Trans Mania

Bree (Felicity Huffman) and her son Toby (Kevin Zegers) in Transamerica. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

Gay liberationists used to claim “we are everywhere,” and for a time, culturally, near the turn of the millennium, the slogan rang true. But the wheel of fashion is continually turning and lately it has stopped on “trans”: the arts community and the media are paying previously unheard-of attention to transvestites and the transgendered. Lesbian chic is so 1993; trans is very stylish, very now.

After playing Ottawa in January, the Tony-winning Broadway play I Am My Own Wife — a one-man show about an actual German male cross-dresser who thrived under the Nazis and the communists — is now on in Toronto and slated to arrive in Vancouver in March. The film biz is also bending, blurring and breaking gender norms with abandon. Coming soon to film theatres, She’s the Man is a cross-dressing teen comedy based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Felicity Huffman is up for an Academy Award for her performance as a male-to-female transsexual in Transamerica... six years after Hilary Swank won the statuette for playing Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena — a biological woman trying to shift in the opposite direction — in Boys Don't Cry. Not far behind is Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is reported to have just scooped up her own trans film role — as if it were the latest must-have accessory.

Norah Vincent, as both woman and man, on the book cover for Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back. (AP Photo/Viking Penguin)

Just how trendy has trans become? In 2000, a middle-aged female writer, Laura Albert, adopted the alter-ego of a young trans hustler, JT Leroy, to sell books. Until this fall, it worked.

And outspoken Los Angeles Times columnist Norah Vincent spent a year dressing up as Ned and going to male bastions like monasteries, female strip joints and men’s movement retreats. She has reported the results of her investigation in a new book called Self-Made Man.

The transgendered seem to have moved from the outside fringes of our culture to, well, the inside fringes. Droves of artists in various media are visiting that imaginary nation memorably christened in The Rocky Horror Picture Show as Transsexual Transylvania. And some are staying on.

Usually when the spotlight is shone on a social issue, it exposes a single artistic or political agenda. Not so here. What seems like a single cultural wave is, upon closer scrutiny, two distinct waves heading in opposite directions. One is all about blurring gender, and heads into a murky sea; the other is about defining gender, and tries to steer toward solid land.

In her influential 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” Susan Sontag wrote: “Camp is the love of the exaggerated, the off, of things being what they are not.” She claims that “the androgyne is one of the great images of Camp sensibility.” Sontag cites examples like the “swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry” and the “haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo,” concluding that “what is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something quite masculine.”

This is the patch of land that gender-blurring art tills. In I Am My Own Wife, a German boy named Lothar visits an aunt who wears only men’s clothing. When she later finds him in one of her old, abandoned dresses, she can tell that’s where he feels most like himself. She gives him On Transvestism, a book by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, which teaches the boy that he’s not the only one whom nature has beckoned across the gender divide. And thus, he is reborn as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. But Charlotte never attempts to pass herself off as a woman; rather, she adopts a sort of third gender — the female man.

Stephen Ouimette in I Am My Own Wife. Photo Shin Sugino. Courtesy CanStage Productions.

The underlying assumptions of such works are that men and women are not so terribly different, that the boundaries between us are fluid, that each of us has some male and some female characteristics that we can nurture — or not — at our discretion. Many of these works hearken back to the story told in Plato’s Symposium, namely that we are descended from a primordial race of hermaphrodites. Because they rebelled against the gods, the gods split these entities in two, and we, their offspring, are forever endeavouring to reunite with our gender opposite.

In John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a German cabaret artist named Hedwig (née Hansel) relates this story in a song called The Origin of Love. Hedwig is the victim of a botched sex change; instead of having distinctively male or female genitalia, Hedwig has been left with just an “angry inch.” The movie presents her as superhuman, a veritable star, more talented than anyone else around her; eventually, she adopts a persona that is neither wholly male nor female.

Jeffrey Eugenides revisits the myth in his 2002 novel Middlesex, which focuses on the life of a genetic hermaphrodite named Calliope (“Cal”) Stephanides.The book’s protagonist is brought up as a girl; when she’s 15, a doctor discovers she has undescended testicles and the telltale Y chromosome. Rather than submit to gender reassignment surgery — so that her male parts conform to her upbringing as a girl — the protagonist runs away from home and continues to live, as the title suggests, in a state of middlesex. Calliope adopts a male name and wears men’s clothing, but retains the part-female, part-male genitalia.

These works celebrate people who end up between traditional genders. Androgyny is the destination, not a way station between masculinity and femininity. The goal is actually to transcend gender; flying above the limitations imposed by society is a common metaphor. In a magical realist sequence in Hedwig, the singer soars through a club. I Am a Bird Now is the title of the breakthrough album of the androgynous singer Antony.

The other half of this movement takes an utterly different approach to the same issues. In Transamerica, Bree (née Stanley) is a pre-op transsexual who discovers she once fathered a son; she decides to take him on a cross-country road trip. She ends up at her parents’ home, where she tries to explain the difference between her inner femaleness and her genetic maleness — and thus her need for surgery, so that her outer self reflects her inner one. Critics have rightly commented that the keynote in Felicity Huffman’s performance is dignity: her Bree has a prissy walk, emphatically pleads for acceptance from her family and develops stereotypical motherly instincts towards her recently rediscovered son. She has always known that she was a girl born in a boy’s body and has a fixed — and very feminine — idea of womanhood. It is not artifice that’s lauded here, but nature.

The gender-defining school is earnest, not at all campy, and often explores what it means when your inner identity is at odds with your outer one. Art with this theme takes for granted the opposite assumptions: that men are naturally from Mars and women from Venus, and that we can identify our inward truest beings by reference to outward norms of male and female. According to this school of thought, gender can’t be transcended; ultimately, these works seek tolerance and understanding for those people who make the transition.

In the 2004 film Stage Beauty, Billy Crudup plays a boy actor on the English stage who specializes in female roles. When the king, Charles II, orders males to cease playing females, Crudup’s character finds himself out of work. He slowly learns how to play young men on stage, and in so doing, finds his salvation (and love with Claire Danes), aligning his art with his born gender.

In Middlesex, Eugenides neatly summarizes the two competing trans trends. In the 1970s, he writes, “women were becoming more like men, and men were becoming more like women. For a little while... it seemed that sexual difference might pass away.” Eugenides believes the male-hunter-versus-female-gatherer stereotypes have since experienced a renaissance. “And so today, you get the current simplifications. Why can't men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to one another where the fruits and berries were.)”

In the end, Cal Stephanides finds he can’t swear allegiance to either school. Some aspects of him seem immutable, there from the start; others have become altered through time and circumstance. He can’t decide on either the nature or nurture side of the equation. In the end, s/he opts to remain a hybrid, because neither option is a complete fit. His hope: “Free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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