198 Evelyn Kirkley

There is one glaring omission to Burack’s work: She does not refract her
analysis through race and socioeconomic class to an appreciable extent.
While addressing these issues is not her primary objective, it would be
helpful to understand how anti-gay rhetoric is understood and espoused
by the large numbers of African American and Latino/a Protestant evan-
gelicals. Do they share the same attitudes as whites in the Christian right?
Why and why not? How do they understand comparisons to the civil rights
movement frequently made by LGBT activists? How is anti-gay rhetoric
of the Christian right informed by white privilege and neocolonialism?
How is it related to increasing middle-class status of many evangelicals
and support for free market capitalism? While Burack notes these issues
in passing, she does not subject them to the fierce analysis she applies to
Chick, Love Won Out, and Robertson’s and Falwell’s post–9/11 comments.
Too challenging for all but the most advanced undergraduates, this
book is most useful to scholars of religion, politics, and queer studies. It is
especially relevant to the LGBT community and its allies who struggle to
understand how many evangelical Christians can simultaneously preach
sincere compassion and virulent animosity without perceiving any ten-
sion. Burack skillfully unpacks the complex interplay of faith, politics,
psychology, and rhetoric in the axiom, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”
For those of us in California and across the United States preparing for
a long siege on same-sex marriage, this book is a sobering assessment of
what we are up against.

Evelyn Kirkley is an associate professor of Theology & Religious Studies

at the University of San Diego. Her research interests include alterna-
tive religions in the United States and the intersections of religion with
gender, sexual orientation, and race/ethnicity. Send correspondence to
ekirkley@sandiego.edu.

Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category by David Valen-

tine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 302 pp., $79.95
hardcover, $22.95 paper.

ANNE ENKE

David Valentine’s ethnography of the category of transgender begins in a

room full of gay people. Valentine describes sitting in the room as a gay
man whose sex and gender have been consistently interpreted as male
according to medical, legal, social, and personal sensibilities. The people
who share the room with him do not share this cis-sex/gender status.1
Book Reviews 199

Instead, they are male-bodied people who identify themselves using a

variety of culturally meaningful, gender-specific terms: they refer to
themselves as girls, fem queens, women; most simultaneously refer to
themselves as gay. It is a transgender support group, but no one in the room
identifies as transgender, and they virtually never use that term. If they
are, according to themselves, gay, then what is the category “transgender”
doing in the room, and what impact does it have in their lives?
Far from deriving organically from their diverse lives and identities,
it seems that “transgender” has been imported—even imposed—from
outside sources: Social service providers, academics, and some portions
of what may be termed a transgender liberation or rights movement.
Those same sources, along with parts of the gay and lesbian liberation
movement, prefer to reserve the word “gay” for cis-sexual men who are
attracted to cis-sexual men. The distinction between “gay” and “trans-
gender” in this case reinforces social hierarchies in which only cis-sex/
gender male-bodied people (like Valentine) are “really” gay and have a
rightful claim to the term; in the same rubric, women-identified male-
bodied people are “really” transgender and mistaken or ignorant in their
claims to gayness. Valentine thus wonders, can everyone in the room call
themselves gay?
Valentine’s question derives in part from the apparent contradictions
he encounters in the transgender support group. More importantly, his
question effectively critiques the neatness of the constructed distinction
between sexual and gender identity. A long history of medical practices,
academic theorizing, social movement efforts, and social service provision
have worked hard to construct distinctions between sexual preference (for
example, homosexuality) and gender identity or expression (for example,
transsexualism). But, as Valentine shows, the institutionalization of the
categorical distinction between transgender, gay, and straight not only
separates sexuality and gender, but simultaneously reinforces race and
class hierarchies according to the priviledged logics of heteronormativity
and homonormativity.
Based on fieldwork conducted in New York City in the mid–1990s,
Imagining Transgender is an exciting addition to the rapidly growing,
interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. It offers a great deal to con-
versations taking place within gender and sexuality studies, women’s
studies, cultural studies, and disciplines such as history and Valentine’s
own field of anthropology. An activist as well as an academic, Valentine
reminds us to be aware of the ways in which scholars participate in pro-
ducing social categories that fail to serve the people who purportedly fall
into them. Rather than analyzing the lives and plights of people who may
or may not think of themselves as transgender, Imagining Transgender
is first and foremost an analysis of the emergence, power, and failures of
the category of transgender; in short, it is an ethnography of a category.
200 Anne Enke

As such, the book elucidates “transgender” as a central cultural site for

defining gender and sexuality and the relation between them. Although
transgender is imagined as an umbrella category to serve an infinitely
broad range of gender-variant people, its history as a field of knowledge
makes it an inherently exclusionary category. Such categories then result
in intellectual and social practices that ultimately fail to reflect a signifi-
cant portion of people whom the category purports to encompass, and may
even contribute to their disenfranchisement in various social contexts.
Valentine’s ethnography is rooted in several Manhattan neighborhoods
and community spaces, each of which is characterized by subcultural
expressions and understandings of gender/sex identities and behaviors.
For instance, there is the support group for transgender-identified people
with HIV at a hospital on the Upper East Side, where, excepting the white,
professional, non-trans, gay-identified leaders, all participants are either
African American or Latina. All traveled from poorer neighborhoods to be
at the group and were assigned male at birth and live as feminine people.
Most of them struggle to make financial ends meet, and none really relate
to the term transgender. The Transgender Health and Education (THE)
Clinic and the Gender Identity Project are both located in the Lesbian and
Gay Community Services Center, where Valentine held a staff position
as researcher and safer-sex outreach worker. Those who come to THE
include people across race, class, and age, and they have varying attitudes
toward the term transgender. Some find it useful as an umbrella term
even if they do not relate to it, while others find it alien and academic.
Another community space, colloquially known as the Meat Market, is in
a gentrifying but at the time still semi-industrial neighborhood between
Greenwich Village and Chelsea, inhabited after midnight by male-iden-
tified people seeking fun and/or sex, and sex workers. Most of the people
in the Meat Market are people of color who, while acknowledging their
male anatomies, think of themselves as “gay,” “women,” “girls,” and
“fem queens.” There are also the clubs, like Tranny Chaser in Greenwich
Village, home of drag shows and balls featuring a highly elaborated set of
gender identifications and performances, and Karalyns, home to white,
middle-class men who see themselves as transvestites, cross-dressers,
and primarily straight. Finally, in national perspective, we see the halting
but increasingly successful incorporation of transgender, transsexual, and
gender-queer consciousness into LGBT organizations such as the National
Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF). Elucidating the dramatically dif-
ferent ways in which these locations and their inhabitants signify gender,
sexuality, and the relation between them, Valentine shows that the rapid
institutionalization of “transgender” as “a collective term to incorporate
all and any variance from imagined gender norms” is nothing less than
spectacular (14).
Book Reviews 201

Competing parties have contributed to this institutionalization. While

“transgender” has served as a powerful organizing tool, bringing together
diverse people in the interest of sex/gender self-determination, its history
includes less noble interests. If “transgender” has come to refer to all and
any variance from imagined gender norms, it has done so in part at the
will of people who wish to assert their own normativity. Beginning in the
1950s, medical professionals and some transsexual clients legitimated
their interests in part by drawing a clear separation between gender iden-
tity and sexual identity: Transsexuals are not necessarily homosexuals.
Simultaneously, the more influential part of the nascent gay and lesbian
liberation movement concurred, arguing that gay and lesbian people are
not gender-deviant. Seeds of social hierarchy—in this case, competing
claims about non-normative gender identity and sexual behavior—were
sown on fertile ground. To this day, a portion of the gay and lesbian lib-
eration movement asserts its right to participation in normative institu-
tions by claiming that gays and lesbians are not gender-deviant, and by
rejecting gender-queer identification. Valentine shows that, while the
twentieth-century epistemological separation of gender from sexuality
was seen by many as a progressive and rather remarkable accomplishment,
it has resulted in (at best) a crushingly fractured movement competing
for human rights and the right to self-definition, and (at worst) the insti-
tutionalization of exclusion and violence against gender-variant people,
particularly those with lower socioeconomic status.
At its broadest, then, Imagining Transgender charts the institutional
production of a field of knowledge about gender and sexuality. As a field
of knowledge, “transgender” produces its subject (trans people) and the
hierarchies that define the conditions and truths of their existence. Most
successfully, Valentine offers an analysis of how and why transgender poli-
tics—as well as gay/lesbian politics and broader constructions of gender
and sexuality—are shot through with race and class hierarchy as well as
gender hierarchy. The term is most powerfully employed by those who
have the most access to socially legitimated channels of education, pro-
test, legislation, and policy formation. To poorer communities of whites
and people of color, to people whose legal or citizenship status is chal-
lenged, to people who do not have privileged access to social institutions,
transgender politics often makes little difference.
This hierarchy of transgender politics bears relevance for how social
services can best address their constituents, and for how the “LGBT
movement” develops its approach to gender/sex/sexuality in public life.
We do violence to cis-gendered and transgender-identified persons alike,
and limit the parameters of feminist, gender, and Women’s Studies, if
we subsume all gender-variance under the category “transgender.” To do
so suggests the stability and normativity of cis-gendered womanhood,
reifying and projecting transgender as an outsider subject position.
202 Anne Enke

The issue of bisexuality might also be germane here, given its part in the
frustrated relationship between gender identity, sex, and sexuality. While
it is a category demanding its own ethnography, it would be interesting
to know whether the term has valence among any of the trans-interested
people with whom Valentine worked.
Equally provocatively, Valentine focuses exclusively on people who
were assigned male sex at birth (people on a male-to-female [MTF] spec-
trum), and suggests that people on a female-to-male [FTM] spectrum have
a different and perhaps even separate institutional history for reasons of
gender hierarchy, feminism, and the ways that gender is classed and raced.
This insight requires further inquiry. In what contexts are people on an
FTM spectrum actually more visible and institutionally integrated than
people on an MTF spectrum? If, as Valentine suggests, the institutional
history of transgender that began in the 1950s with transsexualism is
concerned with assigned-at-birth male people, how do we simultaneously
narrate a more recent transgender liberation movement in which people
on an FTM spectrum have been at the forefront, not only in the academy
and social service institutions, but also on the streets?2 We need a more
extensive race and class as well as gender analysis if we are to better
understand how an FTM movement emerged in the early 1990s, and to
better understand why it might look as though MTF and FTM are separate
institutional and social movement histories.
This is also a matter of timing. Valentine’s fieldwork took place in the
mid–1990s, and much has changed since then, including the visibility of
people on an FTM spectrum in the same neighborhoods that Valentine
discusses. Works such as The Aggressives, U People, and Still Black
document a vibrant and exceptionally diverse culture of male-identified
female-bodied people of color, many of whom identify as female and/or
lesbian but live “as men” in New York City and elsewhere.3
What the reader realizes after reading Imagining Transgender is that if
any of these histories have a coherent institutional narrative, they diver-
sify infinitely, it seems, at the local level. While the term transgender
purports to gather all ways of “being” sex/gender non-normative under
one umbrella, people make meaning of themselves moment to moment
within a neighborhood or a club, a set of friends, and available means
of obtaining food, shelter, clothing, health care, and also pleasure. It is
the responsibility of those who theorize, activate, and implement social
services to recognize the nuances, complexities, and multiplicities of
transgender in micro- and macro-contexts.
Imagining Transgender proceeds through sophisticated and multilay-
ered analysis. It offers a new way to approach gender and the institutions
that name and manage it, and this is a provocative contribution. Perhaps
the biggest challenge is that so few readers come to the book with even a
Book Reviews 203

basic sense of transgender as an identity or as a social category. Scholars

will find this readable and engaging book well worth their time, as it will
allow them to develop a nuanced understanding of transgender and its
social ramifications.

Anne Enke is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, His-

tory, and LGBT Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her current
research interests include the elaboration of Transfeminism from the
1960s to the present. Send correspondence to aenke@wisc.edu.

Notes
1. The term cis-gender (derived from Latin cis, meaning “on the same side”
and gender) has been in use since the early 1990s to refer to consistency and
congruence or alignment of sex/gender across social and personal contexts.
Cis- and trans- are commonly used in chemistry and other sciences to distin-
guish states; the term cis-gender was possibly coined by microbiologist Dana
Leland Defosse in 1994, and has since gained increasing use among activists
and academics. Trans author and biologist Julia Serano also uses the term
cis-sexual to refer to consistency and alignment of physical sex (Serano, Julia.
2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating
of Femininity. New York: Seal Press).

2. For example, activists and authors such as Leslie Feinberg, Lou Sullivan, and
Holly Devor might be credited with bringing widespread attention to the
existence of a movement increasingly cohering under the term transgender;
activists and scholars such as Dean Spade (co-founder of Sylvia Rivera Law
Project), Shannon Price Minter (Legal Director of the National Center for
Lesbian Rights), Richard Juang and Paisley Currah (co-editors of Transgender
Rights), and Bobby Noble (author of Maculinities Without Men) have focused
on the ways in which race and class hierarchies influence institutional
approaches to gender.

3. Peddle, Daniel (Director). 2005. The Aggressives [Motion Picture]. United

States: independent production; Walida, Hanifah and Olive Demetrius (Direc-
tors). 2007. U People [Motion Picture]. United States: independent production;
Ziegler, Kortney Ryan (Director), Awilda Rodriguez Lora (Producer). 2008.
[Motion Picture]. United States: Blackstar Media.