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Wednesday
In these dark time, we look desperately for points of light where we can find them, and one positive development has been all the judges ruling against Trump’s egregious executive orders. Recently, one court overturned his ban on transgendered people serving in the military and an appeals court upheld that ruling.
When it comes to transgender rights, we can count on William Shakespeare, who understood in a deep way the fragility of gender distinctions. Plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It are critical for exploring why some feel compelled to change genders that don’t correspond with their birth anatomy.
That being said, Shakespeare also has a warning that progressives should heed given the outsized role that trans women competing in women’s sports has played in electoral politics. It’s an issue that alienates some liberals who otherwise have no problem with bathrooms or pronouns, partly because sports and domination are so connected. In the figure of Twelfth Night’s Orsino, the Bard shows what male entitlement looks like when it crosses gender lines.
But let’s look first at how Shakespeare challenges gender distinctions. To borrow from my book, in Twelfth Night
we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine.
“Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has,” I go on to write, “Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity.”
We can regard the twins in the play, Viola and Sebastian, as stand-ins for all of us—we all have a male and a female side, and the lightning strike that splits their ship and separates them is symbolic of how, from the beginning, society assigns one gender and all the characteristics traditionally associated with it to each of us. For some, it feels as though the universe has played terrible joke: a bolt of lightning out of the blue has separated them from an essential part of themselves.
Sometimes this ambiguity even shows up in the biological realm. There are people born with ambiguous sexual organs (“easier to dig a hole than erect a pole” has often been society’s surgical response), and there are people whose chromosomes don’t fall into either the xx or xy categories. As University of Hawaii biologist Milton Diamond succinctly puts it, “Nature loves diversity; society hates it.”
Thank goodness we have a society that is somewhat willing—at least so far—to allow people to openly cross the gender divide. Society is the beneficiary because people can serve in ways that otherwise would have been closed to them. From what I understand, trans members of the armed forces have made tremendous contributions. One reason America as a nation has flourished is because it has granted people the freedom to follow their genius, even when doing so breaks with past practice.
To voice my one concern, however, I offer up a personal story. To begin with some background, I was a small and shy boy when I was growing up, one who didn’t engage roughhouse or play football (a religion in rural Tennessee). Although I am cis-gender, I vividly remember thinking that a mistake had been made somewhere, that I was actually a girl. I was riveted by stories of boys who looked like girls (Little Lord Fauntleroy) or actually were girls (Tip/Ozma in The Land of Oz), and when I encountered a recording of Twelfth Night in seventh grade, I listened to it over and over. I identified especially with Viola, with her male exterior hiding a female interior.
Here’s my story: once, at fifth grade recess, I left the boys and inserted myself in a girls’ dodgeball game. While I wasn’t athletic, my boy’s physiology meant that, for once in my life, I was the best player on the field. I still remember the satisfaction I felt. And I also remember the fury of Tootsie Green, the most athletic girl in the class, at how I had invaded her turf. She did everything she could to get me out of the game, ignoring all the other girls in the ring.
Of course, I had a testosterone advantage. If males are stronger and faster than women, it is because we have more muscle mass, larger frames, and larger lung and heart capacity. Weak though I was compared to other boys, I could dominate over girls, something males have a history of doing (to say the least). My reservation about trans women playing female sports is that there is not a level physiological playing field, giving them a built-in advantage.
Martine Navratilova, a pioneering lesbian athlete, got into trouble in 2019 when she made this point. Male athletes who transition to become female athletes but decline to undergo gender reassignment surgery, she said, are “cheating” and should not be allowed to compete against women. As a result of her comments, she was called transphobic, dismissed as a TERF (trans-exclusionary feminist), and dropped by Athlete Ally, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.
Decades later, I remembered the brief sense of superiority I felt on that dodgeball pitch after seeing the movie Tootsie, where an unemployed actor (played by Dustin Hoffmann) passes himself off as a woman in order to get a job. An English colleague of mine expressed her fury about the film, which she said contends that it takes a man to be a superior woman.
Orsino certainly believes this. At the beginning of the play, he has discovered love and sweetness, which he regards as women’s domain. “If music be the food of love, play on,” he commands, lolling around rather than (as his attendant desires) going out deer hunting. Learning that Lady Olivia won’t consider his suit until she has spent seven years mourning her brother, he is overcome with admiration. Women, with their deep sensitivity, are far superior to men, he concludes. If she can love a brother that much, he muses, just think how much she will love a husband.
Note how his gender stereotyping locks both him and Olivia into a life-denying behavior. He admires her decision to mourn for seven years and she herself feels obligated to do so. It takes a figure like Viola, who refuses to conform to gender expectations, to free the two from these mental prisons.
But before that happens, we see what happens when someone with Orsino’s male privilege starts mimicking what he regards as female behavior. When Viola, in the guise of Cesario, tries to argue him out of his Olivia fixation—Olivia, she implies, is shrugging Orsino off the way Orsino would shrug off a woman who loved him—Orsino won’t accept the equation. Now that he has ventured into women’s territory, he wishes to control it. Love for women, he asserts, is merely an appetite whereas, for men like him, it involves the liver. (Note: The liver in the 17th century was considered the site of the soul, the vital organ and the central place of all forms of mental and emotional activity. Since then we have shifted the symbolism from liver to heart.) He doesn’t acknowledge that he earlier he attributed to Olivia a great liver:
There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much. Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia.
So take that, women. Now that I’ve entered your domain, I can inform you that you are merely emotional when you think you are in love whereas men in love are having an oceanic experience.
What’s my point? In addition to having qualms about trans women playing women’s sports, I guess I’m also advising humility in the transitioning. Patriarchal arrogance, the very thing that some transitioning men are seeking to escape, strikes deep. At the very least, Orsino’s behavior can help us understand why some TERFs are hostile to trans women. Perhaps talking about the character may pave the way for more productive interactions.
Goodness knows we need such conversations at the present moment. Radical feminists find themselves targeted by Trumpists no less than trans folk. And then there are all those other letters in LGBTQ+–not only the “T”–that find themselves in jeopardy. The time has come for strategic alliances.
