There’s a certain scene included in virtually every film, documentary or television series depicting MtF transgenderism. It’s worth at least one shot in the trans documentary drinking game, and is usually framed facing a mirror, looking over her shoulders into a trans woman’s reflection. She’s carefully applying her make-up. Putting on her face. The camera may lovingly detail the painstaking process of assembling her outfit, perhaps putting on a wig or plucking her eyebrows, painting her nails or fastening her bra, pulling her socks over her knees or squeezing her feet into her six-inch stiletto boots. Perhaps a quip gets thrown in about how beauty is pain, and she remarks on how the work, effort and sacrifice is worth it to be a woman. Bit by bit we follow along as she constructs her female self to present to the world. She puts on her disguise.
I hate this scene.
Womanhood is neither a construct nor a disguise. But everyone includes it, since it’s an assumption that runs through our entire cultural conceptions of gender: femininity is artifice. Trans-femininity doubly so.
Do you remember when Lady Gaga did her drag king thing on the Video Music Awards? Her king persona (Joe something?) was a stripped down folk-rocker. No frills music for a no frills rocker in a no frills gender. I think there’s something there worth deconstructing.
In our present system of gender, when drawing the lines between femininity and masculinity, we’ve positioned the latter as being the natural, stripped down, down-to-earth, nice and simple, no-frills, no-frivolity concept. We like to imagine that the masculine is just pragmatic and to the point, lacking in any unnecessary aesthetic considerations. We imagine it to be efficient and direct. Conversely, the feminine is believed to be artifice, an elaborate costume, all just poses and aesthetics and frivolous dalliance, wholly lacking in any pragmatic value. It’s an ornament, rather than a tool, and is anything but direct, instead regarded as endlessly complex, subtle, mysterious and intuitive. Full of uncanny, inscrutable excesses like feelings and beauty and style. The feminine is fey, precious, wild, unknowable. The masculine is rational, basic, objective, and ever so apparent.
But to what degree is any of this hinged on reality? To what degree is the feminine truly more artificial, posed, frivolous or aesthetic than the masculine? And what consequences does this dichotomy threaten?
These kinds of knapsacks are always a little tedious to unpack. It always boils down to going through the preconceptions one by one. Reach in, pull something out: stereotypically male hobbies like sports, poker and cars vs. stereotypically female hobbies like celebrity gossip, knitting and fashion. The latter three are consistently regarded as frivolous while the first three go unquestioned as simple, charmingly “universal”, easily understandable pastimes. But comparing each to their counterparts we can’t see any particularly noticeable differences in the degree to which one or the other is necessarily more natural or pragmatic than the other.
Sports and celebrity gossip are more or less both developing narratives set through arbitrarily defined structures and expectations, through which we can construct stories to share with others who follow the same icons. Both are in a basic way connected to something with a degree of direct cultural or entertainment value, but both end up primarily being about sharing (or debating) the agreed-upon story with your friends and co-workers the following day. But sports is the “universal” narrative while celebrity gossip is “shallow”, “pointless” and “banal”. Both poker and knitting are basically a relatively inconsequential activity which we use as an excuse for social interaction with a small set of close friends, the activity providing a sort of framework for allowing the social interaction to flow a bit more smoothly and easily. But again, poker is held up as the more natural and less frivolous of the two. And both cars and fashion have an underlying pragmatic value, but it ultimately becomes about aesthetic enjoyment, appreciation for craft, a shared cultural language and participatory narrative, symbolic of infinite deeper meanings, a means of feeling confident or powerful or sexy, and a means of self-expression. But interest in cars, no matter how much it deviates from the pragmatic goal of getting from Point A to Point B, no matter how much it becomes blatantly about the aesthetics and self-expression rather than the…well…CAR, is regarded as practical while interest in clothes or shoes is regarded as superficial, shallow and a waste of time and money, something that guys will never ever understand, and shouldn’t be expected to.
Reach in, take something out: men’s fashion compared to women’s fashion. Granted, there are some pretty significant differences here. Differences I happen to know A WHOLE LOT about, and would love to discuss in depth some day soon. But a lot of those differences are exaggerated well beyond reason to prop up the natural/artifice dichotomy. We do, for instance, say that certain male clothing styles are a sort of anti-fashion, devoid of any considerations beyond the immediate need of not-being-naked. The funny thing is, this anti-fashion itself becomes a fashion. It even changes over time: what was regarded as the basic, no fuss, totally-pragmatic men’s clothing choice of 1956 is not the same as the basic, no fuss, totally-pragmatic men’s clothing choice of 2012. The degree to which this “non-style” is capable of such dramatic permutations from decade to decade is strongly indicative of the fact that there’s a whole lot more going on than just putting on what’s required to not die from exposure.
Men even make choices to present different variations upon the theme of “natural” and “down to earth”… the down to earth in t-shirt and jeans, the down to earth in a simple business suit, the down to earth in a plaid flannel work-shirt with jeans and a sturdy pair of boots, the down to earth in a hockey jersey and baggy cargo pants, the down to earth in a pastel polo with a pair of white chinos, etc. None of these styles are any more or less a pose than any other. They’re all just different forms of posing a lack of pose. Different ways of affecting the absence of affectation.
Even the precise pattern and colours of a plaid are devised with aesthetic considerations in mind. Every single man, whether he admits it or not, will be capable of finding one shirt ugly and another appealing. I have no idea how many would be willing to apply the adectives “beautiful” or “cute”, however. Too girly. Might get cooties.
Reach in, take something out: the idea that women are full of near-mystical intuitions while men are single-mindedly purposeful, rational and focused on immediate goals. Reach in, take something out: the idea that women’s feelings are complex and inscrutable, beyond the ken of mortal men, while men are simple, thick-skulled gits with no emotions and only one thing on their minds. Reach in, take something out: that women take this impossibly pointless amount of time in the bathroom obsessing over their appearance, while men are only doing what needs to be done as efficiently as they can (fun thing I’ve learned: my make-up and hair, even when I choose to straighten with my flat-iron, does not meaningfully take any longer than shaving my face did).
And you keep at it until the knapsack ends up (hopefully) empty.
What I’m really interested in here is not the whole knapsack, though, just how these ideas construct and maintain the subconscious conception of femininity as something artificial, that a femme woman (or man) is an aesthetic and conceptual elaboration upon a blank (masculine) slate. The idea that while a man simply is, a woman is fabricated from foundation, hair extensions, lace, blush, conditioner, lipstick, fancy soaps, brushes, nail polish, heels, silk, bobby pins, handkerchiefs, hand lotion, push-up bras, jewelry, silicone, sugar, spice and everything nice.
Repeatedly, throughout our culture and media, so often we’re almost incapable of noticing it when it happens, we’re presented with the concept that a feminine identity cannot possibly be a natural one. It must be superficial. It cannot possibly be a natural, honest expression of one’s underlying personality. It is done as a deliberate obfuscation of her natural state or as attempt to achieve certain results through a mindfully crafted persona and appearance. All masculine presentation, so the concept goes, is necessary and genuine while all feminine presentation is superfluous and dishonest. Even feminism ended up supporting this conception, imagining femininity as nothing but a construct of the patriarchy imposed upon women, a means of brainwashing them into passive subservience (even though there is nothing intrinsically subservient or dominated about being femme… it can be, and often is, in fact an expression of power, confidence and radical assertion of the self).
Queer identities and politcs have been roped into this game. Since the 19th century, gay male identity was associated with the aesthetic and the posed. “Affected” itself was even used as a synonym for gay in England in the first half of the 20th century. As the gay culture developed in reaction to its pathologization, its heroes were people like Wilde,Warhol and Crisp, champions of the legitimacy of style over substance (as though the two were ever in conflict, or even distinct), while masculine gay men like Rock Hudson were used as fodder for constructing the concept of “acting straight”. As though gayness itself were in the degree to which one could be imagined as shallow, artificial or aesthetically inclined, rather than to “act gay” simply meaning to engage in a homosexual act, and “act straight” meaning to engage in heterosexual acts.
Trans women were of course, as soon as we’d emerged in public consciousness, used as a sort of ultimate weapon in the fight to cast femininity and womanhood as merely a construct rather than an honest expression of self. We were exactly what the struggle to maintain patriarchal concepts of male and masculine as the “neutral” or “default” state needed at that moment. A group of women who appeared at first glance to be entirely superficial, cosmetic, artificial and constructed. Our cultural icons, like Candy Darling or Roberta Close, were marked by beauty, whereas in the case of trans women who made significant contributions or accomplishments, like Lynn Conway, Sandy Stone or Wendy Carlos, their transsexuality was either heavily downplayed or used as a weapon against them,
For us, we do need to fight to be women. We need to work against the natural state of our bodies. But it is ONLY the bodies that we really seek to change (and even that isn’t a given), not our identities or selves, and the female traits that are expressed through the use of hormones already existed as natural potentials in our genetic structure. Media conceptualizations emphasise the surgical, prattle on as much as possible about breast implants and brow recontouring, discuss a dramatic process of changing into a new person, making it sound as medically difficult and scientifically miraculous as they can, finally summing up this process of fabricating an artificial woman in the inevitable “before”/”after” comparison, in which they present the most stereotypically masculine picture of us as a child they can find to drive home the degree to which modern science has managed to create this wholly new being.
What never receives focus is the degree to which this is for us a process that typically feels natural and like a relief, an unburdening of unnatural constraints… how the woman was not constructed, but already there. How transition is not about becoming a new person, but allowing yourself to stop hiding the person you already really were. What ends up on the cutting room floor are our discussions of how we fabricated and constructed an artificial male pose.
Yes. We constructed our masculinity. The masculinity was the disguise, the unnatural state, the artifice, the pose that we crafted. It, not the femme, was superficial and shallow. It was the aesthetic consideration we had to deliberate upon and mind the details. It was the face we put on in the morning. It was the mannerisms we choreographed. The clothes we carefully chose. The uncomfortable shoes.
An artifice of masculinity.
But in so far as trans women’s narratives are accepted, they are accepted in a manner in which they challenge cultural assumptions of gender as little as possible. Our existence is already a fundamental threat to basic assumptions of masculine prefeability. Adding in the degree to which we threaten the assumption that masculinity is a natural state, that it’s not something learned, trained or affected with a particular aesthetic dictated by the whims of style, would just make us far, far too dangerous.
So instead we get used and out narratives and experiences misrepresented to drive home the point that there’s nothing real or valuable about the feminine. We get filmed in front of mirrors, putting on our make-up, squeezing into uncomfortable shoes, and griping about all the incredible effort and pain that goes into being femme. As though there were no effort or pain at all involved in being masculine.
The pain of wearing heels or plucking my eyebrows is fuck all compared to the pain of denying, suppressing and hating who I was while hiding behind a male mask for twelve years.
Part of me wonders if this plays into the way that butch or tomboy trans women are not acknowledged in media at all. I’m sure there are many, many layers to this erasure, but the fact that such women suggest that a female identity is not the same thing as a feminine identity, that gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation and physical sex do not determine one another and can occur in any combination, and that it is possible to transition to being female with very little artifice or make-up involved, that transition can consist almost entirely of simply stripping away a masculine and male disguise, that is just something that could too easily bring the patriarchal/binary house of cards crashing to the ground.
Of course, this is all just an act and persona. I don’t mean any of this. I’m just trying to seem like one of those smart quirky hipster chicks, like Zooey Deschanel. I like her style, and guys are into smart chicks. Do you think I’d seem more activist and feminist with patterned black stockings, or with red leggings?
“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”