GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

JUNE 7, 1996

Evenings Out

The hidden history transgender peoples

Those who cross gender bound were revered in times past

by Dawn Leach

"When I was born in 1949, the doctor confidently declared 'It's a girl.' That might have been the last time anyone was so sure." Thus begins Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to RuPaul, a groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient and dignified tradition of transgendered people, written by Leslie Feinberg.

Feinberg, author of the award-winning novel Stone Butch Blues, came of age as a young butch lesbian in the factories and gay bars of Buffalo, N.Y. in the 1960s. Since that time, Feinberg has been a grass-roots activist and a journalist. S/he has toured the country for the past two years with a slide show on transgender people that has played to packed audiences and standing ovations. Feinberg is one of the leaders of a growing movement of transgender activists.

The transgender movement is broader than many people realize. Kate Bornstein, another pioneering transgender activist, has defined "transgender" to include anyone who "transgresses gender" by breaking any of society's rules about how a person should behave depending on the sex marked on his or her birth certificate. This includes feminine men and masculine women, and people who are attracted to partners of the "wrong" sex, as well as people who have sex-change operations.

"Under Western law, doctors glance at the genitals of an infant and pronounce the baby female or male, and that's that," said Feinberg. But that has not always been so, as hir new book documents. (The word hir, pronounced "hear," has recently come into use as a gender-neutral pronoun.)

Transgender Warriors traces a long history of cultures that have recognized a variety of gender expressions and allowed people to choose how to express gender, as well as the history of how gender came to be so narrowly defined in our culture today.

Feinberg uses illustrations of transgenders around the world throughout recorded history to show how "the concepts of sex and gender shift like sand dunes over the ages."

For example, Transgender Warriors explains that in many Native American cultures, those born with "male" bodies who chose to live as women and those born "female" who chose to live as men were considered sacred. “Two-Spirit” people, as they are now called by modern Native Americans, had an honored place in religious ceremonies, and they were consulted for advice before important decisions could be made. Two-Spirit people were healers and highly respected shamans, until foreign conquerors brutally killed most of them, and imposed their own cultural beliefs on the native peoples.

Transgender Warriors also tells how bands of men dressed as women, known as "Rebecca and her daughters,"

revolted against tyrannical rulers and high taxes in the 1800s, and how Joan of Arc was revered as an icon. The male garb she was executed for wearing was considered sacred by the peasants who worshipped her.

From ancient Greek rituals to the Harlem drag balls, Feinberg has collected an impressive picture of the magnitude and dignity of the tradition of transgendered people.

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"Transgender Warriors is not an exhaustive trans history, or even the history of the rise and development of the modern trans movement, Feinberg says. "Instead, it is a fresh look at sex and gender in history and the inter-relationships of class, nationality, race and sexuality."

Feinberg also chronicles what it

Leslie Feinberg

was like to discover the information contained in the book; the excitement and joy of finding that there is a proud history of transgendered peoples, and the anger at how this history has been distorted and hidden.

"My interest in this subject is not merely theoretical," Feinberg says in the introduction. "You probably already know that those of us who cross the cultural boundaries of sex and gender are paying a terrible price. We face discrimination and physical violence. We are denied the right to live and work with dignity and respect. It takes so much courage to live our lives that sometimes just leaving our homes in the morning and facing the world as who we really are is in itself an act of resistance."

Even as a renowned author, Feinberg continues to experience mistreatment as a

result of ignorance and fear surrounding hir ambiguous gender expression. Recently, Feinberg had great difficulty getting emergency medical care for a serious illness. When Feinberg arrived at the hospital, the staff was more concerned with whether to use the men's or women's floor than providing urgently needed treatment, and openly referred to Feinberg as "the Martian" and "it" in hir presence. This type of experience is part of why Feinberg wrote Trangender Warriors.

"This is the heart of my life's work. When I clenched my fists and shouted back at slurs aimed to strip me of my humanity, this was the certainty behind my anger. When I sputtered in pain at well-meaning individuals who told me 'I just don't get what you are,' this is what I meant. Today, Trans-

gender Warriors is my answer. This is the core of my pride."

For more of Kate Bornstein's work, read Gender Outlaw, or look for Nearly Roadkill, her cyberspace adventure novel coming out in July, about two cyber travellers who get to know each other through numerous encounters on the Internet as many different characters. They find that it's not necessary to know what sex someone was born with to fall in love. Also coming from Bornstein this summer is My Gender Workbook, a practical guide to finding your own unique gender expression, complete with cut-out dolls, cross (dressed) word puzzles and games, illustrated by cartoonist Diane DiMossa, creator of Hothead Paisan.