So there's this section in Intersexualization where Eckert discusses the cross-cultural intersexualization of a population of people in the Dominican Republic by New York endocrinologist Julianne Imperato-McGinley and her team in 1979.
I want to discuss it here a little differently than Eckert does, just as a way of exploring a particular transfeminist concept for myself.
First, who makes up the population? I'm going to exclude the specific diagnostic labels that Imperato-McGinley assign to this group of people in this quote by Eckert for the moment, to eliminate any temptation to assume what their bodies looked like and draw meaning from that.
"The 38 people in this study identified as having [] were from 23 families of four generations, some of them were related. Eighteen were raised unambiguously as girls of whom 17 changed into a male gender role during or after puberty. It is not noted how the sample was composed, or how individuals were identified as being []. Interestingly, Imperato-McGinley and her research team seem to have collected bio-medical data but it is not stated how and over which time period. In fact they primarily conducted interviews with individuals somehow known to be [] and their families to obtain historical data."
I want to focus on the group of people who were raised unambiguously as girls. For the purpose of simplicity, these were 18 people who were assigned female at birth in their home culture. Of these 18 people, 17 grew into men and 1 grew into a woman.
Julianne Imperato-McGinley and her team saw this as justification for their theory that the "biological force" Stoller imagined must exist (that, in his idea, supposedly dictated a person's unchanging internal gender identity beyond one's rearing) was androgen/testosterone. In a paper written together with Stoller, they state: "some hormonal factors or biological force as previously postulated by Stoller, was strong enough in this subject to override the female sex of rearing."
(As an aside, in my view, this is a strong potential for the origin of the concept that testosterone is somehow more powerful, permanent, and meaningful to identity than either estrogen as a hormone or experience living within a woman's social role. We see this idea echo now in discourses that assume testosterone-based puberty is uniquely damaging, that it somehow overrides a trans woman's femininity or that it generates personality traits associated with masculinity such as aggression and misogyny).
Eckert writes on page 158:
Sex(ual) difference, neither in the psychological framework of Stoller nor in the endocrinological framework of Imperato-McGinley, is thought of in terms of symmetry; Stoller finds his theory of protofemininity and of the effort boys have to go through to become properly masculine backed up by Imperato-McGinleyās theory of male hormones overpowering the female sex of rearing. Masculinity becomes the natural force on a psychological and biological level. It is constructed as both, a hidden biological essence and a psychological achievement, which can literally āoverpowerā and āoverrideā femininity. Biological in combination with psychoanalytical argumentation is here used to reaffirm the status quo and the superiority of maleness and masculinity, and therefore consequently males and men. In Imperato-McGinley, Peterson, Gautier, & Sturlaās research, the category of androgen/testosterone as a male/masculine hormone becomes intensely intertwined with psychological categories when she brings gender identity (Stoller) and gender role (Money) together with four so-called patterns of sexual behavior.
These researchers are heavily invested in constructing this population of people as a rhetorical tool to support their preexisting patriarchal ideas about masculinity, manhood, and heterosexuality. Their need to ignore the personhood of those they're using as data is highlighted in their inability to accept the actual narrative offered. It can't be that girls grew into men, it must be that they were male from the start and simply incorrectly assigned by their society. Already in this premise is the neocolonial notion that Western researchers are superior and have greater authority to assign sex than anyone in the Dominican Republic.
What then of the girls in this population who grew up into women? These were people who were assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and grew up to be women. If not caught in a web of cross-cultural intersexualization, we might understand them as cis women.
However, despite being raised as girls, the Global North researchers assigned everyone in this population as male. Because of this secondary neo-colonial assignment, these women are described by the researchers like this:
"has the affect and mannerisms of a man and engages in sexual activity with village women"
"She left the village, has been living alone and working as a domestic and has not been sexually involved with other men. She wears false breasts, yet her build and mannerisms are masculine. She denies any attraction to women and desires surgical correction of the genitalia so that she can be a normal woman."
Eckert notes, "One person is described as having 'changed to a male-gender identity' but continues to 'dress as a woman'."
I think anyone reading these descriptions can feel the intense transfeminization happening here. The way these women are discussed bears all the hallmarks of a transfeminized subject: having her body and mannerisms compared to men, having her sexuality perceived to be deviant whether attracted to men or women, projecting the idea of artificiality onto her appearance, the implication of her being deceptive ("she denies..."), the concept of her not being a woman but merely dressing as one, etc.
I think this implies something significant about the process of transfeminization. It seems to me (and I'm certainly open to other interpretations) that the mechanism of transfeminization is the assignment of sex (as male on those who refuse it) by whoever is the greatest authority or holds the most structural power within the gender hierarchy. It isn't necessarily an act that must happen at birth, as this mechanism of transfeminization unfolded on adult women already living their lives.
This, to me, really helps to de-naturalize the process of transfeminization. We know it is not about bodies but about power, and I think this piece demonstrates how systems of colonialism and imperialism were able to transfeminize subjects who were not transfeminized beforehand.
This process is explored somewhat in A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson, though not fully. I think Talia Bhatt's work, particularly "The Third Sex," is an especially incicive critique of the failures of Western transfeminism to contend with the processes of transfeminization emerging from patriarchy rather than from colonialism.
It is difficult to know where to begin when contesting such a naive, idealistic view of precolonial societies, precisely because it is so trivially contradicted by the most perfunctory empirical observations. Hindu scripture, predating the very concept of a āWestā by millennia, codifies the inferiority of women and the necessity for wives to subordinate themselves to husbands. Even during colonial times, the outlawing of widow burning was a pitched battle between Indian activists and the upper-caste Hindu elites. (The edict was eventually reverted to appease that selfsame elite.) I do not know how to explain to learned academics that sexual objectification and reproductive exploitation were not innovations that the West pioneered, nor do I know how to explain that a historical record of āasceticismā, of hijra being prescribed a livelihood of begging for alms at ceremonies, is not āreverenceā or an āinstitutionalized gender-roleā, but marginalization.
Here, I think, is a useful example to bridge an understanding of how colonialism and patriarchy intersect. Third gendering transfeminization may emerge from any society organized through a patriarchal structuring, and so a society need not be introduced to it through colonialism to independently produce these structures. However, colonial (and neocolonial) powers can exert authority to reassign sex, usurping the assignment given by a colonized authority. And so transfeminization becomes a tool of power that can abject different populations depending on whoever currently holds the authority of assignment.
I think this nuance better situates how these structures function in my understanding.
