asking for it

i. character creator

How does a cis man react to being feminized?

We live in a patriarchy, so such a thing would be a stain upon his honor. Women are objectified, dismissed, exploited for sexual, domestic and reproductive labor. Their desires are deemed frivolous, their thoughts trivial, their pain hysterical. If you gave a man the body of a woman, made him wear the garb of a woman, forced him to perform the labors and behaviours of a woman, he would be degraded in the eyes of all who hold manhood in high esteem.

Obviously, a cis man would reject this. A cis man is, after all, intrinsically inclined towards masculinity in embodiment, behaviour, and social position. That’s what makes cis people cis and trans people trans: the internal desire to either embody or reject the gender to which you have been assigned.

Cis men are intrinsically inclined towards being treated as men. If you tried to make a cis man live as a woman, he simply wouldn’t stand for it. If you tried to force him out of the honorable, aristocratic gender and into the lesser, subaltern gender, he would surely react by either clawing his way to his rightful position in the gender hierarchy, or die by his own hand rather than endure such an indignity.

A corollary of this is that cis women are honorless. That’s not to say they are underhanded, merely that they lack the kind of self-respect and will to power that makes a cis man a cis man. After all, cis women not only live as the exploited class, but they make no attempt to jump into the hegemonic class. If they did, after all, they would be trans men.

All of what I’ve said so far is self evidently true because gender is 90% a stable collection of real, fixed traits that accrue to people like skill points in a Bethesda game and attribues and 10% malleable fuzz, which is drag or gender identity or whatever it is that Judith Butler spends all their time writing about. Gender is certainly not a set of reactions and formations (including preferences towards embodiment) that occur when individuals and societies are shoved through the Sex Class Exploitation Machine, because that would be very hard to model.

ii. bitches

“One thing at Harrow very soon arrested my attention. It was the moral state of the school. Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognized either as a public prostitute or some bigger fellow’s ‘bitch.’ Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk in the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences. They filled me with disgust and loathing. ” — Memoirs of John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds’ descriptions of homosexuality in a Victorian boarding school are fascinating, not least of all because he found it gross and off-putting despite being gay. There’s an extent to which he clearly finds the transfeminizing, coercive, heterosexual aspects of these couplings to be understandably repellant. However, it’s also apparent that these relationships involved active participation from the transfeminized boys, boys engaging in acts not because they had been forced or threatened, but boys going out of their way to flirt with and proposition other boys.

It makes me think of other things, like the feminelli of Naples, which existed for centuries not just as a dumping ground for male gender failures, but also as something that the surplus sons of poor families would be groomed into in order to make money through sex work. I think of the Black sex workers in the antebellum north, outlined in Jules Gill-Petersen’s Short History of Transmisogyny, ‘cis(?)’ men who did a variety of sex and entertainment work while dressing and acting as women, men who had a considerable financial incentive to do such work compared to the drudgery, danger, and low pay of anything else available. I think of all the other places where society recruits presumed males into transfemininity at a much higher rate than you’d expect to find trans women appearing in the natural population.

I think about the places where males are, not to put too fine a point on it, forcibly feminized. I am fascinated by those males who were either unbothered by or actively embraced transfemininity, because when you look, it seems like there are a lot of them. Are we supposed to believe that the ones who stuck it out were trans all along? When some Neapolital third son in a poor family was pushed into sex work at a young age and remained with the feminelli, are we to assume that they kept picking the latent trans girls by dint of sheer luck?

We sometimes joke about our bullies knowing we were faggots before we did. Is this true in all the places where forced feminisation happens? Is Kenneth Zucker right, that the cute boys are more likely to be gay little fairies? When trans girls are used and bullied by others early in life, is that actually their “true nature” shining through, showing that we’re honorless and exist for exploitation?

iii. parole

David Reimer was a man who underwent a botched circumcision as a child, and was raised as a girl on the advice of reknowned bastard Doctor John Money. Reimer and his twin brother were sexually abused by Money as young children, in an apparent attempt to make David accept his female identity. In his teens, Reimer confronted his parents, who admitted to him that he had actually been assigned male at birth, and by age fifteen he was living as a man.

David Reimer’s name often comes up when people argue for the internal fixity of gender identity. John Money thought that gender before a certain age was completely plastic, and Reimer was the tragic proof that this is not so, that you can’t treat a boy like a girl without consequence. In this view, Reimer had a true, biological sex, which overrode all that socialisation nonsense and reasserted itself.

But we’re begging the question, aren’t we? David Reimer, presumed by society to be a fourteen year old girl, asserted his manhood and disavowed his assigned gender. But was his assertion of manhood proof of the realness of his assigned sex at birth, or was his assigned sex at birth the reason his assertion of manhood was given any fucking credit whatsoever?

How many trans men have been in the same position as Reimer, but, lacking the knowledge that there was something suspiciously different in their body and medical history, gave up and repressed for the rest of their lives? If those trans men had died by suicide as the Reimer brothers did, would it be seen as a consequence of forcing them into living as girls, or would both the desire for gender autonomy and the suicidality be written off as symptoms of the same mental deficiency?

A few months ago, I went with a friend to the birthday dinner of one of her old college friends, who she had not seen for the better part of a decade. When we got to the restaurant, there was already another trans girl at the table. Not long after we sat down, another friend who had since transitioned arrived. Four trans girls in a table of twelve. Among the many truly wild assertions in J.Michael Bailey’s sexological dog-turd The Man Who Would Be Queen is his estimate that transfemininity, which he believes to be almost entirely biological in nature, occurs at a rate of 1 in 20,000 people. That seems absurd now, when you can walk into any small town in Britain and see a statistically improbable number of trans women just walking around. However, in 2003, at the generational trough of trans women and gay men in the wake of the AIDS pandemic, his mistake is more understandable.

Repression works, is the problem. Not for us, obviously. It kills us trans people before we even have a chance to live. But it works for heterosexual society, in terms of forcing trans people to reproduce cisness, live cis lives, and uphold cis systems. We are the daughters of the eggs who wouldn’t crack. We’re not here now in such numbers because we were biodestined to be so, but because our tools for breaking out of cisness — communications technology, medicine, education, organisation — currently outstrip the ability of cis society to capture us.

iv. female socialisation

Maidens is a story about forced feminisation. Part 1 is pretty straightforward, because it is about Mirri, who is pretty straightforwardly a trans woman. She doesn’t identify herself as such at the start of the story, but she lives and exists as one, and it is the answer to a question she’s been asking herself for her entire life.

Because of this, her responses to being exploited, beaten, worked and feminized are all pretty intuitive. She does not want to be subjected to patriarchy, she wants to exist as a woman, and she is neither willing nor able to perform manhood sufficiently to be treated with the dignity of a presumed man. In other words, she navigates her tribulations not as a degraded man but as a humiliated woman.

What about Timo, though? He’s not one of these latent trannies by any stretch of the imagination. He ended up in his unfortunate position from just that — bad luck. If someone hadn’t stuck a lightbulb in poor Laiho’s mouth, if he’d been up against anyone but Reikkinen in the wrestling, if someone else had fucked up a little bit more than him, he’d still be a conscript, happily molesting slobs with the rest of them.

Timo would want to believe in the fixity of gender identity. It would mean he’d go back to normal after all of this is over. Traumatised, yes, but still male. They can make him do it, but they can’t make him like it. But if things were not so fixed, he would have to worry about the carrot as well as the stick. What if he learns to like being pretty? What if he starts to think of himself as an object of desire. What if, without the ability to be properly evaluated as a man, he no longer feels the pressure to prove himself as one? In other words, what if the methods that have successfully groomed cis women into accepting patriarchy in their internal lives work just as well on him as it does on them?

He would be horrified by the prospect, I think, but perhaps only because he does not yet understand it.

v. insight

The liberal ally says that cis men and women are rational for continuing to live as their original genders, and that trans men and women are brave for choosing to live as their preferred genders. The sexologist thinks that cis men are people, cis women are helpmeets, trans men are bullheaded strivers, and trans women are masochistic lunatics. In actuality, cisness is dullness and ignorance.

Cis men aren’t cis because they have some intrinsic drive towards cis manhood, they’re cis because nobody has yet decided to push them out of cisness. I believe a cis man when he tells me he has no desire to be a woman. I don’t believe he’d do anything to stop it if he had womanhood forced upon him. I don’t think he’d eat the apple like Turing did. I think he’d suck it up and negotiate with the tools of femininity, just like the vast majority of cis women do when confronted with the same thing.

As for trans women, did our bullies really know something we didn’t? I think it’s something more Lovecraftian. I think that being transfeminized gives you access to cursed knowledge. I think the state of ignorance that cis men exist within allows them to draw strength from cis manhood — “an open mind is like a fortress, with its gates unbarred and unguarded.” I think crossing the boundary out of cis manhood, whether you walk over or are pushed over, makes you see its protections as illusory, and its most sacred rituals as mere prestigitation. I think you become alert to the hundred-foot Amygdalas clinging to the buildings around you.

I think that you see through fresh eyes everything that masculinity regards as blasphemous and debased. I think you see what you might otherwise have regarded as cursed, fearful, and incomprehensible, and you see now how your hand can fit and hold it, or how it can fit inside you. You can pick up these profane tools, which men flee from as if poisonous, and liberate yourself with them. Without the protective ignorance of cisness, you’ll fucking well need them.

bildungsroman

i)
Coming-of-age shit leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Don’t be cute and say “oh, but Ash, you love memoirs, you love Confessions of a Mask, you love reading real and fictionalized accounts of people who had deeply-alienating childhoods,” because you know I don’t mean those ones*. I mean the kinds of narratives that feel no such shame or aching need to justify themselves, stories that don’t have a coming-of-age part but the coming-of-age part. It’s a little less common in stories that aren’t about het men, so, thankfully, this bugbear of mine is mostly confined to 90% of Hero’s Journey narratives and every shonen anime ever created.

I hate it! I hate the Hero’s Journey, I hate bildungsroman, I hate the Antecedants of the Man! I hate the teleology imposed upon boyhood** and I hate the patronising fucking tone of it. Oh, remember the little boy that dissolved inside you as you became a man, remember how silly and callow he was. Aren’t you better, now. Aren’t you glad you wised up and grew out of it?

This might sound like I just feel alienated from happily masculine guys, but if anything I find those stories less grating. Sometimes I’ll read the biography of a mixed-martial-artist, and he’ll have a name like Chunk Funger, and he’ll talk about how he’s loved fighting his whole life and was always the toughest kid in his class and the only thing he loved more than getting his ass kicked was kicking ass. Someone like that takes so naturally to manhood that it never occurs to them that they could fail at it, and there’s a real charm in it, it feels like reading the memoirs of a dog. They’ve known what shape they wanted to be their whole lives and they were just waiting to fill it, it’s nice.

No, it’s the other ones I hate. Lunkhead boys growing into unexamined patterns of violence and dysfunction feels a thousand times less alienating than the stories of sweet, unassuming boys blossoming into some honorable form of manhood. The gentler the boy and the kinder the man, the worse it is. The more ambivalent a boy is about his ability and desire to pick up the mantle of manhood, the sicker I feel when he accepts it with equanamity.

My attitude is less contradictory than it seems. Hard-knuckled little shits who love violence and adrenaline are annoying, but their attachment to manhood is, if anything, incidental: they’re just like that, and their natural temperment falls cleanly within the walls that society has built around the idea of being a man. I’m sure they don’t object to the social power and status it confirms, but its kind of beside the point for them. Boys who have a natural temperment outside the line, or brushing up against the border, are different. They get groomed into it, pulled closer into the center, because they want the awful gifts that the rank of manhood confers to its devotees, and because they are afraid of the fates that await its exiles.

ii)
I think a lot about the concept of honor. It’s one of those ideas like motherhood, or citizenship where the underlying dynamics are so vile and extractive that a whole edifice of praise must be constructed to conceal the poison and make it seem as if all of its sickening effects come from elsewhere. Take marriage, as another good example: once a way of welding together two clan-like structures of production and domestic reproduction through the enforced mating of the younger members, then, as modernism progressed, a combination of a tenancy agreement and employment contract for a live-in maid, nanny, administrative assistant and sex worker. Nasty business!

So nasty, in fact, that it must not only be obscured, but indelibly tied in to what we think of as the most sacred and selfless of human virtues, like affection, honesty, and unconditional love. These concepts are blended so dogmatically that they become synonyms, marriage is not about love, it is love, and love is the exchange of rings and the wedding cake, and the command to honor and obey your husband, and the binding contract that says you must not leave, and love is when we can kill you if you fuck anyone else.

Anyway, honor. I love this old article, about Dishonored and its relation to 19th century English dueling and honor culture. There’s some fascinatingly counterintuitive bits (the point of an English pistol duel was not to prove that you can kill your rival–any thug can do that–but to prove that you will risk being shot at to defend your honor) but the underlying logic is that it is a social method of establishing who may remain within the class of ‘people’ and who must be pushed out into the classes of ‘property’ or ‘vermin’.

Honor works like this: a class system treats people in the manner which they deserve, because if they are treated unfairly, the honorable ones will fight until they prevail or perish. If you won’t fight and won’t die, you are not honorable, and your only option is to pledge fealty to your more-honorable betters. Once you have pledged fealty, you have affirmed that they are your betters, and that you are unquestionably their inferior. At that point, there is no honor in resisting domination, no right to self-defence, because your role is one of obedience and submission. If your superior attacks you, fighting back not only fails to prove your honor, it proves that you are treasonous, disloyal, dishonorable, vermin.

Honor must be maintained, guarded, constantly proven. To borrow a phrase from Talia Bhatt, honor has downward vertical mobility. Its quantities in each person are granted at birth, those who have it can lose it, those who lose it cannot restore it, and most are never granted it in the first place. Honor is the lifeblood of aristocracy, and the lifeblood of masculinity, and an honorless world could not sustain either of those things.

iii)
The thing that sticks in my craw about coming of age stories is the bullying scene. There’s always a fucking scene with the bullies. Sometimes it’s one guy, sometimes it’s a bunch of guys, sometimes, in the more psychosexually unpleasant ones, its a stuck-up bitch, sometimes it’s a whole institution.

The role of the bully in the narrative is to uphold honor culture. The bully says to the protagonist, “You won’t defend your honor, or can’t defend your honor in any way that matters.”

In some stories, the bullying arc is over in seconds: the bully tries something and immediately gets his ass kicked. Sometimes it gets wrapped up in the first act, where the newly-empowered protagonist defeats his bullies to show he’s ready for the second act. Often, it’s resolved in the coda: the protagonist returns home, and finds that his old bullies are completely toothless against him now.

Whatever the case, it must be resolved. Until the protagonist completes this arc, their agency (and by extension their personhood and their suitability as a protagonist) is in question. The act of bullying is a synecdoche for their agency as a whole: if a bully can take something away without reprisal, then the protagonist has no claim to anything, because anything they own, make or accomplish can be destroyed by others. You can’t keep being vulnerable. Stop being vulnerable. Your story isn’t worth telling until you stop.

iv)
The other thing that bothers me about protagonists going back to defeat their bullies is the immaturity of it. The fantasy of being able to go back and beat your bullies is a revenge fantasy, and revenge is a safety blanket.

I’m not saying revenge is bad or worthless. I’m not embracing some Christian concept of turning the other cheek, which so willingly twists itself into a philosophy of stoic submission to your oppressors, I’m saying that our world is built on unexamined systems of honor, and that we should therefore be clear-eyed about the purpose that revenge serves: reinforcing a moral system where insults to honor can force you out of personhood if you do not retaliate. Look at the people who find fantasies of vengeance most compelling and comforting. Look at their social positions. Look at vigilante films. The protagonist of a vigilante film is one of two things: a patriarch with a dead family who must exact ultimate revenge for the ultimate insult, or a raped woman, who is now broken and unusable and must pursue her despoilers like a living revenant.

Conversely, look at the people who are, in various ways, treated diabolically by society. Prisoners, sex workers, the disabled, undocumented workers, trans women, barefoot is legal guys, racial minorities. Revenge is not a great focus of their stories. Why not, since they have so many more wrongs committed against them?

Because revenge fantasies are about castration. You have a phallus, you have power, you are a real human. These three things are mutually supporting, like three sticks propped up against one another: take one away and the others collapse. If someone strips you of your power, you lose your phallus and your humanity. Unless you can prove via vengeance that you have not been stripped of your power, you are effectively dead, an impotent eunuch shuffling around with no place or purpose until you cease to draw breath.

The problem with having a phallus is that there are so many more ways you can die. If you lack a phallus, if you’re some kind of livestock or undead beast or other human-shaped non-person, you kinda just keep on trucking until your heart or brain stops working. If you have a phallus, you can basically die from humiliation. Sure, it’s a much more conceptual version of death — that doesn’t mean it’s any less terrifying.

But, still. It kind of irks me that a defence mechanism to deal with castration anxiety is presented as a laudible, essential part of growing up.

v)
I have an example, and I wish I had a better one, because I’d rather not bring up this shithead and her work, but the kind of thing I’m describing is most obvious when it is least conscious, and so the dynamics at play at most egregious when the storytelling is mediocre. I could talk about characters from Raymond Feist or Trudy Canavan, but I’ll be surprised if you’ve read those, and I can’t fucking remember the names of half the shows, books and animes I’ve seen this shit in because the worst offenders are the most forgettable.

So, Neville Longbottom. Poor Neville! Loser’s loser, spiritual bedwetter, abused by his teachers, bullied by his peers, too scared to even be a crybaby. His friends are really acquaintances, they pity him more than they enjoy his company, and they respect him so little that he can’t even get Harry to look at his cool herb book. He’s soft, he’s timid, every attempt to shame or bully him into standing up for himself just weakens him further. The only things we see that bring him out of his shell are patience and uncondescending kindness from two of his teachers.

This is interesting, because it’s so strongly contrasted with normal male development in the Harry Potter books. The acceptable forms of manhood require cultivating power, and the acceptable forms of male power are boldness, stoicism, cunning, and ruthlessness. Neville doesn’t have any of those! His positive traits, like his passion for gardening and his gentleness, are completely orthogonal to the traits that every other boy in the books all prize and rank each other along. Towards the end of the series, when everyone is confronted with an ailing conservative government suddenly descending into fascism, it raises an interesting question: how can someone who lacks our society’s most vaunted, most hallowed traits of Male Strength and Virtue resist and undermine such an enemy?

Like all potentially interesting questions in Harry Potter, JKR forgets she raised it and does something dull and ugly. We meet Neville again at the end of book seven and he’s good now. He’s all big and scarred, he can take any punishment and ask for more, he’s totally fearless and now that he’s fearless he’s finally a leader. It turns out there wasn’t a different way of existing as a man–dare I say, existing as a person, even–without embracing one of the four masculine virtues, it just takes some boys longer than others to get there, like puberty. Neville wasn’t a different class of boy, he was just a low-tier boy, but it’s fine! All he needed was to go through some more trauma, this time with higher stakes.

And, idk, that just feels so fucking unhappy! What a fucking waste! There could have been an examination of what it means to be a real human with agency when you lack the traits that let you win contests of domination, but that’s so existentially uncomfortable that you have to retreat into the Motherhood Statement and affirm the primacy of strength, bravery and mettle! Is our imagination really so limited?

vi)
People who’ve read Maidens tell me that the Timo parts are especially upsetting. I’m glad to hear it, because that’s what I was aiming for. I give Timo a rough fucking time. Mirri isn’t being treated better (oftentimes worse) but like… she knew what she was getting into. If Timo had known what was going to happen to him, he’d probably have killed himself.

I wouldn’t call Timo innocent, but he’s naive. The boys in Fox Platoon all got their gender graded on a curve one day, and Timo didn’t make the cut. He has lost access to things that he had only ever imagined as guaranteed: no education, no social standing, no presumption of inpenetrability. We last saw him in Part 1 getting groped by conscripts who were testing where his position as a former comrade ends and his position as a permanent slob begins. As those of you who’ve seen snippets of Part 2 can attest, his position does not improve any time soon, particularly as it relates to Private Reikkinen, the bullying, sadistic lout who pushed Timo into slobhood in the first place.

It’s important to me that Timo never gets it back. He’ll never be on top. He’ll never again have access to presumed, unquestioned manhood. He won’t get revenge, not even through karmic punishment. He will never be elevated (and Reikkinen will never be reduced) to a level where Reikkinen, or someone just like him, couldn’t threaten to do the same awful things to Timo all over again.

Maidens isn’t a story about getting your manhood back, after all. It’s about getting it taken away.

Timo can’t un-castrate himself. He’ll try, but he won’t succeed, because Maidens isn’t about that. Perhaps he doesn’t need to. Perhaps he’ll learn that castration is not death. Perhaps he’ll learn that as a woman-shaped object — as un-threatening, surveilled, mocked, and exploited as that is — he can be a fuller, more capable human than he was when he was being groomed for manhood.

Perhaps, if he’s lucky, he’ll live as a girl.

*There’s nothing more alienating than an un-alienated childhood, and any account of development and maturation that I can relate to should feel like someone being dragged up a malfunctioning escalator with a barren cliff at the top.

**The teleology imposed on girlhood is so self-evidently repulsive as to become its own prophylactic, which is why women’s coming of age shit is mostly of a romantic nature; that kind of humiliation is only palatable if you’re jacking off to it.