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.