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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Middle Sex

  
 
Cat Chant
21:26 / 26.05.05
Typing the summary has calmed my nerves a bit, but I was literally shaking with rage by the time this finished (no, being away for months hasn't calmed me down in the slightest). I'm not sure I can put my thoughts in the form of continuous prose, so here's a few points about what I thought was wrong with this documentary:

No analysis of the relationship between Western heterocentrism, capitalism, and binary sex-gender systems
The closing segment on Thailand summed this up for me: a voice-over insisting that the West has got it all wrong and should be learning from Thailand's 'tolerant' attitude to transsexuality. This followed on from a section in the middle where the narrator brought in some biologists to make the important and accurate points that binary male-female sex accompanied by exclusively reproduction-oriented heterosexual behaviour are unknown "in nature", and that the constant appeal to "nature" and "biology" is actually a social legitimating tactic, and so therefore maybe we should look at non-Western, non-Christian cultures to see how sex, gender and sexuality were managed there. So there was always this sort of double-think, where the "common-sensical", Western binary sex/gender system was being taken for granted all the time it was supposedly being put into question - I mean, why would a society which (as the narrator argued at one point) recognized three original sexes have to 'tolerate' the third one? But even more than that, the idea that Thailand is a model for Western societies was slightly undermined by the way that the documentary presented it - five transwomen/ladyboys (I'm sorry, I've forgotten the Thai word - someone please correct me) were interviewed, all of whom worked in a cabaret club for Western tourists and four of whom had had a fair amount of plastic surgery in order to conform more closely to a recognizably Western ideal of female beauty: they then showed another transwoman, married to a Western man in order to support the family that had told her, when she came out as trans, that it would have been better if she had never been born. Transsexuality was completely spectacularized, fetishized, and placed in the service of the West and there was no indication of any other jobs a transwoman could have in Thailand other than performing for, or marrying, Westerners. There was also no awareness of, or analysis of, the constrictions of gender roles for women - there was a straightforward equation of particular forms of femininity (makeup, dresses, long hair, 'girliness') with "freedom of expression", liberation, and authenticity.

Which segues nicely into my second point:

Where were the people who were born female? Apart from a few minor parts (mothers and partners of transgendered or intersex people), everyone in the show was fighting for their right to be accepted as a woman (okay, there was one woman who was born a woman, but it turned out she was XY chromosomally - she was an athlete & they tried to stop her competing as a woman & take all her medals away etc). Oh, apart from one guy, but he had been born a 'male pseudohermaphrodite', so some of that was about refusing a wrong assignment. But mostly it really felt like it was a documentary about men's rights, as free, liberal individuals, to transform themselves in whatever way they saw fit - I was watching it with Tangent and she said it reminded her of bad 70's/80's stuff about how transsexuality was all about men trying to take over being women. So some of that was about a lack of representation, which ended up making it look like the masculine was the 'universal' again - there was nothing about trying to achieve a masculine gender presentation or identity (the one person who did transition to become male, that was presented as the resolution of a long-term depression over the inappropriate treatment of his intersexuality, not as the struggle to become a man). Femininity was the problem, the goal and the spectacle: masculinity was never presented as a gender at all.

No analysis of sexual orientation/what sex is
Apart from the fact that one professor kept referring to transgenderism as a sexual orientation ('It's so limiting to have straight and gay! Straight, gay, and bi is a bit less limiting, and straight, gay, bi and transgender is better yet'), the narrator/writer - and many of the statements from academics, as edited - kept seeming to lump all deviations from feminine-female or masculine-male heterosexuality into a big box called 'Middlesex' (hmm, I wish that were true, I'd move there) - anyway, but like for example there was this eight-year-old boy called Noah, who we saw wearing a towel wrapped round his head and dancing around in his bedroom, and then wrapping a scarf round his chest or round his hips and informing us that he liked to make things with ribbons. And there were all these really portentous interviews with his family about how hard things were going to be for "a kid like Noah", and how there was a 50% chance that he was either going to be killed or kill himself, but I have absolutely no idea what was supposed to be going on with him - there was no awareness, in the documentary, that he might have been an effeminate gay kid, or an effeminate straight kid, or a perfectly masculine gay or straight kid who liked wearing women's clothing (I don't think Eddie Izzard, the most famous straight male transvestite I know of, is effeminate in any way, for example, but he was wearing women's clothes by the age of eight and never stopped...), or a transgender kid, or, you know, anything. And also, there was this completely ridiculous 'scientific experiment', where they got, like, sixty college boys, divided them into 'homophobes' and 'non-homophobes' on the basis of their answers to a questionnaire, and then made them watch boy-on-boy porn and measured how hard their penises got, and this supposedly 'proved' that being uncomfortable around gay people or transgender people (because, you know, they're the same thing!) was a sign that you were... turned on by them? Or gay yourself? Or something? Again, because it totally failed to make explicit the assumptions it was relying on, it got very hard to follow. (And, I mean, as many of you know, I am totally aroused by the boy-on-boy action. But I don't get turned on by gay porn on video - or what I've seen on it - because it seems not to be very tender or very well-characterized or very meaningful in the ways that I eroticize. So anyone who tried to gauge my sexual orientation by measuring my stiffie would just not have the first fucking clue about it.

Which is just a thing that winds me up, and I must start a thread on it: 'scientific' experiments like this being done without the slightest recourse to (or even, as far as I can tell, awareness of) semiology? Why is there this assumption that, because scientific discourse is clear and communicative and not polysemous, that humans in general read the world and react in such a way? What, in short, do they teach them in these schools?

Pfft. Anyway, that's at least some of the ranting that I was left with, spewed forth in the TV forum for your convenience. What did you lot think of it?
 
 
Ganesh
10:18 / 27.05.05
... five transwomen/ladyboys (I'm sorry, I've forgotten the Thai word

Kathoey - although the term encapsulates a whole load of cultural and historical meaning (similar in some ways to geisha, hijra or berdache), much of which is debased by/reduced into the Westernised "ladyboy".

Taped the programme, but haven't yet watched it properly. Will be very interested to do so, since we've actually been to Club Calypso, the Bangkok cabaret show...
 
 
lord henry strikes back
11:53 / 27.05.05
Deva, all good points well made, and better than I could, so enough said. The other thing that had me screeming at my TV were the constant assertions of how threatening it is to western culture to suggest that the male/female divide is not the be all and end all of gender. Well sitting in my north london falt, I was not threatened. doozy floop, with whom I was watching, was not threatened. And on reflection I'm having trouble coming up with anyone I know socially who would be. Just because certain closed minded element within western society might be uncomfortable with an idea does not make it ture of the whole lot of us. It was another, constantly repeated example of this programme's main flaw: massive generalisation.
 
 
wicker woman
12:15 / 27.05.05
I can sympathize. I haven't seen the special described (and probably won't, unless I special order it), but the Discovery Health channel has been showing an increasing number of specials relating to transsexuality.

Problem being, the only people they present are extremely stereotypical in behavior; all the MtF's are almost across the board dresses, makeup, and "if I can't have FFS I'll just die!", and all the FtM's are all jock-ish muscleheads. No attention is paid at all to genderfuckers, non-ops, tomboys, etc.

So, all in all, my complaints would be pretty much the same as yours. I think the specials I'm referring to are a bit more guilty than your own, though, as they're multi-parters and as such have more time to devote to the above-mentioned subjects.

There's an 8-part special starting in (November?) that follows a number of transgender college students around. I'll have to see how that one goes.
 
 
Cat Chant
12:46 / 27.05.05
Henry - yes, I was screaming many of the same things at my TV: we're not all that threatened by the teeniest wobbles in binary gender, and constructing an imaginary audience which is that threatened is not, necessarily, the best way to get the point across...

Something I forgot to say, but which Ganesh's post reminded me of (and I'll be interested to know what you think, Ganesh - was hoping you'd seen the doc): ethnocentrism. The segment on India threw the term hijra around and the segment on Thailand threw the term kathoey around, and both were framed as examples of 'diversity' and non-Western conceptual systems of sex/gender/sexuality: but then all the personal narratives were framed absolutely in terms of a very traditional, Westernized-medicalized, narrative of, like, 'transsexualism': I always knew I was a hijra/kathoey, ever since I was a little child I would be trying on my mother's clothes, wearing her lipstick... So there was this really ethnocentric insistence that all 'diversity' had to translate itself into highly, but subterraneanly, Westernized terms, and thus not be 'diverse' at all: any and all forms of divergence from binary m/f heterosexuality got mushed together into a narrative about difference (from the norm, not from each other outside the norm) and threat (I didn't even mention how much of the documentary was framed in terms of if you don't conform, you will be killed! Brutally! There was one American transwoman talking about how transwomen 'tended' to be killed in really brutal and long-winded ways - Not just shot! Stabbed forty or fifty times! - and I'm sorry, but I read Take a Break, I know that it's not uncommon for heterosexual non-transwomen to be stabbed forty or fifty times by their ex-boyfriends/husbands. That's another example of the total lack of any kind of analysis of sexism or gendered power imbalances...)

Okay, I'd better stop now.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:33 / 27.05.05
And there were all these really portentous interviews with his family about how hard things were going to be for "a kid like Noah", and how there was a 50% chance that he was either going to be killed or kill himself, but I have absolutely no idea what was supposed to be going on with him

It sounds like Ma Vie en Rose.

This show sounds bad on so many levels but not informing you of what's going on with Noah sounds absurd (actually it all sounds a bit absurd). My brother is in his twenties, he's straight, he behaves like a straight man is 'supposed' to behave, he's a bit vain I guess... but, wait, my brother has a secret in his past, he used to dress in my mum's clothing and play with barbie dolls. My brother loved skirts and dresses. So will someone please explain to me what's wrong with Noah because perhaps I'm being blinkered here but he sounds pretty usual to me?
 
 
*
15:06 / 27.05.05
there was nothing about trying to achieve a masculine gender presentation or identity

I will neither criticize nor defend this docu, as I didn't see it. I'm very glad that these points are being raised here. But the above quote made me think of something I was discussing with some friends, about female-role-oriented clothing being "marked" and male-role-oriented clothing being "unmarked". Speaking wholly from my experiences as a member of the American variety of Western culture: For many trans women whom I've talked with, getting to wear the dress is highly significant, while for many trans men, not having to wear the dress is significant, rather than getting to wear the suit and tie. A maleward transition seems to involve losing more markers than gaining, especially if it's not accompanied by exaggerated masculinity. If this also holds true for Thailand and India, transitions which focus on the losing of markers might be less intelligible to people who put this docu together than transitions which focus on acquiring markers. Maybe.
 
 
Cat Chant
12:46 / 28.05.05
A maleward transition seems to involve losing more markers than gaining, especially if it's not accompanied by exaggerated masculinity

That's interesting. I'm not sure I would agree entirely - I'm not a transman, but being a boy is an important part of the way that I am a woman (if you take 'am' as a slightly more active verb than it usually is, though still slightly less active than 'do'), if you see what I mean, which many don't, so never mind... Anyway, though, I wonder whether one of the reasons I feel like I can be a boy without ceasing to be a woman is because the markers of masculinity (suit and tie, etc) are more available to women, so you don't need to transition in order to gain them. Hmm. (Though I don't want to exaggerate the ease with which women can slip in and out of masculinity: once when I was walking down the street in a suit and tie and lipstick, some young men waiting at a bus stop started shouting "Transsexual!" at me, so clearly there's still some degree of policing and anxiety around that...)
 
 
Cat Chant
12:48 / 28.05.05
Um, obviously I should point out that men don't universally "need" to transition to gain access to markers of femininity, either, cf Julian Clary, Eddie Izzard, Our Very Own Lady...
 
  
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