Facial feminization surgery and body modification politics

Author's note: I know the following essay tendrals a little bit; the arguments are not concrete and the supporting evidence is weak and random. This is probably the fourth time I've written this, and I can't seem to make it work out (probably because I've not been able to just write it all in one sitting). Anyway, I wanted to post it because I feel there are some interesting thoughts about FFS and body modification. Hope you enjoy.

The funny thing about body modification is how a personal decision becomes a political issue, one that often bridges a gap between the mainstream traditionalists (your Fox News types) and many in the feminist movement. The issue of body modification, at least on a macro-level, boils down into a conversation about what is deemed “natural” beauty ideals—the “traditional” attitude demanding a conservation of a natural beauty aesthetic as a non-augmented form, and the feminists speaking out against the oppression of women resulting from unnatural beauty standards. The two sides paradoxically clash while agreeing on this point: body modification is unnatural and unethical. But what of the motivations of those seeking to modify their bodies? Why should their decisions about their own bodies be distorted into a public discourse?

In a recent Associated Content article, Agnieszka Marczak writes, “The unadorned and unaltered body is constructed as the natural state and any willful changes wrought on its surface are by definition, cultural inscriptions. This makes sense from a Western perspective where the intellectual and philosophical traditions that support and inform these views come from the Greeks, who idolized the unadorned athletic body. As such, anything other than that ‘natural’ ideal was necessarily an unnatural modification.” Much of our body politics are derived from the notion that “natural” is a physical manifestation of God’s will—these are the way our bodies were meant to be, as was dictated by our creator, and any modification of these divine figures would be an affront to God. This is the more traditional/conservative perspective; the same attitude my parents and grandparents have when they criticize my tattoos and piercings. When I got my first tattoo my mother asked me, “Why did you do this to yourself? Couldn’t you just get a painting of this; why did you have to put it on your body?” There’s a sense that if people were “supposed” to have any given modification, God would have made them that way—there’s an implied divine design in the natural.

Coming from a feminist perspective, body modification has historically been a means of oppressing women; from corsets to foot binding, genital mutilation to modern “beautifying” plastic surgery, women’s body modification has been an integral component towards disempowering women. Not ironically, the pursuit of beauty is often contemporarily seen as futile, and beauty standards are classified as unnatural. It’s no wonder women body modifiers are frequently seen as outcasts; they at once subvert the beauty norm of the non-augmented body while simultaneously undermine the beauty of what a woman’s body is “supposed” to be.

Along the same vein, any unnatural or augmented expression can be distorted into disingenuous or otherwise fraudulent. That’s where the issue of transsexuality comes into play; transsexuals, in a very literal sense, typically undergo one of the most extreme forms of body modification: we literally modify sex—something that has, until recently, been assumed an immutable and intrinsic physical reality. Sex is supposed to be set in stone, and we subvert that very belief. We reform the body in ways that makes body suspension look like a harmless tea-time activity (which it very well may be). But transsexual body modification comes with its own unique form of scorn—labels of pathology are attached to each transformative procedure and even away from the psychological branding and the assertions from the religious right that transsexuality is a “destructive force” against humanity, trans women’s bodies are often viewed as parodies of “real” women; nothing but a façade of femininity. Thing is, though, trans people and their allies recognize that transition-based body modification is often a major part of living authentically (my note: some trans people don’t see any need for modification. Keep in mind, this article is about those who do modify). Indeed, the motivation behind transitioning is very similar—if not identical—to some of the reasons given for getting tattoos and piercings. According to Victoria Pitts, “Women body modifiers have argued that modifying the body promotes symbolic rebellion, resistance, and self-transformation—that marking and transforming the body can symbolically ‘reclaim’ the body.” I’m not going to suggest this is the reason for all body modification (be it transgender in nature or otherwise), but it is something interesting to think about. When I talk to other trans people about their transitions, most of them describe it as a process of making their bodies match their brains. The transition is a remaking of the body to the will of the individual.

Recently I’ve been considering facial feminization surgery. It’s true I generally “pass” as female already—and really the usual reason for undergoing FFS is to enhance one’s passability, but I have a slightly different agenda. When I look in the mirror, I can still see masculine features in my face; while most non-trans people won’t necessarily pick up on them, they are always present to me. It’s as though they are mocking reminders of my past—features I never wanted. Talking with friends and family, I hear many of the tired arguments commonly made against female body modification: I need to learn to accept myself as I am, and I am surrendering to patriarchal beauty standards. But so what? Those aren’t the reasons I’m looking into these procedures. I want to make my body my own, and I want to have more feminine features. Trans women do not give consent to their first, masculinizing puberty. FFS is a way of reclaiming the body and undoing that damage.

There’s still a lot of controversy about what constitutes “natural,” and the transsexual body often finds itself in the middle of the debate, posing a dialectic paradox. The nature of the transsexual is to be born with an external physiology of one sex, but a psychology of another. The notion that a sex reassignment is unnatural is an incomplete one at best; this is because sex, itself, is remarkably complex. Sex consists of a large number of subcategories ranging from genital sex to psychological—essentially meaning the identity of the transsexual (their internal sense of being male, female, etc.) occurs just as naturally as their genitals or gonads. In the transsexual, lines of “natural” and “unnatural” are blurred; we are a physical manifestation of Donna Haraway’s cyborg. Haraway didn’t necessarily envision the cyborg as a literal half human-half machine, Darth Vader-esque being; rather a cyborg was a blending of natural and artificial, biological and mechanical—think pace makers or artificial limbs. The transsexual body, like these other examples, is birthed from medical technology. Therefore in order to be our true, natural selves we often have to become “unnatural” (i.e. undergo plastic surgery to artificially reform our bodies into something more coherent with our understanding of our spiritual selves).To Susan Stryker, the naissance of our bodies is a little more…gothic:

The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.

It seems inescapable: as our technology advances, the relationship between “natural” and “unnatural” become more intertwined. It seems, as Haraway argued in her essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” that this is the natural evolution for humanity. So why the hang-up on what is “natural”? We live in a world in which “unnatural” mean are employed to express natural desire and the most intimate of personal identification. Whether a person is dying their hair or undergoing facial feminization, the modification is generally not done as an act of deceit or a subversion of some God’s will—and often, in the case of women, it’s not necessarily about surrendering to the whims of the patriarchal libido. Instead, these modifications are reclamations—even if they are only subtle, subconscious reclamations—of the body. They are a manifestation of the individual will in an effort to maintain joy or peace in life. Sometimes it’s as simple as an experimental hair cut, or a revolutionary as a redefined sex. Regardless, we need to realize that the “natural” is not as divine or innate—that “unnatural” is not as fake or deceitful as we once assumed, and neither is so easily distilled.