The Admirable Transvestite
By JT Brien
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Men and women also live in different worlds in the sense that they occupy different space. Some places are forbidden to women and some to men. Even in a one-roomed hut the men live on one side and the women on the other and neither ever crosses to the other side.
In some cultures a person may never see a person of the opposite sex to whom they are not related. Although that is no longer so prevalent, even in our own society it is still considered unlucky for a bridegroom to see his bride on the morning before the wedding.
The differences between men and women vary from culture to culture. In one society only men may make pottery, in another only women may. In one place only women milk cows and only men milk goats; ten miles away vice versa. Each village, each tribe is convinced that it knows best what is suitable for a woman to do and what for a man, but in no case are their ideas universally true. It was these variations in the gender pattern as much as anything that gave a community its identity.
Strangers might be traded with, but it was almost unthinkable to marry one, because they did not understand the real difference between men and women. When I was young I would often hear the old people in my part of rural Ulster complain that "you can't tell the girls from the boys anymore", a remark that seemed patently untrue to anyone of my generation. What they meant, but could not say, was that the difference between boys and girls stood for all the other differences that made them the people they were. When their idea of what that difference was was no longer held true, they felt themselves losing their own sense of identity. The world they knew was passing away.
If the gender difference is so important to a person's sense of who they are, then why is it that a woman can live and work in a man's world, wearing men's clothes, and all the prejudice she encounters does not force her to deny that she is a woman, yet transvestites often feel compelled to deny any trace of their masculinity? Joan of Arc, after all, dressed as a man and fought as a man, yet there was never any doubt as to her original gender.
History is full of similar cases. There have been other cases of women who passed as men and whose true sex was only discovered on death. The most bizarre example is probably the legend of Pope Joan, the English girl who was supposedly elected Pope and gave birth on the way to be crowned. Why are these celebrated in ballad and legend while their male counterparts are over- looked?
History, as any feminist will tell you, is His-story; the story of man's world. Women appear in it only incidentally, where their effect on the masculine world is undeniable, and the most undeniable of women are those like the two Joans who were successful in a man's role. Male transvestites, along with most women, are invisible to History.
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