C. Todd White:
True to its title, CHANGING SEX provides a valuable account of the modern history of transsexuality and the concept of gender. Hausman traces the influences of psychological, technological, and social ideologies on this burgeoning modern phenomenon. Her study contrasts the life histories of transsexuals to the theories of “specialists,” providing a “subversive retelling” of the ongoing discourse between transsexuals and the medical establishment.
Hausman raises many ethical questions regarding surgical sex-reassignment. At times, she points an accusatory finger toward opportunistic, profit-driven psychologists and surgeons: “Doctors, with ever increasing ability to intervene in and on the human body, to enact what are construed as miracles of the flesh, play out fantasies of the normal and the ideal” (65). However, she also illustrates how transsexuals are eager participants in the game, readily providing to psychologists the proper front to facilitate the desired diagnosis and resulting surgery. This she does through a chapter-length review of transsexual autobiographies.
Newcomers to the field will appreciate Hausman's overview of the modern history of transsexuality, endocrinology, and the concept of gender. Hausman's work is valuable as an overview to the theories of German and American researchers, focusing especially on the publications of Benjamin, Stoller, Garfinkel, and Money. She also provides a critique of transsexual autobiographies, such as those by Christine Jorgensen, Mario Martino, Roberta Cowell, Canary Conn, and Renée Richards.
Most importantly for gender theorists, Hausman deconstructs the current split between “sex” as biology and “gender” as culture by showing that it is this split that makes the concept of gender dysphoria possible. In this light, the notion of gender is a conceptual red-herring, “an authorizing narrative that works to ward off the disruptive antihumanism of technological self-construction” (174). Consequently, while the current trend in the humanities is to problematize the notion of binary gender roles or identities, Hausman's intent is to launch a critical attack on the notion of sex. As she puts it, ”[m]aintaining an analytic distinction between sex and gender does not relegate ‘sex' to the realm of scientific fact, but allows the critical thinker to make trouble in that very realm” (75). Hausman creates “trouble” by reminding us that the current conceptualization of gender does not problematize the false idea that there are genetically only two sexes. ”[E]ndocrinology as science provided medicine with the tools to enforce sexual dimorphism-not only to examine and describe it” (38). ”[T]hus it is technology that allows physicians to enforce binary gender through making males and females out of intersexuals” (77).
Hausman raises many serious questions and caveats regarding the current gender- craze. Those of us who have found the term to be liberating and an adequate concept for ontological grounding will be forced to reconsider our comfort with the term. Congratulations to Hausman for providing this accessible and fascinating insight on a complex and generally misunderstood aspect of human nature. I highly recommend this book to students and gender theorists alike.
While this book contains an index and copious endnotes, a bibliography would have been greatly appreciated by this reader.
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