Harry the spy

[cosmolinguist]

I have so far enjoyed the podcast Be Gay Solve Crimes, where three trans women assert that all detectives are transgender.

I love the premise (I'm even paying for the bonus episodes!), but after a dozen or so episodes I'm increasingly unsettled that these fictional male detectives are mostly talked about as "eggs" (a word some trans women use for their pre-transition selves; the moment of coming out to themselves is described as "their egg cracking"), and these fictional women are mostly talked about as fully-formed trans women.

The occasional background character is claimed to be transmasc, so it's not exactly erasure I'm complaining about. Feels more like a version of "the only good thing a man can do is transition,"* which is a possibly-unkind* shorthand I've adopted for the feeling I get from online spaces or statements that position themselves as universally trans but then end up being about things specific to (white) trans fems/women.

I've been telling myself I'm being unfair and too sensitive. But today's episode about Nancy Drew is making me sad. (Partly because it makes me wonder if Harriet the Spy is a certainty for a future episode as I'd initially thought it'd be; is that also a literary fixture only for USians?)

There's nothing wrong with knowing your audience, but to hear early in this episode "If you're a boy -- which, I imagine, that's not many people listening! you might find out something really important real soon!" in this episode about a girl I related strongly but differently to when I was a kid reading all these books. I can understand wanting to identify with a girl who's strong and clever and who barely even has a boyfriend and who's a bit odd -- this is the premise of the podcast really: the kind of detectives you get in fiction are of course very different from the people they're surrounded by, and once you feel (at least) one kind of difference it's easy (or easier) to feel affinity with other people who don't fit in.

And while there certainly are -- and, I hope, more all the time! -- fully-realized trans women who are in the vague older-teenager age range that Nancy Drew is, fully au fait with the Online touchstones that indicate a woman is trans (whether that be a disinterest in male partners or what the hosts perceive as an old chunky laptop which would've been cutting edge when the movie they're watching, from 2007, was made but they're all such infants that they were in elementary/primary school then so only know such things as hallmarks of retrocomputing and/or poverty), this isn't what I was expecting from the podcast.

I expected some of the assigned-female-at-birth characters to be pre-transition men. I expected their reading of Poirot to be transmasc -- he's short, he's dapper, he's obsessed with his mustache... he's right up there with Gomez Addams in this feels like an exaggerated stereotype except I also know people who are literally like this levels of transmasc representation.

And it's not just characters but their reading of characteristics that baffles me sometimes.

• They mention Trying to Make the Hat Work as "deeply egg-coded behavior," but I only had to work so hard on that pre-transtion! There was some allusion to this in an earlier episode too, like if cis men think they can pull of a hat they not only can't, they aren't even really men. Which might have been these women's experience but I think they're overgeneralizing: a lot of men (cis and trans!) can Make the Hat Work! I find them way more fun now than I used to.
• The podcast host I like the best says that any "quote unquote guy" who wears (US English)suspenders/(UK English)braces is an egg, and they're not just a wardrobe staple for me but a godsend because I'm so short but also because they help hide my wide hips (by wearing (US)pants/(UK)trousers that fit my hips but sit at my waist, suspenders keep them there without having to cinch my torso in half, which is less comfortable and also draws unwanted attention to the shape of my body. Suspenders also distract a bit from the way my chest looks in a binder (I won't wear them without one, of course), and break up the lines of my torso in a useful way.
• And then (UK)waistcoats/(US)vests! (Why does this have to involve all the clothing items that I have bilingual terms for?? Or is that just all of them? Hm...) Which is so funny because immediately when I started my new job I was like "what if I became a waistcoat guy?" and the first time I needed to dress up fancy, I went to Slaters and bought one. It's still as dressed up as I get, because suits are the wrong shape for me (without paying for bespoke tailoring, which isn't an expense I can justify when I don't really need to wear a suit ever). And anyway testosterone has made me too warm all the time -- I'm not quite a shorts-all-year-round kind of guy but I'm way closer to that than I ever thought I would be. And, again, it helps hide the binder! And hips!! Whichever old English king it was who was too fat to button the last button on his waistcoat so the whole court had to start wearing them like that and now we all do...that guy was such a trans ally; I don't think I could button that button on mine! But I'm not supposed to! Marvelous.

Anyway, that's more than enough sartorial commentary from me, far more than I ever thought I'd do. But the point is, it's really odd to have stuff that's so obviously one way for me described as so obviously in a venn diagram circle that doesn't really overlap with that at all.

Writing this all out did make me feel better: I enjoyed the podcast episode more, and in talking about this on fedi I ended up wiht two new library books: Harriet the Spy and a recommended book with a transmasc Watson (The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall), which I'm looking forward to.

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*: Though, potential unkindness aside, it seems I'm not even exaggerating: a Black transmasc activist that I know has told me that he's heard people say this in as many words: the only good thing a cis man can do is transition. Oof.)

Comments

[hafnia]

I've run across this before and it usually makes me sigh, too. People who aren't able to see beyond their own limited experience — mm.

I look at it the same way I look at the late-in-life lesbians who assert that you're not really bisexual, you're poisoned by comphet: it's a model that might be useful for them, but it's not useful for me, and it erases a large swathe of human experience. Their loss, really, considering they're alienating people they might otherwise have common ground with.

[otter]

Thank you for posting the link to the article about Kiam. I learn new things most days :)