Trans femininity
Being a trans woman does not mean you owe the world femininity or to be femme presenting. To be a woman in the world has always been about exploring boundaries of societal understandings of womanhood, expectations about your presentations, and then how you personally position yourself within those. If you live in a society where to be trans is a potentially dangerous affair femininity is a safety net you use as a means of ensuring you are not physically attacked. Yet, this is a double bind because many trans women are then attacked for upholding patriarchal standards on beauty and clothing. To be outwardly trans feminine is a potential guilted cage, one that is reinforced by both the trans community and society at large.
As a self-described trans femme myself I love the vast array of options I have open to me. My usual routine is jeans, t-shirt, and hoodie, yet on days when the mood strikes I femme up just because I feel like it. Due to my training routine you are more likely to see me in leggings and sports tops with a goalie kit in tow, none of which changes my personal self-perception. How the world sees me at large is a different matter, one over which I have no control. For all of my personal efforts, society may read me as something I do not ascribe to. And this is not my concern, unless someone chooses to throw it in my face. How we perceive ourselves and how others react is beyond our control, as the complexities of trans femininity attest.
What adds many other layers to this are the things that writers such as Julie Bindel, Julie Burchill, and Janice Raymond forget. For much of trans female medical history there has been strict gatekeeping to access hormones and surgery based on how well a patient passes as a straight heteronormative woman. This rigid enforcement of heteronormativity seeped deep into trans culture, to the point that even in 2000 when I started going through the gender recognition clinic in the UK I was scrutinised if I turned up in jeans. To be a trans woman was automatically assumed that you had to be femme, and anything other was deemed a failure. Passing was seen as essential to being able to lead a “normal” cis-passing life, and as such virtually all of trans culture has come to revolve around passing as cisnormative. Trans passing sub-Reddits typify this, to the point where anything slightly blurring the edge of passing is highly scrutinised.
Added to this is the pressure that trans women put themselves under to match societal expectations, often to the point where the only trans women who act as role models are the ones who are hyper femme. If you exist in the world with cis women you know how varied and wonderful womanhood actually is. There is no one standard female identity, to the point that every woman much find her own identity to live in society. Trans women are rarely afforded the space to simply exist as women in the world without cisnormative scrutiny, and while trans women such as Alana Mclaughlin buck the trend, they are still mercilessly critiqued on social media. To be anything other than cis passing is to exist in a twilight zone that invites ridicule and contempt.
When gender critical voices slam trans women for attempting to secure their own personal safety by calling trans women “woman face” they are essentially saying that being femme is fake and a charade. Raymond’s Transsexual Empire laid a foundation of anti-trans topes precisely because she rejected trans women’s attempts at passing for women. It was the very act of passing that was problematic, that an escape into petticoats was aping womanhood, not embracing it. Much of the modern gender critical discourse focuses in the biological nature of womanhood, seeing it as a physical thing rather than a self-perception, and in doing so seeks to eradicate femme as an inherent expression of what a woman is. Of course femme is not rooted in being a woman, as femme boys and feminine men attest to, yet as society has not eradicated femme presenting from the locus of womanhood passing as a woman still often requires a woman to be femme. It is an inherent contradiction, one which many trans women cannot escape from if they want to live in society at large.
Paris Lees, April Ashley, Christine Jorgensen, and many other trans women talk about the process of being femme, with Munroe Burgdorf outline in her biography just how dangerous the liminal world between passing and being read actually is. Trans femininity as a safety mechanism is mistaken as pastiche by gender critical observers because they only see the expression, not the mechanisms behind it. Femme is a mindset, much as butch is, and to be femme is to explore a certain aesthetic in is panoply, picking what works for you and setting aside what does not. Most women do this over their lifetimes, some rejecting femme entirely, while others embrace it totally. Many simply take what works for them and go with their personal flow. Yes, there is much to be said about the patriarchal imposition of femme, especially when it is legally enforced, and all women should engage in that conversation. However, that conversation should not come at the cost of rejecting femme entirely, much in the same way as rejecting butch is always a mistake.
Being femme is not the inherent problem, it is the assumption that womanhood must centre on femme in order to be womanhood. If there is no alternative then it is simply a pretty cage in which women are sequestered. There needs to be an understanding that trans women are not femme simply to ape womanhood as a pastiche, they embrace aspects of femme due to personal safety as much as they do because they enjoy the act of expressing femme. There is a clear dividing line between the act of personal understanding one’s self as a woman and the ongoing gender expression of femme. One does not need to be femme to be a woman, and one does not need to be a woman to be femme. This needs to be stated every time woman face and anti-femme messages are chucked at trans women, loudly. To be a woman is to understand one’s self as a woman, nothing more complicated than that.
