Maddi-bout You

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We stopped freaking out about the “Oh my god, women want to wear pants!” thing a really long time ago. Women wandered into the traditionally masculine realms of self-expression and ambition and now it’s just normal.

Not so with masculinity. It is still as rigid and well defended as ever, despite a few David Bowies or Johnny Depps in the mix. Just look at last year’s total freaking meltdown about a J. Crew catalog that carried a photo of a woman painting her young son’s toenails. Just look at the way the more delicate boys of the world are bullied by their classmates and accused of being gay. Just look at the gender imbalance in the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder in children, with gender disordered pre-pubescent boys outnumbering girls at a rate of up to 30 to 1. When a girl is boyish, or even claims she’d rather be a boy, it’s cute. She’s a tomboy. When a boy is girlish, wanting to wear dresses or try on some makeup, it’s a mental disorder and needs an immediate medical intervention.

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It’s not the feminine stuff that is the problem. The problem is the expectation that anybody who is perceived as a woman dress a certain way, wear a certain kind of clothes, behave a certain way, whatever.

The problem is that feminine things are only for people with vaginas and boobs.
The problem is that feminine things are seen as less valuable than masculine things.
The problem is the enforcement and the shaming when you’re not feminine.

Rejecting the feminine can be an important critique of oppressive gender roles so long as that critique doesn’t turn into actual hatred of femininity.

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"While cis girls, throughout their socialization and lives in our culture, internalize cultural messages about ideal womanhood as a demand of what they need to be in order to be considered valuable, desirable, good women, they have the comparable ‘advantage’ of at least already being girls / women (or at least already having that assignment). Trans girls, though, are subjected to those same messages but internalize them as what is required to manifest womanhood at all. We’re swimming upstream against our gender assignment, and if THAT is what ‘being a woman is all about’, THAT gets internalized as the standard we need to live up not simply to be loved and valued, but in order to simply be read and perceived as ourselves. In other words, while cis girls internalize it as what they need to be in order to be good girls, trans girls internalize it as what they need to be in order to be.

This ends up creating a whole lot more existential urgency in a trans woman to live up to the cultural standards of womanhood. For us, the question driving our self-hatred and self-consciousness over stupid things like our body not meeting arbitrary-cultural-standard-of-beauty #2677 isn’t as relatively easily conquered as the desire to ‘fit in’ or be ‘good’. It’s instead driven by the pressing need to exist, to be embodied, to be seen by others and understood as who we are rather than who we aren’t."