Undoing Gender (13 page)

There is something of me that exceeds this part, though I want this part, though it is part of me. He does not want his “worth justified” by what he has between his legs, and what this means is that he has another sense of how the worth of the person might be justified. So we might say that he is living his desire, acquiring the anatomy that he wants in order to live his desire, but that his desire is complex, and his worth is complex.

And this is why, no doubt, in response to many of the questions that Money posed: Do you want to have a penis? Do you want to marry a girl? David often refused to answer the question, refused to stay in the room where Money was, refused to visit Baltimore at all after a while.

David does not trade in one gender norm for another, not exactly.

It would be as wrong to say that he has simply internalized a gendered norm (from a critical position) as it would be to say that he has failed to live up to a gendered norm (from a normalizing, medical position), since he has already established that what will justify his worth will be the invocation of an “I” which is not reducible to the compatibility of his anatomy with the norm. He thinks something more of himself than what others think, he does not fully justify his worth through recourse to what he has between his legs, and he does not think of himself as a complete loser. Something exceeds the norm, and he recognizes its unrecognizability. It is, in a sense, his distance from the knowably human that operates as a condition of critical speech, the source of his worth, as the justification for his worth. He says that if what those doctors believe were true, he would be a complete loser, and he implies that he is not a complete loser, that something in him is winning.

But he is also saying something more—he is cautioning us against the absolutism of distinction itself, for his phallus does not constitute the entirety of his worth. There is an incommensurability between who he is and what he has, an incommensurability between the phallus he has and what it is expected to be (and in this way no different from anyone with a phallus), which means that he has not become one with the norm, and yet he is still someone, speaking, insisting, even referring to himself. And it is from this gap, this incommensurability, between the norm that is supposed to inaugurate his humanness and the spoken insistence on himself that he performs that he derives his worth, that he speaks his worth. And we cannot precisely give content to this person at the very moment that he speaks his worth, which means that it is precisely the ways in which he is not fully recognizable, fully disposable, fully categorizable, that his humanness emerges.

And this is important because we might ask that he enter into intelligibility in order to speak and to be known, but what he does instead, through his speech, is to offer a critical perspective on the norms that confer intelligibility itself. He shows, we might say, that there is an understanding to be had that exceeds the norms of intelligibility itself.

And he achieves this “outside,” we might speculate, by refusing the interrogations that besiege him, reversing their terms, and learning the ways in which he might escape. If he renders himself unintelligible to those who seek to know and capture his identity, this means that something about him is intelligible outside of the framework of accepted intelligibility. We might be tempted to say that there is some core of a person, and so some presumption of humanism, that emerges here, that is supervenient to the particular discourses on sexed and gendered intelligibility that constrain him. But that would mean only that he is denounced by one discourse only to be carried by another discourse, the discourse of humanism. Or we might say that there is some core of the subject who speaks, who speaks beyond what is sayable, and that it is this ineffability that marks David’s speech, the ineffability of the other who is not disclosed through speech, but leaves a portentous shard of itself in its saying, a self that is beyond discourse itself.

But what I would prefer is that we might consider carefully that when David invokes the “I” in this quite hopeful and unexpected way, he is speaking about a certain conviction he has about his own lovability; he says that “they” must think he is a real loser if the only reason anyone is going to love him is because of what he has between his legs. The “they” is telling him that he will not be loved, or that he will not be loved unless he takes what they have for him, and that they have what he needs in order to get love, that he will be loveless without what they have. But he refuses to accept that what they are offering in their discourse is love. He refuses their offering of love, understanding it as a bribe, as a seduction to subjection. He will be and he is, he tells us, loved for some other reason, a reason they do not understand, and it is not a reason we are given. It is clearly a reason that is beyond the regime of reason established by the norms of sexology itself.

We know only that he holds out for another reason, and that in this sense, we no longer know what kind of reason this is, what reason can be; he establishes the limits of what they know, disrupting the politics of truth, making use of his desubjugation within that order of being to establish the possibility of love beyond the grasp of that norm. He positions himself, knowingly, in relation to the norm, but he does not comply with its requirements. He risks a certain “desubjugation”—is he a subject? How will we know? And in this sense, David’s discourse puts into play the operation of critique itself, critique which, defined by Foucault, is precisely the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth.

This does not mean that David becomes unintelligible and, therefore, without value to politics; rather, he emerges at the limits of intelligibility, offering a perspective on the variable ways in which norms circumscribe the human. It is precisely because we understand, without quite grasping, that he has another reason, that he
is
, as it were, another reason, that we see the limits to the discourse of intelligibility that would decide his fate. David does not precisely occupy a new world, since he is still, even within the syntax which brings about his “I,” still positioned somewhere between the norm and its failure. And he is, finally, neither one; he is the human in its anonymity, as that which we do not yet know how to name or that which sets a limits on all naming. And in that sense, he is the anonymous—and critical—condition of the human as it speaks itself at the limits of what we think we know.

Postscript: As this book was going to press in June of 2004,
I was saddened to learn that David Reimer took his life at the
age of 38. The New York Times obituary (5/12/04) mentions that
his brother died two years earlier and that he was now separated
from his wife. It is difficult to know what, in the end, made his
life unlivable or why this life was one he felt was time to end.

It seems clear, however, that there was always a question posed
for him, and by him, whether life in his gender would be
survivable. It is unclear whether it was his gender that was the
problem, or the “treatment” that brought about an enduring suffering for him. The norms governing what it is to be a worthy,
recognizable, and sustainable human life clearly did not support
his life in any continuous or solid way. Life for him was always
a wager and a risk, a courageous and fragile accomplishment.

4. Undiagnosing Gender

In recent years there have been debates about the status of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’
(
DSM-IV
) diagnosis of gender identity disorder and, in particular, whether there are good reasons to keep the diagnosis on the books, or whether there are no longer very many good reasons. On the one hand, those within the GLBQTI community who want to keep the diagnosis argue that it offers certification for a condition, and facilitates access to a variety of medical and technological means for transitioning. Moreover, some insurance companies will only absorb some of the very high costs of sex change if they first can establish that the change is “medically necessitated.” It is important, for these reasons, not to understand sex change surgery or hormonal usage as “elective surgery.” Although one might want to say that it is a choice, even a choice of a dramatic and profound kind, for the purpose of the insurance allocation it has to be a medically conditioned choice. We can surely think for quite some time about what a medically conditioned choice actually is, but for the purpose of this argument it’s important to distinguish between a choice conditioned by a diagnosis and one that is not. In the latter case, the choice to transition can include some or all of the following: the choice to live as another gender, to take hormonal surgery, to find and declare a name, to secure new legal status for one’s gender, and to undergo surgery. If it is determined by psychological or medical professionals to be necessitated, that is, if it is determined that not undergoing this transition produces distress, maladaptation, and other forms of suffering, then it would seem to follow that the choice to transition is conceived as one that is embraced and condoned by medical professionals who have the person’s ultimate well-being at issue. The “diagnosis” can operate in several ways, but one way it can and does operate, especially in the hands of those who are transphobic, is as an instrument of pathologization.

To be diagnosed with gender identity disorder (GID) is to be found, in some way, to be ill, sick, wrong, out of order, abnormal, and to suffer a certain stigmatization as a consequence of the diagnosis being given at all. As a result, some activist psychiatrists and trans people have argued that the diagnosis should be eliminated altogether, that transsexuality is not a disorder, and ought not to be conceived of as one, and that trans people ought to be understood as engaged in a practice of self-determination, an exercise of autonomy. Thus, on the one hand, the diagnosis continues to be valued because it facilitates an economically feasible way of transitioning. On the other hand, the diagnosis is adamantly opposed because it continues to pathologize as a mental disorder what ought to be understood instead as one among many human possibilities of determining one’s gender for oneself.

One can see from the above sketch that there is a tension in this debate between those who are, for the purposes of the debate, trying to gain entitlement and financial assistance, and those who seek to ground the practice of transsexuality in a notion of autonomy. We might well hesitate at once and ask whether these two views are actually in opposition to one another. After all, one might argue, and people surely have, that the way that the diagnosis facilitates certain entitlements to insurance benefits,
¹
to medical treatment, and to legal status, actually works in the service of what we might call transautonomy.

After all, if I want to transition, I may well need the diagnosis to help me achieve my goal, and achieving my goal is precisely an exercise of my autonomy. Indeed, we can argue that no one achieves autonomy without the assistance or support of a community, especially if one is making a brave and difficult choice such as transitioning. But then we have to ask whether the diagnosis is unambiguously part of the “support” that individuals need in order to exercise self-determination with respect to gender. After all, the diagnosis makes many assumptions that undercut transautonomy. It subscribes to forms of psychological assessment which assume that the diagnosed person is affected by forces he or she does not understand It assumes that there is delusion or dysphoria in such people. It assumes that certain gender norms have not been properly embodied, and that an error and a failure have taken place. It makes assumptions about fathers and mothers, and what normal family life is, and should have been. It assumes the language of correction, adaptation, and normalization. It seeks to uphold the gender norms of the world as it is currently constituted and tends to pathologize any effort to produce gender in ways that fail to conform to existing norms (or, fails to conform to a certain dominant fantasy of what existing norms actually are). It is a diagnosis that has been given to people against their will, and it is a diagnosis that has effectively broken the will of many people, especially queer and trans youth.

So, it would seem that the debate is a very complex one, and that, in a way, those who want to keep the diagnosis want to do so because it helps them achieve their aims and, in that sense, realize their autonomy. And those who want to do away with the diagnosis want to do so because it might make for a world in which they might be regarded and treated in non-pathological ways, therefore enhancing their autonomy in important ways. I think we see here the concrete limits to any notion of autonomy that establishes the individual as alone, free of social conditions, without dependency on social instruments of various kinds.

Autonomy is a socially conditioned way of living in the world. Those instruments, such as the diagnosis, can be enabling, but they can also be restrictive and often they can function as both at the same time.

On the face of it, it would seem that there are two different approaches to autonomy, but it is important to note that this is not only a philosophical problem to be answered in the abstract. To understand the difference between these views, we have to ask how the diagnosis is actually lived. What does it mean to live with it?
²
Does it help some people to live, to achieve a life that feels worth living? Does it hinder some people from living, make them feel stigmatized, and, in some cases, contribute to a suicidal conclusion? On the one hand, we ought not to underestimate the benefits that the diagnosis has brought, especially to trans people of limited economic means who, without the assistance of medical insurance, could not have achieved their goals.