When being a “boy” and being a “girl” are seen as equally performative and self-falsifying...

Alexej von Jawlensky

I’ve got a new(ish) post up at Genspect:

Because my research focuses in part on experiences of feeling like an imposter, the subject of “passing” as a member of the opposite sex comes up a lot. There’s the constant self-monitoring, the agony of not passing, the mingled thrill and terror of succeeding.

But the other day, I ran into an interesting use of the term on the r/actual_detrans subreddit by a young woman who identified first as transmasc, then nonbinary, and had taken testosterone. She wrote:

I am worried I am not pretty enough to be feminine: I’ve always been chubby and I think a lot of my dysphoria and desire to be masc has been just because I didn’t think I could pass as a pretty feminine person because of being chubby.

Here we find the language of “passing” applied not just to passing as the opposite sex but passing as an “acceptable” member of your own sex. The implied equivalence between these two sorts of passing is interesting and gets at the way femininity feels like a performance or affectation for many girls.

For many girls, “passing” as an acceptable member of your own sex class still means being thin enough, pretty enough, and feminine enough. The band of acceptable femininity is perilously narrow, and the equation of femininity with being female is pushing girls toward transition.

I still remember the girls who could never do anything right, whose effort and lack of effort were equally persecuted by our peers. Attempts to beautify yourself, if you were not considered beautiful, were laughable pretensions (“Why bother?”). There was no opting out, either (“Wow, so-and-so really gave up”). There was no way to insist on other terms. You either “passed” or you failed by some mysterious, ever-shifting standard. 

This was pre-social media, pre-filters, pre-fillers. And there was no escape via trans identification. So the pressure has gone up and a valve has opened to vent that pressure. Girls who struggle with the impossible and often contradictory expectations girls and women face—and the peer pressure and bullying that comes down on girls who cannot or will not conform to these expectations—can opt out now.