The Castrated Woman

By Riki Anne Wilchins

In The Female Eunuch, outlining the means by which authentic, dynamic female individuals are spiritually and psychologically castrated, Germaine Greer wrote: "the chief element in this process is... the suppression and deflection of Energy. The Girl struggles to reconcile her schooling along masculine lines with her feminine conditioning until Puberty resolves the ambiguity and anchors her safely in the feminine posture, if it works. When it doesn't she is given further conditioning as a corrective..."

A transexual woman goes through a similar process, the chief element also being the suppression and deflection of energy. She struggles to reconcile her enforced schooling along masculine lines with her female gender identity,. Finally transition, hormones, surgery, and the closet resolve the ambiguity, anchoring her at last within a feminine posture acceptable to the nonocracy. If this doesn't work, she is given further conditioning in form of public humiliation, harassment, ostracism and actual assault as a corrective. Within this process, an authentic and dynamic child is transformed into a spiritually and psychologically debilitated and often defenseless transexual adult.

The nonocracy often invents us as castrated males, a surgical scalpel having removed our manhood. Actually it is our womanhood that is removed, and with it our self esteem, our joy in being a part of human community, our dignity as women. The scalpel the nonocracy uses is subtler and sharper than steel. Its edges are composed of prejudice, harassment, public humiliation, ostracism. Everywhere we are encouraged participate in our own castration: to cut ourselves off from our identity, to assimilate, to be quiet, tame, docile, conforming, noncentric in thought, word and deed, ashamed of our selves, our sisters and our experience. What is amputated, in fact, is our identity as women.

The way this scalpel is wielded is all too familiar to most transexual women. Harassed prior to transition for being too feminine as men, we are harassed afterward for being too feminine as women (wearing "too much" makeup, "trying too hard", etc.). Or we are harassed after transition for being "too masculine" and "male-like". We are described by our doctors and by nontransexuals as "successful" to the extent we can "blend in" with them: in other words, pass and go into the woodwork. We are employable to the degree we don't upset the noncentric applecart by being "noticeably transexual". We receive romantic attention from prospective non partners to the degree that we approximate non women as well. We are complimented by those who say "I never would have guessed" or "you look just like a real woman"; they, it turn, intend to compliment us.Everywhere our power and our simple dignity is taken from us.

The nonarchy applies further corrective to those who challenge its gender hierarchy in less subtle ways as well. We are disowned by our families. We have our children taken from us by the courts. We are fired from our jobs, turned out from homes and apartments. The punishment of the transexual woman who is radical enough to claim her identity in the nonocracy is pervasive and overwhelming.

Within transexual circles things are often not much better. Filled with shame and self-loathing, we confer status upon those of us who most look most nontransexual. In our shame, many of us retire to the closet, sometimes for a lifetime. For those transexual women who refuse to assimilate and go into the closet, further "corrective" conditioning can come from intrusive strangers, threatened males, angry feminists or even other closeted transexuals. The woman with CCD who is strident, assertive and angry about the deflection and emasculation of her energy can also expect further conditioning among the professionals from whom she must seek treatment: i.e., surgeons strangely reluctant to operate, and shrinks correspondingly eager to label and diagnose.

Mary Wollstonecraft, fortuitously author of Frankenstein, wrote in 1792, "Genteel women are, literally speaking, slaves to their bodies . . . Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison." This rings eerily true for transexuals, doubly imprisoned by our obsession with our looks, as well as by non-transexuals' fixation on our bodies and what is, was, or will be in our pants.

Not only do we become slaves to our bodies, we may become captive to the search for nontransexual appearance. Transition can start out with having our hair cut, dyed and permed, our nails done, our teeth capped, our legs waxed. We begin electrolysis for our beards and body hair and taking estrogen to correct our hormones. Later we have breast implants to augment hormones that have been asked to do their work too late, and then perhaps surgery. From there, we go on to nose jobs, and adams-apple shaves. It may continue to having voices surgically altered to cut off the lower range, facial surgery to reduce strong bone structure, additional labial surgery too improve our vaginal "cosmetic appearance", and other procedures.

Some of our changes are psychological or behavioral. Doggedly altering the way we talk, gesture and move, we study nons for hints on what is "proper". We give up sports and exercise for fear we will appear muscular or masculine, and we sometimes cultivate an atrophied, and therefore "feminine" physique. We learn to subdue our more florid emotions, since these are "masculine", and in particular to curb or suppress our anger. Fearing to be labelled "dominating" we try to project a more docile and submissive demeanor.

None of this is necessarily wrong. Some is the legitimate result of years of not being allowed to care for our appearance or act in ways that were natural for us. Much is an effort to turn back the clock on years of testosterone poisoning and social conditioning which has changed, perhaps even distorted or disfigured, our bodies, our minds and our emotions. No one wants to be in the position of judging what another transexual women should or shouldn't do to feel comfortable with herself. Certainly I don't, for much of the above describes my own transition.

On the other hand, it would be less than honest to ignore for some of us, clearly this process of progressive alteration becomes the original "slippery slope", where once one steps the only possible outcome is an endless and accelerating descent. We no longer know what is enough, or where or how to stop. We make some changes to look more feminine, to feel more comfortable, or perhaps to be less obviously read and therefore less often harassed. But if our goal is to be finally as non- transexual as possible, because after all non-transexual women define what is female, then where and how do we draw the line? Where do we say at last, "Enough, it's finished."?

And so we continue changing and altering our selves, never satisfied and never complete. Until one day, we wake to find ourselves lost within the now unfamiliar landscape of our own bodies, like nomads in some strange and foreign desert, surrounded by unknown landmarks and inhabited by those whose alien features, and distant ways, we no longer recognize: Our castration is complete.

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