Oct 20, 2006  |  By: GWENDOLYN ANN SMITH  | COMMENTS     

A FEW WEEKS ago, I saw that Loren Cameron, a trans man, author and photographer, was producing a new project focused on gay and bisexual female-to-male trans people. In hearing about it — once I got past wondering why someone hasn’t focused on this topic before — I realized an important fact of this and other transgender-based projects. They produce a truth that seems lacking in so many projects done by those outside of the transgender community.

Consider a couple of examples: In 1979, Janice Raymond published “The Transsexual Empire,” a book that set the stage for some of the issues still going on today with events like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.  Her hypothesis seemed focused on transgender women as male usurpers of women’s space, and her studies seemed designed to prove her point, excluding any information that would contradict her. From a very small pool of people, she formed a text that is still causing harm today.

Or consider J. Michael Bailey, and the work he has used based on Dr. Blanchard’s “work” out of Canada. Blanchard — when he wasn’t busy measuring the reactions of phallometers strapped to the penises of male-to-female transsexuals — came up with a concept called “Autogynephelia.” This theory states that a MTF transsexual is not so much a woman with a body in need of correction, but rather that she is a male with a fetish for feminization.

Bailey took this further — stating in essence that all male-to-female transsexuals are with “Autogynephiliacs” or are gay men who are somehow simply too gay to remain male.

What seems to be at fault with those examples is how these folks from outside the transgender community opt to study the group without really listening and without truly trying to understand what they are hearing from us. We are viewed as being deceptive to these researchers when we give them an answer that does not fit their previously crafted hypothesis.


SO MANY SEEM to want to come in with preconceived notions that they simply do not wish to lose. Maybe it’s an ax that they wish to grind with me and my ilk as the target, or perhaps they simply have a bias built on decades of salacious media interest in transgender issues dating back to the first large-type headlines about Christine Jorgensen in the early 1950s.

Of course, when you have these ingrained notions, then you end up tossing out whatever doesn’t fit your worldview. This is, naturally, antithetical to real scientific study, akin to saying that the Earth is flat because that’s what you’ve always been told, then scoffing when a ship sinks below the horizon.

This is what excited me about Loren Cameron’s project, as well as other community-driven projects. These are done by individuals who know the subject of which they speak: they live it every day, and have a deep understanding of just what it means to be transgender to begin with.

WE LIVE THIS life, so we would be the best people to tell about it and to examine it. We don’t have all the answers, but there are some things we know about living this life that would not be visible to an outside observer.

There’s a bigger problem, too, in that the study of things transgender is largely sneered at by the scientific community. We’re not considered a serious enough topic, but rather something that belongs on the daytime talk shows. Hence, most of what does come out is, to coin a phrase, “Baileyesque.”

We simply deserve better than this, and given that the medical establishment seems set on failing us, well, then we need to do it for ourselves.

There are so many things that would be great to know, like Cameron’s aforementioned work. Like what he is doing with gay and bisexual FTMs. I’d love to see how lesbian MTFs compare and contrast with their straight counterparts. I’d love to see work about transsexual post-surgical satisfaction, or something on societal integration of transgender people, and I’d love to see a study on cross-dressing that did not try to pigeonhole people into boxes labeled “fetish.”

Of course, just as the medical establishment does not take us seriously, the ability to get such research to happen is something unlikely to occur without people with a passion or those willing to underwrite such efforts.

Sometimes we simply need to do things for ourselves to be heard.