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Transgender Rage against the Psychiatric Establishment.
This is a text of a speech made by Susan Stryker, founding member of TRANSGENDER
NATION [TGN] at a demo against the yearly meeting of the American Psychiatric
Association on 23/5/93. The protest was organised by a number of mental health /
psychiatry survivors as well as TGN who united to denounce forced drugging,
electro shock, forced institutionalisation and the attitudes of established
psychiatry, who to this day define Transexuality as a mental illness.
Like many of you here today, transgendered individuals - we are
transexuals, transvestites, butch women, drag queens, who are physically
intersexed or who embrace any behaviour or identity that crosses over or moves
between the dominant culture's notion of male and female - we have been abused by
the medical and psychiatric professions. Babies born with ambiguous genitals have
had their bodies surgically altered without their consent, and often without even
the consent of their parents. Children who exhibit gender or sexual behaviours
that challenge the rigidity of conventional sexual or gender behaviours have
been subjected to coercive behaviour modification techniques in psychiatric
clinics in order to prevent them from becoming gay or transexual adults.
Transexual women who choose to transform their bodies so that others may see them
the way they see themselves have been raped by the therapists who enabled their
genital reconstruction surgery. We have been compelled to exchange sexual
services for hormones. If we are female to male gay men we have been told by the
so called experts on transexuality that we simply don't exist.
We have been arrested, institutionalised, drugged, shocked, beaten and
emotionally assaulted just because we insist on expressing ourselves the way we
choose, leading the life we want to lead, being the people we want to be. These
are things transgendered people share with many of the non transgender survivors
of psychiatric abuse We too get fucked over by power because we are different. We
stand by you in solidarity to protest. We raise our voices with you to demand
that this mistreatment stop. We work alongside you to bring these crimes to an
end.
But transgendered people are also involved in another kind of struggle with
the psychiatric and medical establishment. We are engaged in struggle to gain
control of our very identities. People with male bodies who seek to live as women
or with female bodies as men, as well as people who radically reject their
culture's ordering of gendered reality, are known to exist in many human cultures
around the world and in all eras of recorded history. And yet the medical
establishment claims the power to create us. It writes the books that seek to
define us. It controls the procedures that enable us to live lives of our own
design. Whereas I say I am achieving my desired gender, the doctors say they
have assigned it They do not make us who we are. While it is true that hormone
use requires competent monitoring and that genital reconstruction surgery
requires a skilled hand, neither hormones nor surgery require administration by
non transexuals. We should not have to gain permission of people who have little
comprehension of our lives in order to do what we want to do with our flesh.
Transexuals are the most vulnerable group in the transgendered population
because we renounce, for the rest of our lives, the privilege of having a natural
body. It is significant that there is no diagnostic test for transexuality other
than self reporting. The only way the shrinks know we're transexual is when we
walk into their offices and say "I'm not happy with the body I was born into and
I want to change my sex." If we insist on this desire for a few months they sign
a piece of paper declaring us to be suffering from Gender Dysphoria Syndrome and
referring us to an endocrinologist. If we perform to their satisfaction in our
desired gender for at least a year, they'll sign another piece of paper granting
us surgery. This assume that we can afford to support ourselves while we are
transition. This assumes we can afford expensive medical insurance we probably
don't even have. This assumes we don't get killed by some scared, hate filled
bigot because we don't always pass as born members of our chosen gender. We do
not willingly abide these conditions.
Our situation is simple. Other people - psychiatrists, therapists, doctors,
exercise non consensual power over our bodies and our lives. As transsexuals we
do not control the means of our own production. This has always been the grounds
for resistance, rebellion and insurrection.
We of the TGN say to the American Psychiatric Association:
We are a gender minority suffering from medical and psychiatric colonisation. You
are our oppressors not our helpers. We are not a disease. We are not an emotional
disorder. We are not crazy. We should not be in your Diagnostic and Statistical
manual. We demand as well, the quality healthcare for our particular medical
needs that every human being deserves as an inalienable right.
As queer people, we transexuals and other gender minorities draw
inspiration from the lesbian and gay movement that emerged after the Stonewall
riots. We cannot forget however, as others do, that Stonewall began as an act of
Transgender solidarity when street queers came to the aid of a female to male
cross dresser - a passing woman who was resisting arrest. We protest the
transphobia we encounter in the queer community that has co-opted our uprising
and made it the symbol of less radical cause. But we take heart from the fact
that homosexuality was considered a mental illness by the APA until 1973, until
determined and militant political activism succeeded in overturning the
stigmatisation and pathologization of many queer lives.
As radical anthropologist Gayle Rubin has noted gay liberation merely paves
the way for a broader movement. "Sexuality's keep marching out of the pages of
the Diagnostic and Statistical manual and onto the pages of social history. At
the moment, several other groups are trying to emulate the successes of
homosexuals. Bi sexuals, sadomasochists, individuals who prefer cross
generational encounters, transexuals and transvestites are all in various state
of community formation and gender acquisition." And I would add, we are in
various stages of revolt. As transgender activists , we believe, in the words of
our stone butch comrade Leslie Feinburg, that transgender liberation is a
movement whose time has come.
May our rage inform our actions, and may our actions transform the world as
they have transformed us.
For more info: Transgender Nation PO Box 424280
San Francisco CA. 94124. USA