Why the Media Dresses the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels
Julia Serano / FALL 2004
AS A TRANSSEXUAL WOMAN, I AM OFTEN CONFRONTED BY people who insist that I am not, nor can I ever be, a “real woman.” One of the more common lines of reasoning goes something like this: There’s more to being a woman than simply putting on a dress. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why it’s so frustrating that people often seem confused because, although I have transitioned to female and live as a woman, I rarely wear makeup or dress in a particularly feminine manner. Despite the reality that there are as many types of trans women as there are women in general, most people believe that trans women are all on a quest to make ourselves as pretty, pink, and passive as possible.
Trans people—who transition from male to female or female to male and often live completely unnoticed as the sex “opposite” to that which they were born—have the potential to transform the gender class system as we know it. Our existence challenges the conventional wisdom that the differences between women and men are primarily the product of biology. Trans people can wreak havoc on such taken-for-granted concepts as feminine and masculine, homosexual and heterosexual, because these words are rendered virtually meaningless when a person’s biological sex and lived sex are not the same. But because we are a threat to the categories that enable male and heterosexual privilege, the images and experiences of trans people are presented in the media in a way that reaffirms, rather than challenges, gender stereotypes.
Media depictions of trans women, whether they take the form of fictional characters or actual people, usually fall into one of two main categories: the deceptive transsexual or the pathetic transsexual. While both kinds of characters have an interest in achieving an ultrafeminine appearance, they differ in their ability to pull it off. Because deceivers successfully pass as women, they generally serve as unexpected plot twists, or play the role of sexual predators who fool innocent straight guys into falling for “men.”
Perhaps the most famous deceiver is Dil, in the 1992 movie
The Crying Game.
The film became a pop culture phenomenon primarily because most moviegoers were unaware that Dil was trans until about halfway through the movie. The revelation comes during a love scene between her and Fergus, the male protagonist: When Dil disrobes, the audience, along with Fergus, learns for the first time that Dil is physically male. When I saw the film, most of the men in the theater groaned at this revelation. Onscreen, Fergus has a much more intense reaction: He slaps Dil and runs off to the bathroom to vomit.
The 1994 Jim Carrey vehicle
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
features a deceptive transsexual as a villain. Police lieutenant Lois Einhorn (Sean Young) is secretly Ray Finkle, an ex-Miami Dolphins kicker who has stolen the team’s mascot as part of a scheme to get back at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino. The bizarre plot ends when Ventura strips Einhorn down to her underwear in front of about twenty police officers and announces, “She is suffering from the worst case of hemorrhoids I have ever seen.” He then turns her around so that we can see her penis and testicles tucked behind her legs. All of the police officers proceed to spit as
The Crying Game’s
theme song plays in the background.
Even though deceivers successfully pass as women, and are often played by female actors (with the notable exception of Jaye Davidson as Dil), these characters are never intended to challenge our assumptions about gender itself. On the contrary, they are positioned as “fake” women, and their secret trans status is revealed in a dramatic moment of truth. At the moment of exposure, the deceiver’s appearance (her femaleness) is reduced to mere illusion, and her secret (her maleness) becomes her real identity.
In a tactic that emphasizes their “true” maleness, deceivers are often used as pawns to provoke male homophobia. This phenomenon is especially evident on shows such as
Jerry Springer,
which regularly runs episodes with
titles like “My Girlfriend’s a Guy” and “I’m Really a Man!” that feature trans women coming out to their straight boyfriends. On a recent British reality show called
There’s Something About Miriam,
six heterosexual men court an attractive woman who, unbeknownst to them, is transgendered. The broadcast of the show was delayed for several months because the men threatened to sue the show’s producers, alleging that they had been the victims of defamation, personal injury, and conspiracy to commit sexual assault. (The affair was eventually settled out of court, with each man coming away with a reported $100,000.)
In contrast to the deceivers, who wield their feminine wiles with success, pathetic transsexual characters aren’t deluding anyone. With her masculine mannerisms and five o’clock shadow, the pathetic transsexual will inevitably insist that she is a woman trapped inside a man’s body. The intense contradiction between the pathetic character’s gender identity and her physical appearance is often played for laughs—as in the transition of musician Mark Shubb (played as a bearded baritone by Harry Shearer) at the conclusion of 2003’s
A Mighty Wind.
Unlike the deceivers, whose ability to pass is a serious threat to our ideas about gender and sexuality, pathetic transsexuals—who barely resemble women at all—are generally considered harmless. Perhaps for this reason, some of the most endearing pop culture portrayals of trans women fall into the pathetic category: John Lithgow’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of ex-football player Roberta Muldoon in 1982’s
The World According to Garp,
and Terence Stamp’s role as aging showgirl Bernadette in 1994’s
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
. More recently, the 1999 indie film
The Adventures of Sebastian Cole
begins with its eponymous teenage protagonist learning that his stepdad, Hank, who looks and acts like a roadie for a ’70s rock band, is about to become Henrietta. A sympathetic character and the only stable person in Sebastian’s life, Henrietta spends most of the movie wearing floral-print nightgowns and bare-shouldered tops with tons of jewelry and makeup. Yet, despite her extremely femme manner of dress, she continues to exhibit only stereotypical male behaviors, overtly ogling a waitress and punching out a guy who calls her a “faggot” (after which she laments, “I broke a nail”).
While a character like Henrietta, who exhibits a combination of extreme masculinity and femininity, has the potential to confront our assumptions
about gender, it’s fairly obvious that the filmmakers weren’t trying to do so. On the contrary, Henrietta’s masculine voice and mannerisms are meant to demonstrate that, despite her desire to be female, she cannot change the fact that she is really and truly a man. As with
Garp’s
Roberta and
Priscilla’s
Bernadette, the audience is encouraged to respect Henrietta as a person, but not as a woman. While we’re supposed to admire these characters’ courage—which presumably comes from the difficulty of living as women who do not appear very female—we’re not meant to identify with them or be sexually attracted to them, as we are to deceivers like Dil. Ultimately, both deceptive and pathetic transsexuals are seen as “truly” men.
In virtually all depictions of trans women, whether real or fictional, deceptive or pathetic, the underlying assumption is that the trans woman wants to achieve a stereotypically feminine appearance and gender role. The possibility that trans women are even capable of making a distinction between identifying as female and wanting to cultivate a hyperfeminine image is never raised. In fact, the media often dwells on the specifics of the feminization process. It’s telling that TV, film, and news producers tend not to be satisfied with merely showing trans women wearing feminine clothes and makeup. Rather, it is their intent to capture trans women in the act of putting on lipstick, dresses, and high heels, thereby making it clear to the audience that the trans woman’s femaleness is a costume.
While mass-media images of biological “males” feminizing themselves have the subversive potential to highlight ways conventionally defined femininity is artificial (a point feminists make all the time), the images rarely function this way. Trans women are both asked to prove their femaleness through superficial means and denied the status of “real” women because of the artifice involved. After all, masculinity is generally defined by how a man behaves, while femininity is judged by how a woman presents herself.
Thus, the media is able to depict trans women donning feminine attire and accessories without ever allowing them to achieve “true” femininity or femaleness. Further, by focusing on the most feminine of artifices, the media encourages the audience to see trans women as living out a sexual fetish. But sexualizing their motives for transitioning not only belittles trans women’s female identities; it also encourages the objectification of women as a group.
Two 2003 examples are the HBO movie
Normal
and a two-part
Oprah
special on transsexual women and their wives. While both of these offerings were presented as in-depth, serious, and respectful attempts to tell the stories of trans women—and they deserve some credit for depicting trans women as human beings rather than two-dimensional laughingstocks—both pandered to the audience’s fascination with the surface trappings that accompany the feminization of men.
Normal
tells the story of a pathetic-type trans woman named Roy (the character’s name remains male in the credits) as she comes out to her family and community as transgendered.
Normal
has a fetishistic take on women’s apparel and accessories from the opening scene, in which we see bras and underpants hanging from a backyard clothesline. Thus, from the beginning the movie sexualizes the very concept of female identity and reduces all women (trans or otherwise) to mere feminine artifacts. We see Roy bumble her way through her first embarrassing attempts at shaving her armpits and trying on women’s clothing, and are shown two separate incidents where she wears perfume and earrings to her blue-collar workplace only to be ridiculed by her macho coworkers. At virtually every turn, the producers of
Normal
transform Roy’s transition into a hapless pursuit of feminine objects and artifice.
The
Oprah
special was a little more promising, primarily because it involved actual trans women. The entire first episode featured a one-on-one interview with Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of the recent autobiography
She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.
Boylan’s book attempts to reach out to mainstream audiences: It focuses on the difficulties she faced being transgendered throughout her childhood and marriage, and traces her eventual decision to transition. While Winfrey’s conversation with Boylan was respectful and serious, the show nonetheless opened with predictable scenes of women putting on eye makeup, lipstick, and shoes, and the interview itself was interspersed with “before” pictures of Boylan, as if to constantly remind us that she’s really a man underneath it all.
What always goes unseen are the great lengths to which producers will go to depict lurid and superficial scenes in which trans women get all dolled up in pretty clothes and cosmetics. Shawna Virago, a San Francisco trans activist, musician, and codirector of the Tranny Fest film festival, was organizing a forum to facilitate communication between police and the trans community. A newspaper reporter approached her and other transgender
activists, but was interested not in their politics but in their transitions: “They wanted each of us to include ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures. This pissed me off, and I tried to explain to the writer that the before-and-after stuff had nothing to do with police abuse and other issues, like trans women and HIV, but he didn’t get it. So I was cut from the piece.” A few years later, someone from another paper contacted Virago and asked to photograph her “getting ready” to go out: “I told him I didn’t think having a picture of me rolling out of bed and hustling to catch [the bus] would make for a compelling photo. He said, ‘You know, getting pretty, putting on makeup.’ I refused, but they did get a trans woman who complied, and there she was, putting on mascara and lipstick and a pretty dress, none of which had anything to do with the article, which was purportedly about political and social challenges the trans community faced.”
Requests like these from nontrans news interviewers and film documentarians are common. I had a similar experience back in 2001, just before I began taking hormones. A friend arranged for me to meet with someone who was doing a film about the transgender movement. The filmmaker was noticeably disappointed when I showed up looking like a normal guy, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She eventually asked me if I would mind putting on lipstick while she filmed me. I told her that wearing lipstick had nothing to do with the fact that I was transgendered or that I identified as female. She shot a small amount of footage anyway and said she would get in touch with me if she decided to use any of it. I never heard back.
Jamison Green, a trans man and transgender activist, has written about his invisibility as a transsexual person because reporters typically look for “the man in a dress.” Media makers tend not to notice—or to outright ignore—trans men because they’re unable to sensationalize them the way they do trans women without questioning the concept of masculinity itself. And in a world where modern psychology was founded on the teaching that all young girls suffer from penis envy, most people think striving for masculinity seems like a perfectly reasonable goal. Since most people cannot fathom why someone would give up male privilege and power in order to become a relatively disempowered female, they assume that trans women transition primarily as a way of obtaining the one type of power that women are perceived to have in our society: the ability to express femininity and to attract men.