Coming Out And Crossing Over Essay

The discourse on the visibility of “the body” is one that not only touches on censorship but also on the idea of “passing,” which informs and maintains oppressive gender norms. In the scholarly article Coming Out and Crossing Over, the authors extensively discuss the act of passing and the differences between the way transsexuals and transgenderists perceive the body’s ability to do it. Individuals who resist conforming to “the dominant system” of gender are pushed “to alter their bodies or encouraged to perfect a new gender presentation so that they may ‘pass’ as the ‘other sex’” (Gagne, Tewksbury, and McGaughey 479). For transsexuals, it is only through “their ability to pass [as a woman] during informal interactions” that they could be defined in terms of “normality” and settle into “full womanhood” (500-1). In their eyes, transsexuals can only feel comfortable with themselves and their identities if others …show more content…
It not only sparked an uproar in the media but it also inspired many individuals to come out of the transgendered closet as well as help those who did not yet know what or how they should identify. It would also serve as the “force of survival” that would “overcome even the severest forms of fear, shame and embarrassment” (Renard chapter 30). In Renard’s memoir Pholomolo, she recalls the stories of her childhood and explains how she discovered her identity despite the hindrances that the world around her created and reinforced by telling her that she had to identify as male. In the chapter “The Boy Who Changed into a James Bond Girl,” she discusses how the outing of Caroline Cossey transsexual status during the early 1980s gave her the power to decide that she wanted to become female. While it shocked the dominant heteronormative Western society, Cossey’s story gave Renard the strength to pursue her true self-conception and not to be ashamed, embarrassed, or afraid of