More from Whipping Girl, from the essay/chapter entitled, “Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels:”
In the opening five minutes of the film, we see Bree practicing along with the instructional video Finding Your Female Voice, putting on stockings, padding her bra, donning a pink dress suit, painting her nails (also pink), and putting on lipstick, eye shadow, and other cosmetics. This scene (not coincidentally) is immediately followed by the first dialogue in the movie, where Bree tells a psychiatrist that she’s been on hormone replacement therapy for three years, has undergone electrolysis, feminine facial surgery, a brow-lift, forehead reduction, jaw reconstruction, and a tracheal shave. This opening flurry of cosmetic and medical feminization is clearly designed to establish that Bree’s female identity is artificial and imitative, and to reduce her transition to the mere pursuit of feminine finery.
Throughout the rest of the film, feminine apparel and cosmetics are repeatedly used as a device to highlight
Bree’s fakeness. There are excessive scenes in which Bree is shown in the act of dressing and undressing, and though her clothing represented some kind of costume. We also see her applying and fixing her makeup nearly every chance she gets, and it is difficult not to view the thick layers of foundation she constantly wears as a mask that is hiding the “real” (undoubtedly more masculine) Bree underneath…Indeed, the fact that her foundation begins to develop a sheen from perspriation at several points in the movie,a nd that she stumbles in her high heels on more than one occasion–faux pas that never seem to afflict cissexual women in Hollywood–makes it clear that the filmmakers purposely used these female accessories as props to portray Bree as “doing female” rather badly. And they certainly succeeded, as Felicity Huffman comes off seeming infinitely more contrived than the several real-life trans women (such as Andrea James and Calpernia Addams) who appear briefly in the film.
I always want to give the benefit of the doubt in cases like this, to assume that the work in question is smarter and more ironic than it probably is. Like with Hedwig, when I really, really wanted to see it as a reverse-reimagining of transsexuality rather than one femmeish gay man’s (somewhat) phobic reaction to oppositional sexism and homophobia. Then he went and used the m-word, and my hopes were dashed.
I talked about Transamerica’s portrayal of transwoman adolescence with a friend (also an ftm) when the movie came out, and he said that he actually liked the way they showed Bree’s awkward, paranoiac gender presentation. He thought that it was a way of saying that the problem wasn’t actually with her failure to be a woman, or be sufficiently feminine, but that she needed to learn how to relax into her identified gender. She didn’t seem manly to us, but rather terrified of being found out. That confidence would occur over time, and it seemed to–at the end of the movie, Bree is much less wooden, and her face no longer has the same texture as her stucco bungalow. The movie also showed other transwomen who were further along and far less inclined towards self-disgust, and the implication seemed to be that transwomen were not fake.
That having been said, this movie was really inaccurate in many other ways. It also allows Bree to finally falm down after she’s undergone genital surgery–is this a nod to her own feelings or a reiteration of the idea that GRS makes the woman? Serano’s points about the way dressing is used in the movie are apt, as well as the seemingly uncritical acceptance by the filmmakers that–for example–facial feminization surgery is a standard requirement for passing.