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{"id":851,"date":"2010-01-21T23:11:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T23:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2010\/01\/851\/"},"modified":"2010-01-21T23:11:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-21T23:11:00","slug":"851","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2010\/01\/851.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

IT TOOK THE CHURCH THREE CENTURIES TO CELEBRATE THE EPIPHANY<\/span>: Ch 3: \u201cMirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography.\u201d 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\u2013the eye looking back at itself\u2013can 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!<\/a>) and proceeds to perform what I can only call deconstructive surgery on that judgment. The shifting use of \u201cmirror\u201d imagery provides a subtle and sublime rebuke to anti-trans arguments. <\/p>\n

My favorite point from this chapter was Prosser\u2019s defense of transsexuals against a cisgendered woman who argued that transsexual autobiographies equivocate between \u201cI was always already the other sex\u201d and \u201cI needed a sex change<\/span>\u201d: If you\u2019re already a man even though you\u2019ve got ladyparts, why do you need hormones and surgery? <\/p>\n

Against this charge Prosser not only implicitly incorporates the previous chapter\u2019s understanding of sex-reassignment surgery as reconstructive surgery. He also notes that this doubling, this equivocation between past self-understanding and present self\u2019s construal of that self-understanding, is an inevitable feature of autobiography<\/span>: \u201c[T]he genre of autobiography operates precisely on a set of reconcilable and constitutive oppositions.\u201d He argues that transsexual autobiographies play out the way they do in part because conforming to these conventional ways of speaking (\u201csex change\u201d; \u201cI was always already\u201d) 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<\/span> in mind, always has this tension between past and present. Think of conversion narratives: Their whole drama and drive is the tension between \u201cI recognized the truth about myself and the world, the God Who had always been there\u201d and \u201cI converted, I changed.\u201d I had always been the person the Church says I am; I had to change once I recognized that. Or as Prosser puts it: \u201cIn that its work is to organize the life into a narrative form, autobiography is fundamentally conformist. \u2026All 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.\u201d 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\u2026 and yet that doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019re wrong<\/span> when we cite the moment we glimpsed a girl at a window, for example, as one of the key moments in our conversion.<\/p>\n

(Note that Prosser is not using \u201cconformist\u201d 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!)<\/p>\n

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., \u201cevery transsexual, as transsexual, is originally an autobiographer,\u201d and\u2013I\u2019m adding this, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s far from what Prosser says\u2013an autobiographer who\u2019s likely to have an especially acute sense of the difference between what she says and how she\u2019s read. The chapter is equally notable for Prosser\u2019s clear, cold focus on how thoroughly transsexual people\u2019s own narratives of their lives are treated as suspect. The interrogation metaphor on page 111\u2013used positively by a psychoanalyst\/psychotherapist, because interrogator\/prisoner is totally a great model for the \u201chealing professions\u201d!\u2013man, I\u2019d make everyone read that page if I could. \u201cAnd charge them for it,\u201d<\/a> again, some more.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"