Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
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the book that caught her eye chronicled the life of Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen was a former American soldier who had undergone a sex change in the 1950s, and whose story garnered international attention. When Margie came across Jorgensen’s story in paperback, she experienced a jolt of self-recognition. “I was a teenager, and I was at a local drugstore that had magazines and paperbacks. I saw the Christine Jorgensen story … I took it home and I read it. I was just flabbergasted. I was like, this is me. I knew, ‘hey there’s one other person in the world like me.’ Reading those pages gave me comfort.” For Margie, that book served as a kind of mirror. She saw herself in Jorgensen’s life story, and the act of reading helped her realize that gender transformation was possible, and even more, that changing sex did not mean foregoing a successful and fulfilling life. Feelings of solace and encouragement washed over her. She no longer felt so alone.
Margie is a 59-year-old white transgender woman and a small-business owner who lives in the Detroit suburbs. She is a grandmother, a Detroit Tigers fan, and an avid viewer of Fox News. Raised as a boy in a close, conservative Michigan community, Margie grew up in a media and information environment that had little to offer in terms of transgender visibility and discourse. “I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and there just wasn’t anything,” she explained, “I think probably in the 1970s magazines were important because we didn’t have the Internet. I’d search through magazines sometimes. But the things I found in magazines were always from a pornographic point of view because there wasn’t anything else. I did search, but there just weren’t any options.” Margie remembers feeling alienated in the suburbs and facing unrelenting pressure from family, friends, and teachers to fit in and to convincingly portray masculinity. Despite this she recalled, “I knew I was different … I felt that I should be a girl.” As a young person, even though she lacked the self-awareness, vocabulary, and social support to fully come to terms with what she called “her situation,” Margie cross-dressed in private. In her bedroom, she cautiously experimented with her identity, because, as she admitted, “My parents had very specific ideas about what you were going to be and about what roles you were allowed to be in. My parents were strict. Very loving, but I tried very hard to please them.” So, as a teenager Margie kept that drugstore paperback about Christine Jorgensen, her precious resource, hidden from sight in her room, reading it every chance she could get beyond her parents’ watchful eyes. Armed with the new and liberating perspective she gleaned from the book, Margie imagined becoming a girl, daydreaming with delight. But she was at a point in her life where the possibility of gender transition “just seemed like a farfetched dream.”
As Margie became a young adult, she continued on the predetermined course paved for men growing up in the postwar era: get a job, get married, move to the suburbs, and have kids. After marrying in 1971 and following the birth of her first child in 1972, Margie told her wife she “liked to dress up,” and for years continued to secretly cross-dress at home. Yet, the burdens of a restricted self became unbearable. She had to stop hiding. “I struggled with it like everybody else for all those years until I got to the point where I felt like I was going to explode, and either do something about it, or kill myself.”
This turning point occurred in 2005, the result of changes in Margie’s life circumstances and her media environment. “I started getting truly involved on the Internet … Being able to access other people through chat or websites opened up everything. Being able to create an identity that I wanted but that I couldn’t quite have and live helped. Knowing there was a possibility that transgender existed. It also was that my children were grown and didn’t have to answer to their peers.” With her children out of the house, her business stable and profitable, and the Internet at her fingertips, Margie began to consider gender transition. Exploding was no longer necessary.
In 2010, Margie initiated her gender transition. She was ecstatic and immediately changed her name and the gender marker on her driver’s license. Nevertheless, transitioning generated new challenges. Margie struggled to maintain the relationships she had long established with family, friends, and business colleagues. Although many were supportive, some did not understand her decision to transition and distanced themselves from her. Moreover, her marriage was at stake. Margie and her wife were best friends and wanted to remain together. But what would this new relationship look like? In answering this question, they turned to media for guidance. Together, Margie and her wife watched as many transgender-themed films and documentaries as they could find. “The movies,” Margie explained, “make it easier to talk about this stuff, which is very hard sometimes.” Their media journey took them from movies to transgender novels, works of nonfiction, and advocacy websites. All the while, they talked openly about what they read. They took notes and shared insights. Sometimes they fought. Laboring to live as the couple they were before while managing new challenges was difficult, but they ultimately stayed married.
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I first met Margie at “Trans Chat”—a transgender discussion and support group in the Midwest—while I was conducting fieldwork for this book between 2008 and 2012. She was one of the group’s more senior and vocal participants, and playfully referred to herself as its “yenta.” When I told her I was writing a book and asked her for an interview, she accepted without hesitation.
During our first sit-down together, we discussed Margie’s thoughts on media and transgender representation. She emphatically reiterated the following conviction. “The general public needs to see we’re just ordinary people.” Knowing I was going to be writing about the transgender community for a larger audience, Margie wanted to ensure that I comprehended the everyday ordinariness of transgender life—a perspective she felt was largely absent from media and popular discourse. Transgender ordinariness was paramount for her because since transitioning, Margie has strived to create her own version of an ordinary life, and even more, a seemingly conservative and traditional one. She has been married since she was in her twenties, has raised two children, and spends much of her free time spoiling her several grandchildren. She resides in a suburban middle-class neighborhood of manicured lawns and minivans. She voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election and identifies as a political conservative. Her favorite TV channel is Fox News, although she admittedly takes issue with some of its commentators’ political views.
At the same time, Margie is by no means June Cleaver. As a transgender person, her ordinary is far more elastic and queer. In many ways, Margie’s gender transition ruptured her conventional worldview. It enriched her life and gave her a more nuanced perspective. “Ever since coming out as trans, and living it, my view of the world has certainly broadened.” As a queer person, she loves spending nights out dancing at gay bars, partying in Key West, and making friends in the LGBT community—something she never did before her transition. She considers sexuality and gender to be fluid concepts and laments how they are too often narrowly defined. Margie’s gender transition also queered her marriage. Recently, Margie and her wife made the decision to open up and redefine their relationship. Both have started to date men. Although they are often mistaken for a lesbian couple when they go out, they routinely check out potential male lovers together. Revealing a playful grin, Margie explained, “The funny thing is when we go shopping and she dotes on me, people perceive us as a lesbian couple. That bothers her a little bit. I love her and I grab her and give her a big kiss, but she doesn’t want to be perceived as a lesbian. That’s fine. I’d rather have the guys hitting on me anyways.”
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Margie’s story speaks to the central themes and concerns of this book, namely, the many influences of media and technologies of communication on the everyday lives of transgender individuals. In her life narrative, media were leading protagonists. They both structured the norms that limited her life possibilities and offered avenues of agency and self-authorship. From reading the Christine Jorgensen paperback to experimenting with transgender identity in Internet chat rooms, Margie’s media use influenced and interacted with the dynamics and contexts of her life situation to transform how she performed gender, understood sexual subjectivity, and lived her everyday life. Media were used as resources for information and self-exploration, and helped her facilitate difficult interpersonal conversations. They were also ambassadors to the outside world, as she looked to and relied on them to explain transgender experience to broader audiences. Media were also affective engines, as they stirred and moved her. They generated