{"id":284,"date":"2019-09-07T19:45:33","date_gmt":"2019-09-07T18:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.nfshost.com\/?p=284"},"modified":"2019-09-07T20:39:47","modified_gmt":"2019-09-07T19:39:47","slug":"a-cock-and-bull-story-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/2019\/09\/07\/a-cock-and-bull-story-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"A cock and bull story. Part I."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There\u2019s a film you may have heard of called A Cock and Bull\nStory, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. The film is based on the 18th<\/sup>\ncentury novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The novel itself is about\nTristram’s attempts to write his life story. One of the central jokes of the\nbook, however, is that he cannot explain anything simply. Instead, he must make\nexplanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent\nthat his own birth is not even reached until Volume III. To give you an idea, this\nis the very first sentence in the book\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish either my\nfather or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally\nbound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly\nconsider\u2019d how much depended upon what they were then doing;\u2014that not only the\nproduction of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy\nformation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of\nhis mind;\u2014and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his\nwhole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were\nthen uppermost;\u2014Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded\naccordingly,\u2014I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure\nin the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of all of this, Tristram Shandy\nis considered to be an early example of postmodernist literature and many\nbelieve it to be an unfilmable book. Obviously, this didn\u2019t stop the makers of\nA Cock and Bull Story. They got around this by making a film about people\ntrying and failing to make a film about the novel, much how Tristram tries and\nfails to tell his life story. It\u2019s clever and funny stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I bring this up as this is how writing this blog post has felt to me. For ages, I\u2019ve been saying I would write something about John Money and the history of the term gender identity and how trans and intersex became so intertwined in medical literature. The problem is, it\u2019s almost an unrecordable history. Much like the makers of A Cock and Bull Story, the texts I must go from are filled with spurious claims and unnecessary diversions. The language is deliberately vague, while promising details, with its verbosity, that are not there. Many of the former writers and researchers, especially Money himself, were more concerned with self-aggrandising than writing anything that might be useful or clear to others. It\u2019s frustrating. That being said, I think it\u2019s an important story to tell, so I\u2019m going to try. I can\u2019t promise it will be clever and funny, like the film. I can\u2019t even say it will be a definitive history, and I feel like it may take more than one post to write it all, but let\u2019s have a go. Here is my gender identity homage to A Cock and Bull Story\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term gender identity did not appear in our lexicon until some time in the 1960s. First usage is contested, which gives you an idea of why this history is problematic from the get-go. The OED originally attributed it to the Spring 1969 issue of the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) Newsletter, Vol. 2, however, this is contested<\/a> by John Money himself, who states that the term was actually used in volume 1 of EEF, in this passage\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This press release is referencing\nthe opening of the ill-fated (we\u2019ll get onto that another day) gender identity\nclinic at John Hopkins Hospital, previously known as the sex-change clinic.\nObviously, this phrase didn\u2019t spring up from nowhere, so we\u2019re going to begin\nby looking back to understand how it came into being. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, gender and queer theorists\nwill tell you that \u201ctrans people have always existed\u201d but this is a problem, as\nwe cannot attribute modern theories and beliefs about gender to people who\nlived in an entirely different time. Many examples that queer theorists cling\nto seem to be women who wished to escape the historical confines of being a\nwoman, such as the case of James Barry<\/a>, which\nsome of you will be familiar with due to a controversy earlier this year\nregarding a book about Barry\u2019s life. For those of you that don\u2019t know, Barry\nwas born Margaret Anne Bulkley, some time between 1789 and 1805. The child,\nMargaret, was educated with a view to maybe becoming a tutor, but when she\nfailed to find employment, her family, some close friends and herself hit on a\nplan. She would disguise herself as a man and attend medical college. This plan\nwas successful. Margaret attended the University of Edinburgh, disguised as a\nman with the new name James Barry, and successfully qualified as a surgeon in\n1813. She went on to have a glittering career (one of the things she is noted\nfor is completing the first ever successful caesarean section), continuing in\nher guise as Barry. She eventually died in 1865 and only then did the public\nbecome aware that Barry was female. It\u2019s impossible to know if, had Barry lived\nnow, at a time when women can attend universities and train to be doctors, she\nwould have chosen to live as a man. It seems odd to suggest she definitely would\nhave done, when the sole purpose of the deception was to gain entrance to\nmedical school. It\u2019s also impossible to say whether Barry ever expressed any\nthoughts about her own identity. For this reason, I am going to discount the\nhistories of GNC people, co-opted by queer theory, and jump into the science\nliterature instead. This brings us into the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the earliest reference<\/a>s I have found about people who felt an incongruence with their sex and their inner experience of their sex (gender was yet to work its way into science and medical literature) is in the work of German psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal<\/a>. He named the syndrome Kontrdre SexualEmpfindung (contrary sexual self-awareness \u2013 coined in a book of the same name which was published in 1870). However, it\u2019s important to note, that as one or two of his cases were not clearly transsexuals (by modern standards), this term was overextended by others to include homosexuality. This is typical of other work at the time. Another example is the book Psychopathia Sexualis<\/a> (1886), by Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing<\/a>, which documented the histories of people who expressed a strong desire to live as the opposite sex as well as people who had been born one sex but were living as another. One such example can be seen here\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This conflation of trans and homosexuality, really, comes as no surprise in its historical context. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs<\/a>, a German lawyer, journalist, and author (btw, I have no idea why everyone is German at this point in the story \u2013 any suggestions for theories about this would be gratefully received), who is regarded<\/a> as a pioneer of the modern gay rights movement, had invented a third sex theory<\/a><\/em>, in the 1860s. He had proposed that men\u2019s spirits in women\u2019s bodies (urningen) and women\u2019s spirits in male bodies (urnings) were the \u201ccause\u201d of homosexuality. This theory gained in some popularity and was considered very progressive for its time, although it was later abandoned. However, it\u2019s easy to see links with Ulrich\u2019s theory and the modern transgender movement, which seems to rely, in many cases, on a belief of a gendered soul of some description.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This conflation of trans and\nhomosexuality (I should probably point out that neither of these terms existed\nyet) continued until the work of Magnus Hirschfield<\/a>\nin the 1920s. Hirschfield is credited<\/a> as being the\nfirst person to distinguish between homosexuality (the desire to have partners\nof the same sex) and transsexualism (the desire to live as the other sex). What\nHirschfield wanted to show was that cross-dressing (transvestitism) was not identical\nto homosexuality. He argued<\/a> that\nthere were four main types of transvestites: heterosexual, homosexual,\nautomonosexual (or narcissistic), and bisexual. It\u2019s worth noting that many of Hirschfield\u2019s\nsubjects would not be considered transvestites in the modern sense of the word\nbut would be more accurately described as transsexuals. To be clear here, and I\nknow the language is considered outdated by many, but it\u2019s what we have to work\nwith \u2013 a transvestite is someone who dresses as the opposite sex, a transsexual\nis someone who undergoes some medical intervention in order for their body to\nappear as the opposite sex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hirschfield\u2019s work was then built\non by Henry Havelock\nEllis<\/a>, an English physician and writer. Ellis disagreed with Hirschfield\u2019s\nterminology and instead shifted the emphasis from the behaviour of\ncrossdressing to the inner experience a person had of their sex. In 1913 he\ncoined the term sexo-aesthetic\ninversion<\/a><\/em> to explain the phenomenon, following this up in 1920 with the\nintroduction of the term eonism<\/a>\nto describe people who adopted the role of someone of the opposite sex, in distinction\nto transvestites who dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A quick side note here, eonism is\nnamed after Chevalier\nd’\u00c9on<\/a>, a French diplomat and spy, born in 1728. D’\u00c9on lived as a man for 49\nyears, although he also successfully infiltrated the court of Empress Elizabeth\nof Russia by posing as a woman. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the theories and work of\nHirschfield and Ellis, the distinctions between transsexuality and\nhomosexuality were not broadly accepted until decades later. In fact, the term\ntranssexual itself did not come into use until 1949 when American sexologist, David Oliver\nCaudwell<\/a>, introduced it in his essay Psychopathia Transexualis<\/em>.\nCaudwell distinguished between biological sex and \u201cpsychological sex\u201d. He saw\nthe latter as determined by social conditioning and denied that there were\nmodes of thinking intrinsically linked to male or female biology. It\u2019s worth noting<\/a>\nthat Caudwell, however, was not in favour of medical transition and, instead,\nbelieved that it was better treated as a mental disorder, mainly due to the\nlimitations of medical science but also as he believed \u201cpsychological sex\u201d to be\nplastic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, despite SRS (sex reassignment\nsurgery) being performed throughout Europe since the 1920s (the most famous\ncase being that of Lily Elbe<\/a>,\nwhose story was fictionalised and told in the book The Danish Girl), the concept\nof transsexualism did not reach the mainstream until the case<\/a>\nof George Jorgensen was published in the Journal of the American Medical in 1953.\nJorgenson was a US WWII army veteran, who travelled to Denmark in 1952 and underwent\nSRS, returning to the US as Christine Jorgensen<\/a>.\nJorgensen\u2019s case is significant, not just for bringing transsexualism to the\npublic, but also for the influence it had on those who worked with people who\nfelt an incongruence between their sex and their inner feeling of their sex, so\nwe\u2019re going to spend a bit of time unpicking that. Especially as it\u2019s at this point\nthat we really see the idea that having such feelings may have some somatic\ncause and the conflation of trans with intersex really taking a hold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think, though, we can save that\nfor another day, as this post is already quite long, and I want to make this as\nbite sized as possible. I\u2019m aware that we haven\u2019t gotten anywhere near the\ntheory of gender identity yet, but that feels apt for this cock and bull story.\nBesides, Jorgensen\u2019s story brings us to the US, and closer to John Money and\nhis work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a film you may have heard of called A Cock and Bull Story, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. The film is based on the 18th century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The novel itself is about Tristram’s attempts to write his life story. One of the central jokes of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,41,53,48],"tags":[61,6,62,63,18],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-intersex","category-lgbt","category-psychology","category-trans","tag-gender-identity","tag-intersex","tag-psychology","tag-sexology","tag-trans","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrkhvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}