Reading some of the older online trans women’s resources (like, from the late ’90s and early-to-mid 2000s) is kind of an exercise in frustration for me. There’s so much emphasis on “passing”: what you should do to pass, what you shouldn’t do to pass, lots of judgey and victim-blaming bullshit towards trans women who aren’t trying hard enough (in the authors’ judgment) to pass, preachy screeds about how women who don’t pass “shouldn’t” transition (no, really, this is something actual trans women have said to other actual trans women), obsessing over hierarchies of transness based on passability, etc. etc.
And the sad thing is that this still happens. It happened today, to a trans friend of mine, who was told by another trans woman that she wasn’t “real” because she wasn’t working hard enough to “look female” (the fuck does that even mean?). I felt angry, not just on behalf of my friend, but also on behalf of the woman who’d been pushed by society to internalize that bullshit.
So, I mean. I’m not saying this to say that the women who said/wrote these things were bad and should feel bad. Hell, when I was first coming to terms with myself, I’d internalized most of that shit too. It’s hard not to, when cis people try to revoke your humanity the instant they find out that you don’t, or didn’t always, have the “right” body for your gender. And when you’re desperately trying to prove to such people that you’re not just some disgusting pervert, it’s very tempting to compare yourself to others who cis people might not perceive to be as “good” as you. I’m not saying that’s right, of course; I’m saying, I get it.
I can’t just say “but it needs to stop”, because, in order for it to stop, trans people need to understand that they have the absolute right to define themselves. And to do that, as many of us have already realized, we need to shift the conversation away from trans people “passing” and towards cis people misgendering and erasing — which, of course, ultimately leads to a conversation about cis-hetero-patriarchy and gendered power structures and the like. Why do cis people really want to take trans people’s identities away from us? ‘Cause it ain’t just because of how we look! That’s the sort of conversation I’d like to try to have.
