“Qué joto bonita!”: Transgender Negotiations of Sex and Ethnicity

SUMMARY

Recent transgender literature has been sharply critical of existing medical models of the psychosexual development of transsexuals and of the treatment of Gender Identity Disorder. Transgender authors have pointed out that subjects have deliberately falsified their reports in order to conform to medical and psychiatric models for the sake of gaining access to services. In newer transsexual narratives, gender and sexual orientation development appear far more fluid and ambiguous over the life span.

This paper reviews the nosological history of gender atypicality, from nineteenth century “sexual inversion” to transvestitism and transsexualism, examining how deviations of gender identity, gender role, sexual object, and sexual aim were often collapsed together. These imbrications continue to persist in both the medical and popular literature on transsexualism.

A topic that has especially been neglected is the relationship of ethnicity to the development of gender and sexual identity. Presented is case material gathered from dynamic psychotherapy with a Latina, transgendered sex worker which illustrates the articulations of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in both the transgendered subject and her heterosexually-identified male partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-dressing
• ethnicity
• gender dysphoria
• gender identity disorder
• GID
• homosexuality
• Latina
• Latino
• psychotherapy
• sex reassignment
• she-male
• transgender
• transsexual
• transvestivism
• vestida