Private Access to Medicine in Stone Butch Blues and the Framework of Transsexual/Transgender

Since the emergence of transgender theory and the transgender movement, the two categories of transsexual and transgender have been a major point of confrontation in discussions about the bodies and identities of gender variant people. This paper discusses Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues (1993), and the controversy between Jay Prosser and Judith Halberstam regarding the reading of its protagonist as another instance of this confrontation. Prosser positions the experience of the protagonist Jess, a stone butch, as a bodily narrative of a transsexual, while Halberstam frames it as representing a transgender masculinity which is not based on the distinction between lesbian butch and FTM transsexual. There is, however, an element that is easily overlooked in this oppositional framework of transsexual versus transgender: the relationship of Jess’s private access to medicine and the questions of class. As I argue in this paper, when people can access medical services related to gender reassignment without having to take the official route via a country’s public health system, the framework of transsexual versus transgender is only partially effective. For, under such circumstances, it is class rather than medical discourse and definitions, that frames the experience and process.