“Jake in Transition from Female to Male” series, or, Through the Mirror and What Clarissa Found There

© 2002 Carla Williams. All Rights Reserved.

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(To see the Jake images and read the artist's text, go here.)

 

About a year ago I went to a movie and found myself seated next to a twenty-something man and woman. They were talking about the movies they had each recently seen—he had seen Boys Don’t Cry; she said she and a friend meant to go and see it soon. I thought this was great; I couldn’t remember when I’d thought an Academy Award-Ò nominated actress deserved to win more than Hilary Swank and it was a tough, terrific film. He started to tell his date about the movie, saying he didn’t want to give away the plot but that the main character gets raped toward the end of the film. She dutifully winces. “No, but see, all through the movie you just think it’s a guy, you never think it’s a woman, and then there’s this rape scene, and I could not watch a guy being raped,” he explained to his date. I was dumbfounded, waiting with anticipation to hear what I expected, from either of them, that they couldn’t stand to see a woman raped on screen, either. But neither one seemed to really hear or mind what he’d said; she agreed and quickly decided that it was no longer a movie she wanted to see.

 

I don’t know where it comes from, this gender thing, the association of particular behavior, good and bad, with one’s biologically assigned sex. Men rape but are not raped. Women are naturally the victims. Men like being men and women like being women. Some say it is learned from parents and society. Maybe we’re born that way along with our two arms, two eyes, and ten toes. It’s God’s will. The rest don’t count.

 

But what if gender isn’t a given? What if it’s chosen? Then what of the behavior?

 

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Any FTM will tell you that we basically live in front of the mirror when we’re first transitioning…It is indescribably gratifying to finally see that the image in the mirror reflects the image of myself that I’ve always carried inside.[1]

 

Sean Gardner thus describes the exhilarating visual experience of the transition from being a woman to becoming a man. Jake’s own complicated deconstruction and reconstruction is a fascinating one that brought Clarissa Sligh along for the journey as she documented his transition from Deb, a female lesbian to Jake, a heterosexual male. Jake, a sculptor whose early artwork consists of a barbed wire enclosure, asked Sligh to photograph him; but what did he believe the photographs would show? What can they show? In fact, Sligh’s camera is Jake’s public mirror, his enduring affirmation that he is becoming what he believes he is. A man. Male. After all, he’s starting to look like one. He has long behaved like one. What else is there?

 

It gets more complicated. Why Sligh?

 

Maybe Jake initially thought that a photographer just composes the frame, snaps the shutter release, and makes sure that the prints are tonally balanced. But Jake, perhaps unwittingly, chose extremely well. As an African American woman raised in the South during the Civil Rights Movement who was then living in a small town in North Texas, Sligh agreed to photograph the sex change of a white man whose parents, upset over his imminent transformation, tell him they “felt [they] were willing to accept or could take almost anything except [him] bringing home a black.” Well, guess who’s coming to dinner with her camera?

 

A few years earlier Sligh had begun to explore the construct of “maleness” in a series about her father. Like most of us, she had assumed that someone like Jake who had himself endured the lonely agony of carrying around a “deep, dark secret” would be sympathetic to someone else not of the dominant culture. A woman. Black. How can a transgendered person be misogynistic and racist? The latter is easy—he, unlike Sligh, can change what’s “wrong” with him. Yet who would choose “the enemy” or “the unknown” to trust with the intimate details of one of the most important passages of one’s life? Who confronts their fears by making those fears visible through the eyes of someone with whom he feels uneasy, with whom he has no connection? Or doesn’t he?

 

***

 

Breasts get cut off, nipples are remade, every ten days (for the rest of his life) testosterone is injected, body hair grows, voice cracks, silicon balls are inserted, a penis is constructed, the silicon ruptures—Sligh is present for all of it and her photographs take us through that frequently painful journey, and yet the hard part is not physical. As Jake’s body changed, did Jake? Legally he has–he looks and sounds like a man, so why confuse the folks in the bathroom up at work? Yet he becomes more of a stereotype, the kind of man who desperately needs to get in touch with his feminine side. Normal as a man; didn’t work as a woman. Jakes seems happy; we’re kind of stunned. What does being a man mean to him?

 

Eventually Sligh included her own journal’s words and self-images in the visual construction of Jake’s story. By participating as both documentarian and as doppelgänger, Sligh complicates his process, actually and metaphorically, reflecting Jake’s fears and triumphs through her own transformation from hired observer to visibly affected. What the viewer ultimately discovers through Sligh’s work is that the photographs aren’t so much about the process of changing genders, or of visualizing desire, but of coming to terms with difference. His and ours. It isn’t always what you think it should be.

 

Hilary Swank did win her OscarÒ as a woman playing a girl pretending to be a boy, and then every photograph I saw of her in the next year over-emphasized her female-ness, with seemingly larger and larger breasts hanging out of skimpier designer dresses, a grinning husband glued to her side. Surely she had to be portrayed in this way in order to continue her career; after all, changing genders is only visual role-playing, right?