How We Become Real: The Making of Jewish and Transsexual Identities

Abstract

How We Become Real:The Making of Jewish and Transsexual Identities Joy Ladin (bio) The American poet Marianne Moore said that a poem is "an imaginary garden with real toads in it."1 That is the way I understand the symbolic systems that define and sustain gender and Jewish identities, giving meaning to terms such as "Jew," "man," and "woman," and enabling us to recognize, signify, and express these identities. These symbolic systems are "imaginary gardens" with "real toads"—real people—living in them, people who depend upon the identities those symbolic systems define and sustain in order to understand themselves in relation to others. The fraught, fascinating intersection between symbolic systems and those who live in and through them has been a focus of feminist, queer, and trans-gender theory. In much of this work, these symbolic systems are described neither as imaginary nor as gardens, but as sites or channels of social coercion and violence. Feminist scholars, for example, have extensively demonstrated how women have been "disciplined and punished" by the symbolic system—transgender theorists call it the "gender binary"—that defines female identity and turns biology into social destiny. Women are born into this "imaginary garden"—assigned to the female gender at birth, as transgender theorists say—and though feminists have shown that women can resist binary gender definitions, the gender binary itself offers no way out. In this imaginary garden, gender is defined as fixed at birth, and the only alternative to being a woman is being a man. From the perspective of these critiques, the gender binary and, by extension, other identity-constituting symbolic systems, represent an institutionalization of power as unilateral and univocal as prison. Its subjects may try to revolt, escape, negotiate its rules, or break down the walls, but no one would, or at least should, want to live within it. Some queer and transgender theorists invert this top-down model of the relationship between imaginary gardens and their real inhabitants. Their arguments hold that rather than being defined by symbolic systems, we can constitute our identities individually, mixing and matching signs, conventions, and other identity-signaling symbols to define ourselves. According to these accounts, identities are individually determined, rather than being fixed [End Page 67] at birth. For example, Sandy Stone's landmark essay, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," often credited with launching transgender studies, argues that instead of trying to "pass" as men who were born male or women who were born female, transsexuals (those whose gender identifications as male or female conflict with their physical sex) should highlight their "dissonance" with the gender binary, and express their identities in ways that embrace "physicalities of constantly shifting figure and ground that exceed the frame of any possible representation."2 In other words, Stone calls for transsexuals to stop trying to tailor our bodies and life stories to the readily intelligible but inadequate terms of binary gender—terms which require us to hide any aspects of ourselves that would be "dissonant" with binary gender. Stone argues that we transsexuals should define our identities individually rather than communally, and express those individualistic identities in idiosyncratic ways that defy and confound the gender binary. According to Stone and others who embrace this approach, identity is self-determined, defined not by communal symbolic systems that govern how others see us but by how we see ourselves.3 From this perspective, none of us are bound to or defined by imaginary gardens such as that of binary gender. And whatever we choose to do with the signifiers of identity they offer, we should be completely unconcerned with whether we are seen as "real toads"—real men, real women, real Jews, or real exemplars of whatever identity they sustain—because we always are, and only are, really ourselves. Both the top-down and self-determination approaches to identity have proven theoretically powerful and politically useful. However, both tend to overlook the fact that to many people, identity-constituting symbolic systems, whatever their drawbacks, represent neither institutionalized oppression nor obstacles to self-determination; rather, these imaginary gardens represent home and community. For better and, always, of course, for worse, we willingly dwell within them, because...