Trans*

What's in a Name?

Whatever is not normative is many.

Eileen Myles, quoted in Ariel Levy, "Dolls and Feelings" (2015)

Over the course of my lifetime I have called myself or been called a variety of names: queer, lesbian, dyke, butch, transgender, stone, and transgender butch, just for starters. Indeed, one day when I was walking along the street with a butch friend, we were called faggots! If I had know the term "transgender" when I was a teenager in the 1970s, I'm sure I would have grabbed hold of it like a life jacket on rough seas, but there were no such words in my world. Changing sex for me and for many people my age was a fantasy, a dream, and because it had nothing to do with our realities, we had to work around this impossibility and create a home for ourselves in bodies that were not comfortable or right in terms of who we understood ourselves to be. The term "wrong body" was used often in the 1980s, even becoming the name of a BBC show about transsexuality, and offensive as the term might sound now, it at least harbored an explanation for how cross-gendered people might experience embodiment: I, at least, felt as if I was in the wrong body, and there seemed to be no way out.

Today, young people who cross-identify are able to imagine themselves into other bodies, bodies that feel more true to who they are. And as times change, as medical technologies shift and develop, we also struggle to name the new "right-ish" bodies that emerge while continuing to work around the "wrong" bodies that remain. This chapter sifts through the changing protocols and rubrics for bodily identification over the past hundred years and asks, simply, what is in a name?

* * *

Many a great novel begins with a name or identification of some sort — "Call me Ishmael." Or, "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip." But also, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect." And of course, "I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate — at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement." Names establish character, lead into events, and create expectations. To be sure, there are also novels that begin in the absence of names: "I am an invisible man" and "Where now? Who now? When now?" These non-naming flourishes challenge the idea of character and raise questions about the ability of naming to capture all the nuances of human identification. Indeed, one of the most lovable children's cartoons of all time, Finding Nemo, features a friendship between a clownfish, Nemo, whose name means "nobody" in Latin, and a blue fish, Dory, who can barely remember her own name from one moment to the next. The confusion that both Nemo and Dory sow leads not to a cozy lesson about who we "really" are but in fact makes the argument for learning to be part of a group, in part by challenging "proper" names. I offer these examples to make sense of the powerful nature of naming — claiming a name or refusing to and thus remaining unnameable. Indeed, this book uses the term "trans*," which I will explain shortly, specifically because it holds open the meaning of the term "trans" and refuses to deliver certainty through the act of naming.

In a contemporary context, it is hard to imagine what it may have felt like to lack a name for one's sense of self. But only a few decades ago, transsexuals in Europe and the United States did not feel that there was a language to describe who they were or what they needed. Christine Jorgensen, heralded by historian Joanne Meyerowitz and others as "America's first transgender celebrity," wrote a letter to her parents in the 1950s telling them that in her "nature made a mistake." And in Radclyffe Hall's infamous novel about inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928), the female-born protagonist, who calls herself Stephen, anguishes about her identity. Her governess, also an invert, tells her in a magnificent speech,

You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet — you've not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don't shrink from yourself, but face yourself calmly and bravely. Have courage; do the best you can with your burden. But above all be honourable. Cling to your honour for the sake of those others who share the same burden. For their sakes show the world that people like you and they can be quite as selfless and fine as the rest of mankind. Let your life go to prove this — it would be a really great life-work, Stephen.

Hall used the term "misfit" for herself and called her hero, Stephen, an outlaw as well as an outcast and an invert, the word used in the early twentieth century in Europe and the United States to describe people in whom gender identity and sexual instincts have been turned around, such that a female-bodied person desiring another woman would be considered a male soul trapped in a female body and a malebodied person harboring same-sex desires would be seen as a female soul trapped in a male body. The term "inversion" has a certain explanatory power in The Well of Loneliness, but only in that it names a disastrous betrayal of some putatively natural femininity. Until the middle of the last century, countless transgender men and women fell between the cracks of the classifications systems designed to explain their plight and found themselves stranded in unnameable realms of embodiment. Today we have an abundance of names for who we are and some people actively desire that space of the unnamable again. This book explains how we came to be trans* and why having a name for oneself can be as damaging as lacking one.

Naming, needless to say, is a powerful activity and one that has been embedded in modern productions of expertise and knowledge production. I have selected the term "trans*" for this book precisely to open the term up to unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of gender variance. As we will see, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations. As this book will show, trans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix. This terminology, trans*, stands at odds with the...