An Introduction
An advertisement in a national lesbian magazine, On Our Backs, questions readers if they are "Too Butch to Be True?" and encourages them to explore their gender identities at FTM, a female-to-male transsexual support group.1 If female-to-male transsexuals are women who want to become men, who feel they are men, the appearance of such an ad in a lesbian magazine seems incongruous. What about the feminist rhetoric that stated unequivocally that lesbians do not want to be men? Even with the increased acceptance of butch-femme erotic styles, aren't women who want penises antithetical to feminist ideology? For some feminists, specifically those espousing the anti-pornography stance, On Our Backs itself constitutes an anti-feminist and hetero-patriarchal threat, because of its depiction of S/M, role-playing, and other marginalized sexual practices, reinforcing the notion that women who want penises are buying into the patriarchal denigration of women. Setting aside those objections, what developments have produced such an unexpected intersection of butch lesbianism and transsexuality?2
As a diagnostic psychological category, transsexuality originated in 1966 with the publication of Harry Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon. Transsexuality consists of the stated desire to alter one's sex. The causes of such a desire range from schizophrenia to ego-dystonic homosexuality, but hormonal and surgical treatment is only allowed in cases when gender dysphoria has been diagnosed by the psychiatric professionals of a gender identity clinic. Gender dysphoria, as it is presently defined, can be summarized as the continuous feeling of discomfort/pain/hatred of one's anatomical sex, and the overwhelming desire to become the opposite sex, physically and socially.3 Previous to Benjamin's work, transsexuality was considered indistinguishable from homosexuality. The conflation of transsexuality and homosexuality produced two effects: homosexuals were perceived as desiring to be the other sex, and, therefore, were denigrated; and transsexuals were thought to be homosexuals who were too homophobic to accept their sexuality, and were, therefore, denied acceptance.
Historically, transsexuality and homosexuality evolved out of a third diagnostic category: inversion. Nineteenth-century sexologists identified the syndrome of psycho-sexual inversion, a psychological category no longer operative in our contemporary understanding of sexual and gender identities. The invert possessed the psychological characteristics of the opposite sex which lead him/her to same-sex romantic and sexual involvements. In the twentieth century, the concept of inversion has evolved into the contemporary conceptions of transsexuality and homosexuality, through the analytic separation of gender identity and sexual identity.
Sigmund Freud provided the first impetus for the analytic dissociation of anatomical sex and gender identity. In his article "Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality," Freud outlines the distinctions between physical sexual characteristics, mental sexual characteristics, and gender of object-choice.4 Feminists, such as Simone de Beauvoir, also articulated the distinction between sex and gender. By distinguishing sex and gender, or anatomy and identity, feminists could challenge the biological determinist argument for sexual oppression, but such a distinction also facilitated the evolution of transsexuality. When biology was destiny, no language existed to describe a gender identity incongruent with anatomical sex. With Freud's assertion that homosexuality constituted a choice of love object, not a mental sexual attitude or gender identity, arose the need for a diagnostic category which could describe the female inverts who felt they were fundamentally identified with masculinity, hence the construction of transsexuality.
If transsexuality and lesbianism share a common history in the sexologists' concept of inversion, female-to-male transsexuality also shares other similarities with butch lesbianism. Fifty percent of female-to-male transsexuals live as lesbians, ostensibly butch, before they undergo treatment.5 Marcy Sheiner, in her article "Some Girls Will Be Boys," cites the example of:
Sandy and Sal, two lesbians, who've been in a relationship for six years, have found the lesbian community "a safe place to hide, to have female form and be very butch," but have never fully identified as lesbians. As a couple, both women recently embarked on a course of sex change therapy. "We're convinced we're faggots," says Sandy.6
Another junction between transsexuality and homosexuality arises out of the psychological community's aetiologies of lesbian and female-to-male transsexual development. The textbook case of a female-to-male transsexual consists of a biological female who has felt all h/er life that s/he was masculine, shows no outward signs of femininity, and has never had sexual or romantic interest in men, a description which would encompass many lesbians -- butch, femme, or androgynous.
Within the context of feminist discourse, it is difficult to discuss transsexuality, especially female-to-male, without encountering hostility. I view the the present position of the female-to-male transsexual in relation to contemporary feminism as parallel to the treatment of butches in the early feminist movement. Both groups, butch lesbians and transsexuals, have been forced to choose between exclusion from or assimilation into the feminist community. Just as the language of male-identified and hetero-patriarchal was used to control the behavior of working-class, bar dykes upon their integration into the feminist movement, we find the same language used by Janice Raymond and other feminists in relation to female-to-male transsexuals.7
Janice Raymond, the foremost feminist opponent of transsexuality, admits this similarity of transsexuality and lesbianism: "...transsexual surgery can be viewed as taming potentially deviant women. What is further attempted is to ward off potential lesbianism."8 I would argue, however, that within the feminist movement the androgynous ideal of lesbianism was used to tame potentially "deviant" butches in the early seventies. Further, the "taming of the butch" has been used to ward off potential transsexuality.
Examining the construction of sexual difference by "cultural" feminists of the seventies, masculinity was reducible to violence, rape, and exploitation. In her essay "The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968-83," Alice Echols points out that "Cultural feminists believe that the struggle against male supremacy begins with women exorcising the male within us and maximizing our femaleness."9 Within this framework, both butch lesbianism and female-to-male transsexuality would constitute anti-feminist identities. But transsexuality, especially, becomes constituted as women becoming the enemy, as defecting to the patriarchy. In her article "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," Gayle Rubin identifies the issues at stake in "drawing of the line" between good, acceptable sexuality and bad, degenerate sexuality.10 We find that the process of "drawing the line" represents the use of marginalization and exclusion to buttress feminist authority in the realm of the social production of sexuality.
Female-to-male transsexuals in the lesbian and feminist communities are invisible, and knowledge of their existence would no doubt be repugnant to feminists dedicated to the maintenance of biological essentialism. Considering the treatment of male-to-female lesbian feminists by the some factions of the genetically female feminist community, female-to-male transsexuals would likely fare no better were they to disclose their gender identities.11 Janice Raymond, and feminists supporting her, argued in the late seventies that transsexualism constituted "a 'sociopolitical program' ...undercutting the movement to eradicate sex-role stereotyping and oppression in this culture."12 Transsexualism, for Raymond, was the direct response of the psycho-medical establishment to feminism, the weapon of the hetero-patriarchal medical men against the threat of feminism and lesbian-separatism. In 1979, it may have seemed so. It may have seemed as if transsexuals had medico-magically appeared, and appeared as lesbian-feminists to infiltrate hard-won all-women space. But in the 1990s, can we still afford to refuse to revise our thinking about trannsexuals?
As it was constructed by the psycho-medical community, transsexualism may have posed a patriarchal response to feminism, but only in its particular psycho-medical construction as non-threatening to the gender system. The patriarchal medical establishment and sensationalizing television talk shows, both representatives of the dominant culture, used transsexualism to alleviate mainstream America's anxiety about gender roles after the sexual revolution and to channel that anxiety into support for patriarchal values. Use of the transsexual identity by the psycho-medical establishment, however, does not indict transsexuals of gender conservatism. It points only to the construction of the transsexual identity by the medical community.
The relationship between transsexuals seeking treatment and the psychiatric and medical professionals who provide that treatment has not been an easy or unproblematic alliance. Whereas Benjamin's work on transsexuality was based on the voices and experiences of the transsexuals with whom he worked, after Benjamin's publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, the psychiatric and medical professionals who began to pay more attention to transsexuality co-opted and re-interpreted those voices. The "gender" professionals who work in gender identity clinics now control what qualifies as gender dysphoria and who qualifies for treatment. These "guardians" of gender can and do exclude transsexuals from treatment programs if their experience does not match "clinical standards." Generally, only thirty percent of those who present themselves to gender identity clinics for sex reassignment surgery are diagnosed as "truly" gender dysphoric.13
Granted, surgery on demand is impractical, but clinical standards have been constructed to support the gender system. As an example, transsexuals who identified themselves as gay or lesbian in their new sex were often excluded from treatment programs before the "gender" clinicians rediscovered that sexual orientation was independent of gender identity. The desire to be heterosexual in the new sex was considered definitive of transsexuality because Benjamin hadn't encountered any trans-homosexuals. The doctor in the gender clinic has the power to bestow or withhold the desired treatment from the transsexuals within his program. Transsexual cooperation with medical professionals can be seen as the process by which transsexual acquire their goals of treatment and does not necessarily reflect accurately or "completely" the experience of transsexuality.
Raymond also maintains that "all [male-to-female] transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves."14 In conjunction with this, she asserts that the entire (male-to-female) transsexual body is transformed through surgery into a phallus whose presence in lesbian-feminist space represents a total body rape of women's space. Not only does this analysis serve to support the biological essentialism of sexual difference, but it also rests on the narrow scope of her research -- the examination of predominantly male-to-female transsexuals. Raymond's fullest discussion of female-to-male transsexuality is the five pages she dedicates to the subject in her introduction. Raymond is so concerned with indicting the male-to-female transsexual and the psycho-medical community that she overlooks the FTM and h/er experience of gender subversion. Raymond's construction of the female-to-male as tokenized by the patriarchy is in fact a necessary projection of her own tokenization of the FTM. Her analysis of the patriarchal culture's obsession with the male-to-female on the basis of his male privilege mirrors her own attention to the male-to-female at the expense of the female-to-male.
Further study would have shown that female-to-male transsexuals find androgyny more desirable than adherence to rigid sex roles and do not reject the feminine aspects of themselves as strongly as do non-transsexual men.15 Further study of the female-to-male community would have shown that much less distinction is made between trans-gendered and transsexual, between cross-dressing and cross-living, between gay and straight within the female-to-male community than has been seen in the male-to-female community.16 Further study would have shown, as I hope this essay will show, that the female-to-male transsexual's access to all-male spaces, institutions, and privileges, in fact to the very status of male, constitutes the most devastating challenge to essentialist arguments of male supremacy and threatens the very fabric of the patriarchy by throwing into crisis the means by which sexual differentiation is imposed.17
Ten years ago, lesbians struggled to assert their butch-femme identities and, today, role-playing has provided the basis for insightful feminist theory.18 Transsexuality also has the potential for providing great insight into gender ambiguity. The process by which butch-femme role playing reformed feminist conceptions of gender can provide a model for transsexuals to follow in their own process of reformulating feminist theory with respect to gender ambiguity. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, in their introduction to Body Guards, assert that, "gender ambiguity, in and of itself, answers to many different political masters."19 Transsexuality has been tethered to the service of right-wing family politics, the psycho-medical establishment, and the gender system itself. Feminists in the wake of Janice Raymond have denied, excluded, and devalued transsexuality as an instance of gender ambiguity. Transsexuals themselves have been denigrated and denied by feminists. Transsexuals have struggled for "the right to their existence," for a voice for their identities, for the appropriate medical treatment for their problems, for legal protection, for the right to express their sexuality. Transsexuals have not bent their heads in the face of resistance and repression, they are fighters, survivors. Yet feminists label them and their struggles reactionary. Feminists have disowned this struggle and allowed the dominant ideology to construct transsexuality for its own purposes, to continually silence the transsexual voice by appropriating that voice to maintain the gender status quo.
How can we understand transsexuality in a way which re-deploys the discursive power that constructs the transsexual body and reconfigures transsexual identity? How can we support transsexuals in their endeavor to multiply ambiguity, rather than accept the dominant culture's appropriation of the transsexual identity in the service of gender rigidity?
The Well of Loneliness and the Transsexual Imaginary
"Dedicated to our three selves" -Radclyffe Hall's Dedication of The Well of Loneliness
Using the category of inversion as a starting point for examining the intersections of lesbianism and transsexuality, we can turn to the foremost chronicle of the life of an invert in literature, The Well of Loneliness. For sixty years, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness has occupied the foremost position in the canon of lesbian fiction. Written in 1928, The Well was the first novel openly to discuss lesbianism as normal and natural, and to censure homophobic society for not accepting the normality of homosexuality.The Well of Loneliness significantly contributed to the evolution of the ideology of homosexuality and, therefore, transsexuality by utilizing and reversing the psycho-medical discourse on inversion.
Jonathan Dollimore, in his book Sexual Dissidence, describes The Well as "authenticating the inauthentic...by merging, displacing, and replacing negative representations with more positive ones appropriated from the dominant and transformed in the process."20 Hall transformed both the religious view of homosexuality and the psycho-medical view which was replacing it in the dominant discourse, constructing a space in which later lesbians could create an alternative, more radical discourse and establish healthy, positive identities. The Well of Loneliness paved the way for lesbians and gays to speak for themselves, to find a voice in the modern medico-legal discourse of sexuality.
The standing of The Well of Loneliness in the lesbian community has suffered since Stonewall, or perhaps more tellingly, since the "taming" of the lesbian bar culture by feminism. Radclyffe Hall is often neglected in comparison with her contemporaries, who are often considered far greater in their contributions to literature: Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf. Even in comparison to less acclaimed lesbian authors of her time -- Natalie Barney, RenŽe Vivien, and Vita Sackville-West -- Hall is considered less revolutionary in her contribution to lesbian culture. When The Well is discussed in studies of lesbian culture and literature, it is dismissed shortly after a brief acknowledgment of its status as a historically important lesbian novel.
Because the novel specifically defines Stephen Gordon, the protagonist of The Well, as an invert, we can question its generic label as a lesbian novel. As the concept of inversion has been split into both lesbianism and transsexualism, a novel about an invert can be read as either lesbian or transsexual. To interpret Stephen as a lesbian implies that lesbians want to be men, consider men their competitors, and are dissatisfied with their womanhood. In my opinion, it was only through sheer obstinacy that lesbian-feminists could possibly overlook Stephen's desire to be a man.
Because of the valuable effect ofThe Well of Loneliness on the production of a reverse discourse which led to greater and greater strides towards liberation for lesbians, The Well can provide the impetus for such a reverse discourse for female-to-male transsexuals. The position of lesbianism in relation to dominant culture in 1928 mirrors the relationship of transsexuality to both feminism and the dominant culture today. I propose that readingThe Well of Loneliness as a transsexual novel could facilitate the establishment of a transsexual genre of literature in which transsexuals could see themselves reflected and through which they could find a voice for their experience. Just as Jan Morris' Conundrum provided thousands of male-to-female transsexuals with a literary self-representation of transsexuality, the establishment of a specifically female-to-male transsexual genre of literature could facilitate the cultural representation necessary for discursive power.21 The extreme dearth of information on female-to-male transsexuality makes the establishment of a female-to-male transsexual novel a breakthrough in knowledge about this topic. The Well could be added to the short list of narratives of female-to-male transsexuality, which includes most prominently Louis B. Sullivan's From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland and Mario Martino's autobiography, Emergence.
The Well of Lonelinessends tragically: Stephen feigns an affair with a friend, pushing h/er lover, Mary, into Martin's arms.22 Stephen is left alone and despondent, having sacrificed h/erself for Mary and for inverts around the world and across time. In some ways, Stephen's self-sacrifice is incomprehensible. The love affair between Stephen and Mary appears markedly different from Stephen's previous affairs with cruel and manipulative women. Mary is madly in love with Stephen, and even in the midst of the war between Martin and Stephen over her love, Mary stands by Stephen. So why, in the face of Mary's loyalty, does Stephen renounce her love? The answer to this question provides a strong basis for reading The Well as a transsexual novel.
Stephen's final sacrifice constitutes the culmination of h/er character development and of the development of the narrative. To illuminate Stephen's motivations for sacrificing h/erself, we must move to the beginning of the novel and explore h/er development from childhood. Female-to-male transsexuality is characterized by two definitive traits: an overwhelming desire to be male and an intense dissatisfaction with being female. Both traits play themselves out on the body, in social interactions, and through sexuality. Following the development of both character traits through the novel provides insight into Stephen's compulsion to self-martyrdom.
Stephen exhibits the definitive and primary trait of transsexuality: the desire to be male. In all h/er childhood fantasies, Stephen envisions h/erself as a boy, as Christ, "William Tell, or Nelson, or the whole Charge of Balaclava."23 In h/er fantasies, Stephen can be a hero, with "much swagger and noise, much strutting and posing, and much staring in the mirror."24 In h/er games, s/he can be rid of the "hated soft dresses and sashes, and ribbons, and small coral beads and openwork stockings," and enjoy the freedom of breeches and pockets.25 Stephen dearly wishes these fantasies to become reality and protests when h/er femaleness is acknowledged:
Stephen would say gravely; "Yes, of course I'm a boy. I'm young Nelson, and I'm saying: 'What is fear?'...--I must be a boy, 'cause I feel exactly like one, I feel like young Nelson in the picture upstairs."26
But Stephen already recognizes the impossibility of h/er dream to become a man. S/he is prone to fits of temper and depression when s/he becomes "conscious of feeling all wrong, because she so longed to be someone quite real, instead of just Stephen pretending to be Nelson."27 As a child of seven, Stephen expresses h/er innermost desire to h/er father:
Sometimes, when the child's heart would feel full past bearing, she must tell him her problems in small stumbling phrases. Tell him how much she wanted to be different, longed to be someone like Nelson. She would say: "Do you think that I could become a man, supposing I thought very hard--or prayed, Father?"28
Although Stephen becomes less vocal and outspoken about h/er desire to be a man as s/he grows older, h/er desire to "be someone real" never abates.
To further understand Stephen's desire for masculinity, we can look to h/er relationship with Roger Antrim, the neighbors' son. In h/er relationships with the young Antrims, Stephen exhibits all of the discomfort and isolation characteristic of the gender dysphoric child, who at an early age begins to struggle with non-conformity in a gender-structured society.
Of all the children that Stephen most dreaded, Violet and Roger Antrim took precedence.
"...[Roger] grew to hate Stephen as a kind of rival, a kind of intruder into his especial providence...As for Stephen, she loathed...[Roger], and her loathing was increased by a most humiliating consciousness of envy. Yes, despite his shortcomings she envied young Roger with his thick, clumping boots, his cropped hair and his Etons; envied his masculine companions of whom he would speak grandly as: 'all the other fellows!;' envied his right to climb trees and play cricket and football--his right to be perfectly natural; above all she envied his splendid conviction that being a boy constituted a privilege in life; she could well understand that conviction, but this only increased her envy."29
Roger represents the embodiment of Stephen's fantasies, the boy Stephen could have been, and h/er conflicting feelings of loathing and envy represent h/er position in relation to masculinity. S/he desires the trappings of masculinity--short hair, men's clothes, a public school education--but what s/he most desires is the right to them, the right to be masculine. S/he envies Roger for his male privilege, and s/he despises his abuse of that privilege. Stephen's mixed feelings of envy and loathing for Roger resemble closely the boy's relationship to the father during the Oedipal phase.
During the Oedipal period, the boy child envies his father's power, position, and right to the mother, while simultaneously loathing him for preventing the boy from attaining those advantages. For Stephen, h/er Oedipal relationship to the position of the father must have been doubly fraught with difficulty: s/he was barred from male privilege by h/er father and by h/er fe/maleness. Her loathing of the father for his authority becomes compounded by h/er self-loathing for not being "someone real." In fact, h/er envy of male privilege comes to signify h/er pretense of masculinity. Because h/er deep love for Philip, h/er father, prevents h/er from expressing h/er antagonism for him, h/er intense feelings of hatred become turned back on h/erself for h/er inadequacy. Stephen's desire for masculinity appears to be the foundation on which h/er Oedipal relationship to h/er father rests. Although girls do normally perceive their fathers as rivals for their mother's love, only in the case of the transsexual desire to become the father would that rivalry be played out at the level of envy of masculinity and male privilege. I would argue that the desire for masculinity, therefore, precedes the Oedipal phase. It is only through the Oedipal phase and its necessary recognition of female castration that the perception of the self as ideally male becomes signifiable.
The Well of Loneliness also represents in Stephen the second(ary) characteristic of female-to-male transsexuality: an intense dissatisfaction with being female. In a scene from Stephen's childhood, we find a paradigm for examining h/er relationship to femininity:
In a quick fit of anger, she would go to the cupboard, and getting out her dolls would begin to torment them. She always despised the idiotic creatures which, however, arrived with each Christmas and birthday.
'I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!' she would mutter, thumping their innocuous faces.30
Here, Stephen lets loose unencumbered sadism, pure aggression directed towards femininity and its emblems. The dolls, as representatives of societal expectations of femininity, take the brunt of Stephen's rejection of femininity. Stephen's resentment against the assumption that because s/he is female s/he would want dolls as gifts represents a rebellion against the conflation of anatomical sex and gender identity. To contrast Stephen's treatment of h/er dolls, another representation of young girls and their dolls is provided by the character of Violet Antrim. As Roger Antrim represents Stephen's ideal boy-self, Violet represents what Stephen could have been as a girl. Whereas Stephen desperately envied Roger:
Stephen found Violet intolerably silly...Violet was already full of feminine poses; she loved dolls, but not quite so much as she pretended. People said: "Look at Violet, she's like a little mother; it's so touching to see that instinct in a child!" Then Violet would become still more touching.31
Violet embraces the feminine role, and the social rewards she receives for playing that role. What is the significance of dolls in relation to femininity in the novel? Obviously, "plays with dolls" constitutes a cultural signifier of childhood femininity, but why is Stephen's torment of h/er dolls paradigmatic of h/er relationship to femininity?
In his paper "Female Sexuality," Freud provides the answer that playing with dolls represents the child's fantasy of mothering her mother:
The first sexually tinged experiences of a child in its relation to the mother are naturally passive in character. It is she who suckles, feeds, cleans and dresses it...Part of the child's libido goes on clinging to these experiences..., while another part strives to convert them into activity. ...We seldom hear of a little girl's wanting to wash or dress her mother...[but] Sometimes she says: "Now let's play I am the mother and you are the child"; but generally she fulfills these active wishes indirectly in playing with her doll, she herself representing the mother and the doll the child.32
Stephen, then, is enacting a scene between h/er mother and h/erself, with Stephen playing the mother, and the doll representing Stephen. In Stephen's move towards the active role in the relationship between h/er and h/er mother, Stephen does not become actively loving; s/he actively hates and adopts the active term in the sadism-masochism duality. Drawing the connections between Stephen, sado-masochism, and femininity, we should look further into Stephen's relationship with Anna.
At seven years-old and already alienated from h/er mother, Stephen understands femininity as unattainable beauty and grace which fills h/er "with a sudden sense of her own shortcomings."33 Stephen's sense of h/er own inferiority is only reinforced by Anna's rejection:
Stephen, acutely responsive to beauty, would be dimly longing to find expression for a feeling amounting to worship, that her mother's face had awakened. But Anna, looking gravely at her daughter,...would be filled with a sudden antagonism that came very near to anger.34
It is this scene--Stephen worshipping and the object of h/er love rejecting h/er--which defines Stephen's relationship to femininity, and it is this scene which Stephen is repeating in h/er torment of h/er dolls. Anna's rejection of and antagonism towards Stephen is presented as Anna's inability to accept Stephen's masculinity:
the child's soft flesh would be almost distasteful to...[Anna] ...she hated the way Stephen moved or stood still, hated a certain largeness about her, a certain crude lack of grace in her movements, a certain unconscious defiance.35
The focus of Stephen's feelings of inferiority, then, is h/er own masculinity--that part of h/erself which is narrated as fundamental. H/er masculinity constitutes h/er as not feminine enough, as lacking in the eyes of h/er mother.
Mapping this scene of Anna and Stephen onto Stephen's sadism against h/er dolls, we find that three distinct scenarios arise which establish the connections between sado-masochism, femininity, and Stephen. First, Stephen sadistically torments the dolls as an identification with Anna's antagonism against h/er. Stephen plays the mother, the dolls represent Stephen, and Stephen identifies with Anna. Reading Stephen's sadism as an identification with Anna, we can understand Stephen's acceptance of femininity as cold, rejecting, and cruel. With the possible exception of Mary, each of Stephen's loves in the novel fits this image of woman, each, in her turn, betraying Stephen for the love of a man. Understanding Stephen's sadism as a repetition of Anna's sadism also reveals that Stephen's identification with h/er mother involves the antagonism towards h/erself, as the mother's rival for the father's love, which raises the question of Stephen's desire for h/er father.
Reversing the roles in the second scenario, Stephen plays the mother, the dolls represent Anna, Stephen beats the dolls, symbols of femininity and therefore Anna, as an attempt to lash back at Anna. Representing Anna as the doll, Stephen's sadistic torment signifies Stephen's antagonism against Anna as both the rejecting object of desire and as the rival for the father as the object of desire. Stephen's sadism, then, allows an outlet for the aggression arising from both of Stephen's Oedipal positions--loving h/er father and h/er mother. The dolls, as signifiers of social expectations of femininity, exemplify femininity for Stephen as a problematic of the Oedipal triangle.
To delineate the various aspects of Stephen's Oedipal relationships to h/er parents, Stephen identifies with h/er father in h/er desire for masculinity, which constitutes Anna as the object of h/er desire. Stephen also hates Anna for h/er rejection of Stephen's love and for h/er position as rival for Philip's love. In Stephen's desire for h/er father, s/he must identify with Anna, but can only do so through a sado-masochistic scenario. To identify with h/er mother is to inflict pain on h/erself, thus Stephen must occupy the masochistic position to maintain the identification with Anna.
In the third scenario, Stephen punishes h/erself, as the doll, for not being lovable to h/er mother. Stephen plays the mother, the dolls represent Stephen, and Stephen identifies with the dolls. In this reading of the scene, Stephen occupies not the sadistic position, but the masochistic. Stephen's masochism allows h/er to receive love and rejection from h/er mother, or more properly love through rejection. The masochistic development of Stephen's relationship to femininity prevails as the trope for h/er desire for women, and as the defining characteristic of h/er personality. She elicits love fused with cruelty and rejection from the women whom s/he loves. The self-destruction Stephen performs in h/er relationships with women is characterized in the novel as "like a moth who is courting a candle."36 Masochism entails taking up the "feminine" or "passive" position in the duality of sadism and masochism. The tendency towards masochism can also be regarded as feminine because aggression is a socially unacceptable trait in women, women's aggression is often turned on themselves. Masochism, then, is Stephen's compromise: although s/he dearly wants to be male and exhibits primarily masculine traits, for the love of h/er mother, s/he will take up the feminine position which also allows h/er to be punished for that masculinity. Stephen's sado-masochistic identification with h/er mother is h/er concession to h/er femaleness, the method by which Stephen enters some identification with femininity into h/er psychic economy.
Stephen's tormenting and beating of h/er dolls is followed immediately in the novel by an elaborate masochistic fantasy which Stephen develops in the name of love for Collins, a housemaid. The explicit description of Stephen's pleasure in masochism makes it worth citing the passage in full. When Collins explains her rejections of Stephen as a result of "the water in me kneecap," Stephen responds by declaring that:
"I do wish I'd got it...cause that way I could bear it instead of you. I'd like to be awfully hurt for you, Collins, the way that Jesus was hurt for sinners."...That evening...she turned to the child's Book of Scripture Stories and she studied the picture of the Lord on His Cross, and she felt that she understood Him. ...At bedtime,...Stephen prayed in good earnest---with such fervor, indeed, that she dripped perspiration in a veritable orgy of prayer. "...I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins--I love her, and I want to be hurt like You were...." This petition she repeated until she fell asleep, to dream in some queer way that she was Jesus, and that Collins was kneeling and kissing her hand, because she, Stephen, had managed to cure her by cutting off her knee with a bone paper-knife and grafting it on to her own. The dream was a mixture of rapture and discomfort...37
As evidenced in this passage, Stephen has converted h/er physical aggression at the rejection of h/er mother and the social expectations of femininity into an emotional and erotic masochism. Masochism represents both Stephen's modality of expressing love and h/er modality of eliciting love. The masochistic identification with Christ constitutes a particularly fertile and, in our culture, specific form of masochism, that is moral masochism.38
In her article "Masochism and Male Subjectivity," Kaja Silverman characterizes the Master scene of moral masochism as:
Christ nailed to the cross, head wreathed in thorns and blood dripping from his impaled sides. What is being beaten here is not so much the body as the flesh...The Christian masochist...seeks to remake...herself according to the exemplum of the suffering Christ, the very picture of divestiture and loss."39
Stephen's identification with Christ then directs us to examine h/er relationship to the flesh, to the flesh which embodies divestiture and loss. Stephen considers h/erself "afflicted with a...maimed and insufferable body."40 and:
She longed to maim...[h/er body], for...it made her feel cruel.41
Stephen's flesh constitutes the object of h/er sadism. Her flesh is maimed and s/he longs to maim it. The very loss embodied in h/er flesh demands the sadism directed at it. Stephen, however, is echoing the language of Anna in reference to h/er body. Anna considers Stephen "a blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction" of Sir Philip.42 Stephen's sadism towards h/er body, then, is an identification with Anna and Anna's sadism towards Stephen and h/er "distasteful flesh." Stephen enacts both the roles of h/er mother, the cruel punisher, and h/erself, the punished, in h/er relationship between h/er mind and h/er body. By seeking to remake h/erself in the image of the Christ, Stephen performs the avowal of castration. As a masochism focused around castration, the mark of the sexual division of subjects, we can understand Stephen's masochism as the response to a problematized entry into the Symbolic.
The subject enters the realm of the Symbolic through the dissolution of the Oedipus complex. The Law which prohibits incestuous desire institutes the formation of the super-ego, which de-sexualizes the child's relationships to the parents. The formation of the super-ego dictates that the child replaces desire for the parents with identification with the parents. Silverman maintains that:
The super-ego would also seem to involve two different kinds of introjection, one of which I will characterize as "imaginary" and the other as "symbolic." ...imaginary introjection is the psychic process whereby once-loved figures are taken into the self as subjective models or exempla, i.e., the formation of that image or cluster of images in which the ego sees itself as it would like to be seen. Symbolic introjection, on the other hand, designates the psychic process whereby the subject is subordinated to the Law and the phallus.43
By delineating two forms of introjection, we can further outline the process by which Stephen arrives at h/er phallic-masochistic fantasy of identification with Christ. Stephen appears to have introjected the ego-ideals of h/er parental imagos; h/er desire to "be someone real" reflects h/er idealization of h/er father and h/er vision of h/er mother as an object of worship against whom s/he measures h/erself seems to reflect the introjection of h/er mother's image. But Imaginary introjection belongs properly to the period before the Law of the Phallus descends.
If, as I contend, Stephen's identification with Christ as a moral masochist points to a problematic entry into the Symbolic, we need to further explore the position from which Stephen punishes h/erself for h/er castration. All textual evidence points to that position being identification with Anna and h/er sadism. The sadism which Stephen has directed against h/erself reinforces the ego-ideal s/he has formed of h/er mother, transforming that Imaginary formation into the harsh and judgmental super-ego of Symbolic introjection. Stephen was punished for h/er masculinity, which was defined as a lack of femininity, by Anna's rejection and antagonism. S/he despises h/erself for not being feminine enough, and therefore not being worthy of h/er mother's love as a daughter. Conversely, s/he feels h/erself to be inadequate, castrated for not being a son, and therefore not entitled to loving h/er mother. If the Symbolic super-ego is, in Silverman's words, "irreducibly masculine ... within the present social order" but for Stephen the Law of the Father takes on h/er mother's face, we can seriously question the position of the plurally gender-identified wo/man in relation to the Law of the Phallus.44
The nature of Stephen's Oedipal drama, h/er agonistic relationship to both sexes, constitutes the effects of a more primary identification with masculinity. Just as Stephen's perception of h/erself as male preceded but was not signifiable until the knowledge of female castration was acquired, Stephen's difficulty with h/er entry in the Symbolic order directs us again to h/er pre-Oedipal development to understand the origin of h/er masculine gender identity. However, little textual information is disclosed about Stephen's formative, pre-Oedipal years. We learn of Stephen's birth:
Anna Gordon was delivered of a daughter; a narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a baby, that yelled and yelled for three hours without ceasing, as though outraged to find itself ejected into life.45
We know that Stephen's parents wanted a son, and when a daughter is born, they christen h/er Stephen anyway. Between Stephen's "outraged" birth and h/er christening, we learn that as Anna "held her child to her breast,...she grieved while it drank," which points us towards questioning the role of maternal care in the development of the transsexual identity.46 We also find a scene of pre-Oedipal bliss between Stephen and h/er father during h/er toddling years is provided, a scene into which Anna intrudes. This scene directs us towards the role of the father as formative in the masculine identity. These glimmering memory-screens constitute the whole of our knowledge of Stephen's pre-Oedipal period. Although the novel often passes rapidly through the years of Stephen's life, the first seven years of h/er life, the period between Stephen's birth and h/er first grappling with sexual identity issues, presents a narrative absence, a textual void, which proves difficult to plumb. We turn now to psychoanalysis to fill in the gap of Stephen's first seven years--that textual absence which beckons and begs to be understood.
The Man in the Mirror and the Law of the Phallus
In Stephen Gordon, we can recognize that the formation of the self as fundamentally masculine precedes the Oedipal phase of development, that h/er difficulties with traversing the Oedipal prerogative of transforming desire into identification arise from h/er plural gender-orientations, and that the Oedipal drama of castration comes to signify the already existing split of gender identities. To explore the topography of split subjectivity, we can turn to the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, which provides the most sophisticated analyses of the effect of the gender and language systems on the formation of identity. Lacan identifies the mirror stage, occurring between the ages of 6-18 months, as the formative moment in the development of identity. During the mirror stage, the infant, "still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependency," recognizes and is captivated by the image of h/erself in the mirror.47 The child identifies h/erself with the image, and is transformed by the "jubilant assumption of his specular image."48 The assumption of the specular image is jubilant because the child sees h/erself not in h/er infantile incapacity and dependency but as h/er Ideal-I, as the maturation of h/er body and power. The Ideal-I constitutes the ego as fragmented, and "manufactures for the subject...the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality," fantasies which allow the subject to believe s/he will mature into the form of the Ideal.49 Lacan asserts that:
the important point is that this form [in the mirror] situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being ( le devenir ) of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality.50
The identification with the self in the mirror is the first identification, the original transformation. The child is transformed from a bodiless desire for love and food into a bounded system. The identification with the mirrored Ideal, and the transformation which follows it, is the assumption of the body envisioned in the mirror. Assumption--the process of putting on, as in donning a garment--of the mirrored body constitutes the formation of the ego. As Freud stated, "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity [in relation to external reality], but is itself a projection of a surface."51 Through the identification with the mirror image, the child experiences the boundaries of the skin, the perceptual shield between the I and the world, which is then introjected to form the psychic boundary between internal and external--the ego. As the child grows and matures, s/he, envisioning the Ideal, moves h/erself closer to the form of the Ideal-I but can never attain the totality, the seamless whole of the mirror image. The I then constitutes the Other, the object of original desire, the object which initiates the child into subjectivity. In the child's assumption of the I, s/he believes that s/he is the I and constitutes h/er historicized self as an object. Within this framework, identity rests on a fundamentally divided self even before the intervention of society and language.
We know that transsexuals experience such a division of self, and experience it specifically along gender lines. I contend that for female-to-male transsexuals the Ideal-I takes on the form of adult male, fully developed with all of the impressive largeness which little boys envy and fear in their fathers. I would argue that the memory-screen of Stephen and Philip playing blissfully represents the results of h/er mirroring of h/er father. Identification with the male body creates the childhood belief that s/he will grow into a man. For h/er, the Other is h/er Ideal male self, the vision of h/erself as male, which s/he carries with h/er in h/er process of maturation.
As Lacan points out, the incorporation of this Ideal occurs before the child's entrance into language and the Symbolic, before the division of subjects into genders by the Phallus. In this way, we can understand the primacy of the gendered self which occurs before the knowledge of sexual difference. By temporally separating the child's acquisition of a gendered self-image and the knowledge that gender is dependent upon anatomy, which descends with the Law of the Father, Lacan provides a space in which to discuss a separation of gender identity and sexed body. Using Lacan, we can conceptualize Stephen as having developed a masculine gender identity, but it is not until the cognizance of gender as anatomically based that s/he questions both that gender identity and the Phallic Law which denies h/er the possibility of acquiring a body in congruence with h/er identity. Allowing for an initial vision of a gendered self provides a framework for understanding the gender dysphoric feeling of the body as having betrayed the self and of the gendered self as primary. In Stephen, we can recognize that the feeling of belonging to the opposite sex precedes and causes the dissatisfaction with the born-sex. Stephen's difficulties with femininity arise only after h/er recognition that s/he cannot become a man.
The exploration of the transsexual experience of the tension between the betraying body and the primary self, of the body's inadequacy in relation to the Ideal-I, presents new representations of mirrors. The experience of the mirror after Phallic division reflects a reversed image of the mirror in the mirror stage. Instead of seeing the Ideal and idealized body, the transsexual sees the inferior and lacking body. The image of the Ideal-I, which was once foreign but became the psychic image of the self, becomes the standard by which the transsexual's body is measured. The very jubilance of the mirror stage dictates the dejection of confronting later mirrors. Lou Sullivan, a female-to-gay-male transsexual activist, writes of the transsexual experience of the body and the mirror:
Even before pursuing any medical/surgical/hormonal change, the female-to-male experiences her male body every day of her life. Through strong engulfing fantasy, she 'feels' her broad shoulders, 'feels' her flat chest, her low voice. ...With this self-image, she is met in the mirror every single day of her life by someone she doesn't recognize.52
Such severe disjunction of the mind and the body is characteristic of transsexuality. Stephen is described as a "true genius in chains, in the chains of the flesh, a fine spirit subject to physical bondage."53 For Stephen, h/er experience of the mirrored body implicates the entirety of h/er psychical development:
That night she stared at herself in the glass; and even as she did so she hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts, and its slender flanks of an athlete. All her life she must drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. This strangely ardent yet sterile body that must worship yet never be worshipped in return by the creature of its adoration. She longed to maim it, for it made her feel cruel; it was so white, so strong and so self-sufficient; yet withal so poor and unhappy a thing that her eyes filled with tears and her hate turned to pity. She began to grieve over it, touching her breasts with pitiful fingers, stroking her shoulders, letting her hands slip along her straight thighs--Oh, poor and most desolate body!54
The body in the mirror is inscribed with all of the manifestations of h/er transsexuality: h/er self-hatred, h/er problematic relationships to both masculinity and femininity, h/er unsatisfied and unsatisfiable Desire of the Other. The body represented in the mirror constitutes the disappointing opposite of the Ideal form of h/er mirror stage. Stephen's "spirit," that of h/er which was formed by the mirror stage, is represented as antagonistic to h/er body. This antagonism between body and mind, between self and Ideal, can cause severe depression and often suicidal or self-mutilating tendencies in transsexuals. Stephen, for example, moves rapidly from hatred of h/er body to the desire to maim it to self-pity.
The contemporary understanding of depression evolved out of Sigmund Freud's concept of melancholia. Freud states that:
The distinguishing features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.55
Freud finds the key to melancholia in the self-reproaches which appear to be reproaches against a loved and lost object. Melancholia, then, arises out of the internalization of the object to prevent loss of the object. Three models are available to describe the nature of the self-hatred which arises out of the internalization of the object. First, the judgmental and punishing super-ego punishes the ego for its similarity to the betraying object. Second, in the case of melancholia rooted in the Oedipal period, the internalized object forms the super-ego itself, which recreates the relationship between the loved but prohibited parent and the child in the relationship of the super-ego and the ego. Third, melancholia is contrasted to mourning in which the object is acknowledged as lost, facilitating grief and the eventual resurgence of the reality principle. In melancholia, both the love of the object and its loss are repressed out of which arises the self-hatred as the punishment for the prohibited love.
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler uses this third model to describe gender identity as a melancholic structure. She articulates the distinction between introjection and incorporation as the distinction between mourning and melancholia:
Incorporation...belongs more properly to melancholy, the state of disavowed or suspended grief in which the object is magically sustained 'in the body'...Whereas introjection founds the possibility of metaphorical signification...in which words 'figure' the absence and surpass it. As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear "sex" as its literal truth.56
Incorporation creates the sexed body through the inscription of the female genitals as the site of loss. The love of and identification with the Ideal-I of the mirror stage must be disavowed when s/he enters the realm of the Symbolic through the Law of the Father. The disavowal of that love and its loss becomes literalized on the female genitals and body. The female body itself, therefore, "encrypts" the lost love. Butler points out, "Melancholia is thus a psychoanalytic norm for women, one that rests upon her ostensible desire to have a penis, a desire which, conveniently, can no longer be felt or known." 57 Whether or not the castration complex is the norm for women, female-to-male transsexuals feel and know this loss, and the desire which prefigures it. The disavowal of the desire which signals the division of subjects by sex is not lost to the memory of transsexuals. 58
Transsexual melancholia only follows Freud's schema of internalization of an object and an enacting of the ambivalent feeling towards that object if we consider the Phallus as the lost object. Indeed for the female-to-male transsexual, the Phallus becomes the signifier of the Ideal-I as Other. Jacqueline Rose reads Lacan as positing that the Phallic division is laid over the split subjectivity of the mirror phase: "By breaking the imaginary dyad, the phallus represents a moment of division...which re-enacts the fundamental splitting of subjectivity itself."59 The Law of the Phallus forces the child to recognize h/er split subjectivity and to identify with the gender congruent with h/er anatomy. The child's initiation into the Symbolic Order incites h/er consciousness of h/er fragmented identity and h/er alienation from both genders. H/er negotiation of the Law of the Phallus is to engender the Ideal-I as masculine and to embody femininity as castration. The Imaginary man in the mirror comes to be signified as the Symbolic Phallus. All other desire constitutes a metonymy, along the chain of signifiers, of the desire for the Other, of the desire to become the someone real of the mirror stage. Stephen wants women who the Father wants, and s/he wants women who will make h/er feel as if s/he is the Father. As a melancholia originating in the mirror stage, transsexual melancholia can be understood as narcissistic. Julia Kristeva asserts that in the case of narcissistic melancholia:
Far from being a dissimulated assault upon another...sorrow would be the signaling of an incomplete, empty and wounded primitive ego. Such a person doesn't consider himself as injured but stricken by a fundamental lack, by a congenital deficiency.60
Fundamental lack is precisely the language which female-to-male transsexuals use when speaking of their born-body. They feel themselves to be incomplete, lacking in relation to the Ideal of the body, lacking the Phallus which would mark h/er movement through the mirror. The Phallus, then, signifies to the female-to-male transsexual the entirety of the transformation into masculinity.
Transsexuality constitutes an embodied and engendered example of fragmented identity. We need a language in which to discuss conflicts between masculine and feminine identities, indeed a language which can support multiply gendered identities, a language which does not reduce itself to anatomical or sex role differences. We need a more sophisticated language to encompass both the physical and the fantasied bodies of transsexuals. We need a language of gender which supports the play of conservatism and subversion in the practice of gender ambiguity. For the basis of this language and its challenge to the Phallus, we move from The Well of Loneliness to post-transsexual literature.
The Fraud of the Phallus and Post-Transsexual Textuality
The Well of Loneliness develops as the narrative of Stephen's traversal of the Oedipal terrain towards the resolution of the castration complex. The Well constantly constitutes Stephen through a series of triadic relationships, each a compulsive repetition of Stephen's Oedipal triangle. As s/he repeats h/er Oedipal conflicts with h/er parents, Stephen moves slowly towards mastery over the rejection of h/er mother and h/er inability to attain the position of h/er father. This movement towards mastery presents itself in cycles. Stephen desires a woman who will fulfill h/er desire to become the Other. The woman reinforces Stephen's perception of h/er castration. Stephen avows that castration through masochism. The woman betrays Stephen for a "real" man. Stephen faces the impossibility of becoming the Other and responds with h/er fantasy of martyrdom. Stephen compulsively repeats this cycle with Collins and the footman, Angela and Mr. Crossby, Angela and Roger Antrim, and, finally, with Mary and Martin. Only in the final repetition of h/er Oedipal drama does Stephen accept h/er position in the Order of the Symbolic, or rather h/er non-position as transsexed.
Stephen's recognition of the love between Mary and Martin comes to h/er "in a blinding flash of insight...Like a blow that is struck full between the eyes."61 Martin and Stephen challenge each other to fight for Mary's love, but for Stephen the fight is already lost. Martin's challenge constitutes a challenge to Stephen to accept the "lesbian" nature of h/er relationship to Mary, to recognize that "she" cannot become the Father despite all h/er hopes, and, at bottom, to accept h/erself as castrated. In this way, Martin represents the Symbolic Father who initiates the child into the prohibition of incest, and a striking contrast to the loving Imaginary figure of Sir Philip.
Stephen recognizes that s/he has acquired the trappings of masculinity--wealth, prestige, and tailor-made clothes--but s/he has never attained the right to them. Essentially s/he accepts that s/he has never and will never be "someone real." S/he concedes that Martin is the better man, that he is, in fact, the "real" man, and s/he a mere shell of masculinity. S/he realizes that s/he can only offer Mary the trappings of heterosexuality, but cannot provide the privilege of heterosexuality:
Never before had she seen all that was lacking to Mary Llewellyn, all that would pass from her faltering grasp,...with the passing of Martin--children, a home that the world would respect, ties of affection that the world would hold sacred, the blessed security and the peace of being released from the world's persecution. And suddenly Martin appeared to Stephen as a creature endowed with incalculable bounty, having in his hands all those priceless gifts which she...could never offer.62
Stephen identifies the heterosexual privilege which Martin can provide as Protection. S/he is obsessively focused on h/er inability to protect Mary. For Stephen, then, Protection represents the heterosexual Privilege of the Phallus which s/he lacks. Stephen's only defense against h/er lack is h/er writing, h/er status as an author. S/he believes that completing h/er novel on the life of an invert will protect Mary, "will compel the world to accept ...[h/er] for what ...[s/he] is."63 When h/er third novel is finished, Stephen feels "wonderfully self-sufficient and strong, wonderfully capable of protecting."64 Stephen pen is h/er Phallus, h/er defense against the acceptance of h/er feminine body, and in h/er attempt to fight off Martin's challenge to h/er masculinity, s/he writes frantically. "she would feel that her pen was dipped in blood, that with every word she wrote, she was bleeding!"65 Martin has caused h/er to be bleeding where h/er Phallus once was, has castrated h/er.
In the final pages, as Stephen sacrifices Mary to Martin, h/er identity dissociates. She watches h/erself destroy h/erself. She becomes the spectator of h/er self-reflexive masochism, the third character in h/er drama of femininity. In this moment, s/he aligns h/erself with the omniscient, third-person narrator:
She let herself into the house with her latchkey. The place seemed full of an articulate silence that leapt out shouting from every corner--a jibing, grimacing, vindictive silence. She brushed it aside with a sweep of her hand...But who was it who brushed that silence aside? Not Stephen Gordon . . . oh, no, surely not . . . Stephen Gordon was dead; she had died last night: "A l'heure de notre mort . . ."66
It is the hour of our death, the death of Our Three Selves. Stephen's identity disintegrates with the knowledge of h/er fragmented, transsexed identity. Lacan in his analysis of Hamlet, states: "There is a simple relationship that the subject has to the object of desire, a relationship that I have expressed in terms of an appointment."67 The fulfillment of this appointment, the meeting of the two which results in the recognition of the inadequacy of that object in relation to the Other, is the Hour of the Other. Lacan maintains that:
Hamlet is always at the hour of the Other....Moreover, there is only one hour, the hour of his destruction. The entire tragedy of Hamlet is constituted in a way it shows us the unrelenting movement of the subject toward that hour.68
The Well of Loneliness, also, moves Stephen unrelentingly toward the Hour of the Other, towards the hour of h/er acceptance of the inadequacy of h/er objects of desireÑAnna and the succession of women replacing h/erÑto fulfill h/er Desire of the Other. At this hour, Stephen recognizes the lostness of the object, the Phallus, and must, then, renounce the substitutes for that object: Mary, all women, and the very possibility of love. For Stephen, the recognition of h/er transsexed identity constitutes the recognition of the impossibility of the Phallus. Jacqueline Rose maintains that in order to enter the Symbolic:
The subject has to recognise that there is desire, or lack in the place of the Other, that there is no ultimate certainty or truth, and that the status of the phallus is a fraud... .69
Stephen's Hour of the Other, then constitutes h/er entry into the Symbolic, and simultaneously the recognition of h/er identity as fragmented along the lines of gender.
It is in these final moments of the book, when Stephen has sacrificed Mary and Martin, that Stephen's identity as multiple is most clear:
They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful--it ached with its fearful and sterile burden. It ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their right to salvation. ...And now there was only one voice, one demand; her own voice into which those millions had entered. ...
"God," she gasped, "we believe; we have told You we believe...We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!"70
Jean Radford characterizes The Well as utilizing "the elements of religious parable, case history and social protest novel; but for the love story and the sacrificial fantasy of the ending, Hall adapted the forms of heterosexual romance fiction."71 At this moment of closure, the multiple discursive strategies employed by Hall convergeÑStephen's martyrdom for the cause of h/er brothers and sisters; h/er social protest to God and the reader; h/er moment of madness as the tragic end of h/er psychological history; the inversion of the romantic form in which unrequited love operates as the narrative conflict and the union of the lovers represents resolution; and the inversion of the romantic definition of the hero as rewarded with the heroine's love to the making of Stephen as a hero through the renunciation of Mary and Martin's love.
In this textual moment, the multiplicity of narrative forms used by Hall merge, just as the multiplicity of Stephen's identities become one voice--and that voice is Radclyffe Hall's. The text itself represents the "one voice, one demand...into which those millions had entered." Hall's voice, both singular and plural, at this moment points to the multiplicity of Hall's own identity, as a person and as an author. Hall becomes the speaker, uniting author and object of narration, and the text represents the womb aching with the fierce yet helpless children. The text writes the transsexed, multiply-gendered body and constitutes the body which is speaking.
Stephen's identity subverts the notion of a unitary subjectivity; s/he embodies "millions," men and women, lesbians, gay men, and both female-to male and male-to-female transsexuals. Stephen becomes the multiplicity of genders which constitute themselves beyond phallocentric heterosexuality. In h/er final enactment of h/er Oedipal triangle, the moment of the recognition of h/er transsexual destiny, the renunciation of love as a female, Stephen's identities multiply and converge. H/er masculine selves merge with h/er feminine selves and the triangle collapses, as does the "I." The multiplicity of authorial identities merge with the multiplicity of narrated identities to construct a plural voice. Our Three Selves become one and the same, singular and multiple, one voice speaking as "we," which transcends the ordering of sex/gender/sexuality and the ordering of Author/ Narrator/Narrated.
In constructing the third member of the Oedipal drama as ambiguously/plurally gendered, Radclyffe Hall has provided a position outside of the boundaries of gender. In disrupting the Subject/Object, Gazing/Spectacle, Lover/Beloved dualities of phallocentric heterosexuality, Stephen subverts the gender dichotomy by maintaining desires for both the mother and the father as both man and woman, thereby creating a multiplicity of gendered desires. Stephen constitutes not merely a third gender, but an/Other position within the gender system. A position which provides for the possibility of multiple identities, desires, and bodies, the possibility of infinite subjectivities, each re-inscribing our notions of gender and sexuality onto new configurations of desire. By authorizing the multiplicity of gendered positions, The Well of Loneliness becomes a post-transsexual text, a text which can engage the construction of transsexual-ism by the psycho-medical establishment for to extend the discursive realm of the gender system. As Sandy Stone asserts:
For a transsexual, as a transsexual, to generate a true, effective and representational counterdiscourse is to speak from outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible.72
In viewing The Well as a post-transsexual text, we can revive the discursive power of its resistance to dominant culture, a power which for two decades has been buried beneath feminist criticism which has denied its cultural and literary value.
An Epilogue
What do you call it when a woman has a sex-change operation?
An add-a-dick-tomy.
-A children's riddle.
Where the narrative of The Well of Loneliness closes, the lives of most transsexuals open. The entry into the Order of the Symbolic and the Phallic division of the sexes constitutes the first recognition of "difference" for transsexuals. As children, transsexuals often recognize the incongruity between their masculine and feminine identities between the ages of three and twelve. Usually, the understanding of the division of the sexes is the first memory. Jan Morris' realization "under the piano," for example, was h/er first memory and the opening of h/er autobiography. The "infinite desolation" and isolation of Stephen's final sacrifice often follows transsexuals throughout their lives.73 The "ineffable spiritual pain," as one male-to-female transsexual described it, which accompanies the lived experience of transsexuality dampens the glory that I have expressed at the post-transsexual subversion of the gender system.74
In another way, the closure of The Well constitutes an aperture in the lives of transsexuals. Stephen's recognition of h/er fragmented identity coincides with the realization of a transsexual identity. For transsexuals, this moment inaugurates a phase of questioning, exploration, and instability of identity which can or cannot lead to the seeking hormonal or surgical treatment. Surgery is, indeed, the element which marks the vast distinction between the life of Stephen and the lives of transsexuals since Christine Jorgensen. For Stephen, there never exists the issue of actually transforming h/er body into the figure of masculinity. Stephen's sense of masculinity centers around the one privilege s/he was not born into which I have denoted as the Phallus. To discuss contemporary transsexuals, we must question the status of the Phallus in relation to the transformation of the body through medical treatment.
The tendency of a culture still mired in the rut of anatomical essentialism is to reduce the issue of Phallus to the issue of penis-lack of penis. I contend, however, that such a reduction only returns us to a notion of the gendered body as signified solely through the genitals. As Lacan and most transsexuals tells us, the Phallus is not reducible to the penis, but is signified by it. The penis is, of course, not the only signifier of the Phallus. The Phallus, as the signifier of sexual difference, performs its function in all levels of the human experience. The Phallus belongs properly to the Order of the Symbolic, of language, and the Law. Transsexuals, however, enact the Law of the Phallus in the Imaginary and the Real registers.
In exploring the transsexual experience of the gender divide, we find the significance of the Phallus permeates the entire "fabric" of the relation between the self and the world. It is this permeation which constructs the "spiritual pain" which transsexuals feel. Achieving an integrated identity is near impossible for the plurally/ambiguously gendered in a culture which saturates all experiences with gendered meanings. If the Phallus is the symbolization of the necessity for sexual difference, the problematics of sexual difference necessarily focus on the problematics of the Phallus. When we speak of the transsexual transformation of the body, the transformation consists of the inscription or erasure of the marks of the Phallus upon the body.
The inscription of the body, in the case of female-to-male transsexuals, effects transformations on the levels of self-perception, social identity, and sexual identity. The body, the fleshly signification of sex, does not end with the genitals. Androgenic hormones cause male hair growth patterns, redistribution of body fat, and the lowering of the voice. The Phallus is, therefore, inscribed in the beard, mustache, and stubble; in the wide shoulders, small hips, and thighs; in the deep, gravelly voice of masculinity. A bilateral mastectomy, which creates a masculine chest for female-to-male transsexuals, contributes further to the perception of the transsexual self in social and sexual situations. These transformations alter the hatred and pain of the body which deeply effects the psychical life of transsexuals. They, also, become performed as markers of attributable gender in social interaction. As body-fantasies literalized, these marks of masculinity enable the transformed transsexual to pursue h/er sexual identity from a masculine body. The transformation of the body constitutes the condition for the transformation of the identity, the social performance of gender, and the exploration of sexual identity. Without the newly inscribed body, transsexuals cannot effect the transformation in their psychical, social or sexual identities.
For its very fixation on the marks of the Phallus, transsexuality throws into question the very categories of "woman" and "man." Because transsexuals undergo a radical and complete re-orientation of gender position, the experience of the transsexual presents a radical challenge to sexual differentiation. The female-to-male poses a serious challenge to the Law of the Father, for s/he is a man without a penis. S/he has acquired the phallus, in a way which most men do not achieve. Through h/er acquisition of the Phallus, s/he recognizes it as a fraud. Jacqueline Rose suggests that:
If the status of the phallus is to be challenged, it cannot, therefore, be directly from the feminine body but must be by means of a different symbolic term (in which case the relation to the body is immediately thrown into crisis), or else by an entirely different logic altogether (in which case one is no longer in the order of symbolisation at all).75
I contend that the transsexual body, before, during, and/or after treatment, constitutes the symbolic term or position from which the status of the Phallus can be challenged, and it does, in fact, throw the body immediately into crisis. A body crisis constitutes exactly the various forms of disjunctions between identities we have confronted in transsexuals within this essay. The mirror stage for the transsexual initiates a body crisis, as it initiates a body. We have been forced to reconsider the notion of the "male" or "female" body, and to move towards the recognition that the body is only constituted as "feminine" or "masculine" as it reflects the Symbolic division by gender.
The very challenge to the Phallus which transsexuality posits is the primacy of the Breasts.76 Transsexuals enact a drama of the Breasts as surely as they dramatize the significance of the Phallus. Clinically, female-to-male transsexuals often express a stronger and more primary desire to rid themselves of their breasts than to alter their genitals. Male-to-female transsexuals enact the importance of the Breasts through the explicit over-valuation of the Breasts for their feminine identity. Having or not having, wanting or wanting to be rid of the phallus has been constructed as definitive of gender identity. Exemplifying the position of the Phallus and its reduction to the penis, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists "the wish to be rid of one's own genitals" as a core feature of transsexuality.77 But having or not having, wanting or wanting to be rid of the breasts also constitutes a definitive aspect of gender identity. The en-Breasted body represents the body of the adult female in the field of vision, the realm of the Imaginary, which, also, becomes symbolized through castration. The child's loss of the Breasts, during the oral phase of development, has often been characterized as the loss which is un-symbolizable until the Law of the Phallus descends to signify that loss as Not-Phallus. As Marjorie Garber defines the Phallus as "the absolute insignia of maleness," we can read the Breasts as the absolute insignia of femaleness, if we can speak in absolutes at all. The Phallus, then, becomes relationally defined not only against lack-of-Phallus, but also against presence-of-Breasts and lack-of-Breasts. The threatening possibilities, as well as the sexual allure, of the Phallic Mother can be read as the result of h/er possession of both Breasts and Phallus, for s/he possesses the power of both male and female.
I would also argue that transsexuals speak from an entirely different logic of gender and the body. Transsexuals live from the "encrypted" and inscripted body. Where we now understand the Phallus as the signifier of sexual difference, transsexuals have enacted the drama of the Phallus for decades. Theory, post-structuralist, post-modernist, and feminist, has slowly come to analytically outline the Law of the Phallus, but transsexuals were speaking the body Symbolic since the thirties.77 Gender-congruence prevents most of us from recognizing, let alone experiencing, our bodies as literalized rather than literal. We perceive our bodies as natural, real, and essential. Transsexuals experience the entry into the Symbolic which constitutes the literalizing of the body. Transsexuality speaks the body in a language the rest of us have lost, that is the tongue of the Imaginary.