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These are my notes for the seminar I gave in the Iowa Room of the Michigan State University Student Union Building at noon on 16 September 1999.
I'm not suggesting we will wake up on January 1st and find that our bodies all look the same, or that we will all begin behaving like clones.
Rather I suggest almost the opposite. We are becoming aware that our bodies differ in ways that can not easily be covered using the two simple categories male and female; the gender roles masculine and feminine do not suffice; queer encompasses much more than homo-sexuality; and the social roles of man and woman become less well defined every day.
The myth has been that the categories of male and female suffice to cover everyone except the occasional trickster (which is how many people think about a person like Billy Tipton, who lived in the 'opposite' gender and social role without the use of medical technology to transform his body) and 'transsexuals' who do alter their bodies to support the gender and role in which they wish to live.
Our culturally-enforced ignorance of other bodies, and our fear and intolerance for individual difference has made these sex and gender myths sustainable.
But in the past few years the stories that are being told by intersexed people and by gender queers are exploding the idea that there is even a line to cross between what has been called male and female and masculine and feminine.
Intersex and gender-queer isn't all we have been silent about as a culture. Puberty. Pregnancy. Illness. Accident. Age. These all change our bodies, our genders, our social roles, and our sexualities. And we've kept mum about it all.
Why is the silence beginning to break?
What's lifting the silence is access to information. Hundreds of cable and satellite television channels, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and an e-book publishing boom just on the horizon.
Individual voices may now be heard, in private, from anywhere on the planet. Communities need no longer be limited by geographic boundaries. And perhaps most importantly, the individual remains in control of their identity.
Yes, there is some economic elitism about access to this new technology, but on the other hand, this may be the first time in history that a new information technology has not been controlled by the state or by the priesthood.
This is new and it is blowing up in our faces. When I began using email in 1978, there was no Internet. I was a charter subscriber in 1986 to the first transgender discussion list. When I put up a web page about transsexuality in 1995, it was one of the few such pages in the world.
As of last Sunday, the Alta Vista search engine found 542,780 web pages containing the word 'transsexual'. My own web pages have registered hundreds of thousands of hits since I put them up, typically four or five hundred per week. I receive email from all over the world. This is like nothing that has ever happened before.
Some other web page counts: 'intersex' = 3,767; 'bisexual' = 1,282,788; 'lesbian' = 5,666,647; 'gay' = 11,257,708.
Something else that is changing rapidly is medical technology. Remember, antibiotics and hormones were discovered in this century. We cannot imagine what medical technology will enable in the next century, let alone the next thousand years!
Public perception of acceptable use of medical technology is also changing rapidly. Reproductive technology and cosmetic technology are becoming accepted. It hasn't sunk in yet, but this further stretches the old definitions of male and female.
Here's an example. Lansing CityLimits magazine regularly runs this ad. A photo of an ample-breasted woman in a bathing suit, with the text: "I could have worn padded swimsuits. I could have learned to live with what I had. I had breast enlargement surgery instead. You decide how to look your best."
Has anyone read the science fiction novel Babel 17, by Samuel R. Delany? In the future society it depicts, truly cosmetic surgery is as easy and common as tattoos are now. We will see such truly cosmetic surgery in the next millennium.
Predicting the future is folly, but here we go. As we change from a society of identities into a society of individuals, I look for at least these changes:
There are people who desire some of these changes. Other changes will follow as a result of the flow of information. Some specific things I see happening in the short term are:
We had some interesting discussion about how and by whom new technology will be regulated, virtual identities and virtual communities, the difference between face-to-face interaction and interaction via email, and to what extent (if any) a person is grounded in their physical body. I had fun!
For many more titles and links, constantly updated, see my resource page.
Lisa is a co-parent of two home-educated children, a writer, the president of a community theater company, an amateur makeup artist, and a systems analyst and technical writer in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering.
Lisa has spoken to a number of classes and units on campus, writes for anything and anyone, has a chapter in Ronni Sanlo's book Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender College Students: A Handbook for Faculty and Administrators,[*] has several other irons in the fire, and puts a lot of stuff up on several web sites.
Lisa generally dislikes labels, but is not totally disgusted with 'post-transsexual' used in the sense of defining one's own body, gender, and sexuality not necessarily in alignment with anything anyone else seems to be doing.
Any pronouns you just heard were either supplied by the person doing the introduction, or by your own head.
* The working title for that book (in 1996) did not include the term 'transgender', now that is unthinkable.
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