Scars of the Pardoner: A Physician's Tale (Part 1/5)

"I rose from the doctor's slab...
Now everybody gets to take a stab,
they cut me up into parts"

Hedwig's Lament
Hedwig and the Angry Inch

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“Don’t you think we think too much about gender?” a doctor once asked me at the start of a routine physical. As one of a few transgender patients in this Polish doctor’s Chicagoland practice, I couldn’t help suspecting that I was receiving questions that he didn’t ask everyone. He asked his question again, compelling a complicit silence, while informing me that he would neither enforce nor assist in any work of reconstructing sex.[i] He admitted that there are doctors who would prescribe whatever patients requested, “just to get their money,” but he didn’t want them to “take advantage” of me. This led him to repeat his thesis a third time, “don’t you think we think too much about gender?”

This is perhaps an imprudent question to ask a scholar ready to offer her body as testimony against attempts to cut up and cut off vulnerable communities. “I rose from off of the doctor's slab, like Lazarus from the pit,” I hummed to myself from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “Now everyone wants to take a stab, and decorate me with blood graffiti and spit.”[ii] He kept working to enlist me to support his narrative of progress in which we are now in a post-gender era where sexism can finally be forgotten as a relic of the past. I sat there contemplating all the doctors meetings that relate my story to Hedwigs’s journey from living as a man in East Germany to living as a woman in the Midwest United States, tales where bodies are made into metaphors for severed lives, “standing...in the divide / Between east and west / Slavery and freedom / Man and woman, top and bottom,” and how this narrative work has propelled our construction as operatives in a genealogy of castration that draws itself across our collective skin as the scars of stolen histories.[iii] 

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This exchange is not only between two individuals, but competing narrative approaches to reconstructing the body and its history. On the one hand, this physician’s approach to history testifies that the trans body is not self-evident but stolen time and time again to serve narratives of progress. It aspires to tell me that the conversation on sex was over before I arrived, that we are now in a post-sexism, post-transsexual era, cutting me off from affecting surgical access to my body and voicing a counter-history. Progressive models of the body use many narrative tropes but a lasting marker remains the shift from pre-operation (pre-op) status, signifying the past, to a post-operation (post-op) status, signifying the present. This approach to history claims to move society forward by putting things in the past; as though history was some sort of waste bin where parts of our body and community can be left to erode into nothingness and forgotten.

The division of bodies and the erasure of the past has since become signatures of trans bodies in narrative. In the 1950s, doctors developed the language of pre- and post-op in what Sandy Stone describes as part of a clinical “strategy of building barriers within a single subject.”[iv] As genitals underwent operation to bring that body in line with the prescribed gender, clinic’s “charm school” taught transsexual and intersex persons to continue to performatively expunge parts of their history that did not fit in with their future.[v] Thus, while such operations became less compulsory in the ‘90s, trans persons internalized these divides, treating gender transition as a cure to a personal and social disease, the weight of which they must increasingly manage alone.[vi] In this era, doctors indirectly deploy trans bodies as operatives to pardon the wounds of violent pasts while using their metaphor-laden scars to enforce segregation. These cuts do not simply take away but add barriers between man and woman, control and freedom, past and future. 

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In contrast to this narrative of progress, I sat in this doctor’s office representing the persistence of scarred skin, inextricable from histories of castration, slavery, and rape where bodies are stolen and torn open, insisting on more critical attention, alliance, and liberation across attempts to cut up and periodize our existence into manageable and disposable parts. I respond the question posed by the progressive model of the body and history, “don’t you think we think too much about gender?” by demonstrating that attempts to cut bodies into a pre- and post-op periods fail to account for the continued presence and activity of the parts that are supposed to be eliminated by the operation These progressive histories are not without their usefulness and yet the distinctions drawn between periods must be understood as a construct of historicization that polices artificial divides between communities that exist within a trans-historical continuum. 

This study begins with a brief genealogy of castration stretching from late the Middle Ages into a wider array of medical, religious, legal and social operations aimed at erasing problematic parts of the past. It is the repetition of this breaking from the past that helps establish progressive histories that divide pre-modern castrates from post-modern transsexuals. While this study concentrates on the genealogy of the “castrate”[vii] those that have undergone castration as part of their physical and social reconstruction, this critical trans project aims to consider how the work of progressive histories of the body encompass a wider array of scars. I will utilize the term “operative” for bodies undergoing surgical reconstructions, drawing on the wider implications of notions of pre- and post-operation.[viii] The rape of women, the surgical or chemical castration of people of color, the genital mutilation of queer bodies, and the butchery of non-human animals are all parts in the construction of progressive timelines and a critical trans history. 

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I utilize Sandy Stone’s seminal transgender studies essay, “The Empire Strike Back: a Post-Transsexual Manifesto” to argue for a “trans-operative” tension between the practices that surgically construct the human and the fragmented bodies that pose resistance to “erased history” through the affirmation of their past wounds, the scars that division leaves, and the potential for a recollection of the disparate parts and persons in a critical trans-historical collective.[ix] I look to castrates as models of progressive medical theories, an array of bodies, physically or symbolically constructed by what Judith Butler calls “sharp machines” or “the technology of the knife” to serve as metaphors for divided histories, arguing that “trans-operative” better describes the continuum of bodies existing across these events of social redefinition.[x] While castrates have been used as metaphors of a fragmented past that gives way to an imagined wholeness, this symbolic resolution continues to be disturbed by the presence of operative flesh, which, like scar-tissue, demands a place in our history as the remnants of violent politics of cultural castration. 

In the lasts section, I turn to the cutting and cut-up flesh of Fragment VI in Geoffrey Chaucer’s the Canterbury Tales, a problematic work providing two tales of the potential repercussions of rape, murder, and castration that flow from the reconstructive power of the blade.[xi] By drawing out how the progressive medical approach of “the Physician’s Tale” frames “the Pardoner’s Tale,” establishing Virginia as a representative of the surgical logic at work in the 14th century, I reopen up texts and bodies which have already drawn critical attention on matters of gender and articulate how the Pardoner’s bloody knife work and relics respond to this model by calling for a trans-historical reassessment of trans-operative bodies, those moving between operations of the past and present, to counter the progressive histories they have been made to service.

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Part 2: A History of Castration
Part 3: The Trans-Operative
Part 4: The Physician's Surgery
Part 5: The Pardoner's Scars

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[i] I initially replied that working in gender studies I believe I am professionally compelled to answer, “No” to that question. He did not find this funny.
[ii] Trask and Mitchell. “Tear Me Down.” Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
[iii] Trask and Mitchell. “Tear Me Down.”
[iv] Sandy Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Stryker, Susan ed. N.Y.: Routledge, 2006. 226.
[v] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 227.
[vi] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 221-229.
[vii] Kathryn Reusch. “Raised Voices: The Archeology of Castration.” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. Larissa Tracy ed. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer Ltd. 2013. 31.
[viii] In moving from “operation” to “operative” I intend first to break from the binary of operator/operated to suggest that all bodies are operative(s): first, as an adjective to denote an ongoing state of productive functioning, especially in relation to surgery, and, second, as a worker, especially relating to manufacturing and political agencies. The mutation into “trans-operative” asserts that the processes and states are in a continually state of flux across definitive borders of identity.
[ix] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 230.
[x] Judith Butler. “Doing Justice to Someone: A Transsexual Allegory.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Stryker, Susan ed. N. Y.: Routledge, 2006. 187.
[xi] Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Larry D. Benson. “The Pardoner's Introduction, Prologue and Tale.” The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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