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PORTRAITS OF

 
  

 

TRANSFORMATION

Bv ELI CLARE

and writer Dean Kotula gathers

together photos, essays, and inter-
views that explore the experiences of
being a female-to-male transsexual
(FTM). This is a book of many frag-
mented parts. There are Kotula’s
photo portraits of FTMS accompa-
nied by their personal statements, a
handful of autobiographical pieces
by Kotula about transsexuality and
his life as a transman, several articles
by non-trans professionals who work
with FTMs, a series of interviews
with doctors who do FT M surgeries
and photo essays of their surgical
procedures, a couple‘ essays about
trans history and the process of tran-
sition, and two pieces by family
members of FTMS.

In short this book is a col-
lage of information. Not quite an
anthology but more than a single-
authored volume, it is hard to char.-
acterize and feels a bit like a whirl-
wind.

In Phallus Palace, photographer

At the center are Kotula’s
portraits of FTMs. These black-and-
white full-page photos show a whole
range transmen from the 22-year-old
guy who has, just started taking
testosterone and looks all of 14 to
the man who transitioned 24 years
ago; from the impish looking clarinet
player hunkered down on a railroad
track to the kayaker paddling away
from a dock. Paired with these por-
traits are smaller pictures of these
men before transition — when they
were often perceived as women —
and short statements by each of
them. The words and pictures com-
bine to create powerful stories about
what transition means to FTMS.
Michael writes: “I was always mas-
culine in my innermost essence —
though I didn’t come by my physical
manhood until much later, and not
easily  And this journey, this bliss,
is my manhood. I have approached,
and breached,_ what I was made to
believe was the impossible: to
become a man” (p. 120).

It is necessary for non-

‘ trans gay, lesbian, and bi people to

absorb these storiesjabout FTMs
who are men. All too frequently in
non-trans queer space I hear mutter-
ings about how transsexuals are just
selling out, how it’s essentially con-
servative to transition-, how the les-
bian community is losing all its \
butches. These transphobic attitudes
are frustrating at best, and as a gen-
derqueer on the FTM-spectrum, I get
really weary of responding to them.
The men in Kotula’s portraits are
repeatedly saying, “Through transi-
tion I became whole, I became
happy, I became able to live in my

. body.” These aren’t stories of selling

out or becoming conservative or los-
ing anyone, but rather stories of
liberation.

The book as a whole
focuses on FTM transsexuals who
identify as men, which is a small
slice of the whole range of FTM-

spectrum gender possibilities. Kotula
goes to great lengths to differentiate
transmen from other trans identities.
His story and belief, bolstered by the
other voices in the book, is that he
and other transsexuals are simply
men whose female bodies needed to
be corrected.

This viewpoint is vital, and
around its edges lies a lot of com-
plexity. First, I want to acknowledge
the sexist messages that declare all
women’s bodies wrong and the ways
those messages get internalized.
Given this truth about sexism, some
feminists are quick to dismiss
Kotula’s FTM transsexual reality of
being a man living in the wrong
body — a female body — as intemal-
ized sexism. I believe that these
truths — one feminist and the other
trans — actually aren’t contradictory.
Women can struggle mightily with
internalized sexism, and transmen
can struggle with a deeply internal
feeling, unconnected to sexism, that
their female bodies are in need of
correction. By holding these two
realities together, we can all arrive at
a more complex understanding of
sex, gender, and sexism.

And second, I want to note
that there are many different kinds of
gender identities among trans people.
Kotula’s focus is narrow, and The
Phallus Palace would be best read in
conjunction with trans books that are
broader in scope. Genderqueer, edit-
ed by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and
Riki Wilchens, (reviewed in '
October’s OITM) and Leslie
Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors
come to mind.

Around the central series
of portraits is a constellation of
information designed to educate
readers about FTMS. We hear from a
number of non-trans professionals:
surgeons, therapists, and a '
researcher. Kotula took his camera
into several operating rooms, and the
resulting pictures are quite graphic.
If you are squeamish, skip the surgi-
cal photo essays. While they are
somewhat informative for folks
wanting to know more about FTM‘
chest and genital reconstruction, I
wonder whether they play into the
widespread prurient interest in trans
people’s bodies, particularly genitals.
(The book’s rather flip title, The
Phallus Palace, comes from a device
by the same name used in one of the
surgeries that creates a penis.)

The therapists in the book
are a mixed bag. Katherine Rachlin
adeptly debunks many myths and
stereotypes about FTMS, clearly tak-
ing the position of an ally to the
trans community. With Gender
Identity Disorder and Gender
Dysphoria still listed as psychiatric
diagnoses in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders Fourth Edition (DSM-I V),
too many non-trans therapists and
health care providers medicalize,
even pathologize, trans experience.
Disappointingly that is exactly the
tone of Diane Ellabom’s “Seeking
Manhood: An Introductory Guide to

 

Assessment of the Female-to-Male
Adolescent” later in the book. This
makes me appreciate Rachlin’s arti-
cle even more.

In a nod to research about
transsexuality, Kotula interviews
Milton Diamond about his theories
regarding gender identity formation.
Diamond favors a biological expla-
nation, centering on the notion that
pre-natal hormones shape the sex of-
the brain. Although it is interesting
(and mirrors the debate about a bio-
logical origin for sexual orientation),
neither Kotula nor Diamond clearly
states that this is only theory, not
proven fact. Kotula bases much of
his thinking about transsexuality on
this theory and writes about it as a
given, rather than one of a number of
possibilities.

We also hear about some
FTM-specific history. Margaret
Deidre O’Hartigan writes about Alan
Hart who unambiguously lived as a
man in the early l900s and was one
of the first people to utilize medical
technology in his transition from
female to male. And Ken Morris
writes about two female-bodied Civil
War soldiers who lived as men their
entire adulthoods, unlike many of the
passing women whofought in the
Civil War and returned to their lives
as women after the War. Both pieces
of history are important to a growing
body of trans cultural work. Too
often FTM histoiy has been sub-
sumed into lesbian history and trans-
men are misunderstood as butch
dykes. Morris’s distinction between
FTMs and passing women is impor-
tant in understanding the difference
between trans history and lesbian
history.

And finally Kotula writes
about his own history in a series of
autobiographical pieces. Oddly
enough it is Kotula’s writing that I
find the most disappointing in The
Phallus Palace. I-Ie tends to make
sweeping generalizations about
transsexuals. For example, he writes
on page 227, “[M]ost [transsexuals]
will say, ‘I had no choice; it was
either transition or die,’” as if this
were an absolute truth. Yes, there are
many FTM transsexuals for whom
transition is a life-or-death matter,
but for many others, it is not. Kotula
never acknowledges that he’s writing
about one particular kind of trans
experience. Instead he repeatedly
generalizes from his life to all or
most FTMs.

In addition Kotula can be
overly romantic about manhood and
unrepentantly sexist. For example,
he writes, “Now I want to recover
my childhood, to be viewed as a boy
and young man  without hesitation
or jeers. I want what was rightfully