When Trans Prefixes Dyke

In defense of bimbo dolls, diesel dykes, and every woman who is a transsexual first

Recently, after two years of committing to the herstoric force known as the trans dyke mullet, I shaved my head. This isn’t unknown to me, I’ve done it plenty of times, but this is the first time I’ve done it since HRT really changed my body in ways that make me very obviously a woman (only took nearly a decade). Having been butch my entire adult life I didn’t really think much of it as I was doing it. It was only a few weeks after that I started to wonder if I’d made a mistake. Men in public were calling me “sir” (though with that “I am definitely insulting you” tone) again and I was getting looks in the women’s bathroom. I became unrecognizable as a trans woman, or as a woman at all. Other queers began to assume I was transmasculine. A month after I did the deed I realized I was experiencing full throated regret.

I had done it because a friend of mine had recently recruited me into cutting off her grown-out green dye job and giving her a flat top. Feeling inspired and surrounded by solid dyke community (all of them TME it’s worth noting) I decided I wouldn’t miss my hair and I went full Sinead. What I forgot though is this very simple reality: I am not just a lesbian, I am a transsexual lesbian. The kinds of gender nonconformity that are expected or even celebrated in cis dykes or transmascs are barely tolerated for trans women. The rules are different.

And I hear what you’re saying, imaginary reader I’m inventing to argue with, “but sarah it’s gender nonconformity, you’re supposed to break the rules!” That’s true! I will not argue that. Dyke gender nonconformity is a beautiful thing and I don’t want to deny it to anyone. It would be fundamentally wrong however to say that trans women’s gender nonconformity garners the same reaction as cis women’s, or even that they mean the same thing. Whether we’re too butch or too femme, bimbos and diesel dykes alike, when we inhabit gender in a more profound way everybody feels invited to comment. Fuck, even our lesbianism is scrutinized differently. When trans prefixes dyke everything is different.

But before I continue I want to acknowledge one thing. There is no act or process more definitively gender nonconforming than medical transition. To physically change your body, your sex, and to become a woman is the most radical act of gender nonconformity I can imagine. There is a degree to which all TME gender rebellion aspires to the level of transgression that trans women achieve without meaning to. It is a profound irony that our gender nonconformity is so circumscribed while we also set the pace for gender nonconformity in general. But I digress.

Looking back to find where this attitude begins, we have to start with the WPATH standards. In the bad old daze (the ones we’re starting to relive) before informed consent, you needed two psychologists to sign off on your hormones and surgery. They would only do so if you met some extremely arbitrary standards, one of them being a very specific kind of feminine presentation. You had to be exactly the kind of 50’s housewife that your shrink wanted to fuck. Nail that down and you got your medicine.

Partially as a result of this very restrictive standard, stereotypes about transsexual women developed in mainstream society and then, inevitably, trickled into pre-Stonewall queer communities. In her foundational piece The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto, Sandy Stone goes over examples of this stereotypical transsexual narrative. Describing four autobiographical or semi-autobiographical texts from the 1960’s and 70’s, Stone says, “All these authors replicate the stereotypical male account of the constitution of woman: Dress, makeup, and delicate fainting at the sight of blood. Each of these adventurers passes directly from one pole of sexual experience to the other. If there is any intervening space in the continuum of sexuality, it is invisible. And nobody ever mentions wringing the turkey's neck.”

Trans women were conscious of this, of course. Stone says as much, “It took a surprisingly long time--several years--for the researchers to realize that the reason the candidates' behavioral profiles matched [Harry] Benjamin's so well was that the candidates, too, had read Benjamin's book, which was passed from hand to hand within the transsexual community, and they were only too happy to provide the behavior that led to acceptance for surgery.” Among the trans women who were able to access hormones and surgery in mid-century america (a minority of trans women to be sure) a certain set of behaviors was intentionally performed in order to gain that access. This continues today, to a diminished extent.

Stone argues that one reason that some segments of radical feminism were so hostile to trans women is that all of the contemporary published narratives by trans women were written in that performative style. And why wouldn’t they be? When life or death medical care is on the line you’ll say anything in order to get and keep it. Sandy Stone uses The Empire Strikes Back to call on transsexuals to break out of this psychologist-imposed narrative and begin writing honestly about our lives and experiences. She points to the hidden tradition of “wringing the turkey’s neck,” the final act of masturbation before getting vaginoplasty, as evidence of our hidden lives.

Trans women’s narratives have proliferated since The Empire Strikes Back was published in 1987. Very few of these have ever managed to enter the mainstream or made much impact beyond other trans women. Cis women and other transmisogyny-exempt queers can read a library’s worth of queer books and essays and still be blissfully unaware of trans women’s work. To many of them it may as well be 1973. There are two kinds of trans women. One is almost always white, thin, moderately feminine, and usually employed in tech. The other is Black, poor, and inevitably very dead. The former stereotype actually applies to vanishingly few trans women in real life but it is the standard that all of us fail to live up to in our daily lives. The latter is an example of the pedestal and the gutter being the same address, as one feminist author put it. A kind of tokenization that lets white queers sound progressive while still only valuing Black trans women when they’re dead.

Let’s examine the hyper-feminine side of the spectrum for a second. Feminist transmisogynists used to (and still do) accuse trans women of being men who adopted female stereotypes. It is tempting and popular to insist that most trans women aren’t actually the hyper-feminine barbie dolls that TERFs think we are. Fine, but what about the girls who are? What about the trans women who, for reasons of personal expression, to make more money as sex workers, to inhabit femme lesbian space, or any combination of reasons listed here or otherwise actually are hyper-feminine barbie dolls?

Under patriarchal civilization everything associated with women is despised. Feminists have some salient criticisms of compulsory or heterosexual femininity but one thing that we frequently forget is that women who adopt feminine expressions are still subject to patriarchal violence. Us dykes tend to think that women who are hyper-feminine (what some have termed “bimbo feminists” recently) have bought in to hetero-patriarchy in exchange for male favor. This only tracks if we take “male favor” to mean sexual harassment on the streets, rape in interpersonal relationships, and widespread derision by men and women alike.

This applies orders of magnitude more to trans women who go the bimbo route. Many of these sisters are sex workers and are faced with increasingly cheap and aggressive johns, stalkers who follow them home on the regular, and threats yelled out car windows by random men. And that’s just a fraction of the patriarchal violence, which is actually out of the bounds of this piece. I’m talking here about what happens internal to queer and lesbian communities. There is no refuge to be found in queer community for many of our bimbo sisters. We have internalized the patriarchal disdain for the feminine, sometimes combining it with our more legitimate rejection of it in our childhoods or early transitions.

When cis and otherwise TME dykes do give our bimbo sisters the time of day it’s almost always with the same kind of entitlement to their time, bodies, and sexuality that men show up with. Should a sister turn down one of these dykes she will find herself promptly disposed of and sometimes even criticized or publicly accused of sexual misconduct. This is something that happens to all trans women but our bimbo sisters experience it regularly. It’s almost as if other queers read hyper-feminine gender expression as an invitation, the same kind of patriarchal bullshit that says a short skirt is evidence of sexual desire, of deserved rape. Even amongst dykes, hyper-feminine trans women are to be used and thrown away.

To your average college educated settler queer gender is a costume to put on and take off, something to play around with for awhile and then to hang up. For those of us women who not only medically transition but physically embody (in a very literal sense, we change our bodies) our gender presentation, gender is a mode of living and relating to both the world and to our sisters. It can be playful but also deadly serious. White theyfabs want to feel like they’ve transcended gender, love to insinuate that us girls are just caught up in the binary, that we’re just not as enlightened as they are. What they forget is that there is no such thing as gender neutral politics. When white manhood is considered the universal, neutral position, any political attempt at gender neutrality is just cozying up with white men.

We don’t have that option. To turn a transmisogynistic argument on its head, trans women don’t have the option of opting out of womanhood. No one else will have us, it’s part of what makes us women. “Trans women are the women of women” was such a controversial meme because it stepped on a huge, obvious but unaddressed nerve. We are simultaneously women because our material conditions kept us from being men, because we choose to become women, and because in doing so we become the most despised gendered subjects on earth.

“Okay sarah, fine, but what about butch trans girls? Didn’t you once say that a lot of you became butch specifically out of a rejection of femininity?” You’re getting ahead of me, imaginary reader, but yes I did. And it’s true. I know the criticisms of hyper-femininity so well because I used to be the one making them. What I didn’t know then was that our experiences, diesel butch and bimbo femme, were more alike than they were different, two sides of the same tranny dyke coin.

Whereas our bimbo sisters are suspect because they over-perform femininity in the eyes of queer world, butch trans women are suspect because we don’t perform it at all, or do so to a very limited extent in any case. Trans women are supposed to want to be a specific kind of feminine. We’re supposed to want a kind of femininity that’s white, respectable, and cis (not cis-passing, plenty of us do that without meaning to, but cis in that sick, boring way that most of them are). Our bimbo sisters take femininity way too far for cis society. Us butches don’t take it nearly far enough.

It isn’t enough that plenty of us medically transition. Literally bringing our bodies in line with the broader societal notion of what women’s bodies look like. See, to become a woman when (in the eyes of hetero-settler society at least) you had the opportunity to be a man is already a monumental betrayal. Hetero-settler society can barely wrap their grey little minds around it. For a while, the few of them who knew anything about us could understand our adherence to the WPATH standards. To become a very normal, heterosexual, gender conforming kind of woman made it easy to understand transsexuality as a disease with a cure.

Butch trans women sabotage that already very fragile paradigm. We insist on our womanhood as well, insist that we can become butch women, and lay claim to the herstory, symbolism, and aesthetics that go along with butchness. This is nearly incomprehensible to most of our queer communities and completely unimaginable to hetero-settler world. In queer world it’s normal for cis or transmasc dykes to be butch, accepted and even encouraged depending on the community. When trans women step into that space however, the reaction is very different.

There’s a kind of soft-masc vibe that trans women can sometimes get away with. Sweats and baggy t-shirts, maybe Dr. Martens and skinny jeans, always with long hair and never without makeup. When a trans woman cuts her hair or completely abandons makeup, even while medically transitioning or signaling her womanhood in other ways, her already tenuous womanhood becomes suspect. She becomes invisible in her queer community and even more monstrous to hetero-settler society. The outer edges of butch expression are off limits and punishment awaits those of us who wander too far into them.

One key assumption follows butch trans women unendingly: that we are early in our transitions and afraid of the femininity that we must really want. Certainly this happens sometimes, but any butch trans woman who’s been out for a number of years can tell you that we still get this shit. Just as an example, I’ve been out for 13 years and a close butch sister has been out for nearly a decade and recently a cis woman said that our “mean girl” attitudes were typical of trans women early in their transitions. All because we were unwilling to tolerate the level of transmisogynistic shit she was giving us. That we were butch and had spines was evidence to her that we were new to this. Real women are respectably feminine and don’t fight back.

Fundamental to our alienation as trans dykes, particularly for those of us on the far ends of butch and femme, are the issues of agency and objectification. Whether we are refusing to be objectified or insisting on the exact ways we want to be objectified we are pushing hard on what is acceptable for trans women. We are expected to put our lives into the hands of the public. Our access to medical care is decided by others. Public scrutiny shapes what kinds of women we are allowed to be, dictates our social lives, pushes us into some professions and out of others, and frequently kills us. To expropriate a quote from Catharine Mackinnon, “man fucks woman; subject verb object.”

By embodying more extreme gender expressions trans dykes disrupt this apparently natural order. At our best we insist on what kinds of women we are, we form our own outlaw communities, we DIY our own hormones, and we do our fucking best to keep each other alive. If objectification is on the table then it is on our terms, part of our sexuality that we build from the ground up. This is one of the roots of queer transmisogyny. Turns out not even self professed feminists like it when a woman goes her own way.

I want to express my unending thanks and love and gratitude to my friend and bimbo sister Leila Zalokar for our numerous conversations on this topic, and to my butch sister-comrades Rosa Marie and Les for their in-depth answers to my (frequently late-night) questions.