Beauty and Misogyny
[…]Transgender politics are fundamentally conservative, dedicated to retaining the behaviours of the dominant and subordinate classes of male supremacy – masculinity and femininity.
[…]Lawrence also points out that quite large percentages, up to a third, of those men classified by Blanchard as androphiles (i.e. they relate to men sexually before and after surgery) also have histories of finding women’s attire and the idea of having a woman’s body sexually exciting. The creation of strict boundaries between “heterosexual” and “androphilic” transsexuals may be a losing battle in itself. The autobiographies of crossdressers and their websites certainly suggest that many are interested in men as well as women, or interested in men while they are wearing women’s clothes, at any rate.
[…]Those seeking transsexual surgery are exhibiting the most extreme form of autogynephilic behaviour.
[…]The industries that have grown up to service transvestites/transsexuals, whether straight or gay identified as such as specially designed clothes and shoes, makeovers, training in movement and voice, all of which are designed to train and accoutre men in traditional femininity – suggest that the “femininity” they aspire to is a social construction.
[…]On some websites men exchange their beauty tips with relish, since for them these practices deliver sexual excitement.
[…]One of the “most compelling benefits” is that t-girls “come to appreciate the inner beauty of femininity – often times even better than their female counterparts”. There is some truth in this. Many women see no inner beauty in the extreme practices of femininity that these men engage in. They may see the very high heels, the short skirts and makeup as degrading and time-wasting. Transvestites/transsexuals are invested in an old-fashioned, uncomfortable and degrading idea of femininity that many women reject in the present.
[…]Many men who transsex have achieved prosperity and security through male privilege and fancy something a little different.
The heterosexual transvestites/transsexuals can be pillars of the establishment. A newspaper article about the makeover studio “Rebecca’s Girls School” tells us that the clients are mostly from the lobby group TransGender Education Association (TGEA), which represents the interests of crossdressers, drag queens and pre- and postoperative transsexuals (Vitzhum, 1999).
[…]The wives of crossdressers find the men’s behaviour deeply disturbing and struggle to keep their marriages going because ending the marriage and becoming poor, lone women appears, to many, a worse alternative. As crossdressing men tend to be conservative in their values, so, it seems, are their wives.
[…]For conservative men who want to gain the sexual excitements of masochism it may seem impossible to remain “men” because they associate manhood with dominance. But women and lesbians do not base their selfdefinition on sexual masochism. This is not the very core of our understanding of ourselves as it is for autogynephiles like Peter from TGEA.
There is an arrogance in the assumption on the part of such men that their sexual interest in subordination makes them women, and in the concomitant campaigning to amend sex discrimination legislation so that their peculiar understanding of themselves as women is protected by the law as constituting womanhood.
[…]Men’s practice of femininity maintains the system of two genders and thus firmly locks male dominance into place rather than undermining it.
[…]Women’s opportunities in the world outside their marriages are restricted by male dominance but it is a man’s world inside their marriages too, in which they are required to service their husbands’ sexual interests however disturbing they find them.
[…]The female role under male dominance requires many varieties of servicing of men; that is, domestic labour and the labour of childrearing, emotional labour and sexual servicing, as well as the performance of femininity for the men’s excitement. The crossdressers only want to do the “femininity” part of the female role and they do not do it for women’s delight, quite the reverse. Thus wives complain that their husbands will spend hours primping while they do the housework as usual. Peggy gives what she says is a paraphrased comment from wives that she frequently hears: “He says he wants to be feminine and beautiful, so he primps in front of the mirror while I clean the house. He steps out of the bedroom vanity looking like Miss America and I look like a woman appearing in an Ajax commercial” (Rudd, 1990, p. 76).
[…]The major difference between the queer gender project and the feminist one lies in what is to be done with gender after the revolution. Feminist theorists such as Monique Wittig (1996), Janice Raymond (1994), Catharine MacKinnon (1989) expect that gender will be abolished, or simply be unimaginable in the egalitarian future. The stars of queer theory, on the other hand, seek to retain gender as an aid to sexual excitement.
