Gender Immigrant

Broadcast TV bookers seem to think transsexuals are flaming, cheating sadsacks on Ricky Lake and Jerry Springer, murdered victims of brutal hate crimes on lurid nightly news segments, or pathetic, selfish husbands who break the hearts of angry, grieving wives and children in order to become female. In a February special titled "Scenes from a Marriage," Dateline NBC spent a year following a woman named Joyce and her husband David, who was in the process of becoming Victoria. A year's worth of footage was edited to highlight Joyce's pain and loss, and to downplay the couple's commitment to one another, leaving audiences with the implication that their marriage was doomed to disintegrate, despite having survived "so far."

All this makes transgender author, comic novelist and English professor Jennifer Finney Boylan's contribution to our political climate particularly important. Since the publication of the New York Times bestseller She's Not There: A Life In Two Genders, a memoir about Boylan's sex change at age 42, she has made the media rounds, her humor and savviness as an interviewee resulting in a relatively rare phenomenon: coverage of transgender issues that educates rather than exploits. Light on political theory but brimming with anecdotes about the ways gender politics trickle into our daily lives, She's Not There is subversive, poignant and funny. The book's working title was "Gender Immigrant": Boylan has traveled from the culture of men to the culture of women and has emerged with insights extraordinary yet distinctly relatable.

Jennifer Pozner: The subtitle of your book is A Life in Two Genders. Having lived most of your life as a man, what were your expectations about becoming female?

Jennifer Finney Boylan: It's important to understand that if you're a transsexual, you're not changing genders in order to get a better deal. Having lived in this culture and having been a professor for many years, I had a pretty clear sense of the realities of being female, but what I most wanted was a sense of peace. And that is absolutely what I've found now that my gender and my spirit match. As I go through the course of my day there are things that are aggravating about being a woman and many things that are wonderful -- but I can wake up in the morning without having to wonder "what gender am I?" or worry about what to do about a struggle that to most other people is incomprehensible. That is the particular dilemma for transsexuals: The main thing that is required to understand the condition is imagination.

JP: During your transition, you noticed yourself gaining food issues and body image anxieties along with your new breasts and hips. You say the culture had its hooks in you to the point where you felt like you were oppressing yourself. A lot of women can relate to that feeling. Did being socialized with a male sense of confidence for four decades prepare you in any way to reject negative, external judgments?

JFB: Initially, I had to go through a second adolescence, and it was a time of real awkwardness and narcissism for me. Most post-operative transsexuals eventually become rather unexceptional men and women who go on with the business of their lives unnoticed. People don't look at them and say "Hey, wow, there's one of those transsexuals I've heard so much about." We think, "There's a mother, an English teacher, a musician." You asked whether 40 years of maleness in any way prepared me for this. I was not socialized as a woman and didn't suffer firsthand the slings and arrows that women have to experience. Those 40 years did give me a certain strength and patience, and I needed that to endure the indignity and awkwardness of changing genders. It's possible in a strange, ironic way that the male life I lived gave me the courage to surrender it. Being trangendered is not about masculinity and femininity, it's about maleness and femaleness. I'm female now, which is to say I have a female body, but I'm feminine in some ways and not in others. I have the right to decide on any given day, just as all women do, where I fall along the femininity spectrum -- with Dolly Parton on one end and Janet Reno on the other.