Blending Genders – edited by Richard Ekins and Dave King

The subtitle is “Social Aspects of Cross-Dressing and Sex-changing”. That’s the clue to this collection of essays dating from 1996. Then the hunt was still on for the terms in which to examine and discuss what we would call transgender or trans. Now we wouldn’t refer to “sex-change” and we would regard “cross-dressing” as a sub-sub-division of the wider gender-variant universe. To its credit the book contains quite a few speculations on the direction that academic and critical writing (and such books are mainly aimed at college and university readers) might take. There is a lot about “dressing” and at one point we’re in the thick of a discussion about “male femaling” and, by implication, “female maling”. The very title “Blending Genders” declares a focus on gender as something material to be combined and applied, like paint (or make-up). These were all terms which seemed to disappear as we moved on to embrace wider fluidities and to give more emphasis to a wider range of cultures and individual variants, - when in fact “genderqueer” arrived to disrupt even the disruptions. Despite the datedness of its concept-framework the book contains a treasure-trove of research and experience. There is for example an examination of the trans sex-scripts for telephone call-lines, a medium which was very organized and lucrative in the days before the internet took the scripts into the video dimension. In the same vein but more enduringly you can find here a review of “cross-dressing and sex-changing in literature” which includes Conan Doyle and Gore Vidal amongst many more obscure authors. There’s an early instance of “re-transitioning” alongside personal accounts of an American “transvestite club” and the famous “Porchester Balls”. If history matters here it is in abundance. When it comes to theory and theses we have both a passionate and well-reasoned take-down of Janice Raymond’s notorious anti-trans text “The Transexual Empire” (complete with a summary of what that text contains) and Janice Raymond herself attempting to incorporate Leslie Feinberg and k.d. lang into her parsimonious pseudo-feminism. And Stephen Whittle in an early role as queer provocateur offers us a view of trans in queer theory which concludes with the idea that “’Gender-blending’ is a misnomer to the transgendered community. Gender exists as itself, that is, as an idea, an invention, a means of oppression and a means of expression.” And so a publication about gender as a point of reference ends up treating it as a side-show. Which is very much in tune with our later times.