BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine

by Lisa Jervis

  In virtually all depictions of trans women, whether real or fictional, deceptive or pathetic, the underlying assumption is that the trans woman wants to achieve a stereotypically feminine appearance and gender role. The possibility that trans women are even capable of making a distinction between identifying as female and wanting to cultivate a hyperfeminine image is never raised. In fact, the media often dwells on the specifics of the feminization process. It’s telling that TV, film, and news producers tend not to be satisfied with merely showing trans women wearing feminine clothes and makeup. Rather, it is their intent to capture trans women in the act of putting on lipstick, dresses, and high heels, thereby making it clear to the audience that the trans woman’s femaleness is a costume.

  While mass-media images of biological “males” feminizing themselves have the subversive potential to highlight ways conventionally defined femininity is artificial (a point feminists make all the time), the images rarely function this way. Trans women are both asked to prove their femaleness through superficial means and denied the status of “real” women because of the artifice involved. After all, masculinity is generally defined by how a man behaves, while femininity is judged by how a woman presents herself.

  Thus, the media is able to depict trans women donning feminine attire and accessories without ever allowing them to achieve “true” femininity or femaleness. Further, by focusing on the most feminine of artifices, the media encourages the audience to see trans women as living out a sexual fetish. But sexualizing their motives for transitioning not only belittles trans women’s female identities; it also encourages the objectification of women as a group.

  Two 2003 examples are the HBO movie Normal and a two-part Oprah special on transsexual women and their wives. While both of these offerings were presented as in-depth, serious, and respectful attempts to tell the stories of trans women—and they deserve some credit for depicting trans women as human beings rather than two-dimensional laughingstocks—both pandered to the audience’s fascination with the surface trappings that accompany the feminization of men.

  Normal tells the story of a pathetic-type trans woman named Roy (the character’s name remains male in the credits) as she comes out to her family and community as transgendered. Normal has a fetishistic take on women’s apparel and accessories from the opening scene, in which we see bras and underpants hanging from a backyard clothesline. Thus, from the beginning the movie sexualizes the very concept of female identity and reduces all women (trans or otherwise) to mere feminine artifacts. We see Roy bumble her way through her first embarrassing attempts at shaving her armpits and trying on women’s clothing, and are shown two separate incidents where she wears perfume and earrings to her blue-collar workplace only to be ridiculed by her macho coworkers. At virtually every turn, the producers of Normal transform Roy’s transition into a hapless pursuit of feminine objects and artifice.

  The Oprah special was a little more promising, primarily because it involved actual trans women. The entire first episode featured a one-on-one interview with Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of the recent autobiography She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders. Boylan’s book attempts to reach out to mainstream audiences: It focuses on the difficulties she faced being transgendered throughout her childhood and marriage, and traces her eventual decision to transition. While Winfrey’s conversation with Boylan was respectful and serious, the show nonetheless opened with predictable scenes of women putting on eye makeup, lipstick, and shoes, and the interview itself was interspersed with “before” pictures of Boylan, as if to constantly remind us that she’s really a man underneath it all.

  What always goes unseen are the great lengths to which producers will go to depict lurid and superficial scenes in which trans women get all dolled up in pretty clothes and cosmetics. Shawna Virago, a San Francisco trans activist, musician, and codirector of the Tranny Fest film festival, was organizing a forum to facilitate communication between police and the trans community. A newspaper reporter approached her and other transgender activists, but was interested not in their politics but in their transitions: “They wanted each of us to include ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures. This pissed me off, and I tried to explain to the writer that the before-and-after stuff had nothing to do with police abuse and other issues, like trans women and HIV, but he didn’t get it. So I was cut from the piece.” A few years later, someone from another paper contacted Virago and asked to photograph her “getting ready” to go out: “I told him I didn’t think having a picture of me rolling out of bed and hustling to catch [the bus] would make for a compelling photo. He said, ‘You know, getting pretty, putting on makeup.’ I refused, but they did get a trans woman who complied, and there she was, putting on mascara and lipstick and a pretty dress, none of which had anything to do with the article, which was purportedly about political and social challenges the trans community faced.”

  Requests like these from nontrans news interviewers and film documentarians are common. I had a similar experience back in 2001, just before I began taking hormones. A friend arranged for me to meet with someone who was doing a film about the transgender movement. The filmmaker was noticeably disappointed when I showed up looking like a normal guy, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She eventually asked me if I would mind putting on lipstick while she filmed me. I told her that wearing lipstick had nothing to do with the fact that I was transgendered or that I identified as female. She shot a small amount of footage anyway and said she would get in touch with me if she decided to use any of it. I never heard back.

  Jamison Green, a trans man and transgender activist, has written about his invisibility as a transsexual person because reporters typically look for “the man in a dress.” Media makers tend not to notice—or to outright ignore—trans men because they’re unable to sensationalize them the way they do trans women without questioning the concept of masculinity itself. And in a world where modern psychology was founded on the teaching that all young girls suffer from penis envy, most people think striving for masculinity seems like a perfectly reasonable goal. Since most people cannot fathom why someone would give up male privilege and power in order to become a relatively disempowered female, they assume that trans women transition primarily as a way of obtaining the one type of power that women are perceived to have in our society: the ability to express femininity and to attract men.

  Feminist theory is not immune to the problems that plague representations of trans issues. While many feminists—especially those who came of age in the 1980s and’ 90s—recognize that trans women can be allies in the fight to eliminate gender stereotypes, others, particularly those who embrace gender essentialism, believe that trans women foster sexism by mimicking patriarchal attitudes about femininity, or that we objectify women by trying to possess female bodies of our own. Many of these latter ideas stem from Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male, which is perhaps the most infamous feminist writing on transsexuals. Like the media makers discussed earlier, Raymond assumes that trans women transition in order to achieve stereotypical femininity, which she believes is an artificial by-product of a patriarchal society. Raymond does acknowledge, reluctantly, the existence of trans women who are not stereotypically feminine, but she reserves her most venomous remarks for those she calls “transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists,” describing how they use “deception” in order to “penetrate” women’s spaces and minds. She writes, “Although the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist does not exhibit a feminine identity and role, he [sic] does exhibit stereotypical masculine behavior.” This puts trans women in a double bind, where if they act feminine they are perceived as being a parody, but if they act masculine it is seen as a sign of their “true” male identity. This damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t tactic is reminiscent of the pop cultural deceptive/ pathetic archetypes.

  While much of The Transsexual Empire no longer needs to be taken seriously—its premise is that “biologic
al woman is in the process of being made obsolete by bio-medicine”—many of Raymond’s arguments are echoed in contemporary attempts to justify the exclusion of trans women from women’s organizations and spaces. In fact, the world’s largest annual women-only event, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF), still enforces a “womyn-born-womyn” policy specifically designed to prevent trans women from attending. (Full disclosure: I am one of the organizers for Camp Trans, the annual protest of MWMF’s policy banning trans women.) Many of the excuses used to rationalize trans women’s exclusion are not designed to protect the values of women-only space but rather to reinforce the idea that trans women are “real” men and “fake” women. For example, one of the most cited reasons why trans women are not allowed to attend the festival is that we are born with, and many of us still have, penises. (Many trans women either cannot afford or choose not to have sex-reassignment surgery.) It is argued that our penises are dangerous because they are a symbol of male oppression and have the potential to trigger abuse survivors. So penises are banned from the festival, right? Well, not quite: The festival allows dildos, strap-ons, and packing devices, many of which closely resemble penises.

  Another reason frequently given for the exclusion of trans women from MWMF is that we would supposedly bring “male energy” into the festival. While this seems to imply that expressions of masculinity are not allowed, nothing could be further from the truth. MWMF allows drag king performers, who dress and act male, and the festival welcomes female-bodied folks like Animal (from the musical duo Bitch and Animal) who identify as transgender and often describe themselves with male pronouns. Presumably, MWMF organizers do this because they believe that no person who is born female is capable of exhibiting authentic masculinity or “male energy.” Not only is this an insult to trans men, but it also implies that male energy can be measured in some way independent of whether the person who is expressing it appears female or male. This is clearly not the case. Even though I am a trans woman, I have never been accused of expressing male energy, because people perceive me to be a woman. When I do act in a “masculine” way, people describe me as being a tomboy or butch, and if I get aggressive or argumentative, people call me a bitch. My behaviors are still the same; it is only the context of my body that has changed.

  This is the inevitable problem with all attempts to portray trans women as “fake” females: They require one to assign different names, meanings, and values to the same behaviors depending on whether the person in question is perceived to be a woman or a man. In other words, they require one to be sexist. When people insist that there are essential differences (instead of constructed ones) between women and men, they further a line of reasoning that ultimately refutes feminist ideals rather than supporting them.

  Women and men are not separated by an insurmountable chasm, as many people seem to believe; most of us are only a hormone prescription away from being perceived as the opposite sex. Personally, I welcome this idea as a testament to just how little difference there really is between women and men. To believe that a woman is a woman because of her sex chromosomes, reproductive organs, or socialization denies the reality that every single day we classify each person we see as either female or male based on a small number of visual cues and a ton of assumptions. As a feminist, I look forward to a time when we finally move beyond the red herring of biology and recognize that the only truly important differences that exist between women and men are the different meanings that we place onto one another’s bodies.

  Fringe Me Up, Fringe Me Down

  On Getting Dressed in Jerusalem

  Danya Ruttenberg / WINTER 2005

  THE KID WHO WORKS AT MY MACOLET (CORNER STORE) HAS stopped talking to me.

  Yaakov, who’s about seventeen, was totally my buddy when I first moved to Jerusalem for a year of rabbinical study. He helped me remember the Hebrew for words like “shopping basket” and made sure that I knew I was buying cottage cheese instead of, say, one of the nine thousand other possible cheese products available at the Israeli macolet. He waved to me when I walked by. It was sweet.

  Then one day I forgot myself and went to buy juice straightaway from the language intensive I’d been taking, dressed as I would have been back home in Los Angeles. Suddenly it was all over. He wouldn’t even make eye contact with me.

  In my normal life as an American rabbinical student, I wear a kippah (or yarmulke, a kind of head covering) and tzitzit (ritual fringes that are worn on an undergarment but often hang out from under one’s clothes). In Numbers 15:37—40, God tells the Israelite people to “put fringes on the corners of their garments … and you will see it and remember all of God’s commandments.” In other words, tzitzit are a sort of wearable Torah intended to constantly remind the wearer of the relationship he or she strives to have with the Divine—and to implicitly hold the wearer responsible to that relationship. I notice that a particular part of my heart actually unfolds and opens when I untuck the tzitzit, and that kind of openness is crucial when attempting to connect to the Divine in prayer. The kippah, on the other hand, is neither commanded in the Torah nor described in the earliest codes of Jewish law, though it’s one of the strongest minhagim (customs) in our contemporary practice. It’s generally understood that covering one’s head shows respect for the Divine and an acknowledgment of the fact that God is above—greater than—us mere humans.

  I took on these practices because of my own personal contract with God—because they reflect and strengthen my spiritual life and spiritual commitments. I wear these things because of God, but I feel entitled to do so because of feminism. See, neither item is traditionally worn by women. According to Jewish law, women are “exempt” from having to wear tzitzit—it’s not a requirement for women, as it is, technically, for men. But it’s not forbidden, and there is room in Judaism to take on mitzvot (commandments) to which one is not personally obligated. The kippah, legally speaking, is less complicated because it’s “only” a custom—albeit a strong one. There’s nothing “unkosher” about my decision to wear these things, and I believe that anything that helps to foster a connection with the Divine is good and to be encouraged. If ritual garb helps me to be a kinder, more compassionate person who is more connected to the world and those around me, why would I not wear it?

  Whatever the legal details, in the semiotics of traditional Jewdom, I’m a pretty serious gender transgressor. In my own denomination and seminary, it’s not a problem—philosophically and practically, there’s plenty of room for me to get my fringe on. But in more traditional circles of Jewish culture (including at my macolet), I may be perceived as nothing less than a threat to the natural order of things.

  Back in Los Angeles, I wear jeans, a tank top, and my kippah with the tzitzit flying in the wind, and I feel like me—religious, committed, and also of our contemporary cultural time and place. When I’m out and about in my heavily Jewish, largely Orthodox neighborhood, I typically hear one question or comment a day—ranging from the curious to the snarky—but in general people are nice, respectful, and well trained in American pluralism. In the United States, there are many different denominations and modes of Jewish practice, and the dominant American Jewish culture reflects this mix. Female rabbis, queer synagogue activities, and interdenominational dialogue are increasingly commonplace; it’s more or less understood that there are a number of ways that one can be a Jew. Here in Israel, on the other hand, Judaism is generally understood to be only a traditionally interpreted version of Orthodoxy.

  The prospect of a year in Jerusalem was, as such, fraught with hard questions, not the least of which centered around my wardrobe. I knew that my understandings of Jewish law on gender issues would not reflect the dominant culture—and I also knew that a literal hanging-out of my ideas would be loaded and not always well received.

  I decided, therefore, that when I’m just walking around Jerusalem, it’s good both for keeping the peace and for my own self-protection to fall under the radar a little. So I
often wear bandannas instead of kippot and I keep the tzitzit tucked in. Since Israel is a country of dichotomies and extremes, this puts me in one of, for me, two possible categories. When I wear pants and/or a tank top, I signify “secular Jew/Israeli” on the street—pants are considered by many traditionally religious Jews to be men’s clothing, and revealing the shoulders is not considered modest dress. Unlike the interpretation of Diaspora Jews, who might identify as mostly secular but get a little spiritual or religious every now and again, in Israel “secular” tends to connote “completely secular”—of the modern world and wholly disinterested in Judaism. (Secular Jews are sometimes called hilonim, or “desecrators,” in part because of their willingness to do things like go to the discos on Friday night, the Sabbath.) So when my dress suggests that I am secular, people may assume that I have progressive political views, am interested in new music and nonreligious cultural events, and have a lot of modern ideas about gender, society, and all sorts of other things. All of this is true—but I spend my Friday nights in prayer.

  By contrast, when I wear a skirt and a T-shirt or long-sleeved shirt, I signify “nice Orthodox girl.” People will likely assume that I follow Jewish law, keep kosher and Shabbat, value Torah study, and spend a lot of time thinking about God. And while I do all of these things, I don’t identify as Orthodox and have some very different philosophical and religious perspectives from those who do.

  My sartorial choices telegraph a range of meanings, and wearing the tzitzit out is often perceived as an invitation for attention: I’ve had people ask me very intimate questions about sex a moment after asking me about my tzitzit, two moments after meeting me—it’s as though wearing them opens me up to lots of other kinds of bodily scrutiny. At the same time, I’ve had secular Israelis tell me that I’m a wonderful model of rebellion against the religious establishment—which is funny, because I wear them specifically as an expression of my faith. It’s sad, really, that there are so few models here for what Judaism can look like.