My Instagram thinks I’m trans, and I don’t blame it. If you scroll through enough videos of butch women and lesbians, the legions of “trans men” with freshly chopped chests will pop up pretty quickly. Instagram may offer you a little pronoun feature but even the algorithm knows what it is that butch lesbians and trans men really have in common. The content is well directed and I continue to click on it wholly consensually. More and more springs up with each refresh of the app, and I tell myself that it’s for research or that I’m trying to get out of my own gender critical echo-chambers. That’s partially true, but secretly, deep down, I feel strangely envious.
I interact vicariously with these reels of self-identifying former-women. On some weird level, I wish I was them. I admit, the algorithm favours the hot ones, excluding those that don’t quite succeed at their manufactured maleness. Their hips are too wide, their voices turned by testosterone to a nasal buzz rather than a rich hum. That said, even the “trans men” in my offline life evoke this hostile jealousy; I feel at once abandoned and spiteful. I wanted to be a boy so badly when I was a child. I secretly wished I had some secret disorder of sexual development so that I wouldn’t grow breasts.‘‘Trans men” engage energetically with their fantasy of manhood. They enact it viciously onto their own bodies while I squelch in vague and muddy ideas of my imagination. The reality of being a man I know as an impossibility, but the image of being one still roams in my mind. So when I hear that another lesbian has transitioned I think, childishly, “why do you get to pretend and I don’t?” But why do I still think that? What is the appeal that was so vivid as a naive tomboy, and now lurks shamefully in my adult addiction to social media?
There’s a recurrent theme in the trans videos that litter my instagram homepage: the idea that once transitioned, you become free to act feminine or masculine in a way that you were not before. The logic is that once one has transitioned, feminine or masculine expression no longer points to the status of your original identity (that of your sex). The femininity of trans-identifying females is now reimagined as male femininity (and the masculinity of trans-identifying males as female masculinity). I myself have known a few “trans men” who identify themselves as gay men. They love to wear pearls and to grow their hair out now that they have no tits and see themselves as men. It seems that once you’ve lost the baggage of being a “woman”, femininity gains a new charm. If you become a part of the “male gaze”, then you are no longer determined by it.
Part of the appeal of being a man that dresses and expresses “fem”, is then also the choice, the associations of femininity are refigured on one’s own terms, the (supposedly) free terms of maleness. This logic is brought to its climax in a strange trend of trans-identifying women who, with an apparently totally unconscious irony, make no effort to look androgynous in any respect, let alone look like men. One video of a young woman had the caption: “how I feel being fem-presenting knowing I don’t identify as a woman”, as she twirls in a tight-fitting crop-top. She’s a great dancer, but the absurdity is palpable as she frames her breasts with her hands and twists her arse to the camera. By repudiating womanhood, the very same sexualisation of her female body appears to change qualitatively in her mind, although in her mind only. It appears that for some, you don’t even need to go the whole hog of slashing away your female organs — casting off the name of “woman” is good enough.
Implicitly, the pursuit of an unachievable maleness, or even genderlessness, abandons the fight for the neutrality of female bodies
In gender-critical spaces, there is often an underlying sentiment that the young women of the trans movement are deluded victims and the older men are largely autogynephile misogynists. Alongside the pornified and superficial ideas of womanhood that prominent figures like Dylan Mulvaney plainly propagate, gender-crits have good reason to see it this way. While the men prance around in dresses or revel in experiencing misplaced misogyny like catcalling, comorbid mental health issues pervade the surging trans-identifying rates among children, and increasingly teenage girls. The male fantasy of womanhood appears as merely the pornographic, sexualised version of femaleness. In comparison, the female fantasy of manhood appears to have greater nuance; there seems to be greater room in the varieties of manliness. You can daydream of being a conservative military man with a trad-wife, going hunting at the weekends, just as much as the idea of being the indie tatted-up type of man, pensively nursing a cigarette and obsessive levels of self-centred ambition. But just like all ideals, fantasies and fetishes, these pictures can never get beyond the 2D, beyond the superficial and aesthetic. By separating “what it is like to be a man” from the lived reality of biological males, their idea of being or becoming a man will always be a hollow idealisation of what it actually means to live in a male body.
Manhood, even hollowed out, is still compelling. Enough so that young women carve their bodies into a projection of maleness, post it on social media, and produce in me a horrified kind of FOMO. To regard them as merely deluded victims is to miss something real in their experience and mine. An experience of “true androgyny” holds great appeal, and while misguided, it is not unreasonably associated with maleness. One instagram reel from a short-haired woman in hiking gear is captioned “Non-binary as in ‘If I would have been born a boy I don’t know if I would be non-binary’”. Although I bristle at the message, I empathise with the underlying feeling. If I were to go hunting, or even if I was particularly competitive or ambitious, my womanhood is still the qualifying prefix to my actions. The neutrality of maleness seems a given. I can see why this individual thinks she has to shed the label of womanhood, and maybe the tits along with it, in order to possess this natural neutrality. In many respects, the ideal of Being-a-Man is an ideal of purely Not-Being-a-Woman. But in imagining ourselves better off as men, imagining a state of manhood divorced from male reality, we not only do a disservice to ourselves, but also to other women. Implicitly, the pursuit of an unachievable maleness, or even genderlessness, abandons the fight for the neutrality of female bodies. Those who still hold on to the name of womanhood not as a symbol of sexualisation and degradation, but as a testimony of female humanity, will not thank us for our glorification of manhood, and nor should they.
