by Woody Woodger

I was on Twitter which is always a bad idea when I stumbled across a tweet from @SomeBWord (rebecca), a trans woman (she/her) that I follow.

This thread points to one particularly horrid aspect of being a trans woman that goes unbeknownst (unreckoned with, actually) by cis people. Trans people, specifically trans women, live with the default presumption from cis people (and, I would argue indeed the general Zeitgeist[1]) that we are sexually perverse predators whose only intent with gender transition is as a mask for whatever evil we harbor. I think most cis peoples’ frame of reference for the trans “debate” centered around the infamous bathroom bills designed to exclude trans people from public bathrooms. Concerns of “men faking” to get into women’s-only spaces was, and still is, the refrain from many right-leaning politicians and other groups worried about this “postmodern age that promotes an alternative metaphysics”. Unfounded, unsubstantiated ideations of these “concerned citizens”[2] eventually led the nation swinging their collective magnifying glass over trans peoples’ genitals, and gave themselves permission to suggest how we should navigate our grotesque, unnatural urge to tinkle.

As we often are with most conversations about trans people, the bathroom bill example is only a single pin in the sprawling cork-board-and-string nightmare that is the cultural anxiety and fear concerning trans people and our motivations for transitioning. Movies, TV, news articles, politicians, and TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists[3]) are all guilty of equating trans womanhood to sexual deviancy and violence. I believe these entities create this narrative not out of hate, as one might predict, but out of fear. Namely, the fear that transness threatens cisnormative assumptions about gender, and by making trans women into monstrous predators, the Zeitgeist can feel justified at our disposal.

It feels as if the language of cis fear, a “transphobe”, a “phobia”-haver, is designed to be rehabilitative, medicalized, excusatory of bigotry.

Oooo, Woody!, you say, Good catch. The word is transPHOBIA after all. So I say, Ok first, you don’t have to be such a bitch; second, as that which is feared, I should let you know how cisnormative society’s phobia feels and harms me. It feels as if the language of cis fear, a “transphobe”, a “phobia”-haver, is designed to be rehabilitative, medicalized, excusatory of bigotry. Bigots are NATURALLY overwhelmed by my genitals’ eerie mythology (my Loch Ness, if you will); they’re TURNED naturally affright by ME, MADE squeamish by that which they so UNnaturally pine. Essentially, it’s a fear of the unknown. Almost quaint. Almost rational. Almost. It’s important to interrogate our beliefs __________

So perhaps, reader, you—you trans ally, you concerned parent or politician, you TERF, you nazi, you chaser, you the person who thinks I’m not talking to you—I hope you’ll come along and perhaps learn something about cis people.

Cis Fear[4] and Loathing in Las…Everywhere:

Sarah Zedig is a trans YouTuber and content creator so, naturally, she has a podcast. In episode 4, Drugs, Traps, and Transphobes, she reads from a Helen Rosner tweet thread concerning the #MeToo movement that had been flooded by transphobic tweets. In her thread, Rosner makes the crucial mistake of saying a way to help ALL women is, “#1. Overcome your own transphobia…”. Bold move, Rosner! Ally, confirmed. Let’s see how it pays off.

Here are some highlights Zedig reads on her podcast: “Sex is deemed by the sexual organ. No vagina, no woman”; “Nope surgical mutilation doesn’t change your DNA. Science and stuff.”; “Chromosomes and DNA disagrees with your defense of a mental disorder. #dudeinadress”; “No they are not. They are mutilated men in frocks.”; “Drag queens are not women.”; “It can’t give me a family naturally. Women are born not made…”; “When he has a period/baby or hysterectomy, then it’s a female.”; “Yeah sure. They are make-believe women.” They go on. This seems odd, though. These tweets don’t read like fear, as I’m arguing. This read with unbridled revulsion and hate. Because...well, that’s obviously what they communicate.

TERF’s bigotry and jealousy...I mean, vitriol, as ContraPoints describes, has clearly seeped into the Zeitgeist enough that TERF’s as well as the garden-variety transphobes as we see in Zedig’s podcast spout essentially the same “arguments”.

Similarly to Zedig, in her video, “Gender Critical”, ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn) reveals and critiques a series of Reddit posts and comments from transphobes, specifically TERF’s. The crux of the video is that while TERF’s publicly attempt to make feminist critiques of trans people, and trans women specifically, these “criticisms” are performative, intellectual smokescreens for their actual bigoted anxieties of what the existence of trans women means about their own conception of gender. On translating TERF’s performative “concern”, ContraPoints says TERF’s true feelings are that “…trans women are man-ish unfeminine perverts who are forcing masculinity into female spaces” (27:50). I would add that TERF’s, this particular flavor of transphobe[5], is by no means aberrant nor isolated. TERF’s bigotry and jealousy...I mean, vitriol, as ContraPoints describes, has clearly seeped into the Zeitgeist enough that TERF’s as well as the garden-variety transphobes as we see in Zedig’s podcast spout essentially the same “arguments”. Regardless, their image of trans women is informed by old, tired anxieties[6].

*(@SomeBWord’s tweet inspired @Claire_The_Egg [she/her] to confirm these anxieties.)*

But why am I suggesting that this vitriolic harm is coming from a fear of trans women, rather than a hate as bigotry suggests? To answer that we need to examine, as Juanjo Bermúdez De Castro does in his paper “Psycho Killers, Circus Freaks, Ordinary People: A Brief History of the Representation of Transgender Identities on American TV Series”, how popular media has crafted the image of trans people that allows cis people to gawk at transness while ultimately privileging the cis gender norms. In his article, Castro analyzes transgender TV representation from 1965 to the present; and unsurprisingly, he found that time period of television to be, as we would refer to it in intellectual circles, a wholeass YIKES! Castro of course found a wealth of problematic, dehumanizing portraits of transgender women, from which transphobes and TERF’s[7] received their image of trans women as monstrous, psychotic, predatory, “mutilated”, duplicitous, and threatening.

Castro says, regarding Hitchcock’s “An Unlocked Window”, “…the horror in the episode is created through the idea of the lie, the cheating. ‘He has been there with us all the time, deceiving us, pretending to be a woman!’” (2). It’s very damaging that the very first representation of a trans woman on popular TV was one of a perverted-psycho-women-killer. Castro applies Susan Stryker’s book Transgender History to contextualize just how damaging.

He quotes:

Because most people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they cannot recognize that person’s gender, the gender-changing person can evoke in others a primordial fear of monstrosity, or loss of humanness. That gut-level fear can manifest itself as hatred, outrage, panic, or disgust, which may then translate into physical or emotional violence directed against the person who is perceived as not-quite-human. (2)

This quote suggests how it becomes “transphobia” rather than “trans hatred”; you know, the truth. Transphobia is “fear” that has little to do with trans people beyond depicting us as “monstrosities” to retroactively justify the dehumanization cis people already presumed. Monstrous depictions of gender nonconforming people then lead to a Zeitgeist that believes in the depiction so that our culture may manifest these violences beyond the screen.

Monstrous depictions of gender nonconforming people then lead to a Zeitgeist that believes in the depiction so that our culture may manifest these violences beyond the screen.

Because we’ve already invoked his beak-nosed silhouette, how about we take a look at perhaps the most famous piece of anti-trans propaganda: Psycho. The movie that brought the idea of trans women as monsters to mainstream awareness, Psycho is a 1960’s film that invented the modern slasher. Psycho follows real-estate secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) as she steals $40,000 for a client and flees to California to meet her boyfriend Sam Loomis (John Gavin). But, as we all know, Crane is waylaid and ends up at the famous Bates Motel where she meets bird-like taxidermist and closeted monster Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). We watch as Crane hides her money, the two get to know each other better, and ultimately Norman, in the silhouette of his Mother, stabs Crane to death in the famous “shower scene”. At the end of the movie, the psychiatrist tells a room of other white men (I know: grotesque, unforgivable image, let’s just try to move on) that Bates dons the alternate personality of his Mother so he may kill yet not have to take responsibility. In the final shots, Bates sits in a cell while, in voiceover, his Mother explains that HE did these murders while he smiles into the camera—unrepentant, satisfied. We can already see the cross-dressing, reclusive, inhuman, anti-social, matricider, deviant Bates’s character beginning to codify the trans “monster”.

But Bates’s framing creates a very particular image of the monster. The psychiatrist is used in the movie to pathologize Bates, making his deviancy digestible for the cis audience. As Gabriella Colombo Machado concludes in her essay “We Are All In Our Own Private Traps: Transphobia in Hitchcock’s Psycho”, “When Norman is out and diagnosed…[audiences] can be satisfied that normativity has won once again and that the transgender individual has found his proper place: within the police station.” Additionally, I agree with Machado that by ending with Bates’s internal monologue Hitchcock himself suggests that any attempts by cis society to control transness are ultimately futile; and with the final shot being Crane’s car dredged from the lake, it imagines Bates’s violence will reoccur, whether by him or another “monster” hiding in plain sight. As Machado notes, “because Norman resists heteronormativity and gender expectations, he creates a terrorizing revelation at the end of the movie that he and mother were one person all along.” It is this realization wherein we find what lies at the heart of Psycho’s terror and, by extension, the “monstrosity” of trans people as defined by cissies: we know a truth about existence that cis people are either unable or unwilling to know.

(@lxasoeil serving us over-complimentary-mom-is-fun-drunk-at-the-cookout energy.)

We have spent so long in this essay wrestling with this topic through media representation. Ah! media: where the women are women, the men are men (GOD DAMN IT), the transphobia is subjective, and the marketplace of ideas thinks the best course of action is to privatize the COVID vaccine. So! Can I—you ask, you gender nonconformer straw person—actually find evidence of this fear manifesting itself as violence IRL? After all, fantasy is fantasy. Because Psycho exists doesn’t necessarily mean that people are implicitly afraid of trans people. Maybe we’ve evolved to be too rational, what with our standardized testing, slow, racist response to lead poisoning, and Jimmy Fallon, I’m sure that by now, at this late hour in history, we must be able to set aside our ickiest impulses and cooperate. Just like those very rational people in suspiciously diverse corporate advertisements. Utopia.

But the emotional narratives told to us through the media can’t help but influence our actions and dispositions. As a totally random example, let’s do a quick Google search for “article explaining trans women, written by cis woman”. Ok, now after a quick reboot, Google, let’s randomly select hmmm... “Heckler Who Derailed Rose McGowan Book Tour Now Accused of Sexual Misconduct” by Katie Herzog. This article details a now-infamous circulated video of trans activist Andi Dier being removed from a reading after confronting Rose McGowan about her book Brave, ultimately derailing McGowan’s anticipated tour. The article documents the backlash that Dier received. Herzog gives us the tea, saying, “…multiple women accused Dier of unwanted sexual contact while they were between the ages of 12 and 15 and Dier was in her late teens and early 20s” (4). At the end of the article, Herzog says, “Dier denied claims of nonconsensual sexual contact. She also provided The Stranger with a lengthy statement and stipulated that we could only quote her if we published it in full.” (7).

I’ll start my close reading at the end and work my way back up. Right after Herzog says that Dier provided a statement, she says, “The Stranger declined to publish her full statement as it included allegations against her then-underage accusers and others by name.” (7). Protecting accusers’ names: reasonable at first glance. Rational, even. But then I think, hm, so buried at the very bottom of the article, Herzog admits that Dier responded and refuted claims of assault while potentially detailing violence she faced, but Herzog refused to publish it because…Dier referred to the people she was accusing by name? While I respect Herzog’s commitment to her sources’ privacy (many of whom she already identified by name), it just seems odd to me that she would not publish Dier’s response; especially because this article is about sexual assault against women. And every other woman who wanted to add their voice to the article did so. Curious-ish.

If we were allowed to speak as freely and openly about transness as cis women do about transness, they would no longer be in control of the conversation.

What also struck me was Herzog reiterating that the accusers were under-aged at the time of the alleged assaults. That point is rightly foregrounded in the piece, but it also seems to have the DEFINITELY unintended consequence of reinforcing the framing of these accusers as helpless. Any accusation from Dier would not only be baseless but repugnant. And I AGREE! How awful that would be of Dier. Too bad I don’t have access to, say, “a lengthy statement” that could have been “published in full” for me to review and draw my own conclusion.

But hold on. Did I just refer to the “rhetoric” of a news article? Surely this hard news piece would not, say, have a bigoted bias underpinning its reporting. Of course not. That would be misleading and unethical. For shits and giggles let’s just take a look at the section where Herzog rehabilitates the image of TERF’s in a parenthetical so as to undermine the first instance of Dier’s denial in the piece. Receipts below[8]:

Dier denies any nonconsensual sexual contact and says that the allegations are attacks from the alt-right as well as McGowan supporters and TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. (The term TERF, which is generally considered derogatory by those at whom it is directed, describes feminists who oppose the idea that gender can be self-determined, and—sometimes, but not always—object to trans women in what are historically thought of as female-only spaces, like women's bathrooms, changing rooms, and lesbian music festivals.) Dier, both on Twitter and in a lengthy email, repeatedly claimed that the allegations against her are TERF smear campaigns.

Tweets about Dier's behavior date from as far back as 2010. (5)

Cute. Also, let’s take another look at the article title: “Heckler…” Ok, I’ll stop right there. By choosing to present Dier as a heckler before even naming her[9], Herzog elicits associations of an aggressive, combative troublemaker unfairly harassing a stranger. Much like a predator does to helpless prey. And as we read on, we find that someone is a woman[10]. I could continue to pick on Herzog, but she and her “journalism” (much like other TERFy swill) is not worth my very precious time. And this should not be read as some attempt to rehabilitate Dier’s image. Again, I don’t have Dier’s side of the story, so it would be irresponsible for me to make that judgment. Rather, this exercise was meant to demonstrate the strategies Herzog employs and how transphobes like her simultaneously invoke and reinforce the cisnormative ideology that trans women are predaceous monsters. The silencing language that transphobes use to speak for, over, and around trans women belies their fear. If we were allowed to speak as freely and openly about transness as cis women do about transness, they would no longer be in control of the conversation.

If you can’t beat them, beat off to them:

When full-throated violence simply is not enough of a tool of control, cissys have another option: fetish. Fetish in this essay will loosely connote a sexual desire that moves beyond impulse and transforms into acting out a fantasy of control, ownership, and abuse of the fetish object. Fetish object also known as yours truly.

First, let’s see if we can’t find evidence of this “fetish” I seem so confident about. For starters, my most popular listing by far on the phone sex site NiteFlirt is labeled “Transgender-Fetish-Feminization” and revolves around me sexualizing, often in combination with some violent descriptions[11], the process of “feminization”. Additionally, Pornhub has recorded just how much interest there is in the bussy market and, well, what can I be but flattered? They report that “Worldwide, transgender related terms currently represent 1.97% of all searches on Pornhub, so that’s well over a million searches each day”. Below is their trend graph from 2010-2017, and it seems that we are only ascending in Pornhub’s searches:

I’m moving up in the world. It’S sO eASy To bE TrAnS! All you have to do is show a bunch of men your pussy—men, who are interested in explicitly HATE fucking you precisely BECAUSE they believe you are the most disposable incarnation of humanity—and then you might be able to have Pornhub congratulate themselves on allowing you to exist in their conception of the world.

But anyway, let’s talk more specifically about fetish and why I think it offers another explanation for the Zeitgeist’s image of trans women as monsters as well as how that allows cisnormative society to control the emotional narrative surrounding trans women.

First, I want to define “fetish” in the context of Freudian Psychoanalysis and how it is enwrapped in the Castration Complex. Freud suggests that when confronted with societal prohibitions on sex, children will think of these prohibitions as a metaphoric “castration” expressed by the denial of their desires. Whereas Freud specifically pointed to prohibitions like incest and murder, homosexual, queer, and trans sex are included in these prohibitions. A fetish, as Freud explains, is the displacement of prohibited sexual desires onto other objects. Whereas Freud pointed to prohibitions like incest and murder, I’m expanding those prohibitions to include non-hetero/cis sexual relations. With this working definition in mind, I want to frame the Zeitgeist’s fetish around trans women to be indicative of prohibitions on non-cis bodies because of an imposed gender binary which, in turn, is used to subjugate and demonize trans women for our perceived “deviance”.

The Zeitgeist’s fetish around trans women is indicative of prohibitions on non-cis bodies because of an imposed gender binary which, in turn, is used to subjugate and demonize trans women for our perceived “deviance”.

The binary gender system and the violence enacted on trans people in its name can be understood as an expression of the hegemony which Sarah Zedig defines on her podcast as “…when somebody else does something that you would think is unthinkable, it teases at the idea that maybe not everything that defines you was your choice” (“#DroptheT and Queer Respectability Politics // HRT Diaries 001.”). Said another way, hegemony is the explicit or implicit pressure to conform to societal norms. In the same episode, Zedig describes how some queer identities have been conditionally accepted by the hegemony, and transness is not one of those identities. As Zedig says, “there is a right way to be queer and a wrong way to be queer”. It is the hegemonic pressure to conform to the gender binary that catalyzes the Freudian fetish in individuals. Through hegemony’s prohibitive demands, transness gets mistranslated in the Zeitgeist as undesirable and monstrous.

Conclusion:

(Buried at the end of the thread I found a little trans magic from @anarchist_bean. I want to add that I’m not quoting these tweets because they are popular. Very much the opposite. Metric check: “12 Retweets, 1 Quote Tweet and 439 Likes” at time of… — (Buried at the end of the thread I found a little trans magic from @anarchist_bean. I want to add that I’m not quoting these tweets because they are popular. Very much the opposite. Metric check: “12 Retweets, 1 Quote Tweet and 439 Likes” at time of writing (number of Likes dropped since first accessing this thread). These may be stats I’LL never see (so screw you rebecca #blacklivesmatter and your insanely topical last name), but as far as tweets go, no internet was broken. This conversation is one of deep trauma and is nearly invisible)

The irony of this whole situation is that the violence against trans people has virtually nothing to do with trans people. Rather, our suffering is an expression of cis people’s insecurity about their own gender identity. To my first claim that transphobia has nothing to do with trans people: I mean, of course, right? That’s just what prejudice is. Cis-normativity’s emotional narrative clearly illustrates trans people to be monsters worthy of only fear and disposability, thus why should trans people have the privilege to be at the center of even their oppression?

In this way, the violence from earlier in the essay illustrates the Freudian definition of fetish in that it re-establishes for the individual doing the violence—and onlookers—that they have earned and deserve their cis privilege. But, I believe, it is also through this hegemonic, obsessive, fetishized violence that the cis psyche unconsciously recognizes the frailty of their authority. Trans people’s existence essentially destabilizes the entire concept of a gender binary and thus insinuates that cis people may not hold a monopoly on reality. The fear is thus an expression of insecurity of self; an insecurity that ultimately drives cis people to construct a mythos in the Zeitgeist that our deviancy somehow putrefies when, in reality, it only liberates.

The Trans spirit is a power that cis people recognize, fetishize, and are unable to reconcile any way besides violence.

One final note, my use of Zeitgeist in this essay was purposeful because it frames this essay within the context of this discussion’s real material: spirit. Sounds corny, I know; but what I mean by spirit is that ineffable quality that is ascribed to things because people believe they have great power; and, because of that ascription, they always do. This process is also an aspect of fetishization. People fetishize totems that we believe are imbued with mystery and meaning beyond our grasp and, yes, those qualities are absolutely true of trans people. Good catch.

At the same time, I am not your fucking totem. The nastiness of fetishization is that worship relegates the worshiped and vice versa. We see it in Psycho, in the bald prejudice throughout the Andi Dier article; the Trans spirit is a power that cis people recognize, fetishize, and are unable to reconcile any way besides violence. Additionally, the Zeitgeist in this essay can be thought of as the spirit of hegemony, in that our recognition of societal structures and our participation or deviancy from those processes is a kind of fetish; a fetish in so much as we feel the Zeitgeist’s power to replicate itself. Just as with transphobia, fetishes can become our rulers. Ask any one of those sticky Pornhub statistics—your fetishes will eventually rule you...if you let us. Well cissys, I must say I am honored to be your ruler. I promise to be fair and just, and very reasonable and of course rational while pricing my feet pics. Now, for my first decree, as your SUAVEreign, your Marry Antoifishnets, I say, “Let them eat my cake.”

[1] I’m choosing to use Zeitgeist in this essay rather than “society” or “collective conscience” or otherwise because its definition as “the defining spirit or mood” of a cultural moment better illustrates the presumption of trans predation as, I will argue, this presumption is often latent and masked with other rhetoric.

[2] Otherwise known as closeted chasers.

[3] They want to be called “gender critical feminists”. This counts as me mentioning this and I won’t refer to them that way because a. TERF isn’t a slur because that’s not how slurs work and b. because they don’t think I’m people.

[4] First, let’s start small, I’m building to something here.

[5] While deserving none of my attention, THANK you very much.

[6] In other words: You’re unoriginal, sweetie, and you’re boring. Really love how you perverted feminism (GIRL POWER), but maybe let someone who actually knows how to work Google talk about this stuff, ok? THANKS!

[7] And the general population (but we’ll get there)

[8] Herzog, for future reference, that’s how you do that. If you need help, on Mac it’s command C and then command V, BUT, for Microsoft, pay attention because this could get complicated, it’s the exact same. GOOD LUCK!

[9] I wonder how many Weinstein articles did that?

[10] Sorry, typo. I meant famous, wealthy, relatively powerful, white, cis, queer woman. I know I just said “queer woman”, but please don’t read that and forget about the list of privileges that preceded it.

[11] My most frequent customer likes a “forced-feminization” fantasy where he feminizes me (has me put on women’s clothes and do makeup) before raping me. I make less than one dollar a minute.

Make-Believe Women