Transgender without Organs?: Mobilizing a Geo-Affective Theory of Gender Modification

Transgender without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-Affective Theory of Gender Modification Lucas Cassidy Crawford (bio) 1977, Halifax, Nova Scotia. My parents will work in their hometown, Halifax, until they save enough money to move to the country: not the neopastoral country of idyllic retirement, leisure, or quaintness, but rather a place of quietude, crops, and the moral high ground that (at least reportedly) makes the country such a good place to raise kids. But just now, my mother works in the emergency room of the Halifax Infirmary, has recently married my father, and remembers having had a crush on Billy Conway in high school. Billy comes by Outpatients almost biweekly, and receives a day of psychiatric treatment when he asks the sympathetic but distant doctor for a sex change. One day, Billy arrives with his severed penis wrapped in a Kleenex, is made to dwell slightly longer in the psych ward before once again being released; he then promptly hangs himself in his boarding room in the city's North End. Soon after, when Billy's former doctor plans to marry an ex-nun (dyke?) he knows, a man who claims to be the doctor's lover arrives in the emergency room after his own suicide attempt. The doctor comes out as gay, but dies a year later of a then unfathomable virus. The infirmary closed in 1998 and was demolished in 2005, after Ron Russell, the minister of transportation and public works, condemned the building as "unsafe and unusable." When the ruggedly boyish character Moira debuted in season three of Showtime's (in)famous program The L Word, many of us working-class, rural, or butch dykes finally undid the collective knot in our boxers. Moira's impromptu move from Skokie to Los Angeles coincided with hir transsexual awakening, however, and s/he transitions to become "Max" in subsequent episodes. Relocating from Illinois to California puts Moira not only literally but also figuratively in different states: of mind, of identity, and of desire. The queer pilgrimage to the city is a far from innovative motif, and even in theories that are attuned to the role of place in queer life, the role of the rural is presumed to be inconsequential. For instance, Jay Prosser (1998) claims that narratives of pre- and post-operative [End Page 127] transsexuality belie their authors' nostalgia for bodily homes that never existed, a style of feeling that not only shores up the power we attribute to hominess but also traces on our bodies a one-way journey home. As this model configures gender modification as a safe return rather than a risky exploit or experiment in embodied selfhood, Prosser finds relief in the "transgender ambivalence" (177) he finds in the narratives of non-operative gender-variant writers. Their ambivalence towards place, he argues, reflects and generates their nonteleological orientation to practices of gender modification. For both varieties of trans life, styles of affect are constitutive technologies of embodiment; how one is moved emotionally informs and illustrates the mobility of one's gender and one's home. Even in the transgender texts Prosser analyzes, however, the reader encounters linear and one-way trips from the country to the city—supplemented, at best, with a short trip or two back to the protagonist's hometown. As an (albeit far more interesting) forerunner to The L Word's Max, Leslie Feinberg's character Jess in Stone Butch Blues moves from "the desert" (15) to Buffalo and eventually to New York City, while the protagonist of her other novel, Drag King Dreams, lives out her days in this same urban center. The many representations of Brandon Teena's life (especially in Boys Don't Cry) work in tandem with such representations of urban queer freedom, attributing Brandon's murder to regressive, purportedly rural, attitudes that are seldom imagined as characteristics of urban communities. Philosophical and political accounts of queerness all too often corroborate these valorizations of the urban; Kath Weston describes and decries the "Great Gay Migration" to the city (1995, 253), while Douglas Victor Janoff suggests in Pink Blood: Homophobic Violence in Canada that "smaller communities…would benefit from [the] strategy of reaching out to isolated citizens...

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