Lurking At The Threshold

You know, I’ve been thinking about the whole branding of the “trans” condition lately.

I’m not so much into this “new agey” best of both worlds BS that gets floated around from time to time. Probably because it seems terribly impractical, overly idealistic, and excessively convenient. You can’t just re-invent the world to make yourself feel better.

But sometimes the world re-invents itself. And more often than not, radical people with big ideas are right there pushing for that change.

Take, for example, the idea of “man”. As a word, it’s merely a symbol that when we see or hear it, a certain imagery and association is conjured. But that imagery and association is different now than it was fifty, or even twenty, years ago. As we have progressed, the typical “man” has softened in our cultural consciousness… an image that was once hard and sometimes a little scary has become more lean, sophisticated, and gentler. The epitome of this is the phenomenon known as the “metrosexual” – an initially derogatory term that quickly became rather toothless – wherein pedicures and fashion sense became entirely accepted qualities in a male.

And I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the “metrosexual” train derived a lot of its momentum from the gay community… the Queer Eye For The Straight Guy gang emerging as the public figureheads for it, after all.

So these really important cultural notions are always under “discussion” so to speak, being re-thought, re-imagined, and re-defined.

Which bring us to the trans-community.

There is a conversation going on everyday about what it means to be a “woman” in our culture. Ironically, men dominated that conversation for centuries, by virtue of the fact they dominated everything. More than anything “woman” meant “not man”*. But in this country, and dating back decades now, women have been slowly chiseling away at the definition handed to them, refusing to be mandated to about how or what they should be. Suffrage and feminism, and even lesbianism, have helped shape our new image of “woman”.

Sadly, the MtF trans-community isn’t included in that. It seems to be in our nature, really. Things like “passing” and “stealth” – Holy Grails of the transgendered – are predicated upon embracing cultural norms. Essentially, we bend to meet expectation, rather than elevate expectation to meet us. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that many (most?) of us embrace a cultural norm twenty or thirty years old (if not older) that’s more in line with the way men wanted women to be, as opposed to any current thinking on the subject.

At any rate, you can see for yourself where this is going. Even with all our forces marshaled, it would be a feat of cyclopean proportions to convince all of Western civilization that their working definition for “woman” should include some who were born with penises. At the very least, society will always need a way to distinguish between those of us who are natal-born and those who are self-made. But currently there are only a grim-faced handful of us girding for the challenge, while the rest of our “sisters” quietly slip away into the night.

And we wish we were with them.

*This is a bold and generally irresponsible claim to make, since I don’t really have any factual knowledge to back it up. But I’m pretty sure I could google a few dozen bits of corroborating evidence, if I wasn’t being lazy.

Category: Transgender Opinion