Passing for Human:
An open discussion with Sandy Stone
June 2001

Stone:…The title of my next book is 'Passing for Human'. There is that aspect of being a cyborg transie, if we can't pass for anything else we'll just try to pass for human. It's a lot harder to fail.

Audience: It was fascinating to hear about transies learning the gestures and attitudes of the other sex. Given what you've been saying about gender as performance, and the historical increase in crossing gender lines, now that it's more prevalent in society at large and now that it's become more of an option to people with less money, do you foresee a point when we might teach how to act more male or female in order to help people navigate social situations?

Stone: I think we do that in various ways. If boys aren't macho enough they take remedial sports, and of course part of sports is to learn the masculine language. A specific school for that purpose might be very interesting. In 'The Empire Strikes Back' I mentioned that in association with gender-reassignment programs there used to be 'charm schools', where they taught male-to-female transies how to perform 'woman'. That fell into disfavor after a while because it was felt to be oppressive, although it continued convertly of course. What do you think would be accomplished by a school to teach people to perform gender better?

Audience: Well, my question is, why is there more of an interest in performing the female than in performing the male? I'm very curious about where power is perceived to lie, and why people choose to go either towards it or away from it.

Audience: I think it's more accepted for women to adopt masculinity, not that they do it less. I think it's pretty equal, it's just that one is social stigmatized. I'm not talking about transsexualism here, but about things like cross-dressing.

Stone: Well, John Mauney has worked most of his life to try to clarify the puzzle of gender, and to try to resolve alot of the thorny issues that have plagued the medical profession about children that are born with ambiguous genitalia, in order to try and resolve it in the most human way possible. The fact that he's being attacked in a book, which is called 'As Nature Made Him', and which is rabidly essentialist is an extremely troubling and problematic thing that tends to make me want to look at the agendas behind its publication. Who tends to benefit from publishing an essentialist book at this point in time in the U.S., in the midst of feminist wars, in the midst of a time when it has been pointed out, in the line of Judith Butler, that the majority of gender may in fact be performance? To publish a book like this is to radically locate oneself in an extremely conservative position, which is one of the reasons it's getting so much publicity. When you read 'As Nature Made Him' symptomatically, that is, reading for what is left out, one of the things that leaps out of you is the total absence of any critical perspective. The absence of anything like 'While I was busy thinking there was something wrong, what's going on around me? Why am I doing those things?' The a priori conclusion is 'I'm doing those things because there's some essential nature, some deep essential identity that is trying to be expressed.' This is like one of the worst transie arguments, coming back like the return of the repressed to haunt us. 'I was born into the wrong body.' Which is what many transies say to explain what's going on with them, and which completely erases any possibility of any kind of experience they might have had from birth onward that was imposed upon them by other people, unconsciously or unconsciously, that might have pre-disposed them to one side or another. I don't say let's throw out 'As Nature Made Him'. It's a useful book in the ongoing discourse on gender. To accept it uncritically as either an explanation of gender or as an indictment of John Mauney is to miss the point. Any book on gender is a minefield, but the less problematic it is, the more of a minefield it's going to be.

Audience: There's a boy who's penis is removed, he's told that he's a girl and he feels like a boy?

Stone: Yes. He feels wrong. He's treated, he becomes one of John Mauney's patients. He doesn't know why he's being treated. This is an analogue to the human genome project, where for a while we had people running around saying 'Ah ha! Now we've sequenced the genome, now we know how to build humans, cure various diseases' and so forth. The thing is, from knowing the sequence of the human genome we really know almost nothing. We've acquired a useful piece of knowledge but it really doesn't tell us anything about the rest of what goes on in the genome. We know the physical locations, we've solved the geography of the human genome, but we still don't know anything about how different parts of the genome turn each other on and off, or which parts are active and which parts are inactive. The people who are involved with biology at the genetic level are beginning to be aware that only a small part of the genome is active. The rest of it doesn't appear to do anything and no one knows why. One running joke in genetics is that it was comments that God put into the code like 'Rib two looks pretty good. Going to experiment with apple and serpent.' It will be a much longer time before we understand how bits of the genome relate to each other, because the relationships can be so very, very complex. How the relationships work is not at all obvious, and in fact they change. There are still alot of factors about how the DNA is read out that we still don't understand. Similarly, with these issues of genders, I, like John Mauney, would like to find some grand unified theory that explains gender. I think that in all probability it will never happen because no such theory exists. Gender and its interactions are as complex as the human genome, perhaps more complex. Again, as with identity, when you start to go down through the layers to find the essential root of the thing, what you find is that there's nothing there. There's nothing there because as you go into this seemingly 'molar' construction of gender, which is to say a closed, discreet, explicable object that you can hold in front of you and look at, 'this is gender, we can see its boundaries and if we open it up we can see the components', you discover that there's no internal physical structure, but relationships intead. Once you get into it, it's like a power in the Foucauldian sense, which is to say when you stand on the mountainside and look down into the valley you can see the mist down there, it's palpable. It looks like you could go down and scoop the mist up in your hands and it would come up like cream, but as soon as you get into it, it becomes invisible. You look around and you know it's all around but you can't perceive it anymore once you're in it. I propose that gender works very much like that. When you get into it to the point that you think 'Ah, now I can see what it is', that's when it disappears. That's when it turns into a conjury of relationships, no group of which by themselves explain what's going on. The only way to understand is to back out of it. Then you have the molar view, which tells you nothing. It just shows you that there is such a phenomena, it's ongoing, there it is.

Audience: It's the anthropological fallacy, you think that at the end you're going to find something which is on the same level as finding something in physics or biology. It's the wrong kind of theory to look for something overarching to explain social constructs which are dynamic and always changing.

Stone: We need a different set of tools to deal with this. We don't know exactly how to do it but knowing that the tools we do have are not adequate to the job is a very good way to begin. It lets us know that we seriously need to keep looking. One of the reasons that I brought up in class the topic of non-predicate language is that in my heart of hearts I believe that the enterprise of theory has very nearly exhausted itself. We all still practice it, but at heart I think it's worn out. It's played itself out as far as it can go. That's when you get an academic discipline, when something has played itself out and isn't dangerous anymore, when you know what its limits are and when it's safe. Since we do not yet have a theoretical apparatus that can adequately frame and elucidate gender for us, the message in this is that it's time to put away the tools of theory we've been using and look for some other set of tools which aren't recognizable to us as theory. One possible way to perceive it, certainly not the only one, is to pursue what I call non-predication. This is my method of using performance instead of text as a way to try and explain the same ideas from a different approach. I don't know if that's going to go anywhere. There are probably a vast number of approaches that one could take. I do feel that the ones we've used so far have manifestly proved themselves to be insufficient to the task. We still need to keep asking the questions. Maybe what we will find at the end of this, as Rilke says, is eventually if we just 'live the questions', if we live our lives in a performative way, we will live ourselves into the answer. Maybe not so much to live the answer as to become aware that we have reached the answer, we now see the answer around us in a way that we can understand, rather than having it be either a complete set of relationships or a fog. We then have a language with which to say 'Ah, I know what it is!', although that language may not be text on a page, and it may not be the theoretical apparatus that we understand, it may be some as-yet unnameable discourse. I don't know, this may be more of a quagmire than you intended to get into. I know I got momentarily impassioned but it is something that I'm concerned about. Being a transie, as with being any marked group, you have alot of people telling you who you are and why you do what you do. The purpose of the post-transsexual manifesto is to say we have to stop being written and start writing ourselves into these discourses. We're on our way, I think there will shortly be an institute for transgender studies to be set up in San Fransisco. Transie academics are getting their doctorates, getting jobs in universities in various departments, and instead of being silenced and identifying themselves as something they're not, they're identifying themselves as transies, thereby opening the way for more transie academics, eventually for a rich and complex discourse that will present itself alongside the ongoing discourses on gender and sexuality already present. I used to think that I wouldn't live long enough to see it. When I wrote the post-transsexual manifesto I dreamed that I would be at a conference and stand up and say the simplest thing that anyone could say, 'Ok, all of the transies in the room, over here, let's have a caucus.' I never thought I would say that, but there's actually a real chance in the next few years that this could take place.

Audience: Can you update us on your chapter on Anne Rice?

Stone: If you haven't read the book, the part in question is where I talk about the vampire Lestat and his fascination with mortals, which comes partly from mortals' ability to die and therefore mortals' sense in being immersed in life, in its immediacy and thus in both its pain and exquisite pleasure. Lestat lives forever and in some senses is outside of humanity and of time. By being outside of time he has a different perspective. He sees his friends grow old and die and he himself is unchanged. He goes on and makes new friends, they die, which makes him weary of giving himself wholly to any mortal because he knows he will lose them. He also sees humanity in terms of their individual erotic potential. Blood to him is an incredibly erotic object. It's the fragrant, rich substance that pounds and roars through mortals' veins and he drinks it with a huge sense of the enormous erotic potential in that moment. Lestat always sees himself in a tragic light, because he can never die. His vampire nature keeps him from the deep engagement with the flesh that the mortals around him have. He misses the simple sensations that mortals can have, which come with mortality. There's a part in 'The Tale of the Body Thief' when Lestat is given a mortal body. He's drunk with physicality, with a sense of being thrown into a radically grounded relationship with a body, a body that can be hurt, can be damaged, that can bleed, and that can participate in the pleasures of the flesh that he was previously only able to long for. He goes into some crappy American resturant and he has a hamburger and fries. There's this enormous sense of rancid, molten fat that sweeps over him, and I'm reading this going 'I'm going to throw up!' while Lestat is exulting, caught up in the ecstasy of this horrible tasting stuff because he can taste it, because it fills his nostrils and his mouth and lungs with this awful rancid order. But he can smell it! That's his joy and his triumph in that moment. So let's think about this character - I wrote this before Rice wrote 'The Tale of the Body Thief', and by the time I got around to writing 'The War Between Desire and Technology', Lestat was long into being jaded and longing for pleasures of the flesh, feeling himself to be a tragic character in the sense that his relationship to the arrow of time was different. He saw humans around him impaled on the arrow of time, compelled to follow it from birth to death, doomed to grow old and die while he stood outside that. So I thought, let's take Lestat and send him to the university, to the Department of Anthropology at UCSC. He gets a PhD and by doing so he gets a different perspective on what he's doing. He becomes a vampire anthropologist. Partly what he's learned to do thereby is understand how to theorize his vampire nature. He no longer goes around saying 'I long for this, I long for that, I can't articulate it, I don't know what to do.' Now he's a theoretician, he can talk and write about it. He also has acquired a different vision, because the issue for me has always been this difference between normal vision and vampire vision. He has now acquired a kind of mortal vision, which is the anthropological-vampiric vision of how humanity works. He not only sees mortals as trapped in the arrow of time and compelled to move from birth to death in a temporal train, but he also sees mortals as trapped by the sword of subject-position, in which they are compelled not to move in subjective space. Trapped by a framework of power.

Audience: It's interesting to see how the idea which is at the core of the Vampire Lestat is domesticated in a film like 'Wings of Desire' turned into something much less threatening.

Stone: The thing about his vampiric vision having been changed is that Lestat has then acquired the power to impart a different kind of knowledge. Here of course I'm collapsing the phallic intrusion of blood drinking with the kiss, because for Lestat they're very much the same. Here we have the kiss as an act of freeing. As a vampire when he kisses he's drinking blood from, he has the power to grant them the power of being vampires, and thus to escape from the arrow of time. Now because of his theoretical grounding he can look at humans and see the other impalement, the phallic intrusion of subjectivity in the sense of being locked into a particular subject-position, nailed down in time. The Christian myth of being betrayed from the timeless into the agony of time. This also plays into the vampiric gaze and the vampiric kiss, in that by giving the kiss he also gives a different kind of freedom, that from subject-position. This new kiss of subjective freedom looks different - my question is, what precisely does it look like? We know people who have been freed from subject position, they talk about it in terms of flowing between terms of gender and terms of identity. They are about changing subjectivity at will. They talk about subjectivity, instead of a ground or foundation of being, as being rather a boat which is floating on the waters. This boat is anchored in place only momentarily - we can pull the anchor up, we can move the boat to another position and continue along. In that motion, that flowing from one place to another in this infinitely rich spectrum of identity, what is gained and what is lost? Not all the positions in the sea are equal, some of them have whirlpools, some of them have hurricanes, some of them have delightful calm waters. That's what I was after in that little riff in my book. Basically what I've done is to expand on it in my performances, because to say it is quite different from writing it. I use a different spectrum of communication when I'm saying it, because I'm using gesture, voice tone, on the stage I would be standing up and using body position. It's still necessary to write, you can't escape writing. You are ultimately trapped by textuality no matter how much you try. If you want to go on communicating, you have to write at some point. What I say on the page is not the same as what I say on stage. What people hear is not the same as what they read, how they process it is completely different. Both of them are in fact necessary. The book alone does not convey the entire message, performance conveys alot more but not all. You need them both in juxtaposition, to read them as a discursive structure which is in tensivity, that speaks to itself in various forms of tension. Out of that tension comes something else which I can't name, and which is ultimately what this is all about, the non-discursive element, the unnameable discourse. This is what the university of the future is about, what future theory is about, and I have no way of talking about it. I can't sit and say 'It's this, it's that.'