This book is by an anthropologist who, for his dissertation research, decided to study “the transgender community in New York City” in the late 1990s. He got a job at the LGBT Center doing public health outreach to trans people, which helped him meet folks and make money while allowing him to give back to the community while doing his research. However, he quickly discovered that there was not “a” trans community, and many people who he and other social workers/social scientists considered “transgender” did not use that word for themselves, or hadn’t even heard of the word. So instead, his ethnography became about the category of “transgender” itself, rather than the culture of trans NYC.
Valentine is a cisgender gay man. There may have been things I missed as a cis person myself, but I felt like he was very respectful of the people he met and wrote about. In the book, he emphasizes the importance of honoring how people describe themselves first, and includes several anecdotes about times trans people he was talking to called him out, corrected him, or asked him to stop doing a behavior (such as attending a support group meant for trans women). In these anecdotes, he doesn’t try to defend himself, just talks about what he learned from the experience. In one case, he co-authored an article with a trans contact, and sent it to another trans contact, who was deeply offended by the article. He summarizes her critiques and the resulting discussion they had.
At this point in time, at least at the Center, “transgender” encompassed more people than I think we use it for in 2021. Promotional materials at the Center for events designed for trans people specifically say they include people who consider themselves transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, cross-dressers, and more. Now, most of those words are out of fashion/considered rude, and drag queens aren’t considered inherently trans, although some drag queens are also trans (in fact, Ru Paul doesn’t even allow trans women on his show if they take hormones or have gotten gender affirmation surgery). It seems like the way Valentine and his coworkers were using “transgender” in the late 90s is similar to how we use GNC/gender-nonconforming now— including people we now understand as trans, but also including others.
At one point during his fieldwork, Valentine attends 3 “balls” in one week, all recommended to him by folks at the Center as events that belong to the trans community. This was one of my favorite sections, because while using the same word (ball) and being identified as similar by the Center (all trans), these balls were INCREDIBLY different, and most of the people at each of them did not consider themselves trans at all.
The first ball was the most similar to the balls on Pose or in Paris is Burning. The attendees were mostly young working class people of color, and most of them did not call themselves trans. Instead, participants compete in the categories of Woman (femme afab people), Butch Queens (masc amab people), Butch Queens Up in Drags (masc amab people dressed femme), Fem Queens (femme amab people), and Butches (masc afab people). Valentine notes how while there are rules/patterns for which category someone belongs to based on sex assigned at birth and gender presentation, there were many people whose category did not match his expectations for them based on his understanding of the rules. He also discusses a trans woman who tried to compete in the Woman category but was pressured by the crowd to compete as a Fem Queen instead. Valentine also notes that ALL of the people at this ball, regardless of gender identity, sex assigned at birth, or gender presentation, considered themselves and each other “gay.” This helped me understand why some older people (say, my parents’ age and older) find it so confusing to distinguish between gender and sexuality and what words to call someone— because the words we use now are just different than the words people used to use! Now, the general rule is that a trans woman who exclusively likes men is straight (unless she describes herself differently), but then, “gay” was a word for everyone. Valentine also spoke with people who said they lived full-time as women, considered themselves women, but also considered themselves gay men. What seems contradictory to an outsider (such as a modern reader but also to Valentine) was perfectly sensical and consistent within this community.
The second ball was a “debutante ball” for a group of self-identified cross-dressers, most of whom identified as straight men most of the time, but enjoyed dressing as women on the weekends. The general assumption was that they cross-dressed for their own erotic gratification (probably where part of the stereotype that trans women are just men trying to get off comes from?), and this was true of some of them, but certainly not all. This ball was really just a fancy dinner, and people Valentine talked to explained that the hours spent getting ready together were just as important to many as the ball itself. Very few, if any, of these participants considered themselves trans, although some people Valentine met through the cross-dressing association were taking hormones.
The third ball was a big non-profit event for a group called the Imperial Court, consisting of cis gay men who did drag for fun/art. They were very opposed to being called trans.
Another thing I learned is how some strides in gay rights (such as getting homosexuality taken out of the DSM) came at the expense of trans people. One of the main arguments to get homosexuality de-pathologized was that it does NOT involve gender nonconformity, that you can be perfectly “normal” and also gay. So then “gender identity disorder” got to be in the DSM, even when homosexuality was removed.
Valentine also talks about how people’s use of the word “transgender” to describe themselves correlated with the extent to which they interacted with social services. Part of this he thinks is because people who accessed services (such as events at the Center) were more familiar with the term, while other people had never heard of it before, and part of it he thinks is because in order to get some of those services, people had to learn to identify themselves/categorize themselves that way to make themselves legible to the system. It’s not just a simple case of cis social workers inventing new terms and imposing them upon communities, though. Some of Valentine’s coworkers at the Center who used and helped to pragmatically define the terms (such as the explanatory notes in event promotions) are trans social workers themselves, and some of them operate in positions of authority (such as Valentine’s main contact, Rosalyne).
At the end of the book, Valentine writes a little about how things and terminologies have changed even just in the 10 years between his fieldwork and the publication of the book. For example, he notes how “trans” has narrowed as a category, while “genderqueer” is emerging in part as a rebellion against the institutionalization of “transgender.” I don’t know what portion of genderqueer people also consider themselves trans. I know some do and some don’t.
Quotes I Marked
(p.19) “This book is also about the complicity of social scientists and social theorists in producing the objects they are investigating, and the politics of this process. (Marcus 1998).”
(p.20) “I will argue that the kinds of questions I raise in this book are central to careful, thoughtful, and effective political action.” I agree with this
(p.22) “In short, the category transgender became both the ethnographic object and central dilemma of my research, for if it was potentially socially and politically transformative, my research showed it was not equally so for all people gathered into its purview. More complexly, though, as described above, the practice of gathering all these subjects into my fieldwork imaginary was complicit with the very cultural process I was concerned with.”
(p.23) “My argument is that the idea of the gender-normative gay man is not a natural fact that has slowly gained credibility over 150 years but rather that the replacement of earlier models of gender-variant homosexuality has been a historical achievement.” Basically saying he is not trans, but in other times/places, he may have been considered the equivalent (like the construction of homosexuality being caused by gender inversion)
(p.24) — Note about his choice to not include any images of people, only of pamphlets/fliers/other printed materials.
(p.25) “My primary concern is with the institutionalization of political organizing, legislation, social service provisions, and so on, and ‘queer’ does not figure in these contexts in the same was as the categories it critically examines”
(p.26) - Note about his choice of using “transgender” vs. “transgender-identified,” and how the difficulty of knowing which term to use highlights the tension of “some people who others identify as trans do not call themselves trans” and perhaps vice versa.
(p.30) — cites Foucault when talking about how the goal is to not look at what these categories ARE, but what the categories DO. The Angelidies book about the history of bisexuality situates itself the same way, also Sedgwick.
(p.32)— the word “transgender” was originally invented as a third or non-binary gender category, meant to exist somewhere between transsexual and transvestite. But during the 90s this got overtaken by the collective sense of a range of gender nonconforming people (similar to but not identical to the modern sense of the term). I think the term has narrowed since then. It’s still capacious enough to include people who choose surgery and hormones, people who choose neither, and people in between, and includes non-binary genders rather than only binary trans people, but it no longer includes drag queens/kings, butch lesbians, and other people who transgress gender norms in other ways.
(p.61) — discussion of how accusations of “conflating” sexuality and gender can only be made bc of the cultural assumption that these ARE separate things that can be confused. For some people, this is true, gender and sexuality feel separate. But for some people, it’s not true! For some people (like the fem queens who call themselves gay men but also women, or for non-binary folks for whom “attraction to the same/different gender” can’t have the same meanings as it can for a cis or binary trans person), they are totally interrelated. And some cis gay people also feel like aspects of their gender identity or expression are bound up with their sexual orientation.
(p.72) — discussion of how the traditional anthropologist sense of “community” (geographically bound, culturally distinct group) doesn’t apply anymore, at least in most cases, and especially in places like New York City.
(p.100) “Age, race, class and so on don’t merely inflect or intersect with those experiences we call gender and sexuality, but rather shift the very boundaries of what “gender” and “sexuality” can mean in particular contexts”
(p.154) —Discussion of the word “berdache” from the perspectives of both a cis anthropologist and a trans anthropologist, and how gender and sexuality as categories have been colonized— separating them when other cultures don’t separate them (or at least not in the same ways), and then people in those other places start adopting U.S. words and concepts. Hard to know if/when it’s because they like them better or because of cultural hegemony (probably this one)
(p.159) Quote from Don Donham (1998)- “A certain communicative density is probably a prerequisite for people to identify as gay at all, and it is not improbably that as media density increases, so will the number of gay people”
(p.209) — concept of the “primacy of the ethical” in anthropology— sometimes, you gotta violate best research practices or the cultural norms of a place if it means saving someone’s life or preventing some other kind of harm/suffering. Anthropologists should be activists/helpers first and researchers second (more about this on p.249)