Transfeminine masculinities – structural [trans]misogyny

I feel that the label ‘transmisogyny’ is a bit opaque. It often describes many of the moments where transfemme people are understood and treated as ‘biologically male’ by one means or another; an intersection between misogyny and transphobia. I want to talk through a little of what’s going on in the different moments and processes that make up these interactions and situations of transphobia, to give an insight into my world of masculinities. Within the bounds of transmisogyny, there is no room for me to explore my gender nonconformity; no room for my experimentation with pronouns, presentation, or personality; no room for any subversive tendencies without or beyond the original sin of my transfemininity. There isn’t a lot of room in people’s consciousness for masculinity from transfems. It’s hard for us to embody our masculinities as non-men without the people around us eroding, invalidating, and redefining us.

One of the crucial dimensions of transfeminine people’s relationship with masculinity is the way that many of us have a terse history with maleness. I hate the narrative of the trans woman as a man turning or being turned into a woman, as accessible as that image might be. It’s much more accurate to understand me as a person who has tried to find a comfortable way to live as a man and found it toxic to my being, and who has then found a way to express myself and find clarity and wellness in womanhood. In misrecognising myself, aspects of myself slipped from view, like tinted glass so close to a camera lens that it isn’t visible as an object, but instead, the whole world takes on its character. Compulsory masculinity was, for me, such a strange composition. At once, it was awful, unliveable, but it wasn’t outside me- our genders live in our own activity; mental, physical, and social. The misery and maliciousness, the fundamental disjuncts between my wellness and my life were  there in my thoughts and actions, my beliefs and views, my relationships and plans- but the problem made itself invisible. You are told that the iron mask is your own skeleton, so you might never think to remove it and see how obvious it was that it was turning you into something awful. I hated life, I was misanthropic, but only because my self was so naturalised that it seemed as if it wasn’t me but life itself, the whole universe that was sickening. 

As I grew from the youngest child through adolescence, like everyone, I had to learn how to live, how to make my life out of actions and ideas, out of speech acts and dispositions, and out of adornments and artefacts. From the start, I learned to ignore my wellness and desires, and unfamiliar with a healthy sense of consonance between my feelings and my lived existence I developed a whole other set of criteria for the good and the right. Instead of wellness, I gravitated to the relief of non-punishment and private pleasures. Audre Lorde talks about the ‘erotic’ as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” – and it is this erotic which is overcome in the pornographic, the holy and just, the obedient, where our embodied reward systems are placated and mobilised for the perpetuation of things outside our own wellbeing without consideration for it. It’s this that we discover in coming out and transitioning, and continually fight to produce day after day, night after night. For transfems, the first symbolic association is erotic with female and repressed with male- and there is a truth to this in the dialectics of patriarchy, but it’s also another essentialisation of the heterosexual oppositional sexism that declares two diametrically opposed categories of man and woman, however it is dressed up in another vocabulary.

For trans women, every mirrored moment of masculinity is wrapped in a burr-like barbed coating of contradictions and violence. To unpack them at all is to get our fingers bloody as we try to dig between the thorns, fingernails filling up with dirt and mud. To reflect on our past, a past which is present in our living selves, is to repeat the same violence that was inflicted on us and submerged deep beyond observation. This is, however, possibly the only path to liberation. The only way we have found any release is through the ruthless and rigorous questioning of everything that we held dear, all we saw as identity: every tiny aspect of what makes up “me” is now available for scrutiny and question, and everything they told us was ‘natural’ and intrinsic turned out to be so many contingent performances. We have to garden now, it has cleared the air; it has made places so beautiful that we now proudly show them off and invite people in; it yields fruit which sustains us; it even tends to itself as a healthy ecosystem. This garden metaphor is gentle and complimentary, but it is too simple. A garden can be easily understood for itself: it is a closed area of territory managed by the owner, whereas the ‘selves’ we hold are contested social things that others require to make their lives and require others to sustain themselves. This said, I’m going to keep using it because the metaphor of the cultivation of many different and interwoven parts is ideal for discussing gender.

Transition is a long and ruthless process of remaking all knowledge, and of learning to evoke and transform what knowledge could be to us. What might, at first sight, have seemed quintessentially male and been uprooted might later regrow in the new context as a kind and loved part of ourselves- masculine or not. When we position the erotic as essentially feminine, and the feminine as naturally liberating, we close off our discourse to transmasculine people, to other nonbinary and gender non-conforming people, and we close off that which is enclosed under the category of masculine to ourselves. We’ve made yet another structure of ideas by which to map our lives rather than being true to the erotic- which is to say, not listening to ourselves beyond the immediately and easily accessible terrain of word-like thoughts. We need to instead attune ourselves to our inner processes, our body as a friend with whom we must cultivate a relationship and not an object at the mind’s disposal, our past and future as deserving of compassion and love not just calculation. Again, I want to show this in Audre Lorde’s words: “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human.” 

It was with this attitude that I finally came to accept the parts of myself that I once thought male and otherly to be part of myself, just as so many other women and nonbinary people have. Yet my expressions of these parts of myself are rejected in so many places I go. Transfemmes have had to develop a vocabulary to describe these interstices of our feelings and others. One such term is ‘boymoding;’ to be dressed so plainly as to assume misgendering. When I go out in baggy jeans and a hoodie with my hair tied up, I know I’m less likely to be gendered correctly- the same people who would awkwardly offer they/them pronouns to me in a hesitant moment of fearfulness of my gender might now offer no thoughts to queerness as my expression doesn’t call on their preconceived notions of transness and gender nonconformity. Boymoding, because our experience of not putting in conscious work to communicate our femininities to others is handed back to us as boying- being made male through others- for the crime of our bodily structure. Further than this extreme of boymoding are the many positions of butchness and masculinity that I occupy and perform, at which I can’t predict how I will be seen, or what will be seen by whom. Everything from social confidence, to butch style or attitudes, to being a top, to militant or aggressive responses to bigotry or unfair treatment, to working out and enjoying being toned, to having  specialised or geeky skills and interests- anything that so many “progressive-minded” people would consider the most reactionary of restrictive gender roles when placed on cis women is reintroduced as a means by which to question recognition of our genders. It’s the same gender matrix as the biologically reductionist form of transphobia. When people try to wave gender away by rigidly decoupling it from sex so that gender itself- as lived experiences, ways of understanding people, possibilities, and practices- doesn’t need to be interrogated too hard. We need to push people to challenge themselves beyond just learning to use the right pronouns- after all, a sentence without pronouns still has a lot of meaning to convey.  When a cis woman pushes forward her voice in our organisations, she is inspiring, she is strong, and she is challenging patriarchy. When I find my strong and determined voice too, I am exhibiting internalised masculinity, I am bringing ‘male energy’ into the space: I am a problem. I am not asking to be treated with the simple valorisation of the cis woman (though it would be nice to feel so secure in my confident actions) because this is also harmful to so many of those who do not find it easy to express themselves in our communities. Instead, I want all of those who find themselves responding automatically to different ways of taking and making power through simple gendered lenses to think further than masculine or feminine as categories and think of how and what we are expressing and what we are making when we ‘take up space’ or live freely among others. Ask yourself if perhaps it is not the transfem’s masculinity that is the problem, but the space that cannot allow for her to express it. If she were quieter, would this space suddenly be evocative for all and full of equal participants? 

We do, of course, need to temper this openness to masculinities and masculine-like ways of being with an eye on those mirrored, compulsory, internalised hegemonic masculinities- cis and trans alike. It’s a fantasy to think that only trans people are subjected to internalising gender roles that do not fit our own wellbeing, our own potential free selves. In every hierarchical category the inverse is visible, because man is made with woman, white is made with Black, core is made with periphery, able is made with idle. Every one of these categories implies the other and as we learn one, the imprint of the other is inscribed in that knowledge we create. Trans people are at an epicentre of that dialectic, as so many other intersectional lives are, as we have played multiple roles in this game. We can recognise rules and dynamics that only reveal all of their connections to the interrogator in the position of the subject, and so we express this in some of the most evocative and transparent forms. Particularly soon after transition, our hands are bloody and bruised from handling the sharply-coated fruits of the gendered selves we grew up with, and the garden remains full of so many piles of trimmings and emptied beds that we are still full of those vile poisons that hurt those around us. It’s hard to maintain the fight to interrogate everything when you’re still recovering from the last interrogation. Nonetheless, the fight must go on: we, more than most women, have been made to internalise masculinity as a method for self-defence and socialisation, and as such can practise harmful misogynistic practices. By this, I don’t mean to call for tolerance of abuse or harm by transfeminine people: I’m calling for careful recognition of what is abuse and harm, and what is being read as such because a woman is not considered womanly enough. 

My strong jawline and my strong heart complement each other in that each is part of my character, my person, and each is assumed to be a sign that I hold within me a male essence (whether biological, spiritual, or practical), that every masculinity of mine is hegemonic and male, with the implicit insistence that I must conform to the most placid and obedient, the most traditionally inscribed femininity to be an acceptable trans woman. It’s been a long time since I accepted this for myself, but as I move through more and more of life it is crystal clear that many who have otherwise thoroughly dismantled the patriarch in their heads allow him life to police transfemmes.  This world is made of all of us, and we make it together- to unravel the relations and practices that put these learned behaviours and perspectives in us, and to invent the new ones that must replace them, we have to treat each other with care and patience as much as firmness and protection. To overcome gender, we have to question every firmly held structure, every easy algorithm, every gut feeling that tells you who and what is a threat and insist that you reconcile that with all of our needs for the liberation of our every inner desire, the flourishing of our erotics, and the explosive emancipation of the people within every gender.

Kate Goss

Wonderful graphic by one of our incredible graphic designers, Lucia Villegas!