A Little Emergency Rant

I spent Sunday night in the Emergency Room, which prompted reflections on gender identity, existence, hot dogs, and the color yellow.

I went in to the Emergency Room because I had a raging kidney infection and it was causing me agony. The Emergency Room is an eerie place in the middle of the night: spookily bright, and full of medical personnel who are strangely cheery about life-or-death situations. "Yep, you've got antibiotic-resistant staph!" said the doctor heartily in the cubicle next to mine.

They poked me full of things and let various IVs drain into me, which took a long time, during which I wished with all my might that I'd brought The Red Badge of Courage, because I have to read it for a project I'm doing, and I was in pain already, and if you're already bored and in pain, you might as well read The Red Badge of Courage, because then it won't have any noticeable effect on you.

But failing a classic of American realism, I finally snagged a 1998 copy of Martha Stewart Living (yellow is the new pink!), a newsmagazine, and a People. I had been getting a bit droopy -- it had passed the 3 a.m. mark -- the excitement of a CT scan was over, and the IV painkiller was beginning to kick in, so it was just the moment for some light relief. And thus I came upon an article about Renée Richards, the "world's most famous transsexual." You'll remember that Richard Raskind, as was, had the sex-change operation and became Renée Richards in 1975. (Why am I reminded of that Monty Python sketch where the pet-shop owner tries to convince the buyer that with a little skilful surgery he can convert an unwanted terrier into a fish? "Just lop the back legs off here, add a snorkel..." I'm sure it's completely objectionable of me to be reminded of this sketch.)

Anyway, Richard has been Renée since 1975, and here she is at 72 with a new book, No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life. Says the article, "From the age of 9, Richards ... felt an 'unsettling urge' to dress as a girl, a predilection she traces in part to her mother and older sister Jo's love of draping her in frills." You do wonder what exactly her mother and sister were getting at, don't you? Young Richard seems to have concluded that his liking of girl's clothes meant he was destined to be a girl. Note the assumption: if you ever like one thing society restricts to girls, you have crossed the forbidden line! You are one with girls! Because no manly man would ever like anything to do with those icky girls! Because girls have cooties! But however odd society's assumptions, Richards' own assumptions were a bit wonky too -- that the mark of girls is a desire to dress in frills. Yeah, sometimes -- unless we're out of sight of men. But basically the overweening desire to dress in frills is not a characteristic of women. Women want to wear pants. For evidence, see: women. The overweening desire to dress in frills is a characteristic of cross-dressers. Get it straight, Renée.

So anyway, one hopes that having the operation made Renée feel better, even though she still identifies herself as a "facsimile." Presumably she means in the physical sense, but I think there's stronger evidence in the cultural sense. Richards still performs eye surgery regularly (show me a 72-year-old woman eye surgeon who takes her profession for granted and I'll show you -- a transsexual). "There, after a day of surgery, 'she likes to sit in a horrifically dirty leather easy chair, watch the Yankees and drink beer and eat a hot dog...'" That's a facsimile of a woman? It just sounds like a guy to me. Which brings me to the point. Richards thinks being a woman is about the dress and the internal plumbing. This shows that she's a man. Because only men think it's about the dress and the internal plumbing. I think the problem is similar to the hysterical way people thought about race in the nineteenth century. If you were even one-sixteenth black, you were "tainted" by "forbidden blood" and you could never ever qualify as a respectable white person. Similarly, if you're a guy just sitting around in your dirty chair eating hot dogs, but -- shock! -- now and again you like something frilly, you are tainted by femaleness, you are degraded, you do not qualify as a member of the pure master gender, away to the realm of women with you! Even if you are male enough to think that being female is about dresses and plumbing, and not (as women know) that being female is more about the way you conduct conversations, the way you negotiate the world's ambivalence about your ambitions, and the fact that you'd rather wear pants.

So I was turning these facts over in my mind as painkillers drained into me, and meanwhile the next cubicle was briefly occupied by someone with acute appendicitis, who was spirited away alarmingly fast for emergency surgery. And the determined speed with which the nurses got the IVs into me caused some existential reflections as well. And then the newsmagazine had an article on someone who's written a book on what to do when you get a catastrophic medical diagnosis. The author talked about how people react "when they're told they're going to die," as if none of the rest of us have been told this, and as if the rest of us are going to live forever. So this was a bit sobering, as the fellow on the gurney next door was being run off to surgery. And so I thought, y'know, in the words of the classic song, Whatever gets you through the night, it's all right, it's all right.. I wish people would stop telling women what being a woman consists of, but okay, if Reneé Richards gets some comfort out of wearing a dress while she's watching the Yankees, more power to her. Even if I think she's just a man with some altered plumbing. If it makes her happy, what the heck. We're not around for very long, and you never know when it's going to be your turn to be raced off on the gurney.