National Guard armory on Mission Street at 14th.3 We are both
historians, Ian and I, who have been taught to encounter the space around us
in four dimensions, extending our observations into patterns longer than our
lived experience. There is Mission Dolores, established by Spanish priests in
1776, and its counterpart, the Presidio, a garrison farther to the west, near the
mouth of the bay where the ships come in from the sea. Together they formed
the original instruments of California’s conquest and colonization, one hous-
ing church, and the other, army. Behind us, at the crest of Bernal Hill, is a
small military telecommunications facility, a nondescript little cinderblock
building sprouting metal appurtenances, humming low behind a chain-­link
fence and padlocked gate. It forms part of the current martial occupation and
organization of the space we now inhabit.
The armory occupies an intermediate timespace framed and inflected by
these maximal and minimal fixed points in temporal distance within the pres-
ent built environment; it is the materialized remnant of its own distinctive
meshwork of force relations, its own constitutive logics of movement, invest-
ment, and territory.4 Constructed in the years just prior to World War I, the
structure addressed itself to the labor upheavals of late nineteenth-­century
industrial capitalism, to a tradition of urban mass protests, and to linger-
ing memories of civil war. In housing troops and weapons whose function
was to suppress popular insurrection and maintain government control over
city streets, the armory enacted a shift in military attention — management
of domestic populations supplanted the threat of coastal invasion. Its mas-
sive battlements point back in time toward the Presidio, but its placement in

Dungeon Intimacies / 59
the mixed residential-­commercial working-­class neighborhood surrounding
Mission Dolores anticipated the contemporary biopolitical surveillance state.
A block and a half up 14th Street from the armory is the House of the
Golden Bull, where the links play parties took place, starting in 1989. The
armory itself had been vacant since 1976, and its state of disrepair mirrored
the surrounding neighborhood. Multistory houses built for multigenera-
tional families around the turn of the last century had gone derelict in the
post – World War II flight to the suburbs, and some, like the Golden Bull, had
been snatched up by gay men with an eye for abandoned architecture. The
Mission District abutted the homocentric Castro neighborhood and func-
tioned, in its northwesterly extremes, as a spillover zone for populations mar-
ginal to the gay male society that had rooted there in the 1960s. A women’s
enclave had formed in the Mission in the 1970s, a few blocks southeast of the
armory, around Valencia Street between 18th and 22nd, while the epicen-
ter of the city’s leather scene had been on the armory’s northern side, in the
south of the Market District along Folsom Street’s “Miracle Mile.” By the early
1990s, three decades of competition for land closer to downtown had driven
the leather zone southwesterly, toward the Mission. The Catacombs, one of
the city’s most storied dungeon spaces, had been located a few blocks south of
the armory on Shotwell at 17th. The Catacomb’s sudden closure in 1989 con-
tributed to the rise of the Golden Bull as an s/m party venue.5
The Golden Bull occupied the geographical margins of three urban
zones, each characterized by distinct sexual subcultural formations and so-
cial movements — homosexuality and gay liberation, the women’s movement
and lesbian feminism, and the ars erotica of consensual sadomasochism. The
property valuations of its physical site reflected the fallowness of its loca-
tion in the overarching ecology of the city. The view from the back deck
overlooked a disintegrating public housing project; its immediate neighbors
were an edgy gay-­owned art gallery, the dyke-­run Black and Blue Tattoo,
and Red Dora’s Bearded Lady Cafe, where underground performance art-
ist Harry Dodge and the lesbian punk band Tribe 8 held court. Pioneers of
the pierced and tatted subcultural aesthetic shared street space (and some-
times substance-­use habits and job descriptions) with the neighborhood’s
many junkies and sex-­workers. The links parties occupied a slice of time
as precisely sited as their real estate. The aids pandemic was in full swing
in those years before the antiviral cocktails, and s/m seemed situated at the
very crux of the crisis — its precepts of negotiation and consent, its panoply
of techniques for eliciting bodily sensation without exchanging bodily fluids,

60 / Chapter six
its meticulous disarticulations of erotics from genital sexuality, all promised
a viable future.
It was to dungeons such as the Golden Bull that Michel Foucault referred
when he noted that, “you find emerging in places like San Francisco and New
York what might be called laboratories of sexual experimentation.”6 The dun-
geon, I’ll suggest, in the pages that follow, is indeed just such a productive and
transformative space as a laboratory — a space not merely for the discovery of
an existing objective world but a playground, workshop, or place of study that
is in fact a generative space, one facilitative of the materialization of creatively
grasped virtualities. It is place as process: or, in geographer Doreen Massey’s
words, place as a distinctive mixture, “gathering, and manifestation of local
and global social, economic, and communications relations” that knot them-
selves up together for a length of time, and which become concretized in the
objects that collectively constitute their place by assembling there.7
Jack Halberstam points out that Massey offers to queer theorists of em-
bodiment, sexuality, and gender an alternative to the views of other post-
modern geographers such as David Harvey and Edward Soja who privilege
“the global” and distrust “the local” as place-­bound, reactionary, and poten-
tially fascist in its parochial distance from all things cosmopolitan.8 No place
can be more local than the body. Within systems of thought that have a vested
interest in ignoring the inescapable fact that even the most global analysis
is tied to the particular (raced, sexed, classed, educated) body of the analyst
who conceives it (because not to do so would unmask its enabling privileges),
no place is shunted to the periphery of consideration with greater alacrity
than is the body. Reconceptualizing every place, including the lived space of
the body, as a “glocal” hybrid opens an important line of critical inquiry. As
sociologist Avery Gordon points out, “we have become adept at discovering
the construction of social realities and deconstructing their architecture,” but
in telling the stories of these realities, we have not yet taken as seriously as we
should the insight “that the intricate web of connections that characterize any
event or problem is the story.”9
Transsexual sadomasochism incarnates the processes within and through
which the body materializes the specificity of its location, installing the body
that practices it as a place — one as contingent, situated, and real as any ar-
mory or repurposed Victorian house. In offering this autoethnographic ac-
count of embodied knowledges (and knowledges of embodiment) produced
in a particular dungeon space, neighborhood, and historic moment, through
my own past practices of transsexual sadomasochism, my intent is not to at-

Dungeon Intimacies / 61
tribute any particular importance to certain events simply because I, rather
than someone else, participated in them. The goal, rather, is to open a criti-
cal space within which subjectively perceived phenomenological experiences
can offer evidence for more widely applicable statements about the relation-
ship between embodied subject and material environment. I offer these ob-
servations in the spirit of “pornosophy” — Shannon Bell’s apt coinage for the
militant insistence on an epistemic parity between the disparate knowledges
of the scientist, the philosopher, and the whore — and as a refusal to discredit
what our own carnality can teach us.10

Topoanalysis and Rhythmoanalysis

Transsexual sadomasochism in dungeon space enacts a poiesis (an act of ar-

tistic creation) that collapses the boundary between the embodied self, its
world, and others, allowing one to interpenetrate the others and thereby con-
stitute a specific place. It gestures toward the metaphysical counterscheme
that haunts the margins of Western dualistic thought, wherein “the duality of
subject and object,” in the words of philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard,
becomes “iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions.”11
“We are the diagrams of the functions of inhabiting” the spaces where we
have lived intimately, Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, his classic work
on the experience of inhabiting the felicitous spaces we designate with con-
cepts of “home.” “The word habit is too worn a word to express this passionate
liaison of our bodies, which do not forget,” with these unforgettable spaces of
our inhabitation.12 Bachelard calls for a two-­fold approach to spatial poetics: a
“topoanalysis,” conceived as an auxiliary to psychoanalysis, that offers “a sys-
tematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.”13 Its complement,
a ”rhythmoanalysis” that accounts for the reiterative temporal practices —
habitual movements — through which we inhabit those sites. He is particu-
larly concerned with the fluctuating movement between the “real” and the
“unreal” whose dynamic interlacings produce the shimmering iridescence
of poetic reverie, or common daydreaming. Bachelard shares with his psy-
choanalytic contemporaries Laplanche and Pontalis a concept of fantasy as
inhabited structure (and of structure as inhabited fantasy).14 Space, as he
conceives it, is simultaneously phantasmatic and material, furnishable with
variable contents, both psychical and tangible, and within which it is possible
to change positions as one would move about a house.
A hundred people or more might pack the Golden Bull for a well-­attended
links party. One could not enter without an invitation. On party nights, one

62 / Chapter six
approached the grated street-­level door, where a monitor checked the name
you gave against the rsvp list. One then proceeded up a flight of stairs and
through another door to an anteroom off the entrance hall, where one paid
the cover charge, checked one’s coat and, if need be, changed one’s clothes.
One then passed through a kitchen and living room out to the deck, where
one set of stairs led up to the owner’s private floor and another set led down
to the labyrinthine dungeon. One room held a waterbed, another a jail cell,
and yet other mattresses, racks, crosses, ropeworks and suspension hooks,
with conveniently situated hardware screwed into the walls and ceilings. A
bathroom was reserved for piss play, scat, and blood sports. Sharps contain-
ers emblazoned with biohazard warning labels were placed in visible loca-
tions in every room, as were copious amounts of condoms and lube. Safety
monitors kept an eye out for trouble, and medical care providers were on-­site
in case of emergency. Drugs and alcohol were not allowed. Mirrors and Day-­
Glo graffiti covered the unfinished drywalls. It was there in the dungeon that
I first met Ian, sometime around 1991.
Coupling, though tolerated with a certain libertarian aplomb, was not the
dominant mode of interpersonal relationship in the dungeon. The general
ethos of the space favored a respectful openness to spontaneous liaisons,
improvised orchestrations, and serendipitous multiplicities — like a cocktail
party without drinks where the conversations were pantomimed in leather,
or a jam session around the edges of which a solo jazz musician might hover
before joining in. This made the dungeon a welcoming and convivial place,
where one was encouraged to encounter fellow creatures with a sense of won-
der and curiosity, with patience rather than judgment. Every person became
for others a unique opportunity for the universe to reveal itself from a slightly
different perspective — and some of the views were stunning.
The carefully curated guest list favored those unlikely to fit into other, more
rule-­bound and identity-­defined, dungeon spaces — it was neither gender-­
segregated nor compulsorily heterosexual; it honored those who abided by
the customs of “old leather” and carried its inherited wisdom, while cele-
brating freeform experimentation that broke with traditional subcultural
knowledge and practice. links, as its name suggested, forged connections
where they otherwise might not have existed. I first encountered there the
word queer, as it since has come to be used in academic and community dis-
course, in chill-­out conversations after dungeon sessions in the summer of
1990. We used it to name the previously unnamed social formation taking
shape at our parties, which we saw as part of a larger political and concep-
tual shift in identity-­based social movements related to the aids crisis and,

Dungeon Intimacies / 63
a few months later, to anti – Gulf War activism. “Transgender” was a word I
first encountered on a flyer advertising a links “Gender Play Party,” early in
1991. For most of us there, gender was something we explored, analyzed, and
experimented with in the context of a broader engagement with bodily prac-
tices and power; people came at questions of gender from many different an-
gles and emotional investments, with no one right way to proceed. Since the
1990s, considerable ink has been spilled about the relationship between queer
and transgender, transgender and transsexual, transgender, and genderqueer.
For me, these things were linked at the outset.
I wander one night into the dungeon’s back room to find a writhing young
body upright and spread-­eagled, lashed naked to an X-­shaped Saint An-
drew’s Cross, its head shaved, its scalp encircled with a garland of temporary
hypodermic-­needle piercings through which a fine steel wire had been wo-
ven and tightened into a “crown of thorns.” Blood trickled down its face in an
art-­historical tableau vivant of martyrdom and plicked arrhythmically onto
a plastic drop-­cloth. A woman faced the young body, checking its pulse and
respiration with a latex-­gloved hand, wiping the proverbial blood, sweat and
tears from its eyes and giving it occasional sips of water. Two others, whom I
happened to know, were administering a thorough flogging. One was visibly
tired — it had apparently been a long night. She gestured for me to take her
place, and I stepped into the structure of the scene, surrendering myself to its
established cadences.
Something serene and paradoxically solitary can be found in the experi-
ence of giving oneself over to the inhabitation and enactment of a shared pat-
tern of motion — a contemplative solitude born of one’s ecstatic displacement
into a space where the body actively receives and transmits the movements
of others, allowing awareness to flit and alight throughout the transsubjective
ensemble. A whip strikes flesh with sufficient force to blossom the creature’s
skin red and welt it back toward the leather. The young thing moans a low
moan, transforming the kinetic energy of the blow into an audible frequency
by passing breath over slack vocal cords, and my attention is drawn toward
the physicality of the assemblage we cohabit. “A child is being beaten,” no
doubt, but my sense in the moment is that the Freudians, so invested in tex-
tual analyses and narrative outcomes, fail to grasp the philosophical-­critical
dimension of sadomasochistic practice when they approach it through the
lens of oedipal sexuality.15 This is not, for me, primarily a sexual experience,
and it is Freud’s contemporary Bergson, rather than Freud himself, who
comes to mind.

64 / Chapter six
 In a passage of Matter and Memory, Bergson discusses the structure of the
nervous system in the “animal series” that extends (in his teleological schema)
from the Monera to Homo sapiens, in which he observes that even as a simple
mass of protoplasm, living matter is irritable and contractile, “open to the in-
fluence of external stimulation,” to which it reacts physically, chemically, and
mechanically. Stimulus/response is not an event structured by the boundary
between inside and outside, between interior “self ” and external “other,” but
is rather a continuous movement in which a force’s vector is prolonged and
deflected into the movements of living matter; it is a wave transmitting itself
through various media. As organisms become more complexly organized,
specialized parts — nerve cells, sense organs, the musculo-­skeletal system —
divide physiological labor in ways that permit more varied response. At some
point, a neural organ — the brain — introduces the possibility of voluntary
movement rather than automatic organic responses.
Bergson understands the brain to introduce a difference of degree rather
than kind. In a simple reflex action, a “peripheral excitation” transmits a cen-
tripetal movement along an “afferent” nerve toward the central neural pro-
cessing organ, before transmitting itself centrifugally back along an “efferent”
nerve to “motor cells” that direct the energy of the stimulus back into the en-
vironment and thus continue its movement in a new direction. It is the com-
plex branching of neurons in the brain that allows for voluntary responses;
quite physically, Bergson suggests, the possibility of choice of movements is
at root the lived awareness of stimuli circulating with electrochemical speed
through multiple possible neural pathways in the brain, each of which can
descend into a specific pattern of motor response. The brain, rather than hav-
ing some “miraculous power” to change sensory input into a “representation
of things” that can be symbolically manipulated, functions simply by intro-
ducing into the circulation of energetic flows through the body a duration, a
time-­lag (that is to say, more space) between the stimulus and response. Our
consciousness of choice of movements in response to stimuli is nothing other
than our inhabitation of a brainspace that holds the simultaneous presence of
multiple potentials, each made possible by the physical complexity and car-
rying capacity of the neural network, only one of which will be actualized, in
a quantum-­like leap to a particular one of many virtualities, through the ma-
terial actions of our body.16
Whether Bergson’s story can be recognized as true by today’s cognitive
scientists is beside the point: reflecting on Bergson brings me to the place of
poiesis. I envision my body as a meeting point, a node, where external lines

Dungeon Intimacies / 65
of force and social determination thicken into meat and circulate as move-
ment back into the world. So much that constitutes me I did not choose; but,
now constituted, I feel myself to be in a place of agency. I occupy a critical
space, a distance between stimulus and response created by the complex so-
cial pathways converging in the dungeon, in which through my presence I
gain the capacity to choose which patterns I will repeat, or which new pat-
terns I might envision and enact. I invent new choreographies of space and
time as I dance my whip across the creature’s ass. It is not that I somehow in-
ternalize as my own the structure or content of the scene in which I partici-
pate, receiving its impression the way clay would receive a sculptor’s mark. It
is rather a proprioceptive awareness, as I flog, of the role of my body as me-
dium in the circuit of transmissions, and of the material efficacy I possess in
my subjective ability to choose one thing rather than another, or to poetically
imagine the shape of a new pattern. The imagination, Bachelard says, takes
up its place here, “exactly where the function of unreality comes to charm or
to disturb — always to awaken — the sleeping being lost in its automatisms.”17
Gender is a percussive symphony of automatisms, reverberating through
the space of our bodies before there is an awareness of awareness itself. Who
can say why I heard its music the way I did? All I know is that from earliest
memory I disliked being called “he” and longed to be addressed as “she.” I
wanted to look like what I considered myself to be and perceived that I was
profoundly misplaced — all of which evoked in me the utter sadness of feel-
ing irremediably lost and alone in a situation impossible to rectify. I was not
where others looked for me, and I was where they saw me not. Lacan says that
“the real” is the place that is always returned to; these feelings were real. I am
agnostic as to their origin. I did not choose them. I chose only how I would
inhabit the architecture of their affect.
For a long time, the little perceiving one who had been surprised to find,
while still so very young, that it related to its place of habitation in a manner
quite different from others whom it knew, remained quietly observant. It first
encountered another to dwell with it in the awareness of its difference in the
nineteenth year of its body’s extrauterine life. My girlfriend and I had just fin-
ished fucking, and I was stretching next to our bed like a well-­fed cat when I
felt a pinch on my left buttock. Without turning around or looking down, I
swatted vigorously at what I thought were my girlfriend’s fingers. As it turned
out, she had leaned over to bite me playfully on my ass-­cheek; my slap caught
her perfectly on the side of the face and sent her reeling across the room. She
was sobbing, and I was mortified that I had hurt her. But what eventually be-
came clear, through her tears and my guilty self-­recriminations, was that she

66 / Chapter six
had found it terribly exciting that I had hit her, and a secret history of desire
began spilling forth. She wondered if I might not do it again. In all honesty I
had never even dreamed of doing such things to another person — but just as
honestly, I also have to say that something previously unnamed and unrecog-
nized in me did not hesitate to answer, “Yes.” And so it was that I felt obliged
to offer her the gift of a reciprocal vulnerability and invited her into a realm
of feelings I had always occupied without companionship. After a pregnant
pause she replied, “ ‘The hardest thing about asking you to hit me was over-
coming the fear of being hit by a man.”
Cut to 1991, a decade later, and s/m had become for me what it was for
many of the people who shared dungeon space at links parties — a technol-
ogy for the production of (trans)gendered embodiment, a mechanism for
dismembering and disarticulating received patterns of identification, affect,
sensation, and appearance and for reconfiguring, coordinating, and remap-
ping them in bodily space. I could hear people use names and pronouns in
reference to me that I could agree to answer to. I could feel the touch upon
my body of clothes that encouraged certain modes of comportment or styl-
ized manners of moving, clothing that gendered me in the act of wearing
them. In dungeon space I could see a woman in the mirror, and step into the
place of woman in the structure of another’s desire, to witness those bodily
signs — the heaves and shudders and seeping fluids — that attested to my via-
ble occupation of that fantasized place for them.
There are those who say that magic is the art and science of creating
change in accordance with the will. Transsexual body modification is one
such practice.18 It became the means through which I grasped a virtuality
manifested in dungeon space and gave it a materiality capable of extending
its effects beyond the dungeon walls. It is in such moments of magical trans-
formation that, according to Bachelard, “the commitment of the imagining
being is such that it no longer functions as the subject of the verb ‘to adapt
oneself.’ ” This is the moment of poeisis, when that which has been grasped
extends itself into the world, thereby transforming not only “the imagining
being,” but others and the environment that holds them.
My arm tires and I take my turn supporting the young creature’s head,
holding its eyes with mine, cradling it, and attending to its bodily needs. Such
are the intimate sites of queer reproduction. This moment of dungeon inti-
macy is but one of many over the years that collectively will conjure a new
social reality. Deleuze is right to say that sadomasochism deromanticizes love
and eroticizes the world.19 Later, hanging out in the kitchen, I learn that my
playmate calls himself Ian and lives in the world as a woman. He was just be-

Dungeon Intimacies / 67
ginning a PhD program in US history, at another campus of the same univer-
sity where I was in the final stages of finishing mine. We ran around together
for a while, whenever he was in town, until he moved to New York. Some-
times, in the years ahead, we would happen upon one another at academic
conferences. Small world.

Reprise

From Bernal Heights, the city of San Francisco spreads over the land to the
north and west, a slow-­moving accretion in steel and glass, brick, and con-
crete, of the human desire unleashed and focused upon this terrain by the
famous gold rush of 1848 — an alchemical transformation of precious metal
into philosopher’s stone that thinks through me on it.
This landscape is made of memories. Much of what I knew from the early
’90s is now gone. That community dispersed for all the usual reasons: death,
whimsy, jobs, familial obligations. The dot-­com boom came in on top of that,
property values rising like a tsunami that washed people away, across the Bay
toward Oakland, or to the Sierra foothills, or over the mountains entirely and
far away. It was a force of nature, and the space filled back in different from
how it had been before. I see the armory, enormous Gay Pride rainbow flags
flying from its turrets. It was purchased late in 2006 by Kink.com, an s/m
internet porn site that had started shooting its own movies, needed more
studio space, and loved the building’s faux-­Moorish interior stonework and
soundstage-­sized troop assembly rooms. Kink.com is a quintessentially San
Franciscan kind of porn business — it provides safe working conditions, pays
its workers well, and generously gives back to the neighborhood and the s/m
community. And yet as it streams its dematerialized digital media images
onto the World Wide Web, it supplies an image of the new relations between
space and life now being materialized in the fabric of the city and enacts the
relentless commodification and privatization of all we know.20
I wonder aloud about the space of my own body and the practices that
have installed it here. I want to claim that transsexual sadomasochism affords
me a glimpse of non-­unique revolutionary potentials — exemplifying the ma-
terially productive effects of extending and prolonging into the world poet-
ically generated patterns of response to external conditions, demonstrating
how body modification can become a site of social transformation, proving
that the real can be materialized differently than it now is or once was. Ian
points toward the armory and reminds me that all present materializations
become relics, and that nothing prevents their capture by normativizing pro-

68 / Chapter six
cesses or their absorption into the stream of commodities. He wonders if
perhaps I am being sentimental, or nostalgic. Perhaps, but that’s not how it
feels.
A work by the avant-­garde genderqueer performance group Antony and
the Johnsons comes to mind, “The Cripple and the Starfish.”21 I have it on my
iPod, and Ian and I share an earbud apiece to listen to ANOHNI, in the role
of the titular cripple, sing of a sadomasochistic love:

It’s true I always wanted love to be hurtful

And it’s true I always wanted love to be filled with pain and bruises . . .
And there’s no rhyme or reason I’m changing like the seasons Watch!
I’ll even cut off my finger
It will grow back like a Starfish!
I am very happy So please hit me
I am very very happy So come on hurt me
I’ll grow back like a Starfish

I am moved, from my postoperative transsexual perspective, by the sing-

er’s plaintive association of amputation with the yearning for a transforma-
tion of affect. In the song, the (fantasy of the) self-­inflicted bodily wound
functions to create a space of subjective fulfillment. The empty space of the
missing digit is produced, through an act of evacuation, as a space of regen-
eration. That space, being void and not filled, allows for the movement of
desire into it. It is thus not memberlessness itself that is desired, but the sub-
jective experience of transformative growth in which absence becomes the
space of possibility.
In that the amputation of the member produces a space of actualization,
it functions as chora — an ancient Greek concept with the double meaning of
both an enclosed space and the act of enclosing, which figured prominently
in Plato’s cosmogony and which has become a contested site in feminist post-
structuralist reworkings of the Western philosophical tradition. In Plato’s Ti-
maeus, the chora is as his phallocentric philosophy imagines the womb to be,
a passive vessel for the active male elements from which the world is formed.
Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, and others have emphasized
the active function of enclosing, holding, and containing to assert the posi-
tive contribution of the chora in the process of generation as a space genera-
tive of movement that spills forth from containment.22
From my forward-­facing perspective, I look back on my body as a psychi-
cally bounded space or container that becomes energetically open through
the break of its surface — a rupture experienced as interior movement, a

Dungeon Intimacies / 69
movement that becomes generative as it encloses and invests in a new space,
through a perpetually reiterative process of growing new boundaries and
shedding abandoned materialities: a mobile, membranous, temporally fleet-
ing and provisional sense of enfolding and enclosure. This is the utopian
space of my ongoing poeisis.
The August sun is farther west in the sky. Ian removes my iPod earbud
and decides he needs to leave for home immediately to beat the traffic back
across the bridge. We amble downhill toward house and car, chattering about
the mundane details of the remainder of our respective days. He has to cook
dinner and stay home with her kid while her partner goes to an art class, but
that’s all right because he’s chairing his department this year and has a lot of
administrative crap to catch up on. I’m meeting my son and his girlfriend in
Oakland for anime and sushi, then coming home for a late night hot-­tub-­
and-­cocktails date with my partner before heading off to bed. I’ve accepted a
visiting professorship in Vancouver this coming academic year and find my
moments with him already suffused with a longing that extended absence
shortly will bring. Tomorrow I really need to finish an overdue article, be-
cause the editor is breathing down my neck. Ian and I hug our fond goodbyes
and kiss with a dungeon intimacy.23
Our bodies are spaces set in motion; motions set in space: what trace of
their generative locations do these mobile architectures make as they extend
into the world?

Notes
First published in Parallax 14, no. 1 (2008): 36 – 47. Thanks to Julian Carter for
our renewed friendship, permission to speak freely, and comments on the text.
Thanks as well to Rita Alfonso for critical input, and to Gretchen Till for conver-
sations on architecture.
1 Volcano and Halberstam, The Drag King Book.
2 Treut, Gendernauts.
3 On the armory, see Till, “Space of Reception”; and Shermatta, “Mission Armory.”
4 On the framing and inflection of architectural space, see Cache, Earth Moves.
5 Charting the queer geography of San Francisco is a work in progress; much of
this commentary is drawn from personal knowledge, and from unpublished data
in the “Sites Database,” at the glbt Historical Society, https://www.glbthistory
.org/. See also Califia, “San Francisco: Revisiting the City of Desire”; G. Rubin,
“The Valley of the Kings”; and Stryker, “How the Castro Became San Francisco’s
Gay Neighborhood.”
6 Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” 19 – 20; Davis, “History and the Laboratory
of Sexuality.”

70 / Chapter six
 7 Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” 240.
8 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 12.
9 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 20 (emphasis in original), as cited in Rocque Ramirez,
“A Living Archive of Desire,” 117.
10 Bell, “Fast Feminism.”
11 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxxv.
12 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 15.
13 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 8.
14 Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasme originaire, fantasme des
origines, origine du fantasme” [Fantasy and the origins of sexuality], Les Temps
Modernes 215 (1964): 1833 – 68, as reprinted in Burgin, Donald, and Kaplan, For-
mations of Fantasy.
15 Freud, “ ‘A Child Is Being Beaten.’ ”
16 Bergson, Matter and Memory.
17 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxxv.
18 Cameron, Body Alchemy.
19 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty.”
20 Robin Rinaldi, “The New Pornographers,” San Francisco 7 × 7, August 1, 2006.
21 Antony and the Johnsons, “The Cripple and the Starfish,” Antony and the John-
sons (Duturo, 2000), cd.
22 Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling”; Butler, “Irigaray/Plato,” in Bodies That Mat-
ter, 36 – 49; Sophia, “Container Technologies.”
23 I am reminded of an article by Carolyn Dinshaw, who, in commenting on the
queerness of the kiss between Gawain and Bertilak in Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, noted how the heteronormative text is “preoccupied with keeping the
depths and fissures” of queerness “from bursting forth” from the men’s kiss, as
its words labor “to limit the significance of its signs, the nature of its characters,
[and] the meanings of their actions,” in order to reduce a “polyvalent sign” to
“monovalent meaning.” It is precisely the queer work of producing polyvalent
meanings from “dungeon intimacies” that I hope my actions may accomplish.
Dinshaw, “A Kiss Is Just a Kiss,” 205.

Dungeon Intimacies / 71
 7
PERFECT DAY

I still think of it as my perfect day; a day whose date I can’t remember now,
in June 1980. I was a few weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday and had blown
every last cent of my savings to get myself to Europe, to spend the summer
backpacking around to “find myself.” For the first time in my life, I was en-
tirely outside the context of family and friends, away from everybody who
had any expectations of who I was or what I was supposed to be.
I’d made it across Germany and France to the UK and had worked my way
north from London to the Lake District when my perfect day arrived. I was
staying at a hostel in Ambleside and had planned a day of ridge walking — just
me in my woolly gray sweater, low stone walls, contented sheep, and stun-
ning views. I had been unwinding for weeks, visiting places I remembered
from my army-­brat childhood in Bavaria, getting my first taste of Paris hau-
teur, thrashing in the mosh pit at Hammersmith Palais when Burning Spear
opened for The Clash. I had been to Stonehenge and Stratford-­on-­Avon, and
now I was setting off to commune with the souls of romantic poets, a slim
volume of Coleridge tucked in my daypack. I look back fondly, with some be-
musement, on how sincere and naive I was then.
My thoughts were drifting, as teenage thoughts are wont to do, and turned
to the question of love. I had been dissatisfied, I had to admit, but I myself
was largely to blame. I had not been honest with my girlfriends — all four of
them at that point — about what I was really looking for in a relationship. It
was impossible to separate what I wanted from them, from what I wanted for
myself. I can’t honestly say that I considered myself a lesbian at that point in
my life. I was born male but had puzzled over gender as long as I could re-
member. Gender had never been an assumption for me; had always been a
question.
When I was very little, I remember nonchalantly thinking that I would
grow up to be a woman. I’m agnostic about where these thoughts and feelings
came from, but they were phenomenologically persistent and undeniably
real. When I realized, around age five, the normative relationship between
genital difference and social gender, it surprised and shocked me. This pre-
sented a huge problem. Were my self-­perceptions wrong? Had I made a mis-
take? Or was everybody else wrong about me? What was real, and what
wasn’t? Who got to say who was a boy and who was a girl? Why, I wondered,
did the pronoun “she” feel like the one I wanted to name me? Why, when
somebody said “he,” in reference to me, did I shrug inwardly, with the un-
voiced qualifier, “Well, I understand why you might think so, but that’s not
really what I am”? These early conundrums became the bedrock of my later
intellectual life as I pursued an unlikely career as a transgender theorist, his-
torian, and filmmaker.
Living as a boy was nonconsensual. I had been plopped, never asked, into
a gender I would not have chosen. I accepted my status only provisionally,
pending further assessment of my situation. I didn’t know if it would be pos-
sible for me to leave, any more than if it would be possible for me to stay.
I started dreaming of bodily transformations as a potential escape route. I
dreamed of machines that changed the shape of my genitals, gave me breasts,
made my hair long. I dreamed the emotional logic of coercive normalization
within consumer capitalism: some adult would recognize my girlish proclivi-
ties, take me out to buy girl things, but then laugh at me — as if they had suc-
cessfully pulled a prank — when I admitted that I really thought of myself as
a girl. I would always awaken feeling furious and betrayed.
I turned bookish, always looking from the corner of my eye for answers
to the gender questions, and became precociously erudite in the process. My
mind was often elsewhere than my body; still, I didn’t let the unresolved sta-
tus of my gender identity paralyze me. I tried to get on with things and make
the best of it. I didn’t needlessly resist my socialization, picked my battles,
bided my time. I watched war movies, played football, swam competitively,
learned to swear like a motherfucker and get stupid in public with alcohol.
Like everybody else, I learned where the boundaries were drawn between

Perfect Day / 73
masculinity and femininity and knew where I was situated. I learned that
voicing questions about gender did not elicit helpful answers and sometimes
created problems for oneself. Truth be told, I always felt like being a guy was
a perfectly fine way of being in the world. I was just never convinced it was
my way. I wondered why it mattered what gender you happened to be, but
still couldn’t shake my sense of preference.
I dreamed about girls, starting around age six. It usually went something
like this. A classmate or neighbor-­girl I thought was really funny or smart
or cute or nice would confess she had a secret crush on me. (A black-­haired,
dark-­eyed tomboy beauty in my first-­grade class, who showed up at school
every so often looking uncomfortable in a pink Jackie-­O skirt and suit jacket
was my first such inamorata.) My family, however, would be on the verge of
moving away (which we did with some regularity in real life). The girl would
want me to stay with her, and her parents would agree to take me in.
All of my clothes and toys would accidentally be sent away with my own
family, and then, due to some emergency like falling in a mud puddle or be-
ing attacked by a stray dog, my only remaining set of boy’s things would be
ruined. Of course, my girlfriend would lend me some of her clothes until
mine could be replaced, whereupon she would then discover, much to her
surprise and delight, what a nice little girl I made. Her parents would be ac-
commodating; they’d always wanted to raise another girl, and my own par-
ents miraculously agreed to let me stay.
She and I would be friends — not boyfriend and girlfriend — just friends,
practically sisters. We would do all sorts of things together because we really
liked being with each other and would be best friends forever. Somewhere
around puberty, these dreams became sexual. What could possibly be sweeter
than discovering that your best friend, with whom you shared so many spe-
cial things, loved you in a special sort of way?
So I wasn’t quite a transsexual lesbian on that perfect day in the Lake Dis-
trict, a few weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday in the summer of 1980, but I
was pretty darn close. I just didn’t know what to call myself yet.
Somewhere between the ages of ten and thirteen (based on where I re-
member living at the time), I read a Dear Abby advice column in the news-
paper. A woman wrote to say that she had discovered her husband had been
sneaking into her closet and trying on her clothes; she wondered if her hus-
band was secretly homosexual. Abby told her that homosexuals were people
who loved people of their own sex and that it didn’t have anything to do with
cross-­dressing. She said the woman’s husband could possibly be a transsex-
ual, who was a person who considered himself or herself a member of the

74 / Chapter seven
opposite sex, but that most likely her husband was a transvestite, who was
somebody who had no desire to change sex but enjoyed wearing the clothing
of the opposite sex.
Eureka! Language is truly a gift from the gods. Not only did I now have
definitive proof that I was not the only person to have ever questioned their
own gender, I also had a vocabulary to help me frame my thoughts. And
off to the public library I rode, unconsciously fey, on my purple Schwinn
Sting-­Ray with the banana seat and sissy bar, handle-­bar streamers flying fu-
riously in the wind.
The library was hugely disappointing. “Transsexualism” was indeed listed
in the subject classifications of the card catalog, but the only books treating
the topic were textbooks of abnormal psychology. I read that transsexuals
were deeply disturbed people who feared being homosexual, or who felt
guilty about being homosexual, and who wanted to be members of the other
sex so that their sexual feelings would appear normal. Sadly, I concluded that
I was not a transsexual after all, because not only did I not consider myself
abnormal, I also did not consider homosexuality repulsive. In fact, I thought
it sounded pretty cool.
My own budding desires revolved around what the porn magazines
stashed under the mattresses in friends’ bedrooms called “girl-­on-­girl action.”
I knew that if I was one of those women in the magazines, I wouldn’t gin-
gerly touch the tip of my tongue to the tip of hers, or place one long painted
nail against her nipple — I’d crush her lips to mine and fondle her breast vo-
raciously as she fondled mine. What I didn’t know was how to put my body
into the stories I saw in those pictures or into the fantasies of transformation
I dreamed of at night.
I decided that, since I obviously wasn’t transsexual, I must be some hereto-
fore unnamed kind of creature. In retrospect, it seems like it would have been
so easy to put two of those terms I found together — to name my emerging
sense of self as both transsexual and homosexual — but at the time the cate-
gories seemed mutually exclusive, so round and round I went: I feel like I’m
really a girl so I could be transsexual, but if I’m transsexual I’m supposed to
want to be with guys, but if I’m transsexual in order to be with guys then that
means I’m repulsed by homosexuality, but I’m actually attracted to homo­
sexuality, especially homosexuality in women, but a homosexual woman
wouldn’t like me because I have a guy body, but I could be homosexually in-
volved with women if I were a woman, and I could be a woman if I was trans-
sexual, but I can’t be transsexual because that means I’m attracted to guys and
repulsed by homosexuality . . . and in the end, teenage passions being what

Perfect Day / 75
teenage passions are, it was easier to just keep my mouth shut and date the
women who wanted to date me, all of whom happened to be straight.
And that’s what I was thinking about as I walked along the ridge lines of
the Lakeland Fells on my perfect day. I was wondering who I would love, and
who would love me, and how we would love, given the complexities of my gen-
der. My girlfriends had all been nice people, and I still carry happy thoughts
of good times with them all. One was a fiery-­tempered cheerleader running
away from an abusive father and living with an older brother. Another was a
sweet, pot-­smoking rock-­and-­roll groupie who was one of the most relaxed,
fun-­loving people I’ve ever yet encountered. The third was a high-­strung,
mixed-­up daughter of nouveau riche parents; she had — I kid you not — two
uteri. For the fourth, I was a way of rebelling against a controlling and over-
protective mother. I enjoyed sex with them all. It actually felt fantastic to pene-
trate their vaginas with my penis, because it felt like my penis had gone away.
It wasn’t dangling about and poking around but was put away someplace nice
that let me push the little spot at the base of my shaft that I always thought of
as my clit right up against my girlfriend’s bush, and grind against her until we
both came. While fucking, my penis — superfluous — disappeared.
All my girlfriends thought I was such a sweet boy, said I wasn’t like the other
guys, said they could talk to me, said they liked the way I listened to them, said
they appreciated that I liked to do things with them besides fuck and seemed
to enjoy my just hanging out with them. Then something would happen, some
slip, some antigay slur, perhaps. Maybe they would laugh the wrong way when
television comedian Flip Wilson did his “Geraldine” character, or make gag-
ging noises when talking about transsexual tennis player Renée Richards,
whose story was then much covered in the daily papers. It was always some-
thing, some little pin to burst the bubble of what she and I could, in my dreams,
be to each other. I would know then that she was not the one for me. Not that I
ever let on, until the usual vagaries of time drifted us apart.
It wasn’t much of a climax, my little epiphany, that afternoon on the ridge.
It was more like something dropped away. I had been shedding bits of my
familiar self for weeks, all across Europe, when another little piece of scale
fell from my inner eye, and I found myself alone at last in a quiet moment of
clarity and insight. It simply became obvious to me that I would never have
a meaningful relationship with a woman unless I told her how I really felt
about myself, which was that I loved women, had a male body, had never
thought of myself as a man, didn’t seem to qualify as a transsexual, and had
never been turned on by anything other than the thought of being in a les-
bian relationship.

76 / Chapter seven
 The question of whether or not I would ever try to change my body, if that
was somehow possible for a normal nontranssexual like me, or what kind of
body I would have, or how I would live in public, had to be an open-­ended
question within the relationship. I didn’t know yet what kind of flaming crea-
ture I was, but I wanted companionship while I tried to figure it out. I wanted
to find somebody who was interested in the process. I decided that, upon re-
turning home, I would make a point of dating bisexual women — women who
knew how to eroticize a relationship with a woman but could enjoy making
love with a male body. I would come out to my lovers about my sense of self
early in the relationship, because if they couldn’t hang with the situation, it
was all for the best that things end quickly. And that, a few weeks later, is pre-
cisely what I did.
She was in my fencing class. There was something about the way she sat
cross-­legged, her unapologetic armpit hair, her awkward brashness, that big
sexy Jewish nose that tipped me off. Dyke. Probably a hardcore feminist. I
was smitten. Not being properly socialized into the subtleties of womyn-­
loving-­womyn courtship, I tried to engage her with some stupid conversa-
tional gambit, and if she hadn’t noticed that I was left-­handed, she probably
would have blown me off and life would have been very different. But left-­
handers have a slight advantage in fencing — our attacks always come from
the off-­side in relation to most everybody else’s — and she wanted to practice
against me. We spent the next decade fencing with each other, and we both
drew blood in the end.
I loved that she would engage with me, fight with me, play with me, argue
with me, take me as seriously as I took her. I loved that she spoke German.
I loved that she loved movies and would talk about them and not just watch
them and eat her popcorn and be done with it. We would disagree passion-
ately over why we both liked the same thing. Our first date was a triple feature
of Bergman, Fassbinder, and Herzog. Our second date was the Rocky Horror
Picture Show. By our third date, we’d come out to each other — she wasn’t sure
she liked guys, I wasn’t sure I was one. It worked for both of us, more or less
from the time I was nineteen until I was almost thirty. We got married, went
off to graduate school together, made a home together, had a child together. I
was so happy being seen through my lover’s eyes. I thought I knew what the
shape of my life would look like. But I was wrong.
There was that nagging little question about my embodiment. We circled
around it. All of our sex fantasies and bedroom stories and erotica-­reading
were lesbocentric. All of our family life felt gender egalitarian — how we split
up the chores, how we parented, how we took turns with work and school

Perfect Day / 77
and supported each other. It felt like lesbian domesticity. I grew increasingly
disenchanted with only my lover seeing me as I saw myself. The person I
was to myself, the person I was with her, was not the person I was to every-
one else who mattered in my life. She insisted that I keep the matter between
us alone. I grew increasingly alienated from my genitals but was perfectly
happy to fuck with fingers, tongues, toys, or anything else. By this time, I’d
come around to the conclusion that, regardless of what some old textbooks
had said, one could in fact be a transsexual lesbian, that one had the power to
name oneself. It was just a matter of persuading others to go along with you. I
started describing myself to my partner as a preoperative transsexual lesbian
who was still living as a man but no longer wanted to do so.
She did not want me to change. She feared what her family would think.
We had both read feminist and lesbian literature and knew the feminist
party line on transsexual lesbianism — no fake females allowed in the club.
She feared we would be ostracized, would have no community, wouldn’t find
work, wouldn’t have a place to live, would be poor and marginalized, our par-
ents would disown us, and our child would be scarred for life by the stigma.
These were not unrealistic fears, and she wanted to be safe. She wanted to re-
tain heterosexual privilege, even if she felt she was queer. My body was her
closet, and she didn’t want me to come out.
Things turned ugly in all the ways that divorce is usually ugly. One after-
noon, after a sleepless night filled with bitter grief and mutual recriminations,
I was lying, dazed and spent, in the grass beside our apartment building. I felt
as if my entire life was being ripped away and the void was staring into me.
My thoughts spun back to that perfect day, a decade earlier, when familiar life
had been stripped away in a more pleasant fashion, and I consciously stepped
onto the path that led me here. I found again, unbidden as before, that same
sense of inner clarity that welled within me then. The path went forward. I
took my step, she and I parted ways, and I started my transition.
Regrets, I’ve had a few, but not about transitioning. Regardless of how it
might have affected my relationships with other people, it’s what was right
for me. Nobody else can live my life for me, so how I live in my body for my-
self is the necessary basis for every other relationship I have with anyone else.
I’m completely clear about that now. Fortunately, all of the people who really
mattered in my life, except my ex, stayed with me through my transition, and
I found wonderful new people along the way to share life’s adventures.
I started living as a woman in the early 1990s in San Francisco, just as
“queer” (as opposed to old-­school baby-­boomer gay and lesbian) was com-
ing into currency. I’d never seen a good place for myself in the old economy

78 / Chapter seven
of sexual identities anyway, and felt very comfortable calling myself queer. I
was gender queer. I also liked a new word that started getting tossed around
about this time, “transgender.” I felt it fit me and created a bit of distance be-
tween the old medical mindset associated with “transsexual” and the bohe-
mian life I was living. I cared nothing about passing, everything about being
seen for what I was: a queer woman in the process of leaving a male body
behind. I didn’t care, if my girlfriend didn’t, that I still sported nonstandard
equipment. I was saving my pennies to replace the factory-­installed model
with something custom-­built anyway, and just wanted her to love me and
have crazy, sexy fun while I scraped my surgery money together. I wanted her
to look forward to the prospect of eating me out as much as I looked forward
to spreading my legs for her.
Life, in many respects, became a dream come true. My body, and the life I
lived through it, was finally aligned with the structure of my deepest desires
and identifications. I was happy. I had been prepared for a solitary existence
post-­transition but found that I was desirable to many women I desired. Les-
bian transphobia, while real, turned out to be more monolithic in theory than
in practice. I went wild for a few years, dated widely, played around casually,
frequented orgies, slept my way across town. No names, but a few college pro-
fessors, a couple of magazine editors, a stripper, a secretary, a dominatrix, a
tattooist, a performance artist, a lawyer, a graphic designer, an abortion clinic
manager, and two butch dykes in the process of transitioning female-­to-­male.
(If I’ve forgotten anyone, forgive me.) I learned to see myself in relation to a
lot of different women (and a few men), and I came into my own.
I would have been content to live my life with three of those people. One
was dating someone else at the same time she was dating me, and ultimately
chose to be with the other woman. I was sad, but these things happen, and I
got over it. She and I run into each other now and then at professional meet-
ings, and sometimes we get together for a drink when we happen to be in the
same city. I always think it’s nice to see her. Another I would have shacked
up with quite happily had she felt able to leave a long-­term nonmonogamous
relationship. We had horrible timing with each other for years, one of us was
involved in a primary relationship with somebody else when the other was
free, and vice versa. After a while, we reconciled to the fact that for each of us
the other was “the one that got away,” and we settled down into a really warm,
close, and ongoing friendship. The third became my life partner throughout
my thirties.
She was younger than me by eight years, punky butch-­of-­center in appear-
ance but an outdoorsy granola dyke just beneath the skin, same shoe size as

Perfect Day / 79
me and almost my height, with hazel eyes like my father. We lived a life we
considered self-­consciously radical: polyamorous, collectivist, anarchist, ac-
tivist, artistic, intellectual. I didn’t have a regular job and made my living
teaching around as adjunct faculty, writing books and magazine pieces, pick-
ing up speaking gigs, doing odd jobs and piecework, while doing my part to
turn transgender studies into a recognized academic field. I told people I was
just a girl who lived by her wits, and it was true. It was hard economically,
but it was also utterly, romantically, wonderfully, free — just another word for
nothin’ left to lose.
We felt like we were reinventing the world, reinventing family, reinventing
love, reinventing ourselves. She had a child we co-­parented, along with my
son, and we lived with people who felt more like kin than roommates. We all
somehow managed to buy a house together before the dot-­com boom drove
real estate prices through the roof. It was a big place, and we turned it into a
commune. We had the best dinner parties and the most interesting house-
guests in the world. Somewhere along the way I finally had my surgery. We
thought we were the revolution. And in a way, we were.
Revolutions have a way of turning out other than you expect, and this one
was no exception. Our former housemates partnered up and moved away,
and we started renting out rooms. My partner started her own business,
started writing books of her own, and that took up a lot of her time. I landed
a postdoctoral fellowship and then accepted a job as the executive director
of a nonprofit organization. I worked a lot. The kids were getting older, and
just schlepping them to school and karate and playdates with friends took a
big chunk out of the daily schedule. Life wasn’t quite as wild as it once was,
but I felt fine. I felt like I was turning into the woman I’d once imagined I’d
grow up to be.
Maybe it was lesbian bed-­death. Maybe it was, truth be told, that she was
freaked out by my genital surgery, and it triggered her survivor-­of-­sexual as-
sault issues. Maybe she had been too young when we got together, and she
had the best of intentions but just grew in a different direction. Maybe she
never loved me the way that I loved her. Maybe it’s that she secretly wanted
to be monogamous. Maybe it’s just that she fell in love with somebody else.
Maybe it was that I’d gotten fat, or liked to drink more than she did, or would
sometimes self-­medicate my stress with nicotine. It was probably all of the
above. After ten years that felt to me like our relationship was getting steadily
better, she suddenly bugged out and left me for one of my former students,
a trans guy I’d tried to mentor, somebody as much younger than her as she
was to me. It blindsided and shattered me. For the second time in my life, I

80 / Chapter seven
felt like my world had crashed, but this time there was no salving memory
of a quiet inner place, unexpectedly encountered on a perfect summer day.
There was only pain.
That was five years ago, but what they say is true — time is a healer. I’m in
a new relationship now and so far, so good. My current partner is somebody
I had dated during my polyamorous days with my second long-­term lover,
so she’d already been in my life for some time. After my unexpected breakup,
we saw no reason to stop seeing each other, and we moved cautiously ahead.
A year or so of inconsolable grieving on my part, tentative steps toward new
couplehood, weekly relationship counseling (we are, after all, middle-­aged,
middle-­class lesbians, for whom psychotherapy is a subcultural norm), and
finally moving in together about a year ago. It feels solid. It feels like we’ve
both been around the block a time or two now and know how to do relation-
ships right this time. We take nothing for granted.
It’s not always easy between us, but it’s mostly the routine kind of not
easy. We both have kids from previous relationships with us part-­time, and
blending families is sometimes a challenge. There are some unresolved in-­
law issues. We’re from different class backgrounds. She’s detail-­oriented and
I’m a big-­picture gal who’s fuzzy on the small stuff, which sometimes creates
tension. She pouts when I travel, and I get annoyed when she kvetches. We
both like to get our way and usually think we’re right about everything. Some
nights, one of us winds up sleeping alone in a huff. She’d been a lesbian for
twenty years before she met me, but now that we’re together, some of her old
friends have distanced themselves. I’m sorry that she’s suffered a loss for lov-
ing me. We’ve made new friends together, though, and kept the best of her
old bunch as well as mine. My crowd thinks she’s swell.
So, where does that leave us? We love each other and try to be nice to each
other, because life’s too short for unnecessary unpleasantness. We like travel-
ing together and watching movies at home. We’ve established a good domes-
tic rhythm. We find each other sexy. She often laughs at my jokes, and I think
her smile is exquisitely beautiful every time I see it. We take pleasure in our
work, and our material needs are abundantly met. We enjoy our hot tub and
a cold cosmopolitan cocktail on chilly San Francisco nights. Sometimes when
I’m soaking, watching the low clouds scuttle in from the sea, I think back to
that perfect day, the summer I turned nineteen. I came down from the ridge
in the evening, and walked back into town, where I picked up some lamb
meat, rosemary, and potatoes to make myself a stew. After dinner I drew a
hot bath and threw open the big, leaded glass bathroom window to look up
at the hills I’d climbed earlier in the day. The steam rose and the water cooled

Perfect Day / 81
as I lay in the tub, and the dusk turned darker, and the nighttime fell. I look
at my partner and think: I have a lot of perfect days now.

Note
First published in Trans People in Love, edited by Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox
(New York: Routledge, 2008), 43 – 54.

82 / Chapter seven
 8
KETAMINE JOURNAL

The closest I can come to describing today’s experience in words is the glo-
cal hybridity concept promulgated by feminist philosopher Doreen Massey.
Basically, imagine any given point, including one’s own body, as the intersec-
tion of a potentially infinite number of lines of influence or determination,
some shorter (more local) and some longer (more global). These contingent,
happenstance lines of different spatiotemporal lengths and durations are all
knotted together, with no purely “local” place nor a strictly “global” one, just
glocal hybridity, always and everywhere.
I visualize my body lying on a couch in a Castro District psychotherapy
office as the convergent point of innumerable brightly colored storylines, like
yarn threaded through a hole where a nail once was: short lines of proximal
narratives — how I knew the person who referred me to the clinic — and lon-
ger storylines like the ones that brought me to the Bay Area for grad school,
the ones that raveled my sense of being trans, the ones of how the Castro
became queer and San Francisco psychedelic, how certain people colonized
North America to become white. I visualize my individual lineage back to the
southern plains of Oklahoma, to the Ozarks in Arkansas, to the Chesapeake
Bay Tidewater in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries and to Scotland
before that. On my father’s side, the ancestors came to North America from
Aberdeenshire in the 1660s. If Ancestry.com is to be believed (I know, as a
good queer, that all kinship is fictive) my mother’s mother’s line can be traced
back to Gruoch ingen Boite, Lady MacBeth, and through her to the legendary
kings of Dál Riata. For a flash today I was zooming through a long green tube
that ran toward them, back to a landscape that my waking self first visited in
the summer of its nineteenth year.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018, San Francisco

At home.
Had the weird experience yesterday, so fresh from visiting some memory-­
conjured version of Scotland down in the k-­hole, of receiving an email in-
viting me to write a short text to accompany the Scottish artist Charlotte
Prodger’s contribution to the 2019 Venice Biennale. Never was attracted to
ketamine as a party drug, am still in the early stages of using it therapeuti-
cally to work with the emotional investments bound up in my chronic shoul-
der pain (too much “carrying the weight of the world”). It’s dissociative, used
mostly as an anesthetic, can alter proprioceptive sense of time and space, pro-
duce visual hallucinations and out-­of-­body experiences.
I’m finding the visualizations to be the least interesting part of it (mush-
rooms and acid so much better imo) but what I’m finding super useful is my
awareness in a different way to my experientially available bio-­materiality
(“body” feels too organized and contained a word for what it feels like). I
seem able to sense where traumatic energetic residues are held in the tissue,
can make tiny little physical micro-­adjustments, let that energy go. k is be-
coming for me a sort of “chemical savasana,” a heavy-­duty shortcut to the
yogic “corpse-­pose.”
Last night, watched a lot of Prodger’s single-­channel video work on Vi-
meo. Was blown away by how much her work resonates with foci in my
academic working life, particularly my involvement in the Somatechnics Re-
search Network, a transnational group of interdisciplinary scholars whose
shared point of intellectual departure is the proposition that technology isn’t
something added on prosthetically to a preexisting “natural” body; rather,
all embodiment is “always already” technologized. Any given embodiment
and the forms of consciousness and identities it manifests are co-­constitutive
and co-­emergent with particular technés and milieus. Even the form of our
tool-­using hominid body, with its prehensile hands, upright posture, bipedal
locomotion, binocular vision, and big brain, is the evolutionary result of a
particular relationship between the ability of certain stones to flake easily and

84 / Chapter eight
hold a sharp edge, the distance of one tree branch from another in the can-
opy, the flatness of the savannah, the other life-­forms our ancestors could eat.
There is never a “before” technology for any of us, only changing technolog-
ical modalities that create different arrangements, with different capacities,
between different parts of an environment, some of which we experience as
“us,” and some of which we don’t. The boundary shifts.

Sunday, December 16, 2018, Oklahoma City

At Mark and Sonya’s house.

A week into a long visit with the bio-­family in Oklahoma, have had lit-
tle time to write. The progress of Mom’s Parkinson’s-­related dementia has
been accelerating since April, more swiftly since early November, and the
time has come for a different level of support. We’re moving her from an
assisted-­living community into what’s euphemistically called memory care.
Right thing to do — she’s started falling — but still hard.
Have been thinking about the Prodger essay in fits and starts. Googled
“maned lioness,” and one of the first things that popped up was a National
Geographic story about a maned lioness in the Oklahoma City Zoo. Her name
is Bridgit. I went to visit her at the zoo today with my nephew, Leo, who’s
trans like me. Queer-­and bio-­family are pretty entangled. Bridgit the maned
lioness of Oklahoma City was old news to Leo and my brother’s family; they
have an annual membership at the zoo and go there all the time. “Proba-
bly polycystic ovarian syndrome,” says my brother, a nurse-­practitioner. My
niece Camber warned me not to expect too much. “Maned?” she shrugged.
“More like Elvis mutton chops than bearded lady.” True enough, I said after
I’d seen Bridgit, but still, kinda cool? Camber shrugs again. “Sure, Bridgit’s
cool, but life’s diverse, like us, right? No big deal? Just how it is.” This is not
the Oklahoma I ran to California from.

Tuesday, December 25, 2018, San Francisco

At home.
Good to be home. In spite of all the displacement wrought by tech-­driven
gentrification in San Francisco, I can still take a Christmas Day stroll up Ber-
nal Hill to stretch my legs after a plane ride and run into fabulous people.
Bumped into ecosexual post-­porn art activists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Ste-
vens, who live just over the hill from me, their buddy Joseph Kramer from
the New School of Erotic Touch, and my colleague micha cárdenas, Annie

Ketamine Journal / 85
and Beth’s holiday house guest, a transmedia artist who was visiting from
Santa Cruz.
It was wonderful/painful to be with Mom. I see time multiplying for her
even as its content is being subtracted: every time she awakens from a little
nap it’s another new day. Every time she sees me sitting in the other chair, I’ve
just arrived from California. Every time I kiss her goodbye, I’m on my way to
the airport, several times a day, day after day, for two weeks. Location is indef-
inite for her, as are pronouns and person. She’s back at her old job, in another
town. I am my brother, sister, girlfriend, myself. Sometimes she speaks of her-
self in the third person; sometimes she addresses me as if I were she. Such an
unexpected intimacy to be found in the collapse of the maternal boundary.
Kept using ketamine while there, 3 × 100 mg sublingual tablets every few
days, to check out from the family drama for a couple of hours and work on
my shoulder, but also as a touchstone for sharing Mom’s intensifying expe-
rience of time and space, acquiring new dimensions, immersing myself in
Prodger’s video work at odd hours, suturing her eye, her voice, her ways of
talking and seeing into the innermost crevices of my autobiographical ex-
perience at a profoundly melancholic moment in my family’s history. She
speaks in voiceover of her time working in an elder-­care facility, of coming
out to herself there, and I nod in recognition, seeing her hands move in the
motion of those down-­low gay men and women who, instead of me, have
been touching my mother’s body to minister to her most basic needs these
past few years.
She speaks of going under anesthesia for surgery and the way this fucks
with one’s subjective experience of time, of gender trouble and public toilets,
points her camera at hillsides rampant with bluebells and purple heather and
the gray chop of the North Atlantic, and I nod at all of that, too. I’ve been
there, done that, seen that, known that, but it’s different now, transformed,
seen through another eye, and I think: this is how worlds are formed, kin-
ships forged, broken, remixed, ever old and new again.

Note
First published in SaF05, edited by Charlotte Prodger (Argyll and Bute, Scotland:
Cove Park, 2019), 19 – 26.

86 / Chapter eight
 9
SEE BEAMS GLITTER

In one of the works collected in this gentle, fierce, and highly readable an-
thology of autobiographical writings, Cooper Lee Bombardier riffs on that
famous line by Rutger Hauer as the android Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s dysto-
pian sci-­fi classic Blade Runner — a perennial touchstone for the trans percep-
tion of being uncannily different from our human cis-­kin. As Batty’s allotted
span of life ebbs away, he yearns to convey what it means to have seen “attack
ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,” and to have “watched C-­beams glitter
in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.” All those moments will be lost in time,
he says, like tears in rain, when he dies. And then he dies.
Unlike the fictional Batty, the flesh-­and-­blood Bombardier has never been
off-­world, and the unbelievable things he says he’s seen “are largely composed
of small wonders, fleeting joys, and fragments of human behavior filtered
through the lens of being seen as entirely one gender and then as another.”
“In the constellations of gender I’ve traversed, I’ve seen things that people
who presume gender as fixed, innate, and unmoving would never conceive of
as possible.” Rather than evoking the grand pathos of dying, his words point
us toward the humble grace to be found in the persistence of living. For now.
Just for now.
I shared a gender constellation with Cooper a quarter-­century ago in San
Francisco. Those might not have been C-­beams glittering in the darkness of
dykey dive bars along a pregentrified Valencia Street, but something fabulous
sure lit up the night down there, back then. Bombardier was one of the bright
spots, in my opinion, pretty much from the moment he hit town in 1993. I’d
see him hanging out at Red Dora’s Bearded Lady Cafe, in the audience for a
Harry Dodge and the Dodge Brothers set at Club Confidential, and intern-
ing at Black and Blue Tattoo, where I had some of my own inkwork done. I
watched him perform his debut spoken-­word piece “Lips like Elvis” for the
TransCentral performance series at The Lab, an experimental art incubator
in the Mission in 1997, and I remember thinking that this new crop of trans
and genderqueer kids was gonna be alright.
Nostalgia is an easy trap to trip on. Whenever I think about “Trans San-
Frisco” in the queer ’90s, I constantly ask myself whether it could really have
been as cool as I remember it feeling when I was living it. And I keep coming
to the conclusion that, yeah, I think it really was. I’d spent my teens and twen-
ties mournful that I’d missed out on the psychedelic ’6os and was still a little
too young and definitely too far away from New York’s Downtown to have
been part of the punk scene in its heyday. For those of us who had genders
that were not made for the world we grew up in, being in San Francisco in
the early ’90s felt like stepping through a rip in the fabric of space-­time into
some new dimension of possibility. And we had torn it open ourselves. For the
first time in my life, it felt like I was where something was happening. That I
was part of it. That we were alive, becoming free, re/making a world by how
we moved through it.
I read Cooper’s words in the pages of this book and take comfort in know-
ing that I am not alone in my sense of the consequence of that time and place.
Trans SanFrisco in the ’90s was a thing. Its history has yet to be written, but
the essays in this book are a great place to start. They document something
that was not always pretty. It was before the antiretrovirals cocktails made
hiv infection something other than a near-­term death sentence; friends and
lovers left those of us who survived far too soon.
For the first time since Vietnam, we were in a hot war, and clearly saw
the connections between the overseas violence of the American Empire and
that same Empire’s domestic violence toward us as queer and trans people,
who were still explicitly criminalized and excluded from large swaths of life.
When the Cold War ended in the collapse of the Soviet Union, an unfettered
global capitalism — embodied in the tech boom — exulted in a newfound fan-
tasy of limitlessness that started lifting real estate San Francisco toward the
stratosphere; it brought the increasing unlivability of the New World Order

88 / Chapter nine
home, one increasingly insufficient paycheck at a time. People had to leave.
Cooper did.
What I see most in these pages is not what Cooper left behind but what
he took with him from those halcyon days when, as he puts it, “our permu-
tations variegated faster than any taxonomy could pace.” A quarter-­century
later, I see in his mature writing a confidence that comes from knowing early
in life that what is possible can sometimes become real through our actions.
I see intensity, invention, playfulness, persistence, openness. I see a sense of
calm. Those are powerful attributes to cultivate and share in a world in which
what gender means and does still needs to change, along with so much else
that needs to change and that must be survived in the meantime.
I read Cooper Lee Bombardier’s words, and I see the beams in them.
Beams of a beautiful inner light. Beams of inner steel. An ineffable beaming
without ground that is, for me, the essence of our shared trans-­ness — not our
flesh, which is but a means to life, but rather the force of the life that shines
through it. I have no idea what the Tannhauser Gate might look like, but it
can’t be any grander than what being trans has already shown me. I glimpse
those same visions of transcendence glittering in the pages of this book.

Note
First published in Pass with Care: Memoirs, by Cooper Lee Bombardier (New
York City: Dottir Press, 2020), ix – xiii.

See Beams Glitter / 89

This page intentionally left blank
TRANS II.
THEORY AS
GENDER
THEORY
This page intentionally left blank
 10
THE TIME HAS COME TO THINK
ABOUT GAYLE RUBIN

Most readers of these pages are long familiar with Gayle Rubin’s fierce intel-
lect, passion, and astounding depth and range of knowledge. Those as yet
unfamiliar with her work and influence should prepare for a memorable
encounter with a woman branded by the conservative cultural critic David
Horowitz as one of the “101 most dangerous academics in America.”1
When Heather Love invited me to introduce Rubin’s keynote address at
Rethinking Sex, a state-­of-­the-­field conference on sexuality studies held at
the University of Pennsylvania, March 4, 2009, in honor of Rubin’s founda-
tional contributions, I thought it would be prudent to refresh my memory of
her two landmark articles: “The Traffic in Women” and “Thinking Sex,” nei-
ther of which I had read recently. In “The Traffic in Women,” Rubin begins
to develop her thoughts on the processes through which female humans are
transformed into oppressed women by citing Karl Marx’s observation that
a cotton-­spinning jenny is merely a machine for spinning cotton that “be-
comes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no
more capital than gold is itself money or sugar is the price of sugar.” Likewise,
Rubin contends, substituting “woman” for “spinning jenny,” a woman “only
becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a hu-
man Dictaphone in certain relations. Torn from these relationships she is no
more the helpmate of man than gold in itself is money . . . etc.”2 On turning
my attention to “Thinking Sex,” it struck me that there could be no more fit-
ting words of tribute — no better way to demonstrate the extent to which Ru-
bin’s name has become synonymous with a certain kind of critically engaged,
politically radical analysis of sexuality — than to imitate her own rhetorical
strategy in “The Traffic in Women” by substituting her name, Gayle Rubin,
for the words sex or sexuality in the opening paragraph of “Thinking Sex.”
And so, if I may, here I present that first paragraph with its metonymic sub-
stitution, as I delivered it at “Rethinking Sex”:

The time has come to think about Gayle Rubin. To some, Gayle Rubin
may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from more
critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear
annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when people live
with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to
become dangerously crazy about Gayle Rubin. Contemporary conflicts
over Gayle Rubin’s values and erotic conduct have much in common
with the religious disputes of earlier centuries. They acquire immense
symbolic weight. Disputes over Gayle Rubin’s behavior often become
the vehicles for displacing social anxieties and discharging their atten-
dant emotional intensity. Consequently, Gayle Rubin should be treated
with special respect in times of great social stress.3

It was my great honor that night to treat Gayle Rubin with the special respect
she so richly deserves. I first met Gayle more than twenty years ago, in 1989,
on the back patio at the Eagle, a gay leather bar in San Francisco, at an event
she had helped organize — The Beat Jesse Helms Flog-­A-­Thon — which was
a fundraiser for the Democratic politician Harvey Gantt’s sadly unsuccess-
ful bid to unseat North Carolina’s infamously racist and homophobic se-
nior senator. I was a green little newcomer to the radical sexuality scene — a
twenty-­something grad student who, rather precariously, had one foot in the
ivory tower at the University of California, Berkeley, and the other foot in the
dungeons and drag bars of San Francisco.
I was happy as a pig in a poke that night at the Eagle, wallowing in what
was for me at the time a truly revelatory excess of politically progressive per-
vert power, when I found myself in an animated conversation with some
leatherdyke who seemed about ten years my senior, who had the charming
remnants of a Carolinian accent, and who really seemed to know a lot about
industrial and goth music. When it slowly dawned on me that I was talking to
the Flog-­A-­Thon co-­organizer, the Gayle Rubin, famous sex radical, found-

94 / Chapter ten
ing figure of San Francisco’s women’s bdsm community, who had known Mi-
chel Foucault personally, I was more than a little starstruck.
Two decades later, I’m still a little starstruck and consider Gayle the most
important role model for my own career, which, like Gayle’s, has skirted the
margins of academe before ultimately finding a place within it. I came out as
transgender in 1991, just as I was finishing up my dissertation on the history
of religion in antebellum New England. Actually, to be more precise, I came
out as a lesbian-­identified transsexual sadomasochist who was working on
the history of the Mormons — and (surprise!) immediately felt the doors of
academic employment quickly closing before me as I started my social tran-
sition from man to woman.
I know — what was I thinking? Honestly, I was thinking this: “If Gayle Ru-
bin can produce a substantive body of critical and intellectual work, one that’s
explicitly grounded in her own bodily acts, desires, and identifications, and
if she can do that while working on the edgy fringes of the academy where
theory and practice meet, rather than producing safer and more palatable
forms of disciplinary knowledge, if she can take precisely those ways of being
in the world that marginalize her and instructively and productively disman-
tle them, and if she can do that and eventually land a job without apologizing
for who she is and what she does — if Gayle can do all of that for kinky sex —
then maybe, just maybe, I might be able to follow her example and do some-
thing similar for transgender people.” That’s what I set out to do in 1991,
largely because Gayle’s pioneering example made it seem possible to attempt
such a thing.
I know that personally I owe Gayle Rubin a large measure of credit for
whatever success I have had over the years in moving toward the goal of
establishing transgender studies as a recognized academic specialization.
Gayle has been a mentor and an inspiration, as I know she has been for so
many other people. She first steered me toward the glbt Historical Society
in San Francisco, which was my intellectual home for many years and where
I found a community of independent scholars such as herself, Allan Bérubé,
and Willie Walker. She invited me to join reading groups that helped shape
my thinking. She wrote the letters of recommendation that eventually landed
me postdoctoral positions and professorships, and she’s shown me innumer-
able other kindnesses — so I was pleased to be able to express my gratitude in
such a public forum as the 2009 conference in her honor at the University of
Pennsylvania, and I am pleased to offer them again, here in the pages of glq.
But I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge Rubin’s formative
intellectual influence in helping to sharpen the critique transgender studies

The Time Has Come / 95

would make of existing scholarship, quite apart from her significance for me
personally. At the 1982 Barnard Sex Conference, Rubin and the other “sex-­
positive” feminists ably demonstrated that feminism was too large a mantle
to be claimed exclusively by any one faction of feminist thought. In argu-
ing that consensual sadomasochism, pornography, and sex work could be
framed as feminist practices, they forged the main lines of argument against
a moralistic feminist orthodoxy that transgender scholars would continue to
advance in the 1990s. Since trannies were lumped in with all the other per-
verts and outcasts from a good-­girl feminism that considered trans folks to
be either bad, sick, or wrong in our self-­knowledges, it only behooved us to
follow in the path of the powerful sisters who were talking back with such
sass and eloquence in the face of feminist censure.
While it is certainly true that transgender scholarship in the early 1990s
was necessarily on one side of the “sex wars” and not the other, just because
we who were beginning to articulate that scholarship knew who our friends
were, didn’t mean we always agreed with their assessment of us. Sex-­positive,
protoqueer feminism sometimes made the mistake of regarding transgen-
der merely as an erotic practice rather than as something potentially more
expansive, as an expression of self or a mode of embodiment that could not
be reduced simply to sexuality any more than woman could. Rubin herself,
for example, in charting what she called a “moral sex hierarchy” in her ar-
ticle “Thinking Sex,” listed transsexuality and cross-­dressing as examples of
sexuality clearly labeled as “bad” within dominant discourse, without seem-
ing to recognize that this was a reductive sexualization of entire genres of
personhood.
One main goal of Rubin’s article, of course, was to challenge the way that
some schools of feminism established hierarchies that placed their own per-
spective above all others and claimed the power to judge and condemn ev-
erything else as morally suspect. She went on to note how early second-­wave
feminism floundered when it tried to apply the concept of class to the cate-
gory woman and succeeded only when it developed an analytic specific to
gender-­based oppression.
It followed, then, that feminism, as the study of gender, was likewise an in-
sufficient frame of reference for nonnormative sexuality and that a new “sex-
uality studies” was called for that needn’t abandon feminism any more than
feminism needed to abandon political economy. Enacting those same dis-
cursive maneuvers to “rethink sex,” transgender studies argued in turn that
it addressed problematics of embodiment, identity, and desire not readily re-
ducible to sexuality, problematics that eluded full capture by the concept of

96 / Chapter ten
queerness. Rubin did not resist this miming of the movement of her thought;
she was, rather, an enthusiastic participant in the conversations that reframed
influential elements of her own earlier work.
For that generosity of mind and spirit, I am personally grateful, and I
know the same is true for countless others in myriad ways. If I may be so
bold as to use these pages on behalf of all of us whom Gayle Rubin has helped,
in one way or another, I would like to express our collective gratitude. Ru-
bin shaped the field of sexuality studies and planted seeds for future devel-
opments not only through her keen scholarship but also through the many
scholars she has nurtured, encouraged, and cheered on. Simply put, she’s a
mensch — thank you, Gayle.

Notes
First published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 1 (2011):
79 – 84. Copyright 2011, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
permission of the copyright holder.
1 Horowitz, The Professors, 307 – 11.
2 G. Rubin, “Traffic in Women,” 158. The quotation from Marx is from Wage-­Labor
and Capital, 28.
3 Cf. G. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 3 – 4.

The Time Has Come / 97

 11
TRANSGENDER FEMINISM
Queering the Woman Question

Many years ago, I paid a visit to my son’s kindergarten room for parent-­
teacher night. Among the treats in store for us parents that evening was a
chance to look at the My Favorite Things book that each child had prepared
over the first few weeks of classes. Each page was blank except for a pre-­
printed line that said, “My favorite color is (blank)” or “My favorite food is
(blank),” or “My favorite story is (blank).” Students were supposed to fill in
the blanks with their favorite things and draw an accompanying picture.
My son had filled the blanks and empty spaces of his book with many
such things as “green,” “pizza,” and “Goodnight Moon,” but I was unprepared
for his response to “My favorite animal is (blank).” His favorite animal was
“yeast.” I looked up at the teacher, who had been watching me in anticipation
of this moment. “Yeast?” I said, and she, barely suppressing her glee, said,
“Yeah. And when I asked why yeast was his favorite animal, he said, ‘It just
makes the category animal seem more interesting.’ ”
At the risk of suggesting that the category “woman” is somehow not inter-
esting enough without a transgender supplement, which is certainly not my
intent, I have to confess that there is a sense in which “woman,” as a category
of human personhood, is indeed, for me, more interesting when we include
transgender phenomena within its rubric. The work required to encompass
transgender within the bounds of womanhood takes women’s studies and
queer feminist theorizing in important and necessary directions. It takes us
directly into the basic questions of the sex/gender distinction and of the con-
cept of a sex/gender system that lie at the heart of Anglophone feminism.
Once there, transgender phenomena ask us to follow basic feminist insights
to their logical conclusions (biology is not destiny, and one is not born a
woman, right?). And yet, transgender phenomena simultaneously threaten to
refigure the basic conceptual and representational frameworks within which
the category “woman” has been conventionally understood, deployed, em-
braced, and resisted.
Perhaps “gender,” transgender tells us, is not related to “sex” in quite the
same way that an apple is related to the reflection of a red fruit in the mirror;
it is not a mimetic relationship. Perhaps “sex” is a category that, like citizen-
ship, can be attained by the nonnative residents of a particular location by fol-
lowing certain procedures. Perhaps gender has a more complex genealogy, at
the levels of individual psychobiography as well as collective sociohistorical
process, than can be grasped or accounted for by the currently dominant bi-
nary sex/gender model of Eurocentric modernity. And perhaps what is to be
learned by grappling with transgender concerns is relevant to a great many
people, including nontransgendered women and men. Perhaps transgender
discourses help us think in terms of embodied specificities, as women’s stud-
ies has traditionally tried to do, while also giving us a way to think about
gender as a system with multiple nodes and positions, as gender studies in-
creasingly requires us to do.
Perhaps transgender studies, which emerged in the academy at the inter-
section of feminism and queer theory over the course of the last decade or so,
can be thought of as one productive way to “queer the woman question.”1 If
we define “transgender phenomena” broadly as anything that disrupts or de-
naturalizes normative gender and calls our attention to the processes through
which normativity is produced and atypicality achieves visibility, “transgen-
der” becomes an incredibly useful analytical concept. What might “transgender
feminism” — a feminism that focuses on marginalized gender expressions as
well as on normative ones — look like?
As a historian of the United States, my training encourages me to ap-
proach currently salient questions by looking at the past through new eyes.
Questions that matter now, historians are taught to think, are always framed
by enabling conditions that precede them. Thus, when I want to know what
transgender feminism might be, I try to learn what it has already been. When
I learned, for example, that the first publication of the post – World War II
transgender movement, a short-­lived early 1950s magazine called Transves-

Transgender Feminism / 99
tia, was produced by a group calling itself The Society for Equality in Dress,2
I not only saw that a group of male transvestites in Southern California had
embraced the rhetoric of first wave feminism and applied the concept of gen-
der equality to the marginalized topic of cross-­dressing; I also came to think
differently about Amelia Bloomer and the antebellum clothing reform move-
ment. To the extent that breaking out of the conventional constrictions of
womanhood is both a feminist and transgender practice, what we might con-
ceivably call transgender feminism arguably has been around since the first
half of the nineteenth century.
Looking back, it is increasingly obvious that transgender phenomena are
not limited to individuals who have “transgendered” personal identities.
Rather, they are signposts that point to many different kinds of bodies and
subjects, and they can help us see how gender can function as part of a more
extensive apparatus of social domination and control. Gender as a form of so-
cial control is not limited to the control of bodies defined as “women’s bod-
ies,” nor to the control of female reproductive capacities. Because genders
are categories through which we recognize the personhood of others (as well
as ourselves), because they are categories without which we have great diffi-
culty in recognizing personhood at all, gender also functions as a mechanism
of control when some loss of gender status is threatened or when claims of
membership in a gender are denied.
Why is it considered a heterosexist put-­down to call some lesbians mannish?
Why, if a working-­class woman does certain kinds of physically demanding
labor, or if a middle-­class woman surpasses a certain level of professional ac-
complishment, is their feminine respectability called into question? Stripping
away gender and misattributing gender are practices of social domination,
regulation, and control that threaten social abjection; they operate by attach-
ing transgender stigma to various unruly bodies and subject positions, not
just to “transgendered” ones.3
There is also, however, a lost history of feminist activism by self-­identified
transgender people waiting to be recovered. My own historical research into
twentieth-­century transgender communities and identities teaches me that
activists on transgender issues were involved in multi-­issue political move-
ments in the 1960s and 1970s, including radical feminism. The ascendancy of
cultural feminism and lesbian separatism by the mid-­1970s — both of which
cast transgender practices, particularly transsexuality, as reactionary patriar-
chal anachronisms — largely erased knowledge of this early transgender ac-
tivism from feminist consciousness. Janice Raymond, in her outrageously
transphobic book, The Transsexual Empire (1979), went so far as to suggest

100 / Chapter eleven

that “the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally man-
dating it out of existence” (178).4
Even in this period, however, when identity politics effectively discon-
nected transgender feminism from the broader women’s movement and be-
fore the queer cultural politics of the 1990s revitalized and expanded the
transgender movement, it is possible to find startling historical episodes that
compel us to re-­examine what we think we know about the feminist his-
tory of the recent past. The Radical Queens drag collective in Philadelphia,
for example, had a “sister house” relationship with a lesbian separatist com-
mune during the early 1970s, and participated in mainstream feminist activ-
ism through involvement with the local chapter of now. In the later 1970s
in Washington, DC, secretive clubs for married heterosexual male cross-­
dressers began holding consciousness-­raising sessions; they argued that to
identify as feminine meant they were politically obligated to come out as
feminists, speak out as transvestites, and work publicly for passage of the
Equal Rights Amendment.5
In addition to offering a revisionist history of feminist activism, trans-
gender issues also engage many of the foundational questions in the social
sciences and life sciences as they pertain to feminist inquiry. The biological
body, which is typically assumed to be a single organically unified natural
object characterized by one, and only one, of two available sex statuses, is de-
monstrably no such thing. The so-­called “sex of the body” is an interpretive
fiction that narrates a complex amalgamation of gland secretions and repro-
ductive organs, chromosomes and genes, morphological characteristics and
physiognomic features. There are far more than two viable aggregations of
sexed bodily being.
At what cost, for what purposes, and through what means do we collapse
this diversity of embodiment into the social categories “woman” and “man”?
How does the psychical subject who forms in this material context become
aware of itself, of its embodied situation, of its position in language, family,
or society? How does it learn to answer to one or the other of the two per-
sonal pronouns “he” or “she,” and to recognize “it” as a disavowed option
that forecloses personhood? How do these processes vary from individual to
individual, from place to place, and from time to time? These are questions
of importance to feminism, usually relegated to the domains of biology and
psychology, that transgender phenomena can help us think through. Trans-
gender feminism gives us another axis, along with critical race studies or
disability studies, to learn more about the ways in which bodily difference be-
comes the basis for socially constructed hierarchies, and helps us see in new

Transgender Feminism / 101

ways how we are all inextricably situated, through the inescapable necessity
of our own bodies, in terms of race, sex, gender, or ability.
When we look cross-­culturally and transhistorically at societies, as an-
thropologists and sociologists tend to do, we readily see patterns of varia-
tions in the social organization of biological reproduction, labor, economic
exchange, and kinship; we see a variety of culturally specific configurations
of embodiment, identity, desire, social status, and social role. Which of these
patterns do we call “gender,” and which do we call “transgender”? The ques-
tion makes sense only in reference to an unstated norm that allows us to
distinguish between the two. To examine “transgender” cross-­culturally and
transhistorically is to articulate the masked assumptions that produce gen-
der normativity in any given (time-­bound and geographically constrained)
context. To examine “transgender” is thus to risk decentering the privileged
standpoint of white Eurocentric modernity. It is to denaturize and de-­reify
the terms through which we ground our own genders in order to confront
the possibility of radically different ways of being in the world. This, too, is a
feminist project.6
A third set of concerns that make transgender feminism interesting for
women’s studies is the extent to which “transgender,” for more than a decade
now, has served as a laboratory and proving ground for the various postmod-
ern and poststructuralist critical theories that have transformed humanities
scholarship in general over the past half century, and have played a role in
structuring the generational debates about “second wave” and “third wave”
feminism. This is a debate in which I take an explicitly partisan position,
largely in response to the utterly inexcusable level of overt transphobia in
second wave feminism. The second wave feminist turn to an untheorized fe-
male body as the ultimate ground for feminist practice has to be understood
historically in the context of reactionary political pressures that fragmented
all sorts of movements posing radical threats to the established order and re-
quired them to find new, often ontological, bases for political resistance. An
unfortunate consequence was that it steered feminist analysis in directions ill
equipped it to engage theoretically with the emerging material conditions of
social life within advanced capitalism that collectively have come to be called,
more or less usefully, “postmodernity.”
The overarching tendency of second wave feminism to couch its political
analyses within moral narratives that link “woman” with “natural,” “natural”
with “good,” “good” with “true,” and “true” with “right” has been predicated
on an increasingly nonutilitarian modernist epistemology. Within the rep-
resentational framework of Eurocentric modernity, which posits gender as

102 / Chapter eleven

the superstructural sign of the material referent of sex, transgender practices
have been morally condemned as unnatural, bad, false, and wrong, in that
they fundamentally misalign the proper relationship between sex and gender.
The people who engage in such misrepresentations can be understood only
as duped or duplicitous, fools or enemies to be pitied or scorned. The failure
of second wave feminism to do justice to transgender issues in the 1970s, ’80s,
and afterward is rooted in its more fundamental theoretical failure to recog-
nize the conceptual limits of modernist epistemology.7
Transgender theorizing in third wave feminism begins from a different —
postmodern — epistemological standpoint that imagines new ways for sexed
bodies to signify gender. Within the feminist third wave, and within human-
ities scholarship in general, transgender phenomena have come to constitute
important evidence in recent arguments about essentialism and social con-
struction, performativity and citationality, hybridity and fluidity, antifoun-
dationalist ontologies and nonreferential epistemologies, the proliferation of
perversities, the collapse of difference, the triumph of technology, the ad-
vent of posthumanism, and the end of the world as we know it. While it is
easy to parody the specialized and sometimes alienating jargon of these de-
bates, the issues at stake are quite large, involving as they do the actual as well
as theoretical dismantling of power relations that sustain various privileges
associated with normativity and injustices directed at minorities. Because
these debates are irreducibly political, because they constitute an ideological
landscape upon which material struggles are waged within the academy for
research funds and promotions, for tenure and teaching loads, transgender
phenomena have come to occupy a curiously strategic location in the work-
ing lives of humanities professionals, whether they like it or not. This brings
me at last to the crux of my remarks.
For all the reasons I have suggested, transgender phenomena are inter-
esting for feminism, women’s studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, and
so forth. But interesting, by itself, is not enough, when hard decisions about
budgets and staffing have to be made in academic departments, when prior-
ities and commitments have to be actualized through classroom allocations
and affirmative action hiring. Interesting also has to be important, and trans-
gender is rarely considered important. All too often, transgender is thought
to name only a largely irrelevant class of phenomena on the marginal fringe
of the hegemonic gender categories man and woman, or else it is seen as one
of the later, minor accretions to the gay and lesbian movement, along with bi-
sexual and intersexed. At best, transgender is considered a portent of a future
that seems to await us, for good or ill. But it remains a canary in the cultural

Transgender Feminism / 103

coal mine, not an analytical workhorse for pulling down the patriarchy and
other associated social ills.
As long as transgender is conceived as the fraction of a fraction of a frac-
tion of a movement, as long as it is thought to represent only some inconse-
quential outliers in a bigger and more important set of data, there is very little
reason to support transgender concerns at the institutional level. Transgen-
der will always lose by the numbers. The transgender community is tiny. In
(so-­called) liberal democracies that measure political strength by the num-
ber of votes or the number of dollars, transgender does not count for much
or add up to a lot. But there is another way to think about the importance of
transgender concerns at this moment in our history.
One measure of an issue’s potential is not how many people directly iden-
tify with it but, rather, how many other issues it can be linked with in a pro-
ductive fashion. How can an issue be articulated, in the double sense of
“articulation,” meaning both “to bring into language,” and “the act of flexi-
bly conjoining.”8 Articulating a transgender politics is part of the specialized
work that I do as an activist transgender intellectual. How many issues can I
link together through my experience of the category transgender?
To the extent that I am perceived as a woman (which is most of the time),
I experience the same misogyny as other women; and to the extent that I
am perceived as a man (which happens every now and then), I experience
the homophobia directed toward gay men — both forms of oppression, in
my experience, being rooted in a cultural devaluation of the feminine. My
transgender status, to the extent that it is apparent to others, manifests it-
self through the appearance of my bodily surface and my shape, in much the
same way that race is constructed, in part, through visuality and skin, and in
much the same way that the beauty system operates by privileging certain
modes of appearance. My transsexual body is different from most other bod-
ies, and while this difference does not impair me, it has been medicalized,
and I am sometimes disabled by the social oppression that takes aim at the
specific form of my difference.
Because I am formally classified as a person with a psychopathology known
as Gender Identity Disorder, I am subject to the social stigma attached to
mental illness, and I am more vulnerable to unwanted medical-­psychiatric
interventions. Because changing personal identification documents is an
expensive and drawn-­out affair, I have spent part of my life as an undocu-
mented worker. Because identification documents such as driver’s licenses
and passports are coded with multiple levels of information, including previ-
ous names and “akas,” my privacy, and perhaps my personal safety, is at risk

104 / Chapter eleven

every time I drive too fast or cross a border. When I travel, I always have to
ask myself whether some aspect of my appearance, some bit of data buried in
the magnetic strip on some piece of plastic with my picture on it, will create
suspicion and result in my detention?
In this era of terror and security, we are all surveyed, we are all profiled,
but some of us have more to fear from the state than others. Staying home,
however, does not make me safer. If I risk arrest by engaging in nonviolent
demonstrations, or violent political protest, the incarceration complex would
not readily accommodate my needs. Even though I am a postoperative male-­
to-­female transsexual, I could wind up in a men’s prison where I would be
at extreme risk of rape and sexual assault. Because I am transgendered, I am
more likely to experience discrimination in housing, employment, and access
to health care, and I am more likely to experience violence. These are not ab-
stract issues: I have lost jobs and not been offered jobs because I am trans-
gendered. I have had doctors walk out of exam rooms in disgust; I have had
more trouble finding and retaining housing because I am transgendered; I
have had my home burglarized and my property vandalized, and I have been
assaulted because I am transgendered.
Let me recapitulate what I can personally articulate through transgender:
misogyny, homophobia, racism, looksism, disability, medical colonization,
coercive psychiatrization, undocumented labor, border control, state surveil-
lance, population profiling, the prison-­industrial complex, employment dis-
crimination, housing discrimination, lack of health care, denial of access to
social services, and violent hate crimes. These issues are my issues not be-
cause I think it is chic to be politically progressive. These issues are my issues
not because I feel guilty about being white, highly educated, or a citizen of the
United States. These issues are my issues because my bodily being lives the
space where these issues intersect. I articulate these issues when my mouth
speaks the words that my mind puts together from what my body knows. It
is by winning the struggles over these issues that my body as it is lived for
me survives — or by losing them, that it will die. If these issues are your issues
as well, then transgender needs to be part of your intellectual and political
agenda. It is one of your issues.
I conclude now with some thoughts on yet another aspect of transgender
articulation, the one mentioned in my title, which is how transgender issues
articulate, or join together, feminist and queer projects. “Trans-­” is trouble-
some for both lgbt communities and feminism; but the kind of knowledge
that emerges from this linkage is precisely the kind of knowledge that we
desperately need in the larger social arena. Trans is not a “sexual identity”

Transgender Feminism / 105

and therefore fits awkwardly in the lgbt rubric. That is, “transgender” does
not describe a sexual orientation (like homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, or
asexual), nor are transgender people typically attracted to other transgender
people in the same way that lesbians are attracted to other lesbians, or gay
men to other gay men. Transgender status is more like race or class, in that it
cuts across the categories of sexual identity.9
Neither is transgender (at least currently, in Eurocentric modernity) an
identity term like “woman” or “man” that names a gender category within a
social system. It is a way of being a man or a woman, or a way of marking re-
sistance to those terms. Transgender analyses of gender oppression and hier-
archy, unlike more normative feminist analyses, are not primarily concerned
with the differential operations of power upon particular identity categories
that create inequalities within gender systems; rather they are concerned with
how the system itself produces a multitude of possible positions that it then
works to center or to marginalize.
Transgender practices and identities are a form of gender trouble, in that
they call attention to contradictions in how we tend to think about gender,
sex, and sexuality. But the transgender knowledges that emerge from these
troubling contradictions can yoke together queer and feminist projects in a
way that helps break the impasse of identity politics that has so crippled pro-
gressive movements in the United States. Since the early 1970s, progressive
politics have fragmented along identity lines practically to the point of absur-
dity. While it undoubtedly has been vital over the past few decades of move-
ment history to enunciate the particularities of all our manifold forms of
bodily being in the world, it is equally important that we now find new ways
of articulating our commonalities without falling into the equally dead-­end
logic of totalizing philosophies and programs.
Transgender studies offers us one critical methodology for thinking through
the diverse particularities of our embodied lives, and for thinking through
the commonalities we share through our mutual enmeshment in more global
systems. Reactionary political movements have been very effective in telling
stories about shared values — family, religion, tradition. We who work at the
intersection of queer and feminist movements, we who have a different vi-
sion of our collective future, need to become equally adept in telling stories
that link us in ways that advance the cause of justice and that hold forth the
promise of happy endings for all our strivings. Bringing transgender issues
into women’s studies, and into feminist movement building, is one concrete
way to be engaged in that important work.

106 / Chapter eleven

 While it is politically necessary to include transgender issues in feminist
theorizing and organizing, it is not intellectually responsible nor ethically
defensible to teach transgender studies in academic women’s studies without
being engaged in peer-­to-­peer conversations with various sorts of trans and
genderqueer people. Something crucial is lost when academically based fem-
inists fail to support transgender inclusion in the academic workplace.
Genderqueer youth who have come of age after the “queer” nineties are
now passing through the higher education system, and they increasingly fail
to recognize the applicability of prevailing modes of feminist discourse for
their own lives and experiences. How we each live our bodies in the world is
a vital source of knowledge for us all, and to teach trans studies without being
in dialogue with trans people is akin to teaching race studies only from a po-
sition of whiteness, or teaching gender studies only from a position of mas-
culinity. Why is transgender not a category targeted for affirmative action in
hiring and valued the same way that racial diversity is valued? It is past time
for feminists who have imagined that transgender issues have not been part
of their own concerns to take a long, hard look in the mirror. What in their
own constructions of self, their own experiences of gender, prevents their
recognition of transgender people as being somehow like themselves — as
people engaged in parallel, intersecting, and overlapping struggles, who are
not fundamentally Other?
Transgender phenomena now present queer figures on the horizon of
feminist visibility. Their calls for attention are too often received, however,
as an uncomfortable solicitation from an alien and unthinkable monstrosity
best left somewhere outside the village gates. But justice, when we first feel
its claims upon us, typically points us toward a future we can scarcely imag-
ine. At the historic moment when racial slavery in the United States at long
last became morally indefensible and the nation plunged into civil war, what
did the future of the nation look like? When greenhouse gas emissions finally
become equally morally indefensible, what shape will a post-­oil world take?
Transgender issues make similar claims of justice upon us all and promise
equally unthinkable transformations.10 Recognizing the legitimacy of these
claims will change the world, and feminism along with it, in ways we can now
hardly fathom. It is about time.

Transgender Feminism / 107

 Notes
First published in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, edited by Stacy
Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (London: Palgrave, 2007), 59 – 70.
1 This essay was first delivered as a keynote address at the Third Wave Feminism
conference at the University of Exeter, UK, July 25, 2002; and it was presented
in revised form at the Presidential Session plenary on Transgender Theory at
the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting, Oakland, California,
June 17, 2006. Many of the ideas I present here have been worked out in greater
detail elsewhere in my work (see Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”;
Stryker, “The Transgender Issue”; Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theo-
ry’s Evil Twin”; and Stryker, “(De)subjugated Knowledges”); see also Zalewski,
“A Conversation with Susan Stryker.” For another account of the relationship be-
tween recent feminist scholarship and transgender issues, see Heyes, “Feminist
Solidarity after Queer Theory.”
2 Meyerowitz, “A New History of Gender,” 179.
3 My thoughts on the role of transgender phenomena for understanding US
history in general are significantly indebted to Meyerowitz, “A New History of
Gender.”
4 See also Hausman, Changing Sex, 9 – 14, for an overview of cultural feminist cri-
tiques of transsexuality; and see Billings and Urban, “The Sociomedical Con-
struction of Transsexualism,” for a particularly cogent exposition and application
of this approach.
5 See also Victor Silverman and Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical So-
ciety for transgender involvement in progressive grassroots political activism in
the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s.
6 On cross-­cultural studies of transgender phenomena, see Blackwood and Wi-
eringa, Female Desires; and Morgan and Towle, “Romancing the Transgender
Native.”
7 For a poststructuralist, antifoundationalist critique of second wave feminism, see
Butler, “Contingent Foundations.”
8 The concept of articulation is taken from Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and So-
cialist Strategy, 93 – 194.
9 On the trouble transgender presents to identity movements, see Gamson, “Must
Identity Movements Self-­Destruct?”
10 On monstrosity and justice, see N. Sullivan, “Transmogrification.”

108 / Chapter eleven

TRANSGENDER HISTORY,
12
HOMONORMATIVITY,
AND DISCIPLINARITY

The current attention to homonormativity has tended to focus on gay and

lesbian social, political, and cultural formations and their relationship to a
neoliberal politics of multicultural diversity that meshes with the assimila-
tive strategies of transnational capital. Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality?
Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (2003), which
describes a “new homonormativity that does not challenge heterosexist in-
stitutions and values, but rather upholds, sustains, and seeks inclusion within
them,” is generally acknowledged as the text through which this term has
come into wider currency.1
There is, however, an older formulation of homonormativity that never-
theless merits retention, one closer in meaning to the “homo-­normative” so-
cial codes described in 1998 by Jack Halberstam in Female Masculinity, in
accordance with which expressions of masculinity in women are as readily
disparaged within gender-­normative gay and lesbian contexts as within het-
eronormative ones.2 It is this earlier sense of homonormativity that is most
pertinent to the thoughts I offer here on homonormativity and transgender
history, both as an object of scholarly inquiry and as a professional disci-
plinary practice.
Terminological History

Homonormativity, as I first heard and used the term in the early 1990s, was an
attempt to articulate the double sense of marginalization and displacement
experienced within transgender political and cultural activism. Like other
queer militants, transgender activists sought to make common cause with
any groups — including nontransgender gays, lesbians, and bisexuals — who
contested heterosexist privilege. However, we also needed to name the ways
that homosexuality, as a sexual orientation category based on constructions
of gender it shared with the dominant culture, sometimes had more in com-
mon with the straight world than it did with us.3
The grassroots conversations in which I participated in San Francisco
in the first half of the 1990s used the term homonormative when discuss-
ing the relationship of transgender to queer, and queer to gay and lesbian.
Transgender itself was a term then undergoing a significant shift in mean-
ing. Robert Hill, who has been researching the history of heterosexual male
cross-­dressing communities, found instances in community-­based publica-
tions of words like transgenderal, transgenderist, and transgenderism dating
back to the late 1960s.4 The logic of those terms, used to describe individuals
who lived in one social gender but had a bodily sex conventionally associ-
ated with the other, aimed for a conceptual middle ground between trans-
vestism (merely changing one’s clothing) and transsexualism (changing one’s
sex). By the early 1990s, primarily through the influence of Leslie Feinberg’s
1992 pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come,
transgender was beginning to refer to something else — an imagined political
alliance of all possible forms of gender antinormativity. It was in this latter
sense that transgender became articulated with queer.5
This “new transgender” marked both a political and generational dis-
tinction between older transvestite/transsexual/drag terminologies and an
emerging gender politics that was explicitly and self-­consciously queer. It be-
gan for me in 1992, when the San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation distrib-
uted one of its trademark DayGlo crack-­and-­peel stickers that read “Trans
Power/Bi Power/Queer Nation.” The transsexual activist Anne Ogborn en-
countered someone on the street wearing one of those stickers, but with the
words “Trans Power” torn off. When Ogborn asked if there was any signif-
icance to the omission, she was told that the wearer did not consider trans
people to be part of the queer movement.6
Ogborn attended the next Queer Nation general meeting to protest trans-
phobia within the group, whereupon she was invited, in high Queer Nation

110 / Chapter twelve

style, to organize a transgender caucus.7 As a result, Transgender Nation, of
which I was a founding member, came into being as the first explicitly queer
transgender social change group in the United States. The group survived
the soon-­to-­be-­defunct Queer Nation and became, in its own brief existence
from 1992 to 1994, a touchstone in the transgender inclusion debates then
raging in San Francisco’s emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(lgbt) community.
In a contradictory environment simultaneously welcoming and hostile,
transgender activists staked their own claims to queer politics. We argued
that sexual orientation was not the only significant way to differ from heter-
onormativity — that homo, hetero, and bi, in fact, all depended on similar un-
derstandings of “man” and “woman,” which trans problematized. People with
trans identities could describe themselves as men and women — or resist bi-
nary categorization altogether — but in doing either, they queered the domi-
nant relationship of sexed body and gendered subject. We drew a distinction
between orientation queers and gender queers. Tellingly, gender queer, neces-
sary for naming the minoritized/marginalized position of difference within
queer cultural formations more generally, has stuck around as a useful term;
orientation queer, naming queer’s unstated norm, has seemed redundant in
most contexts and has not survived to the same extent.
When San Francisco gays and lesbians who were active in queer politics in
the first half of the 1990s were antagonistic to transgender concerns, we ac-
cused them of being anti-­heteronormative in a homonormative fashion. The
term was an intuitive, almost self-­evident, back-­formation from the ubiqui-
tous heteronormative, suitable for use where homosexual community norms
marginalized other kinds of sex/gender/sexuality difference. Although I do
not recall specific instances where the term homonormative was used, or who
used it, the general discussions in which the term would have been deployed
were playing themselves out in any number of places in which transgender
inclusion was being contested: within Queer Nation and act-­u p and aids
agencies; at community meetings to organize for the March on Washington
in 1993 and the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 1994;
at town-­hall meetings about gays in the military and about domestic part-
nerships during the hopeful early days of the first Clinton administration;
during policy discussions about including gender identity in the proposed
federal Employment Nondiscrimination Act; in catfights over who could at-
tend the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival; at meetings of the Harvey Milk
and Alice B. Toklas Democratic Clubs; at Pride Parade meetings; at mem-
bership meetings and board meetings of practically every lesbian and gay

Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity / 111

nonprofit organization in the city; at the San Francisco Human Rights Com-
mission committee on lesbian and gay issues; in flame wars in the letters-­to-­
the-­editors columns of the Bay Times and the bar (Bay Area Reporter); and
in coffee shops, bars, dance clubs, dungeon spaces, and bedrooms through-
out the city.
The homonormative accusation tended to be leveled against a handful of
favorite targets: gays and lesbians who saw transgender issues as entirely dis-
tinct from their own and who resisted any sort of transgender participation
in queer politics and culture; lesbians who excluded male-­to-­female trans-
gender people but nervously engaged with female-­to-­male people, on the
grounds that the former were really men and the latter were really women;
and, putting a somewhat finer point on the matter, those who conceptual-
ized “T” as an identity category analogous to “glb” and who advocated for
a glbt community on that basis. In the first instance, homonormativity was
a threat to a broadly conceived politics of alliance and affinity, regardless of
identity; it aimed at securing privilege for gender-­normative gays and lesbi-
ans based on adherence to dominant cultural constructions of gender, and
it diminished the scope of potential resistance to oppression. In the second
instance, homonormativity took the shape of lesbian subcultural norms that
perversely grounded themselves in reactionary notions of biological deter-
minism as the only legitimate basis of gender identity and paradoxically re-
sisted feminist arguments that “woman” and “lesbian” were political rather
than ontological categories. The third instance requires a more subtle and
expansive explication.
In this case, homonormativity lies in misconstruing trans as either a gen-
der or a sexual orientation. Misconstrued as a distinct gender, trans people
are simply considered another kind or type of human than either men or
women, which leads to such homonormative attempts at “transgender inclu-
sion” as questionnaires and survey instruments within glbt contexts that
offer respondents opportunities for self-­identification structured along the
lines of

— Man
— Woman
— Transgender (check one)

Misconstrued as a sexual orientation category, trans appears as a desire,

akin to kink and fetish desire, for cross-­dressing or (more extremely) geni-
tal modification. The “t” in this version of the lgbt community becomes a
group of people who are attracted to one another on the basis of enjoying cer-

112 / Chapter twelve

tain sexual practices — in the same way that gay men are attracted to gay men,
and lesbians are attracted to lesbians, on the basis of a shared desire for par-
ticular sexual practices. “t” is thus homonormatively constructed as a prop-
erly distinct group of people with a different orientation than gays, lesbians,
and bisexuals (or, for that matter, straights). In this model of glbt intracom-
munity relations, each identity is happily attracted to its own kind and leaves
the other groups to their own devices except in ceremonial circumstances
(like pride parades and other public celebrations of diversity), or whenever
political expediency calls for coalitional action of some sort.
In either homonormative deformation, “t” becomes a separate category
to be appended, through a liberal politics of minority assimilation, to gay,
lesbian, and bisexual community formations. Trans thus conceived does not
trouble the basis of the other categories — indeed, it becomes a containment
mechanism for “gender trouble” of various sorts that works in tandem with
assimilative gender-­normative tendencies within the sexual identities.8
Transgender activism and theory, on the other hand, tend to treat trans
as a modality rather than a category. Trans segments the sexual orientations
and gender identities in much the same manner as race and class — in other
words, a transsexual woman (someone with a transsexual mode of embodi-
ment who lives in the social category woman) can be a lesbian (someone who
lives in the social category woman and is sexually oriented toward women),
just as a black man could be gay, or a bisexual person could be poor. In do-
ing so, transgender theory and activism call attention to the operations of
normativity within and between gender/sexual identity categories, raise
questions about the structuration of power along axes other than the homo/
hetero and man/woman binaries, and identify productive points of attach-
ment for linking sexual orientation and gender identity activism to other so-
cial justice struggles.
A decade before homonormative became a critically chic term elsewhere,
I thus suggest, transgender praxis and critique required an articulation of
the concept of homonormativity. The border wars that transgender activists
fought within queer communities of the 1990s had important consequences
for shaping contemporary transgender politics and theorizing, and for chart-
ing a future path toward radical activism. Transgender relations to gay and
lesbian community formations necessarily became strategic — sometimes
oppositional, sometimes aligned, sometimes fighting rearguard actions for
inclusion, sometimes branching out in entirely different and unrelated direc-
tions. Central issues for transgender activism — such as gender-­appropriate

Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity / 113

state-­issued identification documents that allow trans people to work, cross
borders, and access social services without exposing themselves to potential
discrimination — suggest useful forms of alliance politics, in this instance,
with migrant workers and diasporic communities, that are not organized
around sexual identity. One operation of homonormativity exposed by trans-
gender activism is that homo is not always the most relevant norm against
which trans needs to define itself.

Antihomonormative Transgender History

As important as queer identitarian disputes have been for present and future
transgender politics, they have been equally important for reinterpreting the
queer past. I first started researching the transgender history of San Fran-
cisco, particularly in relation to the city’s gay and lesbian community, while
participating in the Bay Area’s broader queer culture during the early 1990s.
In 1991, during my final year as a PhD student in US history at the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley, the same year I began transitioning from male
to female, I became deeply involved with an organization then known as the
Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. That organiza-
tion, now the glbt Historical Society, houses the preeminent collection of
primary source materials on San Francisco Bay Area gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender communities, and is one of the best collections of sexuality-­
related materials anywhere in the world. I started there as a volunteer in the
archives, joined the board of directors in 1992, and later became the first ex-
ecutive director of the organization, from 1999 to 2003.
Through my long and intimate association with the glbt Historical So-
ciety as well as through two years of postdoctoral funding from the Sexuality
Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, I had
ample opportunity to exhaustively research the status of transgender issues
within gay and lesbian organizations and communities in post – World War
II San Francisco. I was able to scan all the periodical literature, community
newspapers, collections of personal papers, organizational records, ephem-
era, and visual materials — tens of thousands of items — for transgender-­
related content. This research was motivated by several competing agendas.
It was first and foremost a critically queer project, one informed by theory,
guided by practice, and framed by my historical training at Berkeley in the
decade between Michel Foucault’s death and Judith Butler’s arrival; I wanted
training to account for the precipitation of new categories of personal and
collective identity from the matrix of possible configurations of sex, gender,

114 / Chapter twelve

identity, and desire; trace their genealogies and modes of discourse; and ana-
lyze the cultural politics of their interactions with each other and society at
large. It was also a project to recover the history of transgender experience
specifically, in a way that resisted essentializing transgender identities, and to
make that knowledge available as content for transgender-­related social jus-
tice work. Only those who are “crushed by a present concern,” and who want to
“throw off their burden at any cost,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in “On the Use
and Abuse of History for Life,” have “a need for a critical . . . historiography.”9
And finally, I was motivated by polemical and partisan considerations; I
wanted to offer an empirically grounded account of transgender history that
recontextualized its relation to gay and lesbian normativity and countered the
pathologizing, moralizing, condescending, dismissive, and generally wrong-
headed treatment of transgender issues so often found in gay and lesbian dis-
courses of that time.
Over the course of my research, gender-­policing practices came into fo-
cus as an important mechanism for shaping the landscape of sexual identity
community formations described in the major historiographical accounts.10
As homosexual communities in mid-­twentieth-­century San Francisco re-
defined themselves as political minorities, they distanced themselves from
older notions of “inversion” that collapsed gender transposition and homo-
sexual desire into one another; they simultaneously drew their boundaries at
least partly in relation to new and rapidly evolving scientific discourses on
transgender phenomena and related medico-­legal techniques for changing
sex. Homophile groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of
Bilitis were not initially antagonistic to transgender issues; they sometimes
fielded queries from people questioning their gender or seeking a community
in which to express a transgender identity, but they tended to redirect such
queries elsewhere.11 Transgender issues tended to be seen within the homo-
phile movement as parallel rather than intersecting, at least partially due to
the central role that gender normativity played in the homophile movement’s
public politics of respectability in the 1950s and early 1960s.
In lesbian contexts this took the form of class-­based criticisms of butch-­
femme roles, while in the gay male world it expressed itself through the con-
demnation of the hypermasculine styles found in the leather, motorcycle,
and cowboy subcultures, as well as of the femininity of “swish” styles and
public female impersonation. Drag remained an important subcultural id-
iom, especially for gay men and working-­class lesbians, but one typically con-
fined to clubs, bars, and private parties. Street drag was almost universally
condemned and largely relegated to territories coextensive with prostitution,

Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity / 115

hustling, and other economically marginalized activities. Thus, from the out-
set of the post – World War II gay rights movement, transgender practices
and identities marked communal boundaries between the normative and the
transgressive.
One particular archival discovery seemed so perfectly attuned to all my re-
search motivations, however, and so seemingly significant yet almost entirely
unknown, that I initially questioned whether it could possibly be true. In the
centerfold of the program for the first Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco,
held in 1972, I found a description of a 1966 riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin
District, in which drag queens and gay hustlers banded together at a popular
late-­night hangout called Gene Compton’s Cafeteria to fight back against po-
lice harassment and social oppression. The key text reads as follows:

In the streets of the Tenderloin, at Turk and Taylor on a hot August

night in 1966, Gays rose up angry at the constant police harassment
of the drag queens by the police. It had to be the first ever recorded
violence by Gays against police anywhere. For on that evening when
the sfpd paddy wagon drove up to make their “usual” sweeps of the
streets, Gays this time did not go willingly. It began when the police
came into a cafeteria, still located there at Turk and Taylor, Compton’s,
to do their usual job of hassling the drag-­queens and hair-­fairies and
hustlers setting at the table. This was with the permission of manage-
ment, of course. But when the police grabbed the arm of one of the
transvestites, he threw his cup of coffee in the cop’s face, and with that,
cups, saucers, and trays began flying around the place, and all directed
at the police. They retreated outside until reinforcements arrived, and
the Compton’s management ordered the place closed, and with that,
the Gays began breaking out every window in the place, and as they
ran outside to escape the breaking glass, the police tried to grab them
and throw them into the paddy wagon, but they found this no easy
task for Gays began hitting them “below the belt” and drag-­queens
smashing them in the face with their extremely heavy purses. A police
car had every window broken, a newspaper shack outside the cafete-
ria was burned to the ground, and general havoc was raised that night
in the Tenderloin. The next night drag-­queens, hair-­fairies, conserva-
tive Gays, and hustlers joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would
not allow drags back in again. It ended with the newly installed plate
glass windows once more being smashed. The Police Community Re-
lations Unit began mediating the conflict, which was never fully re-

116 / Chapter twelve

 solved, which ended in a group called vanguard being formed of the
street peoples and a lesbian group of street people being formed called
the street orphans, both of which later became the old gay lib-
eration front in San Francisco, and is today called the gay activ-
ists alliance.12

The story seemed important in several respects. First, what reportedly

happened at Compton’s Cafeteria bore obvious similarities to the famous
Stonewall uprising in New York in 1969, where the militant phase of gay lib-
eration is commonly supposed to have begun, but reputedly preceded it by
three years. How the San Francisco gay activist community positioned the
Compton’s story vis-­à-­vis Stonewall in their first commemorative Gay Pride
Parade was clearly intended as an early revisionist account of gay liberation
history. Furthermore, the inciting incident of the riot was described as an
act of antitransgender discrimination, rather than an act of discrimination
against sexual orientation.
At the time I came across this source in 1995, the role of drag queens in
the Stonewall riots had become a site of conflict between transgender and
normative gay/lesbian histories — transgender activists pointed to the act of
mythologizing Stonewall as the “birth” of gay liberation as a homonormative
co-­optation of gender queer resistance, while homonormative gay and les-
bian commentators tended to downplay the significance of antidrag oppres-
sion at Stonewall — and whatever I could learn about the Compton’s incident
would certainly inform that debate. The 1972 document also related a gene-
alogy of gay liberation activism at odds with the normative accounts — one
rooted in the socioeconomics of the multiethnic Tenderloin sex-­work ghetto
rather than in campus-­based activism oriented toward countercultural white
youth of middle-­class origin. For all these reasons, the Compton’s Cafeteria
riot became a central focus of my research into San Francisco’s transgender
history and its intersectional relationship to the history of gay and lesbian
communities.
Although the 1972 document proved factually inaccurate in several par-
ticulars (the picketing happened before the riot, for example), I was ulti-
mately able to verify its basic account of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot and to
situate that event in a history of transgender community formation and po-
liticization that both complemented and contested homonormative gay and
lesbian history. Most important, I was able to connect the location and tim-
ing of the riot to social, political, geographical, and historical circumstances
in San Francisco in ways that the Stonewall story had never connected gay

Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity / 117

liberation discourse to similar circumstances in New York — thereby open-
ing up new ways to think about the relationship between identity politics
and broader material conditions. The 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria took
place at the intersection of several broad social issues that continue to be of
concern today, such as discriminatory policing practices in minority com-
munities, the lack of minority access to appropriate health care, elitist urban
land-­use policies, the unsettling domestic consequences of foreign wars, and
civil rights campaigns that aim to expand individual liberties and social tol-
erance on matters of sexuality and gender.13

Homonormative Disciplinarity

Although the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot provides a productive

point of critique and revision for homonormative accounts of the recent his-
tory of sexual identity communities and movements, most knowledge of this
event has circulated through works of public history (most notably the 2005
public television documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Caf-
eteria), work by nonacademic writers, and in community-­based publications,
rather than through professional academic channels.14 In those few instances
in which this history has been examined in peer reviewed journals, the ar-
ticles have been placed, as this one has been, in sections of the journals set
aside for uses other than feature articles. In the one instance where this has
not been the case, the article was written by another (nontransgendered)
scholar who interviewed me and made use of primary source documents I
directed her to, in order to relate the Compton’s Cafeteria riot to her own re-
search interest in the sociology of historical memory.15
I point this out not as a complaint — it was my own decision to pursue
the public history dissemination of my research findings; I actually guest-­
edited a journal issue that put my own research into the back matter and an-
onymized my authorship, and I have eagerly collaborated with other scholars
who have never failed to accurately and appropriately cite the use of my re-
search in their own projects. My aim, rather, is to call needed attention to
the micropolitical practices through which the radical implications of trans-
gender knowledges can become marginalized. Even in contexts such as this
special homonormativities issue of Radical History Review, which explicitly
called for transgender scholarship that could generate “new analytical frame-
works for talking about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history
that expand and challenge current models of identity and community forma-
tion as well as models of political and cultural resistance,” transgender knowl-

118 / Chapter twelve

edges are far too easily subjugated to what Michel Foucault once called “the
hierarchies of erudition.”16
In my original abstract for this issue, I proposed not only to recount the
little-­known history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot but also to call attention
to the multiple normativizing frames of reference that kept the Compton’s
story “hidden in plain sight” for so long — the confluence of class, race, and
gender considerations, as well as the homonormative gaze that did not con-
struct transgender subjects, actions, embodiments, or intentions as the ob-
jects of its desire. I wanted, too, to make methodologically explicit the critical
role of embodied difference in the practice of archival research.
As a range of new scholarship on the recent so-­called archival turn in the
humanities begins to make evident, embodiment — that contingent accom-
plishment through which the histories of our identities become invested in
our corporeal space — not only animates the research query but modulates
access to the archive in both its physical and its intellectual arrangement.
Discussing how my transsexual embodiment figured into reading a gay and
lesbian archive against the grain served the larger purpose of calling critical
attention to homonormative constructions of knowledge embedded in the
content and organization of the archive itself. My goal was to offer a radical
critique not just of historiography but of the political epistemology of histori-
cal knowledge production.
Because the tone of what I proposed was deemed “personal,” due to how
I situated my own research activities as part of the narrative, and because, I
suspect, I tend to work outside the academy, I was invited to contribute an
essay to either the “Reflections” or “Public History” section of Radical His-
tory Review, rather than a feature article. I felt some reservations in doing so
because my intent had been to do something else. “Reflections” are not as
intellectually rigorous as the documented arguments expected in feature ar-
ticles, and “Public History,” as distinguished from what academic historians
do, can come off as a form of popularization in which knowledge produced
by specialists is transmitted to the consuming masses through less intellectu-
ally accomplished intermediaries. The journal’s own division of knowledge
into “less formal” and “more formal” categories, and the positioning of my
work within this two-­tiered economy, would replicate the very hierarchies I
had set out to critique by containing what I had to say within a structurally
less legitimated space.
The most basic act of normativizing disciplinarity at work here is not di-
rectly related to the increasingly comfortable fit between gender-­normative
homosexuality and neoliberal policy. It is rooted in a more fundamental and

Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity / 119

culturally pervasive disavowal of intrinsically diverse modes of bodily be-
ing as the lived ground of all knowing and of all knowledge production. In
an epistemological regime structured by the subject-­object split, the bodily
situatedness of knowing becomes divorced from the status of formally le-
gitimated objective knowledge; experiential knowledge of the material ef-
fects of one’s own antinormative bodily difference on the production and
reception of what one knows consequently becomes delegitimated as merely
subjective. This in turn circumscribes the radical potential of that knowl-
edge to critique other knowledge produced from other bodily locations,
equally partial and contingent, which have been vested with the preroga-
tives of a normativity variously figured as white, masculinist, heterosexist, or
Eurocentric — as feminism, communities of color, and third world voices
have long maintained, and as the disabled, intersexed, and transgendered in-
creasingly contend.
The peculiar excitement of academic humanities work at this moment in
time lies, in my estimation, in the potential of interdisciplinary critical work
to produce new strategies through which disruptive knowledges can dislodge
the privileges of normativity. Breaking “personal voice” away from the taint
of “mere” subjective reflection and recuperating embodied knowing as a for-
mally legitimated basis of knowledge production is one such disruptive strat-
egy. Deploying disciplinary distinctions that foreclose this possibility is not.
But that is precisely why the opportunity provided by the editors of this vol-
ume for my words to occupy these pages under the heading of an “Inter-
vention” was ultimately such a welcome one. In the end, it has enabled the
critique I intended to offer all along, albeit not in the form or manner I ini-
tially proposed, while opening up the space to push the argument one turn
further.
Homonormativity, I conclude, is more than an accommodation to neolib-
eralism in its macropolitical manifestations. It is also an operation at the mi-
cropolitical level, one that aligns gay interests with dominant constructions
of knowledge and power that disqualify the very modes of knowing threat-
ening to disrupt the smooth functioning of normative space and that dis-
place modes of embodiment calling into question the basis of authority from
which normative voices speak. Because transgender phenomena unsettle the
categories on which the normative sexualities depend, their articulation can
offer compelling opportunities for contesting the expansion of neoliberal-
ism’s purview through homonormative strategies of minority assimilation.
And yet, even well-­intentioned antihomonormative critical practices that
take aim at neoliberalism can fall short of their goal when they fail to ade-

120 / Chapter twelve

quately account for the destabilizing, crosscutting differences within sexual
categories that transgender issues represent. Such critical practices can func-
tion in unintentionally homonormative ways that circumvent and circum-
scribe, rather than amplify, the radical potential of transgender phenomena
to profoundly disturb the normative — even in so seemingly small a thing as
where an article gets placed in a journal. Creating a proper space for radical
transgender scholarship, in the double sense of scholarship on transgender
issues and of work by transgender scholars, should be a vital part of any radi-
cally antinormative intellectual and political agenda.

Notes
First published in Radical History Review, no. 100 (2008): 1457 – 157. Copyright
2008, marho: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder.
1 Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, 50.
2 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 9.
3 I posted an earlier version of these observations on the genealogy of homonor-
mative on qstudy-­[email protected], November 7, 2006.
4 Robert Hill, personal communication, October 6, 2005; see also Hill, “A Social
History of Heterosexual Transvestism.”
5 I have made this argument elsewhere; see Stryker, “The Transgender Issue”;
Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin”; and Stryker, “(De)sub-
jugated Knowledges.” On Feinberg’s use of “transgender,” see Feinberg, Trans-
gender Liberation, reprinted in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies Reader,
205 – 20. On page 206, Feinberg, after listing a variety of what s/he terms “gender
outlaws,” that is, “transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens and drag kings, cross-­
dressers, bull-­daggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel dykes,” notes that “we
didn’t choose these words” and that “they don’t fit all of us.” Because “it’s hard to
fight an oppression without a name connoting pride,” s/he proposes “transgen-
der” to name “a diverse group of people who define ourselves in many different
ways.” While acknowledging that this term itself may prove inadequate or short-­
lived, s/he intends for it to be “a tool to battle bigotry and brutality” and hopes
that “it can connect us, that it can capture what is similar about the oppressions
that we endure.”
6 Ann Ogborn, interview by the author, July 5, 1998, Oakland, CA.
7 Gerard Koskovich, an early member of Queer Nation – San Francisco, recalls
“lively critiques regarding the group’s awareness and inclusiveness regarding
transgender and bisexual issues.” He writes: “I recall a telling incident at one of
the earliest qn meetings that I attended: A lesbian in her early 30s made com-
ments to the general meeting to the effect that she didn’t appreciate gay men
wearing drag, an act that she portrayed as an expression of misogyny — in short,
she offered an old-­school lesbian-­feminist reading. This led to a group discussion

Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity / 121

 of the uses of drag as a critique of gender norms — a discussion that ultimately
changed the woman’s mind. That early anti-­drag moment quickly gave way to
Queer Nation celebrating personal styles that transgressed gender norms in vari-
ous ways — a phenomenon that fit well with the in-­your-­face politics of repre-
sentation that drove many qn actions.” Personal communication, December 8,
2006.
8 Valentine, “I Went to Bed with My Own Kind Once”; Valentine, “The Categories
Themselves.”
9 Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely Mediations.
10 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities; Armstrong, Forging Gay Identity;
Boyd, Wide Open Town; Meeker, Contacts Desired; Gallo, Different Daughters.
11 Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed.
12 Broshears, “History of Christopher Street West — sf,” 8.
13 A fuller treatment of this material exceeds the space limitations of this essay, but
it can be found elsewhere in Susan Stryker, “At the Crossroads of Turk and Tay-
lor,” 2020 (MW).
14 Silverman and Stryker, Screaming Queens; Stryker, “The Compton’s Cafete-
ria Riot of 1966,” 5, 19; Stryker, “The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria”; Friedman,
Strapped for Cash, 129 – 33; Carter, Stonewall, 109 – 10.
15 Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, “mtf Transgender Activism
in San Francisco’s Tenderloin”; Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Mem-
ory”; see also Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 229.
16 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 7 – 8.

122 / Chapter twelve

 13
LESBIAN GENERATIONS
Transsexual . . . Lesbian . . . Feminist

I interpreted, quite literally, perhaps too literally, Leila Rupp’s kind invita-
tion to “speak informally for about ten minutes” in the roundtable on les-
bian generations by putting the emphasis on “informally” and extemporizing
some rather haphazardly organized thoughts on what generation of lesbian
I considered myself to be. The venue being the Big Berks and the personal,
of course, still being political, I assumed in framing my remarks that an am-
ple amount of autobiographical reflection would be, if not original in its
methodological implications, then intelligible or at least excusable under the
circumstances.
When my turn came to speak, I offered an impromptu performance in
which I sought to cite generational, ethnic, national, and class-­based compe-
tencies of lesbian identity, while simultaneously ironically distancing myself
from those very norms through a calculated and strategic cultivation of af-
fect. By which I mean to say: I tried to make people laugh, and I was pleased
to have succeeded through a variety of techniques (gesture, expression,
phrasing, timing, embodied context) that don’t render well on the printed
page. You had to be there. What follows is a loose rendition of that perfor-
mance into text.
I tried to be funny (1) to demonstrate that lesbian feminists can, in fact,
have a sense of humor, and (2) because ironic distancing — a self-­protective
critique from within of something I actually care about being part of — has
been a mode of survival for me as the particular sexual and gendered subject
that I am. As decades of feminist injunctions to be mindful of intersection-
ality have taught us, all identities are complicated; none can be articulated in
monolithic purity and isolation, nor can the messily lived complexity of iden-
tity’s intermingled attributes be disarticulated and hierarchically arranged
other than by conceptual and narrative operations that are always political
and often violent.
While I don’t deny that my whiteness, upward economic mobility, level
of educational and professional attainment, or coastal cultural mores inform
my lesbian identity, these intersections have not been particularly difficult to
occupy; they are, after all, forms of privilege. Being transsexual — well, that
presented more of a challenge. Being transsexual and lesbian, with one iden-
tity being no more or less ontologized than the other and no more or less
constructed, has been a fraught identitarian intersection indeed. Hence, as
Donald O’Conner put it so eloquently in Singin’ in the Rain, “make ’em laugh.”
Contemplating other approaches to this conversation just makes my stom-
ach churn.
Taking things too literally, by the way, such as the way I took Leila Rupp’s
invitation to participate on the lesbian generations’ roundtable, is something
transsexuals are often accused of doing — literalizing that which is properly
metaphorical. For example, I might, when called upon to do so, defend my
practices of embodiment or stake my claim to gender authenticity by pro-
testing that Simone de Beauvoir herself said, “One is not born a woman, but
rather becomes one,” to which a critic would reply, “But she didn’t mean it
like that. Why do you always have to be so literal?”
I was born in 1961, which means I’m turning fifty the summer that I’m
writing this. I graduated from high school and started college in 1979. The
words feminist, lesbian, and transsexual were the labels available to me in
my native English at the time when I was doing my formative identity work,
and they all stuck. Eventually. Transsexual was the one I consciously wrestled
with from the earliest age. I came across the term in a Dear Abby advice col-
umn published in my hometown newspaper in southwestern Oklahoma in
the early 1970s when I was about eleven.
I had always felt transgendered but had never before that moment seen
reflected back to me from the world one scrap of evidence that such feelings
might map onto an objective reality shared by others, rather than being just a
subjective perception of my own. I immediately rushed down to my public li-
brary to find out more about this potentially life-­changing bit of information

124 / Chapter thirteen

but was disappointed to learn, from the textbooks on abnormal psychology
that were the only source of information available to me, that transsexuals
were profoundly psychopathological people with a deep aversion to homo-
sexuality who mutilated their bodies in order to appear straight.
Damn. I wasn’t a transsexual after all, I thought to my little eleven-­year-­
old self, because I was pretty sure I wasn’t crazy, and I actually thought ho-
mosexuality sounded kind of cool. I have no more insight into the origins of
my sexual orientation than into the origins of my gender identification, just
an awareness of the lifelong presence and persistence of both. Go figure — you
could get a PhD in trying to sort out how such things can be possible and still
not have a good answer. But as far back as I can recall, I always thought of my-
self, to myself, as a girl who liked girls, and who wanted to be liked as a girl by
girls who liked girls. That has been the inalterable transhomosexual structure
of my desire and bodily sense.
“The Girl from Ipanema” was a big hit on the radio when I was about five,
and I remember projecting myself into it as a proto-­femme-­lesbian fantasy: I
was the tall and tan and young and lovely one, who walked just like a samba
that swung so cool and swayed so gentle. As Astrud Gilberto rhymed it in
slightly mangled syntax, “Each day as she walks to the sea, she looks straight
ahead not at he.” That was the me I wanted to be: femininely desirable, obliv-
ious to the male gaze, heading toward something powerful and dynamic and
as big as an ocean that could engulf and sweep over me like a lover.
The feminist part came later, but it seemed like a no-­brainer. After my fa-
ther died unexpectedly when I was thirteen, my brother and I were raised
by our widowed single mother, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see
that “equal pay for equal work” was simply fair or that the government assis-
tance programs we lived on after my mother decided to go to college to be-
come a social worker helped keep our family together. I earned a reputation
as a wild-­eyed liberal among my high school friends because I supported the
Equal Rights Amendment — although raised a boy, I’d been putting myself
in the other guy’s shoes, so to speak, my whole life and knew that I wouldn’t
want anybody discriminating against me just because of my gender.
I knew “nice” girls who needed abortions and “bad” girls who hated their
horrible pimps; I heard unfiltered misogynistic and sexist locker-­room talk
from guys who took me for one of their own; I knew from firsthand experi-
ence the kinds of psychic woundedness from histories of sexual violence that
can echo down through the generations of a family. Feminism, once I was
exposed to the concept of it during my undergraduate honors seminar in US
history (we read and discussed The Feminine Mystique), simply made a lot

Lesbian Generations / 125

of sense to me as a political framework and fit with my perceptions of what
a just world should look like. I came to consciousness as a “second waver.”
So, there I was, at age nineteen, a transsexual-­lesbian-­feminist-­wannabe,
trying to figure out how to put my life together, with all relevant authorities
telling me that the pieces couldn’t possibly fit. Gender identity disorder offi-
cially entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychi-
atric Association in 1980, and for people like me, who were assigned “male”
at birth, being attracted to people assigned “female” at birth was a contrain-
dication for diagnosis, and pathologization offered the only access route to
the medically controlled techniques of body modification that promised any
sense of sustainable embodiment. Janice Raymond’s paranoiac The Transsex-
ual Empire was published a year earlier (it and the psychiatrist Robert Stoller’s
Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred were the only two books on transsex-
uality I could find in my college library). Raymond specifically attacked as
“rapists” people who wanted to become “Sappho by surgery,” alleging that
they — that is to say, me — were symbolically inserting a male presence into a
feminine space where it was unwelcome and, hence, were anathema to femi-
nism and lesbianism.
Raymond’s book taught me the valuable lesson that there was more than
one kind of feminism. At the very least there was the feminism that held
that social structures, gendering practices, government policies, economic
disparities, and media representations needed to be changed through po-
litical action in order to end gender-­based oppression; then there was the
feminism that one might want to have vulnerable conversations with (and
within) about sexuality and gender, provided there was some mutual respect
and reciprocity involved; and then there was the aggressive crazy-­talk kind
that spewed venom every bit as toxic as that served up by the fundamentalist
Right, the kind that would lash out to hurt you if you threatened it. That’s the
part that still makes my stomach churn, waiting for it to pop up when least
expected, the part that makes irony and humor feel safe.
One question roundtable participants were asked to consider was: What
makes someone part of “lesbian history”? I feel very much a part of that his-
tory in the 1970s and 1980s, although not in a way most people would read-
ily recognize — I was neither a subject nor an object of that history, but rather
an abject of it, relegated to the negative space that circumscribed and de-
fined its positivity. I was no less generationally marked by that historically
contingent experience of lesbian feminism for being excluded from its field
of intelligibility. This makes me curious, in turn, about the subjectivities of
those women able to appear positively as lesbian feminists who were likewise

126 / Chapter thirteen

shaped by a tacit transphobia that, however palpable to me, remained largely
invisible to them. Negative affect, it would seem, is a technology that operates
on all bodies, centering some and displacing others.
Between the Scylla of a preemptive categorical exclusion and the Charybdis
of compulsory psychopathologization, I kept my head down for a decade and
deferred gender transitioning. I got through the 1980s with the help of gradu-
ate school, Michel Foucault, poststructuralism, and Gayle Rubin, sublimating
my various dysphorias into a dissertation on the cultural politics of emergent
forms of personal and collective identity, and by knocking around in radical
sexuality subcultures in the San Francisco Bay Area. The queer movement
that erupted around 1990 felt like what I had been waiting for all along, and
I threw myself into it without hesitation. New groups such as the Lesbian
Avengers, the post-­identity politics of Queer Nation, and the eruption onto
the scene of this new term, transgender, opened up a vital space of possibility.
I felt at last that I had someplace to transition into: a place for coming out as
a transsexual lesbian feminist.
Some of the lines of research I’ve pursued as a scholar for the past twenty
years, as well as my efforts to help establish transgender studies as a rec-
ognized academic field, have been motivated to a significant degree by the
lesbian feminist identity politics I lived through, albeit in a queer sort of iso-
lation, during the late 1970s and 1980s — a coda, or perhaps a second act, to
the “sex wars” that aim to reframe what can be properly considered feminist
positions on embodiment, identity, desire, and gender. Looking forward now
to future developments in the fields of gender and women’s history and its in-
tersection with transgender studies, there are a few emerging matters coming
into focus that merit brief mention before winding these remarks to a close.
Another question roundtable participants were asked to consider was:
How do we address the contentious borders between lesbian and transgen-
der identities, between passing women and transmen, between gender iden-
tity and sexual identity? It seems both obvious yet necessary to point out that
the transgender border question cannot be reduced to one between “passing
women” and “transmen.” This border has indeed been a hot-­button issue for
some time now, and has received high-­profile scholarly treatment in works
like Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity. But there is another border. Trans­
women are like Canadians in contemporary US discourse on border surveil-
lance and immigration; we’re not on the border that gets most of the attention
these days, and yet there is a history there, too, of boundaries marked through
wars, of cultural conflict, of tropes of nation and citizenship being deployed, of

Lesbian Generations / 127

access barriers thrown up to the restricted country of feminist womanhood—
all of which is overripe for rigorous historical appraisal.
I know of only one scholar thus far, Finn Enke at the University of Wis-
consin, Madison, who is doing academic work on transgender women and
transgender issues in US feminism in the 1970s.1 There are rich veins of his-
torical material yet to be mined there. Check out the Alternative Press Index
headings for “transsexual” and “transvestite” and you will find tantalizing
leads about transpeople doing political support work for prisoners convicted
of sex crimes, participating in gay liberation, joining feminist collectives and
establishing women’s buildings, organizing rallies against the war in Viet-
nam, and speaking out about disability in lesbian feminist communities.
There is a new history yet to be written of this recent past, one that up-
ends our received narratives about the 1970s. In Philadelphia, for example, a
group called Radical Queens partnered with the separatist Dyke Tactics to
push jointly for economic and political transformation. A group of formerly
closeted heterosexual male cross-­dressers in Washington, DC, came out to
support the era, arguing that in good conscience they couldn’t claim to be
“woman identified” if they didn’t participate in feminist causes. A dating
service in California, the Salmacis Society (named for the typically unher-
alded female nymph in Greek mythology who fused her body with the demi-
god Hermaphroditus to become part of a doubly sexed being), promoted
“femme-­femme” relationships between all sexes and genders.
And there is still much work to do in documenting how transsexual and
transgender issues became flashpoints and turning points in the histories of
better-­known social movements: the ejection of revolutionary street-­queen
Sylvia Rivera from the Christopher Street Liberation Day commemoration,
for example; or Robin Morgan’s verbal attack on transsexual lesbian feminist
Beth Elliot at the West Coast Lesbian Conference; or Janice Raymond’s cam-
paign to have Sandy Stone fired by the Olivia Records women’s music col-
lective. Investigating these and similar acts of transgender exclusion from
broader movements shines a light on the otherwise invisible operations of
the unacknowledged normativities through which social change often moves
forward.
Trying to speak intelligibly from a trans-­lesbian-­feminist sensibility has
required developing critiques of dominant forms of womanhood and lesbi-
anism as well as of queerness, critiques that in retrospect look a lot like the
emerging critiques of neoliberal homonationalism. To wit: the kind of female
homosexual or homonormative male that is increasingly recognized as a le-
gitimate version of the subject-­citizen within Eurocentric modernity secures

128 / Chapter thirteen

her or his relationship to state and market precisely by not troubling the reg-
ulative framework known as gender — a biopolitical technique of bodily ad-
ministration that transgender embodiment can profoundly problematize.
In hindsight, a lot of the trash talk about transfolks since the rise of gay
liberation and second wave feminism sounds like a subspecies of modern-
ization discourse. Some (homo)normative, nontransgendered gays, lesbians,
and feminists frequently posit themselves (as in recent debates about trans
inclusion in the proposed Employment Nondiscrimination Act) as more pro-
gressive, more modern, more liberated, more politically advanced, more be-
fitting of rights than those backward trans people who are either sick, bad, or
wrong, who need to be saved from themselves, who need to be educated and
have their consciousnesses raised by their more enlightened leaders so that
they will become fit bearers of rights at some unspecified point in the future —
after real women and men, both queer and straight, get theirs.
But a queer, feminist, transgender analysis of contemporary society, one
that can expose and articulate from the inside the relations of power that cast
aside all things transgender as inconsequential, marginal phenomena can ac-
tually function as a potent site from which to launch a radical, antireaction-
ary, future-­oriented, countermodern critique of modernity itself. Hopefully,
this sense of the critical potential of a queer feminist transgender studies
resonates with other, more familiar, discursive maneuvers within feminism.
Writers such as Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty have helped teach
people to see that Western feminism risks repeating the colonizing gesture of
“white men saving brown women from brown men” to the extent that it sim-
ply puts white womanhood in the geopolitical place of the white man. A new
wave of feminist transgender scholarship, such as Afsaneh Najmabadi’s me-
ticulous work on the state funding of transsexual surgeries in the Islamic Re-
public of Iran,2 highlights the extent to which transsexuals can now be held
up as evidence to support contemporary kinds of neocolonial intervention
through a structurally identical conceptual operation — namely, Western ac-
tivists waving the bloody shirt of human rights to save disempowered, queer
subjects in distant lands from the backward Islamists who want to transsexu-
alize their bodies to fit them into an oppressive, fundamentalist heteropatri-
archy rather than allowing them to become the liberated modern gays they
rightfully should be in a free world.
So what is one to make of the fact that in 1979 (during the Iranian Revo-
lution and the hostage crisis at the US Embassy in Tehran, one might note),
Janice Raymond published her fantasy of a “transsexual empire” in which
“she-­male” infiltrators of women’s space subvert feminism from within and

Lesbian Generations / 129

become, like the “eunuchs” of old (this is her language, not my gloss), guard-
ians of the harem in service to their patriarch masters? Laughter would be an
entirely sufficient response, were it not for the pernicious persistence of the
“paranoid style” in US politics and cultural life — certain strands of feminism
not excepted — and for the seeming effortlessness with which transsexual
women can be slotted into a phantasmatic structure that imagines a stealthy
enemy at once foreign, internal, and (as is increasingly the case) Orientalized
and Islamized.
When transsexual women are not rendered objects of fear (think here of
how the guy-­in-­a-­dress-­rapist-­in-­the-­women’s-­room caricature is deployed
to defeat antidiscrimination legislation), they’re made into objects of fun
(think here of every cross-­dressing shtick you’ve ever seen in a so-­called
comedy). This is really no laughing matter. (See me perform my righteous
feminist anger?) It’s not just that transphobic violence can kill and that trans
women need to take back a night of their own. It’s also that, if we take seri-
ously the discursive maneuvers that foist upon transwomen the most outra-
geous of constructs, and if we collectively hold space for conversation in a
manner that allows transwomen to speak of their subjection to those con-
structs and of their evasions of those constructs, then transwomen will at last
be in a position to report on the state-­sanctioned violence of coercive gender-­
normativization in a voice every bit as powerful as the ones Audre Lorde used
to talk about Black and Gloria Anzaldúa used to talk about borders.
So: How many transsexual lesbian feminists does it take to change a light
bulb? That’s really not funny — because we’re not trying to change light bulbs;
we’re trying to change the world.

Notes
First published in Feminist Studies 39, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 375 – 83.
1 Subsequently published as Enke, Finding the Movement. (MW)
2 Najmabadi, Professing Selves.

130 / Chapter thirteen

WHEN III.
MONSTERS
SPEAK
This page intentionally left blank
MY WORDS TO VICTOR
FRANKENSTEIN ABOVE THE
14
VILLAGE OF CHAMOUNIX
Performing Transgender Rage

Introductory Notes

The following work is a textual adaptation of a performance piece originally

presented at Rage across the Disciplines, an arts, humanities, and social sci-
ences conference held June 10 – 12, 1993, at California State University, San
Marcos. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference, its theme, and the
organizers’ call for both performances and academic papers inspired me to
be creative in my mode of presenting a topic then much on my mind. As a
member of Transgender Nation — a militantly queer, direct-­action transsex-
ual advocacy group — I was at the time involved in organizing a disruption
and protest at the American Psychiatric Association’s 1993 annual meeting
in San Francisco. A good deal of the discussion at our planning meetings
concerned how to harness the intense emotions emanating from transsex-
ual experience — especially rage — and mobilize them into effective political
actions.
I was intrigued by the prospect of critically examining this rage in a more
academic setting through an idiosyncratic application of the concept of gen-
der performativity. My idea was to perform, self-­consciously, a queer gender
rather than simply talk about it, thus embodying and enacting the concept si-
multaneously under discussion. I wanted the formal structure of the work to
express a transgender aesthetic by replicating our abrupt, often jarring tran-
sitions between genders — challenging generic classification with the forms of
my words just as my transsexuality challenges the conventions of legitimate
gender and my performance in the conference room challenged the bound-
aries of acceptable academic discourse.
During the performance, I stood at the podium wearing genderfuck drag —
combat boots, threadbare Levi 501s over a black lace body suit, a shredded
Transgender Nation T-­shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink trian-
gle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewelry, and a six-­inch long mar-
lin hook dangling around my neck on a length of heavy stainless-­steel chain.
I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair
at the panelists’ table. The jacket had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rain-
bow freedom rings on the right-­side lacings, and Queer Nation – style stick-
ers reading sex change, dyke, and fuck your transphobia plastered
on the back.

Monologue

The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical sci-

ence. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together
again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances,
I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster
in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as
less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the mon-
ster’s, as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abid-
ing rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which
I must struggle to exist.
I am not the first to link Frankenstein’s monster and the transsexual body.
Mary Daly makes the connection explicit by discussing transsexuality in
“Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon,” in which she char-
acterizes transsexuals as the agents of a “necrophilic invasion” of female space
(69 – 72). Janice Raymond, who acknowledges Daly as a formative influence,
is less direct when she says that “the problem of transsexuality would best be
served by morally mandating it out of existence”; but in this statement she
nevertheless echoes Victor Frankenstein’s feelings toward the monster: “Be-
gone, vile insect, or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust. You reproach
me with your creation.”1 It is a commonplace of literary criticism to note that
Frankenstein’s monster is his own dark, romantic double, the alien Other he
constructs and upon which he projects all he cannot accept in himself; in-

134 / Chapter fourteen

deed, Frankenstein calls the monster “my own vampire, my own spirit set
loose from the grave.”2 Might I suggest that Daly, Raymond, and others of
their ilk similarly construct the transsexual as their own particular golem?3
The attribution of monstrosity remains a palpable characteristic of most
lesbian and gay representations of transsexuality, displaying in unnerving de-
tail the anxious, fearful underside of the current cultural fascination with
transgenderism.4 Because transsexuality more than any other transgender
practice or identity represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational
presupposition of fixed genders upon which a politics of personal identity de-
pends, people who have invested their aspirations for social justice in identi-
tarian movements say things about us out of sheer panic that, if said of other
minorities, would see print only in the most hate-­riddled, white supremacist,
Christian fascist rags.
To quote extensively from one letter to the editor of a popular San Fran-
cisco gay/lesbian periodical:

I consider transsexualism to be a fraud, and the participants in it . . . per-

verted. The transsexual [claims] he/she needs to change his/her body
in order to be his/her “true self.” Because this “true self ” requires an-
other physical form in which to manifest itself, it must therefore war
with nature. One cannot change one’s gender. What occurs is a cleverly
manipulated exterior: what has been done is mutation. What exists be-
neath the deformed surface is the same person who was there prior to
the deformity. People who break or deform their bodies [act] out the
sick farce of a deluded, patriarchal approach to nature, alienated from
true being.

Referring by name to one particular person, self-­identified as a transsexual

lesbian, whom she had heard speak in a public forum at the San Francisco
Women’s Building, the letter-­writer went on to say: “When an estrogenated
man with breasts loves a woman, that is not lesbianism, that is mutilated per-
version. [This individual] is not a threat to the lesbian community, he is an
outrage to us. He is not a lesbian, he is a mutant man, a self-­made freak, a
deformity, an insult. He deserves a slap in the face. After that, he deserves to
have his body and mind made well again.”5
When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I find no more reason
to mourn my opposition to them — or to the order they claim to represent —
than Frankenstein’s monster felt in its enmity to the human race. I do not fall
from the grace of their company — I roar gleefully away from it like a Harley-­
straddling, dildo-­packing leatherdyke from hell.

My Words to Victor Frankenstein / 135

 The stigmatization fostered by this sort of pejorative labelling is not with-
out consequence. Such words have the power to destroy transsexual lives. On
January 5, 1993, a twenty-­two-­year-­old preoperative transsexual woman from
Seattle, Filisa Vistima, wrote in her journal, “I wish I was anatomically ‘nor-
mal’ so I could go swimming. . . . But no, I’m a mutant, Frankenstein’s mon-
ster.” Two months later Filisa Vistima committed suicide. What drove her to
such despair was the exclusion she experienced in Seattle’s queer community,
some members of which opposed Filisa’s participation because of her trans-
sexuality — even though she identified as and lived as a bisexual woman.
The Lesbian Resource Center where she served as a volunteer conducted
a survey of its constituency to determine whether it should stop offering ser-
vices to male-­to-­female transsexuals. Filisa did the data entry for tabulat-
ing the survey results; she didn’t have to imagine how people felt about her
kind. The Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network announced that if it admitted
transsexuals, the sbwn would no longer be a women’s organization. “I’m
sure,” one member said in reference to the inclusion of bisexual transsexual
women, “the boys can take care of themselves.”
Filisa Vistima was not a boy, and she found it impossible to take care of her-
self. Even in death she found no support from the community in which she
claimed membership. “Why didn’t Filisa commit herself for psychiatric care?”
asked a columnist in the Seattle Gay News. “Why didn’t Filisa demand her civil
rights?” In this case, not only did the angry villagers hound their monster to
the edge of town, they reproached her for being vulnerable to the torches. Did
Filisa Vistima commit suicide, or did the queer community of Seattle kill her?6
I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without
using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say
this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a mon-
ster. Just as the words “dyke,” “fag,” “queer,” “slut,” and “whore” have been re-
claimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-­assimilationist sexual
minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry work-
ers, words like “creature,” “monster,” and “unnatural” need to be reclaimed
by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on
top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. A creature, after all, in
the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than
a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take at being called
a “creature” results from the threat the term poses to your status as “lords of
creation,” beings elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of be-
ing called “it,” being called a “creature” suggests the lack or loss of a superior
personhood.

136 / Chapter fourteen

 I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship
with nonhuman material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix
of possibilities. “Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine
portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to
refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous crea-
tures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts,
because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign
of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as
messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce im-
pending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound
importance is happening.”
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched
with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous ana-
tomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an
unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is
a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication
that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for your-
self at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb
has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been
compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as
well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and su-
tures in yourself.

Criticism

In answer to the question he poses in the title of his recent essay, “What Is a
Monster? (According to Frankenstein),” Peter Brooks suggests that whatever
else a monster might be, it “may also be that which eludes gender definition”
(219). Brooks reads Mary Shelley’s story of an overreaching scientist and his
troublesome creation as an early dissent from the nineteenth-­century realist
literary tradition, which had not yet attained dominance as a narrative form.
He understands Frankenstein to unfold textually through a narrative strategy
generated by tension between a visually oriented epistemology, on the one
hand, and another approach to knowing the truth of bodies that privileges
verbal linguisticality, on the other (199 – 200). Knowing by seeing and know-
ing by speaking/hearing are gendered, respectively, as masculine and femi-
nine in the critical framework within which Brooks operates.
Considered in this context, Shelley’s text is informed by — and critiques
from a woman’s point of view — the contemporary reordering of knowledge

My Words to Victor Frankenstein / 137

brought about by the increasingly compelling truth claims of Enlightenment
science.7 The monster problematizes gender partly through its failure as a
viable subject in the visual field; though referred to as “he,” it thus offers a
feminine, and potentially feminist, resistance to definition by a phallicized
scopophilia. The monster accomplishes this resistance by mastering language
in order to claim a position as a speaking subject and enact verbally the very
subjectivity denied it in the specular realm.
Transsexual monstrosity, however, along with its affect, transgender rage,
can never claim quite so secure a means of resistance because of the inabil-
ity of language to represent the transgendered subject’s movement over time
between stably gendered positions in a linguistic structure. Our situation ef-
fectively reverses the one encountered by Frankenstein’s monster. Unlike the
monster, we often successfully cite the culture’s visual norms of gendered
embodiment. This citation becomes a subversive resistance when, through
a provisional use of language, we verbally declare the unnaturalness of our
claim to the subject positions we nevertheless occupy.8
The prospect of a monster with a life and will of its own is a principal
source of horror for Frankenstein. The scientist has taken up his project with
a specific goal in mind — nothing less than the intent to subject nature com-
pletely to his power. He finds a means to accomplish his desires through
modern science, whose devotees, it seems to him, “have acquired new and
almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic
the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its shadows. . . . More,
far more, will I achieve,” thought Frankenstein. “I will pioneer a new way,
explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of
creation.”9 The fruit of his efforts is not, however, what Frankenstein antici-
pated. The rapture he expected to experience at the awakening of his crea-
ture turned immediately to dread. “I saw the dull yellow eyes of the creature
open. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a
grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand
was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped” (56, 57).
The monster escapes, too, and parts company with its maker for a num-
ber of years. In the interim, it learns something of its situation in the world,
and rather than bless its creator, the monster curses him. The very success of
Mary Shelley’s scientist in his self-­appointed task thus paradoxically proves
its futility: rather than demonstrate Frankenstein’s power over materiality,
the newly enlivened body of the creature attests to its maker’s failure to attain
the mastery he sought. Frankenstein cannot control the mind and feelings
of the monster he makes. It exceeds and refutes his purposes.

138 / Chapter fourteen

 My own experience as a transsexual parallels the monster’s in this regard.
The consciousness shaped by the transsexual body is no more the creation of
the science that refigures its flesh than the monster’s mind is the creation of
Frankenstein. The agenda that produced hormonal and surgical sex reassign-
ment techniques is no less pretentious, and no more noble, than Franken-
stein’s. Heroic doctors still endeavor to triumph over nature. The scientific
discourse that produced sex reassignment techniques is inseparable from the
pursuit of immortality through the perfection of the body, the fantasy of to-
tal mastery through the transcendence of an absolute limit, and the hubristic
desire to create life itself.10 Its genealogy emerges from a metaphysical quest
older than modern science, and its cultural politics are aligned with a deeply
conservative attempt to stabilize gendered identity in service of the natural-
ized heterosexual order.
None of this, however, precludes medically constructed transsexual bod-
ies from being viable sites of subjectivity. Nor does it guarantee the compli-
ance of subjects thus embodied with the agenda that resulted in a transsexual
means of embodiment. As we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth,
we transsexuals are something more, and something other, than the creatures
our makers intended us to be. Though medical techniques for sex reassign-
ment are capable of crafting bodies that satisfy the visual and morphologi-
cal criteria that generate naturalness as their effect, engaging with those very
techniques produces a subjective experience that belies the naturalistic effect
biomedical technology can achieve. Transsexual embodiment, like the em-
bodiment of the monster, places its subject in an unassimilable, antagonistic,
queer relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist.
Frankenstein’s monster articulates its unnatural situation within the nat-
ural world with far more sophistication in Shelley’s novel than might be ex-
pected by those familiar only with the version played by Boris Karloff in
James Whale’s classic films from the 1930s. Film critic Vito Russo suggests
that Whale’s interpretation of the monster was influenced by the fact that
the director was a closeted gay man at the time he made his Frankenstein
films. The pathos he imparted to his monster derived from the experience
of his own hidden sexual identity.11 Monstrous and unnatural in the eyes of
the world but seeking only the love of his own kind and the acceptance of
human society, Whale’s creature externalizes and renders visible the night-
marish loneliness and alienation that the closet can breed. But this is not
the monster who speaks to me so potently of my own situation as an openly
transsexual being. I emulate instead Mary Shelley’s literary monster, who is
quick-­witted, agile, strong, and eloquent.

My Words to Victor Frankenstein / 139

 In the novel, the creature flees Frankenstein’s laboratory and hides in the
solitude of the Alps, where, by stealthy observation of the people it happens
to meet, it gradually acquires a knowledge of language, literature, and the
conventions of European society. At first it knows little of its own condition.
“I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse
with me,” the monster notes. “What did this mean? Who was I? What was I?
Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually
recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”12 Then, in the pocket of the jacket it
took as it fled the laboratory, the monster finds Victor Frankenstein’s journal,
and learns the particulars of its creation. “I sickened as I read,” the monster
says. “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me what a wretched outcast
I was” (124, 125).
Upon learning its history and experiencing the rejection of all to whom it
reached out for companionship, the creature’s life takes a dark turn. “My feel-
ings were those of rage and revenge,” the monster declares. “I, like the arch-­
fiend, bore a hell within me” (130). It would have been happy to destroy all of
Nature, but it settles, finally, on a more expedient plan to murder systemati-
cally all those whom Victor Frankenstein loves. Once Frankenstein realizes
that his own abandoned creation is responsible for the deaths of those most
dear to him, he retreats in remorse to a mountain village above his native
Geneva to ponder his complicity in the crimes the monster has committed.
While hiking on the glaciers in the shadow of Mont Blanc, above the village
of Chamounix, Frankenstein spies a familiar figure approaching him across
the ice. Of course, it is the monster who demands an audience with its maker.
Frankenstein agrees, and the two retire together to a mountaineer’s cabin.
There, in a monologue that occupies nearly a quarter of the novel, the mon-
ster tells Frankenstein the tale of its creation from its own point of view, ex-
plaining to him how it became so enraged.
These are my words to Victor Frankenstein, above the village of Chamou-
nix. Like the monster, I could speak of my earliest memories, and how I be-
came aware of my difference from everyone around me. I can describe how
I acquired a monstrous identity by taking on the label “transsexual” to name
parts of myself that I could not otherwise explain. I, too, have discovered
the journals of the men who made my body, and who have made the bod-
ies of creatures like me since the 1930s. I know in intimate detail the his-
tory of this recent medical intervention into the enactment of transgendered
subjectivity; science seeks to contain and colonize the radical threat posed
by a particular transgender strategy of resistance to the coerciveness of gen-
der: physical alteration of the genitals.13 I live daily with the consequences of

140 / Chapter fourteen

medicine’s definition of my identity as an emotional disorder. Through the
filter of this official pathologization, the sounds that come out of my mouth
can be summarily dismissed as the confused ranting of a diseased mind.
Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I har-
bor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in
until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage
bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against
my survival. But there is yet another rage within.

Journal (February 18, 1983)

Kim sat between my spread legs, her back to me, her tailbone on the edge of
the table. Her left hand gripped my thigh so hard the bruises are still there a
week later. Sweating and bellowing, she pushed one last time and the baby fi-
nally came. Through my lover’s back, against the skin of my own belly, I felt a
child move out of another woman’s body and into the world. Strangers’ hands
snatched it away to suction the sticky green meconium from its airways. “It’s
a girl,” somebody said. Paul, I think. Why, just then, did a jumble of dark,
unsolicited feelings emerge wordlessly from some quiet back corner of my
mind? This moment of miracles was not the time to deal with them. I pushed
them back, knowing they were too strong to avoid for long.
After three days, we were all exhausted, slightly disappointed that com-
plications had forced us to go to Kaiser instead of having the birth at home.
I wonder what the hospital staff thought of our little tribe swarming all over
the delivery room: Stephanie, the midwife; Paul, the baby’s father; Kim’s sis-
ter Gwen; my son Wilson and me; and the two other women who make up
our family, Anne and Heather. And of course, Kim and the baby. She named
her Denali, after the mountain in Alaska. I don’t think the medical folks had
a clue as to how we all considered ourselves to be related to each other. When
the labor first began, we all took turns shifting between various supporting
roles, but as the ordeal progressed, we settled into a more stable pattern. I
found myself acting as birth coach. Hour after hour, through dozens of sets
of contractions, I focused everything on Kim, helping her stay in control of
her emotions as she gave herself over to this inexorable process, holding on
to her eyes with mine to keep the pain from throwing her out of her body,
breathing every breath with her, being a companion.
I participated, step by increasingly intimate step, in the ritual transforma-
tion of consciousness surrounding her daughter’s birth. Birth rituals work to
prepare the self for a profound opening, an opening as psychic as it is corpo-

My Words to Victor Frankenstein / 141

real. Kim’s body brought this ritual process to a dramatic resolution for her,
culminating in a visceral, cathartic experience. But my body left me hanging.
I had gone on a journey up to the point at which my companion had to go
on alone, and I needed to finish my trip for myself. To conclude the birth rit-
ual I had participated in, I needed to move something in me as profound as
a whole human life.
I floated home from the hospital, filled with a vital energy that wouldn’t
discharge. I puttered about until I was alone: my ex had come over for Wil-
son; Kim and Denali were still at the hospital with Paul; Stephanie had gone,
and everyone else was out for a much-­needed walk. Finally, in the solitude of
my home, I burst apart like a wet paper bag and spilled the emotional con-
tents of my life through the hands I cupped like a sieve over my face. For days,
as I had accompanied my partner on her journey, I had been progressively
opening myself and preparing to let go of whatever was deepest within. Now
everything in me flowed out, moving up from inside and out through my
throat, my mouth because these things could never pass between the lips of
my cunt. I knew the darkness I had glimpsed earlier would reemerge, but I
had vast oceans of feeling to experience before that came up again.
Simple joy in the presence of new life came bubbling out first, wave after
wave of it. I was so incredibly happy. I was so in love with Kim, had so much
admiration for her strength and courage. I felt pride and excitement about
the queer family we were building with Wilson, Anne, Heather, Denali, and
whatever babies would follow. We’ve all tasted an exhilarating possibility in
communal living and these nurturing, bonded kinships for which we have
no adequate names. We joke about pioneering on a reverse frontier: ventur-
ing into the heart of civilization itself to reclaim biological reproduction from
heterosexism and free it for our own uses. We’re fierce; in a world of “tradi-
tional family values,” we need to be.
Sometimes, though, I still mourn the passing of old, more familiar ways.
It wasn’t too long ago that my ex and I were married, woman and man. That
love had been genuine, and the grief over its loss real. I had always wanted
intimacy with women more than intimacy with men, and that wanting had
always felt queer to me. She needed it to appear straight. The shape of my
flesh was a barrier that estranged me from my desire. Like a body without a
mouth, I was starving in the midst of plenty. I would not let myself starve,
even if what it took to open myself for a deep connectedness cut off the deep-
est connections I actually had. So, I abandoned one life and built this new
one. The fact that she and I have begun getting along again, after so much
strife between us, makes the bitterness of our separation somewhat sweet.

142 / Chapter fourteen

On the day of the birth, this past loss was present even in its partial recovery;
held up beside the newfound fullness in my life, it evoked a poignant, hope-
ful sadness that inundated me.
Frustration and anger soon welled up in abundance. In spite of all I’d
accomplished, my identity still felt so tenuous. Every circumstance of life
seemed to conspire against me in one vast, composite act of invalidation and
erasure. In the body I was born with, I had been invisible as the person I con-
sidered myself to be; I had been invisible as a queer while the form of my
body made my desires look straight. Now, as a dyke, I am invisible among
women; as a transsexual, I am invisible among dykes. As the partner of a new
mother, I am often invisible as a transsexual, a woman, and a lesbian. I’ve lost
track of the friends and acquaintances these past nine months who’ve asked
me if I was the father. It shows so dramatically how much they simply don’t
get what I’m doing with my body. The high price of whatever visible, intelli-
gible, self-­representation I have achieved makes the continuing experience of
invisibility maddeningly difficult to bear.
The collective assumptions of the naturalized order soon overwhelmed
me. Nature exerts such a hegemonic oppression. Suddenly I felt lost and
scared, lonely, and confused. How did that little Mormon boy from Okla-
homa I used to be grow up to be a transsexual leatherdyke in San Francisco
with a Berkeley PhD? Keeping my bearings on such a long and strange trip
seemed a ludicrous proposition. Home was so far gone behind me it was gone
forever, and there was no place to rest. Battered by heavy emotions, a little
dazed, I felt the inner walls that protect me dissolve to leave me vulnerable to
all that could harm me. I cried and abandoned myself to abject despair over
what gender had done to me.
Everything’s fucked up beyond all recognition. This hurts too much to go on.
I came as close today as I’ll ever come to giving birth — literally. My body can’t
do that; I can’t even bleed without a wound, and yet I claim to be a woman.
How? Why have I always felt that way? I’m such a goddamned freak. I can
never be a woman like other women, but I could never be a man. Maybe there
really is no place for me in all creation. I’m so tired of this ceaseless movement.
I do war with nature. I am alienated from Being. I’m a self-­mutilated defor-
mity, a pervert, a mutant, trapped in monstrous flesh. God, I never wanted to
be trapped again. I’ve destroyed myself. I’m falling into darkness I am falling
apart.
I enter the realm of my dreams. I am underwater, swimming upward It is
dark. I see a shimmering light above me. I break through the plane of the wa-
ter’s surface with my lungs bursting. I suck for air — and find only more water.

My Words to Victor Frankenstein / 143

My lungs are full of water. Inside and out, I am surrounded by it. Why am I not
dead if there is no difference between me and what I am in? There is another
surface above me and I swim frantically towards it. I see a shimmering light. I
break the plane of the water’s surface over and over and over again. This wa-
ter annihilates me. I cannot be, and yet — an excruciating impossibility — I am
I will do anything not to be here.
I will swim forever
I will die for eternity.
I will learn to breathe water.
I will become the water.
If I cannot change my situation I will change myself.

In this act of magical transformation

I recognize myself again.

I am groundless and boundless movement.

I am a furious flow.
I am one with the darkness and the wet.

And I am enraged.

Here at last is the chaos I held at bay.

Here at last is my strength.

I am not the water —

I am the wave,
and rage
is the force that moves me.

Rage
gives me back my body
as its own fluid medium.

Rage
punches a hole in water
around which I coalesce
to allow the flow to come through me.

Rage
constitutes me in my primal form.
It throws my head back
pulls my lips back over my teeth
opens my throat

144 / Chapter fourteen

 and rears me up to howl: and no sound dilutes
the pure quality of my rage.

No sound
exists
in this place without language
my rage is a silent raving

Rage
throws me back at last
into this mundane reality
in this transfigured flesh
that aligns me with the power of my Being.

In birthing my rage,
my rage has rebirthed me.

Theory

A formal disjunction seems particularly appropriate at this moment because

the affect I seek to examine critically, what I’ve termed “transgender rage,”
emerges from the interstices of discursive practices and at the collapse of ge-
neric categories. The rage itself is generated by the subject’s situation in a field
governed by the unstable but indissoluble relationship between language and
materiality, a situation in which language organizes and brings into signifi-
cation matter that simultaneously eludes definitive representation and de-
mands its own perpetual rearticulation in symbolic terms.
Within this dynamic field, the subject must constantly police the bound-
ary constructed by its own founding in order to maintain the fictions of “in-
side” and “outside” against a regime of signification/materialization whose
intrinsic instability produces the rupture of subjective boundaries as one of
its regular features. The affect of rage, as I seek to define it, is located at the
margin of subjectivity and the limit of signification. It originates in recogni-
tion of the fact that the “outsideness” of a materiality that perpetually violates
the foreclosure of subjective space within a symbolic order is also necessar-
ily “inside” the subject as grounds for the materialization of its body and the
formation of its bodily ego.
This primary rage becomes specifically transgender rage when the inabil-
ity to foreclose the subject occurs through a failure to satisfy norms of gen-
dered embodiment. Transgender rage is the subjective experience of being

My Words to Victor Frankenstein / 145

compelled to transgress what Judith Butler has referred to as the highly gen-
dered regulatory schemata that determine the viability of bodies, of being
compelled to enter a “domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation” that
in its unlivability encompasses and constitutes the realm of legitimate subjec-
tivity.14 Transgender rage is a queer fury, an emotional response to conditions
in which it becomes imperative to take up, for the sake of one’s own contin-
ued survival as a subject, a set of practices that precipitates one’s exclusion
from a naturalized order of existence that seeks to maintain itself as the only
possible basis for being a subject.
However, by mobilizing gendered identities and rendering them provi-
sional, open to strategic development and occupation, this rage enables the
establishment of subjects in new modes, regulated by different codes of in-
telligibility. Transgender rage furnishes a means for disidentification with
compulsorily assigned subject positions. It makes the transition from one
gendered subject position to another possible by using the impossibility of
complete subjective foreclosure to organize an outside force as an inside
drive, and vice versa. Through the operation of rage, the stigma itself be-
comes the source of transformative power.15
I want to stop and theorize at this particular moment in the text because
in the lived moment of being thrown back from a state of abjection in the af-
termath of my lover’s daughter’s birth, I immediately began telling myself a
story to explain my experience. I started theorizing, using all the conceptual
tools my education had put at my disposal. Other true stories of those events
could undoubtedly be told, but upon my return, I knew for a fact what lit the
fuse to my rage in the hospital delivery room. It was the nonconsensuality
of the baby’s gendering. You see, I told myself, wiping snot off my face with
a shirt sleeve, bodies are rendered meaningful only through some culturally
and historically specific mode of grasping their physicality that transforms
the flesh into a useful artifact.
Gendering is the initial step in this transformation, inseparable from the
process of forming an identity by means of which we’re fitted to a system of
exchange in a heterosexual economy. Authority seizes upon specific material
qualities of the flesh, particularly the genitals, as outward indication of future
reproductive potential, constructs this flesh as a sign, and reads it to encul-
turate the body. Gender attribution is compulsory; it codes and deploys our
bodies in ways that materially affect us, yet we choose neither our marks nor
the meanings they carry.16
This was the act accomplished between the beginning and the end of that
short sentence in the delivery room: “It’s a girl.” This was the act that recalled

146 / Chapter fourteen

all the anguish of my own struggles with gender. But this was also the act
that enjoined my complicity in the nonconsensual gendering of another. A
gendering violence is the founding condition of human subjectivity; having
a gender is the tribal tattoo that makes one’s personhood cognizable. I stood
for a moment between the pains of two violations, the mark of gender and
the unlivability of its absence. Could I say which one was worse? Or could I
only say which one I felt could best be survived?
How can finding one’s self prostrate and powerless in the presence of the
Law of the Father not produce an unutterable rage? What difference does it
make if the father in this instance was a pierced, tattooed, purple-­haired punk
fag anarchist who helped his dyke friend get pregnant? Phallogocentric lan-
guage, not its particular speaker, is the scalpel that defines our flesh. I defy
that Law in my refusal to abide by its original decree of my gender. Though I
cannot escape its power, I can move through its medium. Perhaps if I move
furiously enough, I can deform it in my passing to leave a trace of my rage. I
can embrace it with a vengeance to rename myself, declare my transsexuality,
and gain access to the means of my legible reinscription. Though I may not
hold the stylus myself, I can move beneath it for my own deep self-­sustaining
pleasures.
To encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered con-
sciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness of
the natural order. Confronting the implications of this constructedness can
summon up all the violation, loss, and separation inflicted by the gendering
process that sustains the illusion of naturalness. My transsexual body literal-
izes this abstract violence. As the bearers of this disquieting news, we trans-
sexuals often suffer for the pain of others, but we do not willingly abide the
rage of others directed against us. And we do have something else to say, if
you will but listen to the monsters: the possibility of meaningful agency and
action exists, even within fields of domination that bring about the universal
cultural rape of all flesh. Be forewarned, however, that taking up this task will
remake you in the process.
By speaking as a monster in my personal voice, by using the dark, watery
images of Romanticism and lapsing occasionally into its brooding cadences
and grandiose postures, I employ the same literary techniques Mary Shelley
used to elicit sympathy for her scientist’s creation. Like that creature, I assert
my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me
to face and redefine a life worth living. I have asked the Miltonic questions
Shelley poses in the epigraph of her novel: “Did I request thee, Maker, from
my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?”

My Words to Victor Frankenstein / 147

With one voice, her monster and I answer, “No,” without debasing ourselves,
for we have done the hard work of constituting ourselves, on our own terms,
against the natural order. Though we forego the privilege of naturalness, we
are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness
from which Nature itself spills forth.17
If this is your path, as it is mine, let me offer whatever solace you may find
in this monstrous benediction: May you discover the enlivening power of
darkness within yourself. May it nourish your rage. May your rage inform
your actions, and your actions transform you, as you struggle to transform
your world.

Notes
First published in glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 3 (1994):
237 – 54. Copyright 1994, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
permission of the copyright holder.
1 Raymond, Transsexual Empire, 178; Shelley, Frankenstein, 95.
2 Shelley, Frankenstein, 74.
3 While this comment is intended as a monster’s disdainful dismissal, it neverthe-
less alludes to a substantial debate on the status of transgender practices and iden-
tities in lesbian feminism. H. S. Rubin, in a sociology dissertation in progress at
Brandeis University, [H. Rubin, “Transformations”] argues that the pronounced
demographic upsurge in the female-­to-­male transsexual population during the
1970s and 1980s is directly related to the ascendancy within lesbianism of a “cul-
tural feminism” that disparaged and marginalized practices smacking of an unlib-
erated “gender inversion” model of homosexuality—especially the butch-­femme
roles associated with working-­class lesbian bar culture. Cultural feminism thus
consolidated a lesbian feminist alliance with heterosexual feminism on a middle-­
class basis by capitulating to dominant ideologies of gender. The same suppression
of transgender aspects of lesbian practice, I would add, simultaneously raised the
specter of male-­to-­female transsexual lesbians as a particular threat to the stabil-
ity and purity of nontranssexual lesbian-­feminist identity. See Echols, Daring to Be
Bad, for the broader context of this debate; and Raymond, Transsexual Empire, for
the most vehement example of the antitransgender position.
4 The current meaning of the term transgender is a matter of some debate. The
word was originally coined as a noun in the 1970s by people who resisted catego-
rization as either transvestites or transsexuals and who used the term to describe
their own identity. Unlike transsexuals but like transvestites, transgenders do not
seek surgical alteration of their bodies but do habitually wear clothing that rep-
resents a gender other than the one to which they were assigned at birth. Unlike
transvestites but like transsexuals, however, transgenders do not alter the vesti-
mentary coding of their gender only episodically or primarily for sexual gratifi-

148 / Chapter fourteen

 cation; rather, they consistently and publicly express an ongoing commitment to
their claimed gender identities through the same visual representational strate-
gies used by others to signify that gender. The logic underlying this terminol-
ogy reflects the widespread tendency to construe “gender” as the sociocultural
manifestation of a material “sex.” Thus, while transsexuals express their iden-
tities through a physical change of embodiment, transgenders do so through a
noncorporeal change in public gender expression that is nevertheless more com-
plex than a simple change of clothes. This essay uses transgender in a more recent
sense, however, than its original one. That is, I use it here as an umbrella term
that refers to all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between,
or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries. The term in-
cludes, but is not limited to, transsexuality, heterosexual transvestism, gay drag,
butch lesbianism, and such non-­European identities as the Native American ber-
dache or the Indian Hijra. Like queer, transgender may also be used as a verb or
an adjective. In this essay, transsexuality is considered to be a culturally and his-
torically specific transgender practice/identity through which a transgendered
subject enters into a relationship with medical, psychotherapeutic, and juridical
institutions in order to gain access to certain hormonal and surgical technologies
for enacting and embodying itself.
5 Mikuteit, letter, 3 – 4 (heavily edited for brevity and clarity).
6 The preceding paragraph draws extensively on, and sometimes paraphrases,
O’Hartigan, “I Accuse,” and Kahler, “Does Filisa Blame Seattle?”
7 See Laqueur, Making Sex, 1 – 7, for a brief discussion of the Enlightenment’s effect
on constructions of gender. Feminist interpretations of Frankenstein to which
Brooks responds include Gilbert and Gubar, “Horror’s Twin”; Jacobus, “Is There
a Woman in This Text?”; and Homans, “Bearing Demons.”
8 Openly transsexual speech similarly subverts the logic behind a remark by
Bloom, that “a beautiful ‘monster,’ or even a passable one, would not have been a
monster.” Bloom, afterword, 618.
9 Shelley, Frankenstein, 47. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically.
10 Billings and Urban, in “The Sociomedical Construction of Transsexualism”
(269), document especially well the medical attitude toward transsexual surgery
as one of technical mastery of the body. Irvine, in Disorders of Desire (259), sug-
gests how transsexuality fits into the development of scientific sexology, though
caution is advised in uncritically accepting the interpretation of transsexual ex-
perience she presents in this chapter. In spite of some extremely transphobic con-
cluding comments, Meyer, in “I Dream of Jeannie,” offers a good account of the
medicalization of transgender identities; for a transsexual perspective on the sci-
entific agenda behind sex reassignment techniques. See also Stone, “The ‘Empire’
Strikes Back,” especially the section entitled “All of reality in late capitalist culture
lusts to become an image for its own security” (280 – 304).
11 Russo, The Celluloid Closet, 49 – 50: “Homosexual parallels in Frankenstein (1931)
and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) arose from a vision both films had of the mon-
ster as an antisocial figure in the same way that gay people were ‘things’ that

My Words to Victor Frankenstein / 149

 should not have happened. In both films the homosexuality of director James
Whale may have been a force in the vision.”
12 Shelley, Frankenstein, 116, 130. Subsequent page references are given
parenthetically.
13 In the absence of a reliable critical history of transsexuality, it is best to turn to
the standard medical accounts themselves. See, especially, Benjamin, Transsex-
ual Phenomenon; Green and Money, Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment; and
Stoller, Sex and Gender. For overviews of cross-­cultural variation in the institu-
tionalization of sex/gender, see W. Williams, Spirit and the Flesh, 252 – 76; Shap-
iro, “Transsexualism,” 262 – 68. For accounts of particular institutionalizations of
transgender practices that employ surgical alteration of the genitals, see Nanda,
Neither Man nor Woman; Roscoe, “Priests of the Goddess.” Adventurous read-
ers curious about contemporary nontranssexual genital alteration practices may
contact E.N.I.G.M.A. (Erotic Neoprimitive International Genital Modification
Association), sase to LaFarge-­werks, 2329 N. Leavitt, Chicago, IL 60647.
14 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 16.
15 See Butler, “Introduction,” 4, and passim, Bodies That Matter.
16 A substantial body of scholarship informs these observations: H. Rubin, “Trans-
formations” provides a productive starting point for developing not only a po-
litical economy of sex, but of gendered subjectivity; on gender recruitment and
attribution, see Kessler and McKenna, Gender; on gender as a system of marks
that naturalizes sociological groups based on supposedly shared material similar-
ities, I have been influenced by some ideas on race in Guillaumin, “Race and Na-
ture”; and by Wittig, “The Mark of Gender.”
17 Although I mean “chaos” here in its general sense, it is interesting to speculate
about the potential application of scientific chaos theory to model the emergence
of stable structures of gendered identities out of the unstable matrix of material
attributes, and on the production of proliferating gender identities from a rela-
tively simple set of gendering procedures.

150 / Chapter fourteen

 15
TRANSGENDER STUDIES
Queer Theory’s Evil Twin

If queer theory was born of the union of sexuality studies and feminism,
transgender studies can be considered queer theory’s evil twin: it has the
same parentage but willfully disrupts the privileged family narratives that fa-
vor sexual identity labels (like gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual) over
the gender categories (like man and woman) that enable desire to take shape
and find its aim.
In the first volume of glq, I published my first academic article, “My
Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing
Transgender Rage,” an autobiographically inflected performance piece drawn
from my experiences of coming out as a transsexual. The article addressed
four distinct theoretical moments. The first was Judith Butler’s then recent,
now paradigmatic, linkage of gender with the notion of trouble. Gender’s ab-
sence renders sexuality largely incoherent, yet gender refuses to be the stable
foundation on which a system of sexuality can be theorized.1 A critical reap-
praisal of transsexuality, I felt, promised a timely and significant contribution
to the analysis of the intersection of gender and sexuality.
The second moment was the appearance of Sandy Stone’s “The ‘Empire’
Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” which pointedly criticized Janice G.
Raymond’s paranoiac Transsexual Empire and called on transsexual people
to articulate new narratives of self that better expressed the authenticity of
transgender experience. I considered my article on transgender rage an ex-
plicit answer to that call.
The third moment was Leslie Feinberg’s little pamphlet, Transgender Lib-
eration. Feinberg took a preexisting term, transgender, and invested it with
new meaning, enabling it to become the name for Stone’s theorized post-
transsexualism. Feinberg linked the drive to inhabit this newly envisioned
space to a broader struggle for social justice. I saw myself as a fellow traveler.
Finally, I perceived a tremendous utility, both political and theoretical, in
the new concept of an anti-­essentialist, postidentitarian, strategically fluid
“queerness.” It was through participation in Queer Nation — particularly its
San Francisco – based spin-­off, Transgender Nation — that I sharpened my
theoretical teeth on the practice of transsexuality.
When I came out as transsexual in 1992, I was acutely conscious, both ex-
perientially and intellectually, that transsexuals were considered abject crea-
tures in most feminist and gay or lesbian contexts; yet, I considered myself
both feminist and lesbian. I saw glq as the leading vehicle for advancing the
new queer theory, and I saw in queer theory a potential for attacking the an-
titranssexual moralism so unthinkingly embedded in most progressive anal-
yses of gender and sexuality without resorting to a reactionary, homophobic,
and misogynistic counteroffensive.
I sought instead to dissolve and recast the ground that identity genders
in the process of staking its tent. By denaturalizing and thus deprivileging
nontransgender practices of embodiment and identification, and by simulta-
neously enacting a new narrative of the wedding of self and flesh, I intended
to create new territories, both analytic and material, for a critically refigured
transsexual practice. Embracing and identifying with the figure of Franken-
stein’s monster, claiming the transformative power of a return from abjection,
felt like the right way to go.
Looking back a decade later, I see that in having chosen to speak as a fa-
mous literary monster, I not only found a potent voice through which to
offer an early formulation of transgender theory but also situated myself
(again, like Frankenstein’s monster) in a drama of familial abandonment, a
fantasy of revenge against those who had cast me out, and a yearning for per-
sonal redemption. I wanted to help define queer as a family to which trans­
sexuals belonged. The queer vision that animated my life, and the lives of so
many others in the brief historic moment of the early 1990s, held out the daz-
zling prospect of a compensatory, utopian reconfiguration of community. It
seemed an anti-­oedipal, ecstatic leap into a postmodern space of possibility
in which the foundational containers of desire could be ruptured to release a

152 / Chapter fifteen

raw erotic power that could be harnessed to a radical social agenda. That vi-
sion still takes my breath away.
A decade later, with another Bush in the White House and another war
in the Persian Gulf, it is painfully apparent that the queer revolution of the
early 1990s yielded, at best, only fragile and tenuous forms of liberal prog-
ress in certain sectors and did not radically transform society — and as in
the broader world, so too in the academy. Queer theory has become an en-
trenched, though generally progressive, presence in higher education, but it
has not realized the (admittedly utopian) potential I (perhaps naively) sensed
there for a radical restructuring of our understanding of gender, particularly
of minoritized and marginalized manifestations of gender, such as transsex-
uality. While queer studies remains the most hospitable place to undertake
transgender work, all too often queer remains a code word for “gay” or “les-
bian,” and all too often transgender phenomena are misapprehended through
a lens that privileges sexual orientation and sexual identity as the primary
means of differing from heteronormativity.
Most disturbingly, transgender increasingly functions as the site in which
to contain all gender trouble, thereby helping secure both homosexuality and
heterosexuality as stable and normative categories of personhood. This has
damaging, isolative political corollaries. It is the same developmental logic
that transformed an anti-­assimilationist queer politics into a more palatable
lgbt civil rights movement, with T reduced to merely another (easily de-
tached) genre of sexual identity rather than perceived, like race or class, as
something that cuts across existing sexualities, revealing in often unexpected
ways the means through which all identities achieve their specificities.
The field of transgender studies has taken shape over the past decade in the
shadow of queer theory. Sometimes it has claimed its place in the queer fam-
ily and offered an in-­house critique, and sometimes it has angrily spurned its
lineage and set out to make a home of its own. Either way, transgender stud-
ies is following its own trajectory and has the potential to address emerging
problems in the critical study of gender and sexuality, identity, embodiment,
and desire in ways that gay, lesbian, and queer studies have not always suc-
cessfully managed. This seems particularly true of the ways that transgender
studies resonates with disability studies and intersex studies, two other criti-
cal enterprises that investigate atypical forms of embodiment and subjectivity
that do not readily reduce to heteronormativity, yet that largely fall outside
the analytic framework of sexual identity that so dominates queer theory.
As globalization becomes an ever more inescapable context in which all
our lives transpire, it is increasingly important to be sensitive to the ways that

transgender studies / 153

identities invested with the power of Euro-­American privilege interact with
non-­Western identities. If the history and anthropology of gender and sexu-
ality teach us anything, it is that human culture has created many ways of put-
ting together bodies, subjectivities, social roles, and kinship structures — that
vast apparatus for producing intelligible personhood that we call “gender.” It
is appallingly easy to reproduce the power structures of colonialism by sub-
suming non-­Western configurations of personhood into Western constructs
of sexuality and gender.
It would be misguided to propose transgender studies as queer theory for
the global marketplace — that is, as an intellectual framework that is less in-
clined to export Western notions of sexual selves, less inclined to expropriate
indigenous non-­Western configurations of personhood. Transgender stud-
ies, too, is marked by its First World point of origin. But the critique it has
offered to queer theory is becoming a point of departure for a lively conversa-
tion, involving many speakers from many locations, about the mutability and
specificity of human lives and loves. There remains in that emerging dialogue
a radical queer potential to realize.

Notes
First published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004):
212–15. Copyright 2004, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished
by permission of the copyright holder.
1 Butler, Bodies That Matter.

154 / Chapter fifteen

 16
TRANSING THE QUEER (IN)HUMAN

My very first article, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village
of Chamounix,” published in glq twenty years ago, addressed questions of
transgender embodiment and affect through the figuration of (in)human
monstrosity. I have stayed close ever since to the themes and approaches laid
out in that initial work and have noted with interest how current queer criti-
cal attention to the nonhuman world of objects, and to the weird potential
becomings of vital materialities and matterings, resonate with the concerns I
addressed back then.
At the time, my goal was to find some way to make the subaltern speak.
Transsexuals such as myself were then still subordinated to a hegemonic in-
terlocking of cis sexist feminist censure and homosexual superiority, psycho-­
medical pathologization, legal proscription, mass media stereotyping, and
public ridicule. The only option other than reactively saying “no we’re not”
to every negative assertion about us was to change the conversation, to inau-
gurate a new language game. My strategy for attempting that was to align my
speaking position with everything by which “they” abjected us. It was to forgo
the human, a set of criteria by which I could only fail as an embodied subject.
It was to allow myself to be moved by the centrifugal force pushing me
away from the anthropocentric, to turn that expulsive energy into something
else through affective labor, and to return it with a disruptive difference. I
embraced “darkness” as a condition of interstitiality and unrepresentability
beyond the positive registers of light and name and reason, as a state of trans-
formable negativity, as a groundless primordial resource. As I said then, “I
feel no shame in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with nonhuman
material being. Everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities.”
Speaking as-­if Frankenstein’s monster — an articulate, surgically constructed
(in)human biotechnological entity — felt like a clever, curiously cognizable
strategy for speaking as a transsexual, for talking back to hegemonic forces
and finding a way around.
I like to put parentheses around the “in” in (in)human because what ap-
peals to me most about monstrosity as I have lived it is its intimate vacilla-
tion with human status, the simultaneously there-­and-­not-­there nature of a
relationship between the two. (In)human suggests the gravitational tug of the
human for bodies proximate to it, as well as the human’s magnetic repulsions
of things aligned contrary to it. It speaks to the imperiousness of a human
standard of value that would measure all things yet finds all things lacking
and less-­than in comparison to itself; at the same time, it speaks to the resis-
tance of being enfolded into the human’s inclusive exclusions, to fleeing the
human’s embrace. (In)human thus cuts both ways, toward remaking what
human has meant and might yet come to be, as well as toward what should
be turned away from, abandoned in the name of a better ethics.
Over two decades, I have worked to establish transgender studies as a rec-
ognized interdisciplinary academic field by editing journals and antholo-
gies, organizing conferences, making films, conducting historical research,
training students, hiring faculty, and building programs. My goal has been to
create venues in which trans voices can be in productive dialogue with oth-
ers in ways that reframe the conditions of life for those who — to critically
trans (rather than critically queer) Ruth Gilmore’s definition of racism —
experience “the state-­sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of
group-­differentiated vulnerability to premature death” because of their gen-
der nonnormativity.1
This, for me, has been an “other conversation” that becomes possible when
monsters speak. I consider working to enable more felicitous conditions of
possibility for more powerful acts of transgender speech to be vital work that
nevertheless carries many risks: it can bring too much that might better re-
main wild to the attention of normativizing forces, produce forms of gender
intelligibility that foreclose alternatives and constrain freedom, consolidate
identities in rigid and hierarchized forms, police discourses through institu-
tionalization, and privilege some speakers over others.

156 / Chapter sixteen

 Yet I still believe that advancing transgender studies within the academy
is a risk worth taking if we bring our most radical visions of justice with us
as we try to create something new, something better than the past has be-
queathed us. I see the positive work of building transgender studies as one
way to address half of the (in)human problematic: to abolish what “human”
historically has meant, and to begin to make it mean otherwise through the
inclusion of what it casts out (without, of course, abjecting something else in
the process).
At the same time, in the (in)human problematic’s other dimension, I
am eager to make work with as much distance from the anthropic as possi-
ble. This is what I have tried to explore in the other half of my working life,
through my involvement with the Somatechnics Research Network. Coined
by a group of interdisciplinary critical and cultural studies scholars at Mac-
quarie University in Sydney who were inspired by Nikki Sullivan’s brilliant
deconstructive work on body modification, somatechnics emerged as a short-
hand label for a robust ontological account of embodiment as process.2
Its conversations draw on Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology of
the body as sedimented habitual practices, as well as on rich Australian tra-
ditions of feminist philosophies of the body and critical studies of whiteness,
race, and (post)coloniality.3 Its ethical stance draws much from Jean-­François
Lyotard’s differend and Emmanuel Levinas’s stranger at the door, while its
welcoming of strangeness owes much to queer and crip sensibilities.4
As a portmanteau word (soma, body, + technics, tools or techniques), soma­
technics seeks to name the mutually constitutive and inextricably enmeshed
nature of embodiment and technology, of being(s) and the means or modes
of their (or its) becoming. Like Donna Haraway’s natureculture, somatech-
nics dispenses with the additive logic of the “and” to signify the nonseparate-
ness of phenomena that are misrepresented as the conjunction of separable
parts.5 It plays alongside the Derridean “always already” of embodiment’s
technologization as well as alongside Bernard Stiegler’s notion of the body’s
“originary technicity.”6 At the same time, somatechnics provides a name for
the “whole intermediary cluster of relations” that Michel Foucault tells us tra-
verses the capillary spaces linking the anatamopolitical and biopolitical poles
of biopower, that constitute a nexus of techniques of subjective individual-
ization and techniques of totalizing control of populations.7 It is the circuitry,
and the pulse, through which materiality flexes itself into new arrangements.
Jami Weinstein is right to point out that somatechnics can carry forward a
humanist remainder to whatever extent it concerns itself solely with people.
But why must our interest in bodies be confined to human bodies alone? Fol-

Transing the Queer (In)human / 157

lowing Giorgio Agamben, we can acknowledge that within the metaphysics
of Western biopolitics, the human emerges precisely where bare biological
life (zoe) is simultaneously captured by the political order (polis) to potenti-
ate as the good life while also being excluded as mere life, the life shared with
animals and other entities in the kingdom of the living.8
The threshold of biopolitical viability thus opens in two directions. Soma­
technics, as a frame of reference in which body+milieu+means-­of-­becoming
are constantly trading places and trying on each other’s clothes, has the ca-
pacity to render the human nothing more than a local instantiation of more
fundamental processes under special conditions. If transgender looks back
to the human with the goal of making it something else, somatechnics faces
a posthuman future.
In these repeated trans movements across the cut of (in)human difference,
we find a potential for agential intra-­action through which something truly
new, something queer to what has come before, begins to materialize itself.

Notes
First published in glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2 – 3 (2015):
227 – 30. Copyright 2015, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished
by permission of the copyright holder.
1 Gilmore, Golden Gulag.
2 N. Sullivan, “Transmogrification.”
3 Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
4 Lyotard, The Differend; Levinas, Humanism of the Other.
5 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto.
6 Stiegler, Technics and Time.
7 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1.
8 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1 – 5.

158 / Chapter sixteen

 17
MORE WORDS ABOUT “MY WORDS
TO VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN”

This short essay marks the third time I’ve commented in glq on its publica-
tion of my 1994 article, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village
of Chamounix,” a performative text that riffs on a scene in Mary Shelley’s
novel, in which the creature talks back to its maker, to stage a transsexual re-
tort to the devaluation of trans lives through attributions of unnaturalness
and artificiality. As such, it helps map a particular dimension of queer theo-
ry’s development over the last twenty-­five years.
While it’s difficult to assess the importance of one’s own work, I can cer-
tainly say I’m happy that my Frankenstein article still has a life of its own,
a quarter-­century after I first let it loose in the world, and that it remains
one of the most read works in glq’s history (currently at number two, af-
ter Cathy Cohen’s magnificent “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”).
I have a Google alert set for it and take great pleasure in seeing mentions of
it pop up in my inbox from time to time, like postcards from the Travelocity
gnome that keep me apprised of how and where it moves and of the company
it keeps. It’s gained a cult following, supplying pull-­quotes for innumerable
Tumblr and Twitter accounts, and it has contributed to wide-­ranging schol-
arly conversations on embodiment, techno-­cultural studies, gothic literature,
and science fiction, affect theory, posthumanism, animal studies, radical veg-
anism, philosophy of the body, and the relationship between queer and trans
studies, to name but a few of the contexts in which it has circulated.1
Although I didn’t conceptualize it this way at the time, my Frankenstein
article offered an implicit critique of what, in today’s lingo, could be called an
unstated cisnormative bias in queer theory. As I was writing it, I was reading
the pair of articles on the queer politics of gay shame by Judith Butler and Eve
Sedgwick that opened the inaugural issue of glq and served as a point of de-
parture for a new phase in queer studies’ institutionalization; they supplied
an unacknowledged background to my own thoughts on the affect of rage.2
Shame, as I understood it to be articulated in early queer theory, was
predicated on the prior consolidation of a gendered subject and emanated
from the subjective perception that one was a “bad” instantiation of some-
thing that one recognized and accepted oneself as being. But what if one
balked at that gendering interpellation and was thus compelled to confront
not bad feelings but the hegemonic materio-­discursive practices that produce
the meanings of our flesh to render us men or women in the first place? I was
not ashamed that in the name of my own psychical life I needed to struggle
against the dominant mode of gender’s ontologization — I was enraged.
The first opportunity to reflect on “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”
came in the tenth anniversary issue of glq (2004), to which I contributed an
essay called “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” which made
explicit what previously had been unstated in my earlier work. My own in-
volvement in self-­styled radical queer networks in the early 1990s had led me
to assume that “queer” was a family to which I belonged as a trans person,
and guest-­editing “The Transgender Issue” of glq (1998) helped confirm me
in that belief. But as the new millennium dawned, it felt increasingly neces-
sary to flag the ways that cisnormative queer theory naturalized the binary
gender categories of man and woman, as the enabling condition of queer
sexuality’s intelligibility, and relegated questions about the production of the
categories themselves to a marginal status or treated those questions as alto-
gether extraneous to queer theory. Trans studies, I suggested, like queer of
color or queer crip critique, offered a different way to imagine how queer-
ness could be constituted by attending to other registers of difference than
sexuality.
By the time I revisited the article yet again, in 2015, for glq’s special dou-
ble issue “Queer Inhumanisms,” the ground of queer theory had moved in
directions that made my old article appear more prescient than marginal
in its focus on a mode of embodiment excluded from the status of human
and thereby deemed less worthy of life.3 Reflecting a broader shift in the hu-

160 / Chapter seventeen

manities and social sciences, queer theory increasingly linked a biopolitical
framework, which analyzed the segmentation of populations and the hier-
archizing of its groups, with assemblage theories that helped conceptualize
connections across scales of existence from the subatomic to the cosmic, and
an ontological perspective that emphasized the intrinsic fluidity and liveli-
ness of materiality.
In this emerging paradigm, questions about the interrelatedness of such
categorizations of life as species, race, or sex and of how those categories,
materialized in ways that created greater or less capacities for living, came to
the foreground. As queer theory turned toward establishing transversal con-
nections between many varieties of life enfleshed in ways that subordinated
them to the white heteromasculine able-­bodied figure atop Eurocentric mo-
dernity’s humanist hierarchy of values — Man — it could now look differently
on the figure of transsexual monstrosity already nestled within its folds, wait-
ing to be apprehended anew.
Karen Barad’s “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Po-
litical Imaginings,” published in the “Queer Inhumanisms” issue of glq, ar-
ticulated the affinities between my old Frankenstein article and the so-­called
new materialisms far more cogently than I ever have while deftly calling
needed attention to the fraught relationship I suggested between processes
of transsexuation and racialization. In the original 1994 article, I had writ-
ten that my “rage colors me.” I deliberately played on the polysemic shades of
“color” to make space for holding a question that I did not then know how to
properly frame, let alone answer, but which I would now pose as follows: To
what extent might the affect that emanated from my own enmeshment as a
white transgender person in what Alexander Weheliye has since termed “ra-
cializing biopolitical assemblages” share some kinship with affects emanating
from others who have been differently racialized than I, differently subordi-
nated in the hierarchies of life than I, yet with whom I could strive toward
some commons that better sustains all of our differently enfleshed lives?4
Katrina Roen was the first scholar to comment on that phrase about trans-
gender rage and color in her 2001 article “Transgender Theory and Embodi­
ment: The Risk of Racial Marginalization” and to note, accurately, of me,
“That she is colored by rage is explicit. How she is colored by race is not”
(256). The unstated whiteness norm of academic transgender theorizing is
something with which I have been deeply complicit, even in my best efforts
to do otherwise.
One genealogy of transgender studies traces its root to Sandy Stone’s “The
‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” modeled, in part, on

More Words about “ My Words ” / 161

Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” and written during Stone’s years as
Haraway’s student in the History of Consciousness program at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Haraway explic-
itly acknowledged that her figuration of the cyborg drew on queer of color
feminisms; but Stone, crafting her own manifesto in the heady atmosphere
where Gloria Anzaldúa published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
and Chela Sandoval was writing the dissertation that became Methodology of
the Oppressed, did not make the deeper lineage or broader context of her fig-
uration of the post-­transsexual similarly explicit as her mentor had done for
the cyborg, and it’s taken a generation of scholarship to recover the ancestors
and kin of color invisibilized within the post-­transsexual strand of thinking
that I think of as my home.
In Barad’s engagement with my Frankenstein article, which they approach
from the vantage point of quantum field theory, they dwell on the theme I
dwelled on, of being a becoming that emerges from a nothingness that never-
theless teems with lively potentials. I still think the greatest strength of my ar-
ticle is the way it affectively transforms the experience of being abjected from
the human because of one’s mode of embodiment into the joyously empow-
ering experience of embodying a new modality of techno-­cultural life, predi-
cated on different premises than those that subtend Man. And yet I take to
heart Barad’s critique of the metaphorics I deployed in the representation of
that insight, of being thrown into “darkness,” and emerging from the “black-
ness” from which “Nature itself spills forth.”5
As Barad notes, however much my language aims at voicing a condition of
unrepresentability or interstitiality, however much it strives to communicate
a sense of the void as “full and fecund, rich and productive, actively creative
and alive,” it recapitulates “the underlying metaphysics of colonialist claims
such as terrae nullius — the alleged void that the white settler claims to en-
counter in ‘discovering undeveloped lands,’ that is, lands allegedly devoid of
the marks of ‘civilization’ — a logic that associates the beginning of space and
time, of place and history, with the arrival of the white man.”6
In other words, I inadvertently perpetuate the racist trope of imagining
blackness as the unmarked and unacknowledged condition on which the ex-
istence of whiteness depends. Marquis Bey, in a recent article, “The Trans*-­
ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-­ness,” does a much better job than
I at expressing my ill-­formed intent when he says that blackness and trans-
ness “are differently inflected names for an anoriginal lawlessness” that man-
ifests “in the modern world differently as race and gender fugitivity” (275).

162 / Chapter seventeen

 I have no idea where “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” will go from
here, or what it might have to do with queer theory in the future, or if it and
queer theory will go anywhere else at all from here; all things come to an end
at some point. But as we celebrate the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s novel
and come to an even greater appreciation of how that work has always posed
a feminist and implicitly queer, posthuman critique of Eurocentric biopoliti-
cal modernity, I’d be delighted for my own words to share in some degree the
longevity of the words that inspired them, as they tag along for the ride with
that famous literary monster and, hopefully, find new ways to have some-
thing to say to whatever present moments yet may come.

Notes
First published in glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 1 (2019):
39 – 44. Copyright 2019, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished
by permission of the copyright holder.
1 See Barad, “TransMaterialities”’; Galofre and Misse, Politicas trans; Liberazi-
oni, “Monstri (e) Queer”; N. Sullivan, “Transmogrification”; Weaver, “Monster
Trans”; Zigarovich, The TransGothic in Literature and Culture.
2 Butler, Bodies That Matter; Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity.”
3 See Muñoz et al., “Dossier: Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms.”
4 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus.
5 Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” 251.
6 Barad, “TransMaterialities,” 417.

More Words about “ My Words ” / 163

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CONCLUSION
Interview, McKenzie Wark and Susan Stryker

McKenzie Wark (MW): All right, we are recording. I want to go right back
and ask you a little bit about your PhD. I’d love to know a little more about
that.

Susan Stryker (SS): First, my version of the origin story about you edit-
ing a collection of my work: I saw something on Twitter where I was, I’ll just
say, flattered to see you tweet something like “I really appreciate how Susan
Stryker seems to always be on the edge of the conversation, wherever the
conversation happens to be at a given moment.” I appreciated that you had
a historical perspective, being, like me, a trans of a certain age, who could
offer some long takes on trans-­ness both in and beyond the academy. And
I thought: yeah, thank you. I do try to say what I feel needs to be said in the
moment, and that of course changes over time.
I tweeted back something like: “I’ve been thinking about publishing an
edited collection of my older writings, if anybody would like to do that.” And
then you tweeted: “That’s a hard yes.” I thought, “Oh great, McKenzie’s gonna
do this, check that off life’s big to-­do list.” I really appreciate you taking the
time to work with my words, offering your perspective on them, curating
what is, after thirty years, a voluminous stream of occasional writings.
But, yeah, my PhD work. I wrote on history of religion, on early Mormon
history. I joke about it and say it was a crypto-­queer and trans dissertation.
I’m an old enough trans that, back in the early ’80s when I started graduate
school, the idea of writing a dissertation on the history of sexuality was a
radical idea. Trans history was not anything that was legible to the academy
at that time. But I was able to write a dissertation on what I thought was an
adjacent topic.
A little bit of background. I had trans feelings my whole life, even as a
small child. Around five years old, I started paying attention to what Talia
Bettcher calls the “wtf?” of trans experience; that is, I started asking ques-
tions about how I could be who I was, and what I might need to do to stay
alive as me. By the time I was around ten or eleven, I knew the word trans-
sexual; I knew about surgery and hormones and name changes. I knew that
living your authentic life was an option if you could navigate the process. I
wasn’t sure how to access that, or if that was exactly what I needed to do.
That knowledge planted in my mind this historical question of whether
somebody like me, but who lived before hormones and surgery, might be a
thing. Like, what would you do? How would you live? Could you live? Would
it be possible for somebody in an early historical moment to feel like I felt
if they lived before some of the technical possibilities for changing embodi-
ment existed? Because I certainly had those feelings before I knew about par-
ticular ways of being to act on them.
Or was it that even deeper metahistorical questions were at play? About
how identification and desire take shape in the first place, so that one comes to
want things or to be things in historically specific ways? So, there was always
for me a question about what I would call the historicity of identity, about the
contingency of oneself in the context within which one becomes a self. And
so that question — “haunted” is maybe too melodramatic a word — but cer-
tainly that question was present in my thoughts from very early on.
That historicist bent eventually led me to a PhD program in US history,
at Berkeley, in 1983. My dissertation was titled Making Mormonism: A Case
Study on the Formation of Marginal Cultural Identities. The elevator speech
version is basically this: In 1825 there’s no such thing as a Mormon. The word
doesn’t exist. Twenty years later, there’s a church, a body of scripture, inno-
vative forms of kinship, a social movement, a political movement, an anti-­
Mormon backlash, a transcontinental migration; there are people making
“I-­statements” and “we-­statements” about being a Mormon and belonging to
a Mormon community, referencing an identity that simply didn’t exist when
most of the people identifying as such were born. There was a tremendous

166 / Conclusion
amount of cultural activity that took place around and through the emer-
gence of a new category of personal and collective identity.
Those are exactly the kinds of questions that I was interested in, as a trans
person, about trans-­ness. I wrote my dissertation on Mormonism to explore
those questions. And then, as I started transitioning late in grad school, it
became really clear to me that being an out trans lesbian was not exactly the
easiest way to get a job as a professor of early national period US history, spe-
cializing in the cultural history of religion, focusing specifically on Mormons.

MW: Or anything, really.

SS: Right. One of my other bitter jokes is that most trans women are allowed
to have only one job, which is figuring out how to get other people to pay
them for being a trans woman. I put aside for many years the idea that I
would ever have an academic career, and just got busy trying to figure out
how to make money as a trans woman using whatever skills I could muster,
through whatever opportunities I could create for myself. I thought, well,
okay, I know how to think historically, I can do archival research, I know how
to write and talk. I’m just gonna start doing work in trans history, culture,
politics, art, whatever, and figure out how to get paid for it. I never published
my dissertation, but I gutted its theoretical and methodological apparatus to
inform the work that I started doing on trans history in the early ’90s. It ab-
solutely shaped how I think.

MW: The first section of your writing that I put together is mostly set in
“Trans SanFrisco,” in the Bay Area in the early ’90s. What is your impression,
looking back now, on what that context was like? I’m interested in what was
enabling and what was not for a kind of a trans person at that time.

SS: I started at Berkeley in 1983 and finished in ’91, although the degree was
not awarded until ’92. I’ve quipped that my academic training at Berkeley
took place between the time Foucault left (I overlapped with him by a semes-
ter) and the time Judith Butler arrived. There was an intellectual conversation
happening at Berkeley in the wake of Foucault that was trending in the direc-
tion of Butler. Tom Laqueur was writing on the development of the one-­sex
versus two-­sex model of the body.1 A lot of folks there, grad students as well
as faculty, were interested in the history of the body. I lurked on the fringes of
the “Med-­Heads” reading group, a nexus for a whole generation of scholar-
ship on histories of medicine and science about the body. It was a really rich
intellectual environment.

Interview, Wark and Stryker / 167

 At the same time, I was coming into a still rather under-­the-­radar involve-
ment in San Francisco’s queer, trans, and kink communities. I was definitely
exploring that by the mid-­’80s. One foot in the ivory tower and the other foot
in the dungeons and drag bars — a very precarious position to try to hold! I
was thinking and theorizing academically and also learning about some of
the things I thought about in a more embodied sense. I was learning a meth-
odology of thinking through the flesh. San Francisco in the ’80s was an in-
tense place for doing that, with a very political and edgy radical sexuality
underground.
Even though San Francisco in the ’80s was already expensive, it was not
nearly as expensive as it became later. There was still an underground art
scene. There was still a counterculture. The aids crisis gave queer politics
an urgency. It was just an interesting place to be. And then the ’90s: with the
Gulf War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of the internet, with
what Alan Greenspan at the Fed was calling the “irrational exuberance” of the
stock market, the heady early days of a new kind of global capitalism, the pre-
millennial fantasies that people were having about the fin de siècle — life felt
productively unsettled and full of potential because of the depth of change,
as well as full of new challenges. I remember both utopian fantasies and a lot
of reasons for continued outrage in the early ’90s. I mean, the aids crisis was
still utterly unchecked; this was before the antiviral cocktails. But it seemed
to me personally that I had an opportunity to bring together parts of my life
that had been separated, divorced from one another, that could be rearticu-
lated in some better way.
That was certainly my experience in trying to navigate a new way of being
trans, in relation to subcultural spaces and the academy and the street. The
experiences one might have in dungeons and drag bars, or with the commu-
nity of people you’re having sex with, were not exactly what you would talk
about in the classroom. Nor, on a date, would you necessarily talk about post-
structuralist gender theory, or Foucault’s notion of counter-­conduct — though
dates where you did were especially fun.
There was a collapse of boundaries in the ’90s that I still look back on with
great fondness. This was the moment when queer theory was coming into
the academy, and I was already thinking: queer theory gets us certain ways
down the road, but it doesn’t deal with trans issues in quite the right way.
That’s when I started thinking: What might the intellectual project of a trans
studies be?
I don’t want to be nostalgic and say that when I was young, those were the
best days, the golden age. But there was something that I found quite special

168 / Conclusion
happening in “my” San Francisco between say, 1990 and 1995, that I did not
see happening elsewhere. I certainly saw potentials there that didn’t mani-
fest, that did not become what they could have been, but there was a lot else
going on that I see as having a profound and lasting impact, a kind of Guat-
tarian “molecular revolution” that rearranged the material conditions of life.2
That sense of attending to what was at stake, having a sense of what changed,
what persisted, what fell by the wayside is one of the things that made me in-
terested in your curation of some of my work focusing on that period. I think
you have your own perspective on that period, something to triangulate
from, when you pick and choose some of my pieces from that time. You’re
attuned to some of those things that I was seeing and trying to write about.

MW: We are close contemporaries in cis-­birth years, even though I came out
so much later. I found that an interesting pair of perspectives to bring, as
someone who was raised as a trans woman by millennials, but who is your
contemporary in numbers of times we’ve been ’round the sun.
A thing I want to ask you about those pieces from the ’90s has to do with,
as you say, having one foot in dungeons and drag bars and one foot in Berke-
ley. There’s a way that the writing as form has to negotiate between those
spaces. You could call what you were writing autofiction or autotheory, if one
wanted. The dual situations were putting pressure on the form. And so there
is this “I” that’s present in the texts, but it’s not memoir or confession or any-
thing like that. It’s a kind of multiply situated prose. I wonder what you were
reading that headed you in that direction and how you felt about writing?

SS: If I had to say what was an inspiration, I really think it was Chicana fem-
inisms. It’s Gloria Anzaldúa, it’s Cherríe Moraga.3 Something about that
phrase “theory in the flesh,” it was a light bulb that went off in my head.
That’s what feminism is about for me, writing and thinking and acting from
a position of embodied difference vis-­à-­vis an oppressive norm — in this case
androcentrism. Same with writing from a position of racial minoritization or
writing about disability, there’s this whole — I don’t want to say genre — but a
whole cluster of academic fields, or fields of literary production and politics,
that revolve around how you take the knowledge generated by how you move
your body through the world. Then there’s more formally legitimated aca-
demic, discursive forms of disciplinary knowledge. Finding a way to toggle
between those two ways of knowing just really seemed like the problem to be
solved when I was trying to write and think as trans, about trans.
There were things I was learning in community that felt very intellectu-
ally and politically and aesthetically exciting. Ways of being with people in

Interview, Wark and Stryker / 169

subcultural spaces that, for me, were taking place alongside a more formally
legitimated academic kind of knowledge.
I was very self-­conscious about trying to write and publish in venues that
might not seem like they would go together: queer porn zines like Taste of La-
tex, and in the pages of a then-­new queer theory journal called glq. I wanted
to write about similar kinds of things in each space, in different vernaculars
and idioms, tweaked slightly more in one direction than another, depending
on the audience. I wanted to say the unsaid things, whatever was usually un-
said in a given space.
I did have an embodied and experiential sense that being trans involved a
change of form that could shift one in a different genre or gender — what the
historian Leah DeVun has recently called a “shape of sex,” or a phenotype,
that has a relationship to social categorization — meaning one can change
physical shape to change social place.4 Trying to express that in writing, it
just seemed like a no-­brainer to use words in ways that put pressure on form,
that shift genres or that stitch together things that are usually considered in-
congruous or anomalous or incompatible or incommensurable with one an-
other. I had a lived sense of being a shambolic assemblage of things, of trying
to hold together parts that don’t usually go together. That was just very much
what it felt like to be me at that time.

MW: Putting pressure on forms is exactly what a transition is. And we’re also
theory in the flesh — or vice versa. You use the device of journal entries some-
times. I’m curious if that’s a device or if you actually kept journals.

SS: I do keep journals. And I do draw from them in my published writing.

But I also give myself permission to revise and extrapolate and fictionalize
for rhetorical effect.

MW: There’s a shift in the work as we move toward the later ’90s and into
the early part of this century. In the middle part of the book, I put together
a series of pieces that have more formal academic venues. You’re address-
ing historians, you’re addressing gay and lesbian studies, addressing femi-
nism. There’s arguments for where trans-­ness fits in relation to each of those
discourses that excluded us or made us tokens. How do you feel about the
change toward more frequently appearing in that sort of discursive space?

SS: To me it felt like the early ’90s was a moment of explosion, and that I
was writing in more of what you’d call an autotheoretical or autofictional
style as a way of trying to capture it all more or less on the fly. It felt very ex-
ploratory, experimental, and open-­ended. I was indeed very self-­consciously

170 / Conclusion
playing with form. I was going through my public and medicalized transi-
tion in those years. I’d been active in gender-­bent leather subcultures since
the ’80s, but didn’t start publicly transitioning until 1991 – 92. That’s when I
was first coming out, dealing with what it means to be perceived as trans,
what that means for my working life and daily life, and not just how I occu-
pied subcultural spaces.
By the later ’90s, I was in a different position in life. I kind of joke about
it and say, 1991 to 1998 was my seven-­year unpaid residential fellowship in
transgender studies. By around 1998, I was starting to get some grant fund-
ing for some of my research. My finances improved a little bit, my working
life improved a little bit. I was taking things that I had learned from “livin’ la
vida loca” for a number of years, and then starting to situate that in more aca-
demic contexts. How is trans experience related to feminist studies, or how
does it relate to queer theory? How does it relate to other fields of inquiry?
I was very “elbows out” about it. I felt I needed to clear a space for conversa-
tions about trans-­ness (whatever we want to call trans-­ness, whatever we say it
means or does) that were not co-­opted within antithetical power/knowledge
formations or other discursive regimes. I’m very ecumenical — like, if you call
it trans, great, it’s trans, let’s have big-­tent trans! But then let’s have a conver-
sation among us about what’s at stake, in dialogue with whomever wants to
join in, about what trans-­ness is. My goal was to make space for conversations
that centered trans experience, trans lives, trans perspectives, trans theories,
without subordinating that to some other perspective.
That was the next phase of my working life. I had an opportunity to build
on my privileges. Having come from a working-class rural white background,
I never had class privilege, but I certainly had racial privilege, and I had the
opportunity to access higher education; I took full advantage of that. Higher
education put me in a different place in life, regardless of how marginalized
my trans-­ness made me. Because of that privilege, I felt like I was able, by the
end of the ’90s, to access a platform for doing a kind of trans work that is still
not always available to trans women. I started doing the work of building a
trans studies in the academy, and I thought of this as political work, in that it
intervened in the power/knowledge formations that directly impacted trans
lives and could help foster practices of knowing differently.
I undertook that field-­building work very deliberately. I don’t think the
institutionalization of new fields is the be-­all end-­all. I know the importance
in my own life of the kinds of politics and cultural production that takes
place outside the academy, but the academy can still be a very well-­resourced
place, a place that allows academic workers to intervene sociopolitically in

Interview, Wark and Stryker / 171

the kinds of formally legitimated knowledges that get made, which in turn
inform the lives that people live. I do see working to foster a trans studies
as creating more life chances for trans people and more trans people in the
academy. The academy, and how it puts a stamp on what it deems possible
to know, and how best to know, and what counts as better or worse ways of
knowing, is an arena for social struggle. I mean, it’s not the revolution, to
get the full professorship at an Ivy League university, but if you can do that,
and you can access some of the resources attached to that, and you can use it
for the cause, well, more power to you. All hail the “undercommons” of the
Enlightenment.5

MW: I choose to start the second section with an appreciation you wrote for
Gayle Rubin. I love the detail where you meet Gayle in a gay bar.

SS: I was at a fundraiser at the Eagle, a gay leather bar, for the Beat Jesse
Helms Flog-­A-­Thon. She was the DJ and I was like, “Who is that cute butch,
just like spinning this cool industrial kinda stuff?” I started chatting her up
between sets, and suddenly realized who she was. And it was like, “Oh, hey,
you’re Gayle Rubin! I’ve read the ‘Traffic in Women’ and ‘Thinking Sex.’ Nice
to meet ya!” We became good friends.
Gayle had the same kind of professional life that I did. She had made these
incredible contributions to feminist scholarship, gender and sexuality schol-
arship. But she could not find a job to save her soul. That’s how we knew
each other in San Francisco. We were in reading groups together, we shared
research, we hung out in the same circles, and neither of us was employable
right at that moment. You can be doing important intellectual work, and that
just doesn’t translate into having an academic job.

MW: It’s so often that’s where the interesting stuff comes from. Someone has
an intellectual practice that they need to live, rather than from the seminar,
but it’s good to be able to have access to the academy and create access. It’s a
general question I wanted to ask actually. The specific bit of it is: Did we lose
the thread of what was there to be learned from bdsm worlds in things like
trans studies? Or stated more generally: Did we lose things from the kind of
more, kind of open, avant-­garde bohemian worlds that many of us came up
through?

SS: You know, that’s kind of what I feel. I feel like by around ’95 – 96 there was
this new word — well to me, transgender was already an old word. It first ap-
pears around 1965 as far as anybody can tell, but it really begins to take off
as a popular term in ’92 – 93. It was seen as something that replaced trans­

172 / Conclusion
sexual. It was initially something that meant something much more like gen-
derqueer or nonbinary when it was popularized in the early ’90s. It was a thing
of expansive possibilities, not constrained by medicalized psychotherapeutic
gatekeeping.
As the term transgender took deeper root, it began to index a shift toward,
or co-­optation by, a neoliberal politics of minority identity and diversity. It
came to be seen as something that was highly assimilable, just another candy-­
colored rainbow flavor. It came to be seen as depoliticized. It became a con-
cept that was useful for the biopolitical management of the population, an
identity category that could be expanded or contracted based on some exte-
rior political rationale rather than a radical sociocultural formation for blow-
ing shit up. Which is what it felt like to be in the early ’90s. So yeah, I do think
something was lost in that transition.
I have not been one of these trans people of late who will say: “Oh, we have
to use the word transsexual, not transgender, because that’s how we acknowl-
edge our sexuality and avoid depoliticizing trans-­ness and evacuating it of all
danger.” For me, transgender in the ’90s was an intensely politicized and sex-
ualized erotic space. Not necessarily in a way that was eroticized or sexual-
ized from the outside in an oppressive way. Just a sexy AF space to be in. It felt
alive and vital; cruisy and flirty and playful, with lots of hookups and cluster-
fucks. It felt like throwing off the traces of the culture that you had inherited
and inventing something new and feeling the release of a lot of libidinal en-
ergy. And that felt great. I do think that sense has been lost. I think some of
it has been lost, honestly, because most people don’t live in tightly knit urban
communities of self-­styled radical exploratory, bohemian, people who want
to touch, taste, lick, smell, and poke, or get poked by other people in as many
ways as possible. I think it’s harder to find your way to those places and work
your way into them. I think there are fewer such communal and collective
spaces, because internet-­based sex is so channelized and privatized.
There’s a lot more people who now identify as trans now than in the ’90s,
and they all bring their own sense of what trans-­ness means to them to that
identity label, derived from the context in which they’ve come up and where
their sense of self has been shaped. There’s been a lot of mainstreaming of
trans-­ness, a lot of capture.
Of course, there’s also still a lot of repression. We in the US live in a coun-
try where reactionary political forces are actually making it a thought crime
to talk about trans-­ness and a felony to provide trans health care to the young.
After a period of relatively expansive increases in trans civil rights, it’s becom-
ing possible again to exclude more and more trans people from more and

Interview, Wark and Stryker / 173

more walks of public life. Increased trans visibility in recent decades has led
to increased antitrans violence, disproportionately directed at trans women
of color. When you live in such a world, do you have as much time for the
kind of radical, experimental, drug-­fueled, party-­oriented, late-­night subcul-
tural exploration of ways of being different that I can easily romanticize about
the early 90s? Maybe “kids today,” besides having come up as trans in very
different circumstance, are needing to pay attention to survival in a different
kind of way.
It feels very sobering right now, the political environment not just in the
US, but globally, with the rise of authoritarian, ethno-­nationalist, neofascist
movements, with the war in Ukraine, with the environmental situation we
live in. It’s all pretty dire. I would hope that out of trans experience, analysis,
and life we can find resources for living there that we can not only cultivate
among ourselves, for ourselves — but that are shareable with other people. I
hope there can be a revitalized sense of radical trans cultural production and
intervention. Back in the ’80s in San Francisco, we talked about culture jam-
ming.6 I’d love to see a little more culture jamming and hacking of systems of
oppression that can be informed by trans experience. I hope that’s coming,
that it’s happening. I’ll do my part —

MW: I hadn’t intended we have this conversation on the “day of trans visibil-
ity,” but given that we are: there is this argument that visibility turned out to
be not only a two-­edged sword, but maybe a bad thing, particularly for trans
people of color. And I wonder if you had thoughts on that.

SS: I think visibility is a place to struggle. I always think about that dichoto-
mous form of argument: “Topic X: good or bad?” Well, topic X is just a place
where a struggle is happening. It’s a terrain, not a side. And so, yes, at one
level: transvisibility is good. Positive representation in mass media is good;
it’s how trans people know that trans people exist, and see validation and pos-
sibilities for themselves. On the other hand, if that visibility just puts a target
on your face, or on your sister’s face, it’s bad. It really has everything to do, I
think, with the social positionality of what is being made visible and the in-
tentions enacted by the people who see something.
I gave a talk recently that drew a considerable amount of transphobic femi-
nist attention. I was giving a keynote at a lesbian studies conference whose
theme was “solidarity”; but a lot of so-­called terf-­y, gender critical, trans-
phobic feminist stuff got pointed at me on social media. The organizers and I
were getting harassing phone calls and emails and social media postings and
all that. In such situations, it feels like I don’t want to make any noise; it’s like

174 / Conclusion
being in a zombie movie, where any bump, any noise, and they’ll know right
where to go and get you. So, you want to be imperceptible, or you want to
talk just to the people you want to be with, without drawing anybody else’s
attention.
Looking ahead, I think that strategy of imperceptibility, or of strategic visi-
bility, is going to become increasingly important. When the world pays atten-
tion to trans right now, it’s usually not a good thing. So how do we become
imperceptible to hostile forces, while continuing to live our lives and finding
each other? That to me feels like a really important question.

MW: Since you mentioned zombies, I get to segue to one of your most famous
pieces of writing, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.” In the third part of our
book, I’ve put together several reflections on its reverberations that you’ve
written since it came out. It’s kind of like this rhythm. I wanted to ask you in
2022 how you’re thinking about that text.

SS: Who knew it was gonna become that thing that it became? Not me. I
thought it was a one-­off, and it almost didn’t get published. And now it’s an
inveterate global traveler. I’ve put a Google alert on it, and news of it shows
up from time to time in my inbox. “Oh, look, a radical vegan collective in
Northern Italy wants to translate it because they’re seeing in it this interspe-
cies posthuman veganesque ethos at work.” “Oh, look, a Scandinavian glitter
punk band has set it to music, and they’re screaming it at their audience in
some basement club in Stockholm.” The work gets out there and circulates in
ways I never would have imagined when I wrote it.
It sometimes feels like I’m like one of those old school, one-­hit wonders,
who’s doing the musical variety showcase on a pbs pledge drive: “Here’s Su-
san Stryker performing her classic hit from 1994, ‘My Words to Victor Fran-
kenstein,’ let’s give the little lady a big round of applause!” But it’s kind of
interesting to see what now feels dated, as well as what still feels prescient in
that work. And to reflect on the fact that it is still something that gets cited
a lot.
Duke University Press recently sent me a new book by Nicole Erin Morse,
Selfie Aesthetics; they use my Frankenstein piece as a way of framing their
questions about the aesthetics of trans self-­representation in digital media.7
Who knew that would be a use that somebody would make of that article in
1994?
The development that has surprised me the most, though, is the way it’s
being increasingly put in conversation with black feminisms, particularly
around the question of a primordial, prediscursive, outside of representa-

Interview, Wark and Stryker / 175

tion, cosmological sense of nonbiological generativity. What Zakiyyah Iman
Jackson has called “theorizing in a void.”8 Or what Hortense Spillers is writ-
ing about.9 This sense of a generative or insurgent ground that is the well-
spring of everything. I felt like in my “Frankenstein” piece, I was following
what trans experience was teaching me about feeling thrown outside of hu-
man community. And about the kind of affective work that’s necessary to
take that sense of abjection and make it something transformative that refig-
ures not just you yourself but the world you’re in, something that moves to-
ward life by refusing the terms that subordinate you, that threaten to kill you,
whether that’s gender or something else.
When you refuse an ontological framework that excludes the possibility of
your existence and tries to erase you so the framework will be true, what does
that refusal then throw you into? To me, that space of refusal and possibility
felt like the void of interstellar space, or the cosmological spacetime before
the big bang or something.
That space felt like it manifested itself to me, held me within itself as a pos-
sibility. And told me that a profound difference was possible from the existing
order of things, that the social systems that rank and hierarchize and order
life, that diminish some life and elevate others — that there’s nothing ontolog-
ically given about that. It’s something that people make up and do. There are
other ways of being.
I felt like I got that from my own white trans experience, but I see simi-
lar ideas coming out of black feminist traditions. And I’ve been really inter-
ested in how a new generation of scholarship is putting gender-­trans-­ness
and the “trans-­ness of blackness” into conversation. Certain passages in my
old “Frankenstein” piece are functioning as switch-­points that allow conver-
sations that have taken place in two different locations to start being more in
dialogue. That’s the thing that has surprised and thrilled me the most about
a piece I wrote as a one-­off, almost thirty years ago.

MW: Starting in the ’90s, your writing is taking trans-­ness out of the hands
of doctors and psychiatrists. You’re finding all of these different languages to
rewrite it. There’s political language, obviously, cultural language, aesthetic
language, language of affect — it’s famously about rage. There’s also a spiri-
tual language here that emerges from time to time. And can we say a little
bit about that?

SS: It goes back maybe to the dissertation work, but I have always sensed
these affinities about how, without sharing the beliefs of the people that I
wrote my dissertation on, I was impressed and moved and informed and

176 / Conclusion
inspired by the sense in early Mormon history of a transformative poten-
tial for being-­in-­the-­world, available to people through so-­called religious
experience, or ecstatic experience. That those experiences can be a way of
re-­worlding.
It’s the same thing I like in science fiction, in speculative fiction, that sense
of feeling the freedom to really imagine how things can be otherwise. I like
to pay attention to the affective dimensions that link one’s own experience,
not just to other people, but to the nonhuman and more-­than-­human cos-
mos that we live in. That same sense that I have seen expressed in a religious
or spiritual language, I feel is also part of trans experience.
We live in the late Anthropocene. The Eurocentric world order that has
emerged out of the legacies of colonialism and racial chattel slavery, the epis-
temology of scientific modernity that is part of the control and command
structure of a global capitalist economy, is a particular, historically contingent
way of being that is deadly for ourselves and the planet. We have to find our
way out of it. The modernist framework contains a secular/spiritual dichot-
omy that deadens us.
If you’re really paying attention to how feeling works, to how ontology
works, you have to pay attention to what gets called, for lack of a better word,
the spiritual. It’s part of recognizing the connections between those of us who
are trying to worm our way out of the belly of the beast of Eurocentric mo-
dernity toward things that were known in premodern times, things that are
part of non-­Western cultures, things that are part of indigenous worldviews,
things that are part of a speculative and experimental orientation toward the
future.
Attending to what gets called the spiritual is part of the political work we
need to be doing, to actually be reworlding. I think at an even deeper level,
that to phrase things that way implies a sense of hopefulness for the future.
This is the future that we’re going to build. But I want to be really mindful
of the fact that we might not make it as a species or as . . . well, we might not
make it much longer as a species, let’s just leave it at that.
And there’s the question of death. I mean, we all die individually. But are
we also going to die collectively, in the not-­too-­distant future? It’s a real ques-
tion. Dealing with that question of how you confront death, and make mean-
ing in life, is really important. Trans people are often associated with death.
Death sticks to us in these necropolitical ways — to some of us more than
others.10
I think a lot of transphobia is rooted in the sense that trans is somehow
a destruction of life. That trans-­ness can involve physically sterilizing re-

Interview, Wark and Stryker / 177

productive capacities, depending on what genital modification you might
pursue. It could certainly be connected with a refusal of biological reproduc-
tivity through your affectional choices, even if you are a biologically repro-
ductive trans person. Acknowledging the proximity of trans-­ness and death
can be a source of power, not to be disavowed — it can be a form of transcul-
tural production, and knowledge-­formation. We confront what it means to
make meaning in life, without denying the reality of death. That’s a body of
experience-­based knowledge that is useful to other people as well as to our-
selves. Can we think about trans people as having a special capacity or cer-
emonial function, to serve as death doulas for our culture, ritualizing and
celebrating the inevitability of transitions?

MW: Oh, yeah. I totally feel you on that.

SS: I use psychedelics, I’m pretty open about that. There was something that
came to me in an experience once, where I saw this banner in my mind’s eye
that said: “The meaning of life is to experience joy as we move toward death.”
I came back from that trip, and I thought: that’s a pretty good one sentence
philosophy. I’m gonna stick by that one. Thank you, chemical teacher.

Notes
1 Laqueur, Making Sex.
2 Guattari, Molecular Revolution.
3 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; Moraga, Native Country of the Heart.
4 DeVun, The Shape of Sex.
5 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons.
6 DeLaure and Fink, Culture Jamming.
7 Morse, Selfie Aesthetics.
8 Jackson, “Theorizing in a Void.”
9 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”
10 Mbembe, Necropolitics.

178 / Conclusion
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 Index

abjection, 53, 100; and trans-ness, 11 – 12, 133. See also Diagnostic and Statistical
15, 126, 137, 143, 146, 152, 155, 157, 162, Manual of Mental Disorders (dsm)
176 Anarchorporeality Project, 41 – 49
academia, 93, 118, 120, 128, 133 – 34, 151; ancestry.com, 84
dissertations, 95, 127, 148n3, 162, Anne, 141 – 42
165 – 67, 176; exclusions from, 95, 103, antebellum clothing reform movement,
107, 119, 167, 172; queer intellectuals in, 100
8; queer studies in, 63, 153; tenure, 103; Anthropocene, 14, 177
trans scholars in, 3 – 4, 8, 80, 84, 99, anti-Apartheid movement, 2
127, 165 – 72; trans studies in, 35, 107, anti-assimilationism, 48, 136, 153
156 – 57, 161, 165 – 66, 171. See also dis- antifoundationalism, 103
ciplinarity; graduate school; higher antiretrovirals, 2, 88
education; professors anohni and the Johnsons: “The Cripple
academic conferences, 8, 68, 93 – 97, and the Starfish,” 69
133 – 34, 156, 174. See also individual Anzaldúa, Gloria, 130, 162, 169
conferences Arkansas, 83
academic drag, 10 Art Institute of Chicago, 45
academic job market, 171 – 72. See also aru Gallery, 35
adjuncts asexuality, 106
academic journals, 118 – 21, 156, 170 assimilation, 48, 109, 113, 120, 173. See also
Acker, Kathy, 7 anti-assimilationism
act-up, 12, 111 Australia: Sydney, 2, 157
Adair, Cass, 18n8 autobiography, 5 – 6, 18n15, 38 – 39, 86 – 87,
adjuncts, 4, 80 123, 151. See also memoir
aesthetics, 5, 12, 37, 42, 54, 60, 134, 169, autoethnography, 61
175 – 76 autofiction, 5 – 6, 169 – 70
affective labor, 16, 155 autotheory, 6, 18n20, 169 – 70
affirmative action, 103, 107 avant-garde, 4, 7, 69, 172
African Americans, 37 – 38
Agamben, Giorgio, 158
Bachelard, Gaston, 62, 66 – 67
agency, 7, 9, 54, 66, 147
bar (Bay Area Reporter), 112
agender (term), 10
Barad, Karen, 16, 161 – 62
aids. See hiv/aids
Barnard Conference on Sexuality, 8, 96
Albatross, 23 – 26
Bay Times, 112
Alternative Press Index, 128
bdsm. See s/m
American Psychiatric Association, 126,
Beat Jesse Helms Flog-A-Thon, 94, 172
Beatty, Christine: Misery Loves Com- butch-femme cultures, 56, 115, 148nn3 – 4
pany, 36 Butler, Judith, 9, 15, 46, 114, 146, 151, 160,
Beauvoir, Simone de, 124 167
becoming transgender, 5
Bell, Shannon, 62
California Academy of the Arts, 35
Bergman, Ingmar, 77
California State University, San Mar-
Bergson, Henri, 64 – 65
cos, 133
Berkeley, CA, 59, 94, 114, 143, 166 – 67, 169
Cameron, Loren, 42; Our Vision, Our
Bérubé, Allan, 95
Voices, 35
Bettcher, Talia, 166
caning, 26, 31
Bey, Marquis, 17, 162
capitalism, 2, 59, 73, 88, 102, 149n10, 168,
Big Berks (Berkshire Conference on the
177; racial, 17
History of Women, Genders, and
cárdenas, micha, 85
Sexualities), 123
castration, 39, 43 – 45, 47
Billings, Dwight B., 108n4, 149n10
Catacombs, 60
biological determinism, 112
Chen, Jian Neo, 17
biology, 9, 99, 101 – 2, 112, 143, 158, 178
Chesapeake Bay Tidewater, 83
bio-materiality, 84
China, 2
biopolitics, 16, 60, 129, 157–58, 161, 163, 173
chora, 69
bisexuality, 10, 17, 46, 77, 103, 106, 110, 111,
Christianity, 47, 135. See also Mormons
113 – 14, 118, 121n7, 136, 151
Christopher Street Liberation Day, 128
Black and Blue Tattoo, 60, 88
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Black feminisms, 175 – 76
Saints. See Mormons
Blackness, 130; and trans-ness, 17, 162
cis gaze, 6, 14
Blade Runner, 57, 87
cisgender people, 15, 17, 87. See also non-
Bloomer, Amelia, 100
transgender people
body alteration/modification, 7, 15,
cisnormativity, 15, 160
42 – 44, 67 – 68, 112, 126, 157. See also
cis sexism, 155
hormones; sexual surgeries
citizenship, 10, 99
body performance artwork, 42
Civil War (US), 37, 59, 107
bohemian spaces, 2, 4 – 5, 7, 17n3, 26, 79,
The Clash, 72
172 – 73
Clinton, Bill, 111
Bombardier, Cooper Lee, 7, 58, 87 – 89;
the closet, 3, 78, 128, 139
Pass with Care, 8
Club Confidential, 88
bondage, 24 – 26, 51
Cohen, Cathy, 159
Bornstein, Kate, 35
Cold War, 88
Brandeis University, 148n3
colonialism/imperialism, 9, 88, 154, 157,
Brat Attack, 34
162, 177; neo-, 129
Brooks, Peter, 137, 149n7
coming out, 1 – 4, 7, 17, 18n15, 95, 127, 151,
bulldykes, 30
152, 169, 171
Burning Spear, 72
Compton’s Cafeteria riot, 11, 116 – 19
Bush, George W., 153
Connell, R.W., 18n7
butches, 11, 56, 79, 115, 148n3, 172; butch
consciousness-raising, 101
bottoms, 54; stone, 121n5
Constantinou, Sophie: Trans, 35

190 / Index
counter-conduct, 168 dungeons (s/m play spaces), 94, 112,
counterculture, 26, 117, 168 168 – 69
cowboy subculture, 115 dyke (term), 48, 136
critically transing, 156 dykes, 77, 134, 147; bulldykes, 30; butch
critical race studies, 101 dykes, 11, 54, 56, 79; diesel dykes,
cross-dressing, 1, 74, 96, 100, 110, 112, 128, 121n5; dyke spaces, 34 – 35, 60, 88;
130. See also transvestite (identity) femme dykes, 11, 56; leatherdykes, 13,
Crossing the Line (exhibit), 35 94, 135, 143. See also lesbians
culture jamming, 174 Dyke Tactics, 128

Daly, Mary, 134 – 35 Eagle, 8, 94, 172. See also Beat Jesse
Daughters of Bilitis, 115 Helms Flog-A-Thon
Dear Abby, 74, 124 East Bay, 59
death, 3, 68, 88, 114, 125, 140; and trans- ecosexual post-porn art activists, 85
phobia, 13, 15, 130, 136, 156, 177 – 78 848 Community Art Space, 35
Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 67 Elliot, Beth, 128
Democratic Party, 94 embodied knowledges, 61, 120
Denali, 141 – 42 Employment Nondiscrimination Act,
Deneuve, 34 111, 129
depathologization, 42 Enke, Finn, 128
Derrida, Jacques, 157 Enlightenment, 138, 149n7
DeVun, Leah, 170 epistemology, 11, 102 – 3, 119 – 20, 137
diagnosis, 42, 45, 126 Equal Rights Amendment (era), 101,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Men- 125, 128
tal Disorders (DSM), 42, 126 essentialism, 9, 103, 152
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 71n23 estrogen, 13, 44, 135
disability, 10, 104 – 5, 120, 128, 169 eunuchs, 44, 130
disability studies, 101, 153 Eurocentrism, 9, 11, 99, 102, 106, 120, 128,
disciplinarity, 95, 169; and homonorma- 161, 163, 177
tivity, 109 – 21; normativizing, 11, 119
discrimination, 10, 37, 105, 114, 117 – 18,
fascism, 47, 61, 135, 174
125
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 77
dive bars, 5, 55, 88
Feinberg, Leslie, 10, 15, 110, 121n5, 152
Dodge, Harry, 60, 88
female impersonation, 54, 115
Dodge Brothers, 88
The Feminine Mystique, 125
drag, 54, 101, 110, 121n7, 148n4; academic,
femininity, 14, 44, 74, 100 – 101, 104, 115,
10; genderfuck, 134; street, 115
125 – 26, 138. See also femmes
drag bars, 54, 94, 168 – 69
feminism, 112, 120, 138, 149n7, 163, 169,
drag kings, 58, 121n5
172; Black, 175 – 76; Chicana, 169;
drag queens, 116 – 17
cis sexist, 155; cultural, 100, 108n4,
Dr. Phil, 36
148n3; feminist philosophy, 83, 157;
Duggan, Lisa, 109
gender critical, 174; and generation-
Duke University Press, 175
ality, 124 – 30; “good-girl,” 8, 96;
dungeon intimacy, 7, 58 – 70

Index / 191
feminism (continued) drag, 148n4; and normativity, 10 – 11,
lesbian, 11, 60, 121n7, 123, 126 – 28, 109 – 21; and trans-ness, 17, 47, 109 – 21,
130, 148n3; poststructuralist, 44, 69, 135, 151 – 52. See also butches; dykes;
108n7; queer of color, 15, 77, 99, 162; femmes; lesbians
and queer studies, 9, 99, 151; radical, Gay Pride, 68, 111, 116 – 17
100; second wave, 9, 11, 13, 96, 102 – 3, gay shame, 160
108n7, 129; sex-positive, 8, 96; third gender clinics, 36, 39
wave, 9 – 10, 102 – 3; trans, 10, 98 – 107, gender critical feminism, 174
128 – 30; Trans-Exclusionary Radical gender-expansive people, 10
Feminism (terf), 9, 174; transgender, genderfuck, 134
10, 98 – 107; and trans-ness, 44 – 45, 78, gender identity, 38, 42, 48, 73, 104, 111 – 13,
98 – 107, 108n1, 152, 171. See also wom- 126
en’s movement gender identity disorder, 42, 104, 126
feminist sex wars, 8, 96, 127. See also Bar- gender outlaws, 35, 121n5
nard Conference on Sexuality gender play, 4, 15, 64
femmes, 11, 24, 32, 54, 55 – 56, 115, 125, 128, genderqueer (term), 7, 64, 173
148n3; femme tops, 54 genderqueer people, 69, 88, 107, 117
fire play, 53 gender studies, 99, 103, 107
fisting, 31, 56 – 57 gender theory, 4, 8, 168
flogging, 51, 64, 66, 94, 172 gender trouble, 10, 15, 86, 106, 113, 153
Foucault, Michel, 44, 61, 95, 114, 119, 127, gender-variant people, 10
157, 167 – 68 generationality, 5, 162, 167; feminist, 102;
France, 72 lesbian, 123 – 30; trans, 4, 8, 110, 176
Frankenstein, Victor, 4, 11 – 13, 15, 133 – 48, genre, 9, 12, 35, 96, 153, 169 – 70
151 – 52, 155 – 56, 159 – 63, 175 – 76 gentrification, 2, 85, 88
Freud, Sigmund, 64 Germany, 35, 72
ftms, 34 – 36, 42, 54, 56, 112, 148n3. See Gilberto, Astrud: “Girl from Ipanema,”
also trans men 1, 125
Gill-Peterson, Jules, 17
Gilmore, Ruth, 156
Galarte, Francisco, 17
glbt Historical Society, 95, 114
Galli, 44
glocal hybridity, 61, 83
Gantt, Harvey, 94
glq, 95, 151 – 52, 155, 159, 170; Queer In-
Garner, Philippa, 36
humanisms issue, 160 – 61; The Trans-
gay and lesbian movement, 103
gender Issue, 160
gay and lesbian studies, 170
gold rush, 58, 68
gay bars/clubs, 2, 8, 51, 94, 172
Gordon, Avery, 61
gay liberation, 60, 117, 128 – 29
graduate school, 36, 68, 77, 83, 114; disser-
Gay Liberation Front, 117
tations, 95, 127, 148n3, 162, 165 – 67, 176
gay men, 13, 48, 54, 60, 86, 106, 113,
Great Migration, 37
136, 139; and drag, 115, 121n7; and
Green, Jamison, 36
homonormativity, 10; violence
Greenspan, Alan, 168
against, 104
Grosz, Liz, 17, 69
gay people, 5, 9, 46, 78, 129, 151; at Comp-
Guardian, 34
ton’s Cafeteria riot, 116 – 18; and

192 / Index
Guattari, Félix, 14, 169 trans-, 125; and transsexuality, 46,
Gulf War (first), 64 74 – 75, 106, 115, 153, 155. See also gay
Gulf War (second), 153 men; gay people; lesbians; queer
people
hormones, 32, 36, 55, 139, 149, 166. See
Halberstam, Jack, 61, 109, 127
also estrogen; testosterone
Hammersmith Palais, 72
Horowitz, David, 93
Hannah, Daryl, 57
House of the Golden Bull, 60 – 62
Haraway, Donna, 14, 157, 162
Houston, Whitney, 2
Hardt, Michael, 16
Hurtle, Cara Esten, 18n19
Harlem Renaissance, 37
Harrison, David, 35
Harvey, David, 61 Ian, 58 – 59, 63, 67 – 70
Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas Demo- Ice-T, 51
cratic Clubs, 111 identity politics, 10, 63, 101, 106, 118, 127
Hauer, Rutger, 57, 87 Illustrated Woman conference, 35, 47
health care: denial of, 105, 118, 173 incarceration, 10, 105, 128
Heather, 141 – 42 India, 36, 148n4
Herzog, Werner, 77 interdisciplinarity, 84, 120, 133, 156 – 57
heteronormativity, 55, 71n23, 111, 153 internet, 7, 68, 168, 173; commodification
heteropatriarchy, 129 of, 2, 4; World Wide Web, 68
heterosexism, 100, 109 – 10, 120, 142 intersectionality, 105, 107, 115, 117 – 18, 124,
heterosexuality, 46, 55, 71n23, 148n3, 161; 151
compulsory, 63; and cross dressing, intersex people, 103, 120
101, 128, 148n4; and gender, 111, 139, intersex studies, 153
146, 153; heterosexual privilege, 78, intra-action, 158
110; homo/hetero binary, 54, 113; as inversion, 46, 115, 148n3
sexual orientation, 106, 151. See also invisibility, 14, 46, 48, 127 – 28, 138, 143,
straight gaze; straight gender; straight 162
people Iran, 129
High, Kathy, 6, 41 – 49 Iranian Revolution, 129
higher education, 3, 107, 153, 171. See also Irigaray, Luce, 69
academia; adjuncts; graduate school Irvine, Janice, 149n10
Hijras, 36, 44, 148n4 Islam, 129 – 30
Hill, Robert, 110
hiv/aids, 2, 5, 60, 63, 88, 111, 168
Jackson, Janet, 2
homo/hetero binary, 54, 113
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, 176
homonationalism, 10, 128
Jean, Qween, 19n39
homonormativity, 10, 128 – 29; and disci-
Johnson, Marsha P., 11
plinarity, 109 – 21
Jorgensen, Christine, 13, 36
homophile movement, 115
homophobia, 94, 104 – 5, 152
homosexuality, 27, 60, 110 – 11, 119, 128, Karloff, Boris, 139
149n11; gender inversion model of, ketamine (k), 1, 7 – 8, 83 – 86
115, 148n3; pathologization of, 42; Kim, 141 – 42

Index / 193
Kimo’s, 36 Levine, Richard, 34
kink, 8, 26, 68, 95, 112, 168. See also s/m “lgb without the t” politics, 10
kink.com, 68 liberalism, 2 – 4, 10, 104, 113, 125, 153
kinship, 80, 84, 86, 102, 142, 154, 161, 162, liberation, 6, 11; gay, 60, 117 – 18, 128 – 29;
166; queer, 84 – 85, 141 – 43 trans, 19n39, 34, 42, 110
Klaus, Veronica, 35 Lilly, John, 1
knowledge, 7, 62, 70n5, 93, 100, 140, links s/m play parties, 59 – 60, 62 – 64, 67
166; disciplinary, 95, 169; embod- Los Angeles, CA, 6 – 7, 45, 51 – 57
ied, 10, 12, 61, 107; erotics of, 25, 29; Love, Heather, 93
politics of, 4, 9, 12, 119 – 20, 169 – 72; Lyotard, Jean-François, 16, 157
power/knowledge, 171; subcultural,
63; trans, 5, 8, 44, 96, 105 – 6, 115 – 16
Macquarie University, 157
Koskovich, Gerard, 121n7
Madonna, 2
Kovic, Kris, 35
male gaze, 14, 125
Kramer, Joseph, 85
March on Washington for Lesbian and
Kristeva, Julia, 69
Gay Rights, 111
Marin County, CA, 35, 59
The Lab, 45, 88 Marx, Karl, 14, 93
Lacan, Jacques, 66 masculinism, 120
language reclamation, 48, 136 masculinity, 13, 24, 54 – 55, 74, 109, 115, 127,
Laplanche, Jean, 62 137, 161. See also butches
Laqueur, Tom, 149n7, 167 Massey, Doreen, 61
Law of the Father (Lacan), 147 materiality, 32, 67, 84, 138, 145, 157, 161
leather bars, 8, 51, 94, 172. See also Eagle Mattachine Society, 115
leather culture, 54 – 55, 60, 94, 115, 171 – 72; Maupin, Armistead, 11
old leather, 63. See also s/m media theory, 16
leatherdykes, 13, 94, 135, 143 medical colonization, 6, 38, 140
Lesbian Avengers, 127 medicalization, 7, 104, 149n10, 171, 173
lesbian bed-death, 80 memoir, 12, 19n44, 169. See also
lesbian feminism, 11, 60, 121n7, 123, autobiography
126 – 28, 130, 148n3 memory care, 85
Lesbian Resource Center, 136 mental health, 10
lesbians, 121n7, 136, 148n4, 151; gender- mental illness, 5, 7, 104. See also
normative, 109; and homonormativ- pathologization
ity, 10 – 11, 110 – 21; lesbian generations, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 157
123 – 30; middle-class, 81; trans lesbi- Meyer, Morris, 149n10
ans, 36, 54, 73 – 74, 78, 95, 113, 123 – 30, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, 111
135, 143, 148n3, 167; and trans people, middle-class people, 3, 13, 26, 43, 81, 100,
11, 13, 17, 47, 48, 60, 106, 152; work- 117, 148n3
ing-class, 148n3. See also butches; Middle Passage, 38
dykes; femmes millennials, 2 – 3, 168 – 69
lesbian separatism, 100 – 101, 128 misogyny, 104 – 5, 121n7, 125, 152
lesbian studies, 170, 174 Mission Dolores, 59 – 60
Levinas, Emmanuel, 157 Mock, Janet, 18n15

194 / Index
modernity, 10 – 11, 99, 102 – 3, 106, 128 – 29, 60, 63; queer culture during, 88, 101,
163, 177 107, 110 – 14, 127, 152 – 53, 160, 167 – 74;
Modern Primitivism, 34 queer/trans relationship during, 64,
Mohanty, Chandra, 129 110 – 11, 113; San Francisco during, 2,
molecular revolution, 169 4 – 5, 60, 63, 68, 78, 88, 110 – 11, 127,
monstrosity, 4 – 5, 12 – 17, 46 – 48, 107, 167 – 74; trans culture during, 4 – 7, 88,
133 – 48, 149n8, 152, 155 – 56, 161, 163 96, 101, 110 – 11, 127, 167 – 74, 176. See
Moraga, Cherríe, 169 also Trans SanFrisco
moralism, 8, 96, 152 1960s, 36, 60, 88, 100, 110, 115
Morgan, Robin, 128 nonbinary (term), 10, 173
Mormons, 95, 143, 165 – 67, 177 nonconsensual gendering, 7, 73, 146 – 47
Morse, Nicole Erin, 175 nonmonogamy, 79
Mother Jones, 34 nontransgender people, 35, 41, 48, 77, 99,
Motherlode, 55 – 56 110, 118, 129, 148n3, 150n13, 152. See
motorcycle subculture, 23, 115 also cisgender people
mtfs, 34 – 36, 44 – 47, 55 – 56. See also trans normativity, 8, 11 – 12, 56, 68, 73, 99,
women 102 – 3, 106; cis-, 15, 160; gender-,
multiculturalism, 109 109, 112 – 13, 115, 119, 130; hetero-, 55,
71n23, 109, 111, 153; homo-, 10, 109 – 21,
128 – 29; trans-, 10, 19n39
nafta, 2
normativizing disciplinarity, 11, 119
Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 129
North Carolina, 94
Napster, 2
nostalgia, 3, 52, 69, 88, 168
National Geographic, 85
naturalism, 9, 13, 139
nature/artifice binary, 14, 159 Oakland, CA, 59, 68, 70
natureculture, 157 objectivity, 11, 61, 120, 124
necropolitics, 177 oedipal sexuality, 64
neocolonialism, 119, 129 Ogborn, Anne, 36, 110
neoliberalism, 109, 119 – 20, 128, 173 Oklahoma, 83, 124, 143
new materialisms, 16, 161 Oklahoma City Zoo, 85
New Narrative movement, 16 old leather cultures, 63
New School of Erotic Touch, 85 Olivia Records, 128
New World Order, 88 ontology, 102 – 3, 112, 124, 157, 160 – 61,
New York City, 1, 18n12, 59, 61, 68, 117 – 18; 176 – 77
Brooklyn, 2, 4; Downtown, 88; Har- Opie, Cathy, 59
lem, 37 Oprah, 36
New Yorker, 34 orchiectomy/orchidectomy, 6, 43
Nietzsche, FN, 11 Orientalism, 130
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 115 orientation queers vs. gender queers, 111
1980s, 3, 8, 36, 59, 103, 126 – 27, 148n3, 162,
166, 168, 171, 174
Pacific rim, 2
1950s, 99, 115
Paris Is Burning, 17
1990s, 3, 162; feminism/trans relation-
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 15
ship during, 96; leather spaces during,

Index / 195
passing, 15, 56, 79, 127 psychology, 38, 49, 62, 75, 101, 125
pathologization, 141; of homosexuality, Puar, Jasbir, 10
42; of trans people, 37, 42 public history, 118 – 19
patriarchy, 9, 100, 104, 130, 135; hetero-,
129
queer (term), 7, 48, 63, 78, 136, 148n4, 153
Paul, 141 – 42
queer communities/networks, 15, 17, 113,
performativity, 9, 15, 43, 103, 133, 159
136, 160
Perkins, Roberta, 18n7
queer crip critique, 160
Persian Gulf Wars, 2, 153
queer culture, 6, 101, 111, 112 – 14
personhood, 96, 136, 153 – 54; gendered,
queer desire, 54
98, 100 – 101, 147
queer ecology, 15
phallocentrism, 69
queer gender play, 15
phallogocentrism, 147
queer geography, 70n5
phenomenology, 6 – 7, 52, 62, 73, 157
queer history, 114, 118
Philadelphia, PA, 101, 128
queering the woman question, 9,
piss play, 27 – 28, 63
98 – 107
Plato, 69
queer kinship, 84 – 85, 141 – 43
poetics, 58 – 70
Queer Nation, 110 – 11, 121n7, 127, 134, 152
Pollack, Rachel, 19n51
queerness, 4, 71n23, 83 – 84, 127, 166; and
Pontalis, Bertrand, 62
feminism, 96, 105 – 7, 129; and the in-
pornography, 7 – 8, 44, 68, 75, 96, 170;
human, 155 – 58, 160 – 61; and trans-
ecosexual post-porn activists, 85
ness, 10, 64, 97, 105 – 7, 110 – 18, 128 – 29,
pornsophy, 62
139, 146
posthumanism, 103, 158 – 59, 163, 175
queer of color critique, 160
postidentitarian queerness, 152
queer of color feminisms, 162
postmodernity, 102 – 3, 152
queer people, 2 – 3, 8, 15, 29, 78 – 79, 88;
poststructuralism, 44, 69, 102, 108n7, 127,
orientation queers vs. gender queers,
168
111. See also bisexuality; butches;
post-transsexualism, 152
dykes; femmes; gay men; gay people;
Presidio, 59
homosexuality; lesbians
Prince, 2
queer politics, 12, 101, 110 – 12, 127, 133, 153,
prisons. See incarceration
160, 168
privilege, 61, 103, 137, 148, 151 – 54; hetero-
queer reproduction, 67
sexual, 78, 110; and homonormativity,
queer studies: and transgender studies, 3,
112, 120; racial, 102, 124, 171
9, 15, 99, 151 – 54, 159 – 60, 168
Prodger, Charlotte, 7, 84 – 86
queer theory, 16 – 17, 61, 99, 161 – 63,
professors, 70, 80, 95, 156, 167, 172. See
170 – 71; and transgender studies, 3, 9,
also academia
15, 99, 151 – 54, 159 – 60, 168
proletarianization, 3
queer writing, 16
psychiatry, 11, 39, 42, 44 – 45, 104 – 5, 126,
queerzines, 34, 170
136, 176. See also American Psychiat-
ric Association
psychoanalysis, 6 – 7, 43 – 44, 47, 62 race, 6, 37, 61, 150n16, 157, 169, 177; and
psychobiography, 99 trans-ness, 101 – 7, 113, 119, 153, 161 – 62.

196 / Index
 See also Blackness; critical race stud- sadomasochism. See s/m
ies; whiteness Saint Andrew’s Crosses, 64
racial capitalism, 17 Salmacis Society, 128
racial discrimination, 37 Sandoval, Chela, 162
racialization, 17, 161 San Francisco, CA, 2, 18n24, 23, 26, 45,
racial privilege, 102, 124, 171 49, 61, 70n5, 81, 83 – 84, 86, 87, 94 – 95,
racism, 94, 105, 156, 162. See also white 114 – 15, 133, 143, 152; in the 1990s, 2,
supremacy 4 – 5, 60, 63, 68, 78, 88, 110 – 11, 127,
Radical History Review, 118 – 19 167 – 74; Bernal Heights, 58 – 59, 68, 85;
Radical Queens, 101, 128 Castro District, 60, 83; Miracle Mile
radical sexuality, 94, 127, 168 (Folsom St.), 60; Mission District, 59,
Raelyn, 59 88; Potrero Hill, 59; South of Mar-
Rage across the Disciplines conference, ket, 56, 59, 60; Tenderloin, 11, 27, 55,
133 57, 116 – 17; trans art scene in, 34 – 40;
Raphael, Sally Jessy, 36 Valencia Street, 88. See also Trans
raves, 14 SanFrisco
Raymond, Janice, 100, 126, 128 – 29, San Francisco Bay Area, 4 – 5, 7, 15, 34 – 40,
134 – 35, 151 45, 83, 114, 127, 167. See also Berkeley,
the real (Lacanian), 66 CA; Oakland, CA; San Francisco, CA;
“real gender” discourse, 12 Trans SanFrisco
Red Dora’s Bearded Lady Cafe, 60, 88; San Francisco Human Rights Commis-
Over and Out, 35 sion, 112
religion, 6, 94 – 95, 106, 165, 167, 177. See San Francisco International Gay and Les-
also Christianity; Mormons bian Film Festival, 35
Renaissance, 6 – 7, 34 – 40 San Francisco National Guard armory, 59
reparative reading, 6 Santa Cruz, CA, 86, 162
Rethinking Sex conference, 93 – 97 Sante, Lucy, 17n3
revisionist history, 101, 117 science fiction, 87, 159, 177
re-worlding, 177 Scotland, 83; Aberdeenshire, 84
rhythmoanalysis, 62 Scott, Ridley, 87
Richards, Renée, 76 Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s
Rivera, Geraldo, 36 Cafeteria, 118
Rivera, Sylvia, 128 Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network, 136
Rocero, Geena, 18n15 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 160
Rocky Horror Picture Show, 77 sexed body, 9, 17, 101, 103, 111
Roen, Katrina, 16, 161 sex/gender/sexuality relationship, 111,
Rubin, Gayle, 8, 13, 127, 150n16, 172; 148n4
role in gender and sexuality stud- sex/gender system, 9, 99
ies, 93 – 97; “Thinking Sex,” 93 – 94, 96; sex-positive feminism, 96
“The Traffic in Women,” 93 – 94. See sex radicals, 95
also Rethinking Sex conference sex trouble, 10
Rubin, Hank, 35 sexuality studies, 93, 96 – 97, 103, 151
Rubin, H. S., 148n3 sexualization, 9, 96, 173
Rupp, Leila, 123 – 24 sexual language, 8

Index / 197
sexual minorities, 48, 136 stigma, 5, 42, 78, 100, 104, 136, 146
sexual orientation, 106, 110 – 13, 117, 125, St. Jacques, Jill: Umbilical Thom, 35
153 Stoller, Robert, 126
sexual surgeries, 30, 36, 41 – 49, 53, 80, Stone, Sandy, 12, 15, 128, 149n10; “The
126, 139, 156, 166; funding for, 55, 79, ‘Empire’ Strikes Back,” 149n10, 151 – 52,
129; medical framing of, 149n10; and 161 – 62
trans terminology, 148n4. See also Stonehenge, 72
body alteration/modification; or- Stonewall rebellion, 11, 111, 117
chiectomy/orchidectomy; surgical straight gaze, 32
centers straight gender, 10
sexual violence, 80, 105 straight media, 34
sex work, 3, 5, 8, 10, 23 – 29, 36, 48, 55, 60, straight people, 2, 10, 13, 29, 46, 55 – 56,
93, 96, 115 – 17. See also tricks 76, 113, 125, 129; and gender, 9; pass-
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 13 – 14, 134, ing as, 142 – 43; trans, 10. See also
137 – 39, 147, 159, 163. See also Franken- heterosexuality
stein, Victor straight world/life, 9 – 10, 13, 55, 110
Singin’ in the Rain, 124 street drag, 115
slave narratives, 6, 38 Street Orphans, 117
slavery, 37 – 39, 107, 177 subaltern, 16, 155
s/m, 4, 7 – 8, 14, 23 – 29, 45, 51 – 70. See also Sullivan, Nikki, 157
bondage; dungeon intimacy; dun- supplement, trans as, 10, 98
geons (s/m play spaces); flogging; surgeons, 5 – 6, 13, 30 – 33, 36
kink; leather bars; leather culture; surgical centers, 39
leatherdykes; links s/m play parties; surveillance, 6, 60, 127
piss play survival, 12, 14, 49, 80, 88 – 89, 105, 111,
Snorton, C. Riley, 17 124, 141, 146 – 47, 174; survival sex
social construction, 103 work, 3
socialism, 13, 48 swish styles, 115
social justice, 47, 115, 135, 152 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, 17
social media, 4, 159, 165, 174
Social Science Research Council: Sexual-
Tales of the City (miniseries), 11
ity Research Fellowship Program, 114
talking back, 14, 96, 156
The Society for Equality in Dress, 99
talk shows, 2, 36
Soja, Edward, 61
Tannhauser Gate, 87, 89
solidarity, 12, 174
Taste of Latex, 170
somatechnics, 84, 157 – 58
tech boom, 7, 88
Somatechnics Research Network, 84, 157
technics, 12, 16; soma-, 84, 157 – 58
South Africa, 2
testosterone, 55
Soviet Union, 2, 88, 168
Texas Tomboy: Gendernauts, 58
Spillers, Hortense, 176
theory in the flesh, 169 – 70
Spivak, Gayatri, 16, 129
Tijuana, Mexico, 44 – 45, 48
Sprinkle, Annie, 85 – 86
Tonight Show, 36
Stevens, Beth, 85 – 86
topoanalysis, 62
Stiegler, Bernard, 157
trannie hawks, 56

198 / Index
trans artists, 34 – 40, 42 trans lesbians, 36, 54, 74, 78, 95, 124,
trans autobiography, 5 – 6, 18n15, 38 – 39, 127 – 28, 135, 148n3, 167
86 – 87, 123, 151 trans men, 11 – 12, 111, 127. See also ftms
TransCentral, 88 trans-ness, 4 – 5, 16, 89, 165, 167, 170, 173,
trans erotics, 7 176 – 78; and abjection, 11 – 12, 15, 126,
Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism 137, 143, 146, 152, 155, 157, 162, 176;
(terf), 9, 174. See also gender critical and feminism, 10, 44 – 45, 78, 98 – 107,
feminism; transphobia 108n1, 152, 171; and gay people, 17,
transgender (term), 2, 7, 10, 64, 79, 102 – 7, 47, 109 – 21, 135, 151 – 52; and queer-
110, 121n5, 127, 148n4, 152 – 53; origins ness, 10, 64, 97, 105 – 7, 110 – 18, 128 – 29,
of, 172 – 73 139, 146; and race, 17, 101 – 7, 113, 119,
transgender activism, 11, 34, 36, 99 – 101, 153, 161 – 62; and sexuality, 8 – 10; and
110 – 19 s/m, 7
transgender feminism, 10, 98 – 107 transnormativity, 10, 19n39
transgender history, 1, 6, 11, 166 – 67; and trans people in academia, 8
homonormativity, 109 – 21 trans people of color, 3, 174
Transgender History, 1 transphobia, 11, 79, 88, 100 – 105, 127,
transgender knowledges, 8, 106, 118 – 19 130, 134 – 35, 149n10, 174, 177. See also
transgender lesbians, 36, 54, 73 – 74, 78, Daly, Mary; gender critical feminism;
95, 113, 123 – 30, 135, 143, 167 Morgan, Robin; Raymond, Janice;
transgender liberation, 19n39, 34, 42, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Femi-
110 nism (terf)
Transgender Nation, 111, 133 – 34, 152 trans rage, 12 – 13, 27 – 28, 48, 133 – 48,
transgender politics, 12, 104, 110, 113 – 14 151 – 52, 160 – 61, 176
transgender rage, 4 – 5, 12 – 13, 27 – 28, 48, Trans SanFrisco, 4 – 5, 7 – 8, 12, 14, 88, 167
133 – 48, 151 – 52, 160 – 61, 176 transsexual (identity), 15, 17, 27, 36 – 37, 52,
transgender spaces, 55 74 – 79, 95, 104 – 5, 110, 113, 119, 121n5,
transgender studies, 16, 80, 95 – 96, 103, 136, 149n8, 150n13, 152 – 53, 156, 159,
156 – 57, 161, 171 – 72; and feminism, 161; and feminism, 9 – 10, 100 – 101,
106 – 7, 127, 129; and queer studies, 3, 9, 108n4, 123 – 30, 134 – 35, 148n3, 151,
15, 99, 151 – 54, 159 – 60, 168 155; and generationality, 123 – 30;
The Transgender Studies Reader, 1 and sexual surgeries, 30, 36, 41 – 49,
transgender theory, 8, 11 – 12, 73, 103, 113, 53, 129, 149n10; and transgender rage,
152, 161, 171 133 – 48
transgender time, 1 – 4 transsexual (term), 2, 64, 75, 79, 96, 110,
transhomosexuality, 125 128, 148n4, 172 – 73
transitioning, 7, 13, 55, 78 – 79, 114, 146, transsexual erotics, 51 – 70
167, 171; as art of the body, 12; into a transsexual lesbians, 36, 54, 74, 78, 95,
community, 127; language of, 5; men- 124, 127 – 28, 135, 148n3, 167
tors in, 2; obstacles to, 17; as put- transsexual pride, 37
ting pressure on forms, 170; racially trans studies. See transgender studies
classed, 6; in trans autobiographies, trans theory. See transgender theory
38; trans expertise in, 178. See also trans tipping point, 6, 18n15
hormones; sexual surgeries Transvestia, 98 – 99

Index / 199
transvestite (identity), 10, 75, 100 – 101, Walker, Willie, 95
116, 121n5, 148n4 Washington, DC, 101, 111, 128
transvestite (term), 2, 110, 128. See also Weheliye, Alexander, 161
cross-dressing Weinstein, Jami, 157
trans women, 1 – 3, 5, 8, 13, 17, 111, 167, 169, West Coast Lesbian Conference, 128
171; of color, 15, 174; and feminism, 9, Whale, James, 139, 149n11
11, 123 – 30; and lesbian culture, 11; and white men, 129
sexuality, 7, 9. See also mtfs whiteness, 4, 9, 13, 37, 102, 105, 117, 124,
trans writing, 11 – 12, 16 129, 176; classed, 171; and colonialism,
Treut, Monika, 35; Gendernauts, 58 83, 162; and critical race studies, 107;
Tribe 8, 60 critical studies of, 157; and normativ-
tricks, 5, 23 – 29, 32, 52 ity, 10, 120, 161; and sexual surgeries,
“true sex” discourse, 42 43; of trans networks, 16
tsq: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 white supremacy, 47, 135. See also
Twitter, 159, 165 racism
2010s, 3 white women, 9, 13, 129
Williams, Montel, 36
Williams, Raymond, 13
Ukraine, 174
Wilson, 141 – 42
undocumented labor, 10, 104 – 5
Wilson, Flip, 76
United Kingdom, 72
Wolf, Max, 35
University of California, Berkeley, 94,
woman (category of ), 8, 98
114, 143, 166 – 67
womanhood, 9, 11, 13, 15, 52, 98, 100,
University of California, Santa Cruz: His-
128 – 29
tory of Consciousness, 162
womanness, 46
University of Pennsylvania, 93, 95
the woman question, 9, 98 – 107
University of Wisconsin – Madison, 128
women of color, 11, 15, 174
unnaturalness, 12, 48, 52, 103, 134, 136 – 39,
Women’s Building (San Francisco), 135
159
women’s movement, 60, 101. See also
Urban, Thomas, 108n4, 149n10
feminism
US Embassy in Tehran, 129
women’s studies, 8, 98, 102 – 3, 106 – 7
working-class people, 9, 11, 100, 115,
vaginoplasty, 6 148n3, 171
Vanguard, 117 World War I, 59
Venice Biennale, 84 World War II, 60, 99, 114, 116
Vietnam War, 88, 128 wto, 2
Vimeo, 84
virtuality, 14, 61, 65, 67
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 35
Vistima, Filisa, 136
Volcano, Del LaGrace: The Drag King
Book, 58 zines, 4, 34, 170

200 / Index
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