The Trans/Romance Dilemma in Transamerica and Other Films

Abstract

Romance is the stumbling block of trans films, providing a quandary even as it proves a popular standard for mainstream access into the transgender experience. Too often narrative expectation is subverted and romantic contact stifled because the filmmaker fears the audience will read the trans character's gender identity as inauthentic and the romance as transgressive. Duncan Tucker's Transamerica (2005), the award-winning film about a male-to-female transsexual who reconnects with her family in the midst of her transition, recalls earlier transgender films The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), The Crying Game (1992), and Boys Don't Cry (1999), where romance undermines the otherwise positive portrayal of the trans experience and reaffirms the dominant viewpoint that authentic gender is dependent upon birth sex rather than upon gender identity. The trans/romance dilemma is the result of two connected, but distinct cultural associations between transgender identity and sexual transgression: the traditional medical conflation of transgenderism with sexual deviance and the overarching presumption that any identity category transgression, more commonly known as passing, is related to sexual transgression. The directors' attempts to resolve the anxiety inherent in these traditions with the gender casting of the trans character, shots of the trans body, and physical interaction between romantic partners end up only reinforcing the character's inauthenticity.In dominant discourse, sex, a biological category, is conflated with gender, the social category of identity exhibited through appearance, mannerisms, dress, and so on. Failure to differentiate between sex and gender exists even when people recognize that the masculine and feminine characteristics assigned to each gender are social constructs that differ across cultures and time periods. Individually or as a group, transpersons expose the workings of this gender system, revealing that the binary is neither natural nor invariant and that male and female are not mutually exclusive categories.Transgender is an umbrella term, which includes cross-dressers, drag queens and kings, transsexuals, and other genderqueer people who may identify outside of the two gender system. Organized transgender activism has existed since the 1960s, but has gained momentum and public attention since the early 1990s (Meyerowitz 20812, 227-41; Stryker 139-53). As a result of this work, as of early 2012, sixteen states have banned discrimination based on gender identity, as have almost 80% of Fortune 500 and other top companies in 2012 (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, State; Human Rights Campaign 9). Visibility has also exploded into popular culture, with new transgender narratives ranging from reality television shows like TransGeneration (2005), Transamerican Love Story (2008), and RuPaul's Drag Race (2009), major storylines on television series like The L Word, Ugly Betty, and Dirty Sexy Money, and documentaries like Transparent (2005), Boy I Am (2006), and She's A Boy I Knew (2007). However, traditional stereotypes of transpersons continue to shape mainstream depictions, most notably in the conflation of transgender romance and sexual transgression in film.The biased medical discourse that formulated this association between transgenderism and sexual deviance started in early twentieth-century sexology, when homosexuals were defined as gender inverts, so that cross-dressing was presumed to be a physical manifestation of this psychological state. Even though most male cross-dressers are heterosexual, this presumption lingers today in the common stereotype that men who crossdress do so to attract male partners and alleviate their shame and guilt over being homosexual (Boyd 25; see also Garber 207 and Serano 128). Midcentury sexologists who crafted the modern psychiatric category of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) and its accompanying current clinical criteria for transsexuality, known as Standards of Care, obviously feared such connotations when they mandated heteronormative sexuality as a goal of treatment for transsexuals and defined homosexuality as an automatic contraindication for a diagnosis of GID until 1994 (Rosario 39; Fausto-Sterling 107; Rudacille 124-30; Stone 292). …