I mean we can take exception with someone holding a bag that is tagged, “candy for luring kids.” I can’t think of a time when that could be a good thing.
Is it telling about my childhood trauma that I immediately imagined a priest holding that bag?
I also think the point here is considerably more nuanced than non-passing=bad.
I read it as a critique of how trans people are stereotyped as non-passing. The fact of the matter is, a lot of us do pass and go about our daily lives, and the average cis person doesn’t even realize. We assimilate more often than most would admit.
So while I don’t think there should be moral value to passing per se, I also think it’s pretty fucked up the way we’re all sort of stereotyped as being the most visible until proven otherwise…
I don’t know how to say this without sounding insane, but I’ve never met a trans person who didn’t pass.
This isn’t because they’re all beautiful. It’s because there’s a wide variety of women in the world and I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again- I think there’s a lot of internalized misogyny in trans spaces, where there’s this idea that you have to conform to some idea of ‘beauty’ in order to be femme.
A lot of cis women are invisible. That’s not because they ‘pass’. It’s because they aren’t remarkable. One of my oldest friends, who passed away recently, was a woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome. It’s a condition that tends to make women grow more hair than “average,” it tends to be coupled with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, which makes for a rounder body in some ways, and it’s an extremely common condition. I’m not even 40 and I’ve had 5 different friends who all had it! It’s super common! And there’s this thing that cis women deal with which is, if you aren’t pretty, you’re straight up ignored.
So what I see, and I hope that this comes across as gender affirming, is that trans women are women, and they don’t realize that they pass a lot easier than they think they do. Because you don’t have to be like the woman on the right in the comic to be a woman. You can look like the person on the left, and still look like a woman, because there’s lots of ciswomen who look imperfect in a lot of ways. It’s just that trans women are harder on themselves than they should be, because they’ve been taught “women look like X and sound like Y and do like Z.” And the truth is, we’re half the damn population! We look like and sound like and do like everything! We just aren’t on TV, on the radio, in the news.
I’ve said in the past that I have the bodytype of Danny Devito and it’s true. And I definitely am not trying to downplay the extreme difficulty that trans women face, and there are some very obviously masculine things that concern them (such as facial hair, omg, the struggle) but my point is, it’s easier to pass than most people think. Give me 12 hours with Danny Devito (and a talented cosmetologist to do something with his hair) and we can make him pass. He’d probably let us. He probably wouldn’t even make a joke out of it, because he’s a class act.
I mean we can take exception with someone holding a bag that is tagged, “candy for luring kids.” I can’t think of a time when that could be a good thing.
Is it telling about my childhood trauma that I immediately imagined a priest holding that bag?
I also think the point here is considerably more nuanced than non-passing=bad.
I read it as a critique of how trans people are stereotyped as non-passing. The fact of the matter is, a lot of us do pass and go about our daily lives, and the average cis person doesn’t even realize. We assimilate more often than most would admit.
So while I don’t think there should be moral value to passing per se, I also think it’s pretty fucked up the way we’re all sort of stereotyped as being the most visible until proven otherwise…
I don’t know how to say this without sounding insane, but I’ve never met a trans person who didn’t pass.
This isn’t because they’re all beautiful. It’s because there’s a wide variety of women in the world and I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again- I think there’s a lot of internalized misogyny in trans spaces, where there’s this idea that you have to conform to some idea of ‘beauty’ in order to be femme.
A lot of cis women are invisible. That’s not because they ‘pass’. It’s because they aren’t remarkable. One of my oldest friends, who passed away recently, was a woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome. It’s a condition that tends to make women grow more hair than “average,” it tends to be coupled with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, which makes for a rounder body in some ways, and it’s an extremely common condition. I’m not even 40 and I’ve had 5 different friends who all had it! It’s super common! And there’s this thing that cis women deal with which is, if you aren’t pretty, you’re straight up ignored.
So what I see, and I hope that this comes across as gender affirming, is that trans women are women, and they don’t realize that they pass a lot easier than they think they do. Because you don’t have to be like the woman on the right in the comic to be a woman. You can look like the person on the left, and still look like a woman, because there’s lots of ciswomen who look imperfect in a lot of ways. It’s just that trans women are harder on themselves than they should be, because they’ve been taught “women look like X and sound like Y and do like Z.” And the truth is, we’re half the damn population! We look like and sound like and do like everything! We just aren’t on TV, on the radio, in the news.
I’ve said in the past that I have the bodytype of Danny Devito and it’s true. And I definitely am not trying to downplay the extreme difficulty that trans women face, and there are some very obviously masculine things that concern them (such as facial hair, omg, the struggle) but my point is, it’s easier to pass than most people think. Give me 12 hours with Danny Devito (and a talented cosmetologist to do something with his hair) and we can make him pass. He’d probably let us. He probably wouldn’t even make a joke out of it, because he’s a class act.
It’s a label. They’re labeling people based on the way they look.