Patry Whipped: I Can’t Believe It’s Not...
By Chef Jules Burns of Buttermilk Bakery
We Americans can be pretty dense sometimes.
We’ll buy “margarine” that claims to taste just like butter—we’ll even buy a product called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! It says right on the tin that it’s NOT butter, but we’ll use it like butter, and pretend it’s butter, and feel virtuous that we used such an inexact substitute instead of “the real thing,” since butter is supposed to be so unhealthy (let’s overlook, shall we, the potential health detriments of chemicals and processing typical of margarine and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!).
But on other, non-Kraft-or-General-Mills-product fronts, we’ll claim vehemently that natural is best and healthiest and most “real,” and that what we arbitrarily call “unnatural” is dangerous.
I’m talking here, most especially, about American attitudes towards transgendered people.
Now, before you misunderstand me, I’m not trying to suggest that a trans body has anything more to do with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! than does a cis body. I’m trying to point out the hypocrisy in the American habit of constructing some things as dangerously artificial while we happily accept artifice in other areas of our lives.
In fact, many people don’t want transfolk in public restrooms, where those ostensibly “natural” women will be applying their makeup, adjusting their polyester bras and flesh-colored stockings, spraying themselves with deodorants and perfumes designed to mask the scents of their bodies, unwrapping bleached, perfumed sanitary pads and popping Advil like candy so that they can continue to function in the daily world without harassment, shame, or danger.
In the mens’ room, fellows will be smoothing the creases from their “no-wrinkle” polyester shirts, combing in gel and hairspray to cover the bald spots their dyed hair doesn’t quite cover, gargling with mouthwash, snarfing a processed protein bar when nobody can see them do it, fixing their contact lenses and avoiding eye contact with other men (because no homo, man).
But we are a nation who values the natural human being.
Point is, most of us living in the United States (and most westernized countries) are not “natural.” Motorized transportation (and even bicycles), television, telephones change our relationship to “distance.” The foods we eat are, mostly, artificially-farmed and processed and driven to our local markets in artificially-propelled vehicles. Sex—whether hetero, homo, or otherwise—is a system of codes of display, performances (which may or may not feel really authentic). The act of sex often involves artificial lubricants, birth control pills, latex aids and implements. Birth is planned, and happens—when we choose it—in a hospital, with the benefit of electronic monitors, trained medical professionals, controlled environments. We get our news from television, computer, radio. We enjoy leisure activities always mediated by “artificial” technology (whether that’s a bicycle, DVD player, or electrically-driven brewery or distillery). We connect with each other via telephone and internet. So much depends on satellites. We sleep and wake, eat and work according to a clock we invented, not the movements of the sun’s “natural” body. Our bodies function and look the way they do because of “unnatural” things like shoes, shirts, toothbrushes, factories, motorized vehicles.
We get our teeth cleaned and whitened by dentists; our doctors monitor our heartbeats and the way our eyes focus. We take pills to address all manner of biological “problems,” from brain workings to liver function, artificial meds from “penis pills” to Vitamin C.
Yet the supposed naturalness of some bodies (cis ones) is often celebrated as superior to other (non-cis) bodies.
I’m not trying to suggest that we should abandon all of this “technology” for more “natural” living—I like my Doc Martens and Cornflakes as much as the next guy. I am not suggesting that trans bodies are not “unnatural,” either. I am simply suggesting that we need to stop imagining some bodies as more natural than others. We’re all pretty unnatural, and we seem to like it that way, to think about our unnaturalness as an improvement over an unmediated, natural (read: “savage”) condition. Except, for some reason, when it comes to aligning one’s sex with one’s gender.
In that case, unnatural is bad and dangerous.
I thought we were smarter than this.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better.
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