Jordan is a douchey trans guy played by Jennifer Connelly, Ricky is a faggy non-binary trans boi played by a young Queen Latifa and gets hella ass all the time, Angela’s little sis is a straight trans girl, the nerdy kid Brian is a soft futch dyke, Angela’s Mom Patty is a male binary identified ultra-femme fag and everyone else is pan and super queer and rocking a radical butch-femme thing. Angela’s cis & straight tho, LBR.

Everybody calls me pretty.

[[[Yo, when I talk about my trans*ness in this piece, and the way [it is/I am] marginalized, I’m also talking about my femmeness. I didn’t mean to exclude femmeness from the discourse, I just usually center my thought around the trans*ness of my identity, and I don’t think my femmeness can be extricated from my trans*ness. Also, I’m white, and I haven’t really addressed race in this piece, even though Deep Lez’ post that I’m responding to addressed her racialized experience directly. The way Deep Lez talked about her experience helped me find language to talk about mine, in a sorta self-decolonization kinda way, but I’m not trying to say her experiences and mine are the same. Just noting that. ]]]

I hear it all the time, from people I know and don’t know, from people whose friends said “[I saw the most gorgeous lady (as these stories are related to me)/I saw this really [interesting/weird] looking person (as I imagine they really go down most of the time)] [on the street/at a party/at the restaurant (where I work)]” and it turned out to be me. Sometimes the comment is specific, relating to my hair or my shoes or whatever, but more often it’s just ‘you look pretty.’ People seem really eager to say this to me, loudly, especially within earshot of other people, especially people they want to impress or earn respect from. I’m pretty tired of it.

I get that this behavior is sometimes-or-maybe-often well intentioned. I know that sometimes when people call me pretty too much or too loudly or too quickly or when I look a mess, they’re trying to show that they support me, and that they think I belong, or that I’m succeeding at being trans*. They’re trying to show they see me as a real girl, or at least to pretend that they do. But, like, my gender and embodiment and trans*ness aren’t about being pretty. Being pretty isn’t the only measure of the quality of a lady, and moreover, my gender isn’t about other people (mostly). My trans*ness is about feeling less pain in my own body, about feeling true to myself. So being called pretty doesn’t really make me feel better about my body or reassure me that my trans*ness is a success; that sense of success, of progress, comes at introspective moments alone, maybe in the shower or in front of a mirror, when I realize I’m feeling slightly less dysphoria or slightly more love for my body. But that love, or that lessening-of-pain, is not the same as feeling pretty.

I don’t feel very pretty. I feel like this grotesque hairy trans* lady, isolated in an unspeakable territory between sexes, my softening skin drooping eerily over my brow ridge, bulbous nose, and cleft chin. When people make a big deal out of how pretty I am, I feel like they’re really just awkwardly drawing into focus how repulsive I look. It’s on that Miss Piggy farm animal shit that Julie Blair’s talking about, where when people make a big deal out of me doing gender right (‘cause that’s what being hot is, right? Doing gender right? Who said that?) they’re really saying ‘you’re so pretty for a trans* lady because trans* ladies are always really ugly and you are too only I like yr makeup or whatever so, like, less so’. This bestowing-of-the-blessing-of-prettiness that people do to me happens in particular marked ways. Namely, it’s done to me in ways that it isn’t done to cis girls. It’s done repeatedly, publicly, socially, and out of proportion with my appearance. So now, when anyone tells me “you’re so pretty,” I hear “You’re so pretty for a trans* lady” and the FOR A TRANS* LADY rings in my fucking ears. In this way, it feels like a way for other people, almost always cis women, and circumstantially in my life usually queer women, to constantly re-assert my sexlessness, otherness, and inferiority. Like, if I was really a girl, really equal to these cis women, they’d hold me to the same standards of attractiveness they hold other cis folks to, and them calling me pretty might mean something. But the fact that they call me pretty so easily and thoughtlessly really emphasizes that they don’t hold me to these standards, which reminds me that they see me as fundamentally other. Not that, like, I want to be cis or seen as cis—I love being trans*, it’s the only thing I wanna be. But being treated markedly as a non-cis person when that means being treated as an inferior gets old. This positioning of my body and myself as less than, as other, happens in other ways as well. It happens in the constant intentional misgendering that I get (not that intentional misgendering is the only kind I experience) from ‘powerful ladies’, usually cis self-proclaimed feminists who are working out their struggles against the patriarchy by targeting me for their girl-on-girl hate. It happens in the way cis ladies regularly touch my body without permission, in ways that would be obviously not ok to do to a ‘real woman’ (which I’m not, I’m non-binary, but I want rules of respect for women’s bodies applied to mine, for reasons) like [staring at/grabbing] [my tits/my ass]. All of this treatment functions to remind me that in the eyes of others, I’m sexless, fake, and a spectacle; that maybe I did well but mostly that I’m not supposed to do it, where in this case it means femininity.

But all this gets heavier and weirder and scarier when this behavior, the calling-me-pretty, extends to sexualizing me in public space. I’ve been getting sexualized in public more often recently and it feels really uncomfortable. The sexualization comes from cis queer and non-queer women, and it’s mainly enacted in the form of one woman talking to another about me, right in front of me, as if I wasn’t there, about my appearance, in a manner that is subtly-to-explicitly charged with a sense of attraction or desire. So, like, some dyke will say loudly to their friend, “Isn’t she SO fucking hott?”. It feels like these folks are scoring open-minded-ness points off my body—I basically feel like I’m being made into a fetish object. That’s when it gets to be on this fetishized, over-sexualized shit that Deep Lez is taking about. As she said,

can’t i just be a person? can’t i just be a person that is out in a space?

I feel like, do I always have to be a trans* lady, a femme, always sexualized in a way that others me and distances me from everyone? It feels like a form of girl-on-girl hate, where cis ladies project the sexualization we all experience under rape culture forward onto me. But I think this kind of social signaling primarily serves as a way for cis women to garner group attention or flirt with each other, using my body as a fetishized intermediary. Like, saying a trans* lady is hott makes you seem radical or accepting or super-queer in some communities, and therefore makes you more fuckable. All this leaves me feeling violated, othered, and disrespected. It’s also a method of keeping me in my place, a way for cis women to exercise their cis privilege & power over me, because this sexualization happens down a power gradient, in a social context in which it would be totally inappropriate and unwelcome for me to make sexualizing comments in return. I’m expected to say ‘thank you’, which I often do because what other choice do I have?

But really, this sexualization hurts so much because it’s insincere. I haven’t been fucked once in the past year, including the five months since I started hormones. My body is clearly not considered an object of legitimate sexual interest or engagement by anyone in my “community”. People are willing to playfully call me pretty, fawn over my makeup, (which LBR doesn’t look that good y’all, it’s meant to be grotesque) and/or flirtily call me sexy, especially (and maybe circumstantially but still definitely) in ways that make them more fuckable to other queers, but when it comes down to actual sexual contact and relationships with me, it turns out everyone (this is the actual verbatim response I was given recently, by someone I thought respected me) is “only interested in real pussy.”

Going out and socializing with a bunch of white dykes, with whom I identify but who can’t identify with me, who sexualize me and fetishize my gender and then take each other home and fuck each other leaving me alone, is getting really fucking old. I don’t see any way out, I can’t imagine a future I which I can ever have sexual experiences with another person, so I’m considering celibacy. I just can’t take this anymore.

I’ve been trying to believe there’s an answer to these problems, that somewhere there’s someone with whom I could share mutual attraction and desire and respect. I’ve been trying really fucking hard to believe that, because negativity and depression are NOT SEXY and NOT helping my chances of having a functional relationship or getting laid. Ima try to go back to that hoping and looking and trying sometime, but right now it’s just not happening. Sorry if it’s a turn off, but I won’t let that get in the way of me articulating my lived experience.

What I don’t want is for people to programmatically stop calling me pretty, like they’ve started calling me she except when they forget. I DO want people to examine what they’re feeling and thinking and trying to communicate when they call me pretty, and to examine the difference between how people talk about my body compared to others’. Like, you can call me pretty—well, you can say or do whatever you want, obvi, but I don’t always hate being called pretty. Just think of how super cute badass gals usually tell each other they look good: calmly, matter-of-factly, like it’s a given. “Oh hey, yr hair looks killer.” If yr telling me I look pretty because you notice I did something new or special, ok. If you’re telling me to send a coded message about yr politics or my position in a social context, or to score points with someone else, please find another way to do those things. Oh, and it rarely hurts to do what I do: ask a consent-acquiring question before you speak. “Would it be ok for me to make a comment about yr [body/appearance]?” That’d be cool, if someone wanted to show care. ‘Cause, like I’m trying to be an educator here, right? So it’d be nice if people could think about how they [treat/talk about] other people & their bodies in general, not just me and mine. Thanx.

(Source: deeplezstonerwitch)