Originally published in Trivia: A Journal of Women’s Voices , Issue 7/8, September 2008.

A few years ago, I wrote about Marilyn Monroe’s traumatic childhood—which included being raised by a single mother who was repeatedly institutionalized for mental illness, placement in multiple foster homes, multiple incidents of child sexual abuse, and being legally prostituted at fifteen in a brokered marriage. Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead. I made the argument that a woman who could have been a poster child for post-traumatic stress syndrome was being celebrated, instead, as an icon for adult female sexuality:
 
"What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value. Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe ‘s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified they feel. Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men. The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?  The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child."
 

Xaviera Hollander’s memoir is similarly illuminating.
 
In 1972, The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander burst onto the scene, becoming an international bestseller and launching its author into instant celebrity. The book seemed to offer proof positive that the so-called “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s had indeed succeeded. The publisher crowed, “Far from the conventional image of the prostitute, Xaviera is well-read, articulate, fluent in half-a-dozen languages, and bursting with charm and joie de vivre.”
 
In the book, Hollander recounted in titillating prose her experiences as a prostitute and then as a madam in New York City. It didn’t hurt sales that her appearance corresponded with the stereotype of the “blonde bombshell,” and the fact that she was from the Netherlands lent her an air of European sophistication. Hollander was lauded as a completely liberated woman whose apparently insatiable sexual appetite was nothing more than the natural expression of a healthy libido. The one episode in the book where she was beat up and very nearly murdered by a john is treated as an unfortunate and fluke event, in what was otherwise consistently characterized as an empowering and fulfilling profession.
 
The Happy Hooker sold fifteen million copies, and was made into a movie starring Lynn Redgrave. Hollander went on to write a sex advice column for Playboy, and several more books about her sexy escapades. Then, in 2002, she published a memoir that was very different from her other books. Titled Child No More, this book did not make any best-seller lists or attract any movie deals. It was, in fact, a Holocaust memoir.

Few people who remember the heyday of the Happy Hooker know that she spent the first two years of her life interned in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. Here is her story:
 
Hollander’s mother, an Aryan, was living in Germany with her family in the 1930’s, when Hitler came to power. She became engaged to a Jewish friend of the family, but, panicking at the wedding, she ran away. A gang of Nazi teenagers cornered her on the street, beat her and stoned her, shaved her head and forced her to wear a sign with the words “Jew whore.” Her family, shocked and terrified, smuggled her into the Netherlands. Here she met and married a Jewish doctor, who was the head of a hospital in Indonesia. Their courtship had been brief, and even before they left for Surabaya, Hollander’s mother discovered that her new husband was a notorious womanizer.
 
In June 1943, Hollander was born, and two months later, she and her mother were taken to a Japanese concentration camp. Her father had already been taken prisoner. Hollander’s mother had the option of going to a camp for Aryan women, where conditions were not so brutal, but she refused to be separated from her daughter, and chose to join the Jewish women with their children.
 

Hollander was able, as an adult, to reunite with a fellow child-survivor from the camp, a woman who had been six years old at the time of her imprisonment. It seems that some of Hollander’s information about her experiences may have been augmented by what her friend could also remember.
 
Hollander recounts how she saw soldiers repeatedly caressing and fondling her six-year-old companion, who was being prostituted by her mother for food. She remembers how all the women had to crouch down “like frogs” in front of the soldiers:
 
"The women were obliged to accept all kinds of humiliation; the slightest sign of disobedience was punished with mindless severity. A favorite practice was for the man to thrust his fingers into the sides of a woman’s mouth and then tear it open from cheek to cheek, leaving a bleeding gash where there had been a mouth. As more and more savage soldiers took over guard duties, there were many who took delight in inflicting torture for its own sake. They would rip open mouths without even the justification of an act of disobedience or a glance of defiance, just as they would inflict beatings as the whim took them." (Hollander, p. 54)

Food was scarce at the camp, and the women and children were all suffering the effects of malnutrition. Some of them were starving, and women attempted to barter with smugglers for any extra provisions they could get. One woman, caught with contraband for her starving child, was burned alive. Hollander’s mother, who had smuggled diamonds into the camp by hiding them in her vagina, was also caught. She was beaten and left for dead among piles of corpses. Managing to survive, it was weeks before she was able to return to her daughter.
 
Hollander describes what may be her most intact memory:
 
"One image survives of me, a lonely, frightened child sitting on a tiny suitcase containing everything I owned, sobbing in terror as a squad of soldiers marched past, each sporting three or four watches stolen from the women, shouting strange words at the top of their voices. Kirei, kirei: bow down, bow down!  There was the uncanny sight of a group of women, bowing and frog-squatting, while on the other side of a barbed wire fence, rifles at the ready, these frightening men strode by. I burst into an uncontrollable torrent of tears. Where was my mother? No one came to dry my tears. An orphan has to look after herself. "(Hollander, p. 59)
 

Meanwhile, Hollander’s father, whom she barely met, was interned in a different camp. Also caught smuggling food, he was beaten, tortured on a bamboo rack, and subjected to electrical shock administered to his genitals.
 
The war ended and the camps were liberated, but before Hollander and her mother were reunited with her father, she suffered another traumatic experience. Climbing a dead tree, she took a fall that resulted in her groin being impaled with a dead tree branch. Taken to the hospital, she remembers there were two doctors, who playfully told her to choose which one would treat her.  Unknowingly, she chose her own father. He also failed to recognize her. 
 
He apparently performed surgery on her torn vulva, and Hollander’s memories of this episode are bizarre. She remembers his “hypnotic power,” as “magic seemed to flow from his hands as they brushed my most private region.” Whether he was sexually inappropriate or she was overlaying previous trauma memories, she would write, “… there was that peculiar attraction at first sight. And in the years that followed, the precocious eroticism his loving, skillful hands had aroused in me would develop into a powerful emotion, little short of obsession.” (Hollander, p. 71)

Such were the formative years of the “Happy Hooker:” imprisonment in a concentration camp where all the males were enemies,foreigners, and sadists, constant witnessing of torture and murder of utterly subordinated women, separation from her mother, starvation, and then an episode of genital trauma associated with incestuous affect.
 
How much of her eagerness to please men sexually could be attributed to a post-traumatic, generalized Stockholm Syndrome? Was the peculiar form of mouth torture that she noted a result of women not smiling enough at their degradation, of not appearing “happy” enough at their sexual violation?  Hollander noted that, in the camps, it was clear that some women were not starving and were visibly better off than others. Later, she would understand that these were the women who were prostituting themselves.  How deep an impression did that information make? Could her celebrated hypersexuality have been a response to inappropriate sexualization as a toddler—either in the camp or at the hands of a father whose lack of sexual boundaries was a constant source of conflict in his marriage?
 
In Hollander’s own words, “A child’s character is like clay, and my confinement in that hell behind the bamboo wall certainly molded my character.”

Originally published in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Issue 2, Spring 1999, Northampton, MA.

In the last issue of Rain and Thunder, Barbara Louise's plea for donations to provide permanent housing for “The Dinner Party” was published. “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago, a symbolic commemoration of women in history, is probably the most famous work of Second Wave feminist art in the world. From 1974 to 1979, Chicago researched the biographies of women that were just coming to light in the newly-created departments of Women's Studies. She designed a triangular table for the thirty-nine “guests,” each represented by a place setting complete with an individually designed place mat and plate.  Inside the table, was the “Heritage Floor,” where tiles bearing the names of nine hundred and ninety-nine more women honored those not chosen for seating at the table.
 
“The Dinner Party” was a massive work, engaging the minds, hearts, and hands of dozens of women. It marked a reclaiming not only of aspects of women's history, but also of women's traditional arts, which had been considered “crafts” by a male dominant art world.
 
“The Dinner Party,” as with all works of art, represents the vision of its maker—a vision specific to an individual, to a place, and to a time. That time was the beginning of the Second Wave, when the movement was dominated by the interests of white and predominantly middle-class women. That place was the US, a country still struggling to catch up to the upheavals caused by the social revolutions of the 1960's. And that woman was Judy Chicago, a white woman eagerly embracing the discoveries, values, and comeraderie of that early Second Wave and courageously using her feminism to challenge the male hegemony of the commercial and academic art world. It was a time when sisterhood was powerful, but multi-culturalism was not.

Since 1979, the women's movement has undergone changes, including a radical critique of the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of its earlier agenda and constituency. As African American studies became more feminist-friendly and women's studies became more multi-cultural, consciousness about the marginalization of women of color in so-called “women's history” was raised. Curricula that may have appeared to be racially inclusive in the 1970's is now, in light of two decades of scholarship and publication by and about women of color, seen as painfully tokenizing.
 
“The Dinner Party” is an accurate reflection of the racial imbalance that characterized women's studies two decades ago, and critiques of the work that charge it with racism are valid. In a photograph commemorating the dozens of artists who contributed their work to the project, there is not one face that appears to be African American. Ironically, the book in which this photograph is published is titled The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage.
 
The only African American woman invited to sit at the table is Sojourner Truth. Not just a token at “The Dinner Party,” Truth was also used as a token by the predominantly-white Suffrage Movement. The cause for which she labored stood to benefit white women more immediately than women of color, and perhaps it is for this reason that she was the first woman of color to come to mind when Chicago was drawing up her seating arrangements. Perhaps the work of women like Fannie Lou Hamer or Harriet Tubman was seen as too specific to African Americans to warrant the one place at the table with so many white women.

In addition to calling attention to her token presence, African American critics of “The Dinner Party” have raised objections to the plate design for Sojourner Truth. The other dinner guests have plates whose designs represent fanciful abstractions on the theme of the vulva, but Truth's plate is distinctly “other” and “exotic,” in that it has stylized human faces, not vulvas, on it. Critics have noted a “mammy-esque” treatment of the African American woman's face on this plate, which was overtly designed to represent an African mask and the agony of enslavement.  This refusal to ascribe a vulva design to Sojourner Truth has been read as a racist denial of, or discomfort with, the African American woman's sexuality, a flip-side—or perhaps overreaction—to the traditional stereotype of Black women as oversexed.
 
Chicago does include the names of other Black women among the 999 names on the floor tiles, but this roster is still dominated by white women of European background.
 
The only First Nations woman at the table is Sacajawea, again a collaborator with white—and, this time, colonial—interests. Although the goddesses represented at the table are multi-cultural, the actual historical guests do not include any Latinas or Asian women.  
 
Where do we go from here? Should we abandon “The Dinner Party” to the warehouse where it has been ignominiously stowed all these years—a response not to its lack of racial inclusiveness, but to its aggressive feminist content. Do we, for the good of some supposedly overriding cause, gloss the racism inherent in the token presence of women of color at the table?

Is it possible for a work of art to be considered great, when, at the same time, it reflects and perpetuates racist values?
 
To answer this question, it might be instructive to turn to the words of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, whose work as an English professor at an Ivy League university has compelled her to grapple with a canon of “great works” by almost exclusively white authors. In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, she shares with us her discoveries about what she calls “African Americanism,” or “the ways in which a nonwhite or Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the US:”
 
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which to wrest an identity of national virtue while continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury… For the settlers and for American writers generally, this Africanist other became the means of thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasions for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression; permitted opportunities for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power.

In other words, Morrison contends that racist depictions are not just oversights or unfortunate lapses on the part of the white artist to be circumvented like potholes in a road, but rather that these distorted characterizations inform the entire canon of values embodied in the work, being the very key to understanding the construction of the white artist's identity!
 
What does this mean for 1990's feminists approaching “The Dinner Table” today? It means that we should not flinch from confronting the treatment of women of color in the work. Far from shying away from these embarrassing seating arrangements, we should make them the centerpieces of our critical understanding of the work and of the movement it represented. The absence of women of color at the table is more than an unintentional oversight. It is a necessity for a feminist identity that informed and defined the entire guest list. Sojourner Truth's position at that table, according to Morrison's theory, provides the key to understanding the myths, the terrors, the denials, the strengths, the failures of that early feminist movement. The artist's unwillingness to grant, or inability to conceive, a symbolic vulva for a Black woman may be central to an entire definition of Western sexuality, of white women's sexual identity.  Adopting Morrison's perspective and approach, one could argue that the Black and the First Nation's women's place at the table, and the exclusion of the Latina and Asian woman, could be the most historically significant aspects of “The Dinner Party.”
 
White radical feminists have vacillated between stonewalling and scapegoating when confronted with racist artifacts of the early Second Wave. Neither is a constructive strategy, and I suggest that we take Morrison's teaching to heart and begin to find ways to talk about our history that neither glosses over or trashes this very mixed heritage. A step in this direction would be to incorporate an acknowledgment and historical contextualizing of the racist treatment of women of color in any description of “The Dinner Party,” and especially in any press release designed to raise money for housing the project. As Morrison reminds us, “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist."

Originally published as "Oscar Wilde: An Ideal Gay Icon?" On the Issues, Winter, 1996, New York.

In a recent gay-and-lesbian theatre newsletter, there were two notices about Oscar Wilde.  One was recruiting petitioners for a campaign to obtain an official pardon for Wilde, and the other was recruiting support for an Oscar Wilde celebration.
 
I strongly object to Oscar Wilde's being marketed as some kind of figurehead for gay and lesbian theatre activists.  And I object to gay men's attempts to unilaterally define what is touted to the media as coalition culture.  And I object most strongly of all to what I call lesbian "theatre wives," who, for the questionable privilege of a male-funded theatre roof over their heads are willing to table women's issues in favor of those which speak to the interests of their theatre husbands.
 
Oscar Wilde is a case in point.  His "culture" - arrogantly classist, misogynist, pedophilic - shares nothing in common with lesbian-feminist values, and as lesbians we need to be knowledgeable about the facts before we join our gay brothers in celebrating as a martyr someone whom many of us would consider a criminal.

According to the record, Wilde was sent to jail because of his sexual exploitation of working-class and poverty-class child prostitutes.  It was they who presented the testimony against him, and it was their evidence that sent him to prison.
 
Furthermore, it was Wilde's homophobia that set the whole legal process in motion in the first place!  His lover's father "accused" Wilde of homosexual behavior, and Wilde, in a fit of pique and egged on by his narcissistic lover, sued the man for libel - in other words, for lying.  Hardly a stand for gay rights!
 
And here is Wilde retaining an attorney for his suit: 
 
Sir Edward Clarke advised him, "I can only accept this brief, Mr. Wilde, if you can assure me on your honour... that there is no and never has been any foundation for the charges that are made against you."  Wilde stood up and declared the charges "absolutely false and groundless."  It is important to remember that Wilde was prosecuting, and that Clarke, like most attorneys, was not interested in taking on an unwinnable case.   To his credit, Sir Edward continued to defend Wilde through his subsequent trials, even after he discovered how his client's deliberate duplicity had placed him on the losing side of a sordid and sensational case which became known as the "trial of the century."  The suit proved such a professional embarrassment to him, Clarke omitted any mention of it in his memoirs.
 
And what about his family?  Wilde was married with two children at the time that he instigated the frivolous libel suit.  It was an action taken without consulting his wife and without the funds to pay the legal fees.  Foolishly, Wilde trusted his lover to cover the costs.  After his incarceration, his creditors moved in, and his family's possessions - even the children's toys - were ruthlessly auctioned off.  His wife, compelled by the scandal to leave England, found that it was necessary to change her name and her sons' names even to obtain lodging in a foreign hotel. 

Although Constance Wilde was strongly advised to divorce her husband, he importuned her from prison, and she decided against taking such action.  In fact, she continued to demonstrate   extraordinary consideration towards the man who had shown so little for her and for their children, traveling in poor health from Switzerland to Reading Gaol in order to convey in person the news of Wilde's mother's death.  After his release from prison, Wilde proceeded to violate all of the agreements he had made with her to protect the family from any further notoriety.
 
As a footnote to the marriage, Wilde had not had sexual relations with Constance for several years.  The reason he had given was that his syphilis, which he had contracted from a prostitute during his student years and had believed to be cured, was, in fact, still virulent.  There is no evidence that Wilde ever shared this information with any of the boys with whom he had sexual relations.
 
Wilde was brought to bankruptcy while in prison when his lover's father brought suit to recover his damages from the ill-advised libel suit.  Not only did Lord Alfred, Wilde's lover, renege on his agreement to cover these costs, but as Wilde reminded him in his famous letter "de Profundis," this parsimony was all the more reprehensible, because Wilde had squandered many times that amount on Lord Alfred.

But, back to the trial...  Needless to say, the man that Oscar Wilde was suing did everything he could to prove his innocence - as most people will do when they are being sued.  And so, not surprisingly, he produced as witnesses a number of the child prostitutes whose "services" had been procured by Wilde.
 
And at this point, a number of my gay brothers will insist that I make a distinction between "child prostitute" and "teenaged prostitute."  I confess that the distinction is lost on me, and I will leave it to those for whom qualifiers of age, class, geography, period in history, etc. provide a certain rationale, if not outright justification, for a practice which is apparently so intrinsic a part of gay male culture and so violently antithetical to lesbian-feminist values.
 
Some gay brothers will also jump to Wilde's defense, claiming that the boys were being paid by the defendant to testify, either that, or cooperating with the state in order to avoid prosecution.  That some of these boys had histories of blackmailing their "clients" has also been used to discredit their testimony.  Leaving for a moment the fact that Wilde admitted to friends on several subsequent occasions that the charges had been true, let us look at these objections.

Why shouldn't these boys protect their interests against a class of sexual predators who had chosen to victimize them specifically because of their disenfranchisement both as children and as members of a profoundly oppressed underclass?  Why should anyone be surprised that Wilde's affectionately engraved cigarette cases should find their way to the pawnshop?  If, as a function of his privilege, Wilde chose to romanticize his sexually exploitive transactions - such sentimentality was hardly a luxury his victims could afford.  When wealthy members of an elite class pay bargain prices for the sexual services of children, based on the poverty-class economy of these children, -can they be surprised if the more enterprising of these boys turn around and charge them premium prices for privacy based on their economy of privilege?
 
The relationship between the john and the prostituted boy  is not a mutual one.  It is the standard method of operation for colonialists, enslavers, and pimps, to brutalize the members of an underclass created by economic and sometimes social violence, and then to point to their brutalization as a rationale for the conditions to which they are subjected.  This circular and self-serving logic is in play when Wilde's defenders attempt to discredit his victims as "blackmailers and thieves." 
 
Wilde gave a speech during the trial, which is often cited as a testimonial to his gay pride.  In fact, he gave the speech as an attempt to prove that his relations with Lord Alfred were not gay, but rather a platonic bonding between an older man and a younger man.  The context in which he framed his famous "love that dares not speak its name" speech was profoundly homophobic.

During the trial, Wilde persisted in denying any participation in homosexual activity.  Repeatedly questioned about his frequenting of a notorious male brothel, where his "companions" were children who worked as valets, grooms, and coachmen, Wilde stated that he sought the boys out, because they were "bright and entertaining," insisting that he was oblivious to class differences: "I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied."  And again, "I recognize no social distinctions of any kind... "
 
This is difficult to believe when, on one occasion, Wilde picked up a boy who sold newspapers, and took him to a hotel in Brighton for a weekend.  In order to disguise the obvious nature of the relationship, Wilde bought the boy a suit of clothing with insignia that would associate him with a prestigious private boys' school.  In court, he insisted that the choice of the school's colors had been the boy's. 
 
In fact, Wilde was very class-conscious.  In "de Profundis," he told a very different story - and one in which class difference features prominently:

"People thought it was dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life... It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.  I used to feel as a snake-charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth or reed basket that holds it and make it spread its hood at his bidding and sway to and fro in the air...  Their poison was part of their perfection." 
 
To what does "poison" refer if not their class antagonism towards Wilde and his kind?  And what a patriarchal reversal of the power relations!  It is remniscent of the rhetoric used against incest victims, characterizing them as promiscuous and vampiric.
 
One of the boys who testified had not been procured for Wilde.  He had been employed as an office boy at Wilde's publishing firm, and Wilde had cultivated the friendship by exploiting the boy's interest in his writing.  The boy testified that he had been ignorant of Wilde's intentions, that he was traumatized by the sexual contact, and that he was subsequently fired from his job for his association with Wilde.  His emotional confusion about his victimization by a "benign" perpetrator was used against him in court as proof that he was crazy.
 
After his conviction, and halfway through his two-year prison sentence, Wilde wrote the following words in a petition to the Home Secretary.  No doubt the homophobia is exacerbated by his desire to win a pardon, but Wilde's attempt to characterize his homosexuality as a disease or the result of bad company is cowardly to say the least:

"The Petitioner... was suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania, which made him forget his wife and children, his high social position..., the honour of his name and family, his very humanity itself, and left him the helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and drove him to his hideous ruin."
 
Hardly a gay rights manifesto. 
 
And after prison?  Wilde went to Paris, where he rendez-voused with Lord Alfred, who was being serviced sexually at the time by a fourteen-year-old boy who sold flowers on the street.  This boy claimed to be "keeping" a twelve-year-old at home, and Lord Alfred was attempting to gain sexual access to the boy.  Wilde himself, in the words of his lover, was "hand in glove with all the little boys on the Boulevard." 
 
I cannot imagine a lesbian couple deliberately choosing a vacation spot where economic violence and/or colonization has created an underclass of girls who are coerced into selling their bodies to wealthy women tourists.  I cannot imagine this loving lesbian couple buying these little girls and exploiting their poverty for the purposes of sexual self-gratification.  And I cannot imagine two lesbians experiencing this exploitation as a pleasurable and harmless recreational activity around which they could bond. 

And yet this is the kind of vacation activity in which such gay male luminaries as Andre Gide, Tennessee Williams, and Oscar Wilde would habitually indulge.
 
Oscar Wilde was a pedophile, a woman-hater, a colonialist, a classist, a coward, and a colossal liar.  The record speaks for itself. I call upon my gay brothers to drop the euphemisms surrounding the culture of prostitution and child sexual abuse, and to come out of denial about the nature of the men who participate in that culture. 

[If you found this blog interesting, I have another about Wilde...  "Oscar Wilde:His Father's Son."]

                                                                           

Originally published by Trivia: Voices of Feminism, 2009

Portuguese translation: “A verdade inconveniente sobre Teena Brandon”

I want to talk about an inconvenient truth. I want to talk about the fact the person who was named Teena Brandon was a survivor of incest. You won’t hear this mentioned in Boys Don’t Cry, and you won’t hear it mentioned in the documentary “The Brandon Teena Story.” You won’t read about it in the current Wikipedia entry. It is, like I said, inconvenient.
 
“Inconvenient” means “causing trouble or difficulties.” The inconvenient truth of Brandon’s incest history causes trouble because incorporating information about child sexual abuse into the narrative of Brandon’s life pathologizes the transgendered identity adopted by Brandon and for which she has become an icon. This is perceived as disrespectful and transphobic—as an attack on Brandon’s identity and a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim’s identity.
 
But the omission of Brandon’s incest history is disrespectful and phobic to survivors of child sexual abuse. It also constitutes a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim’s identity. As a survivor, I am disturbed by the revisionist histories of Brandon that omit Brandon’s status as a victim of child sexual abuse—and all of the subsequent inconvenient truths accompanying that status.
 

Inconvenient truths have a way of remaining unarticulated, because they exist outside the frame of reference that has been established. The first difficulty one encounters in telling this inconvenient truth about Teena Brandon is the issue of pronouns. Brandon was sexually abused as a female child, born biologically female, by an adult male perpetrator who was a family member. The gender of victim and perpetrator are clinical details that are critical to the understanding of the perpetration and the impact it had on Brandon. Because of this, I will be using a female pronoun to refer to Brandon as a child, even though, in adulthood, Brandon would identify as male. This places my narrative outside the accepted protocol of respectful dialogue about trans identity.
 
In this essay, I will refer to her as “Brandon,” because, as an adult, she chose to adopt her given surname as her personal name. In titling the essay, I have used her legal, given name “Teena Brandon.” It is another inconvenient truth that Brandon never used the name “Brandon Teena.” This name was posthumously ascribed, and then picked up by the media. It was a convenient untruth, because it constituted a clever reversal of Brandon’s birth name, flipping the name to correspond with flipping gender. “Brandon Teena” is a PR-savvy metaphor… and a fiction.

In Aphrodite Jones’ biography, All She Wanted, the first narration of the sexual abuse shows up in an interview with Sara Gapp, Brandon’s best friend when Brandon was twelve. “She [Brandon] told me that one of her relatives was doing something to her that she didn’t like. She just kinda said that, you know, he would kinda whip this thing out and kinda play with it a little bit… and she said occasionally he’d have her touch him and then he would play with her and tell her, ‘oh, you like it. You know this feels good… You know you don’t want me to stop.’” (Jones, 43) According to Sara, “At that point in time, she didn’t want anyone to know about what happened. She didn’t want the guy mad at her… She was embarrassed. No matter what he did to her, she still loved him.” (Jones, 43)
 
Brandon’s therapist later confirmed the story of the abuse, adding that, according to Brandon, the sessions of abuse would last for hours and that the molestation continued for a period of years, from childhood into adolescence. In one counseling session, Brandon confronted her mother JoAnn about it, but requested that she not confront the perpetrator, who may have been one of JoAnn’s relatives. Brandon’s sister Tammy, also a victim, confirmed Brandon’s account. It is possible that this abuse was a factor in Brandon’s decision to leave home at sixteen, get a job, and move in with her then-girlfriend, Traci Beels, an older classmate.

In her book Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self, Janet Liebman Jacobs states that incest represents “the most extreme form of the sexual objectification of the female child in patriarchal culture.” (Jacobs, 11) She makes a compelling case for the fact that incest has a major impact on female personality development, including gender identity.
 
Jacobs’ book highlights significant developmental issues that influence the personality formation of sexually abused daughters, and among these is identification with the perpetrator. Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud and the founder of child psychoanalysis, elaborates on this process:
 
'A child introjects some characteristic of an anxiety-object and so assimilates an anxiety-experience which he [she] has just undergone… By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself [herself] from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat." (Freud, 121)

Turning away from her mother, whom she perceives as an untrustworthy betrayer-of-her-own-kind, the victimized daughter looks toward the male perpetrator, who, because he is her abuser, is perceived as powerful, and who, because he is male, still hold the potential for objective idealization. “Female,” for the daughter, has become identified as the subjective gender for victims and betrayers. According to trauma researcher Judith Herman, “In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim develops highly idealized images of at least one parent… More commonly, the child idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent.” (Herman, 106) Describing her research with survivors of father-daughter incest, Herman notes, “With the exception of those who had become conscious feminists, most of the incest victims seemed to regard all women, including themselves, with contempt.” (Herman, Father-Daughter Incest, 103)
 
Rejecting the mother and her own female identity, the victimized daughter begins to imitate the aggressor. E. Sue Blume, author of Secret Survivors, describes how the daughter reinvents herself through identification with the perpetrator.
 
"...child victims often recreate themselves, developing alter egos who offer a positive live alternative to their own. Most commonly, this is a male persona: female survivor clients may either substitute alternative male personalities, or attach to a male fantasy companion. This is simple to understand: as a victim, and a female, she associates her vulnerable state with defenselessness; males, however, are seen as physically stronger, and not easily targeted for victimization." (Blume, 85)

Brandon didn’t like wearing dresses to school. When her mother asked the reason for this, Brandon told her that dresses were cold (this was Nebraska) and that the boys could look up them when the girls climbed the stairs. Because she attended a school that required uniforms, she wore the pants and ties that were standard for the boys, but that girls were also allowed to wear. According to her best friend Sara Gapp, “People kept saying she dressed like a guy. She didn’t… She dressed in clothes that she felt comfortable in. She didn’t go to the guys’ section to buy those clothes. Those were women’s clothes she was wearing. She just liked baggy clothes. She wore short hair. Does that make her a guy?” (Jones, 55)
 
The choice to wear baggy clothes is consistent with the choices of many survivors of sexual abuse. Brandon’s “passing” as a man began later as a practical joke on a teenaged girl who dialed Brandon’s number by accident and mistook her for a boy on the phone. According to Sarah, “Up until Liz Delano [the mistaken caller], if you had called her a boy, Teena would be offended. She didn’t want to be recognized as a guy. She didn’t feel like a guy.” (Jones, 54)
 
Brandon has also been described as indulging in male role-playing. According to her sister Tammy,
 
"The church was really significant to her. We went to Catholic school, and I think they kind of brainwash you in kindergarten on being priests and nuns. They always bring in priests and nuns to talk about how they got the calling and how you’ll know if you have the calling… Teena never wanted to be a nun; she always wanted to be a priest, and I thought it was funny because I had to participate in her masses, and I’d get really bored half the time, ‘cause she’d read from the Bible and make us sing. I thought it was just a game she played; then every once in a while she’d say, ‘Oh, I want to be a priest someday.’" (Jones, 34)

Was Brandon identifying with the power to officiate or with the gender? In light of the Church’s ban against women priests, which denies women the prestige, ceremonial office, and opportunity for leadership associated with the priesthood, it would be irresponsible to attribute Brandon’s desire to be a priest to “gender dysphoria”—a term that, when applied to females, could as well be defined as “sex-caste resistance.” Identification with gender roles in a male dominant culture cannot be separated from identification with the privileges that accompany those roles. As pioneer psychoanalyst Karen Horney notes, “We live… in a male culture, i.e. state, economy, art and science are creations of man and thus filled with his spirit.” (Horney, 152)
 
Brandon’s discomfort with her developing body has been documented. In her book, Aphrodite Jones reports that Brandon hated the pain caused by her developing breasts, and that she also complained of the pain of menstrual cramps and the inconvenience of having to deal with a monthly flow of blood. Were these the objections of a “male trapped in a female body,” or of a particularly self-assertive and articulate girlchild appalled by the inconvenience, embarrassment, and pain of the adult female body?
 
Brandon’s discomfort ran deeper than annoyance. She reported that it would “make her feel sick” (Jones, 47) to have anyone stare at her chest. Again, a girl need not be an incest survivor to register disgust at the sexual objectification of her developing body at puberty, but the female incest survivor who has internalized a masculine ideal faces a different set of obstacles:
 
"While puberty represents a painful time for many adolescent girls, for daughters in incest families this transition into female adulthood may be especially difficult and confusing as her body signals not only the passage into female adulthood but the recognition that the internalized masculine ideal is truly a fantasy of other and can never be the real self. "(Jacobs, 86)

The rejection of the female self can offer an explanation for the prevalence of eating disorders at puberty among incest survivors. Brandon, at the time of her attempted suicide, was reported as manifesting serious eating disorders.
 
"For the incest survivor, her body becomes the symbol of her victimization and thus the focus of her desire for control. Further, the obsession with a thin, boyish body, rather than an expression of femininity, may represent an unconscious rejection of the female self through which the daughter attempts to integrate the internalized male ego ideal with an external image of a masculinized child’s body." (Jacobs, 88)

Brandon reported that in October 1990, she was raped. That same fall, when she was almost eighteen, Brandon tried to join the army. According to her friends, she was eager to be a part of Operation Desert Storm. Unfortunately, she did not pass the written exams. This appears to have been a turning point for her. According to her mother, “She was really upset… She started to change.” (Jones, 47)
 
One of the biggest questions about Brandon’s choices is “Why didn’t she identify herself as lesbian?” She may well have been trying to do that when she attempted to enlist. Why would a transman want to enlist in a strictly segregated, all-female environment? The military, in spite of its homophobic policies and witch hunts, has always appealed to lesbians, because it has historically provided a same-sex living and work environment for four years.
 
Although rape and sexual harassment occur in the military, a survivor who associates her violation with isolation and ongoing exposure to access by males might feel there was safety in an all-female environment, and especially if she had just been raped. Also, army regulation uniforms provide protective covering that de-emphasize sexual characteristics and discourage sexual objectification. It would be naive to assume that Brandon, who had, by high school, identified her sexual attraction to women and who had already moved in with one girlfriend, was unaware of the association of lesbians with the military. She may well have been looking for the lesbians, and this may explain in part her extreme reaction to failing the entrance exam.
 
If this is the case, then why didn’t she go looking for the communities of lesbians in her hometown? Because “don’t ask, don’t tell” was not a policy that applied to working-class gays and lesbians in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1990. The homophobia there was overt and potentially life-threatening. Harassment could take the form of anonymous, obscene phone calls, drive-by threats and insults, and physical assault. Because rape is viewed by homophobes as a “cure” for lesbianism, harassment can take the form of threats of rape, or the act itself.

For a young woman who had a horror of male sexuality and who had told friends that rape was one of her biggest fears, and who had just been raped, the prospect of this kind of harassment must have been terrifying. The October rape may, in fact, have been a homophobic assault directed against her, as a woman who didn’t date men and who had a history of cohabitation with a girlfriend.
 
But there was another reason why Brandon wasn’t identifying herself as lesbian: Lesbianism had become a power issue between Brandon and her mother.
 
In March of 1991, shortly after Brandon’s rejection by the army, a teenaged girl named Liz Delano dialed a wrong number and reached Brandon by mistake. Liz mistook Brandon for a teenaged boy, and Brandon played along, calling herself “Billy.” For a joke, she put a sock in her underwear and met Liz at a skating rink as Billy. Liz continued to call the Brandon home and ask for “Billy,” and JoAnn began to understand that her daughter was posing as a boy. She was not happy.
 
A few weeks later, Brandon began a relationship with Heather, a fourteen-year-old friend of Liz. She moved in with Heather, posing as a male and calling herself “Ten-a.” JoAnn Brandon understood that this relationship was a sexual one, and she began telephoning both Heather and Heather’s mother, insisting that the young man they had taken into their home was her daughter. Heather, like Brandon, was an incest survivor. According to the account in Jones’ biography, the focus of Brandon’s relationship was intense, romantic role-playing, not genital sex, and Heather responded initially with gratitude for the thoughtful behaviors and absence of sexual pressure. Brandon deeply resented JoAnn’s attempt to sabotage the relationship, and she especially resented her mother’s attempt to cast her in the role of a sexual (lesbian) predator.
 
To explain away her mother’s persistent calls, Brandon told Heather that she had been born a hermaphrodite, but that JoAnn had chosen to raise her as a female in order to “keep her for herself.” (Jones, 89) According to Heather, “He [Brandon] had a legitimate answer for everything. He’d tell me his mother couldn’t accept the fact that he was male, that she wanted two little girls, that she was just playing a joke.” (Jones, 67) Brandon’s knowledge of hermaphroditism had come from an episode of the Phil Donahue show.

JoAnn herself tells a different story: “I knew that all of a sudden there were beer parties going on and I have an eighteen-year-old daughter over there that’s not supposed to be drinking or doing anything.”(Jones, 67) She understood that any sexual activity between Brandon and the fourteen-year-old Heather was statutory rape. JoAnn was outraged by Brandon’s claim of hermaphroditism. “I gave birth to her; I know what sex she is. There were no attachments anywhere that had to be removed.” (Jones, 68)
 
JoAnn stepped up her campaign to “out” her daughter. She sent two lesbian co-workers to visit Heather’s mother. They had photographs of Brandon as a little girl and a copy of her birth certificate. In response, Brandon tore up every picture of herself she could find. Perceiving lesbianism as her mother’s attempt to break up her relationship, Brandon began binding her breasts, lowering her voice, and using men’s rooms in public.
 
In June 1991, Brandon filed a complaint against her mother for harassment. She and Heather took the tape from their answering machine to the police. On it was a message from JoAnn calling them lesbians and threatening to expose them. Her mother’s insistence on Brandon’s lesbianism had become a serious enough power issue to involve the police.
 
Lesbianism was a family issue in another sense. The winter following Brandon’s attempt to enlist, her sister Tammy had given up a baby for adoption—to a lesbian couple from San Francisco. Brandon had urged her sister to keep the baby. She had wanted desperately to be an aunt. Later, one of Brandon’s gay male friends would report how “He [Brandon] hated lesbians; he was totally against lesbians,” (Jones, 93) citing the adoption as the reason for this hatred.

That same summer, Brandon began forging checks in order to buy groceries and gifts for Heather. She had obtained a fake identification card and was getting jobs as a man. She began telling friends that she had gotten a sex-change operation in Omaha. By October, she had been cited on two counts of second-degree forgery. Brandon’s illegal activities began to accelerate, as did her drinking, compulsive behaviors, and eating disorders. Finally, Sarah, her best friend, decided to take matters into her own hands. She met with Heather and explained to her that Brandon was a female. Heather terminated the relationship and Brandon attempted to kill herself by taking a bottle of antibiotics. This landed her in a crisis center, and here, finally, she was able to receive professional counseling.

Brandon spent seven days at the crisis center. Dr. Klaus Hartman wrote up the initial report. Brandon’s history would have included twelve pending charges of forgery, a possible charge of sexual assault on a minor, an untreated rape in October 1990, eating disorders, binge drinking, and an ongoing sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl. The diagnosis? A mild case of identity disorder. After just a few days of counseling, Brandon told her mother that a sex change operation had been suggested by her therapist.
 
Was transsexualism Brandon’s idea or the therapists’? Mental health clinician Deb Brodtke took over Brandon’s case at the crisis center and continued to treat her for almost a year on an outpatient basis. Brandon is reported telling Brodtke she wanted to be a male, “to not have to deal with the negative connotations of being a lesbian and because she felt less intimidated by men when she presented herself as male.” (Jones, 83) If this is true, what Brandon told her therapist was not that she felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body, but a woman trapped in a world where it was dangerous to be female, and especially dangerous to be lesbian.
 
Jones’ book does not record any attempt on Brodtke’s part to challenge Brandon’s internalized lesbophobia. There is no record in her narrative of efforts to supply Brandon with information about lesbian culture or lesbian history, information about lesbian coming-out groups or groups for young lesbians. There is no record of her attempting to connect Brandon with an adult lesbian who could counsel or mentor her. The “gender identity disorder” (GID) diagnosis reflects the historical heterosexism of the mental health field, which has traditionally understood gay and lesbian desire as evidence of the desire  to become a member of the other sex.
                                   
Brandon’s diagnosis appears not to have included alcoholism. It’s interesting to note how prevalent the use and abuse of alcohol is in the documentary, the biography, and the feature film—and yet how absent it appears to have been from the treatment plan. If alcohol abuse had been identified as even a contributing factor to the chaos and torment of Brandon’s young life, it seems logical that there would have been some attempt to incorporate a recovery program into the treatment plan.
 

And finally, Brandon’s GID diagnosis, so replete with homophobia and gender bias, also appears to have ignored the “elephant in the living room”—the incest. The account of Brandon’s treatment and diagnosis does not appear to include Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome commonly associated with survivors of child abuse, and especially survivors of incest. This is remarkable given the fact that, at the clinic, Brandon presented with a record of years of untreated child sexual abuse, a report of a recent rape, an escalation of criminal activity, a history of multiple identities, sexual predation toward under-aged girls, extreme risk-taking behaviors, avoidance of medical care from fear of routine examinations, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, terror of being in a female body, expressed fear of men, preference for protective clothing, and compulsive bathing—six or seven showers a day with changes of clothing. (Brandon’s obsession with cleanliness would continue throughout her life, and, according to friends, even in her last years, she was still taking three or four showers a day.)
 
Instead of a diagnosis related to trauma, the therapist apparently sent Brandon home with information about “gender reassignment” surgeries, which would include such procedures as suturing the vagina, removing the breasts, ovaries, and uterus, transplanting the nipples, constructing an appendage using skin grafts from the thighs, and administering steroids. Brandon’s friends reported that Brandon expressed a marked ambivalence about these recommendations.
 
Her sister Tammy remembers the family’s reaction:
 
"Basically, we were getting worried about Teena. And we couldn’t get any help for her… you know, not help to deal with her being gay or anything like that, but help to deal with her trying to figure out herself. Maybe she needed some counseling. And she had mentioned to us about committing suicide, so we kind of used that as a reason of getting her to there [Lincoln General Hospital], and the psychologist there said that Teena needed long-term help… which I don’t know if that was really the case, but they did send her out to the Crisis Center, and… I wish I really knew what Teena had told them or what those doctors had told Teena, but basically, she came out of there saying, ‘I want a sex change,’ and… ‘They told me I need to do this and that.’ And they might have told her that, but I don’t know if that’s really what she wanted to do.” "(Muska)

In advocating for the surgery that would facilitate Brandon’s transition, the therapist advised her of the professionally-mandated, year-long probationary period, a period in which the patient would be required to live as a man. Had Brandon described her current strategies for passing as a man in relationships—strategies involving the deception and statutory rape of naive and inexperienced minors who were unlikely to be assertive or educated enough to confront Brandon’s sexual subterfuges? If the therapist did address the legal, ethical, or safety issues of these strategies, Brandon never saw any reason to revise them. In fact, armed with the official diagnosis of “Axis I: transsexualism,” Brandon escalated her deceptions and seductions.
 
After this counseling, her repertory of lies expanded to include tales of her grandmother’s plans to send her to Europe to have the surgery done, and of scheduled dates in June 1993 for a bilateral mastectomy. She told her various girlfriends at various times that her vagina had been sewn up, that “something” had been implanted that would eventually grow into a penis, and that she had begun hormone therapy. Like the stories of hermaphroditism that preceded the transsexual diagnosis, all were untrue.

According to the studies of Jacobs and Herman, the victimized daughter’s repudiation of a female identity and her internalization of an idealized male represent responses to childhood sexual abuse.
 
If gender is considered an aggregate of sex-caste markers in a system of dominance based on biological sex, then it is simplistic and misleading to characterize it as “performative.” Viewed in the context of a patriarchal culture, gender is emblematic of a system of dominance in which women are universally oppressed as a caste.
 
The victimized daughter who adopts a male persona is not “fucking with gender.” Gender has fucked with her, and, in attempting to identify with the power that has hurt her, she is adopting the strategy of a desperate child whose only option has been to alter her perception of herself.
 
"What the transgender movement calls gender-fucking is simply an exercise in moving markers rather than any fundamental change in gender. Gender still exists. It is still an organizing structure for society. What’s different is that you just ‘do’ it differently: it is ‘allowed’ to be attached to different bodies. The aim of transgender politics is to allow you to be ‘be’ the gender that you ‘are.’ However, being your gender still means what you wear, what you do, how you express yourself and is still attached to fundamental notions of what it means to be men and women… And it’s no surprise that what is female and what is male in this view exactly tracks what is already defined as male and female. "(Corson, 3)

Transgender politics does not disrupt the positions of men and women in the gender hierarchy, but what it does do is “render women’s choices to oppose this hierarchy as women and on behalf of women incomprehensible.”(Corson, 3)
 
In addition to its participation in the larger political system of male dominance, the GID diagnosis also acts on a more personal front to protect the perpetrators. If the victimized daughter’s “gender dysphoria” is a post-traumatic response to sexual violence, it reflects an attempt to dissociate, or split off, the trauma.
                       
"A trauma that cannot adequately be represented or narrated remains estranged. It is an alienated chunk of experience that resists any assimilation into the personhood of the host on whom it feeds. Dissociation can also be understood as a narrative act. It narrates fragmentation, breakage, rupture, disjunction, and incommensurability."(Epstein and Lefkovitz, 193)

Dissociation is a survival strategy.
 
"It provides a way out of the intolerable and psychologically incongruous situation (double-bind), it erects memory barriers (amnesia) to keep painful events and memories out of awareness, it functions as an analgesic to prevent feeling pain, it allows escape from experiencing the event and from responsibility/guilt, and it may serve as a hypnotic negation of the sense of self. The child may begin by using the dissociative mechanism spontaneously and sporadically. With repeated victimization and double-bind injunctions, it becomes chronic. It may further become an autonomous process as the individual ages." (Courtois, 155)
 
Dissociation is a way of altering consciousness. As millions of survivors can testify, these dissociated memories have not really gone away. Whether or not they ever surface to the conscious mind, they continue to exert their influence through somatic disorders, flashbacks, sleep disturbances, intrusive dreams, and dissociative disorders. Repressed memories do not go away because one wishes them away. The survivor takes control of her life by understanding and assimilating repressed trauma, not reinforcing the split. And this is precisely why the GID diagnosis is so potentially pernicious when applied to the victimized daughter.
 
When the GID diagnosis is substituted for identification and treatment of PTSD, it reinforces the splitting that was a result of childhood trauma. However “queer” the diagnosis, it does not deviate from a model of normativity based on traditional sex-caste roles. The GID diagnosis that recommends transsexualism as a “cure” seriously compromises the victimized daughter’s potential for recovery from the effects of her trauma. Instead of offering techniques to aid her retrieval of memory and reintegration of dissociated material, the GID diagnosis enables and encourages an even deeper investment in the disorder, by offering a false promise of legitimizing this ahistorical dissociative identity through “reassignment” of gender. It exploits, rather than deconstructs, the syndrome.

Finally, when the transgender identity is an extension and amplification of the victimized daughter’s identification with the perpetrator, a divided consciousness continues to inform the survivor’s psyche, playing itself out in scenarios of revictimization.
 
"In both the play and imagination of the survivors, a tenuous relationship exists between the internalized male abuser and the violated female child… While the introjection of the perpetrator may at times mask the daughter’s identity as victim and thus contribute to the construction of a false persona, patterns of revictimization reveal the extent to which the unprotected and violated female self also inform the personality of the victimized daughter." (Jacobs, 99)
 
Revictimization was the story of Brandon’s short adult life, as she played out serial fraudulent identities that resulted in arrest and incarceration, seduction of under-aged girls who rejected her when they discovered her secret, and increasingly dangerous alliances with violent and homophobic males. Brandon’s sexual deceptions, deceptions that escalated after her official diagnosis as transsexual, put her girlfriends at risk in very real ways. Her girlfriends in Lincoln had been teased and harassed by their friends, but when Brandon moved to the more provincial Richardson County, the stakes became even higher. Both of Brandon’s Humboldt friends, Lisa Lambert and Lana Tisdel, were being harassed at their workplaces and at social events. One of Lisa’s friends described Lisa’s dilemma: “Everyone in Humboldt knew about Brandon. Lisa didn’t try to hide it. Lisa couldn’t believe something like this happened to her. She made it clear that she was too caring to shut Brandon out. She was mad and hurt about it, but she didn’t want to hurt him [Brandon], didn’t want to turn him out on the streets.” (Jones, 205) Her compassion would cost her her life.
 
Lana’s situation was complicated by her friendship with ex-convicts Tom Nissen and John Lotter. When Brandon was arrested for forging checks on December 15, 1993, she had phoned Lana to bail her out, but Lana was horrified to discover that her “boyfriend” was being held in the women’s section of the jail. Instead of going herself, Lana sent Tom, her former boyfriend, to bail Brandon out. The arrest was reported that week in the Falls City Journal, making public Brandon’s biological identity as female, and, consequently, Lana’s participation in what would be perceived as a lesbian relationship. Friends of Brandon believe that the bailing-out was the beginning of a set-up for the subsequent rape. Nissen and Lotter appear to have felt deceived and humiliated by Brandon’s gender presentation. In the words of one friend, “He [Brandon] played a player and [the player] got even for it.” (private email, December 20, 2004)

According to Jones, however, Lana had attempted to protect Brandon, even after she realized she had been deceived. She told her family and Tom Nissen and John Lotter that she had seen Brandon’s penis. But Tom and John were not convinced, and they performed their own investigation—strip-searching her. These were both men with histories of violence, and they decided to take matters into their own hands. It may have been that Lana’s safety was seriously compromised once it was known by these men that she had participated in a sexual relationship with a biological female and had lied to protect the fact.
 
Three days after Brandon had, at Lana’s urging, gone to the police to report the rape, the police questioned John and Tom, but did not arrest them. John denied the rape, but said that Lana had asked him to find a way to determine Brandon’s sex. On December 30, the two men went to Lana’s house looking for Brandon, but Brandon, who was no longer welcome there, had taken shelter at Lisa’s farmhouse. Lana reported that John said he “felt like killing someone” and told her she, Lana, was next. This may have been why Lana’s mother told them where Brandon was hiding. After they left, no phone calls were made to warn Brandon or Lisa that the men were on their way. Conflicting testimony suggests that Lana may have actually been in the car, or even at the house, on the night of the murders.

Many aspects of Brandon’s life would have been easier in a culture that was not transphobic, but recovery from incest trauma would not have been one of them.
 
"Recovery from traumatic sexualization… begins with the process of reintegration whereby the original trauma is brought to consciousness. Only then can the idealization of the perpetrator give way to the reality of his sexual violence. With the deconstruction of the idealized father, the daughter can begin to reclaim and redefine the female self, diminishing the impact of the internalized aggressor." (Jacobs, 165)
 
When the internalization of this ideal has become incorporated into the gender identity of the victimized daughter, specifically as a response to the trauma, this kind of deconstruction is impeded. These may have been so damaged by the incest that it might appear more expedient and more therapeutic to adopt a differently-gendered identity that is not so apparently freighted with traumatic associations. This identity, however, cannot—by definition—offer the integration that characterizes recovery.
 
So, how does the victimized daughter heal? In Victimized Daughters, Janet Liebman Jacobs elaborates some of the stages associated with recovery, noting that not every survivor will experience these changes: (Jacobs, 136)

As an adult, Brandon exhibited behaviors consistent with a diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome associated with incest survivors. Gender dysphoria has been clinically identified as a response to child sexual abuse and incest, and it is logical to question whether or not it was therapeutic in the case of Teena Brandon to diagnose transsexualism and recommend surgical reassignment in lieu of focusing on diagnosis and treatment of Complex PTSD. If healing from child sexual abuse and incest requires retrieval and assimilation of dissociated material, a strong case can be made that Brandon’s transsexualism diagnosis served to enhance her dissociation, impeding recovery from the incest and enabling an escalation of high-risk behaviors based on a dissociated identity.
 
As a final footnote, one of Brandon’s friends has shared this story about the week between the rape and the murder:
 
"On Christmas day of 1993, when Lisa brought Brandon back… from Falls City, [a friend] met him[Brandon] at the door and said “Hi Brandon” In reply [the friend] was told by Brandon that there was no Brandon, Brandon was gone. Her name is Teena. That didn’t change at any point in that last week." (private email, December 20, 2004).

 References

 
Blume, E. Sue. Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women. New York: Ballantine, 1990.                                                                              
 
Chodorow, Nancy and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,” in Barrie Thorne, ed., with Marilyn Yalom, Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions. New York: Longman, 1980.
 
Corson, Charlotte. “Sex, Lies, and Feminism,” in off our backs, June 2001.
 
Courtois, Christine. Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.    
 
Epstein, Julia and Lori Hope Lefkovitz, Ed. Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
 
Ferenczi, Sandor. Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Pscyho-analysis. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955.
 
Freud, Anna. The Ego and Mechanism of Defense. New York: International Universities Press, 1946.
 
Herman, Judith Lewis. Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1981.
 
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
 
Horney, Karen. “The Masculinity Complex in Women,” Archive fur Frauenjunde 13 (1927): 141-54.
 
Jacobs, Janet Liebman Jacobs. Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self. New York: Routledge, 1994.
 
 Jeffreys, Sheila. “FTM Transsexualism and Grief,” in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Issue #15.
 
Jones, Aphrodite. What She Wanted. New York: Pocket Books, 1996.
 
Muska, Susan and Gréta Olafsdóttir. The Brandon Teena Story. New York: New Video, 1999.
 
Peirce, Kimberly. Boys Don’t Cry. Hollywood: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1998.
 
Shengold, Leonard. Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
 

[Originally published in Hard Jobbin’: Women’s Experiences of the Workplace, Ride the Wind Press, Beausejour, Manitoba, 2003]


I led a double life when I worked on the second floor of J.C. Penney's. By day
I was a simple store clerk, a sensitive young woman far from home and going
through a painful divorce. By night and on weekends, I was a dangerous politico, a rabid anti-war protester, a hippie, a radical feminist, an enemy of the
people.

If my co-workers suspected me of leading a secret life, it was probably one
more in line with their experience. On the second floor of Penney's, women
did not leave their husbands for trivial reasons, and certainly never within the
first eighteen months of the marriage! I am sure they assumed I was covering
some shameful and traumatic episode when I gave my pitifully naive and inadequate explanation that I had simply grown tired of being married. It would
have gone without saying on the second floor that I was protecting my shame
at having discovered some adulterous affair—either that or I could not bring
myself to name the horrors my brute of a spouse had inflicted during one of
his periodic bouts of drunken debauchery.

In fact, my husband had been a thoroughly nice man. It was I who had been
difficult. I left, because I could no longer bear who I had become in comparison with this consistent, earnest, successful, conscientious, and nice man.

Nor would my co-workers have understood my desire to escape the confines
of home and family. Far from wanting a house of my own, I was actively engaged in eliminating every possession of mine that I could not fit into a backpack— with the exception of my sewing machine, bought on that second floor of J.C. Penneys and resting, even as I type this memoir, not ten feet from the computer.

It was the summer of 1973. I was twenty-one, Nixon was still President, The War was still going on in Southeast Asia. I was living in Boulder, Colorado, where I had been living since the fall of 1971, when I had followed my recently-graduated husband west to his new fellowship in a doctoral program in clinical psychology. A good wife, I had dropped out of school in order to work at J.C. Penney's selling piece goods.

It would be at J.C. Penney's that I became initiated into the mysteries of my tribe. Working on the second floor, I was surrounded by housewares, sewing machines, clothing for infants and toddlers, fabric and notions—and women.

There was not a man who worked on the entire floor.

Irene Manther ran the piece-goods department. She had moved with her husband from Wyoming to Colorado in a horse-drawn wagon, which gives you some idea of her age, and our age, and the speed at which global technological colonization was advancing. And yet, for all her pioneer crossing in the shadow of the Great Divide, in nearly fifty years of service, Irene had been unable to traverse that gulf that lay between management and staff, between men and women in the corporate world. Her lack of promotion was considered a scandal, a source of whispered rage in the no-man's-land of the second floor.

I did not share her rage. I was unable then to understand women's desire to have any part of a position defined by and necessitating congress with men. I considered the second floor of J.C. Penney's to be some kind of heaven. If the price of being overlooked by men was low wages, so be it. Irene Manther was like a goddess to me, presiding over a vast and colorful matriarchate. Through her capable hands flowed miles and miles of fabric, rivers of textiles containing the iridescent visions of women crossing into, and then crossing out of our department, crocheting us briefly into the web of their conversations, snagging our opinions on their projects, and then hooking away as they knitted, knotted, braided, tatted, embroidered, pieced, patched, and wove themselves into the world beyond the second floor.

We sold these women the soft cotton flannel for their babies' rompers, the denim and broadcloth for their children's playclothes, the silks and satins for their daughters' prom dresses, the lace and nylon net for these daughters' bridal gowns, the linen for the tablecloths, the gingham check for the kitchen curtains, the fake fur for the stuffed animals, the discounted cotton floral prints for their housedresses, the polyester doubleknit for their new-fangled pantsuits, the cotton batting and fiberfill for their quilts, the nylon tricot for their lingerie.

The women seldom sewed for their menfolk. It went without saying that men's clothing required too much fuss, what with tailoring, french seams, buttonholing, fly-fronts, cuffs, padding, lining. Most of their husbands and sons wore blue jeans, uniforms, or business suits anyway. Cheaper to buy, and, besides, the men were always so self-conscious, worrying all the time about what other men might think of them. No, it was better all around just to buy them the ready-mades downstairs. They preferred it that way.

The section "Men and Boys" in the pattern books was modest, statutory even, and always toward the back. It was the elegant gowns, the riotously bright sundresses, the voluptuous loungewear sashaying and strutting across the pages that courted our attention when we stood before the long counters with the pattern books as large as Manhattan phone directories.

The women who sewed back then were good homemakers. They practiced thrift and industry. It was never admitted, never even hinted at, that this might have been a form of art, a creative act, a mode of self-expression. No, these were women sewing for their families, saving money, making do. And as we ran the rainbow fabrics through their hands, and held the bolts up next to them, suggesting braids, and rick-rack, buttons, appliqués, bead-work, we never for a moment acknowledged, even to ourselves, that the women we helped were pleasuring themselves.

And over it all presided Irene Manther. There was not a question about clothing construction for which she did not know the answer. She had sewn it all. There was no quilt pattern she couldn't sketch by heart, no fabric stain for which she didn't know a recipe, no body deformity for which she couldn't make adjustments. Irene was even practiced in the lost art of "turning a suit," that Depression-era economy that involved taking apart the seams of a man's suit and reassembling it again with the worn side of the fabric facing in.

Irene had seen the skirts ascend from the instep to the ankle, then shimmy up the knee. She had seen them plummet to mid-calf, only to scramble up again, this time boldly cresting the knee to establish various base camps along the thigh, in anticipation of a final bid for the summit. Irene had seen shoulders go bare, then shoulders go square; bustlines puffed out like powder pigeons, then flattened down like pancakes, then nosed out like torpedoes, and now assuming the anatomically correct, if sartorially nondescript, contours of human breasts at long last out of harness. Irene had witnessed waistlines cinched in with corsets, then dropped loose to the hips, then smoothed over with girdles, then gathered in with waistbands, then raised up to the breasts, and now riding back down on the hips with bell-bottom jeans.

Irene had lived through two wars to-end-all-wars, and the Bomb, and the Depression, and Korea, and the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women's Liberation Movement, and Vietnam. Through it all she had raised children and grandchildren and seen them married and buried. Irene had milked cows and churned butter and split wood and broken horses and barn-raised and she had come through all of these changes to sell piece goods on the second floor of J.C. Penney's where there weren't any men, and where she would never be a manager.

I felt safe in Irene's matriarchate, and safety had been rare in my experience. Raised in terror, I have spent most of my life trying to prevent what had already happened. Now, at twenty-one, I was in the process of going through a divorce, and on the verge of having to take responsibility for my life—a staggering proposition for someone whose whole prior focus had been resistance. J.C. Penney's provided a refuge for me, an oasis of pure sensory experience in a post-traumatic world where every experience seemed freighted with the moral weight of a life-or-death decision, and yet which was, at the same time, eerily unreal.

For eight precious hours a day, I could be present for these bolts of sensuous fabric. It was safe to define myself in relation to them. The demands were not complex. I would move between these parti-colored islands, allowing my hands to trail over the satiny bolt ends that hung like bright flags into the aisles. When a careless customer had disturbed the arrangements of these pennants, it was my job to restore symmetry. I would reach my hand up under the loose fabric, as if running my hand up the smooth thigh of a woman, then in a deft and impersonal gesture, flip the fabric up over the bolt end and wedge it back into the soft and yielding space between the other fabrics.

It had also been my job to restore order to the spool rack. The spools of thread were displayed on a tall metal frame with sloping dividers, where they beckoned to the children like a giant busy-box while their mothers selected patterns and passed the time of day with the clerks. The threads were arranged by color in the dividers, and it was a great game to the children to see how many they could put in the wrong dividers before their mothers noticed what they were doing.

I had my own game that I played as a keeper of the spools. I would try to see how many I could sort by color without checking the dye number stamped on the end. As many of the hues were similar, especially the blues, this posed something of a challenge to my powers of discrimination.

Sorting spools was an aesthetic, a kinesthetic job, and one of my co-workers was as fond of it as I. Her name was Bobbi, and she would try to beat me to it, especially if there were other tasks, like marking remnants, less to her liking. I enjoyed Bobbi. She was not quick like Irene, but soothing and rhythmic in her movements. My own biorhythms would slow whenever I found myself transiting her orbital.

On the nights when I closed the register with Bobbi, she would insist on examining all the nickels and all the pennies. She was a coin collector, and in those days buffalo nickels were still fairly common. She would always buy them from the till. I was never clear exactly what markings Bobbi was looking for on the pennies, but in her methodical way, she would turn and look at them all. In what appeared to me to be the constricted stream of Bobbi's life, she was clearly panning for gold. Still expecting to stumble across the mother lode, I could not appreciate the ritualistic value of Bobbi's actions, which lay entirely apart from the capture of precious metals.

Women were making quilts in Boulder. Sometimes they would bring as many as a dozen bolts of fabric to the counter, from which they would ask us to measure only a quarter of a yard apiece. Of course, this must have seemed unspeakable dilettantism to a woman like Irene, whose quilts I imagined to have been meticulously pieced together from the scraps and rags carefully hoarded during an era when nothing could be taken for granted.

Women who considered themselves not clever enough to work outside the home, would stand at our counter and perform split-second mathematical calculations in their head as they figured for selvedge, for nap, for shrinkage; making allowance for alterations, customizing patterns by combining features from other patterns. And some of them, the old-timers like Irene, worked without patterns at all, using old newspapers or no paper at all.

Everything in the women's world is ritual, and the fabric department was no different from the beauty parlor or the baby shower in this respect. We spoke about sewing, but this was only the most superficial aspect of our communication rituals. Like bees inspecting new arrivals at the hive, we stroked each other gently with a thousand psychic feelers; taking readings, checking orientation. As Irene explained the intricacies of pattern-alteration, she would be teaching, approving, exchanging. We were the keepers of the flame, we women. We were the ones who were responsible for the well-being of the children, for seeing that we and that they survived. Our communications, no matter how trivial, were all informed by this shared understanding, and here on the second floor of Penney's we were not compelled to restrict the dimensionality of our language, as women always must in the presence of men.