Translating Trans:Queer Theory, Script Theory, and Co-constructed Meaning in Kate Bornstein’s Serious Play Madelyn Detloff Phase transition refers to the “bridge” between one state and another, the transition system that includes the time before insight and the crossing over to meaning. —Doris Fromberg (161) The diagnosis of gender dysphoria requires that a life takes on a more or less definite shape over time; a gender can only be diagnosed if it meets the test of time. You have to show that you have wanted for a long time to live life as the other gender; it also requires that you prove that you have a practical and livable plan to live life for a long time as the other gender. The diagnosis, in this way, wants to establish that gender is a relatively permanent phenomenon. It won’t do, for instance, to walk into a clinic and say that it was only after you read a book by Kate Bornstein that you realized what you wanted to do, but that it wasn’t really conscious for you until that time. —Judith Butler (81) Once upon a time there was a girl named Kate. Wait, let me start over again. Once upon a time there was a boy, not named Kate, who became a girl named Kate, well not a girl, but rather a woman. And then not a woman. Or a man. Bornstein, the Kate who was never a girl or a boy named Kate, explains, in hir 2011 book Hello Cruel World, “I’m not exactly a transsexual. A transsexual is a man who becomes a woman, or a woman who becomes a man, and I’m not a man, and I’m not a woman. I break too many rules of both those genders to be one or the other. I transgress gender. You could call me transgressively gendered. You could call [End Page 75] me transgender. Me, I call myself a traveler” (loc. 250-52). [As I typed this, I had to change my Microsoft Word dictionary to allow “sie” and “hir” to count as grammatically “correct” pronouns—not mistakes. My changes alter a script made from a binary code that will now allow me to refer to Kate by gender-neutral pronouns without my constantly being alerted that the pronouns are outside of the lexicon, the pre-programmed words that adhere to “standard” English spellings. The standard, when programmed into a seemingly innocuous computer program like my spellchecker, reiterates the norm—in this case a gender binary: his or hers, he or she. Iterations outside of the binary norm incite scrutiny and are flagged by a red squiggly underline for correction. Thus gender norms reproduce and reinforce themselves by seemingly neutral, even inanimate, forces.] Okay, I’ve fixed the dictionary. Let me start again. Once upon a time there was a kid who became a traveler named Kate. … The “once upon a time formulation” is a different kind of script, theorized by scholars of play. Doris Fromberg, a cognitive psychologist who studies the connections between play and meaning-making, explains that “Script theory” defines the implicit rules that underlie sociodramatic play. Script theory refers to children’s capacity to enter one another’s oral scripts on the basis of minimal clues or plans (Nelson et al., 1986; Schank & Abelson, 1977). Young children instantly become the roles that they play within the emerging scripts. They engage in different degrees of oral script development, depending on their developmental age and language skills. In this sense, sociodramatic play is a form of representation in which script theory is apparent; the rules of the play consist of children engaging in the fluctuating processes of metacommunication and building imagery together during the play. (160) Demonstrating the implicit rules of sociodramatic play, Fromberg includes the following hypothetical example: In effect, as one child “becomes” a role, other children might respond in ways that reflect a particular life experience, as follows: [End Page 76] Child 1: “Wah! My leg is broken.” Child 2: “Stop moving. I need to put on this bandage.” A Different Child 2: “I’ve told you not to jump off the roof. Bad, bad. Now I...
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Jul 27, 2017
Kristin Enola Gilbert 
Open Access