2008 Woodie Awards
Failure to Communicate: Arnold Scwarzenegger, rape, and the problem of being transgender
Luke McIntyre
Issue date: 10/24/06 Section: Opinions
Arnold Schwarzenegger, my favorite former actor turned Republican Governor of California to date, signed a law at the end of September which limits the "gay panic" defense. This defense is becoming popular, or infamous, in cases of attacks on people who are transgender.
The scenario goes - as it did in the murder of Gwen Araujo, for whom the law was named - that a transgender person, we'll say one that was born a man, is living as a woman. That person then has sexual relations with a straight male. The straight male later finds out that the person he was with is not a woman. Then there is violence.
There is another crime here that is not discussed very openly, as it is usually overshadowed by the horrible details of these attacks. After being outed as a man, Gwen Araujo was beaten and then strangled to death by three men - previous lovers - who then attempted to bury Araujo in a California desert. No one outside of evangelical Christian clergy would defend these three monsters, who have since been convicted of their crime. There is, however, an uncomfortable point that needs to be made here.
Gwen Araujo was "living as a woman." This is how they phrase it. Living as a woman. But Araujo was living as a woman in the sense that if I put on a hook and get a parrot, I'm living as a pirate.
Araujo was not living as a woman in the sense that he was a man with a penis, and it's on this point that I constantly feel like a dick for disagreeing with almost every person I've had this argument with. Not that I think I'm wrong. It's just odd to see close friends look at me, mouth agape, wondering how I suddenly disagreed with an LGBT issue. That's not it, exactly.
It's not that I don't agree that a person can be born male but feel as if they should be female, or vice versa. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with a person being surgically altered to look more like how they feel.
But here's the problem: science has not come to a point where we can turn a man into a woman. The surgery we're talking about here is purely cosmetic. You can't have a Y chromosome turned into an X. You can't gain the ability to give birth or menstruate or a thousand other things that only a biological woman can do. This is because of the very simple fact that a man cannot become a woman. He can be reworked to look like a woman, just as a man with the proper dress and makeup can also look like a woman.
The scenario goes - as it did in the murder of Gwen Araujo, for whom the law was named - that a transgender person, we'll say one that was born a man, is living as a woman. That person then has sexual relations with a straight male. The straight male later finds out that the person he was with is not a woman. Then there is violence.
There is another crime here that is not discussed very openly, as it is usually overshadowed by the horrible details of these attacks. After being outed as a man, Gwen Araujo was beaten and then strangled to death by three men - previous lovers - who then attempted to bury Araujo in a California desert. No one outside of evangelical Christian clergy would defend these three monsters, who have since been convicted of their crime. There is, however, an uncomfortable point that needs to be made here.
Gwen Araujo was "living as a woman." This is how they phrase it. Living as a woman. But Araujo was living as a woman in the sense that if I put on a hook and get a parrot, I'm living as a pirate.
Araujo was not living as a woman in the sense that he was a man with a penis, and it's on this point that I constantly feel like a dick for disagreeing with almost every person I've had this argument with. Not that I think I'm wrong. It's just odd to see close friends look at me, mouth agape, wondering how I suddenly disagreed with an LGBT issue. That's not it, exactly.
It's not that I don't agree that a person can be born male but feel as if they should be female, or vice versa. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with a person being surgically altered to look more like how they feel.
But here's the problem: science has not come to a point where we can turn a man into a woman. The surgery we're talking about here is purely cosmetic. You can't have a Y chromosome turned into an X. You can't gain the ability to give birth or menstruate or a thousand other things that only a biological woman can do. This is because of the very simple fact that a man cannot become a woman. He can be reworked to look like a woman, just as a man with the proper dress and makeup can also look like a woman.
Viewing Comments 1 - 2 of 2
Amy Cossaboon
posted 10/27/06 @ 2:51 AM EST
For the record there are many people born with the wrong genetic markers XX or XY even cases of XXXY and XXY and so on. Juding some one on their chemical make up may as well be a form of genetic racisim. (Continued…)
Patrick Tutwiler
posted 10/28/06 @ 4:38 PM EST
For those of us who actually know and love transpeople, and do not think of them as purely hypothetical chimerical creatures to debate about in the papers, Luke's article is unbelievably stupid. (Continued…)
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