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Forced crossing | page 1, 2, 3
Gender boundaries seem to harden under scrutiny. Money may have contended that gender was arbitrary and malleable, but he had no way of assigning gender identity except by imposing stereotypical behavior. Gender makes us anxious; we like to impose rules and standards. Paradoxically, some of the toughest rule makers are those who have broken the rules themselves: transsexuals who are creating new gender identities. I enjoyed and admired "Crossing," Deirdre McCloskey's intelligent memoir of her male-to-female transsexual odyssey, but I found myself tensing at her observations about feminine tidiness and what she calls "graceful living." Just take a look at my kitchen, Deirdre, I thought, surprising myself by the fierce defensiveness of my response. Of course, McCloskey is hardly the gender police. But that's how the gender conundrum works: As soon as you go searching for a road map you begin to sound like you're writing the rulebook. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl By John Colapinto
The Danish Girl By David Ebershoff Viking, 270 pages
It's not the purpose of "As Nature Made Him" to deconstruct the gender system. But interestingly and responsibly, Colapinto gives depth to his discussion by letting the system's exceptions speak. In the past decade, intersexuals -- people born with genitals that are not recognizably male or female -- have begun to organize, to question their treatment (by Money and others) and to protest early surgery that has made some of them incapable of orgasm and made it harder for others to assume the gender that they ultimately chose. "First do no harm" seems like a temperate enough demand, but intersex organizations have had remarkable difficulty getting a medical establishment that insists on early and irrevocable gender assignment to listen to them. These organizations do believe that a child needs to be reared in one gender or the other, but they ask for the recognition that a gender may be assigned mistakenly and for the confidence that, given patience and support, the subjects will best be able to sort things out for themselves. That is, in fact, a profound demand, because it asserts that "nature" is not always as simply, neatly and immediately bifurcated as we might like it to be. Einar Wegener, on whose life David Ebershoff's novel "The Danish Girl" is based, may have been an intersexual; historical accounts differ, but he believed that he possessed a rudimentary set of ovaries. Wegener, a Danish painter, was the first transsexual to have a successful male-to-female sex-change operation: He became Lili Elbe at the Dresden Women's Clinic in 1930. "The Danish Girl" is loosely based on his/her life. An elegant fiction adorned with a profusion of lapidary detail, "The Danish Girl" has nothing formally in common with "As Nature Made Him." But there's an odd resonance, for both books situate their stories of gender identity within love relationships. "As Nature Made Him" is compelling partly because of Colapinto's sensitivity to the Reimers' deep family ties. "The Danish Girl" takes as its subject Wegener's remarkable marriage to a woman who seems to have been his companion, accomplice, lover and impresario. Gerda Wegener (here called Greta) was a successful painter and illustrator whose favorite model throughout the late 1920s was Einar, dressed as Lili. It makes for fascinating speculation: a transsexual's partner who is not only supportive and encouraging but artistically and -- in a rarefied sense -- erotically involved in his/her transformation. In Ebershoff's telling, Greta's relationship with Einar/Lili is both sacrifice and adventure, devotion to another (who is about to become very other indeed) and fulfillment of her own talent. The themes -- of two selves becoming three becoming two, of sharing and separation, of Lili's springing to life under Greta's gaze and of Einar's disappearance -- should make for a powerful and original love story. But the novel remains curiously abstract, its characters wandering through marvelously rendered period landscapes with a sort of art-film vague purposefulness, as though they were trapped in some lovingly photographed Miramax-land. For whatever reason, "The Danish Girl" lacks the urgency of the story as Lili told it herself, in Neils Hoyer's compilation of her rather overheated memoirs. I read "Man Into Woman" with delight in the gay and lesbian section of the San Francisco Public Library's historical collection, the yellowing pages of the 25-cent 1953 Mentor paperback almost dissolving under my fingers. "A nova vita," Gerda thinks to herself, peering at Lili in her hospital bed. A new life. And the tellers of every gender-identity story I've encountered (including David Reimer's) speak with comparable uniqueness and urgency, almost with awe, from the meeting place of meaning and matter of the mysterious conundrum of identity.
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