Trans Literature: Transgender as a Literary Archive

"When you hear the same stories over and over again, from people from all over the world, you start realizing that transgender is not an anomaly. 
It’s a part of the spectrum of people’s realities."

Susan Kuklin
Beyond Magenta

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Introduction

As a recognized archive, transgender literature remains largely on the horizon. There are no "trans lit" sections of most major book stores. Yet in recent years, feminist and LGBTQI book stores are beginning to have shelves or at least special displays that host a variety of books on transgender: history, medicine, self-help, family stories, memoirs, and fiction. As a field of academic study, trans literature is even further behind. This is ironic, given the number of transgender studies scholars who have degrees in English or at least have used trans films in their work. Yet even as transgender studies begins to break away from being a mere sub-set of queer or gender studies, trans literature remains largely subordinate to other fields of trans research: psychoanalysis, sociology, history, and media studies. Of them all, media and film studies has come perhaps the closet to describing transgender film as an archive worthy of study in its own right. As more trans films begin to win awards or at least get nominate, film may continue to lead the way in public awareness of the wider literary archive.

Yet once one begins to ask the question, the number of trans literary texts and narratives that begin to appear are massive. On the surface are those books and films that have begun to get some distinction. When one expands beyond those books marketed as "transgender" by publishers, marketing firms, or stores, one sees how trans literary archives have long existed. One finds trans narratives categorized in genres and archives defined more broadly as women or queer literature, as well as disability, post-colonial, and African-American literature. Looking further for trans narratives, genres, and literary forms, suddenly one arrives at medical, legal, religious, and historical texts that tell trans stories as pieces -- even center pieces -- of other agendas. At this point, one needs to begin to learn other methods of research, other professional and linguistic languages, in order to locate these trans narratives. But once learns how to find them in places not readily marked by the category "transgender literature here," the flood-gates burst open. Suddenly one begins to see trans literature all over the place, from media and books, to medical and government documents, to blogs and suicide notes, to historical manuscripts and saint's lives.

With such a massive and widely distributed archive, it is difficult to give a mere reading list. Such lists are available and reflect mostly recent English language publications currently sold in local book stores or films available on Amazon or iTunes. What I wish to provide in place of giving a "Top 10" or potential candidates for a new literary canon, is a method of categorizing and patterning trans literature as types of narrative. Through such an approach, my goal is to help you dig into the broad, interdisciplinary, and buried archive of trans literature so you will be able to grow the canon rather than merely reiterating the same handful of books and films on sale in specialty markets. So let's dig in and see where and when these narratives lead us!

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The Transition Narrative

As a formal genre, I argue that the transition narrative fits into the example (or exempla) genre. The example (or exempla) are defined by a doctrine (or dicta) that provides a theoretical concept for proof and facts (or facta) that provide the evidentiary grounding. In the case of most transition narratives, the visualization and narration of the facts of altering one's gender signifiers are supposed to fulfill the doctrine of one's trans identification. This doctrine may be as simple as "I am a woman, not a man," or may be as complex as "I have gender dysphoria." While other genres may utilize the transition narrative, the example is the genre most often used and most closely tied the rhetoric used for many transition stories.

Historically, the discursive context that produced and consumed the most number of transition narratives in the modern era is the medical field. In this case, the facts of case studies are given to prove whatever medical and psychological doctrines the researcher is trying to prove. For authors seeking to explore the histories and literary archives of trans persons undergoing transitions, one will spend a lot -- if not most -- of one's time reading such case studies from books written and consumed within a medical context. In some cases the dicta being proven are affirming of these transitions, offering advice for procedures, and others are critical warnings against transitioning. This tension is more pronounced the further one goes back in the study of medicine. If one pushes back even further, prior to the modern medical interest in transition narratives, a researcher will find them present within religious texts that also take the form of exempla. In this case, religious exempla are interested in using these histories and folk stories to prove doctrines of faith and philosophy. As in the early medical exampla, the dicta that accompany the trans facta are often not affirming of transitions, although there are some surprising examples of sympathy for the facts of the case.

The examples of transition narratives take on three dominant forms. These forms present the facts in different ways which correspond to different doctrines of change. The three dicta of change I highlight here are greatly influenced by Carolyn Walker Bynum's work on Metamorphosis. The three forms of transition narrative are: absolute change, hybrid change, and no change:

• The Doctrine of Absolute Change
• Facts are presented within a structure of before and after. There is often a defining event (such as surgery or a name change) which represents the transition. The narrative often diminishes the time given to this period of change because it represents the ambiguity that Absolute Change is trying to diminish.
• In this form, the narrative will often refer to the person's time before transition using the name and pronouns that accompanied that gender presentation (such as "he") and then after the event the person will be described using the name and pronouns that fit that gender presentation (such as "she").
• Examples using absolute change include: Caitlyn Jenner's The Secrets of My Life, The Danish Girl (book and movie), and many medical journals, especially the more sympathetic ones.

• The Doctrine of Hybrid Change
• Facts of different genders are presented alongside each other, before transition and after. Whereas absolute change tends to collapse transition into the short period of a single key event, hybrid change narratives tend to prolong transition to a much greater degree. One may see multiple transitional events, where the person is living one gender in one context and another gender in another context. The effect of this narration often supports doctrines of gender as a fluid spectrum, where male and female traits are present at the same time just in different degrees.
• In this form, the narrative will often switch between pronouns and names. Such examples will even favor the name/name or pronoun/pronoun way to describing a person, such as "John/Eleanor" or "He/She."
• Examples using hybrid change include: most discussions of Eleanor Rykener, Boys Don't Cry (and other discussions of Brandon Teena), and She-Male porn (a genre which depends on presenting trans women as monstrous hybrids, thus the choice and construction of the word "she-male" as "the best of both worlds").

• The Doctrine of No Change
• Facts are presented so as to foreground the present of the identified genders from the very start. The gender assigned at birth is presented as secondary and based on appearances and the identified gender is presented as primary and based on essences or predispositions. Also called the "born this way narrative." This is the most popular among current transgender stories because it affirms that transgender is a discreet and insular identity that is unchanging, based in nature rather than choice or nurture. These qualities have proven important and effective in convincing doctors, medical insurers, the courts, and government bodies to provide assistance and protection for trans people.
• In this form, the pre-transition name and pronouns are de-emphasized. Sometimes, the post-transition name and/or pronoun of the person is used from the start even while it records how other people used the socially assigned deadname and pronouns. Other times, these names and pronouns will be used in describing the person pre-transition but will come with an explanation, "scare quotes," or asterisk* denoting them as based on appearances rather than the person's identified gender.
• Examples using this form include: If I Was Your Girl, A Fantastic Woman, Trans America, and Leelah Alcorn's suicide note.

Transition narrative exempla are very effective and common in circumstances where transgender is considered novel or contentious. This is because exempla transitions are geared at showing as a way of telling. You get the theories of transgender communicated but in a way that typically does so obliquely through narratives and facts that work on the emotions of the audience. By giving case studies with facta that invoke pity (how terrible!) or identification (they use the same lipstick as me!) the dicta can be consumed without inciting the debates that tend to arise when discussions are based more in abstraction.

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The Memoir

Whereas Transition Exempla may be the most numerous in the archive, the confessional memoir is perhaps the most popular. It occurs with relative frequency since transgender has entered public discourse that a trans person gets told, "you should write a book! Tell your story!" Indeed, this turn towards memoir is often part of the process of marginalized identities entering the mainstream. When there is a recognized lack of fact or fiction (beyond the medical or sociological which can be considered to academic for public audiences) memoirs or biographies tend to be the first to fill the void. Whereas exempla demand that readers take some medicine with their sugar, some dicta with their facta, memoirs seem to offer pure sugar, all facts with no doctrinal agenda. Now, one may still derive theories and believes from reading a memoir but they are not nearly as important, if they come at all. Memoirs thus give the sense of learning truth (or truthiness) without the fetters of ideology.

Calling trans memoirs confessional gets at their rhetorical function and their historical genre. Because memoirs are typically highly formalized, edited, and published for a wider (if still somewhat niche) audience. As such, not every trans person will have the chance, means, or desire to write a memoir. Yet nearly every trans person will be asked or even required to tell their life story. This biography may sometimes be given by others but the first person confession is generally preferred as the most authoritative. This may take public form such as an interview, a vlog/blog, or a speech in front of a community group. This may also take an important institutional form, wherein the trans person must confess the truth of their lives to doctors in order to get treatments, to insurers in order to get coverage, to employers or Human Resources to get accommodations, to government agencies to get new documentation, and lawyers or judges to get protections or compensations. Confessional life stories also are frequently used to persuade friends and family members to cooperate with a transition. Rare is the situation where a trans person transitions name and pronouns without someone demanding to hear the life story of the person.

Historically, before transgender was accepted enough to get book deals, confessions were a prominent and important genre in establishing transgender as a discrete condition of life. Before a psychiatrist is willing to sign on to support an individual trans person and before the wider medical industry got into the business of publishing research on trans people in general, a trans person had to sit in front of a doctor and convince them of the veracity and necessity of their gender. The most common and effective way to get these authorities on their side was by providing the facts of one's life. Before doctrines (dicta) could be drawn up to explain the facts (facta) of trans people, making exampla possible, the facts were confessed wholesale to the best of the trans person's ability. And before the private confession of the therapist's office, there were confessions to priests and judges. For much the same reason, as religious institutions and the courts have dominated much of western culture, trans people historically had to also try to convince these authorities of their veracity as well. Thus we see the long history of transgender found in religious and legal documents. At times, the recorder of the confession imports their own doctrines and ideology, but often enough the confession is so surprising to the authority that they do not fully know how to make an example of it. As such, confessions often break free of over doctrine in order to persuade often suspicious audiences of the internal and external realities of transgender.

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The Journey

If transition examples frequently collapse time into a before/after picture and confessional memoirs often assert an essential truth that took a lifetime to unravel, journey narratives tend to fall somewhere in the middle. In fact, journey narratives are often all about the middle, extending the second act of a three into a narrative in and of itself. As such, even though transition narratives can at times be presented as journeys they are presented in ways generically distinct from examples of transition. In fact, they may be seen as inversions of each other. An example typically focuses the narrative on the trans person as the object of study. Even confessional memoirs are sold as the outside looking into the mind and soul the trans person. Yet trans journey narratives are more interested at looking through the eyes of transgender person outward at the world. The trans person becomes the subject and the world becomes the object. Whereas the before/after picture emphasizes the visual difference in the trans person, the timeline of a journey is more about the scenery and saying look at my life "here" and compare it to my life "there." At times, these places are literally different spaces, such as the move from a rural or suburban hometown to the city. Yet frequently, whether or not there is a journey through space there is a usually journey through time. And the goal of this journey from a narrative stand-point is to get the reader to come along with the trans person, to look along with them, to see how the world looks from a different perspective.

For a fan of pilgrimage narratives and travel narratives, it is unfortunate that the vast majority of such trail literature is not only cisgender but white able-bodied heterosexual and male. Yet tropes and narrative structures of these journey narratives are still at play in transgender journeys but in a different form. As noted, there are often physical journeys that define a trans journey narrative, moves across country, from a parent's home to college, going to a new job, getting a new place after a divorce. These physical moves often correspond to other changes in the trans persons life. Part of the journey may be transition but may also be coming out to the family, finding a safer place to live, getting a more accommodating job, etc. Such physical journeys are often described in great detail because journey narratives generically focus on environment. Details such as social contexts and the availability or absence of support are important features of the social terrain, even though the physical differences between one city and another may not be as drastic as walking from the mountains into the dessert. Yet any journey through space is also a journey through time. A journey narrative in this way may resemble a confessional memoir, insofar as it gives details of a life across time. Yet their purposes and foci are different. A confession functions to give insights about the interior life. A journey narrative on the other hand focuses more on the change of circumstances over time. How did moving in with Dad after your parents divorce affect your gender presentation? How did living in Boystown, Chicago affect your freedom of gender expression? How did taking the rural small town job affect your work life? The focus in these journeys are on the external life, which this genre considers no less important.

Because they often lack the typical markers of travel literature (a hiker with a backpack, a walking stick, mountains in the distance) it can seem tricky to locate trans journey narratives. Often you will find them located among other genres: memoir, transition examples and case studies, and histories. An interesting trend in journey narratives are the higher number written by activists or academics. This may be because the activist and academic are habituated in analyzing their surroundings as much if not more than analyzing themselves. For instance, when Eli Clare tells his life story, he will often pause for an extended consideration on his geo-social context, his historical context, his philosophical context. Thus one learns as much if not more about Clare's world as one does about him. Likewise, a characteristic of Laverne Cox's interview or lecture style is that she will introduce a piece from her own life story but primarily as a way to take a journey through the other stories that surround her social contexts: the experience of people of color, women, working actors, LGBTQIA people etc. Yet even non-activists and non-academics will turn to the journey narrative. If I Was Your Girl tells the story of a trans girl moving back in with her father after her transition and mental health breakdown while she lived with her mom. Thus the novel records being a fish out of water in her new school. Being a fish out of water is one way of describing many trans journeys but also travel narratives in general. This is because journey narratives give perspectives that allow us to see the world we live in through a new light and suddenly the world becomes stranger and more interesting. 

Admittedly, a specific form of trans journey narratives are beginning to develop utilizing more traditional markers: the trans road story. From To Wong Fu to Trans America, the trans journey on the road becomes a way of showing the different contexts and problems trans people experience as they move from one place in the country to another. These journeys typically involve many of the features of other travel narratives, including the negotiation of transportation, pilgrimage narratives, including a prophesied holy land or loca sancta on the horizon, or epic and romance, including strange battles, dangers, and veering.

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Next up: Transgender as Literary Theory

Thus far, we have consider the tropes of transgender often found in cisgender narratives as well as the common types of narratives written by or at least focused around a transgender person. Yet this still leaves trans literature largely in the position of text or object for academic study. What is important to consider are the ways in which transgender may affect our methods of reading or enacting literary analysis. What is a trans way of reading? How does transgender affect the way narratives and archives are formed? Stay tuned for the third part of this series as we consider transgender as literary theory!

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Trans Saints: Imitatio Christi in The Last Time I Wore A Dress

“The more I talked to Jesus, the more I liked him, 
and the less crazy he seemed. ”

Dylan Scholinski
The Last Time I Wore A Dress

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Imitation as Counter-Reality

Imitation is not only a matter of performance but embodiment and circumstances. In "Body Talk: Gestures of Emotion in Late Medieval England," Paul Murphy writes on how Christ fashioned the model by which the Imitatio Christi would follow in later generations. For Christ too, this was a process of engaging with and reacting to the world, to the point of suffering and death. "The cross forces Jesus to take on the shape of the cross," observes Murphy, "and as such, humankind are to be considered exemplars of that shape just as they are to imitate Christ's example" (Murphy 2016). Our bodies take on the shape of our sufferings. Imitatio Christi then is not only how we respond to God but how we respond to the world. The figurative cross-section is visible in how the Imago Tranvesti can move toward the Imago Dei at the same time that it is set apart and marginalized by the Imago Mundi. As a result, while postmedieval generations of trans persons may find themselves living outside of Christian community and faith, nonetheless they can come to share in the suffering of Christ (or Christ figures). In this way, while occupying a point in the modern era, trans persons can find themselves within a living narrative of medieval continuity. Murphy observes that for late medieval Christians, "It did not suffice to imitate Christ in his moral teachings, but rather it was demanded that a sensual and emotional activity be completed to better understand the sufferings of the Passion" (Murphy 2016). Unlike models of Christianity that emphasizes otherworldly purity, the Imitatio Christi of saints emphasize sharing a lived position of suffering and opposition to an unjust world. In this vein, one does not become a saint by excelling in worldly virtue but by opposing the norms of the world in ways that bring one closer to the suffering of others, particularly the suffering of Christ. Following this tradition within the hagiographic genre, Dylan Scholinski's memoir, the Last Time I Wore A Dress, surprisingly makes an overt move toward affirming an Imitatio Christi from within the secular circumstances of the mental hospital. For Scholinski is gifted with a chance to relate to a living Christ figure in the form of a fellow mental patient who believes himself to be Jesus Christ himself. Through their shared sufferings by a world that rejects them, the two form a conjoined Imitatio Christi and Imiatio Transvesti that gestures back toward a medieval tradition of imitation even as it responds to very modern circumstances.

Imitation gives a sense of counter-reality or non-reality. The madness of a man who claims to be Jesus Christ is diagnosed as disordered in this sense. It is not-real that he is Christ, therefore to live as though he is Christ is sick. Likewise, the "girl" who lives like a "man" is regarded as imitation of the same non-reality. Imitation as a form of fakeness is then the justification for the asylum locking up youths. Scholinski's memoir however argues against this understanding and argument on imitation. "Even if we'd looked up Gender Identity Disorder, I don't think anyone would have tried to fake it," Scholinski writes. "We knew the rules: pacing, screaming, hallucinating and vomiting were okay. Not okay was walking around with a scarf in your hair, for a boy, or being like me, a girl who never felt comfortable in a dress" (24). A man knows that he is not to say he is Jesus Christ unless he is Jesus Christ. A youth knows that he is not to live like a man unless he is a man. The rules are evident and understood. The other things Scholinski lists are also understood as unacceptable but for different and related reasons. Pacing, screaming, living out visions or fashion statements, even vomiting are all forms of resistance. They are ways that those incarcerated for being fake and unreal assert the reality and transgressive power. In screaming and vomiting the body literally unleashes their internal disgust with the reality being shoved down their throats. In pacing, as will explore shortly, the body walks and may even cross the limits of freedom. Imitation may be counter-real in another sense than non-real. Imitation may be a way of changing reality, asserting alternative ways of being, living, and relating.

The movement of people within the mental hospital causes unexpected relations to occur and over time patients and staff began to imitate one another. Indeed, at first Scholinski tried to assert a level of superiority and distance between himself and other patients. In this way, in his first encounters he imitated the role of staff more than fellow patient. "Being in a mental hospital was a boon for my counseling skills," writes Scholinski, "although after a while I got confused." Over time of meeting the personalities of the hospital, Scholinski began to like them and even began to question how alike they were or could be. A trans youth incarcerated with persons with different diagnoses put them all into similar positions, made similar demands, and forced them into similar routines. Likewise, as with many friendships, relationships with the other patients as peers brought Scholinski to regard himself more as an equal with them. Yet the more he began to associate and imitate other patients, the more the divide between himself and others, trans and mad, began to dissolve. He began asking how he appeared to others. "Maybe I don't know I'm insane," Scholinski wondered. "They don't know they're insane, so why should I know?" (20). After reflecting how life in a mad house made him question what madness actually is, Scholinski describes how the system reacted to such discussions arising between patients like him and Jesus. "The staff discourage this sort of questioning," writes Scholinski. "They liked the line between sane and insane to be perfectly clear" (19). The act of turning someone into a saint can be a transgressive move. In the eye of society, those who have been set apart are marginalized because they resist normative traits and values. The work of re-narrating the mad house into a place where one may meet Jesus Christ (or one representation of Him) and the mad as perhaps worthy of imitation turns the system of madness inside out. 

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Imitation as Solidarity

"'I am Jesus,' he said. 'I Know it's hard to believe, but I am Jesus.'" What draws Jesus and Scholinski together is that both of them believe themselves to be persons that other people do not believe them to be. In the case of Scholinski, the butch soon-to-be trans man is isolated by a world that insists that he is (and should be) a girly girl. Jesus's case is more specific. Jesus is isolated by the world because they deny he is Christ. Ironically, the world also denied that Jesus Christ was who he said he was. In both cases, it is as much the belief of the patient as much as the disbelief (or alternative belief) of the doctors that set them apart from the rest of society. Despite the differences between Scholinski and this modern Jesus (or the biblical Jesus for that matter) there is a shared subject position: men who believe they are other than the world believes. Over time, this shared physical and social position turns into a shared ethos of resistance and support. They began to believe in each other. Scholinski writes, "the more I talked to Jesus, the more I liked him, and the less crazy he seemed. Zealous, but not dangerous. I could imagine him in the outside world, preaching. He'd probably help some people." The argument that Scholinski employs here is a traditional one in the transgender community as well as Christianity: 'so what if you don't believe what I believe? If it makes my life better and doesn't hurt others, what harm is it in letting me be?' Jesus offers the trans youth a way of believing in themselves and affirming others. Beyond their ontological claims, these assertions for alternative networks of care and support when the authorized system turns against those under its care. If the world regards them as disordered sinners, they will be saints for one another.

Sharing in the discourse of Jesus, the trans youth begins to imitate him in various ways, forming a unique kind of Imitatio Christi. A signature feature of this Jesus (much like the Jesus of the Bible) was that he was an unstopping walker. Jesus would walk the halls to the limit of his capacities. In this walking, Scholinski followed Jesus. "A couple times I paced with him, down the long corridor and back, for exercise," recalls Scholinski. "I wanted to help him. I was always this way, helping my friends. I thought of myself as a roving counselor. It kept people a nice distance away from my problems." Scholinski finds that by helping others he is helping himself. Maybe by saving others (in a way) from the harm of this place, he could save himself. Regardless of why he did it, the walking itself taught the trans youth a valuable way of liberation. The walking was a sign of transgression against beging caged. It helped them imagine and prepare themselves for the day that those walls would not be able to contain them. "Escape was something we all talked about," admits Scholinski. "It was a sign of sanity; it was a statement, I am not one of these people, I am not a mental patient" (51). By imitating this mad Christ's physical actions, the mad trans youth imitated his mental actions as well. In the walking was the statement that they could not be contained. They could not be contained forever by physical walls, nor could they be contained by the walls of diagnosis and marginalization. Like a form of prayer, even if this habit did not magically give them what they wanted instantly, it did prepare them and instill in them a form of resistance. The walls and staff kept them bordered yet within these restrictions they could exercise a degree of freedom and life. Set apart from the world, they could create their own world and walk every square inch of it. While they could not cross the boundaries that separated them from those outside, they could at least cross the boundaries that separated them from each other.

The saner Jesus seems to Scholinski, the more mad he fears he has become. Scholinski considers this dillemna without coming to a firm conclusion. He asks, "If I thought he was sane what did that make me? Mental hospitals are rife with this kind of debate. Are people like Bob [a.k.a. Jesus] simply more sensative than the rest of us? Bombarded with information, the delusioned find it hard to function in the world, but is that their fault or the world's?" Deconstructing the definitions and boundaries of madness, the trans youth becomes habituated to skills that will indispensible in preserving his own sense of truth. Are transgender persons insane and disordered or are they simply more sensitive than the rest of us? Bombarded with information, the dysphoric find it hard to function in a world of fixed and binary genders. But is that the fault of the trans youths or the world? This alternative way of thinking and living is attractive for those set apart by society. Scholinski admits to imitating Jesus even to the extent of claiming to sharing in his visions. "I used to hear voices," Scholinski told him. "That wasn't true, but I didn't want him to feel alone. Plus, I wanted to fit in" (19). Rather than making fun of him through sarcasm or trickery which assert the non-reality of Christ's understanding of himself, Scholinski's claim of sharing in the visions of Jesus is rather an attempt at solidarity. The trans youth wants Jesus to know he is on his side; and, he admits, to try to get Jesus on his side. By reaching out to Jesus, Jesus reaches back towards Scholinski. Much like the Jesus Christ of the Bible, the Jesus Christ of the Mad House challenges others to cross borders and identify with the isolated and marginalized. Whether either Jesus was right about their personal ontological or metaphysical claims, this does not mean that their ethical and social critiques are not valid. The Jesus that Scholinski meets offers him a way of life to imitate that could lead him to make the world a more sensitive and just place.

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Imitation as Resistance

Whereas the Imago Dei affirm the diverse creative power of God, the Imitatio Christi affirm the agency among persons to transform their lives and that of their community. The work of imitation brings alternative forms of life and community together, the authorized systems will exert the supremacy of their definitions and boundaries. By affirming the same in the other, imitation can be an act of solidarity and resistance. While often tolerated, the subversive defiance of Jesus's continuous walking was did not go unnoticed by the hospital workers. Scholinski recounts one night when the conflict between patients and staff burst into violence, challenging the contingent alliance established between Jesus and the trans youth. Scholinski explains, "they went after after Jesus because he wouldn't go into his room at bedtime. He kept pacing" (33). The physical control and isolation of patients was an exercise of power whereby the normitizing establishment worked to control and isolate disruptive spirits. "Three guards held him down on the floor and Jesus whipped his body around, screaming and crying. This guards swore at him. It was nasty," recounts Scholinski (33). Each movement of Jesus's body was an material act of resistance much like his continued assertion of the man he is was an internal act of defiance. Yet the force of putting him on the ground as well as the shoving around his body showed how the medical system could curtail even these movements. The dangerous persistence of the system was that it could be in one moment fixed and in another moment fluid while retaining a degree of control on the body being disciplined. Jesus could yell and twist but we could not escape the firm hands of the hospital. The battle to put Jesus into his room was an assertion that the staff could put the man in his place in a variety of ways and senses. The momentary restricting of Jesus relates to the logic of the asylum as a whole: the hospital has a right to hold the bodies of patients and to assert ever more isolated control. The time specific enforcement of power (asserting a bedtime) likewise related to the overall authority of the hospital to remove the patients from the general population for a given amount of time. The removal from public time and community is imitated in the removal from the time and community within the hospital between patients such as Jesus and Scholinski.

The attempt to isolate and divide Jesus and Scholinski from each other are met by resistance between the bond formed during the regular walks prompts the trans youth to stand in solidarity with his companion. "Another patient, I don't remember who, ran over with me to help Jesus. We yelled, Leave him alone, he's not hurting anyone," recalls Scholinski (33). Ironically, the demand to "Leave him alone" reflects the goal of the staff in one way. The hospital intends on isolating Jesus from the others, inhibiting his ability to walk and talk with them and inspire their imitation of his transgressive spirit. Yet in another way Scholinski's demand inverts the meaning of the isolation. While the hospital removed Jesus and the trans youth from the general population, setting them apart, it also allowed for them to form an alternative community and become saints for one another. Indeed, this night, they would become momentary martyrs for Jesus. "A guard with huge arms wrestled me to the floor and put his black leather boot on my head," recounts Scholinski (33). Because the imitation of Jesus did not stop at walking and talking together, the trans youth's decision to stand by his friend results in him receiving similar punishment. While subdued, the act of resistance forced the hospital to extend their energy threefold.  Scholinski admits that the hospital staff spoke their message louder. "He stood over me for a long moment to make sure I understood who held the power," Scholinski recounts. "I understood. 'Shut up, you fucking crazy queer,' he said" (33). Much like the tradition of imitating Christ by "turning the other cheek," the act of others taking and multiplying the punishment was a way to shame the medical staff. The imitation was a message that there are alternative ways of living, understanding, and enacting power. While Jesus and the trans youth were insane by the standards of the medical staff, the staff was out of line by the standards of the patients. As Scholinski repeated several times in various ways, Jesus being Jesus, like the trans youth being a trans youth, wasn't hurting anyone. "So what if Jesus wouldn't go into his room?" Scholinski asks. "He was peaceful until they arrived" (33). In this moment that the hospital staff was asserting the supremacy of their Imago Mundi, the Imago Transvesti and Imitatio Christi worked together to offer a peaceful alternative. Who are the ones that need to be physically restrained: the ones going for a night walk or the ones beating children?

The scene demonstrates the way and the cost of Imitatio Christi for transgender saints. Yet it the narrative also opens up for others to join in the imitative act of solidarity. The invocation of a nameless other person, "Another patient, I don't remember who, ran over with me to help Jesus," works much like the unnamed "Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John" wherein the reader can imagine themselves running to Jesus's aid (33). The Imitatio Christi of Dylan Scholinski is not without dangers nor is it normatizing in the way the Christ of his wider society has become. Standing beside one another can be taking blows meant for another. "The next day my neck and shoulder were so sore the nurse gave my Tylenol," recalls Scholinski (33). In a hospital where medicine is regulated, especially for those with recorded drug transgressions, the gift of pain killers is both an act of care and erasure. The medicine is an act of forgiveness but also a reward for a patient who has returned to following the rules. Just as how the removal of pain smoothes over the materials consequence of the defiance, the act of care works to reassert relations between patient and hospital, oppressed and oppressor, after a swift blow to divide the relations between patient and patient. The immediate force of the violence followed by the lingering memory of the pain can secure the system in silence. "In the meeting we didn't mention Jesus being beaten up" remembers Scholinski (33). Nonetheless, Tylenol is not a very powerful drug. Nor is the act of care able to make all things right and peaceful again. The pains will persist and the memory will be retained until a time that voice can be given to both of them. In this way, through the trans hagiography the veil of silence is lifted. Old wounds are reopened and at last the pain is able to speak. Years after Jesus and Scholinski were divided, the pattern of their relationship continues, offering a model of imitation for other oppressed groups to follow. Even if one is not Christ or a trans man, one can embody the same form of resistance and community through a shared suffering in the Imitatio Christi.

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Click here for more information 

on Transgender Saints

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New Publication: "Unconfessing Transgender" Featured in Accessus 3.1

"Man / The which, for his complexioun 

Is mad upon divisioun"

John Gower

Confessio Amantis

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Unconfessing Transgender: 

Dysphoric Youths and the Medicalization of Madness 

in John Gower’s “Tale of Iphis and Ianthe”

by M.W. Bychowski
Accessus: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 3.

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Abstract

On the brink of the twenty-first century, Judith Butler argues in “Undiagnosing Gender” that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defines the psychiatric condition of “Gender Identity Disorder” (or “Gender Dysphoria”) in ways that control biological diversity and construct “transgender” as a marginalized identity. By turning the study of gender away from vulnerable individuals and towards the broader systems of power, Butler works to liberate bodies from the medical mechanisms managing difference and precluding potentially disruptive innovations in forms of life and embodiment by creating categories of gender and disability.

Turning to the brink of the 15th century, we find that John Gower’s Confessio Amantis narrates the division and dysphoria of gender according to the hermeneutic of the seven deadly sins. The “Tale of Iphis and Ianthe” occurs in the Confessio’s Book IV on “acedia,” or sloth. Iphis, whose story is bordered by a priest’s penitential advice and thereby related to sloth, is a biologically female youth dressed as a boy and later physically transformed into a man. Medieval disability scholars have demonstrated that for premodern thinkers, religion and medicine were so intertwined as to be inseparable, especially in cases such as the management of sloth, where the symptoms of depression, despair, and sluggishness spanned the categorizes of physical and spiritual disease. Gower himself considers the God of Love to be both cause and physician of this ailment.

In “Unconfessing Transgender,” I contend that Gower's text considers the medical definition and control of medieval “trans” bodies under the auspices of sin by presenting both Iphis’s problem and cure as socially constructed. The first part of this article explores “Divisioun and Dysphoria” to establish how Gower prefigures the modern social model of transgender as an experience of living in a world full of change and contradiction. In part two, the particular social forms of “divisioun” identified as “Acedia and Depression” signal Gower’s discussion of the sin of sloth that frames the “Tale of Iphis and Ianthe.” In the third part, I examine how Gower's removal of the dysphoric youth’s voice and agency in the tale emphasizes the systematic character of suffering caused by a dysphoric Nature (represented by Isis) and a subjugating patriarchal Nature (represented by Eros).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eve Salisbury for her indispensable enthusiasm and insights throughout the birthing of this piece, as well as Georgiana Donavin, Jonathan Hsy, Chelsey Faloona, and other readers who helped (like Isis) to midwife this dysphoric work into the world. Furthermore, I would like to extend gratitude to Jenny Boyar, Sarah Gillette, and Pamela Yee, who presented alongside me on the Gower Project panel, “Gower and Medicine,” at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI, in May 2015. For the conviviality and mentorship that has helped in the development of this project, I thank Robert McRuer and David Mitchell, as well as Jeffrey J. Cohen and all members of the George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute. Finally, to my partner in all things, the Rev. Rachel J. Bahr, and our children, who every day teach me more about the power of speaking together, the agency of youth, and the radical demands of love, I dedicate this work to you.

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Accessus

Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media is a biannual publication of The Gower Project. In Accessus, The Gower Project publishes theoretically informed readings of premodern literatures, demonstrates the impact of new media on these texts, and provides a venue for innovative work on John Gower's poetry.

The Forward to this issue was written by Georgiana Donavin, bepress (DC Admins), and Eve Salisbury, Western Michigan University. In this Foreword, the editors summarize the articles published in Accessus 3.1 and offer conclusions about their importance for Gower Studies and contemporary medical practice.

The issue also features another Gower Project participant, "Reflection, Interrupted: Material Mirror Work in the Confessio Amantis" by Jenny Boyar, University of Rochester. In the abstract for the article, Boyar writes: The Confessio Amantis concludes with a revelatory scene in which Venus holds up a mirror to Amans, allowing him to recognize John Gower the poet— a moment that is often read as a mimetic and healing counterpoint to the Confessio’s sickness and self-questioning. My intention in this paper is to very slightly modify certain aspects of this narrative, to consider how the materiality of the mirror can inform its metaphoric deployments in the Confessio. I organize my discussion around two seemingly contrasting moments in the poem in which the self is seen and in different ways recognized through a reflective surface: the “Tale of Narcissus,” and the concluding moment in which Amans looks into the mirror to see, eventually, John Gower. Drawing in particular on the production and dissemination of mirrors in the Middle Ages, as well as basic properties of reflection, I point to certain challenges facing the medieval mirror: the hazy reflective properties of the lead mirror, and the impurities of the precariously made, limitedly accessible glass mirror. I ultimately suggest that, more than a revelation through reflective recognition, the Confessio’s ending would have proven most resonant for its portrayal of seeing through a complicated medium.

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Read more from Accessus

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The Visibility of Transgender: A History of "Freaks & Queers"

"They were made freaks, socially constructed for the purpose of entertainment and profit"

Freaks and Queers
Eli Clare

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A Genealogy of Freaks

As a transgender man with cerebral palsy, Clare recognizes from personal experience how a variety of people, especially those he names in his chapter "Freaks and Queers" are separated from society by longstanding habits of gawking. As a lived situation, being treated as a "freak" makes Clare feel alone and unique. This experience of being isolated by medical and social categorizes is compounded by the treatment of the modern moment as one of unprecedented scientific and cultural knowledge. Transgender, transgender, intersex, cerebral palsy, and disability are all words with very particular modern meanings. As such the bodies and lives they are supposed to describe are defined within specific modern contexts, effectively cutting them off from the impulse to draw on historical struggles, cultural genealogies, and collective pride. "I want to unravel freak, to pull on the thread called history," writes Clare of the desire to cross the geographic and temporal divisions that keep marginalized people from identifying with one another (71). Indeed, by remapping history, Clare discovers how transgender, intersex, and disabled people have long been isolated from collective experiences of time and space through the work of various kinds of Freak Shows. Clare writes, "bearded women, fat women... intersexed people... became wondrous and horrifying exhibits... nature did not make them into freaks, the freakshow did." (71-72). In other words, transgender and intersex people did not suddenly appear in the nineteenth and twentieth century as isolated objects of study and entertainment but are in part produced in the mechanisms of enfreakening that has roots in the medieval period.

"Intersexed people, transsexuals, and people who don't conform to gender norms - such as bearded women who grow their beards - have their own history at the freakshow," claims Clare (96). For Clare, "history at the freakshow," is not simply a history of the freakshow. Rather, diverse peoples who have existed across time have crossed through periods and places where they have been transformed into localized tourist attractions. These places - or shows - take on different forms and use different language but the function of the freakening is a mechanism that extends across differences in time and embodiment. "The history of freakdom extends far back into western civilization," writes Clare. "The court jester, the pet dwarf, the exhibition of Renaissance England, the myths of giants, minotaurs, and monsters all point to this long history" (71). Clare reaches wide and far to gather a wide collection of peoples into his history yet roots this collectivity as central in the anachronistic project of the freakshow. "The freakshow," writes Clare, "construct[ed] an exaggerated divide between 'normal' and Other, sustained in turn by rubes willing to pay good money to stare." (72). In particular, Clare's cultural history hovers around the pre-modern period where the stories of Amazons and Hermaphrodites were imagined alongside pet dwarves and monsters.  In the medieval period, these peoples who today are isolated in medical studies and doctor's offices can be found together in islands on the margins of the world or showed before princes.

Clare acknowledges that there is a linguistic and archival problem in mapping a history of freakdom but hopes to find stories that allow for imaginative alternatives in pre-modern pre-medicalized bodies of freaks.  "Queer identity has been pathologized and medicalized," writes Clare. "Until 1973, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder. Today, transsexuality and transgenderism, under the names of gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder, are considered psychiatric conditions. Queerness is all too frequently intertwined with shame, silence, and isolation"(96). For critics of medieval transgender or intersex studies, these modern medical terms can be through up as roadblocks. The claim can be made that premodern peoples did not understand themselves with the same concepts by which current peoples identify. Yet Clare argues that this fixation on terminology is a part of the practice of objectifying shared subjective experiences that are often much messier. "In the centuries before medicalization...," writes Clare, "the Christian western world had encoded disability with many different meanings" (82). A key part of this work then is translation and the ability of metaphor and analogy to help identification across differences. This points towards imagined cultural histories over the strict boundaries of medical categorization. "I want to follow the messier course, to examine the ways in which the ugly words we sometimes use to name our pride to into tap into a complex knot of personal and collective histories" (93). If enfreakening is the process of isolating and shaming individual persons, then this alternative mapping of the past emphasizes the slippages in category and experience in order to call for collective power and pride through shared history.

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The Place of Freaks

There becomes a circuitous relationship between freaks and their environment, as indeed as the physical and social machinery of various types of freakshows work to contain and explain bodies that diverge from the norm according to their constructed surroundings. When these freakshows were the most successful at its their work, the peoples would appear as natural monsters - literally from the Latin those who "show" or prove a point. This however, argues Clare, is an effect and not a cause of their circumstances. "Whatever these paying customers - rubes in circus lingo - believed, they were not staring at freaks of nature," writes Clare. "Rather, the freak show tells the story of an elaborate and calculated social construction" (71). These circumstances were the beliefs that defined the meaning of the lives contained in the shows but which in turn constructed the environments which were regarded as the natural place of such monsters. Enfreaking was then a process rather than a natural state. "At the center of this construction is the showman, who, using costuming, staging, elaborate fictional histories, marketing, and choreography, turning people from four groups [disabled people, both native and foreign non-disabled people of color, and non-disabled people with visible differences] into freaks," writes Clare (71). These showman were those who had the power of narrative. Mandeville fits this role in his travels for the Hermaphrodites and Amazons which he places and describes. Such showmen control the machinery but treat their role as merely explanatory, covering up the role their knowledge construction had in making the circumstances they described and represented.

"I want to hear their stories, but like the stories of other marginalized people, they are often never told, but rather eaten up, thrown away, lost in the daily grind of survival," writes Clare (78). The power to write histories are a privilege of circumstances where a person is command of their time, surroundings, and language to be allowed to tell stories.  "Some of the 'freaks' didn't read or write, due to their particular disabilities or to the material/social circumstances of their lives. Or, as in the case of many of the people brought here from other countries, they didn't speak English and/or didn't come from cultures that passed stories through the written word" (78).  Those who could write were the people who were free from the confines of their place in society. This meant that those who lived on the margins or were enlisted into freakshows often did not have control of their environment enough to turn it into narrative. "Clearly, working as a freak meant working a lousy job, many times the only job available," writes Clare. "Sometimes the job was lousier than others" (77). Indeed, these jobs and social positions could be described various as "lousy" because of an environmental intimacy and social association with louses and other parasites. The places of the freaks on the margins, were made out as less hygienic, less controlled by the healthy and wholesomeness of central peoples and places. Here the undesirable lived alongside and on one another. Metaphorically, the peoples on the margins became imagined as infestations, clinging and hiding along the fringes of properly governed places and bodies. Yet as Clare notes, these were often the only places and ways of living left for these peoples to survive and from these places magrinalized people are left to draw the metaphors and images with which they will be described to the world of gawkers.

As time went on, the brushing away of premodern travel texts and even the modern side-shows signals to many the improvement of the lives of those marked as monsters and freaks yet as Clare demonstrates, changes in form do not always mean a change in the machinery or its effects. Although the Isle of Hermaphrodites is nowhere on the modern map, this does not mean that freakshows ended but rather shifted to less public medical offices and textbooks. "The end of the freak show didn't mean the end of our display or the end of voyeurism," writes Clare. "We simply traded one kind of freakdom for another" (Clare 87). As a process, the freakshow can change while continuing to fulfill its purpose. In the premodern islands, as in today's gawkers of transgender and intersex people, "they came to be educated and entertained, titillated and repulsed. They came to have their ideas of normal and abnormal, superior and inferior, their sense of self, confirmed and strengthened" (71).Throughout his expansive history, Clare continually moves into language of the collective and co-identified, saying "we" and "us" when referring to the monsters, freaks, and other marginalized. On the other hand, Clare refers to gawkers as "they" who enfreaken or "them." The differentiation happens at the place of the freakshow where differences were and are asserted. "Take for instance public stripping, the medical practice of stripping disabled children to their underwear and examining them in front of large groups of doctors, medical students, physical therapists, and rehabilitation specialists. They have the child walk back and forth. They squeeze their muscles. They watch his gait, muscle tension, footfall, back curvature. They take notes and talk among themselves about what surgeries and therapies they might recommend" (88). While the dirty freakshow has been replaced by sterile enviornments, the isolation and objectification of the bodies continue. In the end, these forms of categorical knowledge, of putting peoples in their places, is an act of power as well of delight.

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The Flaunters and the Gawkers

Given the place of transgender, intersex, and disability in the history of freak shows, Clare argues that it is necessary to be able to transform these loca of shame into appropriated sites of pride. Indeed, these counter-movement, argues Clare, began from the earliest moment that the privileged traveled far and went through expense in order to be able to see the marginalized. "I relish the knowledge that there have been people who have taken advantage of white people's and nondisabled people's urge to gawk," writes Clare (95). While staring and gawking are both acts of power, asserting the freak as set apart by their difference from society's rules of polite interaction, those who were stared at were imbued with a kind of power to enchant. Even as they were pushed to the margins, these peoples on the margins drew people to them and became loca sancta in their own right. The critical contingency is that this power may or may not be a force the marginalized could control. Clare writes, "the people who worked as freaks - especially those who had some control over their own display - grasped an exploitative situation in an exploitative world and, as often as possible, turned it toward their benefit" (79). Freakshows made money for showmen and this was a trade that many transgender and intersex people learned. By turning their lives into performances, people can exploit the gawking they receive for their own benefit. By demonstrating that such divides and places are artificially defined, the possibilities for alternatives arise.  "Even the binary of female-bodied and male-bodied appears more and more to be a social construction," Clare observes, "as intersexed people... begin to speak publicly about their lives and the medical intrusion they've faced" (127-128). By claiming history and identifying with one another's struggles, the tools and constructs that define gender in the body and the environment are reveal as socially made, thus suggesting that they might be remade or otherwise used.

Clare asks if history can reclaim and find pride in the freaks struggle?  "They shape pride out of a centuries-old legacy of performing on the street corner, at the open air fair, in the palace and at the carnival as freak, monster, pet dwarf, court jester, clown," writes Clare. "The history that for so long has placed us on stage, in front of audiences, sometimes in subversion and resistance, other times in loathing and shame, ask not only for pride, but also for our witness as our many different personal histories come tangling into our collective one" (100). In the end, the crux is about the question of who can benefit and who can identify from freakshows. Will they always be managed by outside authorities or can the marginalized claim a collective history? The critical shift seems to be the move from a medical model back to a cultural model of place as it provides more slippages, messy middles, and possibilities for simultaneous effect. "We are declaring, that doctors and their pathology, rubes and their money, anthropologists and their theories, gawkers and their so called innocuous intentions, bullies and their violence, showmen and their hype, Jerry Lewis and his telethon, government bureaucrats and their rules will no longer define us," concludes Clare (90). Indeed, Clare calls for a new turn in scholarship that seeks to give the power of definition and location to the peoples defined and located rather than controlling them by such means. History and mapmaking need not be dispelled as a way to understand lived experiences of time and space but the tools and constructs must be better shared. "We need to know our history, come to understand which pieces of that history we want to make our own, and develop a self-image of pride," writes Clare (90). The freakshow and isle of monsters might turn from a place of shame into a place of pride if only it turns from the isolated topic (and topos) of specialists and authorities into a world of collective identification. Only then can history become a form of liberating the past and not a further circumscribing of it. 

The benefit of sharing the power of a history will embolden the oppressed today rather than define their limits. "Whatever we name ourselves, however we end up shattering our self-hatred, shame silence, and isolation," writes Clare, "the goal is the same: to end our daily material oppression." (101). Continuing to use the collective tense, "we," Clare insists on a history and mapmapping that looks at making connections to marginalized places rather than alienated "them" from one another and the self. Pride in this form is a collective experience that invites identification and a sharing of stories, bodies, and other social resources. Only with this group power can change happen. "Pride is not an inessential thing. Without pride, disabled people are much more likely to accept unquestioningly the daily material conditions of ableism: unemployment, poverty, segregated and substandard education, years spent locked up in nursing homes, violence perpetuated by caregivers, lack of access," writes Clare (91). Mapping out these places of isolation and connecting them with places of monstrocity and freakdom in the past combined critical powers. Where scholars see one as oppressive so too might they be drawn to see the injustice in the other. By so being connected, these lives speak to the value and meaning of one another. A sense of pride develops and pride means a share in power. Power then might mean material change. "Without pride," concludes Clare, "individual and collective resistance to oppression becomes nearly impossible." (91). Pride is the impulse and the power to look beyond the confines of time and place to see more connected and collective possibilities of shared histories and space.

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More on Eli Clare

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Clare points to Rosemarie Garland Thomson's theorizing and historicizing scholarship as critical to comprehending the genealogies that constructed Amazons, Hermaphrodites, Trans and Intersex people as freaks. "Perhaps the freak show's most remarkable effect was to eradicate distinctions among a wide variety of bodies," writes Garland Thomson. "[A]ll the bodily characteristics that seemed different or threatening to the dominant order merged into a kind of motley chorus line of physical difference on the freakshow stage" (Garland Thomson 62-63).

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