Within the collection of poetry of \u201cThe Work of a Common Woman\u201d by Judy Grahn, \u201cThe Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke\u201d really stands out to me as a unique poem. Written more like prose, the poem is a satirical story which points out the ridiculousness of the medical community\u2019s treatment of transgender people, and LGBT people more generally. There was a lot of overlap between this story\u2019s themes and Susan Stryker\u2019s second chapter of \u201cTransgender History,\u201d in which Stryker talks about some of the prejudices LGBT people face in getting the medical treatment they need. Because these two pieces of writing are in such strong conversation with one another, I thought it would be worth examining how they compliment each other, in order to understand why Grahn\u2019s poem is so effective in shedding light on some of the unfortunate realities that Stryker points out in \u201cTransgender History.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Stryker notes in the section \u201cThe Social Power of Medicine,\u201d the advancement of surgery so that it was not a death sentence was very significant to transgender people who felt compelled to physically change their bodies to better reflect their identities. However, in the middle decades of the 19th<\/sup> century, there was really no concept of these \u201celective surgeries\u201d as we may call them today. As such, surgeries at this time required a pre-requisite of \u201csickness.\u201d This created a dilemma among transgender people, where they had an opportunity to receive the operation they needed, but in order to do so needed to accept the medical (and societal) diagnosis that transgender people were \u201cmentally ill\u201d in order to receive treatment, a diagnosis that was absolutely false.<\/p>\n Though the later research of Ulrich, Kertbeny, and Hirschfield have contributed to a better understanding of the biological realities of transgender people, many of the prejudices and generalizations still remain. The prejudiced psychoanalysis of Edward by the doctor within the story is meant to represent a long-standing trend for not just transgender\/LGBT people, but other minorities as well. The poem is characterized by the doctor\u2019s shortness and quick generalization of Edward without listening to the whole story, treating her more as a case study than as a person. His diagnoses are not painted by his evaluation of Edward, but by his views of LGBT people based on long standing stereotypes, like when he assumes that Edward has multiple lovers, that she has penis envy, and that she exhibits the Freudian idea that she wants \u201cto kill her mother.\u201d<\/p>\n The fact that these attitudes could still be held by medical\/psychiatric professionals when Grahn wrote her poetry collection in the 1960\u2019s and 1970\u2019s, well after the origins of widespread transgender medical prejudices that seemingly began in the middle of the 19th<\/sup> century or perhaps even earlier, shows just how deeply systemic discrimination can impact minority livelihoods. Though her poem is obviously slightly exaggerated for satirical effect, what Grahn is trying to get at is just how much these prejudices can persist in a community even after they\u2019ve been disproven, and how harmful these prejudices can be towards LGBT people who are trying to discover their unique identities. This is brought home by Edward\u2019s declaration towards the end of the poem about herself that she is \u201cvile,\u201d because whenever she turns to someone like the doctor in the poem for help, they tell her she\u2019s suffering from a \u201cdeadly affliction\u201d and that she\u2019s \u201csick.\u201d Taken within the context of the LGBT history Stryker examines, Grahn is shedding a light on the systemic issues that have persisted over time for LGBT people that need to be rectified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Within the collection of poetry of \u201cThe Work of a Common Woman\u201d by Judy Grahn, \u201cThe Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke\u201d really stands out to me as a unique poem. Written more like prose, the poem is a satirical story which points out the ridiculousness of the medical community\u2019s treatment of transgender people, and LGBT … Continue reading Connecting Stryker’s “Transgender History” to “The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke” by Judy Grahn<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4636,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4636"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}