Gender Blender

I'd like to say that I'm responding to Books Do Furnish a Room the same week Eve did because I've been working on my response for ages, but the truth is I'm doing it just to bother him. First, a simple clarification: he suggests that I think gender roles should exist "at something like the level of a nation-state" and must therefore regard subversive subcultures as threatening. Since when do I have to believe that? Being American does not necessarily mean being a charming bank robber; neither does it mean wanting to eliminate charming bank robber subculture; the most I would say is that America (and American-comma-what-it-means-to-be-an) would be very different without them running around our country and our folk canon.

Next, the harder question to answer: can I take a hard-line on traditional gender roles that allows "butch lesbian" to be one of them? This will surprise a few readers (BDFAD among them), but I've shifted my ground on this from being enthusiastically pro-butch to being tentatively anti, mostly because I've found less Catholic reasons to have a problem with it. I think I can explain in three easy payments of $19.95, so here goes, briefly.

I watched In a Year of Thirteen Moons, a Rainer Werner Fassbinder movie in which Volker Spengler plays the transsexual Erwin/Elvira. Her back story is that, as Erwin, she fell in love with her business partner (played by Gottfried John), who reacts to her confession of undying love by saying very casually, "Too bad you're not a girl." On the basis of that offhand remark, Erwin goes to Africa, has an operation, and comes back Elvira. (It should go without saying that it doesn't do the trick for Gottfried John.)

The rhetoric of butch lesbianism and transsexualism tends to rest on being true to oneself: my soul calls out for a different body; to deny my right to switch teams is to force me to be someone other than who I am. What we get in In the Year of Thirteen Moons is a character who becomes a woman for love of another person–nothing to do with self-expression–and Fassbinder has it right.

If you are skeptical, consider the fact that there are no straight butches, I think for the simple reason that men wouldn't find it attractive. (Which is not to say that drag kings can't be hot, only that they're only hot for, at most, a couple of nights a week. Put down that cigarette-holder, Marlene honey, and play with the children!) The thrill of being a butch is getting other people to interact with a man. It's all to do with being seen a certain way.

If you're still skeptical, consider that all roles are in some important way about sacrifice and all sacrifice has some kind of love behind it [EDIT: has some kind of beloved as its object]. It could be amour propre, I guess, but that'd be pretty lame, wouldn't it?

If you're still skeptical, you are an authenticity-monger and I want nothing to do with you.

So we pick our gender teams not from any soul-searching assessment of our true selves but for the person (or Platonic form or ideal fiction) we love. As long as we're pleasing the objects of our affection, who better to please than He who loves us best, or, to put it another way, the One that created us in the first place?