My grandfather liked to say that when you argue with stupid, the people watching might not be able to tell the difference. I thought of this the moment a man online passionately claimed that there is nothing strange or alarming about a penis spewing blood if the person attached to that penis has delusions or fantasies about being female. It wouldn’t be a medical emergency, he insisted. It would just be a man on his period. The number of likes this comment got, however, informed me that I had missed a shift in some portion of society’s collective sanity.
Truthfully, I don’t often get into discussions about transgenderism. Sometimes I’ll go to sites like Ovarit and scroll through posts looking for a conversation to contribute to, but none inspire me to do so. A picture of a conventionally unattractive man dressed like Hello Kitty? No. Drag queens? No. Run of the mill male depravity? No. Nothing new to add there.
But just a few weeks ago I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in seven years on the opposite side of the planet from where we’d last spent time together: South Korea. We perused the streets of a popular shopping neighborhood called Myeongdong and wandered into a store called Spao where we came across pajama sets available in patterns of the four Hogwarts houses. My friend grabbed the Slytherin set for another friend of hers back home in Taiwan and I impulsively grabbed a Ravenclaw set for myself. They looked comfy.
Later over dinner, she began despairing over the condition of the United States. Despite being American, she hadn’t lived there in seven years so all of her information was coming through social media. Her concern for America, therefore, mainly pertained to the trans genocide and that even though all her friends still enjoyed Harry Potter, she could not bring herself to purchase any products that would give royalty payments to the Wicked Witch of the North: JK Rowling, citing her essay.
“You’re free to do what you like,” I said, “though in the grand scheme of things I found JK Rowling’s essay rather tame and abundantly generous.” My friend thought her tone was condescending. “The situation in the UK surrounding that kind of thing is quite severe, not sure if you’re aware of that. America by comparison is very behind on the conversation.” She said she’s constantly concerned about her trans roommate from college who she had long since lost touch with.
“Concerned how?” I asked. “What do you think is happening to your trans roommate? What rights do I have that they don’t?” She couldn’t answer and instead just said that she simply wanted everyone to be happy. I barely kept myself from calling her naive. “It’s all backward. Hardcore liberals and hardcore conservatives are all thinking the same way these days despite getting to their conclusions through different schools of thought. Horseshoe effect and all that. Girls like pink and boys like blue? Give me a break. I’m against all of it. I have no gender identity and the suggestion that I do I take as a personal insult. I’m just a female human being regardless of how I feel about the matter. And for what it’s worth, plenty of those who call themselves trans like JK Rowling just fine. Their opinions are just as diverse as any other group of people. Who’s to say what your old roommate thinks about her?”
I briefly wondered if she’d walk out on me. While my friend would certainly consider herself to be a feminist, she is also of the opinion that the issues feminism set out to tackle were all accomplished decades ago and there is nothing to be concerned about being a woman in the world today. That’s how deep her indoctrination runs. On an average day, I don’t have the energy to sort through such a tangled mess. It’s not like she’s in the business of getting intimately involved with men, so I find it easier to simply let her frolic through life clutching photos of her favorite K-pop boyband member and husband in Christ, Baekhyun of EXO.
She didn’t walk out on me though probably because she doesn’t like conflict. It would also be quite difficult to do with us both sharing a hotel room in a country foreign to both of us. If anything, I silently hoped that perhaps the cold bucket of water I just threw on her would help her snap out of it.
Our shopping continued to a massive underground mall. By this point, I was already very tired. I’d never been much of a fan of shopping. But this was her day to decide the schedule which meant no museums or historical sites were on the agenda. Just shopping. We ended up at one of many cosmetics stores, the fifth one of the day. As usual, she began to peruse the shelves picking up sample products and rubbing them on the back of her hand. Feeling kind of dizzy by this point, I announced I was just going to sit on the bench outside for a little bit.
Ninety minutes later, she was still in the store. I watched her through the window, my friend who had always been thin now weighing a good twenty pounds less than she did back in college standing before a large picture of a female K-pop idol from a group called IVE whose “it girl” popularity revolves around how abnormally skin and bones she is. I knew she was struggling with near constant bouts of depression and anxiety. I knew her job stressed her out so much that she had become accustomed to operating on three hours of sleep a night mostly due to her now observed spectacular ability to waste time and seeing firsthand for a few days how her evening cosmetic skincare routine took three hours to complete. Everything she wore in this wintery season in Seoul was constricting and impractical despite so often buying heaps of new clothes her mother had to stage an intervention to save her living space from the mounds of fabric that covered her studio apartment. Her face kept as pale as possible through any number of products I couldn’t name even if I tried asking before we walked out the door into a bustling city that could very well be the beauty industry capital of the world if she looked pretty.
“You look like eleven,” I said on one occasion, not amused by my own joke.
I could tell that by spending time with me, she was hoping things would be exactly as they once were back in college. Late night study sessions, identifying a favorite ramen spot, and indulging in our mutual love of K-pop music. But seven years is a long time. She’d commented over dinner that day that I looked tired. I just shrugged and said, “Well, I guess I’ve seen some shit.”
As she finally wrapped up in the store emerging with a shockingly few amount of items, we continued walking along, and a somewhat recurring thought came to me with more clarity than it usually does.
My friend is trans. Not in the sense that everyone speaks of, but in the sense that she is as captured by gender as any Fox News anchor or blue-haired Starbucks barista who go out of their way to depart from their natural selves and adorne the femininity costume. As much as likely most users on Ovarit. As much as my childhood friend walking down the aisle in white. As much as my sex-positive polyamorous pansexual friend confused why her exploits left her feeling “not great.” As much as my mother who raised me. As much as my sister who, when I was twelve, tried to drag me kicking and screaming and crying into Victoria’s Secret to buy me my first bra.
“I DON’T WANT TO BE SEXY!” I wailed to amused onlookers. “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME!”
The trans trend is the natural evolution of a society within which gender is doctrine - the doctrine of male culture. The tool of feel-good subjugation with hollow rewards. A situation in which parameters are set so that the rebellious “they/them” and the “trad wife” are still painstakingly following the same set of rules.
And maybe that’s why I tend to not talk about this stuff all that much. Certainly not in random internet debates with anonymous avatars. The sheer enormity of the master’s influence makes it so few people ever seem to be asking the right questions.
Even if they did, who’s really listening?
Ah… that does sound too defeatist for my own tastes. I suppose I’m just wanting to ask these questions in arenas where it feels like it matters in situations where time and energy allow for it.
My friend and I have returned to Taiwan and the United States respectively. She still speaks to me online as she always has. The concert we met up to see in Korea was spectacular. The gender topic hasn’t been brought up again but maybe someday it will. Perhaps the seeds I, for once, not so discretely planted will take root. I remain quietly confident that the trans portion of this equation will topple itself eventually. But in the grand scheme of things, that is little more than a recent outgrowth of the thing that infects us all deeper than most of us would like to admit. It takes deliberate unlearning to free yourself.
And once you do? That’s when the real backlash will begin.
Thanks for this account. You really capture and untangle patriarchal thinking (in the current form of gender ideology ) and how it organizes our lives in so many subtle and unspoken ways.
Once you stop using genderist language and ideas, you cease to feel the need to prove how men are men over and over again. This endless shadowboxing GC is engaged in? It's against their own beliefs. Namely that "transwomen" are not quite male. Or that it's a very rude and hateful thing to say that they are. And you know it when your suggestion to just trash the word transwoman altogether is met with opposition and them saying that some vital meaning would be lost if you don't include someone's gender feelings in the conversation.
As to your friend is trans part... I think there's another meaning to this. The femininity that people equate to biological womanhood requires constant maintenance in the form of all these products and practices. Women often aren't even recognized as women if they do not wear the feminine costume.