The 1980 addition of “Gender Identity Disorder” to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-III) has generally been interpreted in trans studies as marking a consolidation and homogenization of gender. What was once a heterogeneous world of gender difference, with various cultural and regionally specific names and practices became simply, transsexuality—a diagnosis, followed by hormonal and surgical treatment, and finally, the attempt to blend in or live “stealth.” As Sandy Stone wrote in her 1987 field-founding essay, “The
Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssxual Manifesto”: “Emergent polyvocalities of lived experience, never represented in the discourse but present at least in potential, disappear.” The ascension of the so-called medical model was blamed for making gender difference invisible. People were made to blend in and be normative. Stone calls for transsexuals “to forgo passing, to be consciously ‘read,’ to read oneself aloud.”
This essay has two aims. First, to challenge the idea that medical transition through surgery and hormones, followed by a stealth life, was imposed unidirectionally on trans people by doctors. And second, to reconsider the idea that living stealth is in some way normative, conservative, or anti-radical/revolutionary. Exploring the stories of trans individuals such as Michael Dillon, Louise Lawrence, and Reed Erickson who worked as/with mid-century gender researchers and clinicians, Harsin Drager evaluates how we make sense of the violence of the sexological project when many transsexuals themselves were actively engaged in sexological research. This paper re-tells the story of trans medicalization as emerging dialectically though the collaborations and conflicts between university researchers and transsexual sexologists in order to challenge notions of “transnormativity.”
