Amy Bloom - Normal

After several centuries of confusion, preceded by some early centuries of clarity (at least for Greek gentlemen), we seem to have gotten the difference between gender and sexuality reasonably clear: men are not defined primarily as creatures who only desire women, and sexual desire for men is not the thing that makes a person female. But in our post-Freudian, even post-Lacanian sophistication, in which we wink at the spinsters’ “Boston marriage,” sure that it must have been a sexual relationship, however unacknowledged, and chuckle knowingly at the “man’s man,” aware that he is often just that, we seem baffled by the difference between sexuality and temperament, between one’s sexual nature and one’s personality. There is a whole history of fops and cowgirls, dandies with marcelled waves and tough, wisecracking broads, and where we once understood that one might be male, effeminate, and heterosexual (most of Spencer Tracy’s screen rivals for Katharine Hepburn come to mind), or female, masculine, and heterosexual (Rosalind Russell and Thelma Ritter), we seem to have now forgotten. The high-heeled, Chanel-clad lesbian and the football-playing, beer-swigging gay man perplex us, as if surely some norm is violated when a woman who doesn’t have sex with men likes lacy lingerie anyway, and a man who doesn’t sleep with women enjoys televised sports, cars, and sweatpants. In our collective cultural wish not to be out of it or old-fashioned, we’ve chosen to be simpleminded. We pretend that sexual orientation and personal style are one and the same and that those who suggest otherwise are trying to make fools of us or hide their shameful preference. Presented with Nature’s bouquet of possibilities, a wild assortment of gender and erotic preference and a vast array of personalities, we throw it to the ground.

No one knows why the loss of the mother early in life leads some men to have extramarital affairs and others to crossdress. No one knows whether transsexuality is a biological result or a mix of the biological, the psychological, and the cultural. (To me, these things seem difficult to unravel — as we are all born into a culture of one kind or another, I’m never quite clear how we strain culture out of our assessments.) No one knows how well most transsexual people do ten or fifteen years after surgery, and no one knows how many transgendered people live happily, and syntonically, at ease with their gender and their sexuality, without ever going near a surgeon, an endocrinologist, or a psychiatrist.

The men and women who devote themselves to these and other questions, to the ins and outs of our private selves, our visions of self, our presentations of self, our hidden histories and baffling communiqués, are psychiatrists, psychologists, sexologists, and academics; they are joined on the field by political activists, surgeons, endocrinologists, entrepreneurs, and lawyers. I am indebted to all of these people, and I, like they, have been taught by the thousands of men and women who live their lives, tranquilly or in distress, with confidence or with trepidation, as cactus and platypus, bearded lady and girlyboy, and push all the rest of us to see that Nature contains multitudes. Although she makes mistakes, these black tulips, these examples of Nature’s range, human creativity, and gender’s mutability, are not necessarily among them.

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