AND NOW, A GUEST POST: Second Chances... To Reinforce Some Really Obnoxious Stereotypes, That Is!

NOTE: I, Sady, have been begging C.L. Minou - who runs the excellent, must-add-to-RSS-feed blog The Second Awakening - to write a guest post for Tiger Beatdown since approximately forever. Today is the day my dreams - and yours, reader - come true!

Trans people can get pretty jaded about our representation in the media--whether it's Transgeneration (excellent!), Sex Change Hospital (um...) or Transamerica (the pain, make it stop) , after a while you notice the invariable repitition of certain themes, especially in that most infamous of genres, the transgender documentary. (In fact, there are even drinking games where you can find out how many shots you're supposed to down if somebody says "a woman trapped in a man's body" or tries on bras on camera.)

Recently the New York Times put a short documentary on their website as part of a new feature called Second Chances--and you guessed it, the first film is about a transsexual named Terry Cummings. It's actually a touching little piece that is very sweet and definitely well-intentioned. But it struck me immediately how even something well-intentioned could manage to pack inside of it so many typical trans-doco-cliches.

And then I realized, that not only are those cliches subtly disparaging to trans people, they're also (no!) not-so-subtly misogynist--allow me to demonstrate:

:30 We kick things off with that most venerable of tropes, the trans woman putting on makeup; I think there must be some FCC requirement for it or something. Such scenes are annoying not just because they are repetitive, but because they make the woman's identity seem artificial, cosmetic, just a deceptive coating around the real person.

Not much different, of course, from the standard lady-hating vibe about how women need to wear makeup, since their attractiveness to men is held up as their most important single characteristic; but trans women especially are held in a double-bind--either wear makeup to look more feminine and be accused of only being interested in the trappings of womanhood, or don't wear makeup and either be told you "look like a guy" or worse, mystify people as to why you'd want to be a woman, since you don't want to look like one.

1:20-1:47 A quick sequence of scenes of Terry on the phone, talking about clothes, cuddling a cat, and telling someone on the phone "Welcome to a woman's world."

The clothes conversation feeds into one of the more damning things thrown at trans women--that we're just in it for the outfits--as if people decide to upend their whole life, spend most of their life's savings, and in general make things a whole lot more difficult for them just so they could wear a skirt. And again, it's a double-bind: don't express interest in clothes, and people wonder why you want to transition; but do worry about what you wear (something that happens especially often to trans people just starting to present as their desired gender) and you're hit with charges of superficiality.

Nevertheless it sure sends out messages about being a woman, like women talk about clothes, or cuddle animals, unlike men who don't have time for appearances or nurturing.

Maybe it's because I take things too seriously, but the way the "welcome to a woman's world" scene unfolds bothers me. I mean, it seems divorced of context--was she saying it in a rueful or sarcastic way, as I often have? (I usually refer to the paperwork I had to fill out to start hormones: "I signed the release.") As a way to sympathize with another woman? Both of those seem more likely; but the way it's shot seems to show her issuing the statement authoritatively, which opens up all kinds of nasty questions about the assumption of privilege that frequently (and especially) dog trans women.

It's not really what she said; given how little control a film subject has over the final result, I hold Terry absolutely blameless here. But the way it's presented seems to send out subtle messages, none of them particularly good, about being a trans person.

1:50 Shopping (drink!). If it's not makeup, it's got to be shopping. Once again, trans women are only in it for the clothes, the superficial trappings of femininity. And shoes! (Why did it have to be shoes?)

I suppose I should be happy that trans women get damned with these accusations; after all, it makes us just like the rest of women, who are told (and believed) to be obsessed with appearances and fashion--though trans women get the added burden of generally being shown as not only obsessed with these things, but not being very good at them. (Fortunately not an issue in Terry's case, but I sometimes think that the makers of these documentaries purposely seek out women who struggle with their female presentations, to reinforce precisely this point.)

We also see Terry's daughter, who seems like a very nice person, talking about her struggles with what to call her. This isn't a laughing matter; it's very tough for family members to deal with. But in the hit and run way it's dealt with in this documentary, it only continues to reinforce the idea that Terry is really still her male parent. Biology is still destiny.

2:25 Terry at her basement workbench. "This was what my life was like..." she says--that is, interested in traditionally male hobbies.

Which manages to be both misogynist and transphobic: that is, she couldn't be interested in them now, because she's a woman, and ladies don't do woodwork or other manly stuff! And also it's a subtle reminder of where she's come from, a continued destabilization and devaluation of her as a woman.

Let me state once again that this isn't a criticism of Terry: people's interests do change often during transtion (I started blogging, for example, and mostly stopped knitting.) It's not Terry's life I'm criticizing, it's how her life is being forced into the Standard Transsexual Narrative template, in a way that (surprise!) is subtly transphobic and misogynistic, despite it's good intentions.

2:40 The goddamn photograph of Terry before she transitioned. (Drink triple-shots: it's in black and white, and from her wedding.) I for one am heartily sick of being shown pictures of trans people pre-transition. Or publishing their former names. Or making a big effing deal about being trans, period. Because there's really no way of doing it that doesn't leave people feeling that the old name and gender are the real gender. And that just reinforces all the old ideas about gender essentialisms, the very thing feminists have struggled against since...oh, since the Agricultural Revolution.

And speaking of gender essentialism, we come to...

3:00--4:25 The surgery. I mean, The Surgery. I mean, The Surgery. It wouldn't, couldn't, be a trans documentary without the surgery. And certainly the largest single portion of the film has to be about the surgery. I think that's actually a law. Of nature.

Shocking but true: the surgery isn't always central to a trans person's life. For one thing, the surgery for trans men is expensive, difficult, and frequently less than satisfactory, so beyond a masectomy many of them never have any genital surgery. Secondly, there is a whole segment of trans women who never have GRS (genital/gender reassignment/reconstructive surgery; the phrasing depends on who you ask), and are perfectly happy and living perfectly ordinary women's lives.

And finally, for a lot of people, GRS isn't that big a deal. Major surgery, yes, but not something that will magically change everything in your life.

That isn't to demean trans women for whom GRS is a big deal--just to point out that for most trans women, it's less about making them into something than it is relieving them of their dysphoria.

And in any case, whether you are trans or a feminist (or maybe even both!), you simply can't accept that you equal your genitals. That biology is destiny. If anything, trans narratives should destroy that idea, rather than being used to reinforce it.

Now, the best part of all this? All the stuff that was left out and only visible on the comments page. Like, did you know that Terry is a lawyer? That might have been interesting to find out. Or that she considers the surgery to be a "rite of passage," but "it would not change her life." That might have been a sort of fresh direction for a film like this to take.

But should we be surprised, that a woman, of any history, has her work erased? That a woman's feelings of her own life are forced into a culturally-determined narrative? That a woman's appearance is stereotyped, or her body pathologized?

That the best thing you can say about most trans documentaries is that they treat their subjects like women, that is, misogynistically?

And in the end, if trans women get singled out for expressing their gender, it's still with the same refrains of oppression as other women.