A confession
I’m drawn to the image of the chimeric girl; angel girl, puppy girl, magical girl, etc, madoka/homura blah blah. I see myself not as something of “purity” but something blended, mixed, in-between, like a middle schooler obsessed with tokyo ghoul, or when mayu takes being half-japanese too seriously. Obviously this reframing is just a way to cope with the transgender part of it all. The truth is chimeras are monsters, and chimeras are meant to freak you out, and in the same way, the world cringes inwardly every time it sees a trans woman who doesn’t pass. And the truth is: I cringe along with them. I hate that I’m reflected in that—that I could possibly have anything in common with a trans woman whose masculinity still shows. A glaring imperfection.[1] Of course these emotions and feelings are awful, misogynistic, and I would never express them out loud, and of course I hold no actual animosity towards any of my trans sisters, and of course, yes, I am aware that these are just reflections of my own self-hatred. But how can I deny my instinctive reaction of disgust, repulsion? It deserves to be analyzed, as messy and self-contradictory as it is. And my disgust and repulsion is really just from my own self-image, thinking about myself as a chimera, a messy combination of feminine-coded signifiers haphazardly thrown together, ill-fittingly grafted on to a regrettably male body. It’s unfortunately turned into this awful habit where I instinctively project this self-image onto my sisters and think that I’m doing something productive by doing so. (Not to mention the damage this does to vast swaths of cis women who have ‘masculine’ signifiers on their bodies and in their fashion choices as well, like are you seriously going to compare yourself against women with pcos? something about how bodies are just bodies, body-neutrality, etc etc.)
But when I pass? When I really pull it off? It’s like ecstasy. That feeling after getting through a whole day, twelve new patients who’d never met me before, all of whom called me ma’am — It makes me feel like I’ve grown wings and I could just float away, fly away from all of it. It feels like freedom. Like I’ve really gotten away with it, and I really have escaped from my cursed provenance, successfully cast it aside. It makes me feel like I’ve finally cleaned up after myself. Like heaven will finally let me in. This must be what it feels like when a robber pulls off the bank heist clean, the money stashed away, all the evidence disposed of, I think to myself. Fooled you, didn’t I!! is what part of me wants to exclaim as I float higher and higher towards the clouds. I’m absolved of my repulsion, my disgust, my sin; I’m closer to the spark of the divine feminine than I ever had been before.
But then the train passes through k town and some alt asian girl gets on the train whose bangs look better than mine and the winds are knocked out of my sails and suddenly my feet are back on the ground. Which brings me back around to the chimera thing. Well yes I can never be as cute and pretty and feminine and slim-waisted and round-faced as beabadoobee but I’m not even trying to do that! After all she’s a girl but I’m a girlthing, something that holds less agency and personhood than your average girl. If anything I’m doing great with what I got, and in some sense I really am beautiful, for a girlthing. And there are many words out there for a girlthing. You can try and believe in the charade, but if you can’t turn away from the part of you that isn’t truly a girl, then in is liberating and freeing to re-cast the other half of your chimeric self not as having been “assigned male at birth” (ew, how clinical!) or “transgendered” (ugh, how politicized!) but instead as a cuter, more innocent name (“boyborn”), as a nonperson entity (doggirl, puppygirl), or something sacred or sacrilegious (angelgirl, devilgirl).
And isn’t boyborn just so cute ugghhh oh my god it’s so cute.[2]
Sylvia asked me yesterday one of her questions which she prefaces with “I don’t mean to be transmisogynistic but…” about why trans women seem to like playing games with titles like snuffpuppy: doggirl hell carriage. My answer was a bit uncertain, like I was reaching blindly out of the curtains towards something I didn’t fully understand or articulate. I have this hesitant answer similar to the discourse above about how trans women often see themselves as half-women (in their eyes, the adjective trans is a derogatory label, not a simple descriptive one), leading some chronically-online girls to reclaim/romanticize the niche archetypes we have available for half-girls: tiefling, furry, puppygirl, girlthing.
Ultimately I think trans women have more in common with edtwt and bpd discord girls than any other type of half-girl: the self-policing/surveillance/denial, cutting out of food or meals or skin, the compulsive need to show others your suffering, inhale the suffering of our sisters, and exhale your trauma and misguided emotion (in the form of visual novels with titles like “snuffpuppy zombiegirl”, or the annals of a discord server’s ‘vent’ channel). See also bodychecking like there’s so so much bodychecking in the trans women community, and since we our childhoods haven’t been saturated with the same pressures to develop feminine social graces as cis women[3], we don’t have the foresight of the damage this self-disclosure causes to the other women in our lives, how it just reanimates the misogynistic self-surveilling voice that lies dormant in all of us.
(an anecdote: i posted a mirror selfie to close friends w showing off my waistline [lol] & alice told me later how it made her jealous that i was so skinny. i recounted this to sylvia who said “that… was really irresponsible of alice.” at the time since i was only like six months hrt i didn’t see what she meant by irresponsible. it was an unexpected compliment, sure, and maybe unwarranted, but irresponsible? i could only see it as some kind of victory: like yes, i finally, finally have something enviable. i reveled in it. even a girlthing like me can have something a real girl could envy.[4])
But uhh, I ran out of stuff I want to say for now. I’m a girlthing I project the thing-ness of it all on other trans women and it’s awful and bad and transmisogynistic of me and someday I will self-flagellate for this. But maybe at the end of the day we are all girls and we are all things and maybe there is no need to label where the girl ends and where the thing begins.
[1] and yes unfortunately i cringe much worse when the reclamation of male characteristics is intentional which is something i really have to unpack and it’s probably better for me not to analyze the whole butch lesbian thing and stay in my lane
[2] puppygirl is ofc cuter and its the prototypical cute but sylvia has told me flatly and bluntly that shes not into it which stings but i understand why she would denounce a label that disavows agency or personhood.
[3] this is just a roundabout way to avoid saying “socialized male” as that phrase gives me an ick
[4] to this day it is still totally baffling to me because i saw alice (and still do) as totally genuinely beautiful.
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