Part II
"Its coming from inside the house"
After finishing the first draft of this essay, I asked my very brave and very beautiful wife for her thoughts. She took a deep breath and congratulated me on giving birth to twins. She was correct, as always, and so I’ve split this essay into two parts. LeGuin’s Tehanu and King’s Rose Madder, which are the focus of part 1, are both horror stories about women having the audacity to live in a misogynistic world. In both cases, the respective lead characters are able to find respite in the company of other women. The call is always coming from outside the house and exclusively from men. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. While it is true that other women are often in the best position to empathize with the nightmare of being a woman in the world, they can also be uniquely skilled in twisting the knife. The worn adage goes that “hurt people hurt people,” and our society hurts women at an industrial scale.
The emotionally complicated relationships between women form a throughline in Tomoko Yamashita’s (Ikoku Nikki) work. Her anthology collection, Her, features a story that captures her layered view of the subject. In the single chapter, the perspective character harbors a deep resentment toward other women. Despite her fashionable and feminine exterior, fitting herself into the mold of a “city-girl” did not come easily. It required painfully grinding down her edges, only to find that, underneath it all, she’s still hollow. Worse, she looks out into the world and assumes that everything she’s struggled with comes easily to other women as if they were gently shaped by the waves instead of battered against rocks.
The real party at fault is structural misogyny but, even if you know that already, what are you supposed to do about it? It’s like a fish getting mad at water. She could choose to lash out at her shitty boyfriend, but she’s internalized that she needs men to desire her in order to be a woman. Interestingly, she doesn’t seem to want a relationship with a man so much as she wants to be wanted by men. That leaves two options; internalizing that anger or directing it out at other women. Tragically, she opts for venom and in doing so hurts herself and everyone around her.
One of the classic blunders: assigning individual blame for structural problems. Second only to getting into a land war in Asia
In writing this, I realize this example, as well as Tehanu and Rose Madder, are referencing textually cisgender characters dealing with misogyny. However, as a reader, my personal experiences with both womanhood and misogyny are informed by my lived experience as a transgender woman. For me, both the dream and nightmare of my transition was being treated like a woman by the people around me.
But what happens when someone sees you from just the wrong angle, looks a little too closely or, worse, you sneeze and they start to suspect you might not have always played for this team? In the eyes of someone who already sees women negatively, someone who makes the choice to live that life is even more taboo; even an outrage. It’s really a “them problem” but some folks are more than happy to touch stoves and make it everyone else’s problem.
If the name doesn’t give it away, transmisogyny builds on the underlying framework of misogyny like the worst DLC pack you’ve ever seen. In short, being trans feminine means facing denigration both for being a woman and for having the audacity to choose that life for yourself. The existence of trans women shows that masculinity is something that can be discarded. If that’s true, it can also be lost or taken, perchance even by force, which is, for some, its own kind of horror. Consequently, that choice to embody femininity must be critiqued, pitied and mocked. Transmisogyny comes in many different flavors. There is classic hostile transmisogyny aka the 1990’s. There is also benevolent transmisogyny perhaps most often packaged as “you’re so brave.”
I want to focus on internalized transmisogyny both at the community and individual level. Just as women are able to leverage misogyny to police one another, trans women are able to leverage transmisogyny to the same effect. There are many ways this manifests but I want to focus specifically on the subject of “passing”; a person’s ability to “pass” as their chosen gender without being identified as transgender.
An evil wizard cursed me at birth so that every mirror I look in transforms into a front-facing camera, making it impossible to perceive myself accurately. Even though I don’t personally see how, roughly 99.9% (repeating of course) of the people I meet see me as a woman. Thanks to factors in and out of my control, I seem to “pass” well. Unless, as I suspect, they’ve all been lying to me for the past decade or so, most folks are surprised to find out I’m trans. This has made many parts of my life much easier but has also unfortunately been a point of friction between myself and other trans folks.
In one particularly formative interaction, an acquaintance let me know that they were blocking me on all platforms we shared because seeing me made them feel awful about themselves. To their credit, they owned that this wasn’t about anything I did but strictly something they needed to do for themselves. Even then, what is anyone supposed to do with that information? What are you supposed to do with the knowledge that your existence makes someone else feel inadequate or envious, especially someone you’d rather be supporting?
There are also lighter strokes with the same pen. I used to show myself more often and would get compliments from queer folks that ended with some version “unlike me” unfortunately often. For what it’s worth, they’re only seeing the one time I got my eyeliner right and not the dozen prior attempts. Again, I don’t think any of these comments were made with ill-intention but the end result is the same, a mutual objectification.
It’s transmisogyny all the way down: a derogation of the self for a perceived lack of femininity and objectifying someone else in the process. Objectification never feels good, but being made into a cudgel for someone to beat themselves down with is a special kind of terrible. It’s made it hard to feel comfortable in queer spaces without worrying that someone else feels worse for my being there. Would you believe that I almost never share pictures of myself anymore? I can’t exactly stop existing but I try to do so quietly.
That’s also not to say that I haven’t been on the receiving end of malicious transmisogyny. Snide comments about my looks and rumor mills about my life have also unfortunately marked my history in queer spaces. In the one case where I actually got to talk with the responsible party afterward, they admitted to seeing me as someone who could and should be taken down a peg. Like the protagonist in Her, they thought I had it too good and had used that simmering resentment to justify hurting me.
I was fishing for a metaphor for how this feels when Jon Moxley cut a promo on AEW Dynamite comparing wrestling to being in a bucket of crabs pulling each other back down when one gets too close to escape. That basically sums it up. Thank you Jon Moxley. I know that the passage of time will eventually make crabs out of all of us but I’m not in any rush to hurry that process along if I can help it. The truth is that the crabs in the bucket are in a stressful situation and flailing at whatever is moving around them. They don’t know or care if another crab is close to escaping Hell, but the outcome is the same.
A dispenser of wisdom and strong opinions about sandwiches
The lived experience of being a woman is already stressful enough. Once you factor in the added precarity of being trans, it goes from doing math to doing math in public. That mounting pressure needs somewhere to vent and it will make one if you don’t. Being trans means near constant stressors that can be difficult to release; like gas under pressure, explodes out hitting those closest the hardest.
Sometimes the call is even coming from inside the house. Like some kind of emotional microplastic, misogyny and transmisogyny are so baked into the experience of living in the world that it’s impossible not to internalize some of it. What shape those feelings take is going to look different from person to person so I can only speak for myself. For me, those emotional microplastics look like self-criticism. I never feel like I’m womanly enough. Whether it’s criticizing myself for choosing to wear pants on a given day or feeling like an alien trying to blend in at Sephora. I feel like I’m always winging it — just not my eyeliner. Speaking from experience, with enough imagination everything can become a test of your womanhood. Philosophers have wondered for centuries if God can make a test even he cannot pass. Maybe he can't, but I know I can.
As much as I know that the ideal of femininity is unobtainable by design and most, very nearly all, of these things are superficial, that doesn’t make it feel any better to try and fail every single day. Without confidence in my womanhood, those superifical markers are something I can point to when I fall back on when I’m feeling inadequate. All those failures are cracks in my armor, one day, it’ll fall apart and we’ll all find out whether there was ever anything underneath.
The complexity of this all is part of why I find Her, as well as Tomoko Yamashita’s other works, so impressive. Across 30 pages, she manages to pull together an emotionally complicated subject into a suitably tangled knot. While none of the characters in the work are textually transgender, the chapter still evokes the dynamics of transmisogyny to me. It may shock you to know that trans women are women and the issues they face are women’s issues. The experiences of trans and cis women overlap far more than they differ.
Part of that shared experience is unfortunately living in a world designed to hurt us. Being part of the world also means that, regardless of our intentions, we can hurt ourselves and each other. As much as the cruelest things said and done to me since coming out have come from other trans women, so have the kindest; the kind of kindness that makes you want to do the same for others. There is a kind of connection that comes from having felt the same pain even if it’s just to say “shit, me too”. The good and bad are both only possible when you’re vulnerable, which is hard in a world that is hostile to you. If the choice is allowing myself to be hurt or closing myself off to the world, I know which one I’m gonna choose.