ABSTRACT

Forty-five self-defined female-to-male transsexuals were interviewed as part of a wide ranging sociological field study about female-to-male transsexuals. The data in this study are unusual in that they were obtained outside of any clinical settings. Questions were asked about childhood experiences of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Sixty percent reported one or more types of severe child abuse. In the course of discussing other issues, participants also reported having experienced many of the commonly cited initial and long-term effects of child abuse, including fear, anxiety and depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, excessive aggression, and suicide ideation and attempts. It was not possible to determine to what extent the sources of these complaints lay in child abuse, in gender dysphoria, in some combination of the two, or elsewhere. While no information was solicited about dissociative responses to child abuse, I have speculated, as have some of the participants themselves, that, in some cases, transsexualism may be an adaptive extreme dissociative survival response to severe child abuse.

INTRODUCTION

Child abuse is a way of life for many people. The U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (1981) has estimated that out of every 1,000 U.S. children 3.4 have been physically assaulted, 2.2 have been emotionally abused, and 0.7 have been sexually abused. These figures, based only on the number of officially confirmed child abuse cases, are surely a vast underestimation of the extent of the problem. By contrast, Miller and Miller (1983) found that one-third of college students studied reported moderate, and 5-10% reported severe physical abuse during their childhoods. Russell, in her random sampling study of 930 adult women found that 16% had experienced at least one sexual assault by a family member before the age of 18 years and that 38% had experienced at least one sexual assault either intrafamilially or extrafamilially by the age of 18 years. She found that only 2-6% of sexual abuse cases ever get reported to authorities, few of which are confirmed and make their way into official statistics (Russell, 1986, 1988). Physical and sexual abuse are often accompanied by emotional abuse (Claussen & Crittenden, 1991; Briere & Runtz, 1990; Germain, Brassard & Hart, 1985). Samples taken from psychiatric populations often report much higher incidence rates than those drawn from the general public (McConaghy, 1993).

Children who have been physically abused tend to suffer from an increased number of behavioral problems when compared to children not known to have been abused. Tantrums and aggression are among the most consistently cited phenomena (Ammerman, Cassisi, Hersen, & Van Hasselt, 1986; Hoffman-Plotkin & Twentyman, 1984; Lamphear, 1985; Lewis, Shanock, Pincus, & Glaser, 1980; McLaren & Brown, 1989). Physically abused children often have poor peer relationships, poor social skills, and problems in school (Hoffman-Plotkin & Twentyman, 1984; Lamphear, 1985). Anxiety and depression have also been reported as outcomes of physical abuse of children (Ammerman et al., 1986; Farber & Joseph, 1985). Adults who were physically abused as children often continue to exhibit increased levels of aggressive behaviors (Briere & Runtz, 1990).

During recent years, our understanding of childhood sexual abuse and its adult sequelae has increased tremendously. Browne and Finkelhor’s (1986) comprehensive review of sexual abuse literature allows for some fairly confident assertions about both initial and long-term effects of sexual abuse on those who survive it. Initial effects, which occur within two years of the abuse, are not necessarily short-term. They include fear, anxiety, and depression; aggressive behaviors, and age-inappropriate sexual behaviors. Both clinical and empirical data on these initial effects have suggested similar results (Briere & Runtz, 1988; Browne & Finkelhor, 1986, Conte & Berliner, 1988; Finkelhor & Browne, 1988).

The clinical and empirical literature on the long-term effects of sexual abuse on adult survivors both point to depression and self-destructiveness, including substance abuse, eating disorders and suicide ideation and attempts, as the most frequently reported long-term effects. Sexual functioning also seems to be affected in adults who were sexually abused as children, although empirical confirmation of clinical findings has not been entirely consistent on this point. Sexual problems show themselves in an inability to trust in sexual circumstances, an avoidance of sexual contact altogether, or in sexual compulsivity (Briere & Runtz, 1988; Browne & Finkelhor, 1986; Conte & Berliner, 1988; Courtois & Sprei, 1988; Edwall & Hoffmann, 1988; Finkelhor & Browne, 1988; Fritz, Stoll & Wagner, 1981; Remell, 1990).

Other frequently noted long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse include amnesia for abuse experiences, somatization, depression, and dissociation (Briere & Runtz, 1986; Browne & Finkelhor, 1986; Conte & Berliner, 1988; Courtois & Sprei, 1988; Finkelhor & Browne, 1988; Remell, 1990). These complaints have all been repeatedly and strongly associated with child sexual and physical abuse in the largely psychiatric literature on dissociation and multiple personality disorder where physical, sexual and/or intensive emotional abuse have been reported by 80-90% of persons diagnosed as having dissociative and multiple personality disorders (Braun & Sachs, 1985; Coons, 1986; Coons, Bowman, & Milstein, 1988; Kluft, 1985a, 1985b; Putnam, 1985, 1989; Putnam, Guroff, Silberman, Barban, & Post, 1986; Rivera, 1991; Wilbur, 1985).

Clinical and empirical research have also shown a fairly high degree of agreement regarding the relationship between how children experience sexual abuse and the later effects that abuse has on the survivors. The more severe adult sequelae seem to be associated with abuse that was perpetrated by adult males, particularly by father figures, or that involved force or genital contact (Browne & Finkelhor, 1986; Finkelhor & Browne, 1988).

Child abuse has been frequently reported by female-to-male transsexuals. Pauly (1974a) summarized the information about female-to-male transsexuals found in 80 reports published by 39 authors between 1922 and 1970. Physical abuse was mentioned in 24 reports. Seventy-nine percent reported that the children perceived their fathers as abusive. Twenty-two percent of the 23 articles which included information about validated sexual abuse reported that fathers had sexually abused their daughters. Lothstein (1983) found that approximately half of the 53 female-to-male transsexuals involved in his study reported some form of child abuse and that 23% of them told of incestuous relations. Many of the female-to-male transsexuals who participated in this study also reported suffering from physical, sexual, or emotional abuse during their childhoods, often under the most traumatizing of circumstances. Many of the initial and long-term effects suggested by the literature on abuse were also reported. A few authors have suggested that child abuse experiences may be implicated in the etiology of transsexualism (Money, 1986; Money & Lamacz, 1984; Schwartz, 1988; Zucker & Kuksis, 1990). In this article I present some preliminary data in this regard and make some suggestions for further study.

METHOD

Research Design

Data were gathered through in-depth interviews and observation between September 1988 and September 1992 as part of a sociological filed study for a book on female-to-male transsexuals. Child abuse was not the main focus of this research, therefore, most of the information about possible effects of child abuse were gained indirectly and as a result of questions about other issues. Data were qualitatively analyzed to produce descriptive statistics. Data were also used as the basis for generation of some tentative theoretical
hypotheses.

Subjects

A total of 46 self-defined female-to-male transsexuals were interviewed. They ranged from people who had, at the time of contact, taken no concrete steps toward effecting a transition to those who had completed their transitions eighteen years before. All participants in this study volunteered their time as a result of hearing about this project through public advertisements or through networks within the transsexual community. One person declined to be included in the data set after completing one interview. His reasons for withdrawal are presented later in this report.

Thirty-eight participants lived in the United States, seven lived in Canada, and one person resided in New Zealand at the time of contact. They ranged in age from 22 to 53 years with a mean age of 37 years at the time of first contact. All participants had a minimum of a high school education, with the average being four years of post-secondary education. Participants’ incomes ranged from a low of welfare support to a high of US $75,000/yr. Average income was approximately US $22,600/yr. Thirty-eight participants were Caucasians of European heritage, five people were of mixed heritage two of whom were of Eurasian background, two of Amerindian and European heritage, and one of whom was of Polynesian and European heritage. There was one Black American participant and one Hispanic American participant.

Although the participants in this study did not constitute a random sample of all female-to-male transsexuals, they did represent a relatively large and diverse group. They were also probably more forthcoming than many female-to-male transsexuals because they were interviewed in-depth, outside of any clinical context, and by a sociologist with no ability to influence the course of their lives beyond any personal reactions they may have had to the interview process itself. It therefore seems possible that this research may have uncovered some information not readily available in clinical environments. The sample also included a disproportionate number of individuals who had been active as female-to-male transsexual advocates and were therefore probably more accustomed to speaking with strangers about the more intimate details of their lives. Some of the participants had little or no contact with the therapeutic community in regard to their gender issues. Others had sampled all that gender clinics had to offer and were many years into their new lives. The data presented here, not being based on a random sample, must be taken with caution, but they do provide insights into the lives of female-to-male transsexuals from a different perspective than most publications which have largely been either based on clinical data or auto(biographical).

PROCEDURES

Twenty-seven individuals were interviewed face-to-face and in-depth by the author. In four cases, part of the interview was conducted face-to-face and part was self-administered. Another eighteen people were mailed copies of the interview questions and either answered the questions in writing or by speaking into a tape recorder. Face-to-face interviews were audio tape recorded. Eight of the self-administered interviews were quite brief in comparison to the interviews which were conducted in person. All participants completed at least part I of the interview process; 31 persons also completed part II. Each part of the interview process, when conducted in-person, usually lasted between two and three hours.

Part I consisted of questions about (1) demographic information, (2) gender issues in relationships with family members, (3) gender issues in relationships with peers, (4) gender issues in school experiences, (5) childhood abuse experiences, and (6) sexual and romantic experiences. Part LI covered the following areas: (7) physical health, (8) gender identity development, (9) body image development, (10) transsexual identity development, (11) transition experiences, and (12) philosophical questions about the meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality. (A complete copy of the interview schedule may be obtained from the author.) In-person interviews were loosely structured so as to allow participants more freedom to follow their own thoughts through to their own conclusions. As a result, in those interviews, topics were not always covered in exactly the same way and unique information sometimes arose.

I maintained correspondence, face-to-face, and/or telephone contact with all participants throughout the period of time required to complete individuals’ interviews. I also attended a number of formal and informal gatherings of female-to-male transsexuals during the research period. Field notes were taken after attendance at any such meetings where I was in attendance in an official capacity as a researcher.

Analysis

Interviews were transcribed from audiotape to computer disk. Interview materials and field notes were coded and collated for information about experiences of childhood physical, sexual and/or emotional abuse, evidence of fear, anxiety and depression, expressions of high degrees of anger and hostility during childhood, inhibited or compulsive sexuality, self-destructive behaviours, suicide ideation, and suicide attempts. Descriptive statistics were compiled and possible theoretical implications were noted. No effort was made to arrive at clinical diagnoses.

RESULTS

Childhood Experiences of Abuse

Thirty-eight percent (17) of the participants reported having experienced significant physical abuse in their childhood homes. Table 1 summarizes some of the conditions of the physical abuse experienced by participants.

Type of abuse	n of abused	% of abused
by fathers	12	71 (N = 17)
by mothers	8	47 (N = 17)
frequent	15	88 (N = 17)
early onset	11	65 (N = 17)
Total physical abuse	17	63 (N = 17)

 

I have only considered those situations where the abuse was generally quite severe and ongoing. The abuse that participants suffered took the form of being severely slapped, punched, kicked, burned, horsewhipped, choked, beaten with belts, loops of rubber hose or electrical cable, pushed down stairs, thrown against walls, and locked in basements. Their beatings resulted in welts, bruises, broken bones, bums, and lacerations in addition to the emotional scars they sustained. Most did not receive medical attention, although several felt that they should have. A few required hospitalization. Beatings were administered by both mothers and fathers, although fathers were the abusers 50% more often than were mothers. Many spoke of the daily terror this engendered in them. For example, one person, whose mother used to say “these parents who hug their children make me sick,” recalled:

My mother instituted this thing like if my father was at work and we did anything bad when he got in it was like a regimented thing. He would come in and beat us up. I can remember when [my brother and I] did something and I remember one night we were lying in bed and we heard him come in and both my brother and I were just screaming and crying because we knew for sure that she was telling him and he was going to come in and hit us both. And we were just terrified. I can remember that terror of knowing that there was someone that was going to come in and beat you up. Just give you a really good spanking and hit you on the face and all.

Similarly, another remembered:

We got beaten on a regular basis. Like the mealtimes—it was either before or after.. . . Just to give you an example. . . there was steps to the basement, and at the side there was a mirror, and every time we walked in from that mirror, you could see many parts of the downstairs, and even from the upstairs. We never walked in the house from one place to another without checking in the mirror whether there wasn’t somebody standing there, ready to beat us up.

Sexual abuse experiences were also reported by 31% (14) of the participants in this study, including one person who reported having been date-raped as a teenager. Table 2 summarizes the types of sexual abuse experienced by participants.

Type of abuse	n of abused	% of abused
by older males by father figures by brothers by other older males	9 5 2 5	64 (N = 14) 36 (N = 14) 14 (N = 14) 36 (N = 14)
by mother	1	7 (N = 14)
by date rape	3	21 (N = 14)
by exhibitionist	1	7 (N = 14)
genital contact	11	92 (N = 12)
Total sexually abused	14	52 (N =27)

 

In total 64% (9) of the fourteen people who specifically recounted the facts of at least some of their abuse remembered having been sexually abused by an older male. The mildest form of sexual abuse reported was that of an adult male neighbour exposing his genitals to one six year old. All other instances about which information was provided involved genital contact. These are the kinds of circumstances that previous research has indicated are most likely to produce more severe effects in the lives of those so abused.

Emotional abuse often accompanied the physical and sexual abuse experienced by the female-to-male transsexuals in this study. I have only counted participants as having experienced emotional abuse when the stories they recounted seemed to be well beyond the normal stresses of family life, and indicated recurrent emotional abuse. Terror of abusive parents was one major theme. For instance, one father who was particularly physically and sexually abusive kidnapped his children from their mother and lied to them that their mother was dead. The participant also believed that the father had killed a previous wife and child and therefore was afraid of being murdered, too. Three more participants similarly feared for their lives or the lives of their mothers and siblings. Others told of being profoundly humiliated by their parents. One person, whose father had locked the child in a coal cellar for several days recalled the following incident:

Another incident was a breakfast type of thing. My father insisted that we eat poached eggs. I didn’t like poached eggs and I remember one morning that.., he had made these poached eggs and sat them down in front of me. They were ninny. I didn’t want to eat them. I sat there all day. He wouldn’t let me up from the table. I wet my pants. I ended up defecating in my pants. I still hal to sit there. I ended up failing asleep at the table. He wouldn’t let me go to bed… . and the next morning these things were still sitting in front of me and he said that I would not leave that table for anything until I ate those eggs. Well, needless to say, I ate the eggs, got sick and threw up. But I guess he won that one.

Another person, who was beaten regularly by both parents,
remembered what he referred to as “morn’s favourite game”:

My mom used to have this favorite game, where…, if she was mad at us for whatever reason, she was going to send us to an orphanage—the three of us. And she would go into a big dramatic schpeil about it—how we’d be separated, and we’d never find each other again, and we’d never see each other again, blah, blah, blah… And then she’d put her hand down on the phone, and pretend to call the cab company. “Now you get out on the porch, and you wait for the cab to come,” etc. So, we’d be out on the porch, crying, and making promises to each other that we’d try to find each other no matter what. Then she’d call us, and we’d come back in, and it was time to beg. We’d get down on our hands and knees, and cry and carry on. She may say ”yes,~~ or she may say “no, it’s not good enough,” and send us back out on the porch, and on and on until she was appeased at some point.

In total, 60% (27) of the 45 female-to-male transsexual participants in this study explicitly reported having experienced physical and/or sexual and/or emotional abuse during their childhoods (see Table 3). In most cases, the conditions under which they experienced abuse were those which are likely to be associated with more severe after effects.

 

Type of abuse	n of abused (N = 27)	% of abused	% of total (N = 45)
physical	17	65	38
sexual	14	52	31
emotional	13	50	29
Total (one or more types)	27	100	60

Initial Effects of Childhood Abuse Experiences

Table 4 summarizes the rates participants reported of some of the more commonly found initial effects of child abuse.

Type of Effect	n of abused (N = 27)	% of abused	n of non-abused (N = 18)	% of non-abused
fear/anxiety/depression fear of parent misc. anxieties fear of murder depressed	26 14 3 4 17	96 52 11 15 63	6 0 3 0 5	33 0 17 0 8
aggression fistfights murderous desires	10 3 8	37 11 30	2 2 0	11 11 0
sexual problems	12	44	6	33
Total (one or more effect)	27	100	12	67

It is important to bear in mind when considering these figures that participants were not asked systematic questions about these issues. Instead, this information came out in the course of the retelling of stories about a variety of events. Fear, anxiety and depression have all been shown to be common initial sequelae of child abuse. Fears of parents, including fear that their parents might murder them, each other, or other family members, were common among those who were abused but not mentioned by other participants. Miscellaneous anxieties mentioned by participants included recurrent nightmares, fears of ever being alone in their parents’ home, or being “afraid of people.” Those whom I counted as depressed had specifically stated that they had been “depressed,” “miserable,” or “unhappy” for extended periods of time during their childhood or adolescent years. I excluded those who said that their depression had been related to their gender dysphoria. In sum, childhood or adolescent fear, anxiety or depression was reported by 96% (26) of those who reported abuse but by only 33% (6) of those who did not report abuse. A heightened level of aggressive behaviour has been the most frequently cited initial and long-term effect of physical abuse and has also been noted in relation to sexual and emotional abuse. I have included reports of regularly having been in fist fights with children or with parents as one criterion of childhood aggression. Perhaps a more telling indicator was found in the expression by those who had been abused, but not by any of the others, of strong desires to kill parents, siblings, or others close to the family. Two people actually went so far as to hold guns on the people to whom they objected. In sum, 37% (10) of the abused group, but only 11% (2) of the others, exhibited highly aggressive childhood or adolescent behaviour.

Inappropriate childhood or adolescent sexual behaviour is often used as a clue to the possibility that a young person has been sexually abused. I have counted three participants who reported that they were almost daily masturbators from the ages of four, five, and seven as having exhibited inappropriate childhood sexual behaviour. One of those persons had been physically abused, two reported no abuse. Eight others who were abused reported one or more of the following: masturbating from an early age; having been “sexually precocious” and never having been “innocent” as a child; any hint of sexual contact having brought on nausea as a teen; having been “intensely sexual” as a youth; having worked for many years as a teen and adult prostitute and being “sexually compulsive.” Two of the people who reported no abuse said that, as teens, their own sexual practices were disgusting to them and two reported never having had any sexual activity. In sum, 100% of the abused told of one or more of the initial effects of child abuse, whereas only two-thirds (12) of those participants who did not report abuse reported one or more of the more common initial effects of child abuse.

Long-Term Effects of Childhood Abuse Experiences

Table 5 lists the incidence of some of the more common long-term effects of child abuse as reported by the participants.

Type of effect	n of abused (N = 27)	% of abused	n of non-abused (N = 18)	% of non-abused
depression	20	74	7	39
substance abuse alcohol abuse drug abuse	15 10 8	56 37 30	4 3 3	22 17 17
eating disorders	6	22	0	0
suicide idea or try ideation only attempted	15 7 8	56 26 31	8 6 2	44 33 11
sexual problems	7	26	6	33
Total (one or more effect)	25	93	12	67

Once again, the reader should remember that the interviews used as the basis for these figures were not focused on child abuse or its outcomes. Participants most often commented on these feelings and activities in the course of discussions of others issues.

Depression is among the most frequently observed adult outcomes of child sexual abuse. Depression is also a common concomitant of female-to-male transsexualism. Pauly (1974b) reported that among 45 female-to-male transsexuals 62% said that they were mildly, moderately or severely depressed. Similarly, in this sample of 45 female-to-male transsexuals, 60% reported having suffered from depression at some time in their lives. Among those who reported abuse, 74% reported having been depressed, whereas only 39% of the other participants reported having suffered from depression.

Somatization and self-destructiveness have been observed to occur in adult survivors of childhood abuse. Defining oneself as transsexual includes a preoccupation with and profound distaste for manifestations of one’s birth sex as well as an intense desire for alteration of the physical body. In another sample of genetic females, such a relationship to one’s body might well be considered as either somatization or self-destructiveness. For the purposes of this discussion, I will not consider such body anxiety, or the desire for sex reassignment surgery, as somatization or self-destructiveness because it is precisely this relationship to one’s body which defines a person as transsexual. To transsexual persons, such a relationship to one’s body feels natural and sex reassignment surgery is perceived as palliative rather than destructive.

Eating disorders and substance abuse have been reported among other samples of female-to-male transsexuals, and have also been cited as self-destructive effects of child abuse. Stuart (1983) found that 25% of the 20 female-to-male transsexuals in her sample reported alcohol or drug abuse. In a larger survey covering 13 years and involving 285 female-to-male transsexuals, it was found that 3.2% reported alcohol abuse and 28.8% reported drug abuse (Dixen, Maddever, van Maasdam, & Edwards, 1984). In this sample of 45 female-to-male transsexuals, 29% reported alcohol abuse and 24% spoke of partaking of drugs beyond casual recreational use. Overall, substance abuse was 2.5 times more common among those reporting abuse than among the other participants. Anorexia and obesity were also found among those who reported abuse, whereas none of the other participants made similar reports.

Suicide ideation and attempts are frequently noted as long-term effects of child abuse. Suicide ideation and attempts are also common among female-to-male transsexuals. Pauly (1974b) reported that 17.5% of the persons he studied had attempted suicide. Lothstein (1983) reported almost half in his study as being suicidal. Stuart (1983) reported that 41% of her sample had considered suicide and that 15% had made an attempt. Dixen et al. (1984) reported 19% of the group they had studied had tried to kill themselves and 11% had considered the idea. Fifty-one percent of the female-to-male transsexual participants in this study had either considered or attempted suicide at some time in their lives. It is of interest to note that among those who did not report abuse, thoughts of suicide were three times more common than attempts, whereas those who did report abuse were as likely to have attempted suicide as to have only considered doing so.

Impairment of sexual function has also been cited as one of the possible long-term effects of child abuse. It is difficult to say exactly what constitutes impairment of sexual function among female-to-male transsexuals. Some female-to-male transsexuals have never experienced consensual sex with males, most spend a part of their lives living as lesbian women, most feel a strong aversion to their female sexual body parts, and many require that their lovers either avoid those parts altogether or relate to them as if they were physically male. I have not included such behaviours as signs of sexual impairment among female-to-male transsexuals.

It should come as no surprise to find that people who suffer such a profound alienation from their bodies would have difficulties achieving satisfactory sexual relationships. Twenty-nine percent of participants reported significant impairment of sexual function such as a complete inability to orgasm, complete sexual abstinence, sexual compulsiveness, or expressions of disgust and physical revulsion for the sexuality that they did engage in. As might be expected, participants reporting abuse mentioned similar levels of sexual impairment as those who did not report abuse.

To summarize, depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders were more commonly found among those who reported abuse. Suicide ideation and attempts, and significant sexual problems were found to exist to a similar extent in both groups. In total 93% (25) of those who remembered having survived child abuse, but only 67% of the others, reported thoughts, feelings, and behaviours which have been identified as possible long-term effects of child abuse.

There are other possible initial and long-term outcomes of child abuse, amnesia for abuse and dissociation, about which I am unable to provide any summary data. Clearly, if abuse experiences are still suppressed from memory, they will not be recalled for an interviewer. However, a few people did mention that other family members had told them of abuse episodes that they themselves had no memory of; others said that they were able to retrieve memories of abuse experiences only after they had made their transitions.

It is also worth noting that all three of the participants who were therapists mentioned that they thought that their own abuse experiences might be related to their transsexualism. One specifically talked about the possibility of using dissociation as a psychological defense against abuse, suggesting that transsexualism might originate in a mechanism similar to that commonly theorized as underlying multiple personality disorder. This person spoke of the possibility of having “lost a little girl” through abuse but made the point that, after so many years of being gender dysphoric, resolution to a gender identity as a woman was not desirable:

I think that serious assault of a young child, especially sexual assault, might cause some children to dissociate and split in a way that establishes a sense of self different from one’s biological sex. I have, in my clinical experience, worked with a number of women with multiple personality disorder who were sexually and physically traumatized as children who have male identities and identities or personalities that are of different races and sexual orientations as well. . . . I don’t know whether there was a little girl that, fairly early on, through some abuse, disappeared. I don’t know that. But I do know that even if that happened, and I were to try to identify that and work it through, it just seems like the way I’ve lived my life to this point, for forty-one years, says there’s something to be said for that identity.

Another psychotherapist with advanced training and degrees in his field, who completed one interview and then asked not to be included in the data set, recounted this story to me in response to a query about his earliest memories. He has given me permission to explain his reasons for withdrawal and to summarize some of what he said.

Approximately six years after he began living full-time as a man, he reported having two dramatic abreactions of sexual abuse. He told me that he had reason to believe that the sexual abuse had occurred at approximately age fourteen months. Prior to his abreaction experiences, he had had no previous recollection of sexual abuse. He went on to say that he doubted that he would have become a transsexual were it not for the abuse he experienced. In his opinion, he had dissociated away both the memory of the abuse, and his attachment to the femaleness that the “baby girl” had interpreted as having made her vulnerable to such abuse. He also believed that he was able to reclaim the memories of the abuse only when he was a man and therefore no longer in any danger of being sexually abused as a female. Furthermore, he was of the opinion that such abuse and dissociation experiences were at the core of many cases of transsexualism.

He withdrew from the research project because, in the time since remembering his abuse, he had been engaged in “reclaiming the little girl” whom he felt he had dissociated away so early in life. He told me that he feels that she is still very wary of being used by others for their own ends and that having told me of her existence began to feel vulnerable to the possibility of her words being used / abused in the research process. He said that my recounting of our conversations, one step removed, was not perceived by the “little girl” as a violation.

DISCUSSION

The female-to-male transsexuals who participated in this study told of having experienced many instances of severe physical, sexual, and/or emotional child abuse. They also recounted stories describing many of the commonly found initial and long-term effects of child abuse. The research which uncovered this information was not directly focused on eliciting such information, therefore this report can only be suggestive rather than declarative. It is also important to bear in mind that there was probably an increased likelihood of disclosure of abuse experiences under the conditions of this research because I had no power to effectively label participants as mentally ill or to otherwise interfere with their progress in their new gender status. At the same time, it seems unlikely that participants would have been motivated to fabricate histories of abuse when the most commonly stated reason for participation was to contribute to a realistic picture of the lives of female-to-male transsexuals. Most female-to-male transsexuals, in my experience with them, are quite concerned that their condition not be construed as an outgrowth of psychological instabilities. Those who have not completed their transitions into men are fearful that they might be denied sex reassignment surgery due to attributions of their transsexualism being a treatable psychological symptom. Those who have already made their transitions are wary that neither they, nor their brothers, should retroactively become similarly stigmatized. I found their stories of child abuse credible.

The female-to-male transsexuals in this sample reported an incidence of physical child abuse which approximated that found in other studies (Miller & Miller, 1983; Russell, 1986, 1988). They also reported many of the possible effects of child abuse. Fully 100% of those abused, as compared to only 67% of the others, reported at least one of the possible initial effects of child abuse; 93% percent of those abused, but only 67% of the others, said that they had experienced one or more of the long-term effects of child abuse. It is possible that the ongoing stresses of transsexualism might have produced effects similar to the long-term effects of child abuse. More research is needed to clarify this issue.

Nonetheless, the data presented here did suggest that if so many common sequelae of child abuse were reported by this group, then others may also have been present. Many clinicians have found that severe child abuse can result in various degrees of dissociation. It is my suggestion that in some cases transsexualism may be an extreme adaptive dissociative response to severe child abuse. Under such circumstances, transsexualism might constitute a kind of adaptive “normal dissociation” (Ross, 1989, p. 86-90) enabling individuals to consciously and willfully move between psychic personality elements. In such cases, a male protector/survivor personality, which functions co-consciously (Beahrs, 1983) with the original female personality, might act first as a defense, and later, after many years of reinforcing psychological and socialization experiences, as an escape route from otherwise intolerable psychic pain.

Several authors have, indeed, suggested that transsexualism might be viewed as a result of a kind of personality splitting or dissociation (Meyer, 1982; Money, 1974, 1986; Volkan & Berent, 1976). Money (1986) briefly mentioned that both child abuse and dissociation “could be etiologically important” in transsexualism (p. 210). Schwartz (1988) wrote about a single case where she diagnosed a post-operative male-to-female transsexual as having multiple personality disorder. She suggested that the person’s transsexualism and multiple personality disorder were both related to extensive child abuse experiences.

Unfortunately, several of the theorists who have discussed a possible connection between child abuse and transsexualism appear to have fallen prey to Freud’s error of failing to see, or give sufficient weight to, child abuse when it does exist (Masson, 1984). Green (1974) suggested that some people may use transsexualism as a defense against their own incestuous desires. He suggested that female-to-male transsexuals may use the strategy that they cannot have sexual relations with their own fathers if they themselves are males. He did not seem to entertain the notion that there might have been actual incest from which children needed defense. Meyer (1982) proposed that transsexuals split off their “good” and “bad” personality traits assigning aggressiveness to their male personality segments. In the case of female-to-male transsexuals, that aggressiveness can be used to defend against female vulnerabilities. Meyer seemed to see this as a symbolic action with little relation to real dangers. Lothstein (1983) suggested that female-to-male transsexuals perceive their femaleness as a dangerous condition and that they believe having a penis acts as “a magical totem” which protects its owner against violation (p. 144-5). Unfortunately. Lothstein’s tone seemed to imply that it is unrealistic to perceive femaleness as a dangerous condition and maleness as a position of relative safety.

Young (1992) took up the question in more general terms. She pointed out that when children’s bodily integrity is violated through physical or sexual abuse, they are left with a problem of embodiment. They have to find a way to live with/in a body which has become a site of danger to them as whole and integrated persons. The literature on multiple personality disorder discusses this issue extensively. Most authors conclude that children may cope with such trauma by dissociating themselves from the body/person who is being hurt and by creating other “people” who can better handle abuse. Thus, they live with the body/person who is subjected to abuse but not in that body/person when there is danger present.

While the true prevalence rate of multiple personality disorder is an intensely debated issue, those experts who do not doubt its existence argue that multiple personalities are formed as extreme dissociative responses to trauma such as multiple and severe incidents of child abuse. They claim that it is quite common, in multiple personality disorder, for alter personalities to be of a different gender than that of the original personality. More than 80% of persons who have been diagnosed as having multiple personality disorder are believed to have protector personalities, who are almost always males (Putnam, Guroff, Silberman, Barban, & Post, 1986; Rivera, 1988; Ross, Norton, & Wozney, 1989). It seems like a logical step for youngsters who are being abused to assume that were they to become like their aggressors they would also become as invulnerable as those aggressors seemed to them at the time (McCarthy, 1990). This mechanism has been suggested as being actively used by youngsters who later become female-to-male transsexuals as a defense against abusive males in their lives (Bradley, 1980, 1985; Lothstein, 1983; Pauly, 1974b).

As is the case with other instances of dissociation and child abuse, precipitating abuse experiences might not be available to memory until a state of sufficient psychic safety has been reached. A successful transsexual transition may be one such place of safety. I would therefore suggest that clinicians should be aware of this possibility and that, in order to clarify these issues, further research should be undertaken into child abuse experienced by transsexuals and the coping mechanisms used by them in response to those experiences. Finally, I wish to underscore that I am neither suggesting that child abuse might be the cause of transsexualism, nor am I suggesting that people should necessarily be denied access to sex reassignment surgery if they are found to be highly dissociative. Transsexualism is, no doubt, the result of many and complex biological, psychological, and social forces. If further research does indeed establish that some transsexual people also have multiple personality disorder, or another extreme dissociative condition, then it would seem only humane to ensure that it is an individual with an integrated personality that requests and receives sex reassignment surgery. It is my hope that a better understanding of the relationship between child abuse and transsexualism will aid in the healing and strengthening of those people who are still suffering in the painful aftermath of child abuse.

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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to express thanks to the people who volunteered their time to become involved in this research project and to teach her something of their way of life. She also wishes to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Victoria for funding which aided in the accomplishment of this research. Finally, her thanks go to Lynn Greenbough, Frances Ricks, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper and to her research assistants: Noreen Begoray, Bev Copes, Sheila Pedersen, and Sandra Winfield.

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Abstract

Forty-five female-to-male transsexuals from diverse backgrounds and at different stages of transition were interviewed in depth about their sexual attractions, sexual practices, and sexual orientation identities prior to their transitions into men. Forty-three participants had been sexually attracted to women at some time prior to their transitions. Thirty-five participants engaged in homosexual activity, 25 of whom adopted lesbian identities before coming to recognize themselves as female-to-male transsexuals. The information provided by participants suggested that they were initially attracted to lesbian identities on the basis of popular images of lesbians as mannish women. However, they later rejected lesbian identities at least partially in response to politicized lesbian-feminist definitions of lesbians as women-loving-women who emphasize womanhood and eschew manliness. Participants adopted identities as female-to-male transsexuals because they believed that such identities more accurately captured the natures of their sex, gender, and sexual orientation identities.

Sexology as a discipline first began to emerge in earnest during the end of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries. One of the main projects of sexologists in those early years was the identification and classification of some of the many varieties of human sexuality. It was therefore during this period that characterizations of lesbians were first scientifically specified. A variety of authors, including such luminaries as Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, formulated pictures of lesbians as females in whom gender had become pathologically inverted to the point that they behaved sexually and emotionally like men and wanted to be men (Elks 1918; Kraft-Ebing 1965). Thus, the earliest sexological diagnostic criteria for lesbianism were remarkably similar to today’s diagnostic criteria for female-to-male transsexualism.

As the ideas of sexologists commingled with those of members of the public, the image of lesbians as manly women became firmly embedded in the popular imagination. Indeed, the 1928 publication of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness was a benchmark in this regard. The book’s protagonist, Stephen Gordon, who was a near-perfect exemplar of the style of lesbian described by the early sexologists, became and remained emblematic of prototypical lesbianism for close to half a century (Newton 1989).

The 1970s marked a major turning point in both clinical and popular North American conceptions of lesbianism. The combined efforts of the gay and women’s liberation movements shifted definitions of lesbianism away from sin and sickness and toward images of health and happiness. The success of the public relations campaigns of these liberatory movements can be noted in two major changes, one clinical and one cultural: the December 1973 removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual II (DSM-II) of the American Psychiatric Association (1980), and a noticeable shift from cultural representations of lesbians as mannish women who want to be men to images of lesbians as women-identified-women who revel in their womanhood (Radicalesbians 1970).

Concurrent with these changes in professional and public understandings of the nature of lesbianism was the development of the concept of transsexualism, which was popularly launched by the 1966 publication of Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon. By the end of the 1970s, there were an estimated three to six thousand post-surgical transsexuals in the United States alone, and approximately forty clinics worldwide that provided sex reassignment surgery. (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association 1990). In 1980, approximately six years after homosexuality was removed from the DSM-I1, female-to-male transsexualism became an officially delineated diagnosis in the next edition of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 1980). Thus, those women-who-want-to-be-men who were rapidly becoming personae non gratae among woman-identified lesbians were repatriated back into the clinical purview as female-to-male transsexuals.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the older depiction of lesbianism retained currency while the newer, more radical one gained in definitional muscle. More quietly, but inexorably, the ideas and practices of transsexualism also became public knowledge during this time. Therefore, those female persons who both wanted to be men and felt sexual attractions to women during the 1970s and 1980s had all of these categories available to them as possible explanations for their feelings. However, they were not equally accessible to most people.

In the earlier part of these two decades, the older idea of lesbians as women who want to be men was more widespread than the woman-identified-woman concept, which, in turn, was more readily available than the idea of female-to-male transsexualism. Toward the later end of this timespan the mannish woman concept had lost considerable ground and the idea of transsexualism was well on its way to becoming common knowledge. However, among groups of politically oriented lesbians, the idea of lesbians as mannish women became anathema very early in the 1970s. Likewise, among gender-oriented clinicians, or readers of clinical literature, the diagnostic category of female-to-male transsexualism was readily at hand by the early 1970s (Pauly, 1974).

Thus, female individuals who wanted to be men and found their way to self-consciously organized groups of lesbian women in the 1970s and 1980s would have been likely to find that they no longer fit the in-house definition of lesbianism. Were such individuals to continue their search for identity in libraries or in clinicians’ offices, they would have been likely to find that they did fit the template for female-to-male transsexualism. If by no other means, the fascination of the popular media with transsexualism that exploded in the late 1980s eventually would have introduced them to the idea of female-to-male transsexualism.

In this report, I recount some of the ways in which these social phenomena were played out in the lives of a group of female-to-male transsexuals. In doing so, I trace some of the ways in which they came to first think of themselves as lesbian women and, later, to reject that designation in favor of identities as female-to-male transsexuals.

Subjects

A total of forty-six self-defined female-to-male transsexuals were interviewed. They ranged from people who had, at the time of first contact, taken no concrete steps toward becoming men, to those who had completed their transition eighteen years before their participation in this research. All participants in this study volunteered their time as a result of hearing about this project through public advertisements or networks within the transsexual community. The sample was therefore probably biased toward those people who were less private about their transsexual status, more socially connected to other transsexuals, and more inclined to educate nontranssexual people about female-to-male transsexuals. One person declined to be included in the data set after completing one interview. He was unwilling to contribute to research conducted from an explicitly feminist perspective.

Although the participants in this study did not constitute a random sample of all female-to-male transsexuals, they did represent a relatively large and diverse group. They were probably more forthcoming than many female-to-male transsexuals, and the sample surely included a disproportionate number of individuals who had been active as transsexual advocates. Some participants had little or no contact with the therapeutic community in regard to their gender issues. Others had sampled all that gender clinics had to offer and were many years into their new lives.

This study was unusual in that it was conducted under nonclinical social relations by a sociologist who had no gatekeeping powers in the lives of any individuals who participated. As such, it seems reasonable to believe that participants’ responses were less tainted by goal-oriented distortions than is usually found in clinically based research. Nonetheless, these data are subject to the usual distortions from which any retrospective account might suffer. The data presented here must be taken with some caution but might also be viewed as providing insights into the lives of female-to-male transsexuals from a perspective different from that of other researchers.

Measures

Data were obtained from responses to a detailed interview schedule that I created specifically for a research project leading to a monograph on female-to-male transsexuals. General areas of questioning included (a) demographics; (b) gender issues with family members, peers, in schools, and at work; (c) child abuse; (d) sexuality and romance; (e) physical health and body image; (f) development of gender and transsexual identities; (g) transition experiences; and (h) philosophical questions about sex, gender, and sexuality. This report pertains primarily to question groups (d) and (f), although relevant information may have appeared in a variety of places throughout interviews.

Procedure

Announcements describing the project goals and my background were posted in places where transsexuals might congregate, distributed at transsexual support-group meetings, distributed by prominent members of transsexual communities, and printed in publications that might be read by female-to-male transsexuals. Potential participants were asked to contact me directly. I obtained written consent and interviewed twenty-three individuals face to face. Another eighteen people were mailed copies of interview questions and either answered the questions in writing or by speaking into an audiotape recorder. In an additional four cases, part of the interviews were conducted face to face and part were self-administered. Face-to-face interviews were audiotaped. All participants completed at least one interview; thirty-one persons completed two interviews. Each interview, when conducted in person, usually lasted between two and three hours. All names, and any other identifying information, are kept in a locked cabinet, to which I have sole access.

I also attended a number of formal and informal gatherings of female-to-male transsexuals. Field notes were taken when I was in attendance in an official capacity as a researcher. Transcribed interview materials and field notes were coded and collated for information about sexual attractions, sexual practices, sexual orientation, and transsexual identities.

Results and Discussion

All but two participants (95.5 percent) reported that they had been sexually or romantically attracted to women at some time during their lives as women. Thirty-five of the forty-three participants who had been attracted to women (81 percent) acted upon their inclinations to some degree, all but two of whom established relationships of approximately one year or more in duration. Twenty-five of those who were attracted to women (58 percent) thought of themselves as lesbian for at least a short period of time. Those participants who never took on the title of lesbian thought of their relationships with women as heterosexual ones.

Participants Who Did Not Act upon
Their Attractions to Women

Seventeen participants (39.5 percent) went through periods during which they felt unable to act upon their sexual feelings for women, five of whom (12 percent) never became sexually involved with women while they themselves were still living as women. For all twelve of those participants who later went on to experiment with homosexual relations, their periods of reluctance to act upon their homosexual attractions were confined to their teenaged years. It became clear from the stories of most participants that the generalized homophobia of the decades during which they were children and adolescents (1950s, 1960s, early 1970s) played a significant role in discouraging them from acting upon the adolescent attractions that they felt for females. Homophobia acted to abort their lesbian activities and deflect them from lesbian identities mainly in two ways.

First, information about lesbianism was not readily available. Thus, the only sexual model to which many girls had access was a heterosexual one. Therefore, when they felt sexual desire for other females, the only logical interpretation that they could place on their feelings was that they should be males in order to have such lusts. Furthermore, since they were not males, there was nothing that they could do about their feelings but contain them and bide their time until an opportunity arose to somehow transform themselves into men.

For example, Bruce remembered that she had very explicitly sexual thoughts about women when she was a teenager, but did not act on them:

I used to get out my parents’ Sears catalogue and look at the women in their underwear. I got turned on …. But I thought, I can’t do this the way I am. I have to be a boy because girls don’t like girls …. So, I saw men and women together. So, I thought, that’s what it’s supposed to be, and all the girls liked me because I was a boy …. But I used to put those kinds of feelings behind me, I think, because I felt that I couldn’t . . . be sexual…. It wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t right. Because. how can women be attracted to women?

The second way in which the homophobia of the times acted to deny these participants opportunities to explore their lesbian urges during their teen years was through misinformation. Those participants who had heard of lesbianism had only the most negative of perspectives on the phenomenon. They absorbed the messages that their society wanted them to believe: that lesbians were sick and dangerous people; that lesbian activity was sorely stigmatized and totally taboo. Thus, those individuals who wanted to retain some modicum of self-respect and a decent standing in their society avoided tainting themselves with the stain of lesbianism.

Peter, for instance, thought that her childhood and adolescent attractions to girls meant that she must be “gay,” but Peter did not want to accept that label as appropriate for herself. Peter recalled: “There’s always been the social stigma about being gay. And I would think that probably, for a time when I was an adolescent, that, in that sense, that really backed me off. That kept me really under wraps.”

The participants who were acting under the sway of these kinds of homophobia were left few alternatives. They simply could not act because they could only see their attractions as being heterosexual in form, if not in content. Nevertheless, three participants did think of themselves as lesbian on the basis of their unactualized attractions to women.

Minor Homosexual Involvements
Ten participants (23 percent) went through extended periods during which they had only limited homosexual experiences. These plateaus occurred during the adolescences of all but one such participant. They engaged mostly in kissing and in touching of their partners’ breasts in the context of short-term infatuations. Only two participants thought of themselves as lesbians on the basis of these interactions. Most of these participants also kept their attractions for females relatively in check because of their fear of social stigma. Their anxieties about possible social retribution for transgressions were sufficient to deter them from any extensive homosexual adventures. Many participants had so absorbed the messages of their society that they held opinions that could be interpreted as indicative of internalized homophobia and misogyny.

Lee’s comments illustrated this type of thinking:

I knew that queers existed …. Things like that weren’t talked about …. That was almost like Mafia. They’s just dirt road people or something. So, that was a bad word. You didn’t want to be that …. You knew it wasn’t accepted …. You knew it wasn’t right in the eyes of everybody . . . . It makes me sound stupid, but I didn’t just sit down and think about things like that. I just did it. You knew that it wasn’t right . . . but it’s something you enjoyed.

It seems plausible that, had these participants lived in a time when information about lesbianism was both more readily available and more salutary, most of them would probably have been more homosexually active. In a climate more conducive to positive lesbian identity, many of them might well have more avidly adopted a lesbian identity and cleaved to it more persistently. Be that as it may, gender identity is a different matter from sexual orientation. Later, more extensive homosexual experience and lesbian identity did not banish, but only obscured, underlying male identities. Experimentation with lesbianism for most participants was one step in the process of clarifying that a male identity was the most suitable one for them.

Major Homosexual Relationships

Thirty-five participants (81 percent) became involved in ongoing genitally sexual relationships with other females during their pretransition years. Due to the explicitly sexual and nonfleeting nature of these unions, they could not be dismissed as merely affectionate or experimental. Thus, these liaisons forced participants to confront issues of sexual identity and, by extension, issues of gender identity.

Some of these unions were undertaken by both partners with the understanding that they were, at least in all apparent aspects, lesbian relationships. In other cases participants, but not necessarily their partners, maintained the belief that they were men, and that therefore their relationships were, de facto, heterosexual ones. A few relationships foreshadowed what was to come in that both partners agreed from the start that, in their own eyes, they were in heterosexual relationships. In other cases, particular relationships became redefined as they progressed and as participants went through stages wherein they came to have better insights into themselves and into the nature of lesbianism. As they did so, they generally moved more toward the rejection of the label of lesbian and of the womanhood implicit in that title.

When participants did think of themselves as lesbian women, they did so principally for two reasons. In the first place, they were faced with the unmistakable evidence of their own, and their lovers’, bodies. They knew that the definition of lesbian therefore technically included them. Some participants were also persuaded by the popular conception that lesbians are women who want to be men. As that was precisely how participants felt, they uneasily accepted the appellation of lesbian, despite the fact that it required them to acquiesce to being women. However, only a very few participants easily accepted that their intimate relationships with women fully qualified as lesbian ones. More commonly, participants recognized a superficial similarity between their own relationships and those of lesbian women, but retained a sense of themselves as different.

As participants used their intimate relationships with women as testing grounds for their sex, gender, and sexual identities, they found that their homosexual relations did not allow them to express their identities adequately. After some initial delight at the increased tolerance for their masculinity that they found among lesbian women, participants began to encounter some limitations. They found that the social and sexual values of lesbian women did not align as well with their own as they might have wished. Eventually the disjunctures between their own self-images and the images they held of what lesbian women were like became too disquieting to them and they concluded that they were not lesbian women. When they reckoned that they were beyond the range of what constituted lesbian thoughts and deeds, they became receptive to the possibilities of transsexualism as a means of realigning themselves with their social worlds.

Avoiding Lesbian Communities

Thirteen participants (30 percent) went through periods of their lives during which they were homosexually active but stayed away from places where homosexual women congregated. During those periods of their lives, they fell in love and built relationships with women, but six of them (46 percent) resisted accepting identities as lesbian women. They conceived of their partners as being attracted to them for their manly qualities and did what they could to nurture their mutual conceptualizations of their relationships as straight ones.

These participants found ways, outside of established lesbian environments, to meet women with whom they could establish sexual/romantic relationships. One result of their making contact with their lovers independently of communities of similarly disposed women was that they had only popular models of the nature of lesbianism against which to measure themselves. By the time that they were making such comparisons, lesbian-feminist definitions had begun to move definitions of lesbians away from the “mannish woman” typology popular before the 1970s and toward a “woman-loving-woman” characterization that has become more dominant since then (Faderman 1991; Sedgewick 1990). As a group, they found the latter definition less acceptable than the arguably more stigmatized former one, and so they eventually rejected the label of lesbian in favor of more obtusely acceptable identities as men.

For example, Stan feared being branded as a lesbian. Although Stan remembered always having had “feelings about [women] like guys do,” as a woman she felt exceptionally guilty about these feelings even as she was having several years of otherwise satisfying relationships with women. As she tried to work through this contradiction, she became so depressed at the thought that she might be lesbian that she ended up spending several months hospitalized for mental problems. Stan also reported that she later destroyed one of her relationships with the heavy drinking and marijuana smoking that she used to help her cope with her extreme aversion to being known as a lesbian woman. As was probably common among many homosexual women who came out in the 1970s, Stan seemed to have two different views of what it meant to be a lesbian woman. On the one hand, Stan had held a more traditional view of lesbian women as sinful and sick. On the other hand, Stan had also been exposed, through the media, to a more feminist version of lesbianism. When I asked Stan about it, he described lesbians this way:

I knew about lesbians but it just didn’t occur to me that’s what it was …. What I knew about lesbians was that two women can be together and it’s okay if you are a lesbian …. It was something they did on the coast in the big cities, more liberal people did. I just didn’t consider myself that liberal, that open minded . . . . To get into being a lesbian, like, you have to march for things, and you gotta go to caucuses, you gotta hate men, you gotta dress butch, and you gotta get into all that stuff, and I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to get into all that stuff.

Stan, like others who were unable to accept lesbian identities as appropriate for themselves, later enthusiastically latched onto the normalizing potential of female-to-male transsexualism.

Moving through Lesbian Communities

Another twenty-two participants (51 percent) who were homosexually active as women went through stages wherein they initially threw themselves wholeheartedly into lesbianism. They became friends with other homosexual women and participated in social or political activities with them. They were thus exposed to socialization processes that taught them something of what lesbian subcultures expected from women who were lesbian.

In some cases, these communities were highly politicized ones whose members espoused lesbian-feminist ideologies concerning the nature of lesbianism. In other instances, they were communities of women who came together at bars or ball games and who were less heavily influenced by feminist political analyses of lesbian identity. Eighteen of these twenty-two participants (82 percent), at some time during their lives, accepted the label “lesbian” as descriptive of themselves, only to later reject it as inadequate to the task. They came to their conclusions after making comparisons between their senses of themselves and their visions of how they believed that lesbians thought and acted.

Aaron’s story illustrated how this happened. Aaron started to think of herself as “probably gay” when she was a woman of twenty-five and her psychiatrist diagnosed her as homosexual. Aaron accepted that label as descriptive of herself because, at that time, in the early 1960s, “the only image I could think of was women that fell in love with women, and women that dressed and wanted to be men and acted masculine. I figured that was what a gay woman was.” However, when Aaron became divorced from her husband three years after this diagnosis, she decided to remain celibate and separate from other gay women because “frankly, I wouldn’t have kept my kids if I wasn’t.” Nonetheless, during that fifteen-year period Aaron recalled, “I was living primarily in male clothing . . . [people] just assumed I was a dyke.”

At the end of the 1970s, two days after Aaron’s youngest daughter reached legal adulthood, Aaron started having a series of affairs with lesbian women at the university where she was taking courses. A number of brief affairs and one longer relationship demonstrated to Aaron that she was not like other gay women. Aaron described two aspects of her process of discovery. On the one hand, she found herself at odds with the lesbian community in which she was situated:

 

Let’s face it . . . they saw the woman’s body, and figured I was a gay woman, and I went along with that to the point where they expected me to be female . . . . It means sticking up for the female when you get into a discussion with a bunch of women on wife beating, or sticking up for the feminist role when you get with a bunch of women and no men around, or . . . preferring the company of women …. I was trying to get along with these women; I was trying to love some of these women . . . but I didn’t fit. And the longer I was with them, the more I realized I didn’t fit. When I got involved with gay women and found out how frigging different I was it was obvious. Up until that point I thought other gay females were the same as me, they wanted to be male. And when I found out that was not true, that no matter how masculine they acted, they had female identities, I realized I don’t quite fit in here, but I fit in closer here than I ever had.

On a more intimate level, Aaron further found that she did not respond to her lesbian lover in the ways that both of them believed were characteristic of lesbians. Aaron drew this picture of the issues involved:

 

Basically she wanted a woman. At the nitty gritty deep level I wasn’t a woman . … Okay, concrete example.. . our lovemaking. She would resent it when I got too masculine …. When I became too aggressive and too demanding, too macho, whatever, it ruined it for her . . . . Hey, I want to be on top part of the time . . . figuratively and literally. And it would turn her off more, it would slow her response down and turn her off right when mine was speeding up. We didn’t match.

Aaron construed these events as evidence that she did not belong among lesbians and concluded that she was a female-to-male transsexual. Another participant, Howie, summed up well the way in which these people deduced that they were men rather than lesbian women. At first Howie thought that she and her lover were lesbian but then,

 

Later . . . upon closer investigation I realized that lesbians enjoyed their womanhood and didn’t want to change their bodies surgically. They were simply women who loved women. I realized I didn’t fit that mould at all …. A lesbian is a woman, who is glad she’s a woman, who happens to relate sexually to other women. She does not wish to be male. In fact, she rejoices in her femaleness and wants to be with other females …. I knew that wasn’t for me …. I often wish I could have accepted myself as gay, or identified as gay, because it is infinitely easier than changing.

Ron also became embedded in a lesbian community and came to be extensively committed to lesbian-feminist activities. Like Aaron and Howie, Ron also concluded, on the basis of her knowledge of lesbian social and sexual mores, that she was neither a lesbian nor a woman, and that she was better suited to being a man. Ron remembered:

 

For one thing, sexual[ity] definitely played a big role …. I had to go through and analyze for myself whether I was just a strong female, or whether I was a male. Whether I just didn’t fit into the stereotypical female sexist kind of role ….

For instance, being with women . . . the love I got was toward the woman, the physical woman. And for me, that was a conflict sexually . . . I was not making love as a woman with a woman. From my heart, it was that I was a male . . . . It’s a completely different dynamic …. There is a different approach from a woman to her man than the approach from one woman to another woman who are lovers . . . . There were a lot of needs that I could not express with lesbians, because the lesbians that I was having relationships with were not open to anything that had anything to do with males.

Hal, too, made a profound commitment to lesbianism. Even though Hal felt like “a man in a woman’s body,” she had a number of homosexual relationships, including a thirteen-year-long lesbian relationship. Hal called herself a lesbian and functioned well within a lesbian-feminist community. Hal discussed how she handled her co-identities as a man and as a lesbian:

 

When a transsexual goes into the lesbian community it’s because they get support there for wearing the clothes they want, relating to women . . . as sex partners. For being strong …. What happened was that I thought for a long long time that, although I knew inside that I was male, it was okay for me to identify [as a lesbian]. I never was homophobic or embarrassed about being a lesbian, so it was okay for me . . . as long as my lover understood that I was male, and some of my friends understood that I was male …. I went along like that for many, many years …. I felt the pressure of the [ 1970s’ and 1980s’ ] lesbian doctrine. I was trying to be a “strong, handsome woman,” and not a man in a woman’s body after all …. I put off [starting a transition] for at least ten years out of a fear of rejection, fear of the risks, and fear of making a political mistake with respect to my lesbian-feminism.

However, Hal reached a point in her life when, despite the critique of gender roles offered to her by lesbian-feminism of the late 1980s, she could no longer find a way to see herself as a woman.

These participants entered into communities of lesbian women at times during which lesbian-feminists of the 1970s and 1980s were dedicated to a redefinition of lesbianism away from the depiction of lesbians as mannish women. Instead, lesbian-feminists promoted the idea that lesbians were “women-identified-women.” Participants felt excluded by that definition and therefore were left to search in other quarters for labels that more snugly fit their self-images. When they discovered female-to-male transsexualism they embraced it as both an escape and a homecoming.

Summary and Conclusions

By far the strongest pattern that emerged from the stories offered by participants was one of participants’ earnest attempts to fit themselves to the available social roles of their times. Forty-three participants (95.5 percent) had been sexually attracted to women at some point in their pretransition lives. Thirty-five of them (81 percent) established relationships of some duration with women during their pretransition years, two participants (5 percent) had only minor sexual involvements, and another six participants (14 percent) were attracted to women but never acted upon their emotions. Drawn as these forty-three participants were to being lovers of women, they were confronted with a difficult-to-deny characterization of their love as lesbian.

More than half of these participants who were sexually attracted to women (58 percent) passed through periods during which they thought of themselves as gay or lesbian women. They were originally attracted to making such identifications because of their awareness of the common social definition of lesbians as women who want to be men or as mannish women who are sexually interested in other omen. However, over time, they came to make more finely sifted distinctions.

Two major issues became important to participants in their process of moving out of lesbian identities. Both of the axes on which participants judged themselves to be men rather than lesbian women were products of a particular historical period wherein the definitions of lesbianism constituted contested territory. On the one hand, all participants who once considered themselves to be lesbian ceased doing so during the 1970s and 1980s. These were years during which the proponents of lesbian-feminism were waging campaigns to supplant the idea that lesbians are mannish women with images of lesbians as women-identified-women who celebrate their womanhood with other women. On the other hand, these decades were also those during which female-to-male transsexualism was being defined as a treatable medical condition, similar to, but distinct from, lesbianism and characterized by the persistent desire of females to become males. Thus, participants searching for viable words to use to identify themselves were caught up in these shifting boundaries.

Participants who lived part of their lives as lesbian women were thus often in the position of having been drawn to lesbian identities on the basis of older definitions of lesbians as women who want to be men, only to discover that the lesbian pride movements of the 1970s and 1980s required them to reject those characterizations. When participants tried to measure themselves against the more woman-centered images promulgated by lesbian-feminists they found themselves lacking on two points. First, they were ashamed, embarrassed, or disgusted by the specifically female aspects of their bodies and therefore had little desire to join with their companions in the glorification of their womanhood. Second, they were generally not interested in having their sexual partners enjoy their femaleness or attempt to provide them with pleasures in specifically female ways. In other words, when participants compared themselves to both generalized and specific lesbian others, they were struck more by the contrasts than by the similarities. It therefore became apparent to these participants that they had more in common with straight men than with lesbian women. Eventually, their discomfort with being included in the lesbian camp was alleviated by their discovery of the increasingly socially available concept of female-to-male transsexualism, which offered them a conceptually simple, and more apt, solution to their extreme gender dysphoria. Once they knew themselves to be female-to-male transsexuals, they were eager to move beyond wishing to and into actually becoming men.

Thus, in the end, participants gradually exhausted their possibilities as women. Each probed the roles for women that were available to them. As each alternative was weighed and found wanting, the field of possibilities narrowed to that which was perhaps ultimately the most suitable but also seemingly the most unobtainable: to become men. Until participants happened upon the option called female-to-male transsexualism, they were relegated to forever feeling like bizarre misfits–even among those sexual minorities who already inhabited the fringes of society. Female-to-male transsexualism offered them a way out of their dilemmas: a path toward integration and self-actualization.

 

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost I wish to express my thanks to the people who volunteered their time to become involved in this research project and to teach me something of their way of life. My thanks to Lynn Greenhough for helpful comments on early drafts of this paper and to my research assistants Noreen Begoray, Bev Copes, Sheila Pederson, and Sandra Winfield. Portions of this research were funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Victoria, Canada.

 

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Endnotes:

1. I use the term “female-to-male transsexuals” rather than “transsexual men” because I do not wish to distinguish between individuals at various stages of transition. I have included in this category anyone who so designated themselves to me. I use the term “lesbian” to refer to sexual/romantic relationships between two persons who have gender identities as women regardless of their anatomical sexes. I use the term “homosexual” to refer to sexual relations between persons of the same anatomical sex regardless of their gender identities. For further discussion of my use of the language of gendered sexuality see Devor 1993.
2. Consider that Krafft-Ebing described “the extreme grade of degenerative homosexuality” as “hermaphroditism” wherein “the woman of this type possesses of the feminine qualities only the genital organs; thought, sentiment, action, even external appearance are those of the man . . . the[ir] desire to adopt the active role towards the beloved person of the same sex seems to invite the use of the priapus” (264-65). Compare Krafft-Ebing’s description of mannish lesbians with the diagnostic criteria for adult Gender Identity Disorder from the DSM-IV: “a stated desire to be the other sex, frequent passing as the other sex, desire to live or be treated as the other sex, or the conviction that he or she has the typical feelings and reactions of the other sex” (1994, 537).

3. My comments on this topic are partially based upon my own recollections and partially upon my analysis of the data reported herein and elsewhere.

4. Consider this extract from Martin and Lyon:

It is those women who feel that they are “born butch” who tend to ape all the least desirable characteristics of men. In this case one may as well say to those butch, “Up against the wall, male chauvinist pig!” For to consider oneself a heterosexual, to stress that male and female are opposites which presumably, attract, is to accept the entire male-imposed doctrine that woman’s place is indeed in the home serving the male (1972, 74).

5. The book is tentatively titled Making Men: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society, and is to be published by Indiana University Press.

6. All percentages subsequently reported are proportions of the forty-three participants who had been attracted to women.

7. In 1921 the English Parliament attempted to introduce a law that would make lesbianism a crime. Speaking against the proposition Lord Desart said, “You are going to tell the whole world that there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamt of it. I think that is a very great mischief ” (quoted in Weeks 1989, 105). Clearly, many young women were still laboring under such ignorance more than fifty years later.

8. I have given all participants pseudonymous men’s names and, for the sake of continuity and clarity, have used them when referring to participants at any age.

9. I have tried to remain true-to the gender of the persons involved in this research project. When referring to a man telling a story about when he was a girl or woman, I have used gender pronouns that reflect the gender of the subject in each time frame, e.g., “He remembered that as a girl, she was a tomboy.”

10. In addition, two participants who had been involved with lesbian communities also took this tack. One other participant was involved in a more-than-twenty-year homosexual relationship that both parties framed as a relationship between two gay men.

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References

American Psychiatric Association. 1980. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 3d ed. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 4th ed. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association.

Benjamin, H. 1966. The transsexual phenomenon. New York: Julian Press.

Devor H. 1993. Toward a taxonomy of gendered sexuality. Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality 6: 23-55.

Ellis, H. 1918. Studies in the psychology of sex. Vol. 2. Sexual inversion. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis.

Faderman, L. 1991. Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth century America. New York: Penguin.

Hall, R. [1928] 1986. The well of loneliness. London: Hutchinson.

Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. 1990. Standards of care. Available from The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, Inc., P.O. Box 1718, Sonoma, CA 95476.

Krafft-Ebing, R. von. [1906] 1965. Psychopathia sexualis with especial reference to the antipathic sexual instinct. A medico forensic study. Translated by F. S. Klaf. New York: Stein & Day.

Martin, D., and P. Lyon. 1972. Lesbian/woman. San Francisco: Glide.

Newton. E. 1989. The mythic mannish lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the new woman. In Hidden from history: Reclaiming the gay and lesbian past, edited by M. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey, Jr., 281-93. New York: NAL.

Pauly, I. 1974. Female transsexualism: Parts I and 11. Archives of Sexual Behavior 3: 487-525.

Radicalesbians. 1970. The woman identified woman. In Radical feminism, edited by A. Koedt, E. Levine, and A. Rapone, 240-45. New York: Quadrangle.

Sedgewick, E. 1990. The epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weeks, J. 1989. Sex, politics and society: The regulation of sexuality since 1800. 2d ed. London: Longman.

Aaron H Devor – Prospective Students

If you are interested in working under my supervision, please feel free to contact me directly by e-mail. When you initially write to me, however, please be sure to provide all of the following information:

 

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For more information about graduate studies at the University of Victoria, see the Faculty of Graduate Studies. The application process for new students can be completed online.

Dr. Aaron H Devor is professor of sociology, former Dean of Graduate Studies, and the Founder and Academic Director of the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, Canada. Dr. Devor specializes in the study of gender, sex, and sexuality in transgender people. His first book, Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality, coined the phrase Gender Blending, and examined the social construction of gender in society and its implications for the lives of females whose gender presentations mixed masculinity, femininity, and other characteristics to the point that their gender was not always recognizable to observers. Devor’s second book, FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society, provided a detailed, compassionate, intimate, and incisive portrait of the life experiences of 45 transmen and suggested theoretical frameworks for understanding the interplay of gender, sex, and sexuality. His more recent research focussed on Reed Erickson, a transman and founder of the Erickson Educational Foundation, who was instrumental in bringing issues of transgender and gay rights into public awareness during the mid-twentieth century. Currently, Dr. Devor is actively building more depth and breadth in what is already the world’s largest Transgender Archives. Dr. Devor is an accomplished public lecturer who has made numerous appearances in person, on television and radio, and in print media. He is available for research, consultation, and educational work concerning trans* issues.