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Showing posts with label hsts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hsts. Show all posts

23 November 2012

The ebb and flow of social constructions


There is a misconception by some of those who prefer biologistic or even essentialist explanations that they therefore should reject social construction explanations.  For over 150 years now various writers have been proposing that homosexuality, transvestity and/or transsexuality are caused by some mixture of genetics and pre-natal experience, and for 150 years of effort very little has been established, especially in identifying which factors might make someone gay rather than trans or vice versa.  Every now and then some suggestive aspect of brain anatomy/chemistry such as H-Y Antigens or BTSc neurons is accepted uncritically as an explanation.  However these never seem to move on any next stage so that gender variance is as well explained as say autism or schizophrenia, or be developed to be used as a test,  and indeed attempts at replication of the original results by other scientists often fail.

Biologistic explanations have two serious weaknesses.  They cannot explain the dramatic increase in the percentage of us who are trans.  Add up all the known trans people in the entire nineteenth century and you have fewer than the transsexuals who are the newspapers in any one year in the 21st century.

Secondly biologistic factors do not at all explain the cultural changes of how trans persons are perceived and what options are available to trans persons at any time.  The biology was presumably similar for Lavinia Edwards in 1833, Charlotte Charlaque in 1930, Norma Jackson in 1931, Christine Jorgensen in 1953, Bibíana Fernández in 1977 and Jin Xing in 1995, but the social constructions in which they lived have changed enormously.

In the mid 19th century, a person whom we would now regard as transsexual was regarded as an invert, a category that also included what we now regard as homosexual.  In fact the first usage of the concept of a female trapped in a male body, anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, was to explain male homosexuality.
In the mid 20th century persons like Jorgenson were generally described as transvestists, before the term ‘transsexual’ came into use.

Let us take a small double wave in the sea of social construction.

The HSTS/Autogynephilia distinction was developed by Kurt Freund at what was then the Clarke Institute of Psychology Gender Identity Clinic, and appears in that institute’s Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management 1985, edited by Betty W. Steiner - although different terms are used.   Freund’s protégé and eventual replacement,  Ray Blanchard took the idea and renamed it with the terms that we now use.  Blanchard published papers in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (edited by Richard Green until 2001, and then by Kenneth Zucker) and similar journals that were not read by most trans persons.  However one who did and proclaimed herself to be an autogynephile, was Anne Lawrence who studied for a PhD at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality at San Francisco.  Michael Bailey was one of her thesis advisors.  Speculations continue as to which influenced the other more.  In 2003 Bailey published The Man Who Would Be Queen, and the concept became a public controversy.

Willow Arune, Lisanne Anderson and others set up the Autogynephilia Yahoo group, and a small but significant number of trans women self-identified as autogynephiles.   The group was apparently destroyed by Jennifer Usher manipulating the Yahoo complaints policy.

There were fewer trans women self-identifying as HSTS (homosexual transsexuals).   The most prominent was Kiira Triea, which was odd in that she had previously identified as a lesbian intersex.  She was the prime mover behind transkids.us.  Others involved included Jennifer Ross, Hontas Farmer and Heike Bödeker none of whom still speaks up for HSTS.

Very shortly afterwards, in 2005, Charlotte Goiar met Diane Kearny online, and then they split and founded two competing groups both using the term Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS).  The term had been proposed by Tom Reucher a decade before, but they turned its meaning upside down by applying it to emotions that had been previously expressed by Betty Cowell and Margaret O’Hartigan. The concern here is that most HBS advocates took up the term ‘autogynephile’  (Rose White, the author of the only book on HBS says rather ‘autogyne’ instead implying that she does not properly understand the concept).  It was stated in the short-lived HBS-written Wikipedia page on HBS that non-HBS MTF persons who have gender surgery were either autogynephiles or possibly gay men (no self-identified HSTS woman has ever claimed to be  or to have previously been a gay man).  Kearny claimed that non-HBS transsexuals were autogynephiles and fetishists.  The vast majority of trans women who do not fit these categories were defined out of existence, just as in the Freund-Blanchard-Bailey schema the same vast majority also disappears.

By syllogistic logic, HSTS = not autogynephile = HBS.  However this never worked psychologically.   A small number of HBS persons, could, if you force the HSTS/AGP dichotomy, be considered HSTS.  Diane Kearny who transitioned relatively early and later married a man, is the best candidate.   However most HBSers were first husbands and fathers, and transitioned only later. Thus if we force the dichotomy they would be AGP. Examples include Joanne Proctor, Tabatha Basco, Jennifer Usher, Cathryn Platine.  Rose White’s accounts of her life exclude what she did between the ages of 14 and 57, and it seems reasonable to assume that she fits here also.

The link between autogynephile and HBS was kept alive by the mutual antipathyof Willow Arune and Jennifer Usher across various Usenet fora.

In 2009 the Transkids site was revived by Kay Brown, the author of Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, writing as Cloudy. She also started a blog: On the Science of Changing Sex.  "I slept through the controversy surrounding the publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen. ... Prof. Bailey graciously gave me access to an online version of the book and I read it from front to back in nearly one sitting. Although I disagreed with several minor points, I felt I could have written the book myself. I agreed with each and every major point. Who wouldn't, if they knew what I know."

Of course the problem with HSTS is that it means ‘homosexual transsexual’, which is a confusing term for women who are mainly heterosexual (some are non-sexual).  It is also a very rude term in that it defines a trans women’s orientation by her birth gender.  There have been attempts to make Blanchard’s system less rude by proposing alternate terms, usually that HSTS should be called by the neutral term ‘androphilic’.  Alice Novic also proposed the terms Love-to-be-femme and Act-femme for AGP and HSTS respectively.  However these terms have not caught on.

The insistence on the term HSTS has kept away those HBSers who might have adopted it and also many others (myself included, even though unlike Triea and Brown, I am a graduate of gay lib).   The transkids.us site includes a page strongly insisting that HSTS and not androphilic is the right term.  Kay Brown/Cloudy continues the insistence in her FAQ:   “Transsexuals with this etiology are most often called, “homosexual transsexuals” (HSTS) or “early onset” in the scientific literature.  (This does not imply that they act like, nor identify, as “homosexual”.  It only means that they are sexually and affectionally attracted to the same natal sex.)” And goes on to refer to AGPs as non-homosexuals.   This is the same Kay Brown who in her Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History was critical of Harry Benjamin for using the term ‘male transsexual’ for a trans woman.

Anyway the tents are rolled up, and the circus has almost left town. 
  • The Kearny web site and forum are derelict sites.
  • The Goiar web site stands, but the forum has become inactive.
  • The Rose White book caused such embarrassment that most HBS-ers declined to even mention it.  There has not been a second HBS book from anybody else.
  • TS-Si which was initially proudly HBS, later removed the term and denied being HBS, and has now closed.
  • Suzan Cooke, who initially labelled Women Born Transsexual an HBS site, later realized that she did not really identify with the HBSers and removed the label.
  • In 2009 various HBSers wrote pages for the English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Simple Wikipedias, but were unable/refused to include critical opinions, give a history of HBS or support their claims.
  • Alice Novic has removed almost all content from her web site.
  • Cathryn Platine has announced that all “trans themed blog entries“ have been removed from radicalbitch.wordpress.com.
  • Joanne Proctor and Tiira Triea are no longer with us.

Charlotte Goiar, who is the youngest person mentioned here, is now 40.  I don’t think that I have seen any enthusiasm for either HSTS/AGP or HBS among persons under 40. Their time is over
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13 September 2010

Kiira Triea (1951 - 2012) intersex/HSTS activist, guitarist, Linux geek.

Denise Magner has claimed that she was born at the US Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, but also that she was born in Finland. Either at birth or aged 2 she was assigned as a boy. He grew up in the Baltimore area. After puberty, as Denise, she became a lesbian-separatist, and also a hard rock musician. 

She also tried living as a man for a while, and became a patient of The Johns Hopkins Hospital Psychohormonal Research Unit and of John Money, and was operated on in 1974 by Howard Jones.

Later, in 1993, as Denise Tree she became editor of Linux News, and at this time was using a jhu.edu id (Johns Hopkins University). She was also a bicycle maker and metalworker. She took the name Kiira from the character in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Kiira Triea was an early member with Cheryl Chase (Bo Laurent) of the Intersex Society of North America, (ISNA) and had an article in the first issue, 1994, of Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and maintained their website. In 1997 she founded the Coalition for Intersex Support Activism & Education (CISAE). Her essay of that year, “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”, about her experiences at Johns Hopkins and being forced to be either male or female, was originally published by Dallas Denny in Chrysalis and reprinted in Dreger's Intersex in the Age of Ethics. The essay says that she was 14 when she went to Johns Hopkins. 

She is credited with the design of the Phall-O-Meter, a useful tool for intersex activists to mock the doctors’ obsession that a clitoris must be less that 0.9 cm and penis more than 2.5 cm. 

In her essay "Learning about transsexuality from transsexuals", Kiira explains that after she became an intersex activist, she was approached by supposed intersex persons, and claims that over 99% of them were lying. Many claimed to be true hermaphrodites or Klinefelter's but were obviously not.
"Finally, I began to understand transsexuality, as it was expressed by socially privileged former men, in terms of being antithetical to my understanding of the underlying socio-political causes of intersex oppression and at odds with my goals as an intersex activist. Certainly there are many conceptual frameworks within which intersex can be understood but I found feminism to be useful because it addressed the core issues of what sexualities and what bodies are allowable by an androcentric technocracy and answered questions like why would doctors create non-functional female genitals in children, not bothering to determine the results of those interventions for decades. I also began to wonder why the natural biological variation of intersex, which did not actually result in socially expressed 'gender variance', was not allowed while the biological variation and socially obvious gender variance that resulted when adult men attempted to modify their bodies to become female was allowed."
"I began then in 1997 to understand transsexuality and its supporting model of 'gender identity' not as medical syndrome but as a social instrument which eradicated understanding in order to preserve social privilege".
On the other hand, she found that HSTS or trans-kids were quite different:
"None of them had tried to write to me for several reasons, first was that they were not motivated to acquire any other legitimizing identity as were autogynephilic transsexuals because their social identities and personal identities were congruent. They simply seemed like normal feminine girls or women whose social ‘gender’ or what Suzanne Kessler calls ‘gender attribution’ was immediately obvious both in their appearance and behavior and required no theoretical explanation. They did not present themselves to me as intersex nor did they advocate for transsexuality to be classified as an ‘intersex condition’ because, in common with intersex children, they were a socially devalued population who were often medicalized harmfully as children."
These persons she had invited to her intersex groups. Kiira herself was invited by Michael Bailey to join his closed SEXNET mailing list. She became an advocate for Bailey's variation on Blanchard's ideas. 

In 2004 Kiira launched the transkids.us website which endorsed the Blanchardian concept of 'homosexual transsexual' in distinction to autogynephiles. It was very quickly linked to by the Anne Lawrence and Michael Bailey websites. Kiira became the one and only public HSTS, although people pointed out that if she were a lesbian intersex, she could hardly be an HSTS (= heterosexual trans woman). 

Kiira died from cancer at age 61.
___________________________________________________________

This is an overview of Kiira.  See the Andrea James pages for the details of her alternate autobiographies.

Triea, Dreger, Kessler all moved from ISNA to the Bailey camp.

Born in 1951, Triea was 61 when she died.  The only photographs available are from decades ago.

Dreger’s first essay is a defense of Triea after what James wrote.  However it merely dismisses ‘loony things said about Kiira on certain sites’ and does not address the issues.  Nor does she give any explanation at all why an intersex woman would be running an HSTS site.

Sophia Siedlberg has problems with intersex activism as radical-feminism.  Feminism is many things, not just trade-union activism for women.  One of the other things is a radical deconstruction of the sex-gender system.  Intersex activism also deconstructs the sex-gender system.
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