IT TOOK THE CHURCH THREE CENTURIES TO CELEBRATE THE EPIPHANY: Ch 3: “Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography.” Again we get careful, sympathetic attention to the metaphors and tropes of transsexual autobiography, especially the way in which the doubling effect of a mirror–the eye looking back at itself–can shift from emotionally devastating to enthralling. Prosser boldly opens the chapter with quotations which seem to reinforce the idea that transsexuals are uniquely narcissistic (sort of like us homos!) and proceeds to perform what I can only call deconstructive surgery on that judgment. The shifting use of “mirror” imagery provides a subtle and sublime rebuke to anti-trans arguments.

My favorite point from this chapter was Prosser’s defense of transsexuals against a cisgendered woman who argued that transsexual autobiographies equivocate between “I was always already the other sex” and “I needed a sex change”: If you’re already a man even though you’ve got ladyparts, why do you need hormones and surgery?

Against this charge Prosser not only implicitly incorporates the previous chapter’s understanding of sex-reassignment surgery as reconstructive surgery. He also notes that this doubling, this equivocation between past self-understanding and present self’s construal of that self-understanding, is an inevitable feature of autobiography: “[T]he genre of autobiography operates precisely on a set of reconcilable and constitutive oppositions.” He argues that transsexual autobiographies play out the way they do in part because conforming to these conventional ways of speaking (“sex change”; “I was always already”) are necessary for someone to gain access to treatment. But he also argues that autobiography itself, because it shapes the story of a life with a telos in mind, always has this tension between past and present. Think of conversion narratives: Their whole drama and drive is the tension between “I recognized the truth about myself and the world, the God Who had always been there” and “I converted, I changed.” I had always been the person the Church says I am; I had to change once I recognized that. Or as Prosser puts it: “In that its work is to organize the life into a narrative form, autobiography is fundamentally conformist. …All life events in the autobiographies seem to lead toward the telos of the sex-changed self. This gendered coherence is inextricable from the narrative coherence of the genre.” The moments and epiphanies we cite to draw out our sense of how we ended up where we ended up did not necessarily seem to convey that meaning to us at the time… and yet that doesn’t mean we’re wrong when we cite the moment we glimpsed a girl at a window, for example, as one of the key moments in our conversion.

(Note that Prosser is not using “conformist” as a slur, but as a neutral descriptor of one feature of a genre with its own formal properties and characteristic beauties. Conservatism rears its lovely head!)

This chapter is also notable for its crisp argument that because transsexuals must construct an autobiographical narrative in order to even identify themselves as transsexual, and because they must further shape those narratives to fit the rigid conventions of the clinical diagnosis in order to gain access to hormones, surgery etc., “every transsexual, as transsexual, is originally an autobiographer,” and–I’m adding this, but I don’t think it’s far from what Prosser says–an autobiographer who’s likely to have an especially acute sense of the difference between what she says and how she’s read. The chapter is equally notable for Prosser’s clear, cold focus on how thoroughly transsexual people’s own narratives of their lives are treated as suspect. The interrogation metaphor on page 111–used positively by a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist, because interrogator/prisoner is totally a great model for the “healing professions”!–man, I’d make everyone read that page if I could. “And charge them for it,” again, some more.