The First Implication: Psychotheraphy with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Clients
By continuing to browse this web site you are certifying your agreement to its terms of use; please read them if you have not done so already.
THE FIRST IMPLICATION:
Psychotherapy with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Clients
William A. Henkin, Ph.D.
Copyright c 1997 by William A. Henkin
“The misfortune of today is no more real than the happiness of the past.”
-- Jorge Luis Borges,
“A New Restatement of Time” 1946, Labyrinths
[In 1997 San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics celebrated their 30th anniversary with a conference called Caring for the Community. At that conference I presented an earlier version of this short essay.]
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people often see themselves as members of one or more sexual minorities. The same holds true as well, of course, for many people who are involved with cross-dressing, infantilism, consensual sadomasochism, or other non-violative fetishes, as well as for those engaged in professional sex work.
Indeed, because, as Joan Salon noted in her essay, “The Femme Question,” “Politically correct sexuality is a paradoxical concept,”1 it is quite possible for virtually anyone to feel that she is a sexual minority, and it is quite possible to agree that she is – the famous minority of one.
Working with my own gender and sexual minority clients, one implication I find underlies this sort of view is that I cannot assume a client is who or what she seems at first to be, even in the most basic ways. A female-bodied person may have come to discuss a lifelong history of male identity; a devoutly gay man may be wrestling with heterosexual feelings; and a person with an extremely ordinary public life may have a closet full of hidden gender identities and sexual proclivities.
To address this first implication some distinctions are in order. Because feminism in its many forms, gay liberation, and the more recently emerged transgendered communities – as well as various other sex- and gender-based subcultures in our midst – rejected and gave the lie to some ideas about identity our dominant culture has long taken for granted, the definitions of certain terms most people never even think about have now to be re-examined and re-defined. “Queer” is an obvious example of a word that has already been re-processed: once applied pejoratively by the straight community to the gay community, it was first reclaimed as a term of empowerment within much of the gay community, and was then usurped by whole lifestyles full of people – heterosexual and bisexual as well as homosexual – who did not identify their sexual selves as “straight.” Just as “queer” ceased to mean only homosexual then, therefore so did queer’s antithesis, “straight,” cease to mean only heterosexual.
In the transgendered communities it was Virginia Prince2 who provided the first useful redefinitions of sex and gender which, while not strictly accurate in terms of genotypes and other biological specifics, have proved fairly durable because they are so often functional: sex, she said, is what’s between the legs, gender what’s between the ears.
People with transgendered experience have also caused us to refine and redefine other words and phrases Prince’s life and writings – and those of the people who came after her – called into question, though she neither intended nor knew she would have exactly this effect when she formed the first really out male-to-female (MTF) cross-dresser’s club in Los Angeles, in the early 1960s. Gay liberation freed both the gay and the straight – or het – worlds from the myth that gay men were all femme and lesbian women all butch. And so, despite the fact that Prince oddly turned out to be a little homophobic and even transphobic and limited her club’s membership to heterosexual male cross-dressers, in addition to differentiating between a person’s sex and his gender we now have also to distinguish between his gender identity (his self-perception as male, female, or something else) and his sexual orientation (his preference for men, women, both, neither, or others as sexual partners).
The transgender communities also defined and then made other people re-examine our definitions for cross-dresser and transvestite, its Latinate original coined by Magnus Hirshfeld3 in 1910, as the former came to mean someone who wears clothes of the complementary gender for purposes of non-sexual relaxation or self-expression, while the latter came to mean someone who cross-dressed for erotic reasons.
Transsexual, which once was a term reserved for people who had had sex reassignment surgery (now post-op) – also known as gender confirmation surgery – is now applied as well to people who have not yet had such surgery (pre-op) and even to people who do not plan to have genital surgery (non-op), depending in large measure on their self-definitions, although there are people both within and peripheral to the transgender communities who still think of a non-op as a transgenderist: a person living full-time in a sex-role other than the one she was assigned at birth – as Virginia Prince does.
Needless to say – or need I? – it is also possible to have a sexual identity or a gender orientation that is different from one’s gender identity or sexual orientation by identifying as a man or a woman (sexual identity) and by feeling attracted to males or females (gender orientation). Sex roles and gender roles, as the word “role” implies, are entirely social constructs: how one presents oneself or is seen by others. The drag queen Virginia Prince assumed all gay cross-dressers to be turns out, for now at least, to be a professional female impersonator of a particularly emphatic sort, who, by the 1990s, had acquired a cross-gendered counterpart among female-to-male (FTM) cross-dressers, the drag king. As our current understanding runs, no one identity or orientation implies any other: I can see I am a man, feel myself to be a woman, be sexually attracted to either, both, neither, or other, and present myself to you as anything I want, and never contradict myself.4 The system is no longer binary.
All these definitions, incidentally, are written in rubber: they are fully as much in flux as the communities to which they rightly belong. Under the guidance of Cheryl Chase, the Intersex Society of North America, with its newsletter Hermaphrodites with Attitude,5 has become a surprisingly influential political voice among professional sex researchers and clinicians over the past few years. In her book Gender Outlaw6 Kate Bornstein called for the same sort of recognition in our society that various pre-Industrial societies have always had for people who do not fit neatly into either of the more common gender categories (e.g; French appellation for transgendered/gay men in Native American society, berdache; Navajo nadle). And in May of this year [1997] a “Third Gender/Androgyny Support Group” was formally organized in San Francisco, intended, according to its own literature,
for transfags, androgynes, genderfuckers, fagdykes, persons with male and female physical characteristics, gender adventurers, anyone who wants to explore multiple sides to gender or gender fluidity and who questions the traditional bipolar gender model. The group is also open to significant others, friends, family, admirers, and supporters. The group’s sexual/political trend so far is queer-friendly, anti-assimilationist, perv-positive (especially leather) and with a mix of ages and genders. 7
I’ve focused here on definitions in the worlds of gender variability specifically because our notions of gender go so directly to the heart of our notions of identity, which is very much what my work is most deeply about. But other sub-cultural communities have their own languages too, of course, explorations of which confirm for me my first implication: I cannot assume a client is who or what she seems at first to be, even in the most basic ways, and preferably without reference to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders8 because, as Leonore Tiefer notes in her essay, “Towards a Feminist Sex Therapy,”9 “By ignoring the social context of sexuality, the DSM nomenclature perpetuates a dangerously naive and false vision of how sex really works,” separating what Gayle Rubin once called “the charmed circle [of] good, normal, natural, blessed sexuality” from “the outer limits [of] bad, abnormal, unnatural, damned sexuality.”10
A second implication for me as a therapist is that, while each gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered person brings concerns to the therapeutic process that are unique to her sexual and gender identity and orientation, so does everyone – and so also everyone brings concerns to the therapeutic dialogue that are simply human. I won’t expound on this second implication this morning both because we’re short on time and because I make the bold assumption that we all know that already.
I do note, though, that responding to both implications has allowed me to become a better therapist, and to better serve my clients of every sort, because when I make myself sensitive to the concerns of any “minority,” I am necessarily enabled to make myself sensitive to the concerns of every human being.
* * * * *
Notes
Borges, Jorge Luis, “A New Restatement of Time,” in Labyrinths, New York, New Directions, 1962
1Joan Salon, “The Femme Question,” in Joan Nestle, ed., The Persistent Desire, Boston: Alyson, 1992
2 Virginia Prince is the grande dame of the male-to-female (MTF) cross-dressing universe. A scholar with a Ph.D. in chemistry, author of some dozen books and many professional articles, and publisher of Transvestia, the first serious modern attempt to create a magazine for people interested in cross-gendered behavior of any kind, she formed the Hose and Heels Club in Los Angeles in the early 1960s for the express purpose of creating a space for male cross-dressers to be. After a few permutations her organization turned into Tri-Ess, the Society for the Second Self, and became the basis for a nation-wide and then a world-wide transgendered community.
3 Magnus Hirshfeld, Transvestites (1910), translated by Michael Lombardi-Nash. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991
4 There are racial implications for this position. In The Apartheid of Sex (New York: Crown, 1995), Martine Rothblatt reflected on Gordon Allport’s1954 observation in The Nature of Prejudice that if we lined up all the people on earth from darkest to lightest skin, no one could tell where one race left off and another one began. She proposes the same is true with the continuum of gender. Is it? If I can see I am white, feel myself to be black, am socially attracted to either, both, neither, or other, can I still present myself to you as anything I want without contradiction?
5 Intersex Society of North America, P.O. Box 301, Petaluma, CA 94953-0301; www.isna.org
6 Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge, 1994
7 Press Release 5/27/97 from Edward G
8 Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, 1994
9 Leonore Tiefer, “Towards a Feminist Sex Therapy,” in Marny Hall, Ph.D. (ed), Sexualities, Binghampton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1997
10 Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in C.S. Vance (ed), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984
If you're new to this site, we recommend you visit its home page for a better sense of all it has to offer.