Just found a draft of a post I was working on a while ago, a response to my friend Marcia's review of a movie I hadn't seen (still haven't!), but that's okay because it's not about The Substance as much as it is about bodies and what we embody: race, gender, age.
This film is really about white women’s insecurities and never did I have illusions that I would feel seen and heard. I think it affirmed that I am an object, and that I owe my gender or allegiance to no one; I create myself.
Feeling not female and trying to bend, cut, open and fold this body into female and instead of it being gender affirming, I felt more alienated from female, from woman.
Oof. Yes. So much of femininity is doing little violences to our bodies. I learned the word tribulation because of my grandmother, complaining about the awkwardness of buying clothes or the discomforts of jewelry, I can't now remember which, telling tween or teen me "these are the trials and tribulations we face as women" with a chuckle, but I wasn't chuckling. I didn't know what a tribulation was but it sounded scary. I was not looking forward to a lifetime of those!
I kept waiting for the little violences I did to my body in the name of femininity to pay off, and they never did. Surely this discomfort and pain, actual blood, sweat and tears, had to mean the payoff would be really good right?? And I mostly rejected even high heels and makeup, never mind plastic surgery. Never had to harm my hair and skin with relaxers or skin-lightening creams. So if even I feel such pain, when mine is a small fraction of the pain there is in the demands that femininity puts on Black and Brown people...
Once on Twitter, whilst I was defending Trans folks, a person wanted to misgender me by calling me a little boy. It was a weird sensation to process, someone wants to misgender me by calling me a boy, which is what I thought would make me most comfortable in the end, being boy, that would make life easier, but instead I work to be comfortable in girl.
I was fighting TERFs on twitter way back when they assumed absolutely anybody with pronouns in their profile was trans, so my "she/her" once got someone to tell me I looked like an ugly man and I'd never be a woman. I had never thought I was anything other than cis at the time, but I have held that in my heart for years and now am delighted to be an ugly man who no one would ever believe is a woman.
When I saw the monster, I saw my future without being honest with myself about what beauty really is, what it truly means to de-center the male gaze, to de-center white womanhood whilst being queer, of color and other identity markers; for me, the monster is the culmination of a wasted life...
I do feel like middle age has found me in the last year or so. I'm leaning in to it for the dadcore vibes and grateful that I get to age because to age is to live (I am twice the age my brother ever got to be, so I will never fear growing older). But my age feels so bound up with my gender because when I was in my 20s and first tried to imagine myself as an older person, I imagined a man. I couldn't imagine a woman at all. I never have been able to think of myself growing old as a woman, and I really want to grow old, so that's the thing that finally tipped the scales for me into I must be trans, I better take action accordingly.
I'd rather have had a trans childhood and a trans young adulthood like a lot of people, but what matters much more to me is having a trans middle age and hopefully old age. Maybe my beard will come in gray already, maybe my hair will disappear any moment, I don't care at all (or I don't think I do; maybe I will feel differently when these things happen but neither has so far). A friend of mine once said that second puberty in your 40s disrupts the usual narrative that the changes in your body after you leave your 20s are unwelcome ones. I think there are lots of ways that body changes can be more welcome, but definitely addressing gender dysphoria in middle age is one way to mitigate the "oh my knee hurts all the time now" etc. type of changes to the body.
I'm also struck by someone misgendering Marcia by calling them a little boy specifically; there's some age-related incorrectness in there too (as well as echoing the racism of Black men always being called "boys" by the kind of white people who still want them as slaves); it's setting up a power dynamic often levelled at women (and definitely at people who are incorrectly perceived as women).
I still want for us to want more than to appeal to the gaze. I want all women to want more for themselves beyond ‘beauty’, not because I think anything feminine is bad, but because I want them to consistently examine what they mean when they are reaching for beauty. Who is really defining what you deem beautiful? Who is paving that definition for you? Is it you? Is it white supremacy? Do these things matter? Yes, to a point I think they do. I want us to want more, and to imagine more.
Anyway, their writing and thinking are great; I'm so glad I can now afford to subscribe to their essays and also their DJ sets!
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