nissaba

Why Two Genders Are Enough
Gendys Journal, Issue 5, February, 1999

anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa.

How often have you heard the expression "a woman trapped in a man's body?" I hadn't given it much thought, assuming that it is a catch-phrase that relatively modern transsexuals have adopted. In fact it appears in a nineteenth century pamphlet by K.H.Uhlrichs,(1)who wrote of "men . . . . who might be described as of feminine soul enclosed in a male body," hence the Latin tag above, and of "women whose definition would be just the reverse."

Homosexuality, especially being 'gay', hadn't been invented then and it is a little difficult to tease out what people's attitudes were. Rudyard Kipling, at the beginning of this century, is known to have considered homosexual feeling, between schoolchildren at least, as perfectly natural, but something to be avoided. The people who stood out, therefore, were those whose everyday behaviour was considered inappropriate, although it was assumed that they would be attracted to their own sex.

The point, therefore, about 'sexual inversion' was not sexual relationships, but what we would now call their gender behaviour. Uhlrich referred to such people by the unlovely name 'Urnings' a contraction of 'Uranians.' This was not after the planet Uranus, as some writers think, but from the Latin, 'Uranos', heaven, implying love of a higher order. He started a cult, which I imagine would be impracticable now owing to the crude music-hall jokes it would attract.

It clearly is not an artefact of psychiatry, as the infamous Janice Raymond asserts. How many of these people would have jumped at the chance of medication and surgery if it were available?

...

I leave the last word to Christine Burns(12) ". . . . we cannot practically eliminate sex as a consideration in a world that has no incentive to do so . . . and so transsexual people have to be accommodated within the framework. This isn't achieved by creating a third sex either . . . since if it isn't acceptable for society to lose the comfort of being part of a two sex system, then it is equally unacceptable to set transsexuals apart from the rest in some "no man's land". In other words, if we're determined as a society to hang on to the notion that sex is strictly dimorphic (the assumption that sets transsexuals apart as the unacknowledged evidence of the contrary) then we have to fit them in . . . with both sides happy to connive in the perpetuation of the status quo. Seen from that perspective in fact, the transsexuals who seek to be invisibly reintegrated into society are doing the world a huge favour. After all, if they stood up and insisted on being visibly different . . . demanding that all intersex people should be classified and honoured as a third sex then think how dangerous and complicated that would get!"