Blurring
the Lines
Women
and men
and the gray area in between
by Mariette Pathy Allen
Miranda:
Sole Rockette at a social club. A married crossdresser
when this photograph was taken, Miranda lives full-time
as a woman now. She is a highly successful scientist,
and a political activist for transgender rights in Illinois.
Mariette
Pathy Allen
has been photographing the transgender community for more
than 20 years. Her images will be shown in the FotoFest
show "Discoveries of the Meetingplace," running
March 3-April 3. Her 1989 book, Transformations: Crossdressers
and Those Who Love Them, was an insightful and moving
exploration of cross-dressers and their lives, both through
photographs, and in the mini-portraits Allen wrote about
many of her subjects. She wrote in the introduction, "These
are people who question gender roles not merely with their
minds but with their lives. I see them as heroic because
they confront what most of us keep hidden in our innermost
fantasies--if we allow ourselves even that much freedom."
She made the natural progression from photographing transvestites
to photographing the larger transgender community. She
is currently working on another book with these new explorations.
At
OutSmart, we seek to present the LGBT community
in all our diversity. While the questions of gender
are certainly different from those of sexual orientation,
the lines can often get blurred. We believe in blurred
lines. Strict lines, impermeable boundaries, these are
what are used to exclude, a phenomenon that our community
is all too familiar with. What we like especially about
Allen's work is that she goes to the boundaries of that
most shadowy frontier--our feelings about ourselves
and each other as men and women--and that she does all
this in such a compassionate, inclusive fashion. If
you like Allen's work, copies of her book Transformations
will be available at Lobo Bookshop and Cafe during March.
--Ann Walton Sieber
Transgender
people are like the rest of us except for being
more urgent in their questioning of identity: the mysterious
essence of a human being. What changes, and what remains
the same when a person transitions? What is the power
inherent in the transformation of the body? Sometimes,
being with transgender people scares me because I can't
figure out who I am, or what I'm attracted to. More
often, that fear turns into exhilaration because I like
the breaking apart of the predictable. What does it
mean when a group of people with male anatomy, wearing
women's clothes, dance together as "sisters"?
What does it mean when I dance with them? Or when people
with female chromosomes, wearing tuxedos and business
suits, join the dance and escort those wearing dresses,
to banquet tables in a hotel ballroom?
Tonye
first realized she was not a little boy when she saw
her brother's penis. "What's that? Why don't I
have one? Will I get one later?" To which her mother
replied: "If you can kiss your elbow, you'll turn
in to a boy." No matter what contortions she tried,
Tonye couldn't kiss her elbow, but no one could convince
her to stop trying. Finally, while working as a sheriff
in rural Florida, Tonye became the man he always knew
he was.
John's
mother raised eight children while his father went to
work. He always thought his mother had the best deal
and envied her opportunity to work at home. While crossdressing
secretly throughout his childhood and adolescence, John
managed to be an ice hockey star, musician, and brilliant
student, graduating from MIT in engineering. But John
never felt fulfilled until 1993: After a motorcycle
accident left him near death, scarred and impotent,
he decided to live as Nancy for the rest of her life.
Peggy
Sue and Karen were in a lesbian relationship which began
in Chicago 14 years ago. Through a gender program, Peggy
Sue transitioned to Maxwell before the couple moved
to suburban Florida. After a few years, they were legally
married, until Karen realized she too "had a gender
issue" and decided to live as Jake. In just over
a decade, they went from being a lesbian couple, to
being a heterosexual couple, to being a gay male couple!
Since then, they have parted ways. Feeling desolate,
Maxwell moved to Georgia to be closer to other transgender
friends. Here he met Cori, a young male-to-female, formerly
active in the local gay drag community. While Max had
had little experience with genetic men, Cori had never
been in a relationship with anyone with female genitalia.
In spite of all the odds, Max and Cori are passionately
in love, and live together, near Atlanta. They enjoy
seeing themselves as the "ultimate straight couple,
no matter how you look at it!"
While
Max's relationship with Cori has been joyous, he's seen
the tragedy of being transgender with his best friend
and "big brother," Robert, a non-surgical
female-to-male who died of ovarian cancer in January.
When Robert became ill, over 20 doctors and three hospitals
in Atlanta refused to treat him. He finally got help
in rural Georgia.
My
work over the past 20 years focuses on individuals who
live in more than one gender, or transition from one
to another. They embody the concept that anatomy need
not be destiny and need not dictate a person's sex,
sexual orientation, or gender role preference.
In
the '80s, as a photographer, speaker, and writer, I
focused on changing the way transgender people saw themselves,
as well as how they were seen by others. Unlike the
common depictions of transgender people in rundown,
unsavory environments, looking bizarre or disturbed,
or encouraged to behave exhibitionistically for the
camera, I photographed male-to-female crossdressers
in the daylight, in everyday life, in relationships
with wives, children, and other family members. I wanted
to show that people who live with gender issues have
much to teach the rest of us about courage, and about
breaking gender stereotypes. By making transgender look
ordinary (de-freakifying it!), I hoped, and continue
to hope, to move the perception of gender identity issues
from being the "problem" of a small minority
of people to an area of exploration within which we
all contend, and even, are enriched by the exploration.
In
the '90s, my focus has been on portraying how transgender
individuals are coming together to form a social and
political movement. As transpeople become more open
to loving each other, and themselves, and to seeing
the beauty of androgynous or hermaphroditic bodies as
a male-female continuum, they are increasingly less
willing to remain at the mercy of medical, legal, and
political authorities. Now a small but growing core
of activists mourns at vigils for murdered transpeople,
protests at trials, and lobbies Congress for equal rights.
In
spite of the lack of civil rights, the evolution within
the transgender community is palpable. One example:
When I began doing slide shows at transgender events,
people asked me repeatedly why I thought they were "that
way." Now, the question is: "What do we do
with our transgenderedness? How do we deal with whatever
is left of our shame and guilt for our differentness
and come to love ourselves? Are we possibly, as some
like to say: 'the gender-gifted,' a new breed of people?"
Transgender people are still a conundrum to themselves.
When
I show my work to people outside the transgender community,
they want me to define categories, to explain who is
what, and how they work. But what interests me are the
questions: How would you react to this image if I tell
you it's of a man, or if I tell you it's a woman? What
does it do to our own definition of ourselves? How do
we avoid hating our own uniqueness and vulnerability?
How does our identity change when we relate to another
person?
Mariette Pathy Allen's show is part of the exhibit
"Discoveries of the Meeting Place," in which
10 international curators selected one photographer whose
work they found particularly interesting from those they
reviewed at the 1998 FotoFest Meeting Place portfolio
review. Allen was selected by Angela Magalhaes of the
National Foundation of Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
"Discoveries" will run March 3-April 3 (March
3-19, daily, noon-6; March 20-April 3, Wed.-Sun., noon-6)
with a reception on Saturday, March 11, 7-9 p.m., artists'
talks at 8:15 p.m., at the Erie City Iron Works, 713/223-5522,
1310 Nance (in the NoHo warehouse district, across from
Last Concert Cafe).
To
see four of Allen's photographs, click on the names
below:
DEE
& DONNA
JAY
CHERYL CHASE
EVA & RUBY
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