When cis people craft jokes that are only funny if the idea of a man in a dress is funny, we hear that they are not safe for us. An especially insidious one I heard recently: a man in a position of power joked he’d only wear a dress if it was a very expensive brand - a drag queen offered him one, and he declined with a panicked expression; they were my heroine in that moment.
But the joke he made only makes sense if “a man in a cheap dress” is inherently absurd. That is what trans femmes look like when we come out as adults. We did not have friends and family help us learn to dress and style ourselves when it was safe and accepted to make mistakes - if we had that kind of safe home environment that was emotionally attuned to us as the femme people we were, we would generally have come out as children. Even if we have steady work and resources, which many trans femmes do not, buying a totally new wardrobe is a daunting task. We’re gonna look a mess, at first. And we know it.
There’s a further twist of the “comedy” knife: we, the joke’s audience, are being asked to laugh. Trans femmes who transition during adulthood often are just waking up to the layers of denial and coping mechanisms that kept them safe and alive to reach the point they can finally meet themselves and transition. They may well not have a strongly established sense of self-worth, yet. Their traumas are raw and likely still hidden from their own view, emotional triggers that have not even been identified yet, let alone confronted. And these emotionally vulnerable people are being told to laugh at themselves, to degrade and devalue the tiny flickering light of hope and happiness they have painstakingly coaxed into being.
The naked cruelty of that is hard to overstate.
I honestly don’t give a fuck that comedy is hard to write if you cannot punch down. Do better. Don’t say things we cannot unhear.
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@Willow It's to the point that representation be damned, I sorta wish cis people would just stop talking about trans people entirely, and let us talk for ourselves. But they never will, same as they never have for any other marginalized group.
I remember at a previous corp where they had a whole bit in an all-hands meeting where 3 white (presumably) cis guy executives all talked with one another about International Women's Day and how important it was. And if that ain't it in a nutshell...
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@Willow holy shit I felt this so hard
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@Willow your second post points to a situation that is actually inherently fraught with more structural oppression than most people realize and that many cis women even have blinders toward.
Women are expected to have more varied outfits, while clothes are more expensive and don’t last as long, and they make less money do buy them, and buy makeup. So economic imbalance is inherent.
This it is far more difficult even that “a different wardrobe.” We are expected to immediately work within a system of structured oppression that many cis women decide to give up on, without error.
I know this is secondary to your main thesis, but bears mentioning that the barriers are far higher than most even realize.
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