Transvestism
and the Construction of Self

First published in 1994

At the time I wrote "Those who have read The Gender Paradox will have sensed the questions I was asking myself, particularly in the last chapter."

 
What do we mean by gender identity? Indeed, what do we mean by the word identity at all? It is clearly more than our name, or whether we are called a man or a woman. It is who we are, but is it who we think we are, or who others think we are, or should be? It is something internal to us, a subjective mental construction which is virtually inaccessible to the experimental methods of ordinary psychology.

Identity, self image and self esteem may be viewed as part and parcel of another concept - personality. Personality is something individual to each of us. It enables us to describe our self and others, and allows us to interact in consistent and predictable ways. Thus, for most occurrences in life, we have a ready-made strategy to help us address them. Judging someone's personality allows us to predict how he, or she, will behave. For people we don't know well, we predict how they will behave by reference to people like them, the stereotypes we carry, often unquestioned, in our minds. Often, we deal with people according to social custom but, also, we relate differently with people perceived as friendly , for instance, than we do with people interpreted as aggressive.

Needless to say, personality has, from the days of Freud, been an object of psychological study - until recently, always studying the person from the outside. Freud's ideas of the oral and anal personalities are somewhat startling to the new reader, and there is considerable criticism of his concept of the Oedipus complex. There is little support nowadays for the idea that isolated early experiences can produce lifetime effects, unless they were particularly traumatic. Most people use the ideas as analogies, suggesting that they say as much about the personalities of a baby's parents, as about the baby itself. For instance, a particularly fastidious parent may transmit similar attitudes.

Freudian theory was overtaken by behaviourism, but the idea that babies were born with no innate behaviours at all was always difficult to sustain. Far from being a blank slate, most gynecologists insist that even new born babies have their own very definite individual personalities.

In the urge to understand people in general, and what they have in common, several psychologists attempted to de ne personality traits - individual elements of behaviour. Eysenck succeeded in defining a range of such elemental traits. Someone who was cheerful, for instance, would also be likely to be optimistic. He related them to two scales, which ranged between two basic traits he called introversion and extraversion, the other between two that he referred to as neuroticism and stability. He suggested that each individual would have a range of traits which formed a cluster that would put them in an individual position in this two-dimensional space. Later work showed a relationship to aspects of individual nervous systems, the tendency to psychological arousal in the person and what was termed the lability of the autonomic nervous system.

Eysenck's meaning of the words introversion, extraversion, neuroticism and stability, should be regarded with care. He used them only in terms of the traits that he associated with them, and did not set out to de ne them in the way they are used in daily life. While this gave hope that everything could be, in the end, explained in biological terms, there was, of course, no proof of causation. What it, in fact, showed, was the complexity of the interaction between nature and nurture. There are considerable problems in defining traits that are likely to be demonstrated by a baby, which might later develop into adult traits, since they will be developed in interaction with experience. One has to define some subtle behaviour in babies and follow it through childhood, describing how a proposed trait develops in a coherent way into an adult trait. This raises difficulty in ensuring that different observers interpret a given trait in the same way, particularly in longitudinal studies.

There is little to show that a given temperament remains stable from birth. However, Kagan,⁽¹⁾ who had long asserted the impossibility of proving the stability of any personality trait through childhood, discovered that he was able to identify groups of children, at fourteen months old, who were bolder than others, and groups that tended to be intimidated by novel situations. Following the children's progress, he found that, at four or five years old, what he termed the timid children, tended to be restrained and socially avoidant. In fact, he went further and related it the biology of individual children, in terms of the tone of their sympathetic nervous systems.

The validity of Kagan's conclusions is still a matter of detailed review and is likely to be the subject of continued debate among psychologists. However, one can detect here the shades of Eysenck's personality dimensions. Would such a youngster be what we might regard to as a sensitive child? Or highly strung? Kagan found no difference between the genders. Might we predict that the boy might become a gentle lad, even, in certain families or social groups, labelled a sissy boy? Might such children, boys or girls, be particularly susceptible to conform to social attitudes, such as gender stereotypes? Might a bold little girl later become a tomboy? Such an idea is purely speculative. We would have to follow a great many children from birth to a considerable age, possibly intruding into their lives in an unacceptable way, even affecting the result because of their knowledge that they were being studied.

Eysenck saw personality as largely biologically derived, and, if completely analysed, he felt that the reaction to any stimulus could be predicted. As a behaviourist, he regarded the person as simply reacting to events, rather than initiating them. However, whether we are talking about personality traits, like timidity, or concepts like man, woman, boy or girl, what is important is their meaning to the child. The only way he, or she, can impose meanings on them is by the way others portray their meanings.

The work of Mead took an entirely opposite approach, seeing the self as arising through the experience of interactions with others, in direct contradiction to those who saw personality as arising from inborn traits. Clearly, many people see gender identity as arising in the same way, promoting the idea of hormones wiring up the brain as male or female.⁽²⁾

In different situations we may choose - indeed we may be expected - to portray ourselves in different ways. For different occasions and in dealing with different people, we adopt different masks. To our superiors, we adopt a confident knowledgable posture. To a close friend, we may admit our feelings of vulnerability. In all our different encounters, where we might exhibit an almost chameleon-like range of appearances, it is our constructions of our own selves as individual people that gives us a schema of reference.

Mead saw the self as being in two parts, the I and the me . The me, or self as object, is the sum of our physical attributes and our material possessions and achievements - the things that others know about us. Thus they might also attribute motives to us, or emotional characteristics, sometimes in a judgemental way. Thus the me is partly the image we wish to portray, or are expected to portray to others, and how they appear to regard us.

The I , or self as subject, is the feelings we have about ourselves and the qualities that we personally see in ourselves, which frees us from relying totally on the opinions of others. We are seen as a boy or girl, a man or a woman, and are expected to behave appropriately. In very many ways, though, as we grow up in an authoritarian society, who we are can become lost among who we should be.

Rogers stressed the importance of what he called self-actualisation: "the inherent tendency of the organism to develop all its capacities in ways which serve to maintain or enhance the organism."⁽³⁾

He saw it as the person's motivating force - the feeling of being in control of one's actions and one's life, with the power to express one's self. To take a valuable and valued part in relationships and to achieve aims that one feels are worthwhile and are perceived by others as being worthwhile. In other words, he took the power over our lives away from the moralisers and the psychiatrists and put it back where it belongs - within ourselves.

In effect, the measure of self is similar to the difference between Mead's 'I ' and 'me' . There are those who are perceived as highly successful, yet do not value themselves, and drive themselves on to achieve more and more. Others are very disempowered by what they think are the opinions of others. People who lack confidence in themselves, or feel negatively valued, may feel unable to achieve anything. Thus Rogers also placed a responsibility on the individual - to discover how he is stopping himself from doing what he would like to do.

What distinguishes us as humans is that we have continuity - we existed yesterday and, hopefully, we will be here tomorrow. More importantly, we don't simply react to experience as it occurs, we consciously review experience and we make organised plans. Moreover we can think about ourselves. We have self-awareness. In all the foregoing, the self seems to be almost entirely the result of experiencing relationships with others. But what about the person who grows up in a lonely farm, like the children of the early settlers in America, for instance?

Most psychology deals with socialisation. Indeed it has been accused of being a study of white, middle class suburban people. Though humans are generally social creatures, it is a measure of their adaptability that they can develop as solitaries. For me, there was a massive gap in the theory, particularly as I see the development of masculinity in the last century as a process of discouraging the need for relationships.

Allport⁽⁴⁾ took the study of the self further, using the term proprium to distinguish it from earlier ideas of the ego and the self. He saw the self as the knower, knowing itself as a discrete autonomous individual, a central identity, emotionally supported by self esteem and self respect, with a self image by which one continually monitors one's self and the knowledge of the ability to achieve and to plan the future.

For Allport, one's body-sense was an important part of the proprium. Clearly, the preoccupation with body-image in our society keeps cosmetic surgeons busy and makes fortunes for those in the diet and fashion industries. As Money⁽⁵⁾ points out, human preoccupation with body-image has a long history and can, in extreme cases, become a neurosis.

In general, we all have a clear idea of our bodies. At the very least, we know the dimensions of our bodily parts and our position in space. To reach out and pick an apple out of a fruit bowl, we have to know how long our arm is, our position relative to the bowl, and the operation of our fingers. We also have a clear idea of our boundaries, both physical and psychic. The latter is sometimes called personal space , while the former is illustrated graphically by Gross, quoting Allport: "Imagine sucking blood from a cut on your finger . . . . Now imagine sucking the blood from a plaster on your finger! Once it has soaked into the plaster it has ceased to be a part of ourselves."

Melanie Klein theorised that a new born baby is unaware of its boundaries during the first few weeks of life, being a part of the psychic skin of its mother. However, it is now clear that the mental image of the body's boundaries begins to be built up in the womb, and continues to develop with the learning of motor skills. It also must include the person's feelings about his body in terms of sensation and sensuality. Some men, in learning not to show their emotions, often learn not to acknowledge them. Indeed, in having never experienced them, some are frightened to do so, but they lose touch with themselves physically as well as emotionally.

Many people, who have had limbs amputated, can feel phantom limbs. Others who, for instance, have broken limbs plastered, lose their body image of the limb temporarily. They can see the limb but, somehow, they no longer know that it is there. The transvestite, becoming all too serious about himself, desperate to be a woman can come to believe that he can pass. He genuinely comes to believe that, in the mirror he sees a beautiful woman looking back at him.

Body image problems can create great distress. Many people feel that they dislike seeing themselves in a mirror, others may have features that are perceived as unusual and are teased about them, especially at school. Such people may wish to alter a feature that they don't like, but in extreme cases their distress may cause their fundamental internal mental map, or schema, to become distorted. An anorexic person knows, beyond all the reasoned argument of those who are trying to care for him or her, and in spite of the evidence of the weighing scales, that he/she is gross and overweight. The young transexual boy knows that he has no penis, yet every time he undresses the terrible evidence is clear to view. No wonder so many have resorted to self-mutilation. The transexual girl's problems usually begin at puberty. Suddenly there appears the terrible evidence of nature's betrayal of what she has always believed about herself.

However, there is another aspect of the proprium that requires attention - what Allport called the ego-extension.

This is the group of people of which we feel a part, our family, our friends, the place where we work and our country. It includes our trade and, perhaps, the pride in the work we do. But it also includes the collection of the things we call ours, our possessions our home, our territory. It also includes abstract things like our beliefs or attitudes. Perhaps those, whose breadth of significant relationships with others is limited, find that the material aspects of their ego-extension become more significant.

Yet, is there not another important aspect to the ego extension? One, moreover, that, in our civilised living, we neglect - our place in nature? This is, perhaps what the solitary traveller and hunter develops as part of his identity. Even traditional farming people may once have had something of this, a feeling for the land and the stock that they cared for, which came from a fundamental feeling of being part of it.

Intrinsic to ones self is autonomy, a feeling of continuity as a person in control of one's life. There is a sense of self as a physical being, in space and in nature. There is the self as a source and a receptacle of communication, and basis of personal motivation. But there is also an emotional self, having its own unique needs and communicating them.

A problem had been at the back of my mind for a couple of years, since someone suggested that I seemed a lonely person. The idea intrigued me, for I have never felt particularly lonely. I have experienced very few close relationships, yet I never found it a problem. It would appear that loneliness is not just being alone, but depends on one expectations of relationships.⁽⁶⁾ Therefore I was dissatisfied with the idea that the development of identity was primarily a matter of experiencing relationships.

It seemed to me that the proprium was an important part of many people's self-image, especially in terms of what they have achieved in strictly materialistic terms and the possessions that they have acquired. My thoughts were crystallised by reading a dissertation in which the account of women's experience became a mirror to hold up against my own.

It included personal accounts by two extremely articulate and intelligent women. One was suffering from anorexia, the other from bulimia. Both had been unable to find any self- esteem within their families. Their fathers were erratic in their attention and their mothers subservient to the male members of the family. Thus they found themselves unvalued in the relationship to their families and, later, within their peer group. In an attempt to find value in themselves, they turned to their studies and gained good marks. Since they were girls, these were also regarded by their families as being of little value. Perhaps this why anorexia is a problem experienced mainly by women.

Their search for a sense of self and personal identity turned back on their bodies, in a society that is very demanding of the bodily appearance of women. Thus in gaining control over their bodies they sought to gain control over their lives.

They both expressed negative attitudes to the periods spent in hospital, being forced to eat, with no attempt being made to discuss their feelings about their lives. If we accept the suggestion that they were trying to gain control over their lives, then the hospital was taking control away from them. Plainly the treatment was exacerbating the cause of their problems. It would seem that our health services, with their attitude of infallibility, and their need to take control of people, are the worst places for people with identity problems, as I have noted elsewhere from their tendency to give transvestites aversion therapy.⁽⁷⁾

Anorexia usually appears in teenage, though there are signs that some girls as young as six are unduly self-critical about their appearance and diet. The emotional issues involved clearly arise much earlier. Transexuals seem to discover their difference at an even younger age, which may later crystallise into a perception of their identity. The hero of Rose Tremain's beautifully perceptive fictional account, Sacred Country,⁽⁸⁾ is transexual. The story begins with six year-old Mary standing quietly in the snow with her family, mourning the death of King George VI, and realising "I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I am a boy."

The story tells of Sonny, her father, withdrawn inside himself, occupied only with the farm that provides the family living, and Estelle, her mother, retreating into fantasy to escape a life of emptiness. It tells of Mary, who is really Martin, displaced in the family's cognisance by the arrival of her younger brother, despising him for his scrawny weakness. She found herself unloved by either her parents or her brother. Indeed, a dynamic of mutual hate sprang up between her and her father. ". . . . [her father] hit Mary on the ear eight times with the flat of his hand. . . . she thought When I am a man, I will kill you. [Her mother] did not protect her or comfort her. . . . " She refused ever to let her father see her crying. She saw her mother as a victim, and dreamed she was a knight in armour who would put her mother on her grey charger and ride away.

Never having experienced a loving relationship, she never sought one. She became a loner at school and sought a sense of identity through her studies and looked for people who would admire her for her material achievements rather than friendship. She persuaded herself that she would grow to become a man, but at fifteen: "Her flesh had refused to harden as she believed it would. It has disobeyed her mind. In her mind she was Martin Ward, a lean boy." Like so many transexuals, before and since, she sought to hide her breasts behind tight bandages, wound round her chest seven times.

Many people suggest biological determinacy governs the way people live, but we are more than our biology. Different people take charge of their lives in different ways. Biology may simply predict a number of directions from the multiplicity that may be available. Mary is the central character in a story which describes how several people lived their lives and triumphed in their own individual ways.

The self, then, is not a social but a personal construction. Feminism began as a search for autonomy, independence from submission to the family on the one hand, and to the male world on the other. It set out initially to find a sense of identity through achievement, but in attempting to do so in a male way, many women began to feel that they were losing the ability to relate, which they saw as equally valuable. Today's feminist values personal achievement, but organises her relationships in ways that do not submerge her, in which she is not merely an accessory.

In a number of studies asking teenagers to say how they felt about themselves, boys invariably defined themselves in terms of their abilities in school and sport, while girls spoke in terms of the surrounding in which they lived and the people they knew. In making moral choices, the boys saw themselves as having to make an individual choice based on rules, while the girls saw their choices in relation to other people.

If relationships are non-existent or unfavourable, then other issues become important. Men are discouraged from finding a sense of self through relationships and are positively encouraged to seek it through material success. As Jean Baker Miller⁽⁹⁾ says "Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organising society for human ends. . . . We have reached the end of the road . . for the male identity . . . advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, kill them if necessary . . . . the exercise of such manly virtues was always available only to the very few, . . . held out as goals and guidelines for all men."

I have given two examples, one fabricated to disguise the people's identity, but used with their permission, and one fictional example. Here are abbreviated accounts from two transvestites, one male, one female, two loving partners from Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them⁽¹⁰⁾ which for me is a beautiful account of people becoming their true selves.

Yvonne, the male transvestite, says: "Today my name is Yvonne. Yesterday my name was George. George fathered three children and is a grandparent of two. In my past I tried to achieve what other people thought I should do to be successful. Owning my own business and other material things that were nice by other people's standards. Yvonne has emerged into a lifestyle that is caring and sharing and making other people happy - and hurting no-one."

Dan, the female transvestite, says: "The fourth child of two boys and four girls, I grew up with mixed views about my femininity. The comfort in cross-dressing is not purely physical, it is also emotional and psychological. I feel more confident in making my own decisions when I am freed up inside mentally and emotionally to respond in a direct manner as Dan."

In the book Geraldine,⁽¹¹⁾ the hero, Gerald never resolves the conflict between his high powered, executive male self, and his sensual, loving, female self. At the end, he becomes Supergerald, endlessly wheeling and dealing, becoming outwardly successful, inwardly desperately unhappy, forever a loner, denying those valuable parts of himself that he has been forced to label as unmanly.

Had his childhood been different, he might never have become an executive, but he might have become a very good counsellor. Whenever I suggest this idea to counsellors, they become very uncomfortable. Yet these are the one class of men who are, or should be, totally in touch with themselves. They have never been called sissy boys in childhood, when they displayed the gentle and sensitive side of themselves. They have never, therefore been forced to build two separate identities, as Jung would put it, one for their anima and one for their animus.

1. In Konner.M, (1991) Childhood (p58-61, p165), Little, Brown and Co: Kagan.J, (1981) The Second Year, Cambridge: Harvard University Press and (1984) The Nature of the Child, New York: Basic Books.
2. Moir.A. and Jessell.D., (1989) Brain Sex, London: Mandarin Books.
3. In Gross.R.D., (1987) Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour (p286-7, 571), Hodder and Stoughton.
4. For more information see Allport.G.W, (1955) Becoming - Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality, Yale University Press.
5. Money.J, (1992) About Disorders of Body Image and Gender Identity. Reported in Conference report: The Beaumont Trust International Gender Dysphoria Conference. Manchester (1990). The Beaumont Trust, BM CHARITY, London WC1N 3XX.
6. Reference cited from Perlman.D, Peplau.L.A, (1981) Towards a Social Psychology of Loneliness in Duck.S.W, Gilmour.R. (eds)
7. Bland.J, (1994) Sexuality and the Transvestite in Transvestism: A Guide . ed M.T.Haslam. The Beaumont Trust, BM CHARITY, London WC1N 3XX.
8. Tremain.R, (1993) Sacred Country, London: Sceptre Books
9. Miller.J.B, (1991) Toward a New Psychology of Women, London: Penguin Books.
10. Allen.M.P, (1989) Transformations: Crossdressers and those who love them, New York: E.P.Dutton. Now distributed by The International Foundation for Gender Education, 123, Moody Street, Waltham, MA02154, USA.
11. Jay.M, (1992) Geraldine - For the Love of a Transvestite, London: Mandarin Books.