Aleshia Brevard, a transsexual, high fashion model, Playboy model, and film and television actress and director, "began" her life at Westlake Clinic in Los Angeles, in 1962 (she was born a male in 1937):
Gone was my "birth defect". From that day forward I could react to life emotionally, pursue my own feminine dreams of success, and live as an equal partner with the man I loved. I had been reborn woman. I was free. - Aleshia Brevard (Brevard, 2006)
I decided to spend some time researching Aleshia Brevard because she is among only a few transsexual women who have appeared either bikini-clad or in the nude (Playboy magazine) for the American audience. I discovered the quote above on her website, and found it very interesting that she referred to being born a male as a "birth defect." Viewed in this way, I feel that it is much easier to understand the position of transsexual women and men; they are born a gender, and are that gender all along, but a "defect" stands between them and their right to claiming a certain sexual identity in our culture. Because gender is so black and white in America, by referring to her sex as a "defect," Brevard is making a point that clearly justifies, for the American public, the switch from male to female.
Nevertheless, my research has shown a certain amount of separation between those who have gone through sexual reassignment surgery, and those who have not. While we, as a culture, do not allow for this other gender type, transsexuals still have a place in society, and by ignoring it, we are avoiding reality. Someone once told me that there are at least five different genders between male and female (black and white), but American society only recognizes those two. How strange we are to only accept a small number of these categorized genders. But reality does prove to us that there is a large amount of gray area in between:
To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one's step or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries, and hormones. It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity. Male and female are sex, masculine and feminine are gender, and though the conceptions obviously overlap, they are far from synonymous. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, gender is not a mere imaginative extension of sex. "Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental extension of sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless." - Jan Morris (Ames, 2005: 89)
That being said, and returning to the topic at hand, gender plays a role in society that defines who we are. So, what happens when a man suddenly breaks the social norm and changes his physical make-up to match that of a woman? Deirdre McCloskey, an economic theorist and historian, says, "It's strange to have been a man and now to be a woman. But it's no stranger perhaps than having once been a West African and now being an American, or once a priest and now a businessman. Free people keep deciding to make strange crossings, from storekeeper to monk or from civilian to soldier or from man to woman. Crossing boundaries is a minority interest, but human" (Ames, 2005: 205). Is the gender switch, therefore, equivalent to that of a culture change? McCloskey seems to think so, and not only that, but she seems to agree that it is of human nature to create change for oneself. Aleshia Brevard saw this change as only natural and it seems to me that we give way to many changes in our lives that naturally occur. But in the United States, as in other countries all over the world, the transsexual change specifically is a social taboo:
"Never forget," I tell myself, "you are always a stranger here, always carry a smoldering, deadly secret. Never fully relax; never completely let go." - Calpernia Sarah Adams (Ames, 2005: 278)
~ Katherine Niemczyk
Sources -
Ames, Jonathan ed.
2005, Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs. New York, New York: Vintage Books.
Brevard, Aleshia
2006, Excerpt from Aleshia's autobiography. Electronic document.
http://www.aleshiabrevard.com/Gallery_Fashion.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment