A trans woman’s reflections on societal otherment
By Maeve G. Howser
In 2016, a year oft remembered by trans women my age for its online political culture, I was coming off the heels of being (mostly) open about my identity as a trans woman, a lesbian, and a furry, until the treatment I received from my peers gaslit me back into the closet and convinced me that I was, rather than the premiere zoomer autistic girl, an emotionally childlike, bestiality-prone autogynephile. All parts of my identity–from my search for a name to my enjoyment of Five Nights at Freddy’s–were used to vilify who I was for a portion of my life so that I may set against it the “new” me who could be a better “man”.
Of the things I still find darkly amusing about this period, chief among them are the priorities of my treatment by my generation. Something as inconsequential as a notebook full of Death Note and Soul Eater fan art could be placed next to a post-Silence of the Lambs assumption that my want for tits will invariably result in the defilement and skinning of good-and-tasty, young, cis, America-loving brunettes. Cringe culture, for as long as it has existed (yes, even before the 2010s), has always been able to draw lines between different social taboos to crochet one monolithic moral boogeyman for the townsfolk to hurl rocks at. Moreover, it is an aspect of cultural conservatism that has lasted for as long as the bones of bigotry have been set in human civilization.
For as long as patriarchal society has existed, so too has the sperm protocol existed to enforce the continued birth of children as the prime metric of social health. What this means for men is that to be righteous is to be penetrative and domineering, and that for women, to be fair is to be demure and impregnable. In pre-Christian Scandinavia, as was common during antiquity and the early middle ages, homoerotic relationships among men were acceptable for the dominant man in the engagement, while the submissive man was culpable for rejecting his manhood. In a sense, the top was never gay at all; only the bottom was. Men and women both partook in seid magic, which was used to see and affect the future–but was also an overtly sexual system of magic. Therefore, despite Odin being associated with both seid and masculinity, men who practiced seid were known as ergi, a term denoting their effeminacy. Sorcerers skirted and often crossed a social boundary–that term, ergi, was cognate with argr, which indicated that a man was such an effeminate bottom in man-to-man relations that he was the “woman” of the engagement: a deadly insult to deliver to a viking. In a way, one could almost imagine the Norsemen calling such behavior “cringe”.
Moving far ahead in history, what do people think of as “cringe” now? To name a few things: Japanese animation; fallen off game franchises; animal costumes (and the indie horror games about them). With this in mind, some subcultures which comprise “cringe culture” bear a resemblance to historical examples which were quite accepted in their own contexts. Furry subculture is comparable to anthropomorphism in the art, culture, and religion of many ancient societies, and I feel many of us are furries for the same reasons those before us depicted gods and spirits with anthropomorphic aspects; we depicted the gods by seeing ourselves not just in our cosmos and world, but also the animals that live here. This persists not just through furry culture, but through such things as astrology, full of iconography relating the person to the natural elements and animals. It wasn’t until Christianization that anthropomorphism was more often relegated to depicting the devil, rather than God.
But we live in a broadly secular (or, rather, Christosecular) culture; why do people hate furries now? I think to dissect this, we must recall what made the effeminacy of men “cringe” to Old Scandinavia: what a society views as useful or useless, and in that sense we must assess how capitalism has affected our ideas of being useful. Following the industrial revolution, our relationship with usefulness has become perhaps the most toxic it’s ever been. It was once that we created art–whether we likened ourselves to animals or not–by and for the grace of the world and the gods. Now, capitalism pressures us instead to create art that sells; to form culture around what sells, or find another job. In this sense, whatever can be reasoned as financially fruitless is “cringe.” This includes behavior that can be labelled as “childlike”, from watching My Little Pony to wearing a fursuit. I always tell people, “you can only hate furries for so long until you start to hate autistic people,” but it goes in many directions between different identities. You can only hate male sorcerers for so long until you start to hate bottoms, and you can only hate Buffalo Bill for so long until you start to hate trans people. Depending on how far you go with the governing factor of goodness being utility to others, you can only hate people who keep away from constant, high pressure work for so long until you start to hate the human spirit at peace.
Many political identities can be boiled down to asking a person, “what does the downfall of society look like?” but more of us than we would like to admit end up asking “who does the downfall of society look like?” Even in social settings in which people are nominally “progressive”, it is common that people ignore the identities of marginalized people once they become unsavory. I have seen it happen too often that a trans woman does something bad, and the “trans-accepting” community finds this as an excuse to deadname and misgender said trans woman–as if we are “bad” for the trans community. Once we begin reminding our “allies” anyhow of the autogynephiles in media who get off on being draped in tanned womanhide, it’s as if our “trans card” gets revoked, and inoffensive parts of us, “cringey” as they are, are put on the same level of revulsion as any actual wrongdoing. No, Chris-Chan doesn’t magically stop being a trans woman due to either the funny Sonic OC or committing incest, and no, you are not based for deadnaming Jessica Yaniv–but when we have boiled people down to how “good” they are for society, it shouldn’t be surprising that we treat being trans as a privilege to be revoked, instead of a right to be exercised. In this capacity, I feel cringe culture is intrinsically tied to bigotry itself–or more appropriately, cringe culture as answering the same call as bigotry. Cringe culture is a (usually ancillary) response to the idea that there are useless people who the citizen body is better off without. When we presuppose that there is dead weight to be culled in the first place, we end up with genocide, eugenics, ableism, fatphobia, and in the case of cringe culture, the vapid hatred of furries, people in fandoms, bottoms, and weebs. To suppose that there are people who are wasting space, or air, or genes, is to give way for bigots to decide who is wasting space: a minority, a person in a cultural movement you dislike, or both?
