Author’s note: On Passing makes explicit mention of transphobia, cissexism, bigotry, eating disorders, drug abuse,and mental illness. As the author, I can’t in good conscience recommend that you engage with this article if these are difficult points for you.
By Maeve Howser (she/they)
In the early hours of July 22nd, 2022, the official Twitter account for the Women’s March announced that they’d adopted a new logo. Their previous logo had sported the side profile silhouettes of three people with facial structures that appeared feminine in a way that was more in line with character design than the innate physical characteristics of those assigned female at birth. The proportions of these faces were not unlike a Tinkerbell sort of design, lips pursed, noses like tiny buttons, and eyelashes and pixie-cuts aflutter in a breeze. The new logo is most notable for its change in color palette, but upon release, it entered the realm of public discourse instead due to the changes it made to the shapes of the faces. The faces on the center and right of the illustration were somewhat similar to the previous drawing, though possessing less of a Disney appearance in the feminine characteristics, while the face on the left had a larger nose, a slightly more prominent chin, and a hairline cropped out of the logo, whereas the others have some visible protrusion of hair.
The logo, along with the Women’s March stating their agreement with most major world health authorities that transgender women are women, was dragged across the muddy floors of Twitter by many notable self-described “gender-critical” idealogues, most notably Dr. Jane Clare Jones, author of the book, Annals of the TERF-Wars and Other Writing. According to these detractors, the face with the larger nose and chin and less puckered, pouting lips was unmistakably that of a man, which was made all the more heartbreaking when a friendly sub-tweeter superimposed over the “man” in the logo a side profile of none other than Dr. Jane Clare Jones herself, the shape of whom matched the logo’s apparently masculine visage perfectly. What ensued was a handful of Jones’ would-be allies assuming that she was a trans woman, thereby referring to her using he/him pronouns. A true affront to the dignity of women the world over, I’m sure, but this was a telling moment for the true nature of contemporary transphobia. Alongside the disrespect intended toward transgender people, this moment of stupendous backfire came packaged with some disturbing undertones regarding all manner of appearance, not the least of which being race, biological sex, and the essentialism around these subjects, as perceived by the gender-critical mind.
As a trans woman, it’s difficult to overstate how truly great is the shadow cast by the achievement of passing over all other parts of self expression and presentation. Without some heavy psychiatric moderation as to your priorities, as well as the obvious need for an accepting ecosystem to comfortably transition within, it doesn’t matter what your personality is best expressed by, what your unique look that you wear best is, the bubbles in the clay that make you yourself. Passing as a cis member of your gender can also be classed as a survival tactic, sparing one from a lot of social miseries unique to trans people. It’s then rather evident why passing as cis is held in such importance among trans people, but if we’re to consider social gender stereotypes and their impact on the image that we have of a “default” man or woman, what exactly constitutes passing anyway? What extent of extreme masculinity or femininity must we exhibit before not only the broader world, but more steeply, our own distorted funhouse mirrors that we call self image, accepts us as the gender that we know we are? And what of the characteristics physically possessed by cis people that contradict the binary nature of their assigned gender? Are these merely aberrations to design, retroactively meant to signify transness without actually constituting transness? I hope to provide an argument from the transfeminine perspective as to why the ardent cling to passing is overly reliant on assumptions about gender that exist within western culture, especially our distorted media figures, which ultimately contradict the sociological justifications for our existence in the first place, as well as how the obsession with passing actively hinders the amount of both support from cis allies, and solidarity within trans communities. Before I move forward, though, I don’t want this piece to be mistaken for an attack on those who pass well. As I mentioned earlier, particularly for many in more conservative areas, it can be a survival tactic, and a means to diffuse as much conflict as possible. Some of us are also simply luckier than others, with supportive families that allow HRT at a young age, or simply the proper genetic makeup for a smooth transition. I will spend a lot of time babbling about solidarity between all trans people being a non-negotiable part of the package deal of trans liberation, which animosity toward transgender people who are privileged enough to pass flawlessly would make impossible. However, I want us to view passing, which I later define in some circumstances as being “functionally cis”, and the erasure it’s brought to a wide swath of the rest of the community, in a more nuanced and helpful light.
The criteria beneath which the transphobe will categorize the trans from the cis is squashed into two-dimensional narrowness by the extreme reliance on stereotypes of gender as it exhibits in behavior, clothing, and physique/biology. A common limerick parroted by zealots of transphobia is the “what is a woman” line, which is exclusively used to try to coax us into running in a rhetorical circle for hours rather than engaging in a legitimate discussion. As it would happen, the false-clocking phenomenon tells us that even transphobes themselves can’t seem to answer the question. The example I gave earlier about Dr. Jane Clare Jones and her valiant heroics to save the true women of the world from the evil transes, in the end only to be done in by her inexplicably male face, is no isolated outlier within gender-critical communities. In the wake of the incident in the Scottish Parliament on December 22nd, 2022, when a protestor reacted to the passing of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill by raising her skirt in a room filled with a variety of individuals, which included minors and survivors of sexual assault, she would succumb to the familiar fate of Dr. Jones. Before she was identified as Elaine Miller, an anti-trans activist who would later turn the photo of her committing a non-consensual sex act in public into an icon for gender-critical ideology, she too was falsely assumed by nameless transphobes to be a deranged trans woman. Whether the masses came to this conclusion due to the nature of Miller’s sex crime as it conflated naturally with their preconceived falsehoods about the activities between trans women and children, or due to the semi-masculine (by American media standards, which we will discuss) shape of her body is unknown, but it was likely a product of both. I would also be remiss to not mention Elaine’s appearance otherwise, with dark hair cut into a masculine part and with clothing and jewelry evocative of Etsy impulse buys and middle aged women at the summer farmers’ market. If ever you wished to set off alarms inside the head of a mid-2010s anti-intellectual political commentator with latently libertarian-right views and an army of adolescents for an audience, Elaine Miller is right for you. If this incident had taken place only 7 years prior, she would have been the face of that internet for a solid month.
The implications of this snafu are that the mentality that draws someone into transphobia is rooted in expectations of female and male bodies that are formed more from Hollywood films, pornography, simplistic textbook illustrations, and magazine covers, and less from real life interactions with people of both genders. Because Elaine Miller simply possesses so many aesthetic elements associated with contemporary “Love Is Love sign in the crushingly high mortgage yard” cool mom feminism, a short haircut, and a body shape rather rotund when compared to the figures seen in comic books, pin up ads, and only the most mainstream, lowest common denominator studio pornography, she was assumed to actually be a trans woman, because of course, according to transphobia, it simply isn’t possible for a cis woman to have a midsection wider than her hips. It’s as easy as going outside to see that rather few femme-presenting individuals have the glassy, coy eyes, narrow waists, and bob haircuts that Norman Rockwell posited they did, but the opposition to trans rights is ignorant to this reality, as are many people who are influenced by our homogeneous media and culture. I must emphasize that these biases about gender are absolutely everywhere in the most seemingly innocuous of expressions, such as subtle reinforcement in the alteration of photos in magazine publication, to the overt adding of fuel to the fire in casting choices in mainstream films, not to mention the pervasive nature of diet culture. “Eat this fruitarian diet for 6 months, the caloric deficit will gradually reshape your bone structure into the non-euclidean geometry Sonya Blade is wearing under her skin!” This creates a hellish environment for young trans eggs to live within.
Early in my transition, this point being early enough that I didn’t know yet if I was a woman or not, a major part of what held me from admitting it to myself (that wasn’t the extreme shame caused by my first realization in my teenage years) was the characteristics I had (and some I still have) that I firmly believed were true blue masculinity. I was ghoulishly thin (mostly due to stimulant abuse and eating problems that were really the result of gender dysphoria) and had a face structure befitting of that, but I knew that if I recovered, I would have to deal with that masculine fat distribution that had caused me so much agony as I returned to a healthy weight. My voice was even more masculine. My much esteemed radio voice, attractor of many compliments during my time in customer service, had felt like a blessing when I was trying to believe I was cis, but I was deathly afraid of turning that into something I would be conscious of feeling terrible over, especially since my art form demands that I call “ACTION” and spend long days on set talking to people. Not to mention the fact that not being sure if I’m non-op (a trans person who doesn’t receive reassignment surgery) completely dashed my acceptance of the notion that I was at all a real woman. I also had so many insecurities bubbling in my head about whether or not I, as a person, fit the mold of being a woman, which is an idea that only exists in the basal foundations of western gender stereotyping. Although many of my insecurities have been alleviated greatly by hormone therapy and social transition, the insecurities about my voice pose an explicit irony, which is that one of my transition idols was Jamie Lee Curtis, whose distinctive voice wasn’t far off from being my own with higher intonations, something easily achievable in voice training.
It’s already innate to our experience that we struggle to keep cohesion in our internal identities, constantly second guessing the truth of our own transness, and it’s made so much worse by the existence of these biases. We fail often to believe that we even resemble cis people of our genders if we possess a physical trait divergent from not that sex, but the gross oversimplification of that sex by culture and media. If we have low voices that are had by some cis women, or breast tissue that is had by some cis men, if our bone structure or fat deposition is closer to the idealized version of our assigned gender at birth as opposed to our actual gender, it causes us as trans people of all kinds to completely discredit ourselves. The fact is, though, that most of us have no legitimate reason for such behavior. As trans women, there exist cis women who look the way we do. And even then, some of us, when extricated from the social influences that extrinsically suggest these insecurities, don’t actually feel discomfort over our facial structures, beards, bones, adam’s apples, penises, etc. Others, in all truth, may never be able to afford the procedures necessary to change any of these qualities. For our liberation to be legitimate, we need this fact to hinder us in absolutely no capacity imaginable. But I digress, lets say your transition is “successful” beyond calculable likelihood, you just walked out of your tracheal shave, after you’ve been in voice training for several years, been on hormones for ten, gotten your vaginoplasty, various bone structure alterations, facial feminization surgery, etc., which just cost you more money than a great deal of people living today or ever can even imagine. You were most likely crushed with debt in this pursuit. You perfectly resemble that blonde actress weird men base their idea of womanhood on and develop one-sided imagined relationships with. I know you’re asking, now you’ll pass, right? Right?
Well, it isn’t that easy. In much the same vein as the plight of Elaine Miller, it’s become a rather common pastime in the trans communities of Twitter to catch transphobes in the lie by posting photos of notable celebrities, occasionally transphobic ones, as if they’re photos of oneself, only to have the droves of endless, nameless transphobes eagerly claim that they “can always tell.” This was most infamously done by screenwriter and stand-up comedian Mia Moore with headshots of UK author J.K. Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter franchise, associate of the aforementioned Scottish Meeting Flasher, great hulking bastion of bigotry and final boss of the figurative trans-exclusionary feminism dungeon. The gotcha is sacred as always, but wait, something is wrong here. Look at J.K. Rowling. I hate to offer a compliment to someone so gruesome in their views, but if any trans woman looked the way she does, the passing game would be effectively won. There shouldn’t be any debate, right? Simply put, in response to a trans woman who is “functionally cis” (in that you can easily ignore her transness and regard her as someone who isn’t your chosen fanatical political opposition) transphobes can always simply raise the bar of clocking so high that it ends up cutting short the high arcs cis people can average in this proverbial high jump, which has even come to make cis people feel the outcomes of things like bathroom discourse, themselves facing assault due to the suspicion that there may be a secret trans in their midst.
