Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. (Book reviews: centering the margin: research by, for, and with people who are transsexual and transgender).

Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. By Viviane K. Namaste. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, 320 pages. Cloth, $50; paper, $18.

Reviewed by Sharon E. Preves, Ph.D., Hamline University, Department of Sociology, Mailbox # 263, 1536 Hewitt Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55104; e-mail: [e-mail].

Namaste's Invisible Lives is a critical contribution to the rapidly expanding body of research and theory about transsexual and transgender people and communities. In a comprehensive and somewhat incisive manner, Namaste explores myriad ways by which transsexual and transgender (TS/TG) persons are erased, or excluded, from various social institutions, including academe, medicine, and social service organizations.

Drawing on several sources of data, Namaste documents the extreme forms of disenfranchisement experienced by many TS/TG individuals. She delivers a rigorous and insightful critique of queer theory and social science that uses TS/TG people merely to illustrate the limits of gender dualism, without examining its relevance for TS/TG persons and communities. Namaste challenges scholars to bridge this gap between theory and practice, by putting the needs and concerns of their research subjects at the forefront. She also urges scholars to be self-reflective in their studies by exploring their own personal connections to their research topics, methods, and participants. While her style is a bit tedious and redundant at times, the book is well worth the investment for those who are interested in TS/TG persons' experiences and lives.

This book is unique because of its focus on the exclusion of transsexuals from social systems and institutions, rather than the production of transsexuals via medicine and psychiatry. Namaste's main thesis is that TS/TG persons are socially ostracized in their daily experiences in ways that continue to go unrecognized. She explores three ways by which TS/TG persons are excluded from society: (a) queer theory and social science research that produces an obscure understanding of TS/TG persons, (b) popular cultural and rhetorical representations of TS/TG persons as implausible, and (c) the institutional exclusion of TS/TG persons from employment, health care, and social service sectors. Building on these themes, Namaste organizes the book into three distinct sections in which she explores the erasure of TS/TG persons from theory, culture, and institutions.

In the first section of the book, on theory, Namaste makes a sweeping criticism of queer theory, taking on several authors, including Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, Janice Raymond, and Bernice Hausman. She critiques Butler (1990, 1993) for using transsexuals to merely illustrate gender performativity, apparently without concern for their experiences, perspectives, and lives. Similarly, Namaste takes Garber (1992) to task for her demonstrated lack of care for people who experience the consequences of defying a binary sex/gender system. She also critiques Raymond (1979) and Hausman (1995) for not evaluating the impact their work has on the lives of TS/TG people.

More generally, Namaste critiques queer theorists and social scientists for producing work that is acontextual. She argues that most scholarship about transpeople lacks an understanding or representation of TS/TG persons' everyday experiences in varied social locations, such as diverse racial or socioeconomic backgrounds. Namaste argues that most scholarship about TS/TG persons has provided only superficial readings of their cultures and ignores the diversity within these communities, ultimately serving up monolithic and essentialist portrayals of TS/TG identities and communities. To rectify these problems, Namaste calls for scholarly and popular representations of TS/TG persons as multifaceted and heterogeneous.

Namaste further critiques social scientists for being too detached from their research subjects and for conducting research that has little practical application for the people studied. A sociologist and transsexual herself, she argues that a scientific or popular preoccupation with TS/TG genitals, gender, or sexual identity does not serve, but rather exploits these populations and treats TS/TG persons as objects of fascination. She encourages scholars to focus on the diversity of TS/TG communities, to be accountable to the people we study, and to involve the people we study in the construction of academic knowledge about them, ultimately making both theory and research practically relevant for them. To this end, Namaste calls on and pays homage to sociologist Dorothy Smith's (1987) method of institutional ethnography. Smith's method is quite useful in Namaste's quest to understand how TS/TG persons are located in everyday cultural and institutional worlds.

In the second section of the book, on culture, Namaste conducts extensive literary criticism, focusing on the erasure of TS/TG persons in popular culture and rhetoric. Here she explores the power of language, especially the use of metaphor, in actively creating social structures and relations. While I found this section to be a bit dry and repetitious, Namaste's discussion of Michael Tremblay's play Hosanna and the "tragic nature" of Hosanna's transsexuality was quite compelling. According to Namaste, when the play's main character, male-to-female Hosanna, embraced her homosexual attraction to men and renounced her transsexuality, she bolstered the popular conception that, given the choice, TS/TG persons would choose to be nontransgendered. That is, they don't really know who they are and long to be someone who is perceived as more real, authentic, and credible. Namaste conducts further literary criticism of media representations of punk cultures, the films The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Le sexe des etoiles, Susan Stryker's (1994) discussion of the 1990s "transsexual renaissance" in San Francisco, and Martine Rothblatt's (1995) book The Apartheid of Sex. In the end, she is critical of each for providing limiting, offensive, and unrealistic representations of TS/TG persons.

In the final section of the book, on institutions, Namaste's proposed activist research shines through during her discussion of research politics, methods, and the findings from her interviews with 33 Canadian TS/TG individuals. She opens this most interesting section of the book with a discussion of queer-bashing and the conflation of sexuality and gender in homophobic and transphobic attacks. Here Namaste includes a powerful review of the literature on hate crimes associated with sexual and gender minorities, highlighting the relationship between sexual and gender marginality. That is, people who bend traditional gender norms (for example, masculine women or effeminate men) are often presumed to be homosexual. In a statistical summary of hate crimes against GLBT persons, Namaste notes that TS/TG persons are at risk in both gay-identified sectors (e.g., gay bars) and non-GLB arenas, whereas gays and lesbians are attacked more often in public spaces that are designated GLB.

Namaste goes on to highlight how TS/TG persons are denied health care and social services on a regular basis, focusing on the arduous process of gender transition and sex reassignment. Here she details the difficulty transsexuals have in accessing hormones by prescription, illustrating how reluctant doctors are to get involved with TS/TG persons' specific health care needs, and how many TS/TG individuals wind up buying their hormones on the streets. Namaste also discusses the role of gender identity clinics in gender transition, with specific focus on the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto. She aptly describes the lengths to which transsexuals must go to document their commitment to gender transition via letters of diagnosis and real-life tests, including viable employment in the desired gender and traditional masculine or feminine gender presentation, all without the aid of hormone therapy.

In this section, Namaste also highlights the consequences of individualizing social problems, whereby individuals, not institutional policies, come to be seen as the root of the problem. She makes this point particularly clear by exploring the dearth of TS/TG antidiscrimination policies in hospitals and institutions. As a result, these institutions often house TS/TG residents, patients, and prisoners according to their biological gender, revoking residents' access to hormones or other means of passing as their desired gender.

In the remainder of the book, Namaste summarizes the research interviews she conducted with 33 Canadian TS/TG persons, staff members at the Clarke Institute, and staff from police departments, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, and shelters for youth, women, and homeless persons throughout Toronto. She provides a graphic account of the structural constraints experienced by the transsexuals in her sample, including the financial expense of sex reassignment surgeries and hormones and the difficulty of attaining employment in one's desired gender, without the aid of hormones or an employment history. As a means of illustrating these constraints, she reports that 12 of the 33 TS/TG persons she interviewed are prostitutes, and that they find prostitution to be their most viable and lucrative form of employment.

Invisible Lives is a well-written and fascinating study on marginality. The main fault I find with the book is Namaste's own self-contradiction. Despite her criticism of others' acontextual research, she forgoes a discussion of the relevance of her Canadian research for TS/TG populations located elsewhere in the world. In addition, she includes only a cursory discussion of the main organization and set of regulations that oversee sex reassignment protocol: The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association and its Standards of Care. Because of their international recognition and widespread implementation, these standards of care no doubt have a major impact on how TS/TG persons experience health care and treatment at the Clarke Institute, or at any other gender identity clinic.

More significant is Namaste's contradiction in her call for self-reflective research. Throughout the book she appeals to scholars to openly report and explore their own relationship to their research subjects, topics, and methods, yet she relegates her own transsexuality to a footnote. She calls for reflexive research, yet does not discuss how her own transsexuality impacts her understanding of and commitment to her research, nor how it affected her rapport with various research participants including TS/TG persons, police officers, social service agents, and clinicians specializing in sex reassignment.

In summary, Invisible Lives is thought provoking, refreshing, and well worth the read. Namaste's critique of queer theory and social science is very apt and her insightful suggestions for future research inspire a call to action. Namaste makes a convincing case that TS/TG persons are excluded in theory, culture, and institutions. The voices and experiences of her TS/TG interviewees are particularly compelling in her illustration of their disenfranchisement, as is her exploration of their exclusion from institutional policies related to upholding basic human rights.

REFERENCES

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of "sex." New York: Routledge.

Garber, J. (1992). Vested interests: Cross-dressing and cultural anxiety. New York: Routledge.

Hausman, B. (1995). Changing sex: Transsexualism, technology, and the idea of gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Raymond, J. (1979). The transsexual empire: The making of the she-male. Boston: Beacon Press.

Rothblatt, M. (1995). The apartheid of sex: A manifesto on the freedom of gender. New York: Crown.

Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Stryker, S. (1994). Renaissance and apocalypse: Notes on the Bay Area's transsexual arts scene. Transsexual News Telegraph, 3(Summer), 14-17.