The Inconvenient Truth about Teena Brandon

 
Originally published by Trivia: Voices of Feminism, 2009 

Copyright © Carolyn Gage 2009

Teena Brandon is remembered today as the female-to-male, transgender victim of

a brutal murder motivated by transphobia. When she was eighteen years old,
three years before her death, she had been admitted to a crisis center as a result
of a drug overdose, which may have been intentional. At the time, she was
seriously underweight from an eating disorder and taking seven showers a day,
with seven complete changes of clothing. Drinking heavily, she faced twelve
pending charges of forgery and a possible charge of sexual assault on a minor,
was suffering from a recent, unreported and untreated rape, and was involved in
an ongoing sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl, in which she was
passing as male. She reported to therapists that, as a child, she had been a victim
of years of sexual abuse perpetrated by a male member of her family. According
to her biographer, she was diagnosed with “mild gender identity dysphoria,”
reporting to her friends that a sex-change operation had been suggested.

I want to talk about an inconvenient truth. I want to talk about the fact the person who
was named Teena Brandon was a survivor of incest. You won’t hear this mentioned in
Boys Don’t Cry, and you won’t hear it mentioned in the documentary “The Brandon
Teena Story.” You won’t read about it in the current Wikipedia entry. It is, like I said,
inconvenient.

“Inconvenient” means “causing trouble or difficulties.” The inconvenient truth of

Brandon’s incest history causes trouble because incorporating information about child
sexual abuse into the narrative of Brandon’s life pathologizes the transgendered identity
adopted by Brandon and for which she has become an icon. This is perceived as
disrespectful and transphobic—as an attack on Brandon’s identity and a posthumous
attempt to appropriate a victim’s identity.

But the omission of Brandon’s incest history is disrespectful and phobic to survivors of
child sexual abuse. It also constitutes a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim’s
identity. As a survivor, I am disturbed by the revisionist histories of Brandon that omit
Brandon’s status as a victim of child sexual abuse—and all of the subsequent
inconvenient truths accompanying that status.

Inconvenient truths have a way of remaining unarticulated, because they exist outside the
frame of reference that has been established. The first difficulty one encounters in telling
this inconvenient truth about Teena Brandon is the issue of pronouns. Brandon was
sexually abused as a female child, born biologically female, by an adult male perpetrator
who was a family member. The gender of victim and perpetrator are clinical details that
are critical to the understanding of the perpetration and the impact it had on Brandon.

 
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Because of this, I will be using a female pronoun to refer to Brandon as a child, even
though, in adulthood, Brandon would identify as male. This places my narrative outside
the accepted protocol of respectful dialogue about trans identity.

In this essay, I will refer to her as “Brandon,” because, as an adult, she chose to adopt her
given surname as her personal name. In titling the essay, I have used her legal, given
name “Teena Brandon.” It is another inconvenient truth that Brandon never used the
name “Brandon Teena.” This name was posthumously ascribed, and then picked up by
the media. It was a convenient untruth, because it constituted a clever reversal of
Brandon’s birth name, flipping the name to correspond with flipping gender. “Brandon
Teena” is a PR-savvy metaphor… and a fiction.

The Incest

In Aphrodite Jones’ biography, All She Wanted, the first narration of the sexual abuse
shows up in an interview with Sara Gapp, Brandon’s best friend when Brandon was
twelve. “She [Brandon] told me that one of her relatives was doing something to her that
she didn’t like. She just kinda said that, you know, he would kinda whip this thing out
and kinda play with it a little bit… and she said occasionally he’d have her touch him and
then he would play with her and tell her, ‘oh, you like it. You know this feels good…
You know you don’t want me to stop.’” (Jones, 43) According to Sara, “At that point in
time, she didn’t want anyone to know about what happened. She didn’t want the guy mad
at her… She was embarrassed. No matter what he did to her, she still loved him.” (Jones,
43)

Brandon’s therapist later confirmed the story of the abuse, adding that, according to
Brandon, the sessions of abuse would last for hours and that the molestation continued
for a period of years, from childhood into adolescence. In one counseling session,
Brandon confronted her mother JoAnn about it, but requested that she not confront the
perpetrator, who may have been one of JoAnn’s relatives. Brandon’s sister Tammy, also
a victim, confirmed Brandon’s account. It is possible that this abuse was a factor in
Brandon’s decision to leave home at sixteen, get a job, and move in with her then-
girlfriend, Traci Beels, an older classmate.

Victim Responses to Incest

In her book Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self, Janet
Liebman Jacobs states that incest represents “the most extreme form of the sexual
objectification of the female child in patriarchal culture.” (Jacobs, 11) She makes a
compelling case for the fact that incest has a major impact on female personality
development, including gender identity.

Jacobs’ book highlights significant developmental issues that influence the personality
formation of sexually abused daughters, and among these is identification with the

 
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perpetrator. Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud and the founder of child
psychoanalysis, elaborates on this process:

A child introjects some characteristic of an anxiety-object and so assimilates an

anxiety-experience which he [she] has just undergone… By impersonating the
aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms
himself [herself] from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat.
(Freud, 121)

Turning away from her mother, whom she perceives as an untrustworthy betrayer-of-her-
own-kind, the victimized daughter looks toward the male perpetrator, who, because he is
her abuser, is perceived as powerful, and who, because he is male, still hold the potential
for objective idealization. “Female,” for the daughter, has become identified as the
subjective gender for victims and betrayers. According to trauma researcher Judith
Herman, “In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim
develops highly idealized images of at least one parent… More commonly, the child
idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent.”
(Herman, 106) Describing her research with survivors of father-daughter incest, Herman
notes, “With the exception of those who had become conscious feminists, most of the
incest victims seemed to regard all women, including themselves, with contempt.”
(Herman, Father-Daughter Incest, 103)

Rejecting the mother and her own female identity, the victimized daughter begins to
imitate the aggressor. E. Sue Blume, author of Secret Survivors, describes how the
daughter reinvents herself through identification with the perpetrator.

...child victims often recreate themselves, developing alter egos who offer a
positive live alternative to their own. Most commonly, this is a male persona:
female survivor clients may either substitute alternative male personalities, or
attach to a male fantasy companion. This is simple to understand: as a victim, and
a female, she associates her vulnerable state with defenselessness; males,
however, are seen as physically stronger, and not easily targeted for victimization.
(Blume, 85)

Brandon’s Gender Expression

Brandon didn’t like wearing dresses to school. When her mother asked the reason for
this, Brandon told her that dresses were cold (this was Nebraska) and that the boys could
look up them when the girls climbed the stairs. Because she attended a school that
required uniforms, she wore the pants and ties that were standard for the boys, but that
girls were also allowed to wear. According to her best friend Sara Gapp, “People kept
saying she dressed like a guy. She didn’t… She dressed in clothes that she felt
comfortable in. She didn’t go to the guys’ section to buy those clothes. Those were
women’s clothes she was wearing. She just liked baggy clothes. She wore short hair.
Does that make her a guy?” (Jones, 55)

 
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The choice to wear baggy clothes is consistent with the choices of many survivors of
sexual abuse. Brandon’s “passing” as a man began later as a practical joke on a teenaged
girl who dialed Brandon’s number by accident and mistook her for a boy on the phone.
According to Sarah, “Up until Liz Delano [the mistaken caller], if you had called her a
boy, Teena would be offended. She didn’t want to be recognized as a guy. She didn’t feel
like a guy.” (Jones, 54)

Brandon has also been described as indulging in male role-playing. According to her
sister Tammy,

The church was really significant to her. We went to Catholic school, and I think
they kind of brainwash you in kindergarten on being priests and nuns. They
always bring in priests and nuns to talk about how they got the calling and how
you’ll know if you have the calling… Teena never wanted to be a nun; she always
wanted to be a priest, and I thought it was funny because I had to participate in
her masses, and I’d get really bored half the time, ‘cause she’d read from the
Bible and make us sing. I thought it was just a game she played; then every once
in a while she’d say, ‘Oh, I want to be a priest someday.’ (Jones, 34)

Was Brandon identifying with the power to officiate or with the gender? In light of the
Church’s ban against women priests, which denies women the prestige, ceremonial
office, and opportunity for leadership associated with the priesthood, it would be
irresponsible to attribute Brandon’s desire to be a priest to “gender dysphoria”—a term
that, when applied to females, could as well be defined as “sex-caste resistance.”
Identification with gender roles in a male dominant culture cannot be separated from
identification with the privileges that accompany those roles. As pioneer psychoanalyst
Karen Horney notes, “We live… in a male culture, i.e. state, economy, art and science are
creations of man and thus filled with his spirit.” (Horney, 152)

Brandon’s discomfort with her developing body has been documented. In her book,
Aphrodite Jones reports that Brandon hated the pain caused by her developing breasts,
and that she also complained of the pain of menstrual cramps and the inconvenience of
having to deal with a monthly flow of blood. Were these the objections of a “male
trapped in a female body,” or of a particularly self-assertive and articulate girlchild
appalled by the inconvenience, embarrassment, and pain of the adult female body?

Brandon’s discomfort ran deeper than annoyance. She reported that it would “make her
feel sick” (Jones, 47) to have anyone stare at her chest. Again, a girl need not be an incest
survivor to register disgust at the sexual objectification of her developing body at
puberty, but the female incest survivor who has internalized a masculine ideal faces a
different set of obstacles:

While puberty represents a painful time for many adolescent girls, for daughters
in incest families this transition into female adulthood may be especially difficult
and confusing as her body signals not only the passage into female adulthood but

 
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 the recognition that the internalized masculine ideal is truly a fantasy of other and
can never be the real self. (Jacobs, 86)

The rejection of the female self can offer an explanation for the prevalence of eating
disorders at puberty among incest survivors. Brandon, at the time of her attempted
suicide, was reported as manifesting serious eating disorders.

For the incest survivor, her body becomes the symbol of her victimization and
thus the focus of her desire for control. Further, the obsession with a thin, boyish
body, rather than an expression of femininity, may represent an unconscious
rejection of the female self through which the daughter attempts to integrate the
internalized male ego ideal with an external image of a masculinized child’s body.
(Jacobs, 88)

Brandon’s Lesbophobia

Brandon reported that in October 1990, she was raped. That same fall, when she was
almost eighteen, Brandon tried to join the army. According to her friends, she was eager
to be a part of Operation Desert Storm. Unfortunately, she did not pass the written exams.
This appears to have been a turning point for her. According to her mother, “She was
really upset… She started to change.” (Jones, 47)

One of the biggest questions about Brandon’s choices is “Why didn’t she identify herself
as lesbian?” She may well have been trying to do that when she attempted to enlist. Why
would a transman want to enlist in a strictly segregated, all-female environment? The
military, in spite of its homophobic policies and witch hunts, has always appealed to
lesbians, because it has historically provided a same-sex living and work environment for
four years.

Although rape and sexual harassment occur in the military, a survivor who associates her
violation with isolation and ongoing exposure to access by males might feel there was
safety in an all-female environment, and especially if she had just been raped. Also, army
regulation uniforms provide protective covering that de-emphasize sexual characteristics
and discourage sexual objectification. It would be naive to assume that Brandon, who
had, by high school, identified her sexual attraction to women and who had already
moved in with one girlfriend, was unaware of the association of lesbians with the
military. She may well have been looking for the lesbians, and this may explain in part
her extreme reaction to failing the entrance exam.

If this is the case, then why didn’t she go looking for the communities of lesbians in her
hometown? Because “don’t ask, don’t tell” was not a policy that applied to working-class
gays and lesbians in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1990. The homophobia there was overt and
potentially life-threatening. Harassment could take the form of anonymous, obscene
phone calls, drive-by threats and insults, and physical assault. Because rape is viewed by
homophobes as a “cure” for lesbianism, harassment can take the form of threats of rape,
or the act itself.

 
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For a young woman who had a horror of male sexuality and who had told friends that
rape was one of her biggest fears, and who had just been raped, the prospect of this kind
of harassment must have been terrifying. The October rape may, in fact, have been a
homophobic assault directed against her, as a woman who didn’t date men and who had a
history of cohabitation with a girlfriend.

But there was another reason why Brandon wasn’t identifying herself as lesbian:
Lesbianism had become a power issue between Brandon and her mother.

In March of 1991, shortly after Brandon’s rejection by the army, a teenaged girl named
Liz Delano dialed a wrong number and reached Brandon by mistake. Liz mistook
Brandon for a teenaged boy, and Brandon played along, calling herself “Billy.” For a
joke, she put a sock in her underwear and met Liz at a skating rink as Billy. Liz continued
to call the Brandon home and ask for “Billy,” and JoAnn began to understand that her
daughter was posing as a boy. She was not happy.

A few weeks later, Brandon began a relationship with Heather, a fourteen-year-old friend
of Liz. She moved in with Heather, posing as a male and calling herself “Ten-a.” JoAnn
Brandon understood that this relationship was a sexual one, and she began telephoning
both Heather and Heather’s mother, insisting that the young man they had taken into their
home was her daughter. Heather, like Brandon, was an incest survivor. According to the
account in Jones’ biography, the focus of Brandon’s relationship was intense, romantic
role-playing, not genital sex, and Heather responded initially with gratitude for the
thoughtful behaviors and absence of sexual pressure. Brandon deeply resented JoAnn’s
attempt to sabotage the relationship, and she especially resented her mother’s attempt to
cast her in the role of a sexual (lesbian) predator.

To explain away her mother’s persistent calls, Brandon told Heather that she had been
born a hermaphrodite, but that JoAnn had chosen to raise her as a female in order to
“keep her for herself.” (Jones, 89) According to Heather, “He [Brandon] had a legitimate
answer for everything. He’d tell me his mother couldn’t accept the fact that he was male,
that she wanted two little girls, that she was just playing a joke.” (Jones, 67) Brandon’s
knowledge of hermaphroditism had come from an episode of the Phil Donahue show.

JoAnn herself tells a different story: “I knew that all of a sudden there were beer parties
going on and I have an eighteen-year-old daughter over there that’s not supposed to be
drinking or doing anything.”(Jones, 67) She understood that any sexual activity between
Brandon and the fourteen-year-old Heather was statutory rape. JoAnn was outraged by
Brandon’s claim of hermaphroditism. “I gave birth to her; I know what sex she is. There
were no attachments anywhere that had to be removed.” (Jones, 68)

JoAnn stepped up her campaign to “out” her daughter. She sent two lesbian co-workers
to visit Heather’s mother. They had photographs of Brandon as a little girl and a copy of
her birth certificate. In response, Brandon tore up every picture of herself she could find.

 
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Perceiving lesbianism as her mother’s attempt to break up her relationship, Brandon
began binding her breasts, lowering her voice, and using men’s rooms in public.

In June 1991, Brandon filed a complaint against her mother for harassment. She and
Heather took the tape from their answering machine to the police. On it was a message
from JoAnn calling them lesbians and threatening to expose them. Her mother’s
insistence on Brandon’s lesbianism had become a serious enough power issue to involve
the police.

Lesbianism was a family issue in another sense. The winter following Brandon’s attempt
to enlist, her sister Tammy had given up a baby for adoption—to a lesbian couple from
San Francisco. Brandon had urged her sister to keep the baby. She had wanted
desperately to be an aunt. Later, one of Brandon’s gay male friends would report how
“He [Brandon] hated lesbians; he was totally against lesbians,” (Jones, 93) citing the
adoption as the reason for this hatred.

That same summer, Brandon began forging checks in order to buy groceries and gifts for
Heather. She had obtained a fake identification card and was getting jobs as a man. She
began telling friends that she had gotten a sex-change operation in Omaha. By October,
she had been cited on two counts of second-degree forgery. Brandon’s illegal activities
began to accelerate, as did her drinking, compulsive behaviors, and eating disorders.
Finally, Sarah, her best friend, decided to take matters into her own hands. She met with
Heather and explained to her that Brandon was a female. Heather terminated the
relationship and Brandon attempted to kill herself by taking a bottle of antibiotics. This
landed her in a crisis center, and here, finally, she was able to receive professional
counseling.

The Gender Identity Disorder Diagnosis

Brandon spent seven days at the crisis center. Dr. Klaus Hartman wrote up the initial
report. Brandon’s history would have included twelve pending charges of forgery, a
possible charge of sexual assault on a minor, an untreated rape in October 1990, eating
disorders, binge drinking, and an ongoing sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old
girl. The diagnosis? A mild case of identity disorder. After just a few days of counseling,
Brandon told her mother that a sex change operation had been suggested by her therapist.

Was transsexualism Brandon’s idea or the therapists’? Mental health clinician Deb
Brodtke took over Brandon’s case at the crisis center and continued to treat her for almost
a year on an outpatient basis. Brandon is reported telling Brodtke she wanted to be a
male, “to not have to deal with the negative connotations of being a lesbian and because
she felt less intimidated by men when she presented herself as male.” (Jones, 83) If this is
true, what Brandon told her therapist was not that she felt like a man trapped in a
woman’s body, but a woman trapped in a world where it was dangerous to be female, and
especially dangerous to be lesbian.

 
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Jones’ book does not record any attempt on Brodtke’s part to challenge Brandon’s
internalized lesbophobia. There is no record in her narrative of efforts to supply Brandon
with information about lesbian culture or lesbian history, information about lesbian
coming-out groups or groups for young lesbians. There is no record of her attempting to
connect Brandon with an adult lesbian who could counsel or mentor her. The “gender
identity disorder” (GID) diagnosis reflects the historical heterosexism of the mental
health field, which has traditionally understood gay and lesbian desire as evidence of the
desire to become a member of the other sex.

Brandon’s diagnosis appears not to have included alcoholism. It’s interesting to note how
prevalent the use and abuse of alcohol is in the documentary, the biography, and the
feature film—and yet how absent it appears to have been from the treatment plan. If
alcohol abuse had been identified as even a contributing factor to the chaos and torment
of Brandon’s young life, it seems logical that there would have been some attempt to
incorporate a recovery program into the treatment plan.

And finally, Brandon’s GID diagnosis, so replete with homophobia and gender bias, also
appears to have ignored the “elephant in the living room”—the incest. The account of
Brandon’s treatment and diagnosis does not appear to include Complex Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder, a syndrome commonly associated with survivors of child abuse, and
especially survivors of incest. This is remarkable given the fact that, at the clinic,
Brandon presented with a record of years of untreated child sexual abuse, a report of a
recent rape, an escalation of criminal activity, a history of multiple identities, sexual
predation toward under-aged girls, extreme risk-taking behaviors, avoidance of medical
care from fear of routine examinations, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, terror of being
in a female body, expressed fear of men, preference for protective clothing, and
compulsive bathing—six or seven showers a day with changes of clothing. (Brandon’s
obsession with cleanliness would continue throughout her life, and, according to friends,
even in her last years, she was still taking three or four showers a day.)

Instead of a diagnosis related to trauma, the therapist apparently sent Brandon home with
information about “gender reassignment” surgeries, which would include such
procedures as suturing the vagina, removing the breasts, ovaries, and uterus, transplanting
the nipples, constructing an appendage using skin grafts from the thighs, and
administering steroids. Brandon’s friends reported that Brandon expressed a marked
ambivalence about these recommendations.

Her sister Tammy remembers the family’s reaction:

Basically, we were getting worried about Teena. And we couldn’t get any help for
her… you know, not help to deal with her being gay or anything like that, but help
to deal with her trying to figure out herself. Maybe she needed some counseling.
And she had mentioned to us about committing suicide, so we kind of used that as
a reason of getting her to there [Lincoln General Hospital], and the psychologist
there said that Teena needed long-term help… which I don’t know if that was
really the case, but they did send her out to the Crisis Center, and… I wish I really

 
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 knew what Teena had told them or what those doctors had told Teena, but
basically, she came out of there saying, ‘I want a sex change,’ and… ‘They told
me I need to do this and that.’ And they might have told her that, but I don’t know
if that’s really what she wanted to do.” (Muska)

In advocating for the surgery that would facilitate Brandon’s transition, the therapist
advised her of the professionally-mandated, year-long probationary period, a period in
which the patient would be required to live as a man. Had Brandon described her current
strategies for passing as a man in relationships—strategies involving the deception and
statutory rape of naive and inexperienced minors who were unlikely to be assertive or
educated enough to confront Brandon’s sexual subterfuges? If the therapist did address
the legal, ethical, or safety issues of these strategies, Brandon never saw any reason to
revise them. In fact, armed with the official diagnosis of “Axis I: transsexualism,”
Brandon escalated her deceptions and seductions.

After this counseling, her repertory of lies expanded to include tales of her grandmother’s
plans to send her to Europe to have the surgery done, and of scheduled dates in June 1993
for a bilateral mastectomy. She told her various girlfriends at various times that her
vagina had been sewn up, that “something” had been implanted that would eventually
grow into a penis, and that she had begun hormone therapy. Like the stories of
hermaphroditism that preceded the transsexual diagnosis, all were untrue.

Misogyny, Dissociation, and GID

According to the studies of Jacobs and Herman, the victimized daughter’s repudiation of
a female identity and her internalization of an idealized male represent responses to
childhood sexual abuse.

If gender is considered an aggregate of sex-caste markers in a system of dominance based

on biological sex, then it is simplistic and misleading to characterize it as
“performative.” Viewed in the context of a patriarchal culture, gender is emblematic of a
system of dominance in which women are universally oppressed as a caste.

The victimized daughter who adopts a male persona is not “fucking with gender.” Gender
has fucked with her, and, in attempting to identify with the power that has hurt her, she is
adopting the strategy of a desperate child whose only option has been to alter her
perception of herself.

What the transgender movement calls gender-fucking is simply an exercise in

moving markers rather than any fundamental change in gender. Gender still
exists. It is still an organizing structure for society. What’s different is that you
just ‘do’ it differently: it is ‘allowed’ to be attached to different bodies. The aim of
transgender politics is to allow you to be ‘be’ the gender that you ‘are.’ However,
being your gender still means what you wear, what you do, how you express
yourself and is still attached to fundamental notions of what it means to be men

 
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 and women… And it’s no surprise that what is female and what is male in this
view exactly tracks what is already defined as male and female. (Corson, 3)

Transgender politics does not disrupt the positions of men and women in the gender
hierarchy, but what it does do is “render women’s choices to oppose this hierarchy as
women and on behalf of women incomprehensible.”(Corson, 3)

In addition to its participation in the larger political system of male dominance, the GID
diagnosis also acts on a more personal front to protect the perpetrators. If the victimized
daughter’s “gender dysphoria” is a post-traumatic response to sexual violence, it reflects
an attempt to dissociate, or split off, the trauma.

A trauma that cannot adequately be represented or narrated remains estranged. It

is an alienated chunk of experience that resists any assimilation into the
personhood of the host on whom it feeds. Dissociation can also be understood as a
narrative act. It narrates fragmentation, breakage, rupture, disjunction, and
incommensurability. (Epstein and Lefkovitz, 193)

Dissociation is a survival strategy.

It provides a way out of the intolerable and psychologically incongruous situation

(double-bind), it erects memory barriers (amnesia) to keep painful events and
memories out of awareness, it functions as an analgesic to prevent feeling pain, it
allows escape from experiencing the event and from responsibility/guilt, and it
may serve as a hypnotic negation of the sense of self. The child may begin by
using the dissociative mechanism spontaneously and sporadically. With repeated
victimization and double-bind injunctions, it becomes chronic. It may further
become an autonomous process as the individual ages. (Courtois, 155)

Dissociation is a way of altering consciousness. As millions of survivors can testify, these

dissociated memories have not really gone away. Whether or not they ever surface to the
conscious mind, they continue to exert their influence through somatic disorders,
flashbacks, sleep disturbances, intrusive dreams, and dissociative disorders. Repressed
memories do not go away because one wishes them away. The survivor takes control of
her life by understanding and assimilating repressed trauma, not reinforcing the split. And
this is precisely why the GID diagnosis is so potentially pernicious when applied to the
victimized daughter.

When the GID diagnosis is substituted for identification and treatment of PTSD, it
reinforces the splitting that was a result of childhood trauma. However “queer” the
diagnosis, it does not deviate from a model of normativity based on traditional sex-caste
roles. The GID diagnosis that recommends transsexualism as a “cure” seriously
compromises the victimized daughter’s potential for recovery from the effects of her
trauma. Instead of offering techniques to aid her retrieval of memory and reintegration of
dissociated material, the GID diagnosis enables and encourages an even deeper
investment in the disorder, by offering a false promise of legitimizing this ahistorical

 
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dissociative identity through “reassignment” of gender. It exploits, rather than
deconstructs, the syndrome.

Revictimization

Finally, when the transgender identity is an extension and amplification of the victimized
daughter’s identification with the perpetrator, a divided consciousness continues to
inform the survivor’s psyche, playing itself out in scenarios of revictimization.

In both the play and imagination of the survivors, a tenuous relationship exists
between the internalized male abuser and the violated female child… While the
introjection of the perpetrator may at times mask the daughter’s identity as victim
and thus contribute to the construction of a false persona, patterns of
revictimization reveal the extent to which the unprotected and violated female self
also inform the personality of the victimized daughter. (Jacobs, 99)

Revictimization was the story of Brandon’s short adult life, as she played out serial
fraudulent identities that resulted in arrest and incarceration, seduction of under-aged
girls who rejected her when they discovered her secret, and increasingly dangerous
alliances with violent and homophobic males. Brandon’s sexual deceptions, deceptions
that escalated after her official diagnosis as transsexual, put her girlfriends at risk in very
real ways. Her girlfriends in Lincoln had been teased and harassed by their friends, but
when Brandon moved to the more provincial Richardson County, the stakes became even
higher. Both of Brandon’s Humboldt friends, Lisa Lambert and Lana Tisdel, were being
harassed at their workplaces and at social events. One of Lisa’s friends described Lisa’s
dilemma: “Everyone in Humboldt knew about Brandon. Lisa didn’t try to hide it. Lisa
couldn’t believe something like this happened to her. She made it clear that she was too
caring to shut Brandon out. She was mad and hurt about it, but she didn’t want to hurt
him [Brandon], didn’t want to turn him out on the streets.” (Jones, 205) Her compassion
would cost her her life.

Lana’s situation was complicated by her friendship with ex-convicts Tom Nissen and
John Lotter. When Brandon was arrested for forging checks on December 15, 1993, she
had phoned Lana to bail her out, but Lana was horrified to discover that her “boyfriend”
was being held in the women’s section of the jail. Instead of going herself, Lana sent
Tom, her former boyfriend, to bail Brandon out. The arrest was reported that week in the
Falls City Journal, making public Brandon’s biological identity as female, and,
consequently, Lana’s participation in what would be perceived as a lesbian relationship.
Friends of Brandon believe that the bailing-out was the beginning of a set-up for the
subsequent rape. Nissen and Lotter appear to have felt deceived and humiliated by
Brandon’s gender presentation. In the words of one friend, “He [Brandon] played a
player and [the player] got even for it.” (private email, December 20, 2004)

According to Jones, however, Lana had attempted to protect Brandon, even after she
realized she had been deceived. She told her family and Tom Nissen and John Lotter that
she had seen Brandon’s penis. But Tom and John were not convinced, and they

 
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performed their own investigation—strip-searching her. These were both men with
histories of violence, and they decided to take matters into their own hands. It may have
been that Lana’s safety was seriously compromised once it was known by these men that
she had participated in a sexual relationship with a biological female and had lied to
protect the fact.

Three days after Brandon had, at Lana’s urging, gone to the police to report the rape, the
police questioned John and Tom, but did not arrest them. John denied the rape, but said
that Lana had asked him to find a way to determine Brandon’s sex. On December 30, the
two men went to Lana’s house looking for Brandon, but Brandon, who was no longer
welcome there, had taken shelter at Lisa’s farmhouse. Lana reported that John said he
“felt like killing someone” and told her she, Lana, was next. This may have been why
Lana’s mother told them where Brandon was hiding. After they left, no phone calls were
made to warn Brandon or Lisa that the men were on their way. Conflicting testimony
suggests that Lana may have actually been in the car, or even at the house, on the night of
the murders.

Treatment Considerations

Many aspects of Brandon’s life would have been easier in a culture that was not
transphobic, but recovery from incest trauma would not have been one of them.

Recovery from traumatic sexualization… begins with the process of reintegration

whereby the original trauma is brought to consciousness. Only then can the
idealization of the perpetrator give way to the reality of his sexual violence. With
the deconstruction of the idealized father, the daughter can begin to reclaim and
redefine the female self, diminishing the impact of the internalized aggressor.
(Jacobs, 165)

When the internalization of this ideal has become incorporated into the gender identity of
the victimized daughter, specifically as a response to the trauma, this kind of
deconstruction is impeded. These may have been so damaged by the incest that it might
appear more expedient and more therapeutic to adopt a differently-gendered identity that
is not so apparently freighted with traumatic associations. This identity, however,
cannot—by definition—offer the integration that characterizes recovery.

So, how does the victimized daughter heal? In Victimized Daughters, Janet Liebman
Jacobs elaborates some of the stages associated with recovery, noting that not every
survivor will experience these changes: (Jacobs, 136)

• Deconstruction of the idealized father.

• Recognition of the sense of self constructed around the ideal of maleness
embodied in the perpetrator.
• Separation from the perpetrator.

 
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 • Identification of the self as victim (which may include identification with
other powerless members of society, and which allows her to deconstruct
the “bad self” at the core of her development).
• Recognition of past victimization integrated in the context of original
sexual trauma (which may result in establishing and maintaining better
boundaries in potentially victimizing relationships).
• Reclaiming the sexual self (a result of deconstruction of the idealized
perpetrator and development of a separate sense of self, which may
involve controlling dissociative responses and intrusive flashbacks, and
the restructuring or elimination of sexual fantasies that signifies
disengagement from the perpetrator).
• Self-validation and reconnection to the female persona (through
therapeutic transference that models respectful caretaking, or reconnection
or empathy with the mother, or identification with female spiritual power).
• Reintegration through creative imagination.

Conclusions

As an adult, Brandon exhibited behaviors consistent with a diagnosis of Complex Post-

Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome associated with incest survivors. Gender
dysphoria has been clinically identified as a response to child sexual abuse and incest,
and it is logical to question whether or not it was therapeutic in the case of Teena
Brandon to diagnose transsexualism and recommend surgical reassignment in lieu of
focusing on diagnosis and treatment of Complex PTSD. If healing from child sexual
abuse and incest requires retrieval and assimilation of dissociated material, a strong case
can be made that Brandon’s transsexualism diagnosis served to enhance her dissociation,
impeding recovery from the incest and enabling an escalation of high-risk behaviors
based on a dissociated identity.

As a final footnote, one of Brandon’s friends has shared this story about the week
between the rape and the murder:

On Christmas day of 1993, when Lisa brought Brandon back… from Falls City,
[a friend] met him[Brandon] at the door and said “Hi Brandon” In reply [the
friend] was told by Brandon that there was no Brandon, Brandon was gone. Her
name is Teena. That didn’t change at any point in that last week. (private email,
December 20, 2004).

References:

Blume, E. Sue. Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women. New
York: Ballantine, 1990.

Chodorow, Nancy and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,” in Barrie
Thorne, ed., with Marilyn Yalom, Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist
Questions. New York: Longman, 1980.

 
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Corson, Charlotte. “Sex, Lies, and Feminism,” in off our backs, June 2001.

Courtois, Christine. Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1988.

Epstein, Julia and Lori Hope Lefkovitz, Ed. Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the
Holocaust. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Ferenczi, Sandor. Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Pscyho-analysis.

London: The Hogarth Press, 1955.

Freud, Anna. The Ego and Mechanism of Defense. New York: International Universities Press,
1946.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1981.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From
Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Horney, Karen. “The Masculinity Complex in Women,” Archive fur Frauenjunde 13

(1927): 141-54.

Jacobs, Janet Liebman Jacobs. Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the
Female Self. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Jeffreys, Sheila. “FTM Transsexualism and Grief,” in Rain and Thunder: A Radical
Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Issue #15.

Jones, Aphrodite. What She Wanted. New York: Pocket Books, 1996.

Muska, Susan and Gréta Olafsdóttir. The Brandon Teena Story. New York: New Video,
1999.

Peirce, Kimberly. Boys Don’t Cry. Hollywood: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1998.

Shengold, Leonard. Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation. New
York: Ballantine Books, 1989.

 
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About the Author

Carolyn Gage is a lesbian feminist playwright, performer, author, and activist. The
author of twelve books and more than fifty-five plays, she is the 2009 winner of the
Lambda Literary Award in drama. Her website is www.carolyngage.com

 
 
 

 
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