For today's installment of The Boundaries Issue, we'd like to offer you an essay by critical theorist Eliza Steinbock. Reviewing M. Christian's Transgender Erotica: Trans Figures from Haworth Press, Steinbock traces the evolution of trannies in popular culture.

From The Crying Game to Tootsie, Steinbock hones in on the good, bad and ugly of trans representation, particulary with regard to trans sexuality - a concept we're sure many of you haven't even considered. As the new year approaches, why not expand your boundaries? Besides, your sex life's pretty stale anyway. (Trust us, we know.)

Trans Sexuality?

Do you have a diclit? Did you know that fags have pussies too? Are you in a reverse or a cross couple? Have you met your mixed gender neighbor? Ever have a genderfuck porn star fantasy? How about tasting a mangina today? These are just some of the creative terms and likely situations put forward by mounting numbers of English-language cultural products that advocate for the social recognition of a specifically trans-sexuality. This movement is about claiming the erotic rights, or the right to be erotic, of transfolk. To be clear, I am talking about the horizon of trans (mind the gap) sexuality, that is, the sexuality of trans people and those who love them.

The proffered vocabulary and images from transgender erotica and pornography helps us to rethink and reorganize the gender in our sexualities. Gay or lesbian sexuality differs from heterosexuality in the gender of its erotic choice, but trans-sexuality fucks with what it means to be a man or a woman. Lined up next to homo, hetero and bi-sexuality, trans-sexuality unnervingly points out the limitations of a sexuality defined by the gender of the one desired. And that can be hot.

What is your sexual identity when you desire, love or find erotic someone whose gender isn’t clearly defined by being male or female? Are you, then, a translover? Or, on the flipside, what does it mean to crave gay men if you have the history of a female-bodied person? Are you a different sort of gay guy? These identity games, and conundrums, crop up with an alarming frequency when one takes seriously the desire for someone who is transsexual or transgendered, as well as transfolk’s desire during transition.

Representing trans-sexuality becomes an even more difficult task than doing it because of the influential (and false) social fantasy that all trans desire is channeled into a self-involved process of gender transformation. This misunderstanding stems from the first set of interviews gender clinic doctor Harry Benjamin made with people requesting surgical changes to their genitals. These pioneering “transsexuals” did not talk of an erotic sense of their bodies. Consequently, no other transwomen and transmen would thereafter. This was likely out of fear that they would not be diagnosed as transsexual and, therefore, kept from receiving surgery, rather than indicative of a total lack of erotic feeling accompanying pre-operative bodies.

How then to shift the conversation from the terms of transsexuality, which suggests an erotic investment in one’s transition, to trans-sexuality, which issues a demand for an erotic life beyond one’s self and defies the social edicts that restrict sexuality to the terms of gender? I would finger the 2002 edition of Best Transgender Erotica put together by Hanne Blank and Raven Kaldera, two insiders from the trans community, as one of the first widely read books that opened a space for trans people to picture themselves as having sexual desire and to be erotic. With twenty-three contributions originating “in the trans community” the anthology was ground breaking for evidencing trans-sexuality. It used literary means to confront, and ultimately to counter, the stigmatized and disfigured images of trans desire. In the four years since its publication a veritable eruption of independent trans pornography, also made by trans people, has been on the film festival circuit from MIX NYC to our own Dutch Transgender Film Festival.

Now, four years on from the first ever collection of transgender erotica, we are presented with another treat of and treatise on trans-sexuality. This time editor M. Christian, who contributed to the first collection, gathers twenty-four stories under the title Transgender Erotica: Trans Figures (2006). The book’s highly potent political and sexual impact comes through offering the reader a multiplicity of “trans figures” who are, for example, real-time lovers, rock stars, best friends, homeless, porn stars, Israeli and Arab, rural, stealth, fantastical and part wolf; thereby exceeding and exploding expectations of what trans-sexuality looks like or can feel like. The range of trans characters aren’t always pretty, rich, monstrous or marginal. This is gender variation in action. The undulating text of wide-ranging genres carries along the different sexes in transition with it. The subtitle truthfully announces what the book does deliver: erotic essays with “transgender” as a figure of change that also can be pleasurably read as thoughtful pieces about the changing figures of transgender people.

The difference of M. Christian’s Trans Figures is most apparent in comparison with the traditional trans-focused porn that, as Blank and Kaldera say in their introduction, “hasn’t given us erotic role models or even a notion of what our sexual possibilities might be like, it has only given us warped, grimy peep-show windows through which to gawk at the sideshow Half-and-Halfs”. Most readers will be familiar with this kind of erotica that deploys transsexuality as a plot device that activates a horrifying surprise or enables wires to get humorously crossed, in short, what titillating things could happen when you blur the boundaries between male and female.

These stories are usually a reflection of the author’s all-to-common channeling of myths about transsexual people’s anything goes sexuality or the mistakenly monolithic transsexual experience of loathing and lack of love. Unfortunately, these kinds of disfigurements are usually the only ones most non-transgendered people get to know. These are the trans figures that either function as the harbingers of radical change or the portents of destruction. Either way, they usually have to suffer and eventually die for all the sins of the gender system.

We can see this warped “transsexual” figment of the Western imagination at play in the psycho serial killer character of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and in the sickening transsexual mystery woman in The Crying Game (1992). Trans figures have also provided the basis for gender-confusion in heterosexual comedy, such as a male seeking proximity to a desired female by cross-dressing in Some Like It Hot (1959) and Tootsie (1982). Like other misleadingly “queer” characters in mainstream cinema, the use and abuse of trans figures reflects the fears and anxieties about gender difference present in the culture at large, rather than actual images of transfolk themselves.

This is true even in some queer cinema articulations of transgender like in the Australian drag road movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) or in the American version To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), both of which conflate gay sexual desire to the trans desire for gender transformation. Yet, we seem to be in the midst of a cultural transition. The blockbuster hit Transamerica (2005) provided insight and depth into one transwoman’s experience, without anyone dying (!). And the reality-TV series TransGeneration (2005) gives broad coverage on trans collegiate youth in the USA, which encourages understanding of gender variation and prevention of violence based on the fear of the unknown or uneasily categorized.

And now, in Trans Figures we have lucid, passionate and honest stories about the pain and the allure of trans-sexuality. I would highly recommend this book as a good place to explore the potentials of trans loving and sexing, or for scooping out the scene. And, of course, it is also an invaluable source for trans people to find validation for their sex appeal, which that doesn’t pander to the prurient interests brought about by being perceived as freaks. Regrettably, much mainstream trannysmut has the look of a circus sideshow. But, we can always learn something from it! Porn is said to be one form of educating desire (Dyer 1985). Erotica likely provides the same self-knowledge. You know when you like it, or when you don’t, and that have a painful or pleasurable precision. One’s desire for trans people can be confronting because it forces the scary question of “what does that make me?” Trans Figures is in part a response to the popular belief that holds trans love as impossible, such as in the narrative of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001).

These most recent erotic writings about trans-sexuality demand an audience, a purview and their seeming impossible place in the sexual spectrum. Still today, many transfolk are afraid to be honest about their transsexual desires because of how it would complicate their sexual lives. The looming question for them is, “who will love me then?” It is a matter of life and death that such love, the latest “love that dare not speak its name,” be spoken loud and clear in the many erotic voices of Trans Figures. May we name this proud love trans-sexuality?

Undoubtedly, like any other loosely grouped set of people, the trans community houses a diverse range of sexualities. This is an entire spectrum of desire to explore through the representational mediums of literature and film. Collections, such as M. Christian’s Trans Figures, house a colorful expansion of these spectra first called for by Sandy Stone in her 1987 Posttranssexual Manifesto. Trans Figures is a part of the wave of trans-sexual visibility contributed to by the work of trans activists, writers and image-makers. In the Netherlands this work is carried out by many dedicated people in groups like The T-Image Foundation, who are responsible for the Dutch Transgender Film Festival and T3 Conferences, as well as the local Noodle group, “a queer collective for the diversity and freedom of gender, sex and sexuality,” who organize a monthly café, a radio show and demonstrations. In alignment with such political culture work for trans visibility, education and community carried out by these groups, this contribution brings fresh voices to the pleasure dome and excellent erotic scenes, none of which, thankfully, end in vomiting. A reading of Trans Figures shows how far the trans movement has come to cum.

For more information on the Noodle group check their website and look out for the next Nederlands Transgender Film Festival coming May 23-27, 2007 at de Balie with information posted at www.transgenderfilmfestival.com.