"Pathetic and Deceptive"

The relationship between transphobia and masculinities will be hard to define. I cannot imagine that there will be a single concise way to sum up the intricacies and nuance of the issue. It’s even hard to imagine where to start, but it’s important to start somewhere. 

I wasn’t exposed to trans identities for most of my life. My conception of what it meant and looked like to be trans was built, almost exclusively, on the trans individuals I saw represented in movies, TV, and the media. What I saw was confusing and conflicting. I could not form a clear understanding of the reality of being trans. From what I could tell, trans was a joke, a shame, a disorder, or a tragedy. Early on, I internalized the messages behind these distorted representations: trans = joke, trans = shameful, trans = unhealthy, trans = bad. Now, I work to critically examine and deconstruct the messages embedded in these misrepresentations. As part of a project that I completed for a video art course last year, I began exploring representation of trans feminine identities in conventional media platforms (namely, film and television). While I would argue that the main problem with media representation of trans women is underrepresentation, my focus was to analyze the instances when trans women were represented.

I turn to writer, performer, and activist Julia Serano who identified two common archetypes of conventional media’s misrepresentation of trans women which she termed the “pathetic transsexual” and the “deceptive transsexual”. Both archetypes contribute to the popular assumptions that trans women are not really women, but do so in two different ways. The first posits that transgender women are actually men who try (and fail pathetically) to be women in their attempts to “perform womanhood”(Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp, Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Henrietta in The Adventures of Sebastian Cole). This trope emphasizes the popular assumption that, “trans women are truly men, and, although they identify as female and want to be female, their masculine appearance and mannerisms always give them away” (Raun 26). The second suggests that some trans women are just men who can “pass” as women and use their looks to “trick” men into sex (Dil in The Crying Game, There’s Something about Miriam, Roy in Normal). Here, trans women are positioned as, “’fake’ women, whose ‘secret’ trans status is revealed in a dramatic moment of ‘truth’” (Raun 27). Thus, despite their ability to “pass” as women, the fact remains that they are men.

On the one hand, if a trans woman fails to “pass”, then she is a pathetic failure. If she does “pass”, then she is deceptive. In both examples, however, trans femininity is treated equally as an artificial construct which is used to hide “the inherent masculinity” of the individual. The trans woman’s expression of her gender is seen as a mere appearance or performance of womanhood, not an achievement of it. In either form, transgender identities are not seen as valid or real in themselves, a view which ultimately serves to maintain strictly biological definitions of sex.

So, what does this have to do with masculinities? Simply put, the hegemonic configuration of masculinity has a vested interest in maintaining a binary, biologically determined, system of gender. This system puts men (specifically cis-gender men) at the top of a gender hierarchy, from which they derive their privilege. The very existence of transgender identities upsets this binary system, and challenges the biologically deterministic nature of sex which hegemonic masculinity seeks to uphold. Thus, by representing trans women as “pathetic” or “deceptive” men, conventional media negates the possibility of non-binary and transgender identities.

These representations not only reflect societally imbedded misconceptions about trans identities, they also perpetuate and create them. My own perception and understanding of trans individuals came from what I saw in movies and TV as a kid. These representations, in part, contribute to the rampant transphobia in western culture. 

(669 words)