Some endnotes to "The Aesthetic"
This video is primarily about trans women, and the role of identity, performance, and social recognition in our lives. The problems it deals with aren't abstract problems to me. They're problems of my moment-to-moment existence. I made this video because I wanted to show a wider audience the way trans people talk about gender amongst ourselves, and because I wanted to work through some of my private doubts about common explanations of what it means to be trans. I also wanted to reconcile the existence of a devoted Tabby fandom with my having created the character as a caricature of leftist ineffectiveness. Exploring the transness of Tabby made her more human and sympathetic to me. It's now a fandom I can live with. Justine is more of an independent character than in "The Left," but she does voice many of my concerns, though with the attitude of Lord Henry Wotton. She prefers wit to veracity. "Cis women are fully clockable" A lot of people expressed that they found Justine's point of view painful and uncomfortable. And it is painful and uncomfortable. But it's the chronic pain and discomfort that I live with, and for me voicing it is a relief. I didn't arrive here through armchair philosophical reasoning, but through living my life as a trans person and trying to make sense of my ongoing predicament. Some non-binary people disliked this video because they felt that the dialogue excluded or invalidated them. Whereas most of the feedback I got from binary trans people is positive. Which, fair enough—this is a video about binary trans women.
Being a binary trans person is very different from being non-binary. I feel like I'm being grossly misunderstood by NBs when they characterize the desire to pass, Justine's point of view, as "respectability politics." My desire to appear to others and interact fluently as a certain kind of woman is not a song-and-dance I'm doing to win acceptance for my transness. It IS my transness.
My wearing long hair, makeup, changing my voice, generally softening my confrontation with the world is nothing like e.g. a black man wearing a suit and speaking in "white voice." I'm not doing "woman voice" to please cis people. I'm doing it because I want to be a woman.
Social recognition of my gender identity is not an independent, external source of validation. It's inextricable from the social, structural, material reality of the identity itself. Cis women understand this deeply. They know that they aren't oppressed as women because they psychologically identify as women. They know that misogyny is foisted upon them regardless of their psychology, so long as society views them as women.
Trans men escape misogyny to some degree—generally to the degree that society views and accepts them as men. And trans women are in the sad situation of having to claw our way into a social position where we begin to experience misogyny.It's not psychological identity that makes this happen. It's the interpersonal recognition that comes about as a result of habitually living/performing the identity. Let's be good leftist materialists here. Oppression doesn't happen in the realm of ideas.
Before I transitioned I identified as genderqueer for a while. I presented basically as what used to be called a male transvestite. People were sometimes shitty about that, but my coming out with the NB identity was greeted mainly by, "sure, whatever bro, wear whatever you want."
I found that as an AMAB NB, I was for most intents and purposes—socially, structurally, materially—still a man. Whereas when I came out as a trans woman and began acting accordingly, every single aspect of my life was upended.
I'm sure this is not the experience of many NBs. I leave it to them to articulate what NB existence looks like in a binary world. I do not and cannot speak for them. But surely an account that begins and ends with "I'm not a man because I don't identify as one" is pretty weak.
To return to Justine—it's right to point out that she's a a little villainous. She's harsh, she's insensitive, she's hyperbolic, she's glib. But she's not Tiffany Tumbles. She does care about Tabby (in fact she loves Tabby!) and genuinely wants to help.
Some of that help is unwanted and intrusive, but it's constructive criticism and it comes from a genuine place. I like to think that in public, in front of Jackie or Tiffany, Justine would be a fierce defender of Tabby.
I'm sympathetic to Justine because people like her—willing to privately sidestep the hugbox and divulge pragmatic MtF wisdom over tea—have been the most helpful to my transition. I owe a lot to people like that. This is what's called the "trans mom" relationship, something I've wanted to depict in a video for a while. Of course I'm a lot more eager to learn than Tabby. If someone wants to teach me to walk in heels I'm like, yes Mommy show me I'm desperate. But of course it is a kind of Justinian vision of transsexuality that has turned out to be what works for me. Other trans women have other visions, involving combat boots perhaps, that they can make work just as well, as Justine finally concedes in the video.
Remember that I'm in an abnormal situation. My transition needs to be contextualized. Hundreds of thousands of people are watching me transition. My pre-transition life, voice, body, sexuality, manner are well documented, & exist online forever beside present-me.
My appearance is the focus of so much discourse, some hostile, some "friendly." (I'll be browsing a trans forum and some egg will worry about attracting partners post transition. Another user reassures them, "you can be hot even if you don't pass, just look at contrapoints!")
I am under much more scrutiny than most people, and I feel that the bar for how I look, how I pass, is higher for me. I try not to read about myself but even when I succeed I know what's being said, I know people are talking about it.
The consequence is that I now spend around 50% of my waking life thinking about how I look. Half of my mind that used to get to do other things is now exclusively devoted to that.
And because my pre-transition online existence is so prominent, I feel that my life's work at a glance is the absurd spectacle of a philosophy nerd becoming a glamazon. I feel that I will always be a freak show, but can never really be a woman so far as the Internet is concerned.
The most hurtful things Justine says are my confessions. I have no security in "feeling like a woman." I feel like I'm desperately trying to be a woman though confronted by endless obstacles. It's a shadow that hangs over me every moment of every day.
But these are just some feelings I have. I don't have opinions. I made this video to show off that I can walk in heels.
