Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  55 Another major flaw with these theses is that they rest on the assumption that people identifying and living as members of the sex other than the one they were assigned at birth was a novel phenomenon, one that did not exist prior to the invention of sex reassignment procedures. However, numerous historians and anthropologists have described the existence of trans people in other eras and cultures. 56 In fact, many of the original gatekeepers, including Harry Benjamin, only “discovered” the existence of transsexuality after trans people approached them about the possibilities of physically transitioning, and many of the earliest transsexuals, such as Christine Jorgensen (the first transsexual to gain mainstream attention) and “Agnes” (who is discussed in more detail in chapter 9 ), self-administered hormones prior to consulting with doctors about their desire to physically transition. 57 Indeed, the gatekeepers didn’t “invent” sex reassignment, but were dragged into it kicking and screaming. And the fact that the gatekeepers almost universally favored strict restrictions that greatly reduced the number of people undergoing sex reassignment clearly indicates that they were, at best, reluctant advocates. A similar attempt to remove transsexuals from any historical or cross-cultural context can be found in Bernice L. Hausman’s 1995 book Changing Sex. Despite the fact that Hausman is aware of people throughout history who have lived as members of the other sex, or who do so today without using hormones or surgery, she nevertheless chooses to narrowly define transsexuality as the act of changing one’s sex via physically transitioning. 58 This allows her to put forward the thesis that “developments in medical technology and practice were central to the establishment of the necessary conditions for the emergence of the demand for sex change.” 59 The amateurish nature of this argument is astounding; it’s akin to discounting the existence of all nonmotorized vehicles (bicycles, sailboats, horse-drawn carriages, etc.) to make the claim that transportation is a modern construction dependent on the discovery of fossil fuel and combustion engines. Of course, there is an obvious reason why Hausman chose to define transsexuality so narrowly: To do otherwise would subvert her entire thesis. After all, if she were to acknowledge that trans people have existed in varied cultures and throughout history, her readers might view transsexuality as part of a natural rather than culture-specific phenomenon and thus understand trans people’s desire to live in their identified sex as being primarily driven by their own intrinsic inclinations rather than by social forces.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  And of course the reason the Enlightenment has taught us to trash our own history, to say that Christianity is part of the problem, is that it has had a rival eschatology to promote. It couldn’t allow Christianity to claim that world history turned its great corner when Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again, because it wanted to claim that world history turned its great corner in Europe in the eighteenth century. “All that went before,” it says, “is superstition and mumbo-jumbo. We have now seen the great light, and our modern science, technology, philosophy, and politics have ushered in the new order of the ages.” That was believed and expounded in America and France, and it has soaked into our popular culture and imagination. (George Washington contrasted the “gloomy age of ignorance and superstition” up to that point with the new epoch ushered in by the great revolutions of the late eighteenth century, when “the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined.”) So of course Christianity is reduced from an eschatology (“This is where history was meant to be going, despite appearances!”) to a religion (“Here is a way of being spiritual”), because world history can’t have two great turning points. If the Enlightenment is the great, dramatic, all-important corner of world history, Jesus can’t have been. He is still wanted on board, of course, as a figure through whom people can try to approach the incomprehensible mystery of the “divine” and as a teacher of moral truths that might, if applied, actually strengthen the fabric of the brave new post-Enlightenment society. But when Christianity is made “just a religion,” it first muzzles and then silences altogether the message the gospels were eager to get across. When that happens, the gospel message is substantially neutralized as a force in the world beyond the realm of private spirituality and an escapist heaven. That, indeed, was the intention. And the churches have, by and large, gone along for the ride.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Therefore, despite the fact that the mainstream public tends to be more concerned and disturbed by MTF spectrum trans people than their FTM spectrum counterparts, subversivism creates the impression that trans masculinities are inherently “subversive” and “transgressive,” while their trans feminine counterparts are “lame” and “conservative” in comparison. Subversivism’s privileging of trans masculinities over trans femininities helps to explain why cissexual queer women and FTM spectrum folks tend to dominate the queer/trans community: Their exceptional gender expressions and identities are routinely empowered and encouraged in such settings. In contrast, there is generally a dearth of MTF spectrum folks who regularly inhabit queer/trans spaces. 3 To me, the most surreal part of this whole transgressingversus-reinforcing-gender-norms dialogue in the queer/trans community (and in many gender studies classrooms and books) is the unacknowledged hypocrisy of it all. It is sadly ironic that people who claim to be gender-fucking in the name of “shattering the gender binary,” and who criticize people whose identities fail to adequately challenge our societal notions of femaleness and maleness, cannot see that they have just created a new gender binary, one in which subversive genders are “good” and conservative genders are “bad.” In a sense, this new gender binary isn’t even all that new. It is merely the original oppositional sexist binary flipped upside down. So now, gender-nonconforming folks are on top and gender-normative people are on the bottom—how revolutionary! Now, I understand the temptation for a marginalized group to turn the hierarchy that has oppressed them upside down, as it can feel very empowering to finally be atop the pecking order, but it’s absurd to claim that such approaches in any way undermine that binary. If anything, they only serve to reinforce it further. Subversivism’s binary flip is very reminiscent of another binary flip that was forwarded by cultural feminists in the mid-1970s. While subversivism reverses oppositional sexism, cultural feminism sought to reverse traditional sexism by claiming that women were naturally creative and cooperative and therefore superior to men, who were seen as inherently destructive and oppressive. While it is always difficult to draw comparisons between different social/political movements for fear of oversimplifying them, there are other striking parallels between subversivism and cultural feminism that are worth bearing out. As historian Alice Echols describes in her book Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975, cultural feminism evolved from its more outwardly focused predecessor, radical feminism. 4 While radical feminism—which asserted that neither sex was inherently superior to the other— actively engaged the mainstream public (and men in particular) to challenge and change their sexist ways, cultural feminism was a more insular movement, focusing on creating women-run organizations and women-only spaces rather than organizing public demonstrations. And unlike radical feminism, which attempted to accommodate a variety of different female perspectives (in fact, issues over “difference” in class and sexuality consumed much of the movement’s energy), cultural feminists forwarded the idea of “sameness” and “oneness”—that all women were part of a universal sisterhood, united by their female biology.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  She left voicemails for the landlady every day for two weeks in addition to knocking on their door every night and yelling that nine p.m. was too late to make any noise of any kind. Now her landlady was accusing her of trying to start a rift in the building. She was trying to evict her for harassment, which was unfair, because it was she who had been harassed by their music. This, too, was her truth. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened to get Chickenhorse in here—only that it involved a married man and a restraining order. I wondered if she’d ever broken anyone’s nose. She seemed more the type to burn your house down. Seated next to Chickenhorse was Sara, who, apparently, was not only sensitive to men but also to light, cleaning products, mold, pollen, gluten, dairy, and sugar. She had fibromyalgia, chronic migraines, and, as a result of her hypoglycemia, was given special permission to eat during group. She said that made the room more of a “safe space” for her. Throughout the ninety minutes she consumed two bananas, a nectarine, one dried fig, a large box of raisins, and an entire two-liter jug of water. Her emphasis on hydration annoyed me. From what I gathered, Sara had been in love with a man named Stan—a researcher at the hospital where she worked—for over twelve years. Unfortunately, while Stan was happy to have sex with her, he couldn’t commit to a relationship. Then Sara woke up at fifty-one—childless, husbandless—and decided that enough was enough. She entered group and began a “detox” from Stan. Was Jamie a Stan? Worse yet, was I a Sara? Unlike Chickenhorse’s ex, Stan wasn’t married to anyone else, but somehow he was still “unavailable.” This was a word I heard repeated by all of the women during the session, echoing throughout in chorus. The plight of the available woman and the unavailable man! But somehow, each of these women convinced themselves that they too were emotionally unavailable. As encouraged by Dr. Jude, they’d come to the realization that their choice of unavailable men actually reflected an unavailability within themselves. Well, they all looked pretty damn available to me. In her attempts to detox from Stan, Sara was taking a ninety-day break from contact with him. She was now on day forty-three and claimed to be doing pretty well. In fact, she said, she barely pined for him at all. “I’m doing me,” she said. “And tonight, I’m going salsa dancing.” Salsa dancing—now, that was the kiss of death, the evidence that Sara wasn’t doing quite as well as she claimed. Who salsa danced? Salsa dancing was the last stop on the suicide express. Whether or not she wanted to admit it to herself, Sara was clearly destined for a crash.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I am sure these women believe that they are protecting the values of lesbian and women’s space by opposing our inclusion at all costs, but in reality the specific points they make generally undermine feminist goals and beliefs rather than support them. After all, at its core, feminism is based on the conviction that women are far more than the sex of the bodies that we are born into, and our identities and abilities are capable of transcending the restrictive nature of the gender socialization we endure during our childhoods. I have yet to meet the person who can explain to me how refusing trans women the right to participate in women’s spaces and events is consistent with this most central tenet of feminism.Indeed, some of the most common arguments used to deny trans women the right to participate in women-only spaces also happen to be the most antifeminist. For example, many argue that trans women should be barred from women’s spaces because we supposedly still have “male energy.” But by suggesting that trans women possess some mystical “male energy” as a result of having been born and raised male, these women are essentially making the case that men have abilities and aptitudes that women are not capable of.Another popular excuse for our exclusion is the fact that some trans women have male genitals (as many of us either cannot afford or choose not to have sex reassignment surgery). This “penis” argument not only objectifies trans women by reducing us to our genitals, but propagates the male myth that men’s power and domination somehow arise from the phallus. The truth is, our penises are made of flesh and blood, nothing more. And the very idea that the femaleness of my mind, personality, lived experiences, and the rest of my body can somehow be trumped by the mere presence of a penis can only be described as phallocentric.It’s distressing that such phallocentric arguments, along with related arguments that harp on the idea that trans women “physically resemble” or “look like” men in other ways, are so regularly made by lesbian-feminists, considering that they are based in the society-wide privileging of male attributes over female ones.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  In a tactic that emphasizes their “true” maleness, “deceivers” are most often used as pawns to provoke male homophobia in other characters, as well as in the audience itself. This phenomenon is especially evident in TV talk shows like Jerry Springer, which regularly runs episodes with titles like “My Girlfriend’s a Guy” and “I’m Really a Man!” that feature trans women coming out to their straight boyfriends. On a recent British TV reality show called There’s Something About Miriam, six heterosexual men court an attractive woman who, unbeknownst to them, is transsexual. The broadcast of the show was delayed for several months because the men threatened to sue the show’s producers, alleging that they had been the victims of defamation, personal injury, and conspiracy to commit sexual assault. The affair was eventually settled out of court, with each man coming away with a reported 125,000 British pounds (over 200,000 U.S. dollars at the time). 1 In the 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge, the protagonist is a trans woman who heads out to Hollywood in order to take revenge on traditional manhood and to “realign the sexes.” This “realignment” apparently involves raping an ex–football player with a strap-on dildo, which she does at one point during the movie. The recurring theme of “deceptive” trans women retaliating against men, often by seducing them, seems to be an unconscious acknowledgment that both male and heterosexual privilege is threatened by transsexuals. In contrast to the “deceivers,” who wield their feminine wiles with success, the “pathetic transsexual” characters aren’t deluding anyone. Despite her masculine mannerisms and five o’clock shadow, the “pathetic transsexual” will inevitably insist that she is a woman trapped inside a man’s body. The intense contradiction between the “pathetic” character’s gender identity and her physical appearance is often played for laughs—as in the transition of musician Mark Shubb (played as a bearded baritone by Harry Shearer) at the conclusion of 2003’s A Mighty Wind. Unlike the “deceivers,” whose ability to “pass” is a serious threat to our culture’s ideas about gender and sexuality, “pathetic transsexuals”—who barely resemble women at all—are generally considered harmless.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  A simple preference for crossdressing or simulating female attire meets the diagnostic criterion for boys but not for girls, who must insist on wearing only male clothing to merit diagnosis.” 28 The GID in children diagnosis has come under a lot of scrutiny since it was instituted in 1980, as it is often used as the justification for carrying out behavioral modification (including aversion and electroshock therapies) on children in an attempt to eliminate their exceptional gender expression and prevent them from growing up to be queer. 29 While children of both sexes have been subjected to these procedures, the lion’s share of the research and funding for such projects has targeted femininity in boys rather than masculinity in girls. In fact, the largest grant awarded to this sort of research has gone to the “Feminine Boy Project,” which was conducted by Richard Green and summarized in his 1987 book The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality. 30 Green (who is also a former HBIGDA president and coeditor of the book Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment ) is just one of many researchers whose work seems to be primarily focused on studying all varieties of feminine or female-associated behaviors and inclinations in male-bodied people. I would describe much of this research as stemming from effemimania —an obsession with “male femininity.” One of the characteristic traits of effemimanic research is that it tends to conflate feminine gender expression, male homosexuality, and MTF transsexuality with one another, often treating them as though they were different symptoms of the same “disease.” This is evident in the theories psychiatrists and sexologists have offered to explain the etiology of these phenomena. The most common of these theories is that the combination of a dominant or smothering mother and a passive or distant father leads young boys to identify with their mothers and emulate their mothers’ behaviors. 31 (This theory, which was fiercely forwarded by effemimanic psychiatrist Robert Stoller, has been regularly applied to both male homosexuality and MTF transsexuality.) Variations on this theory remained popular in the psychiatric community for many decades, despite psychiatrists’ inability to explain all, or even most, instances of “male femininity.” Another common theory is that a male child’s developing brain may be inappropriately influenced by the mother’s female hormones in utero. Others have suggested that both male homosexuality and MTF transsexuality may arise from X chromosome–specific mutations or genomic imprinting events that a mother passes on to her son (who is susceptible due to the fact that he has a single X chromosome).

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  1 In the 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge, the protagonist is a trans woman who heads out to Hollywood in order to take revenge on traditional manhood and to “realign the sexes.” This “realignment” apparently involves raping an ex-football player with a strap-on dildo, which she does at one point during the movie. The recurring theme of “deceptive” trans women retaliating against men, often by seducing them, seems to be an unconscious acknowledgment that both male and heterosexual privilege is threatened by transsexuals. In contrast to the “deceivers,” who wield their feminine wiles with success, the “pathetic transsexual” characters aren’t deluding anyone. Despite her masculine mannerisms and five o’clock shadow, the “pathetic transsexual” will inevitably insist that she is a woman trapped inside a man’s body. The intense contradiction between the “pathetic” character’s gender identity and her physical appearance is often played for laughs—as in the transition of musician Mark Shubb (played as a bearded baritone by Harry Shearer) at the conclusion of 2003’s A Mighty Wind. Unlike the “deceivers,” whose ability to “pass” is a serious threat to our culture’s ideas about gender and sexuality, “pathetic transsexuals”—who barely resemble women at all—are generally considered harmless. Perhaps for this reason, some of the most endearing pop culture portrayals of trans women fall into the “pathetic” category: John Lithgow’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of ex- football player Roberta Muldoon in 1982’s The World According to Garp, and Terence Stamp’s role as the aging showgirl Bernadette in 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. More recently, the 1998 indie film The Adventures of Sebastian Cole begins with its teenage protagonist learning that his stepdad Hank, who looks and acts like a roadie for a ’70s rock band, is about to become Henrietta. A sympathetic character and the only stable person in Sebastian’s life, Henrietta spends most of the movie wearing floral- print nightgowns and bare-shouldered tops with tons of jewelry and makeup. Yet despite her extremely femme manner of dress, she continues to exhibit only stereotypical male behaviors, overtly ogling a waitress and punching out a guy who calls her a “faggot” (after which she laments, “I broke a nail”). In the case of Henrietta, this extreme combination of masculinity and femininity does not seem designed to challenge audiences’ assumptions about maleness and femaleness.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  She just tends to go into this moaning, talking about how misfortunate she is and ... it’s sad.”9 Rather than be inconvenienced by the overwhelming depression and isolation that often typifies the lives of gender-variant people, Eugenides set out to invent his own new-and-improved intersex story: “I wanted to write about a real person with a real condition. I did a lot of research on the details, but in terms of figuring out what hermaphrodites psychologically went through, I did that from my imagination. That’s how I work, I try to identify my narrator and my characters as much as I can instead of going out, observing other intersex people and focus[ing] on the details. Hopefully I make the right assumptions and choices about all these characters, so that someone [who] is interested in intersex reads the book.”10Middlesex is chock-full of descriptions of atypical chromosome combinations, genital configurations, and other highly detailed medical references to intersex conditions, yet it remains remarkably untainted by actual intersex perspectives or voices.11 The book reads like an intersex adventure story, with colorful scenes of Cal’s visit with an eccentric, John Money-esque doctor who wishes to perform nonconsensual genital surgery on him, or his befriending other intersex people (as well as transsexuals) when he fulfills the standard gender-variant-person cliché of working as a performer at a sex club. For a character who is supposedly fourteen years old at the time of these events, Cal’s narration remains remarkably light, humorous, and generally above the fray at all times, as though it had been whitewashed of all of the shame, self-loathing, and self-consciousness that plagues gender-variant adolescents as their bodies, identities, and behaviors are placed under society’s microscope. The way that Eugenides dwells in all of the physical aspects of intersexuality while playing down the emotional trauma and stigma that generally accompanies it gives the book an extraordinarily objectifying and voyeuristic feel to someone who is actually familiar with the subject.Eugenides and Anderson both claim to use intersexuality and transsexuality merely as metaphors, but this is clearly disingenuous. While Middlesex may be an epic novel that follows a Greek American family through several generations, what consistently grabbed people’s attention in book reviews and interviews was its intersex protagonist. And while Normal may be a film about marriage, it was clearly marketed as a film about transsexuality.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  (18:36) The difference between the kingdoms is striking. Caesar’s kingdom (and all other kingdoms that originate in this world) make their way by fighting. But Jesus’s kingdom—God’s kingdom enacted through Jesus—makes its way with quite a different weapon, one that Pilate refuses to acknowledge: telling the truth: “So!” said Pilate. “You are a king, are you?” “You’re the one who’s calling me a king,” replied Jesus. “I was born for this; I’ve come into the world for this: to give evidence about the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” “Truth!” said Pilate. “What’s that?” (18:37–38 ) The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God’s wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed. Empires can’t cope with this. They make their own “truth,” creating “facts on the ground” in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice. Pilate’s cynical retort leads to another exchange with the crowd, who ask for Barabbas (18:40). Pilate’s soldiers dress Jesus up as a king in order to mock him; the sight of him thus attired provokes the chief priests to make fresh demands for his death and to offer a fresh twist in the accusation: “He deserves to die,” because “he made himself the son of God” (19:7). This prompts a new set of questions from Pilate. “Son of God” in his world, of course, meant Caesar; but he seems to sense that there may be a different sort of claim going on. It brings up the question of power: the Greek is exousia, which carries the notion of “authority” or “right,” as in the prologue where John says that those who believed in Jesus were given the exousia (“right,” “power,” or “authority”) to become God’s children (1:12). Here we find an astonishing thing: Jesus recognizes that Pilate has power over him, power given him from God: Pilate addressed him again. “Aren’t you going to speak to me?” he said. “Don’t you know that I have the authority to let you go, and the authority to crucify you?” “You couldn’t have any authority at all over me,” replied Jesus, “unless it was given to you from above.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Barely had they been in Paris a week, when Jonathan Brockett turned up in person: ‘Hallo, my dears, I’ve come over to see you. Everything all right? Are you being looked after?’ He sat down in the only comfortable chair and proceeded to make himself charming to Puddle. It seemed that his flat in Paris being let, he had tried to get rooms at their hotel but had failed, so had gone instead to the Meurice. ‘But I’m not going to take you to lunch there,’ he told them, ‘the weather’s too fine, we’ll go to Versailles. Stephen, ring up and order your car, there’s a darling! By the way, how is Burton getting on? Does he remember to keep to the right and to pass on the left?’ His voice sounded anxious. Stephen reassured him good-humouredly, she knew that he was apt to be nervous in motors. They lunched at the Hotel des Reservoirs, Brockett taking great pains to order special dishes. The waiters were zealous, they evidently knew him: ‘Oui, monsieur, tout de suite—à l’instant, monsieur!’ Other clients were kept waiting while Brockett was served, and Stephen could see that this pleased him. All through the meal he talked about Paris with ardour, as a lover might talk of a mistress. ‘Stephen, I’m not going back for ages. I’m going to make you simply adore her. You’ll see, I’ll make you adore her so much that you’ll find yourself writing like a heaven-born genius. There’s nothing so stimulating as love—you’ve got to have an affair with Paris!’ Then looking at Stephen rather intently, ‘I suppose you’re capable of falling in love?’ She shrugged her shoulders, ignoring his question, but she thought: ‘He’s putting his eye to the keyhole. His curiosity’s positively childish at times,’ for she saw that his face had fallen. ‘Oh, well, if you don’t want to tell me—’ he grumbled. ‘Don’t be silly! There’s nothing to tell,’ smiled Stephen. But she made a mental note to be careful. Brockett’s curiosity was always most dangerous when apparently merely childish. With quick tact he dropped the personal note. No good trying to force her to confide, he decided, she was too damn clever to give herself away, especially before the watchful old Puddle. He sent for the bill and when it arrived, went over it item by item, frowning. ‘Maître d’hotel!’ ‘Oui monsieur?’ ‘You’ve made a mistake; only one liqueur brandy—and here’s another mistake, I ordered two portions of potatoes, not three; I do wish to God you’d be careful!’ When Brockett felt cross he always felt mean. ‘Correct this at once, it’s disgusting!’ he said rudely. Stephen sighed, and hearing her Brockett looked up unabashed: ‘Well, why pay for what we’ve not ordered?’

• From How God Became King (2012)

  High-Volume, Dangerous Distortion What has, for many generations, been passed off as “critical scholarship” has in fact regularly reflected one of two quite different prejudgments, both of which must be challenged. First, there has been the judgment of skeptics, from Reimarus to the present. They maintain that we know, in advance, that most of these stories must be fictitious, because dead people don’t rise, lepers don’t get healed, people don’t walk on water, and not least gods do not appear in human form. That point of view, reinforced by the “spirit of the age,” has enabled anyone casting doubt on the gospels to appear as sophisticated, knowing, and clever, someone who isn’t going to be taken in by a lot of religiously motivated claptrap. People have thus assumed that it is a mark of intellectual maturity to be able to question the historical truth of any and every statement in the gospels. (Curiously, the historical critics are often much more generous when they read Josephus, Tacitus, or other non-Christian first-century sources.) Those who accept things at face value (“Matthew says Jesus said this, so Jesus said it”) are scorned as naive, uncritical, or perhaps fundamentalist. Or all of the above. When asked the point of the stories if it is not that “they happened,” the skeptics answer that these stories reflect the faith of the early Christians. The stories are, as it were, coded statements of the faith of the “early church.” They are, in that sense, “myths,” stories told not in order to say “what happened,” but in order to provide a narrative basis for present existence. Though the philosophical basis for this way of thinking has steadily been eroded over the past half century, many New Testament scholars still insist on the skeptical reading as a mark of intellectual maturity or academic credibility. Well, skeptics must be allowed to have their say. But serious historical arguments can be mounted in favor of a much more positive account. I and plenty of others have offered such accounts, and there has been remarkable little attempt at serious refutation. The second prejudgment has been that made from within the dominant school in New Testament studies in the early part of the twentieth century, namely, the radical Lutheranism of some elements in the German academy, represented particularly by Rudolf Bultmann. As we saw earlier, Bultmann and others believed that it was in the very nature of authentic Christian faith that it should rest on nothing outside itself, no human achievement or status, no historical events.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Perhaps for this reason, some of the most endearing pop culture portrayals of trans women fall into the “pathetic” category: John Lithgow’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of ex–football player Roberta Muldoon in 1982’s The World According to Garp, and Terence Stamp’s role as the aging showgirl Bernadette in 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. More recently, the 1998 indie film The Adventures of Sebastian Cole begins with its teenage protagonist learning that his stepdad Hank, who looks and acts like a roadie for a ’70s rock band, is about to become Henrietta. A sympathetic character and the only stable person in Sebastian’s life, Henrietta spends most of the movie wearing floral-print nightgowns and bare-shouldered tops with tons of jewelry and makeup. Yet despite her extremely femme manner of dress, she continues to exhibit only stereotypical male behaviors, overtly ogling a waitress and punching out a guy who calls her a “faggot” (after which she laments, “I broke a nail”). In the case of Henrietta, this extreme combination of masculinity and femininity does not seem designed to challenge audiences’ assumptions about maleness and femaleness. On the contrary, Henrietta’s masculine voice and mannerisms are meant to demonstrate that, despite her desire to be female, she cannot change the fact that she is really and truly a man. As with Garp ’s Roberta and Priscilla ’s Bernadette, the audience is encouraged to respect Henrietta as a person, but not as a woman. While we are supposed to admire their courage—which presumably comes from the difficulty of living as women who do not appear very female—we are not meant to identify with them or to be sexually attracted to them, as we are to “deceivers” like Dil. Interestingly, while the obvious outward masculinity of “pathetic transsexual” characters is always played up, so too is their lack of male genitalia (or their desire to part with them). In fact, some of the most memorable lines in these movies are uttered when the “pathetic transsexual” character makes light of her own castration. At one point during Priscilla, Bernadette remarks that her parents never spoke to her again, “after [she] had the chop.” In Garp, when a man is injured while receiving a blow job during a car accident, Roberta delivers the one-liner, “I had mine removed surgically under general anesthesia, but to have it bitten off in a Buick…” In the 1994 fictionalized biography Ed Wood, Bill Murray plays another “pathetic transsexual,” Bunny Breckinridge.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Eugenides was fascinated by the book, but he found that, “as an expression of what it is like to be a hermaphrodite, from the inside, Herculine Barbin’s memoir is quite disappointing. She just tends to go into this moaning, talking about how misfortunate she is and ... it’s sad.” 9 Rather than be inconvenienced by the overwhelming depression and isolation that often typifies the lives of gender-variant people, Eugenides set out to invent his own new-and-improved intersex story: “I wanted to write about a real person with a real condition. I did a lot of research on the details, but in terms of figuring out what hermaphrodites psychologically went through, I did that from my imagination. That’s how I work, I try to identify my narrator and my characters as much as I can instead of going out, observing other intersex people and focus[ing] on the details. Hopefully I make the right assumptions and choices about all these characters, so that someone [who] is interested in intersex reads the book.” 10 Middlesex is chock-full of descriptions of atypical chromosome combinations, genital configurations, and other highly detailed medical references to intersex conditions, yet it remains remarkably untainted by actual intersex perspectives or voices. 11 The book reads like an intersex adventure story, with colorful scenes of Cal’s visit with an eccentric, John Money-esque doctor who wishes to perform nonconsensual genital surgery on him, or his befriending other intersex people (as well as transsexuals) when he fulfills the standard gender-variant-person cliché of working as a performer at a sex club. For a character who is supposedly fourteen years old at the time of these events, Cal’s narration remains remarkably light, humorous, and generally above the fray at all times, as though it had been whitewashed of all of the shame, self-loathing, and self-consciousness that plagues gender-variant adolescents as their bodies, identities, and behaviors are placed under society’s microscope. The way that Eugenides dwells in all of the physical aspects of intersexuality while playing down the emotional trauma and stigma that generally accompanies it gives the book an extraordinarily objectifying and voyeuristic feel to someone who is actually familiar with the subject. Eugenides and Anderson both claim to use intersexuality and transsexuality merely as metaphors, but this is clearly disingenuous. While Middlesex may be an epic novel that follows a Greek American family through several generations, what consistently grabbed people’s attention in book reviews and interviews was its intersex protagonist.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  To do so would require these predominantly straight- and male-identified gatekeepers to view masculinity and maleness in purely erotic terms—in other words, to reduce maleness to the status of mere sexual object (something that they would be loath to do in the unlikely event that this line of reasoning ever crossed their minds). This unwillingness to sexualize masculinity to the extent that femininity is sexualized explains why the gatekeepers endlessly dwelled on every perceived nuance and variation that occurred in the sexual practices and fantasies of the MTF spectrum population while simultaneously adamantly claiming that there was no such thing as female transvestism, no erotic component to FTM crossdressing, and no such thing as a gay-identified trans man. 40 Of course, such identities and experiences have always existed, and have been documented by members of the transgender community and by researchers outside the field of sexology. The sexualization of trans women has also had a profound effect on the criteria used to determine which transsexuals have been allowed to transition. While both trans men and trans women were historically required to meet the gatekeepers’ oppositional sexist ideals, trans women often faced an additional standard: They had to be sexually desirable in their identified sex as well. In the 1970s, Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna came across several instances in which gatekeepers were rather blatant about this practice: “A clinician during a panel session on transsexualism at the 1974 meeting of the American Psychological Association said that he was more convinced of the femaleness of a male-to-female transsexual if she was particularly beautiful and was capable of evoking in him those feelings that beautiful women generally do. Another clinician told us that he uses his own sexual interest as a criterion for deciding whether a transsexual is really the gender she/he claims.” 41 While not all gatekeepers relied on their own sexual attraction to assess whether trans women would gain their approval for sex reassignment, it is clear that most took the issue of sexual desirability into consideration. For example, in 1969, gatekeeper John Randell stated, “In both sexes, the individuals chosen for operation were selected because they were credible in their impersonation or, in the case of some males, had won sexual acceptance in the female role despite minor incongruous features.” 42 Thus, being sexually desirable often superseded other transitioning criteria. Further, as one reads through MTF transsexual case studies, it becomes readily apparent that the word “attractive” is regularly used in conjunction with trans women whom the gatekeepers consider to be successful in their transitions.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  After seeing Wood’s film Glen or Glenda, Bunny is inspired to go to Mexico to have a “sex change,” announcing to Wood, “Your movie made me realize I’ve got to take action. Goodbye, penis!” The “pathetic” transsexual’s lighthearted comments about having her penis lopped off come in stark contrast to the revelation of the “deceiver,” who is generally found out by someone else in an embarrassing, often violent way. A Freudian might suggest that the “deceptive” transsexual’s dangerous nature is symbolized by the presence of a hidden penis, while the “pathetic” transsexual’s harmlessness is due to a lack thereof. A less phallic interpretation is that the very act of “passing” makes any trans woman who can do so into a “deceiver.” Ultimately, both “deceptive” and “pathetic” transsexual characters are designed to validate the popular assumption that trans women are truly men. “Pathetic” transsexuals may want to be female, but their masculine appearances and mannerisms always give them away. And while the “deceiver” is initially perceived to be a “real” female, she is eventually revealed as a wolf in sheep’s clothing—an illusion that is the product of lies and modern medical technology—and she is usually punished accordingly. The Fascination with “Feminization” In virtually all depictions of trans women, whether real or fictional, “deceptive” or “pathetic,” the underlying assumption is that the trans woman wants to achieve a stereotypically feminine appearance and gender role. The possibility that trans women are even capable of making a distinction between identifying as female and wanting to cultivate a hyperfeminine image is never raised. In fact, the media often dwells on the specifics of the feminization process, showing trans women putting on their feminine exteriors. It’s telling that TV, film, and news producers tend not to be satisfied with merely showing trans women wearing feminine clothes and makeup. Rather, it is their intent to capture trans women in the act of putting on lipstick, dresses, and high heels, thereby giving the audience the impression that the trans woman’s femaleness is an artificial mask or costume. An excellent example of this phenomenon is Transamerica (2005), a “buddy” road-trip movie pairing up trans woman Bree Osbourne (played by Felicity Huffman) with a son that she was previously unaware she had. In the opening five minutes of the film, we see Bree practicing along with the instructional video Finding Your Female Voice, putting on stockings, padding her bra, donning a pink dress suit, painting her nails (also pink), and putting on lipstick, eye shadow, powder, and other cosmetics. This scene (not coincidentally) is immediately followed by the first dialogue in the movie, where Bree tells a psychiatrist that she’s been on hormone replacement therapy for three years, has undergone electrolysis, feminine facial surgery, a brow-lift, forehead reduction, jaw recontouring, and a tracheal shave. This opening flurry of cosmetic and medical feminization is clearly designed to establish that Bree’s female identity is artificial and imitative, and to reduce her transition to the mere pursuit of feminine finery.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  This reflects the very different levels of privilege men and women have in our society. Of course women want to be men, the general attitude seems to be, and of course they can’t. And that’s that.” 7 Once we recognize how media coverage of transsexuals is informed by the different values our society assigns to femaleness and maleness, it becomes obvious that virtually all attempts to sensationalize and deride trans women are built on a foundation of unspoken misogyny. Since most people cannot fathom why someone would give up male privilege and power in order to become a relatively disempowered female, they assume that trans women transition primarily as a way of obtaining the one type of power that women are perceived to have in our society: the ability to express femininity and to attract men. This is why trans women like myself, who rarely dress in an overly feminine manner and/or who are not attracted to men, are such an enigma to many people. By assuming that my desire to be female is merely some sort of femininity fetish or sexual perversion, they are essentially making the case that women have no worth beyond the extent to which they can be sexualized. Feminist Depictions of Trans Women There are numerous parallels between the way trans women are depicted in the media and the way that they have been portrayed by some feminist theorists. While many feminists—especially younger ones who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s—recognize that trans women can be allies in the fight to eliminate gender stereotypes, other feminists—particularly those who embrace gender essentialism—believe that trans women foster sexism by mimicking patriarchal attitudes about femininity, or that we objectify women by trying to possess female bodies of our own. Many of these latter ideas stem from Janice G. Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, which is perhaps the most influential feminist writing on transsexuals. Like the media, Raymond virtually ignores trans men, dismissing them as “tokens,” and instead focuses almost exclusively on trans women, insisting that they transition in order to achieve stereotypical femininity. She even argues that “most transsexuals conform more to the feminine role than even the most feminine of natural-born women.” 8 This fact does not surprise Raymond, since she believes that femininity itself is an artificial by- product of a patriarchal society. So despite the fact that trans women may attain femininity, Raymond does not believe that they become “real” women. (To emphasize this, she refers to trans women as “male-to-constructed-females” and addresses them with masculine pronouns throughout the book.) Thus, Raymond builds her case by relying on the same tactics as the media: She depicts trans women as hyperfeminine (in order to make their female identities appear highly artificial) and she hypersexualizes them (by playing down the existence of trans people who transition to male).

• From The Pisces (2018)

  He asked stupid questions—“So how long have you lived here?” and “Do you like it?”—but every question was a chance to put his own hotness into action. Why were they even bothering to speak? Who had time for all of this? Why weren’t they just fucking, right there, out in the open? The entire performance was merely a vessel for something else. It was nothingness. Sure, compared to the greater nothingness—the void, the lack of explicit meaning in life, the fact that none of us knows what is going on here—it was at least something. Their engagement in this dance of elevating a stupid restaurant to high levels of importance, discussing kombucha, making the fleeting matter, the shorts: all of these were a fuck-you to emptiness. Or perhaps these details were symptomatic of their ignorance of nothingness. Was nothingness so imperceptible to them that these things could matter? Could anyone be totally ignorant of the void? Didn’t all of us have an awareness of it, a brush with it—perhaps only once or twice, like at a funeral for someone very close to you, when you walked out of the funeral home and it stopped making sense for just a blip that you existed. Or perhaps a bad mushroom trip where one’s fellow trippers looked like plastic. Could there be people on this Earth who never stopped for a moment, not once, to say: What is everything? Whether these were those people or not, I knew that in this moment neither of them was asking that question. If they had tasted the nausea of not knowing why we are here or who we are, or if they had not, now they were willfully and successfully ignoring it. Or maybe they were just stupid. Oh, the sweet gift of stupidity. I envied them. But really, I knew that everything came down to her shorts. All of the answers were in that ass line—the reduction of all fear, all unknown, all nothingness, eclipsed by the ass line. It was holding its own in all of this. It was just existing as though living was easy. The ass line didn’t really have to do anything, but it was running the whole show. All dialogue began and ended at that ass line. The direction of their evening, their conversation, and in a way, the universe ended there. I hated them. I hated their ease with everything. I hated their lack of loneliness, their sense of time stretching out languidly like something to be toyed with, as though it were never going to get too late tonight or in their lives. I didn’t know who I resented more: the man or the woman. 5. I had always thought of depression as having no shape.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the feast of the Ass, —festum asinorum, —the beast that Balaam rode was the chief dramatis persona. The skin of the original animal formed a valuable possession of a convent in Verona. The aim was to give dramatic representation to biblical truth and perhaps to do honor to the venerable and long-suffering beast which from time immemorial has carried man and other burdens. At Rouen the celebration took place on Christmas day. Moses, Aaron, John the Baptist, the Sibyl, Virgil, the children who were thrown into the furnace, and other ancient characters appeared. Balaam, wearing spurs and seated on an ass, was the centre of attraction. A fire was started in the middle of the church around which stood six Jews and Gentiles. The prophets, one by one, made addresses attempting to convert them. The ass spoke when his way was barred by the angel, and Balaam uttered his prophecy of the star. The ass was then placed near the altar and a cope thrown over him. High mass followed. At Beauvais the festival was celebrated on the anniversary of the Flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, Jan. 14. The ass, bearing "a most beautiful maiden" with a child in her arms, was led into the church and stood before the altar during the performance of mass. At the close of the ritual, the priest instead of repeating the customary formula of dismissal, ite, missa est, made three sounds like the braying of an ass,—sacerdos tres hinhannabit, —and the people responded three times, hinham. The improprieties and revels which became connected with these celebrations were adapted to bring religion into disrepute and called forth the rebukes of Innocent III. and Innocent IV., the latter mentioning a boy-bishop by name and condemning the travesty upon serious subjects. In 1444 the theological faculty of Paris spoke of grave and damnable scandals connected with the celebrations, such as the singing of comic songs the men being dressed in women’s attire and the eating of fat cakes at the altar. Councils, as late as 1584, joined in condemning them. At the close of Henry VIII,’s reign and at Cranmer’s suggestion the festivals were forbidden in England. § 135. The Flagellants.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Could there be people on this Earth who never stopped for a moment, not once, to say: What is everything? Whether these were those people or not, I knew that in this moment neither of them was asking that question. If they had tasted the nausea of not knowing why we are here or who we are, or if they had not, now they were willfully and successfully ignoring it. Or maybe they were just stupid. Oh, the sweet gift of stupidity. I envied them. But really, I knew that everything came down to her shorts. All of the answers were in that ass line—the reduction of all fear, all unknown, all nothingness, eclipsed by the ass line. It was holding its own in all of this. It was just existing as though living was easy. The ass line didn’t really have to do anything, but it was running the whole show. All dialogue began and ended at that ass line. The direction of their evening, their conversation, and in a way, the universe ended there. I hated them. I hated their ease with everything. I hated their lack of loneliness, their sense of time stretching out languidly like something to be toyed with, as though it were never going to get too late tonight or in their lives. I didn’t know who I resented more: the man or the woman. 3. That night I called him. “So we aren’t really taking a break, are we?” I asked. “I actually think it’s a good idea,” he said. “I know you were the one who brought it up, but I’d actually like to.” “But what does that mean? For how long? Is it just temporary and then will we get back together at the end?” “Let’s just take it one step at a time,” he said. I could no longer conjure the image of Jamie as I had seen him earlier in the day: overweight, unable to solve my problem, shut down. Now I saw him only as I had seen him when we were first together: strong in the jaw, self-contained in a sexy way, Gore-Tex handsome. I saw him again as a separate person, not an extension of me or something to be coaxed or endured, but his own entity: dry-humored, capable, a real man—whatever that meant. I saw my loss, felt the weight of it, and sat down on my bed. My mouth twitched downward and my stomach heaved. I felt tears rise up. I had not cried in years. I had felt, for a long time, that if I started crying I would not stop—that if I finally ripped, there would be nothing to stop my guts from falling out. I was scared of what might come out of me: the things I would see, what others would see. I was scared the feelings would eat me.