Beautiful Robots (2008)

“Without any meaning, we’re just skin and bone, like beautiful robots dancing alone”

- Untouchable, Girls Aloud, 2008

In the film, Transamerica, a transsexual person appears to be part machine. Like clockwork, the body must be tuned, appendages added and subtracted. Like fuel, hormones must not run out. The mechanized body at work defines the functionality of sexual transformation. Doctors use the term “gender dysphoria” to scientifically intimidate the legitimacy of this mechanization. In the transgender glossary, a trans man distinguishes himself from what he calls “bio” boy, short for biological male or what is explained as the “dialectical slang for a factory equipped male (one born with penis)”. It is in the privileged intersection of gendered body parts that plastic surgery becomes a technology of both body and gender. However, plastic surgery for gender reassignment, or GRS as it is called, does not create the stable spaces of body or of mind that popular rhetoric, even at times in Transamerica, suggests. Further from simply altering the physical body (machine) to correspond with the desired sex (mind/soul), plastic surgery interrupts the borders so that there is in fact no stable distinction between machine and biology, or between body and soul. What I mean to suggest is that the transsexual body offers a way out of the false centering of human according to the idea of being “alive” and “biologically existing”. In its place, human can then be considered in terms of the non-human or of the artifact, the mechanized, or the robot.

We can see the primacy of the conditions of “alive” or “biological” in the common assumption made about transsexuals: they are born into the wrong body. This suggests that things would have been fine if their bodies matched their trapped souls. Felicity Huffman’s character, Bree Osbourne, is trans female in that she is a woman born with male anatomy. She cries to her mother “Mom, you never had a son”. Like other forms of cinematic transsexuality, such as Boys Don’t Cry, such films offer the “born into the wrong body” mantra as the overall narrative arc while teasing out the social and emotional tensions within finer narrative detail. One need not elaborate on how these may function to reassert hetero-normativity; transgender groups already resist this by providing the idea of “gender fuck”, where they combine in their appearances and behavior, both female and male traits. To the effect that it interrupts the conventional forms of gender, perhaps gender fucking does its job; but it remains that the grammar of gender-fucking – dress, emotion, behavior – draws from the heteronormative. In order to really move beyond hetero-normativity the body cannot simply be fought in terms of gender because gender, whether activist groups will admit or not, can never be divorced from biological conditions.

This is where the impasse must take a more productive turn. The question is not whether he or she, but one of “it” and “its”, between that of machine and cognition.

Whether male-to-female (MTF) or female-to-male (FTM), the transsexual body, by being the central focus of transformativity or change, already provides a language for a mechanical register of human. The transsexual body is broadly described as pre-op or post-op. Bree Osbourne, is a pre-op transwoman, meaning she is waiting to undergo gender reassignment surgery to acquire female genitalia. The importance of the ‘op’, or the surgery is suggested by it being the key driving force of Bree’s actions and relationships with people around her. It suggests that until Bree’s male anatomy is cosmetically altered to mimic the female genitalia, Bree’s identity and social being are things that cannot engage with the world. She needs, in other words, the necessary prosthetic, to plug into the hetero-normative world. However, GRS never realizes its goal because no gender is actually re-assigned; rather, a completely different mode of existence is produced wherein the privilege of the biological is mechanized. In this mode, neither the biological nor the mechanical takes complete hold of the human: as automaton, machine and human are mutually enabling and mutually destroying.

The automaton is a mode of perpetual failure, since GRS must be sustained by a lifetime of hormone treatment – a bi to tri-monthly dosage of hormones to ensure that the rest of the body looks the part: for the FTM, this includes a lower voice, facial hair, coarser skin texture and special dietary needs to counter the side effects of hormone treatment on health. The failure of the machine is induced by the failure of the body to mimic the biological functions of a “bio boy” or a “real girl”. Indeed this is an uphill task. Even in these terms bio boy and real girl, one can see that the historical advantage of biology: it is worth noting that the term “bio boy” does not invert itself accordingly. MTFs refer to “factory equipped” females as “real girls” rather than bio girls, highlighting the central importance of the penis as originary progenitor of Biology whilst the female genitalia may only be consigned as “real”: truthful according to Father Biology. Yet it is in the failure of the automaton to be either total machine or a bio boy or real girl, that we may also invoke the failure of the privileged human. What is produced, the automaton, allows us to dictate a failed human; in this way the automaton may be said to be an idiom of productive failure to de-naturalize the mythic, biological components of the privileged human.

One sees this play out in the idea of failed happiness. “Real” happiness is assigned as one register of “real” human. UK’s National Health Service (NHS) advises that pre-ops must undergo what is known as “Real Life Experience” (RLE) where by pre-ops must live as their desired gender for 12-24 months to ensure that “permanent surgery is the right decision”. The idea of the RLE is based on the belief that the pre-op transsexual body and external social stimuli of the hetero-normative world intersect in error unless confirmed otherwise.This is based on a notion of happiness where happiness is non-error, or no-mistake; it is centered on the idea that the automaton’s lived – cognitive – experience, or RLE, must also be a matter of social ritual and habituation. For Bree this involves, as her therapist instructs, integrating and assimilating Stanley (her male past) into her life as woman. In order for the transsexual to be happy transsexual, i.e. a happy human, the machine must be ritualized and habituated in a socially and historically determinate way so that the machine is ideally invisible. In the UK, to qualify for the Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), one must produce evidence of a suitable continuity in past, present and future in order to be certified a happy transsexual: prove that one has lived as their “preferred gender for the last two years, and that you intend to live permanently in your preferred gender”. Yet regardless of the classifications awarded by the body politic, the automaton remains in a state of flux.

The degree of flux depends on the amount of stealth possessed by the automaton’s form. When a post-op is living in stealth, it means the automaton “passes” as a biological male or female all time. The automaton with stealth is able to move and act as lifelike gender without being detected. Obviously the automaton’s stealth does not fail as long as the mechanical genitalia – prosthetic – are not placed in situations where they are expected to work. Without stealth, the automaton must confront the risk of mechanical failure at every turn, even after GRS.

It is precisely the failure of the machine that allows the automaton to confront the failures of human; it is in this machine-human reflection that one sees specific discriminatory denomination of human and machine, kept separate by the body politic. There is a great debate around the validity of GRS. It revolves around the question of whether this mechanical intervention offers transsexuals the proverbial “happiness”. This means that “gender dysphoria” is not incompatible with the belief that transsexuals are simply unhappy men or women born with the wrong body. However, by invalidating the mechanical, using as evidence unhappy post-ops, the body politic attempts to restore the privileged notion of human – genetic, biological, and natural.

The transsexual body aligns with the promise of mechanical happiness for after all, the automaton wants to retain the choice of flicking the switch. The body politic is uncomfortable with this. The argument, if automatons were to retain their choice, cannot be narrated in terms of options – this is wasteful in the eyes of the body politic – but in terms of absolute success. For this purpose, the (failed) work of GRS falls into false absolutes so that even the automatons must appear to comply with such absolutes. The transsexual body requires the technology provided by the body politic to make them part machines. Paradoxically, the automaton’s happiness is really only constituted in terms of failure, since it is a biologically/mechanically failed mode of human. What we then get is a double negated success: we do not assert the happy transsexual body rather, we say, the automaton is not unhappy. On the 30^th of July 2004, UK newspaper Guardian, commented on the research around this debate. Itquotes an employee at the NHS gender identity clinic as saying “There’s no other treatment that works. You either have an operation or suffer a miserable life. A fifth of those who don’t get treatment commit suicide”.

At the end of Transamerica, Bree finally gains the approval and acceptance of her family before embarking on surgery. Right after the operation, she merely grimaces at the pain of her wounds but sobs hard while gesturing to her chest saying “it hurts”, wherein her therapist goes “Oh, honey, that’s what hearts do”. At this point, Bree Osbourne finally confronts her motherly anguish at losing her son, whom she has grown to love as her own throughout the film. This is the money moment for the film where Bree’s internal universe may now become external because her emotions have acquired a pronoun. It is in this moment that Bree’s tribulations through the story are restored as arising out of issues of self and of soul, and the conflicts of familial affection and kinship as a result of her desire to remove Stanley’s penis. Bree is spared “a miserable life” because she successfully completed the customary pre-op “Real Life Experience”. As the film closes, we see the automaton fade into invisibility: Bree’s estranged son comes back to visit her in a new home and new life, where she is taking a course to become a teacher.

Clearly, the film eventually falls back on the most pliant character device: human emotion. It is disappointing to see that Transamerica falls into the shadow of human emotion just as cinematic transsexuality often do. Even though the film does well initially to figure the transsexual body as automaton, it never really carries this notion far enough, far enough so that the failure of machine reveals the failure of the human.