18 July 2022
Identity is offered as the grounding for transsex, yet it obscures the consistency with which trans people modify their bodies.
So it is worth examining surgery and body modification across historical contexts; in fact many practices were equivalent to later transsexual medical treatments.
Promoted by Harry Benjamin, hormonal treatment of transvestites (and transsexuals) could prevent suicide (Bakker et al. 2020, 107). This has become familiar but it is not historically necessary for trans life.
Castration has a hormonal effect as well; testosterone is produced in the testes. So one must read castration not only as genital disgust but as parallel to modern medical interventions.
Some of these castrations were self-performed, but whatever anthropological explanations are offered, the hormonal effects must be the primary explanation.
The Galli, priest(esse)s in the Roman empire, castrated themselves, apparently in a frenzy. Their trans status is attested by their taking female clothes, hairstyles, perfume, and mannerisms (Roller 1997).
Initially Phrygian, the order expanded to Greece, Syria, Africa, and the whole Roman empire (Bell 1790, 322). One must assuming that the opportunity to castrate oneself was appealing despite its strangeness to historians.
Roberts (1843) recollects an encounter with hijra:
The emasculating process in India is most comprehensive, all protuberances being removed by knife and cautery—saf-kur’d, or “made a clean business of,”as the phrase runs in Hindostan.
the emasculated personages common in Upper India who invariably assume the female garb, and by long tresses, false mammæ, and bustles,seek in every way to imitate the weaker and better sex.
Hijra persist to today and castration serves as proof - onlookers will lift their skirts to examine the genitals. They are fully feminine, including the psychic and social aspects: their voice, gestures, gait, and timidity imitate women; they prefer women’s occupations, they like children, and they stay with male partners. They are shy around men and have sex in the female way (face-to-face) (Nanda 2004).
So again one finds surgical modification among those with feminine gender identity.
Though not widely appreciated, this is well-documented by Herrn (2005): initial castration operations were performed after a transvestite threatened suicide. This attests not to not only the deep desire for body modification but also the heterodox nature of the request - castration is not driven by pressure to conform nor “medicalization”.
I am so grateful to all you men of medicine
The more medical people sympathetically interested in transvestism the better.
Such operations expanded to Americans despite great logistical difficulties; due to bans on castration, transsexuals made trips to the Netherlands or Morocco (Bakker et al. 2020).
As I pointed out (McHale 2021), anorexia among the transmasculine would appear to serve a purpose of withering the breasts. The cases of Pelagius of Antioch and Hilarion the Eunuch are particularly interesting: the anorexia and the trans status are recognizable in the ancient context. In the case of Pelagius, the extreme, sunken visage repudiates any connection to the female - in his case, the past as a prostitute, dependent on beauty.
One can see the exact same thing play out in the 70s:
Catherine Clément, a French analyst, in a brilliant essay on myth and sexuality, warns against the illusion that health can be discovered in the denial of fundamental laws, the law of sexual difference, the law of time and change. She quotes the case of Sidonie, an anorexic girl who told her doctor as she lay dying of starvation: “There it is, my problem, I want neither to get fatter nor thinner, to be neither boy nor girl, to have no more periods.” She wanted, as Clément comments, to annul periodicity, “to play the disorder of androgyny against the order of the female cycle [called règles, or rules, in French], to be neither one thing nor the other, neuter.”
(Warner 1981, 157–58)
Setting aside the question of pathology in such cases, they testify to the overwhelming need to modify the body; even basic biology is defied.
The need to modify the body is endogenous; it precedes from the same place as trans identity and is as fundamental as cross-dressing or sex preference.
Moreover, the trans category is not at all constrained by requiring body modification; in fact it becomes clearer when the many independent historical inventions are taken together.