I am loving Whipping Girl. I’m not really sure how to post about it, because so many of my ideas look like this:
[Introduction to Julia Serano quote]
[Lengthy quote from Julia Serano]
[Paraphrase of quote from me]
Where to start? There’s so much happening with me around me these days, and I’m running into questions related to womanhood, femininity, transfeminity, cissexual privilege–because I possess both cissexual and transgendered/transitioning status these days–transition, adolescence, misogyny….
Serano’s book is really helping to clarify some of those cross-purpose feelings.
One thing I’ve been wanting to talk about and dreading talking about is internalized transphobia. Rather, as Serano defines the terms, trans-misogyny: hatred specific to transwomen and transfeminine people. As I’ve been transitioning back, one of the most difficult things for me to get over is my own fear of being transfeminine. That is, I was desperate to seem like anything other than a male-assigned or male-bodied female-identified person. That fear has dissipated as I have been able to pass as female, but it still crops up whenever someone seems to read me as a trans woman or a transfeminine person. It also returns whenever I see parts of my body that have been masculinized by the testosterone. Chest hair, for example. Those new physical attributes are repulsive to me.
This goes beyond simple oppositional hatred of masculine cues, too–I feel obsessively insecure about my (minimally, if the long-suffering sighs of my friends are any indication) receded hairline, but not about the way I sit or stand or speak. It also goes beyond fears about simple androgyny–I never felt this awful about residual tells on the other end, and do not feel as bothered by the idea of being a passing woman. That outcome would be inconvenient, but not disgusting.
A brief sojourn amongst the whipping girls, on the other hand, is so very very frightening. I think that this phobia has only faded as much as it has because it doesn’t seem to be happening, not because I’ve come to peace with my gender-insecurity. It’s funny (bigotry often is, since it is by definition absurd)–I don’t see trans women as unattractive, or unworthy, or clumsy, or gross, or unsuccessful, or unwomanly. I have never had that reaction to any actual real-life transwoman I’ve met. In fact (I’m quite the little closet case, aren’t I?) my feelings have been closer to awe and affinity.
Still, the possibility that I would be confused with a transwoman, or indeed that my transition would be equated with a transwoman’s, was worse for me than any other interpretation. I had much rather be a butch dyke, or an androgyne, or an effeminate man, or simply an extremely confused person who does not know how to dress. I am not one of them. I delayed switching back over–and probably resisted coming out to myself–because I was so anxious to avoid any implication of transwomanhood be. I craved that cissexual status, and crave it still.
Coincident with these feelings has been the sense that these women have something I desperately need: that is, a way of seeing us as something other than repulsive. It’s not a belief I’ve been able to glean from my current communty. Transwomen are often treated kinda like I was in middle school. Casual abuse of transwomen is really common, and it’s probably even more common when no trannies can hear. Transwomen are hulking ugly craggy-faced old men wearing pathetic smiles. They’re frumpy. They’re obvious. They’re unwanted.
Speaking of unwanted, the most overt difference seems to be eroticization. I’m a beautiful and sexy woman, but there’s no beautiful and sexy transwoman role to step into, no way to reconcile an erotic sense of self with womanhood with a masculinized body. Transmen and trannyboys are really heavily sexualized by the “tranny-friendly” (i.e. queer cisgendered women and ft? people) in this city, and much of that aesthetic has to do with gender-bending, or blending. That is, it is intended as a celebration of trans-gendered status and identity. There are many options, and together they seem to create a sense of overarching complexity, a kind of community transcendence.
Trans women, on the other hand, cannot claim complexity as erotic; for them, ambiguity is often a stain. It means that they are not trying hard enough, or that they are too dense or delusional to see themselves. An affirmative sense of self as something more than a facsimile isn’t really recognized. This extends to physicality, too–a man with a delicate jaw is beautiful; a woman with a square jaw is not. If the conversations I’ve been privy to are any indication, they are subject to sexualized gender-policing that is striking in its similarity to the mainstream version.