Transgender, Transvestism, and Transsexualism Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The term transgender, although not accepted universally, has been used since the 1980s to refer to a range of practices and identities that cross between or lie outside the traditional western dichotomy of male and female, man and woman.

The term transvestite was coined by Hirschfeld in 1910 to refer to those men and women who, to varying degrees and for varying lengths of time, dressed as, behaved as and sometimes wished to be, members of the other sex, and he argued that this did not necessarily involve homosexuality as others assumed. In the early 1950s the endocrinologist Benjamin began to use the term transsexual to refer to those people who sought to ”change sex” by means of newly developing hormonal and surgical procedures.

With transsexualism linked to ”sex reassignment,” transvestism came to be limited to forms of cross-dressing. Despite Benjamin’s advocacy of ”sex reassignment,” it remained outside mainstream medicine until the 1960s when it began to be carried out on an experimental basis in some medical centers. This provided opportunities for some sociologists to encounter patients seeking such procedures. Other opportunities for sociological research opened up during the 1960s as sub-cultural groups and organizations began to develop. This enabled empirical studies of transvestites and transsexuals and their social worlds.

The late 1960s also saw the (re)emergence of the women’s movement and the interest in gender. The new sociologists of deviance were generally ”on the side” of those who were questioning conventional norms at that time. Those who were questioning the gender norms, however, were feminists and, on the face of it, transvestites and transsexuals appeared to be embracing what feminism was questioning. The critique of transgender phenomena that developed in some feminist circles culminated in Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1980).

By the late 1980s some transvestites and transsexuals were beginning to use the term transgender in an inclusive, ”umbrella” sense to encompass both identities. In time some authors included other ”gender variant” people (e.g., drag queens and kings and intersexed people) within the term (sometimes controversially). By the early 1990s it became common to find references to the ”transgender community,” although, again, this concept has not been without controversy.

Since the early 1990s there has been a surge of anthropological interest in transgender, principally in Southeast Asia and in South America. Some of this literature has focused on conceptions that have developed without the influence of western medicine, such as the idea of an institutionalized ”third” gender or liminal gender space. Nevertheless, it is also evident that western discourses of transgender have been exported to many parts of the world. The attention of social scientists has also begun to focus on those people with intersexed conditions. This has been partly stimulated by the development of a more visible and vociferous inter-sex community.

Transpeople who were originally assigned as female were not much in evidence in either the medical literature or the transgender community before the early 1990s but since then they have become much more visible and in fact have come to play key roles within that community and within transgender politics and theory.

The rise in popularity of the term transgender has paralleled the rise of queer theory, within which crossing the gender border is seen as subversive and transgressive. Stone’s (1991) article which can be seen to provide the starting point for this approach has been particularly influential with some transactivists and academics, and raises radical questions about the binary and fixed nature of gender categories themselves.

Despite this late-modern/postmodern approach with its emphasis on diversity, fluidity, and moving beyond the rigidities of the binary gender divide and its celebration of new combinations of masculinity and femininity, for most in the professional and transgender communities, as in society at large, the binary view of gender prevails.

Bibliography:

Califia, P. (1997) Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. Cleis Press, San Francisco, CA.
Ekins, R. & King, D. (2006) The Transgender Phenomenon. Sage, London.
Stone, S. (1991) The empire strikes back: a posttranssexual manifesto. In: Straub, K. & Epstein, J. (eds.), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Routledge, New York.
Stryker, S. & Whittle, S. (eds.) (2006), The Transgender Studies Reader. Routledge, London.