Transgender and The Literary Imagination

Front matter

TRANSGENDER AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION

Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing

Rachel Carroll

Contents

Introduction: Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing 1

1. ‘Two men, so dissimilar’: Class, Marriage and Masculinity in George Moore’s Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa’s The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1977) 37

2. ‘She had never been a woman’: Second Wave Feminism, Femininity and Transgender in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977) 64

Introduction

Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing

A figure in the throes of a furious struggle is illuminated against the darkness by the intermittent flash of a photographer’s bulb, the sounds of extreme human exertion and the slap of fists and feet against hard, damp surfaces testifying to an otherwise invisible contest between the human body and inanimate matter. In Becoming an Image (2012-) the performance artist Cassils applies the prowess and agility of a body disciplined by intensive training to the task of transforming a monumental block of clay. Capturing the artist in postures which are both frozen and fleeting, photographic documentation does more than simply record: it frames the audience’s experience of the performance, imprinting images which are both arbitrary and forceful. One still image in particular uncannily evokes the traditions of classical statuary, depicting a human figure seemingly seated atop a battered pedestal in a posture of Promethean ambiguity: is this a body emerging out of the clay, moulded by a hidden hand? Or is this the figure of the artist, fixed to the rock in eternal punishment for the crime of creative presumption?! Originating as a commission by the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, home to a longstanding LGBTQ archive, Becoming an Image draws attention to what is neither seen nor recorded: it is a testament to the struggle to make an impression in the field of representation, to gain visibility in conditions of unseeing and to find a foothold in the institutions of cultural memory. Cassils’s work speaks powerfully to the themes of this book, which examines questions of visibility, recognition and representation in relation to literary narrative. A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives — whether historical or fictional — have been ‘authored by others’: named, defined and appropriated in ways which obscure, displace or erase transgender experiences, identities and histories. By revisiting twentieth-century narratives and their afterlives this book aims to examine the legacies of this representational history, exploring the extent to which transgender potential can be recovered and realised.

Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors first published between 1918 and 2000, each text featuring a protagonist (and in some cases two) whose gender identity differs from that assigned to them at birth: George Moore’s naturalistic novella set in an 1860s Dublin hotel, Albert Nobbs (1918); Angela Carter’s dystopian feminist fantasy The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jackie Kay’s contemporary fiction inspired by the life of a post-war jazz musician, Trumpet (1998); Patricia Duncker’s historical novel based on the life of a nineteenth-century colonial military surgeon, James Miranda Barry (1999); David Ebershoff’s historical fiction The Danish Girl (2000), based on the life of Lili Elbe, reputed to be the first person to undergo gender reassignment treatment. An interest in the intertextual relationship between these narratives and a range of source and adapted texts is central to this study, which explores memoir, biography, drama and film, including historical biographies of James Miranda Barry, Niels Hoyer’s 1931 ‘memoir’ of the life of Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, and Simone Benmussa’s 1977 stage adaptation The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs; the afterlives of these narratives are explored with a special focus on contemporary film adaptation, specifically Albert Nobbs (directed by Rodrigo Garcia, 2011) and The Danish Girl (directed by Tom Hooper, 2016). ‘Transgender’ is a term whose current meanings can be traced to its origins in the 1990s in a combination of contexts, including community formation, political activism and scholarly enquiry. The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the entry of debates about transgender rights and representation into mainstream public discourse and popular culture.* In this context, this study returns to the narrative representations of an earlier era, examining how they reflect, shape or transform changing understandings of gender in the twentieth century and beyond. By identifying and analysing the narrative strategies and motifs which have characterised the representation of transgender lives in literary fiction prior to the twenty-first century, this book investigates the relationship between these narratives and dominant ideas about the origins, meaning and significance of conventional categories of sex and gender.

The American campaigner Virginia Prince (1912-2009) is widely credited as being the first to coin the term ‘transgender’.* However, the publication in 1992 of Leslie Feinberg’s pioneering Transgender

Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come is seen by many as playing a pivotal role in establishing transgender as a concept referring to ‘an imagined political alliance of all possible forms of gender antinormativity’.* As T. Benjamin Singer writes:

Feinberg’s manifesto resonated with an early 1990s social imaginary that infused the category transgender with the collective energy of a social movement — enabling a range of different bodies to congregate underneath a single umbrella. Without this sense of political collectivity, it would not have been possible to visually render transgender as an umbrella instead of a continuum of gender-nonconforming identities and behaviours or as a particular mode of being.’

Singer notes that the ‘original purpose’ of the term, as conceived by Feinberg, was for ‘political advocacy’,® and from the late twentieth century onwards transgender activists and organisations have variously challenged conventional assumptions about sex and gender and campaigned for social and legal change.’ While the term and its meanings have continued to evolve over the decades, it is worth reflecting on the distinctive characteristics of this formative formulation. Firstly, the adoption of the term ‘transgender’ represents a rejection of existing clinical terms and definitions, with their origins in medical and psychiatric discourse, and an assertion of the right to self-determination: in this way, it constitutes a refusal to be named by others and an expression of a developing sense of collective identity and agency. Secondly, the term embraces an identity grounded in the experience of transition, defying the pressures to conceal or deny a differently gendered past. In an essay which has proved a founding text for the field of transgender studies, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, Sandy Stone wryly observed that the ‘highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase him/herself, to fade into the “normal” population as soon as possible’. To identify as transgender is to refuse the invisibility — whether social, political or cultural — which Stone describes. In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser conveys this conceptual shift in the following way:

If transsexual has been conceived conventionally as a transitional phase to pass through once the transsexual can pass and assimilate as nontranssexual — one begins as female, one becomes a transsexual, one is a man — under the aegis of transgender, transsexuals, now refusing to pass through transsexuality, are speaking en masse as transsexuals, forming activist groups, academic networks, transgender ‘nations’.’

Indeed, the emergence of ‘transition’ as ‘the vernacular term of choice’ for ‘describing the process or experience of changing gender’? is important here; where the phrase ‘sex change’ has acted to imply an irrevocable rupture effected by medical intervention, ‘transition’ foregrounds a durational experience without a single, fixed or finite destination. Finally, transgender is an inclusive category which provides space for a diverse range of gender identities. It is not simply equivalent to, nor a substitute for, ‘transsexual’ (a term referring to someone who seeks or has undergone gender reassignment treatment) but rather provides an organising ‘umbrella’ for a range of people who, in Talia Mae Bettcher’s words, ‘do not appear to conform to traditional gender norms by presenting and living genders that were not assigned to them at birth or by presenting and living genders in ways that may not be readily intelligible in terms of more traditional conceptions’.'’ This book does not seek to define, explain or delimit who counts as transgender in literary fiction but rather to examine the narrative strategies at work in the representation of characters whose lived gender identity or expression differs to that assigned to them at birth. In doing so it aims to examine how narrative conventions have shaped the ways in which characters with transgender potential are read, interpreted or understood in literary fiction in particular, and cultural representation more broadly.

The challenges of cultural intelligibility and the struggle for self-determination are especially evident in twentieth-century texts in the form of two recurring and closely related motifs: the prominence of modes of life writing and the persistence of tropes of forcible revelation. Life writing — both biography and autobiography — has proved an important genre in relation to transgender representation and has been the focus of key works on cultural representation in the field of transgender studies.” Jack Halberstam’s critique of transgender biography in his pivotal essay “Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography’ demonstrates the ways in which transgender lives have been forcibly ‘dismantled and reassembled’, imposing normative assumptions about sex and gender and overwriting the reality of lived experience. By contrast, autobiography could be seen as a form of self-expression through which such misrepresentations might be redressed. The genre is given close consideration in Prosser’s Second Skins, where he proposes that ‘every transsexual, as a transsexual, is originally an autobiographer’.'* Indeed, the publication of a number of widely read transgender memoirs over the course of the twentieth century has shaped popular perceptions about the forms such life stories take. However, consideration of the contexts in which these narratives have been produced draws attention to the specific discursive conditions of some transgender life writing. As Prosser argues: “The autobiographical act for the transsexual begins even before the published autobiography — namely, in the clinician’s office where, in order to be diagnosed as transsexual, s/he must recount a transsexual autobiography." The complex relationship between auto/biographical and fictional accounts of transgender lives will be examined in this book with reference to the narrative afterlives of James Miranda Barry (c. 1799-1865), Lili Elbe (1882-1931) and Billy Tipton (1914-89), with an emphasis on the extent to which these narratives perpetuate or resist the dynamic outlined in Halberstam’s essay. The narrative of forcible, and often posthumous, exposure is not only a recurring trope in historical biographies of transgender subjects but also extends across a range of cultural narratives. It is exploited in particular ways in visual culture, including film and television drama, where the spectacle of revelation has been used to achieve effects ranging from comedy to horror. This trope raises central questions to do with self-determination and representation, especially as it typically mobilises demeaning, pathologising or sensationalist meanings which negate the transgender subject’s self-definition. In an essay on what she terms the ‘reveal’ as a narrative device, Danielle M. Seid argues:

Structuring an audience’s knowledge of a character’s transgender status as a reveal can contribute to the perception that living a transgender life involves concealing ‘the truth’ of sexed bodies. The moment of the reveal provokes a struggle over the meaning of the trans body, a struggle in which the trans person often ‘loses’ to dominant discourses about trans lives, the conclusion being: that’s really a man. [emphasis in original]'°®

The protagonists who feature in the texts examined in this study are repeatedly subject to unwanted acts of revelation which rewrite their identity, typically reversing their lived gender identity: for George Moore’s Albert Nobbs, Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry and Jackie Kay’s Joss Moody this takes the form of a posthumous exposure, whereas for Tristessa in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve it instigates a series of events which conclude with her murder. The varying treatment of this theme will be examined in close detail, culminating with an extended exploration of Kay’s unravelling of the narrative dynamics of forcible exposure in her novel Trumpet. Drawing on the insights of leading scholars in the field of transgender studies, this book aims to provide new frameworks for the analysis of literary fiction as a significant form of cultural representation. More specifically, by situating a selection of key texts in a range of historical, cultural and intertextual contexts, it will examine the following topics: questions of historical representation in relation to historical fiction; the influence of genres of transgender life writing, including memoir and biography; the legacies of Second Wave feminist critiques of transsexuals; the impact of narratives of gender crossing on the interpretation of transgender lives; the relationship between transsexual narratives and intersex bodies; the role of colonial contexts and discourses of ‘race’ in the construction of gender normativity. The sections which follow provide a more extended consideration of critical frameworks essential for the project of rereading representations of transgender in twentieth-century literary fiction: the first section addresses debates to do with transgender historiography; the second and third sections consider the relationship between transgender studies and feminism and queer theory respectively; the fourth and final section reflects on contemporary debates about the limits of identity politics. This introduction will conclude with an overview of the book structure, providing summaries of each chapter.

Paradoxical Projects: Transgender Historiography

In a founding intervention in the field of transgender studies, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, Sandy Stone observes that ‘it is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear’.'’ Historically, assimilation — whether coercive, strategic or desired — has served an important function as a means by which people perceived to be non-normative in terms of their sexed or gendered identity could seek to evade the social penalties of stigma, discrimination and prejudice. In this context, questions of visibility have proved a recurring preoccupation within the field of transgender historiography. Indeed, Halberstam has described transgender history as a ‘paradoxical project’ in that it ‘represents the desire to narrate lives that may wilfully defy narrative’.'* By contrast, a ‘refusal to disappear’” is identified by Prosser as a defining characteristic of transgender identification in contemporary contexts, expressing as it does a collective affirmation of identity in defiance of a culturally coerced invisibility. The recovery of a hidden history has been an imperative for many identity politics movements seeking to redress a legacy of cultural misrepresentation. However, the relationship between the needs of contemporary rights movements and the evidence of historical record is a complex one, characterised by the challenge of recovering minority histories from historical sources which may obscure or deny their existence. Moreover, the potential subjects of a transgender history can be subject to competing claims given that the historical practice of ‘gender crossing’ has acquired significant meanings in women’s, lesbian and gay, and queer historiography.

Finally, the tensions between historically specific constructions of identity and the historical records of lived experience which predate them pose further questions of interpretation across time. In a 2008 essay exploring narratives of female cross-dressing in late Victorian London, Katie Hindmarch-Watson articulates some of the concerns that have been expressed about transgender historiography: ‘The ahistorical transgender subject is the latest manifestation of a politically useful but historically problematic attempt to locate nonnormative gendered individuals within a grand narrative culminating in present-day transgendered lived experience.” Firstly, there is a concern about the anachronistic imposition of contemporary categories of identity on past historical subjects; such a methodology is understood as ahistorical because it universalises current understandings without due regard for historical difference. Moreover, integral to this critique is a sense that retrospection is being put to improper use, with the historical past conjured as a mirror image of the present. Finally, the imposition of a linear, teleological narrative whose only destination is the present moment is at odds with the insights of postmodern historiography, with its emphasis on the textuality, contingency and multiplicity of historical narrative and its implication in uneven dynamics of power. It is interesting to note that this observation is situated in the context of a historical analysis of ‘female cross-dressing’.

Indeed, the author acknowledges that this figure has been the object of interpretative struggles: ‘Usually, passing women are divided into those who, through their intimate and sexual relations with women, are considered the rightful subjects of lesbian history and those whose heterosexual relations remove them from the scholarship about sexual deviance.” The question of who constitutes the ‘rightful subject’ of any historical enquiry — especially those concerned with gender or sexual minorities — is a potent one. The broader context of Hindmarch-Watson’s compelling historical analysis is worth further reflection. The allusion to feminist and lesbian feminist historiography reminds us that questions of identity, visibility and methodology are not unique to transgender history. To take lesbian historiography as one example, in their introduction to Sapphic Modernities (2007), Laura Doan and Jane Garrity suggest that ‘scholars in lesbian studies have been inordinately preoccupied with the question of “who counts” or “what is it that we count” in assigning modern categories of sexuality (lesbian, bisexual, straight, etc.)’, concluding that ‘such questions are, in fact, at the crux of lesbian historiography’.” In their survey of lesbian historiography they note that leading scholars (such as Judith Bennett and Martha Vicinus) have emphasised the ‘importance of avoiding ahistoricism by differentiating between questions that concern us now (the urge and desire to know for sure) and what the historical record allows us to conclude (what might never be known)’.”* Foucault’s hypothesis, outlined in his History of Sexuality, that homosexuality as a category of sexual identity — indeed the very idea of sexual identity as a category — is the effect of a unique confluence of legal, medical and psychological discourses in the late nineteenth century has been central to debates about lesbian and gay historiography. Some scholars, including in the field of lesbian history, have questioned the usefulness of Foucault’s theories on the grounds that they appear to render invisible the historical existence of lesbians and gay men prior to the late nineteenth century. However, in other contexts, and especially within queer historiography, Foucault’s insights into the discursive and historically specific production of sexed, gendered and sexual identities have significantly extended the field of historical enquiry. In her 2004 essay ‘Queer Physiognomies: Or, How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality?’, Dana Seitler describes how this historicising of categories of identity has informed queer perspectives on the past:

Ostensibly moving away from the assumptions of identity politics, queer theory has had as its promise a project that was less interested in ‘discovering’ stable sexual subjects from the past than in developing an understanding of the process of deviant subject formation that helped constitute the prescriptions for compulsory heterosexuality.”

Similarly, leading theorists in the field of transgender studies have offered strategies for reconstructing potential transgender histories without projecting contemporary categories on to the past. Indeed, in ‘Telling Tales’, Halberstam does not aim to name, identify or categorise the historical subjects of her essay, but rather to recognise their narratives as ‘unresolved tales of gender variance that will follow us from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century: not resolved, not near, not understood’.*’ Similarly, for Susan Stryker ‘transgender phenomena’ are not limited to questions of individual identification but rather extend to ‘anything that calls our attention to the contingency and unnaturalness of gender normativity’.*’ In the following account Stryker gives some indication of the kind of locations in historical archives where the ‘transgender phenomena’ of the past might be discerned: ‘appear[ing] at the margins of the biopolitically operated-upon body, at those fleeting and variable points at which particular bodies exceed or elude capture within the gender apparatus when they defy the logic of the biopolitical calculus or present a case that confounds an administrative rule or bureaucratic practice.” Indeed, K. J. Rawson has argued that a history of transgender people may be dispersed across a range of sources, rather than residing in any single archive:

Prior to the development of ‘transgender’ as a discrete identity, a variety of state-sponsored materials — dress code laws, police documents, immigration reports, homicide records — provide a glimpse of the troubled meetings between gender-nonconforming people and the social and legal mechanisms that have attempted to define, control, and dictate gender norms.”

These ‘glimpse[s]’ of ‘troubled meetings’ are what the historian of transgender phenomena might be alert to, whether working in the medium of historical record or fictional reconstruction. David Getsy’s concept of ‘transgender capacity’ is immensely helpful in conceptualising a methodology conducive to transgender historiography and is defined as follows: “Transgender capacity is the ability or the potential for making visible, bringing into experience, or knowing genders as mutable, successive, and multiple.’*' Getsy explains how recognition of ‘transgender capacity’ might be applied to historical methodology:

With regard to historical analysis, transgender capacity poses particularly urgent questions, since it is clear that there is a wealth of gender variance and nonconformity that has simply not been registered in the historical record. Without projecting present-day understandings of transgender identities into the past, one must recognize and make space for all of the ways in which self-determined and successive genders, identities, and bodily morphologies have always been present throughout history as possibilities and actualities.*”

Hence, it is with these ‘unresolved tales’ (Halberstam), historical ‘glimpses’ (Rawson), and ‘possibilities and actualities’ (Getsy) in mind that this study approaches the question of historical existence within cultural representation and narrative, whether memoir, biography, fiction, drama or film. Within the field of literary criticism, characters whose gendered identity is at odds with prevailing assumptions about the relationship between sex and gender have historically tended to be the provenance of feminist, lesbian and gay and queer readings.”

For the purposes of this study, a focus on the ‘transgender capacity” of the protagonists of each text will be the starting point for analysis. This is not to suggest that the protagonist — whether fictional or historical — should only be read as transgender, nor is it to preclude other readings of his or her gendered identity. Rather, these readings are offered as a counter discourse to dominant narratives (historical, literary and critical) which have either overlooked the transgender potential of the figure concerned or defined it in negative or disparaging terms. It is not the intention of this study to anachronistically impose contemporary categories of identity — themselves dynamic and subject to change — on to historical subjects which predate their emergence. Nor does it seek to judge historically contingent texts — and their authors — against protocols of address which they could not have anticipated. However, it does aim to examine a specific set of narrative strategies employed in the telling of lives which we might now wish to call transgender and to examine how these strategies both produce and deny different narrative possibilities. In her 2008 book Transgender History, Susan Stryker notes: ‘What counts as transgender varies as much as gender itself, and it always depends on historical and cultural context.” This study will pay attention to the variety of contexts at work in the production and reception of the texts examined, including the period in which the narrative is situated (ranging from the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, to 1860s Dublin and early-twentieth-century Europe), the era in which the text was written and published (from 1918 to 2000), the cultural conditions in which adaptations for the stage and screen were produced, and the present moment from which the cultural productions of the last century — and their afterlives — are revisited. A historicising approach is also essential when considering the relationship between transgender representation and a critical framework which has played a formative role in the reception of transgender motifs in twentieth-century writing: feminism.

The Empire Writes Back: Transgender and Feminism

The relationship between transgender and feminism is a complex one, especially in relation to feminist perspectives on literary and cultural representations of transgender bodies or identities. Composed of competing, and even contradictory, histories, politics and discourses, this relationship has taken different forms at different times. Four contexts are important to consider when attempting to unravel the close but sometimes contentious relationship between feminism and transgender: firstly, a tradition of women’s writing and feminist literary criticism which champions female-to-male gender crossing as an important metaphor for feminist subversion; secondly, a history of Second Wave feminist polemic which denounces male-to-female transsexuals as victims of sex role ideology and agents of patriarchal infiltration; thirdly, the impact of queer theory, and specifically Butler’s theories of gender performativity, on feminist perspectives on transgender; finally, new efforts on the part of feminist and transgender theorists to confront past and current tensions and to renew and theorise a ‘transfeminist’ alliance. The influence of all contexts can be seen in the diversity of contemporary feminist positions both on the existence and rights of transgender people and on their representation in literature and culture.

Gender crossing — whether historical or figurative — has occupied a significant place in traditions of women’s writing and feminist literary criticism. The existence of historical records and reports testifying to a long history of female-to-male gender crossing has proved an important source of inspiration for generations for women writers and feminist critics who have embraced the gender-crossing figure as symbol of feminist defiance. In her 1989 book Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness, Julie Wheelwright cautions against the ‘temptation to claim these women as our feminist forebears’,** given that their success was in many ways conditional on their compliance with gender convention, but does interpret their actions as indicative of a deep and systemic dissatisfaction with conventional gender roles: ‘The thread that pulls these stories together is women’s desire for male privilege and a longing to escape from domestic confines and powerlessness. Many vividly describe a lifelong yearning for liberation from the constraints they chafed against as women.” Wheelwright’s narrative rescues the female-to-male gender-crossing subject from the margins of history; no longer an exceptional, anomalous or aberrant figure, she is placed within a larger history of women’s struggle for freedom and independence, providing an inspiring antecedent for future generations. For lesbian feminist historians, the female-to-male gender-crossing figure can further be placed within cultural histories of ‘female masculinity”? as one of the ways in which women expressed their gendered and sexual identity; in this way a ‘hidden history’ is made visible and the gender-crossing subject claimed for a larger history of female same-sex desire and lesbian identity.

In this kind of narrative, historical reality and historical metaphor combine to produce a concept of gender crossing whose figurative uses have been extensively employed in traditions of women’s writing and feminist literary criticism. Virginia Woolf’s historical fantasy Orlando, first published in 1928, has played an important role in the tradition of women’s writing and feminist literary criticism in which gender crossing as a symbolic trope is embraced as an expression of feminist defiance or subversion. Moreover, the novel’s dedication to Vita Sackville West and its widespread interpretation as a tribute to Woolf’s lover have meant that the novel has been situated in traditions of lesbian feminist writing. In this irreverent pastiche of historical fiction and biography, Woolf depicts sex as inessential and gender as culturally contingent; as a literary conceit, the character of Orlando combines the historical and the figurative in a way which was to have a lasting effect on traditions of women’s historical fiction — including those embracing postmodern strategies — and on feminist literary criticism. In this way, Orlando’s change of sex — as presented in a novel which lays claim to both historical reference and the licence of fantasy — has served as a kind of feminist literary prototype for the depiction of gender crossing as a metaphor for women’s position in a patriarchal world and for female same-sex desire and lesbian identity. In these contexts, motifs of ‘sex change’ or ‘gender crossing’ are understood primarily as metaphors for women’s experience, with the unintended consequence that the transgender potential of these narratives has often been overlooked or obscured.

In the tradition of women’s writing and feminist literary criticism considered above, motifs of gender crossing or changing sex — whether historical or fantastical — are considered subversive in ways which are both playful and empowering. By contrast, the actual lived existence of some male-to-female transsexuals has been less celebrated in some feminist contexts. A series of public expulsions of transgender people from ‘women only’ cultural spaces in the US in the early 1970s, combined with the publication of Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male in 1979, had the effect of constructing transgender identity, especially in relation to male-to-female transsexuals, as a focal point for heated debates about what constitutes women’s identity in feminist contexts. Male-to-female transsexuals form the principal focus of attention in Raymond’s book, which offers a critique based on two major assumptions: that male-to-female transsexuals are intent on both colonising women’s spaces (understood in terms of identities, bodies and communities) and appropriating women’s power (aligned with women’s creativity and attributed to reproductive capacity). In this context, male-to-female transsexuals are repeatedly figured as intruders in disguise, seeking to penetrate and colonise ‘women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality’? and to capture and usurp ‘female creative energy and power’.® Insistent throughout is the assertion that “Transsexuals are not women. They are deviant males .. .’ [emphasis in original]*! and their actions are compared to rape and pornography, the principal objects of Second Wave critiques of male sexual violence and objectification. Raymond defines the ‘transsexual empire’ as ‘the medical conglomerate that has created the treatment and technology that makes anatomical sex conversion possible’.** Her argument that transsexual identity is the product of medical technology — an effect of modern science rather than the expression of individual agency — is one which challenges its authenticity and legitimacy: ‘Historically, individuals may have wished to change sex, but until medical science developed the specialties, which in turn created the demand for surgery, sex conversion did not exist.’** The implication is that medical science, long recognised in feminist, gay and lesbian critiques for its role as an agent of coercive normativity, conspires with the transsexual patient to enable them to fulfil an illusion of gender which only perpetuates patriarchal power. Where figurative gender crossing had been embraced in longstanding feminist contexts as subversive, the actual existence of male-to-female transsexuals was now denounced in ideological terms.