Resisting Transnormativity: challenging the medicalization and regulation of trans bodies

Abstract

When Jenna Talackova entered the 2012 Miss Universe Canada competition, she did not disclose her history of being bom and assigned male at birth (nor should she have to). When the competition's organizers, including business mogul Donald Trump, became aware that Talackova was a transsexual woman, she was disqualified from the competition as the incongruence between Talackova's sex assigned at birth and her current gender identity and presentation were grounds for dismissal. Talackova was not the young woman she appeared to be. However, a month later she was told that if she could prove she meets the gender recognition requirements of Canada and other international competitions, then she would be allowed to compete.1 Following her initial ousting, Talackova gained media attention as she fought for the same opportunity to compete as other women. Her story included the narrative of cross-gender identification as a child: she knew she was female by age four, she began hormone therapy at puberty, and she had undergone full sexual-reassignment surgery, which reconstructed her penis into a vagina.2 Jumping through all the right hoops to qualify for sexual reassignment surgery (SRS), Talackova upholds society's standards of both beauty and femininity. Effectively, Talackova was presented as a normal heterosexual woman whose body (read: genitals) now matched her gender identity. By wholly crossing from one side of the binary to the other, the sex-equals-gender model is upheld. Talackova proved she was a woman by conforming to traditional notions of gender. Consequently, Talackova was rewarded for subscribing to gender normative standards and was reinstated in the competition. If Talackova had not been fortunate enough to undergo sexual reassignment surgery, it is likely that she would not have been allowed to compete as she would not have met the legal and competition requirements of being female. The incongruence between her gender and sex would have challenged the sex-equals-gender binary and would have been seen as a threat to normative gender standards.This paper investigates some of the medical and legal procedures and policies of sex reassignment within Canada and the United States. Talackova's narrative illuminates several key aspects of medical transition and transnormativity that are discussed in this paper. These include early childhood cross-gender identification, medical treatment (through hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgeiy), sexuality, and legal change of sex designation on identification documents. Trans bodies and identities are constructed and regulated through medicalization and trans persons must conform to medical models of transsexuality to access treatment and undergo sex reassignment surgery.3 I argue that the normalization of trans persons upholds the bigender system that constructs trans bodies as either normal or deviant (read: sick). I will deconstruct the ways in which the transnormative narrative of transition simultaneously legitimizes transsexuality to those who can conform to the dominant narrative while delegitimizing gender variance and nonconforming trans persons.(TRANS)NORMATIVITYTo be normative is to ascribe to a social set of ideals that are unquestioned and presumed to be essential and unchangeable. We constitute ourselves through these notions of normality, reinforcing or resisting what it means to be normal. Michael Warner, known for his critique of same-sex marriage, attributes nonnativity to the invention and spread of statistics in the nineteenth century.4 While to be is to fall within a statistical range known as the mean or average, through medicalization these nonnalcies become biological truths of what a person should be. Nonnativity depends on a hierarchy of privilege and shame where those who fall within the category of nonnal are privileged, and those who fail at normativity are often disadvantaged and shamed by society. …