Book Review:

My Gender Workbook by Kate Bornstein
(Routledge, 1998 292 pages, illustrated)

Copyright 1998 by Christine Beatty

(Originally published in Spectator magazine on March 20, 1998, this is the pre-edited version.)

My Gender Workbook is a dangerous tome. It imperils deeply ingrained ideas, venerated social conventions, and the seemingly rock-solid foundations most of us have about gender.

Your foundation is solid, isn’t it Darling?

Maybe not?

Then this is definitely the title for you.

And guess what? Even if you never even questioned gender—yours or another’s—this book is still for you. Because maybe you never really pondered this stuff before, asked questions whose answers might seem obvious.

What is a man?

What is a woman?

Why do we have to be one or the other?

A true philosopher is one who supplies questions instead of answers, and Kate Bornstein has so established herself with My Gender Workbook. Her stated goal is to shortciruit the way we’ve been looking at ourselves, and each other, through “gendered glasses.” And the shunt she wields throughout this work is a question. Lots of ‘em. Lots of really good questions that only the terminally closeminded could shrug off.

For those who don’t know her, Kate is a male-to-female transsexual writer, actor, performance artist and phonesexworker. Her plays include Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex is Neither and Virtually Yours. Her groundbreaking work Gender Outlaw (Routledge, 1994) on “men, women and the rest of us” earned critical acclaim and provided a springboard for this book which painstakingly dissects the concepts of gender and examines it ways we’ve never even imagined.

Rather than interview Kate, with her permission I taped the reading she recently gave at Cody’s Books in Berkeley, excerpts of which I’ve included throughout and which hint of the flavor of My Gender Workbook.

I want to give you a feel for this new book that I wrote but I don't want to read from the book 'cause it's kind of an old book to me now. It took me two years to write it and that's not counting the year it took to collect the words from the over three hundred gender outlaws whose observations provide just the right accessories to an outfit as basic as a workbook...

My Gender Workbook is much like the talk she gave, friendly and chatty—downright flirtatious at times—but also with a flow of thoughtful questions, leading you gently down paths you never even knew existed. “Gender is a question with a whole lot of possible answers,” she tells us, proceeding to ask them one by one, building up a theory of gender perhaps far beyond what we might conceive what that word could mean, showing us radically new ways to explore it.

She begins by inviting you to discover your Gender Aptitude with a series of questions designed to reveal where you stand when it comes to gender, each section of them introduced with some provoking thoughts as to how they might be answered. And after you find out where you fall into a range spanning from “gender freak” to “James T. Kirk,” the book begins to tackle the possible natures of gender, the not-so-obvious contributing factors, and the power bestowed by gender. With that under your belt comes the big exam (remember, this is a workbook) Are You Perfectly Gendered?

Now that you’ve imbibed a dose of theory, Kate begins to scrutinize this “transgender” word, what it might mean and who could possibly be one. You might be transgendered and not even know it! Then she begins to tantalize with a scary concept: what would it be like to have no gender at all? And, for that matter, how would you accomplish that? As she states more than once: “The way you live without gender is you look where gender is, and then you go someplace else.” After you’ve read this book, you’ll understand what that means.

I ask questions all through the book... so think about these questions, like—what did you want to connect with? What made you excited enough to come here? Did you think you might meet someone like yourself? Did you think you might see someone attractive? ... Did ya think the book I wrote would be pink? Could you give yourself permission to buy a pink book? Me, I'm giving myself permission to feel sexy. When I walk down the street these days, I feel my labia rubbing together, especially if I've been seriously or not so seriously fucked the night before. I'm swollen. There's an ache and it says someone thinks I'm beautiful.”

Yes, that’s right. She discusses sex, too. And love and desire. And how they all relate to gender, which raises more questions. How does gender affect these for you? In what ways? Lots of fascinating stuff. As Kate says, “Looking for love, there are no wrong places.”

Perhaps the most fascinating chapter to me was Just Say No, a detailed investigation into the ways the world tries to plug us into a gender. Religion, science, gender “experts,” the law, art, pornography, marketing, friends, family, clubs, class, race and the economy are some of the cues and prods we learn gender from. What do all these social conventions tell us about gender? Why should we listen?

From Just Say No, (p 116)

Theologians might argue that “Why?” is not a spiritual question, but when it comes to Science, we need to be little kids and keep asking “Why?” We need to get into a dialogue with the biologists and endocrinologists, the medical doctors, the physiologists... any scientist who’s trying to tell us what our gender is. Such a conversation might look like this:

You: What make a man a man?

Mr. Science: A man has a penis.

You: (kid-like) Why?

Mr. Science: For the propagation of the race.

You: Why?

Mr. Science: So we don’t die out.

You: Why?

Mr. Science: GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!

You: Okay, okay... there need to be people with penises, but why do those people need to be called “men”?

Mr. Science: Because they are men.

You: Why?

Mr. Science: Because they have penises!

You: So you really don’t know, huh?

Mr. Science: [sputtering]

Of course, you might find a scientist who’s intrigued by these questions. There are outlaws in every field, and Science thankfully has its share of mavericks.

After we’ve learned to say “no” we learn to say “yes,” to discover gender fluidity and what it might mean to have no gender, to consider the idea of going someplace where gender isn’t. On the practical side of exploring gender, she gives us a whole chapter on various safe playgrounds for trying out a new identity. Among these playgrounds are Cyberspace, and she includes a delightful one-act play titled “Post Hard” which is drawn from one night’s session in an Internet S/M chatroom. It’s fun and provoking at the same time.

I found Cautionary Interlude one of the most useful chapters, written for overt gender outlaws (which includes transsexuals like myself) who occasionally tailspin into the hellish depths of selfdoubt or loneliness. And finally she encourages all of us to challenge the bipolar, two-and-two-only gender system, to do our part for the universal rights of all no matter which gender they may claim, and she presents us with some of the tools to accomplish just that.

Summed nicely, this is a book about creating space within yourself to discover who you might be at any given moment and the freedom to express it. And the way she accomplishes that is to encourage you to set aside your preconceived notions, roll up your sleeves and do a little  work. As a final thought, this book should be required reading for all therapists, especially the sex and gender specialists, and I highly recommend it to all transgressively gendered people and freethinkers everywhere.

What I've written down are all the questions that fried my brain and let me see what I hadn't been looking at, and let me finally walk in the world and express myself for the most part the way I'd like to be. Would ya like that? Would you like to  walk in the world the way you always wanted to be? Deep down, wanted to? That's why I wrote the book. I want a world where more people are brave enough to have some fun...

Sometimes, more frequently than not, I get this stare. It's not a stare of horror. Because I know, I've come to believe, that whatever they're seeing, they're seeing something cute. And when they stare at me like “Ohmigod what are you?” I'll smile at them, I'll grin. Sometimes I'll give them a little wink. And I'll say “Hello. Isn't it a beautiful day?” And it stops them, they blink and they go “Yeah. It is.” And I love that. I love connecting with people. It's what I'm trying to do right now with you. It's the way I wrote this workbook. I want to flirt with you. It's the most fun. So I made this book to flirt as much as I possibly could. I want to smile up at you through the pages and say “Hello. Isn't it a beautiful day?”