Trans and femme.

So far in this blog I've been hammering home the concept of femme vs. trans: the idea that, for a lot of male TVs, notions of femaleness are (in my opinion) false and that our natures are actually femme (and male). And I'm as sure as can be that this is true for many of us.

But – and it's a big but – I must emphasize that the opposite can also be true: that some TVs are not femme (or at least not just femme) but trans; that notions of femaleness can be correct too. And in this case it might be considered that such natures are obscured by femme: that it is only after someone's femme has been allowed free expression that they can get past the "feminine" aspect, realize there is more to their gender issues, that they are essentially female, and (possibly) that they need to transition.

Perhaps it's that journey – from male to femme to female – which gives rise to the old joke: "What's the difference between a cross-dresser and a transsexual? Two years." (cf Anders, ‘The Lazy Crossdresser’, p5). Obviously that's not always true, any more than my conception of femme (contra trans) is always true, but it's sufficiently true (i.e. sometimes) for the joke to be funny. And there are many other truths as well, and which holds for which person is not for anyone but them to say. In this I think it should be as Patrick Califia once wrote: The best we can do is speak our own truth, make it safe for others to speak theirs, and respect our differences.

While on the subject of trans and femme, I should admit that using quotes from ‘My Husband Betty’ to illustrate my “not woman, but femme” post was somewhat suspect. Because Betty herself is both femme and female (and has since transitioned). I might also add that the author, Helen Boyd, doesn't need any instruction on these matters from me. (It has been, and is, the other way round.) Nor any lessons on femme and feminism either. Here I'd just like to flag her recent interview on Safe Space Radio, in particular the part (from 18:13 to 22:41) with "the shoe store story". I've made a transcript (a nice pun!) of that section (in case the interview gets taken down), but it's much better to go and listen.

femme guy!

Reading a new post in one of my favourite blogs (The Femme's Guide) a couple of days ago, I noticed a link to another blog: femme guy!. Awesome! Another male femme blog. I went there straight away.

It turns out that this one started over a year ago, with the following introduction:

Welcome to my fabulous new blog about femme guys! (Because, like everyone else, I desperately needed more reasons to spend time on the computer.)

I have noticed over the last little while (by which I mean, like, ten years) a distinct lack of internet resources targeting the community of femme guys. Believe me, I’ve looked. The most I’ve ever managed to find is one or two laudatory mentions in a few blogs, one or two Facebook and Livejournal communities, and a whole lot of hate.

And yet it’s not like there’s any lack of us. You can’t turn around in queer men’s spaces without walking right into a profusion of non-traditionally-masculine-presenting fellows. But you’d never notice it – our whole existence is silenced, denied, and (paradoxically) vigorously shouted down. A galaxy of kinks, fetishes, and types of every kind are catered to (so much the better!), but femme boys are nowhere to be found among them. (And yet someone must be having sex with us, considering how much of it we have.)

So this is a blog about men, boys, and other male-identified folks of all varieties, embodiments, karyotypes, and histories who are femme, feminine, effeminate, non-masculine, faggy, nancy, sissy, faerie, limp-wristed, limp-fisted, genderqueer, gender enhanced, and gender euphoric – anything but gender-normative.

As you'll swiftly gather, femme guy is coming at this from a different direction to me: from queer men's space. Whereas my blog is coming from straight men's space. Or, perhaps more accurately, femme guy is coming from queer gay men's space and I'm coming from queer straight men's space. But anyway...

What I like most about femme guy is how he, as a gay man, is taking in a lot of ideas from trans writing (Julia Serano is a particular favourite of his). Because that's almost a mirror to my own journey: from a trans perspective (initially) and absorbing ideas from queer/gay writing (albeit more lesbian than gay male, but never mind). The result is that aspects of two men's very different identities – gay, straight, queer, trans – are all connecting at femme.

I just have to say: that pleases me immensely :)

It's not about sex; it's about gender.

How many cross-dressers have said those words? I've said them myself – and meant them. Meanwhile, significant others and the rest of the world look on, see us getting off, and think "yeah, right". But cross-dressers are not wrong and are not lying. It's just that the language we're all (CDs, SOs, everyone) using is inadequate.

Rather than "sex" and "gender", the crucial (and missing) word, I think, is sexuality. By sexuality I don't mean who you're attracted to (whether you're straight, gay, bi, or whatever); nor what turns you on as part of a sexual encounter (morphology, nakedness, latex, whipped cream, baked beans). These may be part of someone's sexuality, but they don't encompass it. Instead, I'm talking about another aspect: how you feel about yourself, your body, your desire; how you see yourself as a sexual being; and how you express it all.

For male cross-dressers that aspect might be exemplified along these lines: wanting to be the pretty woman in the room, the confident and sexy woman, the one that turns heads, the revamped Olivia Newton-John in Grease (never mind how implausible that thought); to feel that particular female sexual energy, not in a sexual act, but within oneself, as bliss.

To a certain extent a male cross-dresser can do that on his own. He can get dressed up, stand in front of a mirror, give himself the thumbs up (in female Fonz style), turn his own head (a good dose of self-deception is quite helpful there). Hence also, I'd guess, the practice by some CDs (not me in this case) of posting provocative photos online: so as to be the sexy woman in the virtual room, turning the virtual heads, responding flirtatiously to salacious (but anonymous) comments.

Of course, when a man's sexual feelings are heightened he may want to do something about it – and for a man by himself (with or without computer interaction) there is an obvious solution. But that, I think, is a consequence of his feelings, not the impetus for them. To put it more bluntly: he's not dressing in order to jerk off; he jerks off because his sexual feelings have been so amplified that he wants or needs to, and because he can. At the start he very likely had no such intentions at all; he just wanted to get dressed up.

So why wear women's clothes? After all, any man can dress to feel good about himself: perhaps powerfully masculine in a smart suit or uniform; cool and confident in t-shirt, jeans and a leather jacket (the Fonz proper); even sexy and gorgeous (handsome) for a night out. Yes, but those feelings are rather different from the ones we're after. I'd also suggest that they're not even male as such, but butch – the adjunct of femme – which brings me back to my blog theme.

Notice my use of the words "female" and "woman" in the third and fourth paragraphs above. That was deliberate; I wanted to put things in more familiar (for cross-dressers) and universal terms. But I'll say again now that "female" and "woman" seem inappropriate; that these are femme (not female) feelings; this particular sexual energy belongs to femmes (not women in general); that it's the femme who turns heads in this particular way.

In the end, for me, it probably is about sex after all, because it's about sexuality. But it's about gender too, because this facet of sexuality is inseparable from gender expression. And the taxonomy that connects these aspects of sex and gender in the most apposite way in this precise context is — wait for it — femme.

(This stuff becomes so much easier when you think about it in femme/butch terms and put woman/man to one side.)

Male femme, sexual fantasy and desire.

It is very common for male transvestites, irrespective of their (our) sexual orientation, to fantasize about sex with men. Indeed, most of my sexual fantasies are about men. But..... I'm not really attracted to men. (And that's not some lame sort of denial: I have had sex with men, but it doesn't do it for me where it counts.) So what are these fantasies about?

Looking at the lesbian paradigm once again: butch/femme is a significant erotic pairing, two women's mutual desire for each other's differing forms of gender expression as women. That's not to say that all lesbians follow this paradigm. They don't. Even within butch and femme, the pairings femme/femme and butch/butch are perfectly valid. And very many (most?) lesbian relationships do not involve butch or femme at all.

But in this instance I'm thinking, as a femme man, specifically about butch/femme as the focus of desire. And given that I fantasize about men but don't actually desire men, perhaps what I really desire is butch women and just use men as butches by default (which, given everything I've said and think about gender, is a bit crass of me, but there you go; sexual fantasies don't have much to do with well-considered gender analysis).

The question is: do I really desire butch women? I've always thought it was androgynous women I liked, but, hmmm..., maybe it's butch women. For instance, listing some of the women on film that do it for me: Sarah Connor in Terminator 2; Ripley in (especially) Alien 3; Vasquez in Aliens; Jordan O'Neil in GI Jane (after she's shaved her head of course); Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby; Kara Thrace (Starbuck) in Battlestar Galactica; Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager (if only for one particular scene in a turboshaft); Jean Seberg as Saint Joan (okay, that's quite soft butch there).

And then there's tomboys. How many films are there where the really cute tomboy (e.g. Doris Day in Calamity Jane) gets a makeover – a girly haircut, a pretty dress, make-up. And there! So she was pretty after all! She looks so much better now! No, she doesn't. She looked great before, you morons.

Is it possible to go further than the personal and suggest that a lot of straight male cross-dressers – male femmes – who fantasize about men, might in fact be attracted to female butches? I don't know. But perhaps it's something worth considering at least.

Femme and feminism.

A current debate on the mHB message boards (in which I've been trying to propagate my view of male cross-dressing as femme) has had me thinking (tangentially) about how feminist-informed women perceive of male cross-dressing and, from there, how feminism perceives, or has perceived, of femme expression in general. The following is an attempt to summarize my (ongoing) thoughts in a coherent way...

Femme and feminism have often been uncomfortable companions and the reason for that is not hard to apprehend. Prior to feminism (in particular, the second wave) women were generally expected to dress in a certain way, behave in a certain way, conform to the oppressive gender rules laid down by a male-dominated society. Among the many achievements of the feminist second wave, one was to say a resounding "no" to all this. And the importance of their (albeit partial) victory cannot be overstated. Freedom (including gender freedom) means nothing without the ability to say "no".

However, in gaining that gender freedom, a converse (though not opposite) one was (perhaps inevitably) constricted: the freedom for some women to choose to present in a fem(me)inine style, to wear pretty or sexy clothes, and so forth. Such presentation was disparaged, as it was held to be reinforcing the gender status quo, and that women who opted for it were either dupes or traitors: in either case collaborators in their own oppression. This disparagement was heightened within lesbian feminism, as the erotic roles of butch and femme were further derided for aping an unenlightened and heteronormative conformity.

Eventually femme feminists themselves said "no". We are not puppets of the patriarchy; we are not perpetuating gender stereotypes. We are informed by feminism and we choose this form of gender expression. ("Refusing the fate of Girl-By-Nature, the fem(me) is Girl-By-Choice" – Lisa Duggan & Kathleen McHugh in their Fem(me)inist Manifesto again.) We choose it because it expresses an essential part of who we are: femmes. In this, lesbian femmes (Joan Nestle, Madeline Davis, Jewelle Gomez, Amber Hollibaugh, Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt, ...) have been in the vanguard: because femme is also about sexuality, and the denigration of femme (and butch) struck at the erotic heart of their lives. Now, in the 21st century, there is a burgeoning femme pride, albeit still in the leftfield of queer and (trans)gender debate.

Nonetheless, the battle fought by the feminist second wave, the freedom to say "no", remains important (especially as that freedom seems once more to be being eroded – for an exposition of this topic see, for example, Natasha Walter's recent book ‘Living Dolls’). Because not all women are femme. It's not possible even to say "most" women, even in the simple majority meaning of the word. (As to the actual proportion – majority, minority, large or small – who can possibly say.) But it doesn't matter anyway. All that matters is that some women are femme; that they have the right to choose femme expression for themselves; and, equally, that other women have the right to choose otherwise.

Having got thus far, it is not much of a leap to realize that such gender freedom might also be necessary for men. That some men are femme, too, and have the same need to express it. And that, in doing so, those men are not necessarily maintaining gender based oppression, and are not just acting out their own stereotypical, hyper-sexualized visions of women. Rather, they are appropriating the major cultural signifiers of femme (women's clothes) and using them to express their own femme personalities. Or so it seems to me. Even if most such men would probably not explain themselves in anything like those terms.

Regarding men's ability within society to express their femme, that is perhaps another question – or perhaps, another battle. At present western culture is barely tolerant of male femininity (in whatever form it takes: trans, femme, sissy, ...), but to some extent at least this is our own fault. Women did not gain such gender freedom as they do have without fighting for it. As a wife of a cross-dresser (quoted by Helen Boyd in ‘My Husband Betty’) put it: "We had to burn our bras. You're going to have to wear yours in public." In the light of everything I've just written, that seems a very pertinent comment.

So, what is femme?

I'd really like to answer that question, but femme is an elusive quantity and as such is difficult to define.

We cannot begin with a definition; we cannot offer assurances of any kind. For "fem(me)" is not an identity, not a history, not a location on the map of desire. The fem(me) body is an anti(identity)body, a queer body in fem(me)-inine drag.

— from A Fem(me)inist Manifesto by Lisa Duggan & Kathleen McHugh.

What cannot be seen, what cannot be held or pinned down, is where femme is (...) Femme is inherently "queer" – in the broadest application of the word – as bent, unfixed, unhinged, and finally unhyphenated. Released from the strictures of binary models of sexual orientation and gender and sex. Released from a singular definition of femme.

— from the introduction to Brazen Femme by Chloë Brushwood Rose & Anna Camilleri.

Interestingly, and significantly for me, in the same piece Brushwood Rose and Camilleri relate a "pivotal acquaintance" with a man they call "Jim":

Both of us had begun to sense the need to articulate femme as a gender experience that is never tied to biological sex. (...) What would it mean to be a femme and not a woman? What would it mean to be femme outside of a lesbian framework? What is it that femmes have in common? What makes femme different from femininity?

And then we met Jim. A straight man. A femme. Jim lived and worked as a man. Jim also lived and worked in what most would describe as "women's clothes", but what might also be described as "high femme" clothes. Many people would call Jim a transvestite. Jim called himself femme.

Our brief but pivotal acquaintance with Jim helped us think about the common dangers and pleasures of femme as an experience that is informed by and also exceeds lesbian herstory; as a way of being that cannot be described as quintessentially feminine. Instead, femme might be described as "femininity gone wrong" – bitch, slut, nag, whore, cougar, dyke, or brazen hussy. Femme is the trappings of femininity gone awry, gone to town, gone to the dogs. Femininity is a demand placed on female bodies and femme is the danger of a body read female or inappropriately feminine. We are not good girls – perhaps we are not girls at all.

Perhaps not, no :)

As for the original question: I guess I'll return to it in subsequent posts.

Not woman, but femme.

Helen Boyd's My Husband Betty is one of my favourite trans-related books, in particular for the way she elucidates the difficulties faced by female partners of male cross-dressers. But on rereading it (yet again) a few passages have already (I'm up to page 51) stuck out:

(p14) how insulting it could be when your husband, in professing a desire to "feel like a woman," dressed in clothes that to you made him resemble someone you'd call a slut.

(p44) I don't really buy the argument that men who crossdress are getting in touch with their "inner woman" because they so rarely have any interest in the actual lives of women. What they are interested in is their own expression of their own version of femininity, which is a whole different thing altogether. What I see and experience and hear about is closer to that idea than any other, that crossdressers are men, with men's notions of what women are, who then choose to express those male-centered ideas about femininity in a very masculine way. They don't help with the laundry or make dinner, they don't train themselves to make more room for others' needs than for their own. They continue to be the same guys they always were, in dresses.

(p45) men understand their own "femininity" as men, and they know women through their own men's eyes. That may be why some crossdressers portray such a sexualized image of women when they dress as them. It may also be why their notions of femininity seem a little absurd and outdated.

The trouble arises, I think, from the use (by cross-dressers themselves) of "woman/women" in those passages: "inner woman", "feel like a woman" – what do those statements even mean? They imply that "woman" is some unifying category, that every woman has the same feelings, experiences, needs, desires, etc, which is blatantly silly. Rather than "feel like a woman", it would be far more meaningful to say: "gain access to certain feelings that our society restricts to women".

And those feelings are femme feelings. Thus we can rephrase the above accordingly: "inner femme", "feel like a femme", "portray such a femme image", and so forth.

The correlation of "femme" with "woman" is familiar but false – clearly, because a lot of women are not femme. I'd guess that, as a woman with tomboy leanings, Helen herself is not femme. So she wrote (p14): "dressed in clothes that to you made him resemble someone you'd call a slut". Correction please: not a slut – femme. And quite likely high femme – often a cross-dresser's needs and feelings have to be relieved in only occasional outbursts, leading him to (over)compensate by upping his femme.

Incidentally, this also explains why (cf p25) the cross-dresser "devot[es] endless hours to ritualized crossdressing" instead of "taking care of children or cleaning the house". That is, because the cross-dresser's need is not to "be a woman" (whatever that might mean) but to express his femme. And taking care of children, cleaning the house – helping with the laundry, making dinner – have nothing to do with being femme. Indeed, they have nothing as such to do with being a woman either. They're merely gendered tasks imposed on women by the prevailing (male-dominated) culture.

The point is that the word "woman" is misplaced, I think, in a lot of explanations about male cross-dressing. Change it to "femme" and the explanations make much more sense – at least to me.

Male femme in vision.

To show what I mean, here's a picture of an archetypal male femme:


That's Eddie Izzard, of course.

As far as I know, Eddie doesn't describe himself as a male femme. Instead, he creates his own personal labels: "an executive transvestite", "a male tomboy", "two lesbians trapped in a man's body", and other such esoteric and piquant nomenclature.

But "male femme" is also appropriate, I think. Notice that Eddie is making no attempt to pass. There's no sort of woman there, no disguise (for whatever reason) about who he is. There's just a man in women's clothes, looking good, feeling good, displaying his femme style. A femme man.

A male femme.

Got me? :)