passing

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Laura Jane Grace subverts MTV with style

Having previously written a little bit about Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace’s recent appearance on MTV’s House of Style, I finally got around to watching it.

And, you know what, I really am impressed.

Grace makes the most of every moment of air time: she seems determined to convey a whole series of positive messages. It seems like the editing team who put together the short were pretty respectful of this. The whole programme is also largely free of the usual transphobic tropes, which is an achievement in and of itself.

I’m not normally a fan of this kind of thing. I don’t care how celebrities dress. I don’t care how they “choose” their “style”. I associate such programmes with shallow consumerism and damagingly limited ideas about how people should and shouldn’t express themselves.

But the messages that come from Grace are powerful, important and – to my mind – broadly feminist. Be true to your tastes and interests (“You can see like the texture of it? That’s real dirt”). Dress in a way that makes you feel good. Passing doesn’t need to be an end in and of itself. If you’re a young trans people, it’s okay – other trans people exist, in public!

Grace is self-consciously making herself into a role model. That’s not always a good thing, but the message here isn’t “be like me”, it’s “be yourself”. Sod the naysayers: this is punk as fuck.

Video embedded for readers who (like me) aren’t based in the US, and hence can’t watch this on the MTV website.

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Passing as cis: why I’d love to stop shaving my legs, but don’t

Several months ago, a friend of mine sent out message inviting participation in a new feminist video-blogging project. This seed of an idea grew into Those Pesky Dames, in which five women say awesome things about body autonomy, self-care, inspirations, intersectionality and pop culture. And then this week, the Dames stepped beyond the realm of YouTube (and Facebook, and Twitter and Tumblr…) to appear on the good ol’ fashioned television.

You can watch them talk about body hair on Cherry Healey: How to Get a Life for the next couple of weeks (it’s available on BBC iPlayer until Wednesday 18th July).

The Dames’ contribution to the programme is fantastic: they talk about how body hair is entirely natural, and shouldn’t be regarded as unfeminine. Why should women have to spend hours shaving in order to conform to the beauty myth? Why should we feel bad about baring our natural fluff in public? And why regard hairy women as unhygienic, but not hairy men?

I was so happy not only to see my friends on TV, but to see them discussing a vital feminist issue. Michel Foucault came up with this idea known as “governmentality” to describe the relationship between individual people and social rules. We enforce social norms through self-governance, tailoring our actions and behaviour to uphold the status quo. We police our own conformity through the application of self-esteem (when we conform) and shame (when we fail to conform). I felt that the programme beautifully highlighted the governmentality at play in the maintenance of female body hair: our self-esteem depends greatly upon our lack of hair, and when our legs or armpits are hairy in public we feel shame. In this way, women come to enforce sexist ideals of appropriate female behaviour. We can escape by embracing an alternative, feminist ethic of selfhood whereby shaving is not required. I went to bed reflecting happily upon this liberatory potential.

The next day was warm and sunny, and I planned to see my friends in town. I pulled on my shorts…and then took them off again and wore jeans instead, because I didn’t want the world to see my hairy legs. My boyfriend insisted that my short, very thin crop of leg hair wasn’t even visible and that it really didn’t matter. The rational part of my brain agreed wholeheartedly. I still couldn’t do it.

A great part of this response was no doubt down to your bog-standard governmentality at work. I was ashamed at the thought of being an Inappropriate Woman, and tailored my behaviour accordingly. Knowing that you’re a sucker in this way only gives you so much power! But there was an additional element at play: my fear of not passing.

I feel that being trans greatly complicates body hair issues. I don’t really fear being read as different or somewhat deviant, and happily flaunt my subcultural identity as a rocker on an everyday basis. I don’t worry too much about looking feminine or conforming to female stereotypes. But at the same time, I don’t want anyone thinking I’m not a woman, and I certainly don’t want anyone thinking I’m a man. I spent 18 years of my life being read as male, and those 18 years were quite enough.

My fear is not that people will look at my hairy legs and think “urgh, a hairy woman”. My fear is that people will look at my hairy legs and thinking “urgh, she’s actually a man!” This is somewhat irrational given how well I pass as cis, but the fear is real, and powerful.

The problem is that passing as a cs woman is important to me. Not because I think it’s better to look cis than trans (I most certainly don’t!) Not because I aspire to some outdated, patriarchal ideal of womanhood. It’s because I hate being heckled on the street, and I fear the violence that can come with transphobic responses. I realise that I’m deeply unlikely to suffer an assault in broad daylight in my home town, but past experiences of violence – however minor – can exert a powerful control. I aim to pass for my own mental and physical well-being.

And so I shave my legs and my armpits when I think they’ll be seen in public, because I’d rather be seen as an Acceptable Woman than not be seen as a woman at all.

The thing is, I hope this might change with time. At the start of my transition, I used to wear eye make-up and straighten my hair daily. I used to shun baggy clothes, instead aiming to highlight what curves I had. As time has gone on, I’ve become more and more relaxed about my appearance. This is partly because I’ve become generally more chilled with time: I’m no longer bothered about people who know me being aware of my trans status, and this blog is hardly anonymous these days. But it’s also because of the impact of hormones, meaning that I pass more easily as a cis woman regardless of how I dress. I now wear make-up and dress in a more feminine manner on special occasions, when I want to put on a certain appearance: in this way, I’m now doing these things for me, rather than for others.

One of things I really like about the kind of feminism espoused by Those Pesky Dames is that it leaves room for all these complications. There wasn’t really time for an exploration of this in How to Get a Life, but it’s all there in their vlogs. They argue for a feminism in which you shouldn’t have to shave your body hair…but you should be able to if it’s the appearance you’re going for. A feminism in which you don’t have to wear make-up, but should feel empowered to do so on your own terms. A feminism that accepts that some of us really want to escape the governmentality that leads us to shave our legs, but for now, we remain constrained.

As such, I’m going to keep shaving my legs, despite acknowledging that (in my case) I’m not really doing it for me. Meanwhile, I’m going to celebrate the achievements of those who aim to break down this norm.

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Passing as human in “Buffy”

I’m currently re-watching Season 5 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and it got me thinking about how trans people are perceived by others. The link isn’t a particularly obvious one, I’ll grant you, but bear with me.

In Season 5 of Buffy, a new character is introduced: Dawn Summers, Buffy’s younger sister. Dawn quite literally appears during the first episode of the season, artificially inserted into Buffy’s life by some desperate monks. She is (or was) the Key: a ball of pure energy capable of granting access to a demon dimension. The other characters’ memories are changed to accommodate the idea that Dawn has always been a part of their life, and everyone perceives Dawn as a normal teenage girl.

Everyone, that is, other than those see things differently. On a number of occasions Dawn is approached by men driven mad by demon god Glory. “You’re not real,” they tell her. “You don’t really exist.” Buffy discovers Dawn’s “true nature” in a trance, and even Joyce (the girls’ mother) see that there’s something “wrong” with one of her daughters whilst suffering from the dehabilitating effects of brain cancer.

I thought about this just the other evening after I wandered into the ladies’ to check if a somewhat inebriated woman (who’d been in there for a while) was okay. It turned out she was fine and just about to leave, but she gave me a funny look as I walked in. “This isn’t the men’s, is it?”

I don’t think there’s a single trans woman who hasn’t had this experience, or something very similar. Many have to endure being misgendered every day. I’m very lucky these days: I suspect that I “pass” as a cis woman around 99% of the time. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m always gendered correctly: now and again, there are always those who mistake me for a man.

Those who misgender me are usually either drunk adults, or children. Some might think that sober adults are more likely to figure I’m trans and gender me correctly out of politeness, but I’m not convinced this entirely accounts for it. I’ve been misgendered a number of times in front of people who don’t know I’m trans, and they always greet such incidences with incomprehension and amusement. How could anyone be so stupid as to think I’m a man, they wonder? After all, I’m obviously a woman.

I figure that once you’ve assigned a gender to a person in your head, it takes a lot to overturn this. This is one reason why coming out is so hard for trans people, but it also tends to make life a lot easier for those who wish to successfully pass as cis women or men. Once people have got it into their head that I’m a woman, they tend to think that anyone who sees me as a man is mad.

In “Buffy”, people with mental disabilities perceive Dawn as different, as non-human. Buffy initially dismisses such people as mad and deluded. Drunks and kids aren’t (always) so harsh, but I do think that different ways of thinking affect the chances of perceiving something (or someone!) in a particular way. People who think differently seem more likely to see something in me that others can’t.

Here’s the catch. Dawn is percieved is non-human, but in actual fact she isn’t just passing as a teenage girl: she is a teenage girl. The monks altered memories and created a personal history for Dawn, but at the same time they made her flesh and blood. Buffy reassures Dawn that they are sisters: they share Summers blood. Dawn may not always have been human, and some can see this, but she now is human.

Similarly, the people who perceive me as male are misguided. They’re right in believing that there’s something about me that’s different, but they’re wrong in assuming that I’m therefore not woman. They see my transness, but can’t comprehend this. Sometimes I’m asked “are you a man or a woman”, but far more often my appearance is translated into “effeminate man”. To people who have always known me as a woman, this is very strange!

So there it is. “Passing” trans people are sort of like Dawn: the few who “read” us as trans tend to wrongly leap to the conclusion that we’re therefore not real (real women, real men, real humans, whatever)…but they’re so very wrong.

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Passing as a (cis) woman

“You don’t look like a transsexual”

“You look very convincing”

“You look just like a real girl”

There’s a lot of discussions out there about how a trans person can pass as a man or as a woman. These range from straightforward passing tips to more complex debates about the value of passing, and what we even mean when we use the word.

Passing to me seems to be about two things: it’s about making sure that others see our gender as we wish them to, but it’s also about survival (disappearing in order to make sure we don’t become targets). As such, although I’m inclined to argue that we should try and downplay the importance of passing in trans communities – after all, not everyone can pass, and you can spend so long worrying about it that you barely end up leaving the house – I think people have every right to work towards passing. Anything that minimises public harassment has to be a good thing.

One thing I don’t think we really talk about enough though is what we’re trying to pass as. I hear a lot of talk about “passing as a woman” or “passing as a man”. A couple of conversations with friends over the past few days though made me realise that it’s not really about that. It’s about passing as a cis woman, or as a cis man.

This distinction is important. I look at friends of mine who are trans women or trans men, and I see women or men. If one of these trans women doesn’t “pass” though, others are inclined to see her as a man. She is likely to conclude from this that she doesn’t look like a woman. Surely though, she does look like a woman, because she is a woman: by definition any given woman looks like a woman.

Cis-ness is invisible. The erasure of trans people in our culture means that the models of “man” and “woman” are inherently cis. This is why trans women don’t just have to assert their identity in order to be accepted as woman: they also have to look cis. It’s not enough to fit within social norms and roles as a woman, to undergo hormone therapy and surgery. It’s not just about having breasts and a vagina. It’s about looking like you were born that way.

I think it’s important to talk explicitly about passing as cis. When we’re talking about “passing as a woman” we’re always imply “passing as a cis woman”, but we don’t think about what this means. It’s as if we’re saying that cis people have a monopoly on how sex and gender should be defined and how it should look.

Obviously we’re years away from being able to do away with passing. There are things we can do to change people’s perceptions on the issue though. I used to think the comments at the beginning of this entry were compliments: I now realise that they’re transphobic (and the last one is misogynist). They’re basically praising someone for not looking trans, as if there’s something wrong with looking trans.

We need to point out to the people who make these (usually innocent) comments that looking trans doesn’t make a person any less of a man or a woman. For that matter, looking like a man doesn’t make anyone less of a woman, or an androgyne, or a genderqueer. We need to do away with the idea that people have to look, dress or act in a certain way to have their identity accepted and supported in queer and trans spaces. In short, we need to do away with outdated, sexist ideals of how people should act and what they should look like. We should bear in mind that looking cis doesn’t make someone look better; it just makes them look cis.