IGF CultureWatch

At the recently concluded [1998] Gay Games in Amsterdam, a major brouhaha broke out over a requirement that athletes who define themselves as belonging to the sex different from the one to which they were born should provide proof of what the rules called "completed gender transition."

You'd think this would be a no-brainer. After all, the reason that men compete against men, and women against women, is because the male body is, well, different from the female body and same-sex competition ensures a level playing field, gender wise.

Gay Games organizers, in fact, explained that concerns over fairness and legal liability made it imperative that transgender athletes be put into the proper physical category so that men, with their greater body strength, "whether born or created," did not compete unfairly (or perhaps even dangerously) against women.

But even to talk about "proper categories" is to raise a red flag to those activists nourished on queer theory and its offshoot, the new transgenderism, which holds that all sexual categorization, and the dual-gender system in particular, is by necessity oppressive. In a New York Times story headlined "Event Founded to Fight Bias Is Accused of It," Riki Anne Wilchins, leader of the transgender advocacy group Gender PAC and author of Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, complained that the organizers were "now forcing another group of athletes to go back into the closet or face a barrage of stigmatizing obstacles." Sydney Levy of the San Francisco-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission asked, somewhat overheatedly, "Where is their sense of fairness and justice�where does discrimination stop?"

It should be reiterated here that no one was trying to ban the transgendered from the Gay Games, only to require that those transsexuals who are (still) physically men compete against men, and women against women, while allowing those who had surgically and hormonally changed gender to happily compete with their new same-sex comrades. Where is the "discrimination" in that? It's certainly more liberal than the Olympic Games, where chromosome testing (to ensure that only men-born-men and women-born-women face off) has been required since 1968.

The reason for the emphatic condemnations of the Gay Games policy rests in the transgender advocates' academically trendy belief that gender itself is a "social construct," not a natural given, and therefore an individual's "self- definition" of gender should be all that matters. In an August 4th letter to Time magazine, Dean LaBate, head of the (take a breath) Michael Callen-Audre Lorde Community Health Center Transgender Health & Education Clinic, takes exception to Time's referring to transgender people as "those whose deepest awareness of their sexuality doesn't correspond to the physical parts they were born with." Writes LaBate: "The term 'transgender' is political and does not refer to any specific anatomy or sexual practice... Especially as a health center, we would deem it dangerously irresponsible to state a single definition of transgender for our clientele or anyone else."

This rejection of gender as an intrinsic concept is given full voice in a book by John Stoltenberg titled The End of Manhood. Stoltenberg takes the view that "The male sex is an abstract fiction," and lauds "the radical feminist critique of gender." He elaborates that "Manhood is a personal and social hoax that exists only through interpersonal and social injustice." Finally, in a virtuoso denial of any natural, underlying distinctions between the sexes (remember, gender is "a political and ethical construction"), Stoltenberg minimizes the physiological differences between a penis and a clitoris, blaming sex researchers for using "arbitrary criteria [to] fudge human experience in order to make 'scientific' distinctions between 'female and male categories' of human sexuality."

Ding, dong, reality calling. The idea that a penis marks a body as "male" only because of social convention influencing self-identification is not one that most gay men (or lesbians) would embrace. Rather than being a viewpoint in support of homosexuality, it's more like an argument favoring an androgynous unisexuality that even most gender benders would find unreflective of their lives.

In a sense, Dean LaBate is right: Transgenderism, the opposition to sexual identities as specifically dual, should not be confused with transsexualism, the desire to undergo sexual reassignment surgery because body and psyche don't match. Transsexuals, arguably, ultimately affirm gender distinctions (or why have the surgery?), whereas being transgendered is about "transgressing gender." What the Gay Games controversy highlights is the way in which ideologically motivated activists who have proclaimed themselves the voice of the new, utopian transgender movement are attempting -- and often succeeding -- in using liberal guilt and Generation X political correctness to impose their will on the community formerly known as gay and lesbian.