It's Just a Word: Transvestite, Transsexual, & Transgender

My first dissertation chair, Glenda Russell, loved words. She also loved challenging our use of words. It wasn't black ice--as our culture frequently equates black with bad and white with positive--it was invisible ice. We don't skirt around issues either, as making reference to a skirt calls upon society's perceptions of women.  These conversations we had in her office some ten odd years ago came to mind this morning while I was reading my Twitter feed.

This is exactly the nuanced and thoughtful awareness that Glenda taught me to pay attention to in her office. Words matter--our choices in words represent complicated concepts and in turn, create our mutual understandings of the world around us.

Well now that's interesting. Maybe not to the casual reader, but the use of the word transvestite is very interesting to me. I had a great Twitter conversation with Steve Silberman about the use of language.

Magnus Hirschfeld

Transvestite, first coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in the early 1900s, the term was used to describe people who consistently dressed in clothing consistent with what those of the opposite sex wore. Transvestites would be male or female, with same-sex attractions or different-sex attractions, or no interest in sex at all. The word has evolved and now most frequently is associated with a mental illness. The current incarnation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association lists Transvestic Fetishism as a mental illness. The official symptoms are:

over a period of at least six months, in a heterosexual male, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving cross-dressing. The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

So the official word is that straight men who get turned on by wearing women's clothes have a mental illness. Gay men who get turned on by women's clothes are perfectly normal, as are, apparently, women who wear pants. Sound a little ridiculous to you? It does to me.

So let's go back to the Discovery News article that Steve posted. What Chevalier D'Eon, pictured on the left, suffering from transvestic fetishism? Did he have a mental illness?

The answer depends on how you contextualize his experience (and, how Chevalier described his own experience). Chevalier died in 1810. The word transvestite had not yet been created and the DSM hadn't been dreamed up. Could he have been suffering from conditions that were not yet invented? Are mental illnesses--or conditions--timeless? Have they always existed? Do they exist only within the context of our culture and society?

We are prone to making terrible errors when thinking about history. We project our modern understandings of phenomena into the past. Yes, the phenomena of some men being turned on by wearing clothes associated with the opposite sex is likely a phenomena that has existed since we first started wearing clothes that identify differences in sex. This does not, however, mean that the meanings associated with the behavior are consistent through history. Context matters. Context changes--and so does our understandings of the same phenomena when we add the variable of time.

The article went on:

Here's how D'Eon's transvestitism came to pass: He joined King Louis XV's secret service in 1755, had his first major military posting in London in 1763... However, within months, he had a falling-out with the ambassador appointed to replace him in London, accusing the ambassador of trying to murder him. D'Eon also made public secret documents and ended up being sent to prison, which he escaped. Once escaped, D'Eon concealed his identity, reportedly, by dressing as a woman... And after that, apparently D'Eon was forced to adopt female dress, and others accepted him as a female. 

Whoops. Wait a minute. The current understanding of transvestism is that it is a mental illness that occurs in heterosexual men that are sexually turned on by wearing clothes that are considered female. The discovery article makes no mention of any of the relevant criteria for the so-called mental illness. D'Eon's transvestism, as described, is behavior used to avoid being detected by authorities and/or adversaries.

This is a totally different phenomena than is captured by the phrase transvestism.

What was D'Eon really thinking and experiencing? The Wikipedia page offers this tantalizing bit of information:

D'Eon claimed to be physically not a man, but a woman, and demanded recognition by the government as such. King Louis XVI and his court complied, but demanded that d'Eon dress appropriately and wear women's clothing.

This would make it more likely that in modern times, D'Eon would have identified as transgender. As with transvestism, I think it's important to look at how our description of this phenomena developed. Magnus Hirschfeld, who coined the term transvestite, also supervised the first known sex-confirmation surgery. The term transsexual didn't come into use until 1949 when David Oliver Cauldwell first used it. It wasn't until the 1970s and 80s that the terms gender identity disorder and later transgender came into use.

D'Eon would have never considered himself as a transvestite, as transsexual, as someone with gender identity disorder, or transgender. These terms did not exist to describe phenomena. Our shared history and way of viewing the world had not yet evolved and grown to a place where these terms had come into existence. We thought of ourselves very differently in the 1700s--our sense of self--and our ways of know ourselves--was embedded in the language of that time.

So how do with think of D'Eon? Maybe he (or she, as some references suggestion D'Eon referred to self as she) left behind journals or other writings. Maybe their are some historical documents that describe how D'Eon moved through the world, how D'Eon represented his/her self to others. Maybe these documents don't exist.

What I do know is that it makes no sense to transport ourselves back to the 1700s with 2012 ways of knowing and think we can understand how people experienced the world. If we take our current world-view and use it to understand the past, we really are just developing an understanding of the past as we would think of it if we time traveled. It is an ethnocentric way of understanding history, and is a tool that isn't particularly helpful. We cannot judge a culture (or individual experience) from another era by our own standards and ways of knowing.

To understand the past as it was, we need to know how people of the time thought of their experience.

Back to D'Eon and my conversation with Steve.

I had no idea who D'Eon was when I had this conversation with Steve. Now that I know, I think this still wouldn't be the right way to think about D'Eon. It's unclear what D'Eon thought about his/her sex or gender. We can only project into the past (he/she lived and dressed like a woman, so he/she must have thought we was a woman--or female). No matter how we think of D'Eon, our thoughts will be embedded in our modern culture and our modern way of thinking. Absent first person narrative, there isn't a way to represent D'Eon in a way that is grounded in D'Eon's own phenomenology.

That for me is the exciting part of history--learning about my own phenomenology and trying to decode how someone in any particular historical era might have understood something from their own phenomenological viewpoint. What do you think?

Anxiety Goes to the Movies: The Desk Set

So my TiVo recently decided that I'd be interested in watching classic movies. Over the years it's become quite the prescient device. As usual, it's recent choices have been right on the money in terms of giving me interesting things to think about.

I recently curled up on the couch to watch Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star in the film "Desk Set"  (directed by Walter Lang). Here is the original film trailer for the movie which was released on May 1, 1957.

The machine that could replace everyone except a woman like Katie (aka Bunny Watson) was what really stood out to me about this movie. Here is a scene where Katherine Hepburn matches wits with Miss Emmy the computer, a modern miracle cloaked under a metal skin.

The movie got me thinking about how films provide us a way to work out some of the cultural anxieties that are embedded within the Zeitgeist of any particular era. Here in the Desk Set, at the dawn of the computing era, office workers fear the oncoming obsolescence of their jobs due to the modern marvel known as Miss Emmy (which was the stylized Hollywood version of the first computer, UNIVAC).

Bunny Watson prevails in the end of the movie, of course, and the computer proved to be no match for the problem solving skills of an actual person. Bunny, however,  has not exactly prevailed across time. The vision set forth in this movie--masses of information being transformed into electronic information and made available to nearly anyone with an internet connection (keeping in mind pay-walls and many scholarly resources kept locked within private university systems).

Have you noticed how much misinformation flies across the internet? Information moving across the world at near instant speeds comes with misinformation moving at the same rapid pace. We still need Bunny Watson to be there (be it a librarian, a journalist, a scholar, or a critical thinker) analyzing information and vetting it for its veracity.

At lot of people like Bunny Watson have gone obsolete. Hidden within this movie, for me at least, was the notion that while some specific jobs become obsolete, people do not. We adapt, we grow, and we discover new ways to create (hopefully assisted with new technologies and devices). We also remain remarkably afraid of change--and resistant to it too.

Before I digress into my own nostalgia, check out this article on using the movie Desk Set to teach computer and society issues.

Vibrator Miscellanea

My post-doc director of training frequently reminded us that 20 years from now we'll look back at the kind of therapy we practiced and be unable to believe we practiced that way. Our ways of understanding will become more complex, new types of therapy will develop and evolve, and things that were once popular will fade into obscurity.

Let's take hysteria as an example. During a large portion of the 19th century hysteria was all the rage. Women's sexually, however, has been deemed pathological and diagnosed long before that. In her book The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, Rachel P. Maines quotes a medical text from 1653:

When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted women can be aroused to the paroxym. This kind of stimulation with the finger is recommended by Galen and Avicenna, among others, most especially for widows, those who live chaste lives, and female religious, as Gradus [Ferrari da Gradi] proposes; it is less often recommended for very young women, public women, or married women, for whom it is a better remedy to engage in intercourse with their spouses.

We have the ancient Greeks to thank for the notion of hysteria. Plato thought the uterus was a living creature that wanders around a women's body. At times it can wander to the wrong area which would cause "blocking passages, obstructing breathing and causing disease." Those pesky uteri.

What are the symptoms of hysteria? They include faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and as Maines aptly writes, "a tendency to cause trouble." Ladies, if you have any of these symptoms you might need treatment.

Charcot demonstrates a case of 'hysteria' c. 1885

Thankfully, treatment options expanded quickly in the 19th century. Physicians, interested in increasing their income, looked for ways to improve tedious manual treatments. It could take hours to manually induce a hysterical paroxysm. This seriously cut into billable hours. Also, for those of you who think physicians enjoyed this--they didn't. There is no evidence that physicians of the time found this an enjoyable task. To the contrary, they found it tedious and uninteresting work. It probably would have been considered unimportant work had it not made a significant amount of income.

How is this for an interesting fact: electric vibrators were first used in medicine in 1878 and were made available as a consumer product by 1900. The first appliances (in order) electrified: sewing machine, fan, teakettle, toaster, and electric vibrator. It took another ten years until the electric vacuum, iron, and frying pan were consumer products that were available for purchase. This tells you a little something about what made money at that time (businesses will develop products most likely to sell) and thus, what people considered important. Hysteria was big business.

Vibrators were so widely available they could be purchased for home treatment (medical use only, please!) from the Sears catalog:

We also have an advertisement from a 1913 edition of the New York Times:

Curious for even more images? Check out the vibrator museum. There is a collector for everything, isn't there? I wonder how many accidental electrocutions there were from these contraptions.

Cabinet Card Gallery

Curious why a fainting couch appears here on this post? It appears that these Victorian ladies, reclining on their fainting couches experiencing "the vapors," were actually having a personal physician apply the appropriate treatment for hysteria. Who knew? I certainly never did.

Back to Maines book one last time:

Hysterical women represented a large and lucrative market for physicians. These patients neither recovered nor died of their condition but continued to require regular treatment. Russell Thacher Trall and John Butler, in the late nineteenth century, estimated that as many as three-quarters of the female population were "out of health," and that this group constituted America's single largest market for therapeutic services. Furthermore, orgasmic treatment could have done few patients any harm, whether they were sick or well, thus contrasting favorably with such "heroic" nineteenth-century therapies as clitoridectomy to prevent masturbation. It is certainly not necessary to perceive the recipients of orgasmic therapy as victims: some of them almost certainly must have known what was really going on.

And now back to my point. We forget in our current modernity that we all all one day be obsolete. While we might not be applying "vibration" to heal the wounds and maladies of our day, our current notions of sanity and insanity are as tightly wound with the Zeitgeist of 2011 as they were in 1900. 

The vibrating doctors meant well--at least most of them probably did. We mean well, too. We do the best we can with the knowledge and understanding of the world that is currently available to us. Too bad only a few of us have figured out that some certain portion of what we call therapy now will sound ridiculous in another 100 years.


 (Not to mention the aspects of therapy that already sound ridiculous but clung to to by a some ardent believers of different kinds of historical therapies).

By the way, apparently Maggie Gyllenhall is staring in the upcoming movie "Hysteria" that was recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival 

A Tree's a Tree--Until It's Not

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum was recently asked why he thought marriages between people of the same sex would affect marriages between people of other sexes. Here is what he said:

Because it changes the definition of an intrinsic element of society in a way that minimizes what that bond means to society. Marriage is what marriage is. Marriage was around before government said what it was.

It’s like going out and saying, ‘That tree is a car.’ Well, the tree’s not a car. A tree’s a tree. Marriage is marriage. You can say that tree is something other than it is. It can redefine it. But it doesn’t change the essential nature of what marriage is. Marriage is a union between a man and a woman for the purposes of the benefit of both the man and the woman, a natural unitive according to nature, unitive, that is for the purposes of having and rearing children and for the benefit of both the man and the woman involved in that relationship.

What is Rick actually saying here when he says a tree is a tree and a marriage is a marriage? He is suggesting that there is a single definition of marriage that has been consistently used in the history of humanity. Any student of history (or psychology, or science, or a student of any other subject, really) would easily reject this statement. There are no absolute meanings, and there are no static social institutions that have kept the same purpose for all of recorded (and unrecorded) civilization.

Santorum makes a stupid argument. He makes an argument that is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

Interested in the history of marriage? You might want to check out this link, or this one, or even this one.  You might also be interested in E.J. Graff's book "What is Marriage for: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution."

A few highlights:

While in many (but not all) parts of the modern world marriage is a personal decision between two people, for much of recorded history marriage has been an arranged affair. We married not for love, not for companionship, but for family bonds. We married because our families arranged for us to do so, and we did so to build businesses, alliances, and economic security. There was little--if any--room for love or affection.

Did you know that during the Protestant revolution Martin Luther totally rejected the religious underpinnings of marriage? He declared that marriage is "a worldly thing... that belongs to the realm of government. The Puritans, who found there way here to the coast of New England, felt similarly. They asserted (and passed an Act of parliament) that "marriage [is] to be no sacrament." That was the beginning of our modern day secular marriages.

Check out the links above to learn more.

My point here is that a tree isn't always a tree. They evolve, change, and adapt to the environment in which they are living. What Santorum is really saying is that he values one particular understanding of marriage. It is an understand that is adapted to his values, his morals, and his way of seeing the world. The meaning of the word, and the institution, reflects the values of the meaning maker and the zeitgeist of the times.

It's just silly to engage in meaningless banter about a tree always being a tree, and a marriage always being a marriage, when the recorded history of humanity shows that what we consider a marriage has changed over time.

So here is my question: what are your morals and values? Why do you value one sort of marriage over another? Why is that important to you? How does it reflect the world you want to be in? How does it reflect the world that you want to create?

Pandora Was Robbed

I've always been a fan of Greek and Roman mythology--who am I kidding. I've always been a fan of any kind of mythology. Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythologies provide such interesting windows of how the world was once understood. There are other mythologies that I'm interested in too--take psychology for example. While we cloak our field with the garments of the scientific method, there are times that I feel that psychology is yet another elaborate mythology that tries to explain our human condition.

I risk digressing here, so back to what I wanted to write about today: Pandora was robbed. That's right. Over the centuries we've chopped away at her story and lost some key parts of the story--and in doing that we've created a whole different mythology.

Pandora seems to most often be depicted as a Jezebel--a dangerous character who wittingly or unwittingly releases evil upon the world. Alternatively, when referring to her box, we talk about something that should be avoided. One wouldn't want to open Pandora's box. It's too difficult. it's too dangerous. It's not the right thing to do.

Did you know that Pandora's box wasn't really a box? It was a jar.

As the story goes, Zeus (you all know him, right?) ordered Hephaestus (the god of craftsmanship) to create a woman. Hephaestus did just that with water and earth. Other gods gave Pandora talents and gifts. Aphrodite gave her beauty, Hermes persuasion, Apollo music, Athena wisdom, etc.

Pandora thus was known as "all-gifted." 

Zeus, always being the one to argue and bicker with other gods, got ticked off when Prometheus (known for his forethought and intelligence) stole fire from heaven. To exact vengeance, her presented Prometheus' brother Epimetheus (known for hindsight, or afterthought) with Pandora. Along with Pandora, he sent a jar which under no circumstances was she to open. Being gifted with curiosity, Pandora of course was going to open the jar. As most of you who already know this story, all the evil contained in the jar escaped and spread around the world. Pandora tried to close the jar but everything had escaped.

Everything escaped but one last thing--hope. That part of the story seems to be consistently lost.

From all accounts, Pandora was was similar to the Christian archetype of Eve. Prior to Pandora, the world was a nice place. Eve got curious about the apple and everyone got expelled from Eden. Pandora gets curious about what's in the jar and Earth becomes sullied by evil. 

Somewhere around the seventh century B.C., the story of Pandora first appears in print. Hesiod writes

From her is the race of women and female kind;
of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who
live amongst mortal men to their great trouble,
no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.

He ends the story with this:

Only hope was left within her unbreakable house,
she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not
fly away. Before [she could], Pandora replaced the
lid of the jar. This was the will of aegis-bearing
Zeus the Cloudgatherer.

A hundred years later or so another poet gives an altered view of Pandora and suggests she didn't open the jar at all--a foolish man did. Theognis writes:

Hope is the only good god remaining among mankind;
the others have left and gone to Olympus.
Trust, a mighty god has gone. Restraint has gone from men,
and the Graces, my friend, have abandoned the Earth.
Men's judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone
revere the immortal gods; the race of pious men has perished and
men no longer recognize the rules of conduct or acts of piety.

Some scholars point out that the reading of this text suggests that Pandora's jar was actually filled with blessings--not evil.

What we don't know is what the ancient Greeks really thought about Pandora. Did Hesiod reinterpret her story? Was Theognis more accurate to the original telling of the tale? 

The answer to this is likely lost forever in translation. Depending on how one translates the ancient language Pandora's jar can be seen as either a prison or a pantry. The jar-as-prison suggests that it contained evil and that evil was intended to be kept away from humankind. Interesting then that hope was kept in prison. In this reading, hope is something forever kept from humankind and we are forever tortured by the evils of the world. The jar-as-pantry suggests that Pandora's jar contained gifts. Precious gifts that were perhaps lost when a foolish man (or Pandora herself) opened up the pantry and squandered those gifts. Except of course for the gift of hope.

What does it all mean? In the end, I think each of us need to make this decision on our own.

Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment - Friedrich Nietzsche

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
--Emily Dickinson

We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking to the stars - Oscar Wilde

Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy - Eskimo Proverb

Hope never abandons you: you abandon it - George Weinberg

Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark - George Iles

No More Wire Mothers

from John Keatley

The clinical director of my post-doctoral training program made a comment that stuck with me. We were talking about Marsha Linehan and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Many see DBT as a panacea for all different sorts of problems. Evidence based therapy suggests that it would actually be unethical to use a different sort of treatment. Joe reminded us that 30 years ago, prior to DBT ever being thought of, psychologists were successfully treating Borderline Personality Disorder. Sure, we might look back on what we did 30 years ago with a little horror. 30 years from now we'll look back on some of the things we are doing now (maybe even DBT) and have that same sense of horror. How could we do that?

What were psychologists doing 50 years ago? They were building wire mother monkeys. I can't believe that's not the first thing you thought of. Harry Harlow spend years with rhesus monkeys doing various kinds of experiments. Most look back now in horror at his experiments. These are some of the experiments that brought on the development of our modern code of animal welfare laws in research.



50 years ago, this was amazing stuff. As Deborah Blum writes in her book Love at Goon Park, the psychological establishment in the 1950s believed that babies were drawn only to their mothers for milk and were motivated by a survival drive. The prevailing belief was that children were harmed by too much affection. The truths most take for granted now were far from the truth in Harlow's time. Infants need the love, attention, and physical contact from their parents.

What else did did the field offer up? Here are two more vintage clips. The first is Fritz Perls:




And of course, how could I not pay homage to B.F. Skinner and his pigeons:




These three people (some day I'll have to write about Fritz's wife, Lara, who always seems to be forgotten) were all revolutionary. From their own different perspectives, they encouraged psychologists and society at large to think about things in a new way. There ideas seem outdated now or even quaint. Much of what they have taught us has entered into our common knowledge and we couldn't even imagine a time where these things weren't known and thought about.

It seems like psychology hasn't really done much to capture the imagination of society. I'm hard pressed to think about contemporary psychology that has the potential to enter into the Zeitgeist of society and transform the way we think about ourselves.

Linehan, for example, is producing a marvelous technology that helps alleviate the suffering of many. There are countless other psychologists who are busy creating manuals and replicating studies that can help the most people with the most symptoms in the most efficient ways. This is all great. Really. I'm all for less suffering.

I'm left wanting for psychology to find new ways to inspire us to be more than we thought we can. Anyone have any suggestions of ideas from psychology that are entering into our shared Zeitgeist?