I started to write a quick post about a good op-ed in today’s New York Times about a good op-ed in the New York Times today about gender and the Olympics. Apparently, the Chinese Olympic Host Committee is planning on instituting gender testing for female athletes.

The Olympic hosts seem to want to impose a binary order upon the messy continuum of gender. They are searching for concreteness and certainty in a world that contains neither.

Most efforts to rigidly quantify the sexes are bound to fail. For every supposedly unmovable gender marker, there is an exception. There are women with androgen insensitivity, who have Y chromosomes. There are women who have had hysterectomies, women who cannot become pregnant, women who hate makeup, women whose object of affection is other women.

So what makes someone female then? If it’s not chromosomes, or a uterus, or the ability to get pregnant, or femininity, or being attracted to men, then what is it, and how can you possibly test for it?

The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life, the lives we live each day. Surely the best judge of a person’s gender is not a degrading, questionable examination. The best judge of a person’s gender is what lies within her, or his, heart.

While I think it’s a definite sign of progress that the Times is willing to publish an op-ed like this, the reality for many transgender folks isn’t so rosy. A quick search for “transgender” on the Times’s site turned up this article, from the day before:
GREELEY, Colo. — Angie Zapata began living as a woman six years ago even though she was born male and named Justin.

While Ms. Zapata, 18, was accepted by her many friends and five siblings, she was bullied in school and at times was lonely and troubled, an older sister, Monica, said. Eventually, Ms. Zapata dropped out of school and got her own apartment here in Greeley.

It was in that apartment that Ms. Zapata’s badly beaten body was found on July 17.

On Wednesday, the police arrested Allen R. Andrade, 31, and charged him with murder. According to the authorities, Mr. Andrade had gone out on a date with Ms. Zapata, and upon discovering she had male genitalia, beat her to death —starting with his fists and then with a fire extinguisher.

Mr. Andrade told investigators that he thought he had “killed it,” according to an affidavit filed by the police. Mr. Andrade, who is in custody, has said nothing publicly about the killing, and his arraignment has not yet been scheduled.

On Thursday, the Weld County district attorney announced that he would prosecute the killing as a hate crime, which carries an additional 18-month sentence if Mr. Andrade is convicted.

These two article show a pretty stark conflict between the growing theoretical and academic acceptance of the fluidity and biological indeterminance of gender and the harsh and even fatal consequences of society’s lingering prejudice. Clearly, all the op-eds in all the papers in the world will not bring back Angie Zapata, or Gwen Aruajo, or any of the other transgender folks murdered for not conforming to society’s expectations of gender roles.

There’s a memorial site for Angie Zapata here.

Melissa McEwen from Shakespeare’s Sister expresses some of the rage we all feel, I think:

Because Zapata was trans, she went from being a woman with whom Andrade wanted to (and did) have sex, hang out with, and view as a human being, to being a genderless, neutered “it” devoid of her humanity. A thing, who wrought its own demise with its false advertising.

Andrade could have shouted, could have stormed out, could have just gone quietly and never looked back. But he had to “kill it.” He had to destroy all trace and presence of what he perceived as a mistake that impugned his very manhood. And so he grabbed at the notion of transgender people as “things,” as freaks and monsters, as Its, the narrative of objects and outcasts, always so close at hand in a culture hostile to everything and everyone different—he grabbed it and seized it and held it close while he killed a living, breathing person. Angie Zapata. A trans woman who was loved.

And now people who never, ever, would have known the names Allen Ray Andrade or Angie Zapata know that they fucked and know that he murdered her. Because he couldn’t bear to just walk away. Because he is a coward who would rather kill than defend his choices, and a stupid man who didn’t consider that stealing Zapata of her humanity to justify slaying her would only rob him of whatever humanity he ever had.

Who’s “it” now, asshole?