In contentious situations such as the one produced by removing Catherine Crouch's short film The Gendercator from the Frameline 31 festival, taking the long view can sometimes help quell the heat of more immediate passions, and create space for more nuanced, less reactive responses to disagreement.
As many readers undoubtedly know by now, The Gendercator is about a butch lesbian named Sally who falls asleep in 1973 and wakes up in 2048, in the future where everybody must choose to be either a masculine man or feminine woman. Tomboys and fairies are not tolerated, but medical sex-changes are freely available from the government. My response to Crouch's film was informed by my acquired knowledge of transgender history, as well as by my experience of living long-term in a transsexual body.
There were three specific things in the film that I found to be overtly transphobic – that is, to perpetuate prejudicial misrepresentations of trans people, motivated by ignorance, fear, disgust, or hatred, in ways that result in harm – rather than merely expressing an understanding of gender different from my own. The first was when a character explains to Sally that the current political regime began in 2008 when religious fundamentalists took over the government and imposed compulsory heterosexuality with mandatory sex-reassignment for gender deviants. In that character's words, "the trannies went along with it." The second was when the character known as the "gendercator," a former female responsible for educating Sally about 21st century gender, decrees that Sally will be reassigned as male against her will (a horrified Sally soon thereafter wakes up in a hospital bed, her body having been nonconsensually transformed). The third instance of transphobia was the general proposition throughout the film that trans people represent conformity, oppression, and heterosexism, whereas non-transgender people represent the possibility of freedom and liberation.
The stereotype of trans people being politically reactionary enemies to gay, lesbian, feminist, and progressive causes has a history that stretches back to the early 1970s. It developed over several years in various contexts, but first achieved wide dissemination at the 1973 West Coast Lesbians Conference, where keynote speaker Robin Morgan denounced a male-to-female transsexual member of the organizing committee as "an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer with the mentality of a rapist." It found its most vehement expression in Janice Raymond's 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, in which she concludes that "the problem of transsexualism would best be solved by morally mandating it out of existence."
When I was first coming out as trans in the late 1980s, a letter-writer to the Bay Times complained that a transsexual woman had been allowed to speak on a panel at the Women's Building; she called that woman "a mutilated perversion" and said, "he is not a lesbian, he is a mutant man, a self-made freak, a deformity, an insult. He deserves a slap in the face." In the early 1990s, when a group called Transgender Nation formed to advocate for trans inclusion in what was rapidly becoming the "LGBT" community, its very existence sparked an outpouring of outrage in the community press. Some of the same women who had opposed transsexual participation in the 1973 lesbian conference 20 years earlier revived the "rapist infiltrators sucking the lifeblood from our community" rhetoric, and accused the group of spreading "hatred of women." Foreshadowing by 15 years Catherine Crouch's stated motivation for making The Gendercator, one woman wrote of her alarm over the "frightening rise in the number of butch lesbians (especially the younger ones) who are going through the change ... and rushing into female-to-male operations."
The same fears, the same gross mischaracterizations of trans people's lives surface every time trans people make some positive stride toward visibility, inclusion, or equity, or whenever we stand up for our place in broader queer, progressive, and feminist communities. I'm sick of it, and that's why I opposed screening The Gendercator at Frameline 31. The stated mission of the festival is "to strengthen the diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community." Rehashing hurtful and hateful stereotypes of transsexuals strengthens no one. I'm glad that more people share that opinion now than was the case a generation ago. I appreciate that Frameline heard our justified anger and frustration, and tried to do the right thing by removing the film from the festival lineup.
I wish, however, that canceling the festival screening had been accompanied by finding an appropriate venue for the film. Opening up dialogue and contextualizing the issues is better than shutting down discussion. Many people who would not perceive the transphobic messages in the film, and who have not lived as targets of transphobic prejudice, see only an act of censorship against a lesbian filmmaker.
To help remedy that perception, I have joined an effort being led by Ondine Kilker of the group Center Women Present to bring The Gendercator and its director to San Francisco's LGBT Community Center later this year. I hope that by screening Catherine Crouch's film in a context where lesbian gender anxieties can be explored without trashing transsexuals, we can all take an important step toward healing the pain that divides us.
Susan Stryker is former executive director of the GLBT Historical Society and co-director of the Emmy Award-winning film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria. She is currently Woodward Professor of WomenÕs Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.