`When I was very young, I prayed each night to wake up in the morning and be a girl. I always added that part at the end of `Now I lay me down to sleep’ “
For the better part of 37 years, Kate Bornstein, born Albert Herman Bornstein on March 15, 1948, in Neptune, N.J., teetered on the masculine side of the gender fence, even marrying three times and fathering a child. But through it all she sensed something was “deeply, terribly wrong,” although she didn’t know exactly what it was or what to do about it, except to feel ashamed.
“I didn’t listen. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t talk. I didn’t deal with gender at all. I avoided the dilemma as best I could,” Bornstein mused during a recent interview in Chicago. “I lived frantically on the edge of my white male privilege until I tackled issues of transsexualism in therapy and was able to take apart gender and examine it. But as I looked at each facet of gender, I defined it just long enough to realize the definition was entirely inadequate and needed to be abandoned in search of deeper meaning.”
In May 1986, Bornstein’s childhood prayer finally was answered through a male-to-female sex-change operation. .Although the procedure and pre- and postoperative hormones made Bornstein anatomically a woman, she discovered life was not that simple; in fact, she was out of the gender loop altogether.
No longer tacitly following the rules of a gender system that defines only “men” and “women,” Bornstein says, she became a cultural outsider, a freak, an oddity. She recalls with obvious anguish being forced by her employer to use a dirty, isolated bathroom on another floor because the building manager couldn’t decide which gender she really was, even though she dressed and acted as a woman.
“I have no idea what a woman feels like,” Bornstein admits. “I never felt like a girl or a woman. It was my unshakable conviction that I was not a boy or a man, the absence of a feeling, rather than its presence, that convinced me to change my gender.
“Now I know I’m not a man, and I’ve come to the conclusion I’m probably not a woman, either, at least not according to a lot of people’s rules on this sort of thing. I never claim to be a woman, nor do I see myself ever becoming a woman, but I am seriously playing at being one.
“The problem is, we live in a society that insists we declare ourselves one or the other, a society that doesn’t bother telling us precisely what one or the other is. OK, if you wanna push me, I’m a transsexual woman, a transsexual lesbian, a feminist thespian. Yeah, I like that — it’s fun. And I abbreviate it all to `girl.’ That’s fun too.”
Bornstein likens her genital surgery to dying a “virtual death,” not only on the operating table but also in terms of losing a key aspect of male identity, then being reborn as someone else. “But who?” she wonders aloud.
“For me, the in-between place itself was the truth I became aware of, the existence of a place outside the borders of what’s culturally acceptable,” she says. “I was reborn into a world that tells people like me to remain silent, to not reveal the truth of our transsexuality. It’s the only condition for which the therapy is to lie. But this therapeutic lie eventually makes us crazy because silence equals death. I realized, `Yep, I was a freak, all right, but only to the degree I remained silent.’ “
Today, as author, playwright and acclaimed performance artist, Bornstein, 47, is anything but silent. From her home in Seattle, the former IBM salesman traverses the country, in person and as “OutlawGal” via America OnLine’s electronic bulletin board, initiating and encouraging dialogue with “men, women and those in between,” with anyone and everyone who struggles with gender issues.
Ever since her first play, “Hidden: A Gender,” premiered at San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros in 1989, Bornstein has tap-danced on the leading edge of this country’s debate about sexual identity and gender, although she denies being a spokesperson for the transsexual movement.
“My voice is not representative of all transgendered people,” she says. “When a minority group has been silent for so long, the majority tends to listen to loudmouths like me when we first speak up, believing we speak for the group. But more important than my point of view, than any single point of view, is that people begin to question gender.
“In neither my life nor my art am I a leader. I’m just a minion with a mission, that of helping people reach beyond male-female, binary thinking, to uncover a hidden third space–not a third gender–in which we can function more authentically. The concept of `third’ is the concept of the outlaw, who subscribes to a dynamic of change outside any dichotomy, not only gender.”
Like most of her performance pieces, Bornstein’s 1994 book, “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us” (Vintage, $12), in its second printing, is part stream-of-consciousness autobiography, part sexual-political manifesto.
“The reality of being a transgendered individual goes way beyond just being born in the wrong body,” Bornstein says. “Rather, it reflects a deeper dissatisfaction with the bipolar gender system, the culturally constructed imperative to be either man or woman.
“Transgendered people blur traditional definitions of gender and flout established gender rules. The first wave of feminists in the 1960s transgressed a basic rule of gender when they began working outside the home. Gays and lesbians transgressed another when they loved each other openly.
“Now this third wave, the transgendered movement itself, embraces choice, fluidity even, of gender. You no longer are locked into being male or female; you can be either or neither, whenever and wherever you choose. It’s that simple, and that complicated.”
Bornstein says she knew from age 4 that something was different about her, that gender denominations of “boy” and “man” didn’t fit the way they seemingly did for other male children.
“In nursery school, the first time they told us to form two lines, `Girls here, boys over there,’ I literally looked around to see where I should go,” she recalls. “When I saw the pushing, shoving and fighting, I joined the girls’ line. But you know how grownups give you the look that tells you you’ve been really horrible? Well, that’s how they looked at me.
“I skulked over to the boys’ line, where I stayed for the next 17 years, behaving on the surface every bit like a good little boy, but in reality only deferring the underlying issue.
“I hid out in medical textbooks, pulp fiction, drugs and alcohol. I numbed my mind with everything from peyote to Scientology. I buried my head in the sands of television, college, lovers and spouses.
“But I was still a lonely, frightened, little fat kid who felt there was something very bad about me, something sick and twisted inside, because I didn’t feel like the gender I was assigned.
“Being raised as a male, I never experienced what it meant to be female in this culture, so I built a repertoire of female gestures, phrases, body language and outfits in my head and practiced them at night when everyone was asleep.
“By day, I played alone in the basement, way back in the corner where nobody could disturb me. I attached all manner of wires, boxes and dials to an old chair that functioned as my gender-change machine.
“At 10 or 11 years old, I already saw myself as a mistake, something that needed to be fixed and then placed neatly into the proper gender category.”
Bornstein compares gender to an oppressive class system not unlike a club or cult that tightly defends its boundaries, borders and members. As a former believer in Scientology, a self-proclaimed applied religious philosophy, she says she is sensitive to recognizing cult patterns, structural and behavioral, even in classifications not traditionally so defined.
“The bipolar gender system of one-up, one-down is a venue for playing out a cultlike power game, in which roughly half the world’s population is oppressed by the other in the name of male privilege,” she says.
“Economic abuse, mental, emotional and sexual abuse, murder, torture and slavery, all are perpetrated because of the gender system.
“Male privilege holds the system together, and until men give up this privilege, from unearned higher wages to less expensive clothing to better bathroom facilities, from sexual harassment to rape and war, we can’t even hope to begin to dismantle a state of affairs that causes untold suffering for the women on this planet.”
Bornstein says she is often asked what it was like to have had male privilege and give it up, an experience she compares to kicking a habit that was destroying her and those she loved.
“It was really difficult to leave the group of–what should we call it, the gendered? I cannot think of many gendered people who encouraged me or even wished me well,” she says.
“Just as some cults keep their followers under lock and key, the gendered keep their number under tight control and surveillance. To lose a member–oops, did I say that?–would be unthinkable.”
Bornstein’s disarming humor and refreshing honesty about all aspects of her life give the impression she never has been anything other than “the girl next door.” Yet she acknowledges she still constantly “performs identities” and sometimes isn’t certain where her life and art merge.
“Al was always very interested in the construction of persona and displayed a remarkable ability to transform himself into a wide range of energies,” recalls John Emigh, professor of theater, speech and dance at Brown University, in Providence, R.I., and Bornstein’s college acting teacher in the late 1960s.
After so many years of changing shape, molding ideas and perceptions and sampling different lifestyles, Bornstein says, she now has reached a state of contentment, if not happiness.
“While mostly I love the idea of being without a gender identity, I’d really like to be a member of a community some day,” she says wistfully. “One of the reasons I didn’t undergo my gender change for such a long time was the certain knowledge I would be an outsider.
“Living along the borders of the gender frontier these past nine years, I have come to see the gender system we’ve created as a particularly malevolent and divisive social construct, made all the more dangerous by the culture’s apparent inability to question its own creation.
“I’ve searched all my life for a rock bottom definition of woman, an unquestionable sense of what is a man. But I still haven’t found any answers.
“Are you a woman because you can bear children? Because you bleed every month? Do you then cease being a woman after menopause? Are you a man because you can father children? What if you were exposed to nuclear radiation and became sterile? Are you then a woman?
“Nowadays, I try to make it easier for people to ask these questions, but most still don’t ask them easily. For now, my happiness lies in connecting with people, trying to reverse that trend, encouraging them to converse freely about gender, to question it and to find answers they can live with.
“As such, my life has finally become the dialogue I always wanted growing up but never had the chance to have.”
