Someone was talking about a young person who was transgender male to female, and said people were pressured to accept their sexuality. Transgender status is not about sexuality (transgender people can be the range of sexualities), it is about inate identity.
I think part of the problem we are seeing in the argument about Caitlyn’s spread, is about gender identity and gender expression. Gender identity is what you are, gender expression is how you play that out. Some of the more mean types claimed that transwomen were all men playing dress up, living into the societal idea of a woman as a barbie doll and so forth (leaving out that a lot of M to F transgender women dress like many other women most of the time). If they were talking a fetishistic crossdresser, maybe, but the point is the identity has nothing to do with how you express it. The fairly butch women who belonged to the church I did were still women, the mom with the young kids who wore jeans and tops was a woman, the expression is not the woman. The same people who criticize Caitlyn for ‘defining womanhood’ one way, also criticize young women who wear heels and miniskirts and such for much the same reasons, that this selling out and so forth. In the end, I think it is as silly to criticize someone for dressing “femme” as it is to criticize someone for dressing ‘plain’, the same way it is absolutely idiotic to criticize someone who likes jeans and sweatshirts, how they dress, how they comport themselves, has nothing to do with everyone else:).
Ironically, in some ways what Caitlyn is facing has nothing to do with being transgender and puts her in the middle of a major squabble among women, and that is about the unrealistic images of women that are presented routinely in magazines and such. Photo spreads are photoshopped, airbrushed, and otherwise altered to make the person being photographed “perfect”. Models, whose bodies represent a very tiny percent of the population (male or female, I might add), are sold as the ideal, and so forth. Something like 40% of women fall into what is routinely called plus size (and to be honest, I wonder about that, I suspect it may be much more like 50%), size 12 or 14 and up, yet fashion is all about people who are size 0…it doesn’t help that she had the money to work with absolute experts at reconstructive surgery, which few people can afford, the brazillian butt lift, the implants on the hips,to make the ‘curvy fatale’ look (I don’t know exactly what she had, but I read somewhere what a plastic surgeon said was likely), I am sure that irritates some, that women are held up to someone literally crafted to look like that. So in a sense, the backlash isn’t entirely about her being transgender, it is that she did the photo spread as the ‘ideal woman’ in their eyes.
and continued my MO as well.
