Pass / Fail

April 13, 2012 at 9:57 am Natalie Reed

Oh, passability. You most intensely problematic, yet utterly
inescapable, of trans concepts. What a rascal you are! I think it’s
time we had a little chat…

Passability is an issue that cuts pretty close to the bone for most
trans folk. It’s immensely complicated, tied in to a dozen or so
different larger issues, connects very deeply and intimately to
intensely personal things like one’s body image and dysphoria and
sense of validity in one’s identified gender, it’s hopelessly tangled
up in privilege and risk and oppression and the day-to-day facts of
our lives, and it breeds endless jealousy, disgust, resentment,
alienation, and internalized transphobia, hierarchies and conflict in
our own community. Can’t buy into it, because that elevates
cisnormativity as what we “ought” aspire towards, measures our
validity, beauty, worth and identity by cis standards, and positions
being a good little tranny as being all about being as cis-like as
possible. And you can’t really reject it either, because it’s deeply
connected to what most of us are working towards, which is a body and
social / cultural / interpersonal identity that are in accordance with
our sense of self, our gender identity. You certainly can’t seem to
ignore it, despite how many voices within the trans community want to
just scrap the word entirely, because it’s completely impossible to
talk about things like cis privilege, cissexism, transphobia,
gender-based discrimination, our experiences, our lives, our fears,
our beauty, our daily hassles and so forth without talking about
passing.

It’s a great big mess, really. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Since it’s not going anywhere, we might as well learn to talk about it
and deal with it, right?

There’s a lot that’s inherently problematic in the term itself, and
the assumptions that underlie simply choosing that word at all, and
that semantic structure. For instance, it’s a verb in which we’re the
active party. A trans person either “passes” or ze doesn’t, as though
ze has some kind of say in the matter, or that it’s somehow hir
responsibility, hir fault, if ze “passes” or… fails? A more accurate
way to structure it would be to speak in terms of being gendered
correctly or incorrectly. That the active party in this relationship
is the people around us, who are the ones doing all the perceiving,
and projecting their concepts of gender onto our presented selves.
That would provide a lovely shifting of that problematic issue of
who’s the one “doing” anything here, and whose “responsibility” it is.
But it’s clunky, and doesn’t really provide us a way to talk about the
trait, or set of traits, or state of being, by which a trans person
has the privilege of being consistently gendered in a manner
consistent with hir identity, which is something that sometimes we do
need to talk about. For instance, it’s nearly impossible to discuss
the issues surrounding the degree of media attention surrounding Jenna
Talackova, in contrast to far more socially significant stories
unfolding alongside her’s, without being able to talk about how much
she fits into cisgender standards of female appearance and beauty… her
“passability”.

Then there’s the sort of wider sociological sense from which “passing”
is derived. “Passing” conventionally meant to be able to be seen and
interpreted as others as being a member of a different identity or
class or group or race than one’s own. It has that dimension of
“deception” smuggled in through that etymology, which I’ve
consistently to held to be one of the most dangerous and harmful ways
in which transgenderism is conceived (as a “deception” or “trying to
be something you’re not” and all that stuff). To say, for instance,
that a trans woman “passes as female” is to quite clearly state by
implication that she’s not really female. We aren’t “passing ourselves
off” as members of our identified sex. We are the gender we are
presenting.

But we could say that in “passing” what’s going on isn’t that we’re
“passing” as female or male, but rather that we’re “passing” as cis.
Which, arguably, is presenting ourselves as “something we’re not”. But
here we run afoul of cisnormative assumptions again in that that sort
of universalizes the flimsy assumption of “everyone is cis until
proven otherwise”. It plays into the sense of cis as “normal” and
default, hyper-privileged to the point of being almost entirely
conceptually unmarked, such that our existence isn’t even factored
into perceptions, and for us to not be wholly obvious in our marked
status is somehow seen as trying to “pass” as the unmarked status.
This is tricky to explain… but as with the “ethical imperative of
disclosure” issue, the real problem here is the cis privilege that
allows people to walk around as though there’s no such thing as trans
people at all until that fact is staring you right in the face,
explicitly announcing its presence. The simple truth is that trans
people present with a range of phenotypes, which overlap, in varying
degrees, with those of cis members of any morphological sex. Sometimes
we look a way that you might read as “trans-looking” and sometimes we
look in a way that you’d read as “passing” (or hardly get read at all,
just fading into background noise), and most of the time we look
somewhere in between and how we’re gendered varies from context to
context, but regardless of what perceptions get imposed on us, that
range of phenotypes IS the range of phenotypes that trans people may
present. A “passable” trans woman doesn’t in any meaningful sense
“look like a cis woman”, she simply looks the way that many trans
women happen to look, which often happens to not be distinguishable
from the way cis women look.

And there’s definitely no precise identifiers. Everything is
gradiated, and everything is a whole greater than the sum of its
parts. Like there’s a general range of brow bossing that most people
consider within the norm for women, and there’s a general range of
brow bossing that most people would consider within the norm for men,
and the two overlap a bit. And there are women (cis and trans alike)
who are outliers for the average range and men who are outliers for
their average range. So effectively, there’s no specific point at
which brow bossing ends up giving you a “male forehead” vs. a “female
forehead”. It, in and of itself, won’t make any difference in terms of
whether you “pass” or not. And every single one of these gradiated,
gendered traits, pretty much all of which have male/female overlaps in
the middle,  end up playing off one another. A prominent Adam’s Apple
can go unnoticed on a woman. A large nose can go unnoticed. Big hands
can go unnoticed. A strong jawline can go unnoticed. Broad shoulders
can go unnoticed. A husky voice can go unnoticed. But if you take
enough of those features together, and the way people will
conceptually categorize you in that lightning-fast act of perceptual
gendering will shift.

But yeah, sorry, but as De Beauvoir pointed out like, 75 years ago,
there really isn’t any single, completely reliable test you could use
to delineate a line between “woman” and “man”.Much less in terms of
outward phenotypes. Instead we have a loose bundle of features that we
happen to use to make little speedy intuitive (unreliable) abductions
about unseen features of sex, like genitalia, chromosomes, whatever.

So we’re not “passing ourselves off” as cis just because our features
happen to be in a given range that you happen to not find any
difficulty abducting a gender from. Nor are we failing to “pass” just
because we happen to land in a range of features (just as available to
cis people) that strike you as unexpected and throw a bit of a kink
into the totally intuitive guessing-game your brain constantly plays
with everyone around you.

What’s really interesting, though, is that despite the degree to which
these features all overlap and gradiate, such that there really isn’t
any definable “trans look” or “cis look” (so if I catch you saying
“looks like a tranny”, “hot tranny mess”, or anything of the sort, I
will feed you to my cybernetic velo-cis-raptor, Mittens), is that the
line between being gendered male and gendered female can be extremely
thin. One has to work to be truly androgynous and genuinely confound
perceptions (though it’s still, of course, easy to confound people so
ignorant the thought of another human being being trans or intersex
never even crosses their minds). I remember that after about three
months of hormones, while I was still presenting as male, I very, very
suddenly started experiencing “male fail” (that is, being gendered
female, referred to as “miss”, “dear”, “love”, etc.). It happened
virtually overnight. The overall whole, from the sum of the parts, had
suddenly hit the tapping point at which people’s brains started to
occasionally find it easier to guess that I was female than guess that
I was male. I also remember one day where I was male-failed four times
over the course of the day, then was back to being consistently
“sirred” the next, when quite literally the ONLY change in my
presentation was changing my shirt from a v-neck to a crew-neck.

One of the ways the trans community has started to work around and
address some of the complex sociological factors into the issue of
passing, and how it reflects and plays in to a cis-dominated system,
is to frame it in terms of “passing privilege”. This helps. It reminds
us that passing doesn’t make us better, it doesn’t make us more “real”
as women or men, it isn’t because we’re more committed or serious or
worked harder or anything, nor does it have anything to do with being
more beautiful <http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/10/going-to-be-sticki...>
. It’s simply a matter of getting lucky, mostly just lucky with things
like bone structure and height and noses, the stuff hormones can’t
change. And it does typically operate as privilege… it’s a fortunate
set of inexplicable circumstances or traits that make one’s life a
little bit easier, particularly in terms of social power dynamics and
discrimination. If you have passing privilege, you don’t have to deal
with nearly as much misgendering, harassment, Othering, invasion of
privacy, etc. You have the option of stealth if that’s what you feel
is best for you. You’ll have your gender much more consistently
validated by others, and much less consistently invalidated.

But discussing it as privilege doesn’t quite cut it. For one thing,
the sociological privileges are not quite as clearly defined as they
initially appear, or as intuition would suggest. “Passing”, for
instance, is strongly correlated to increased risk of violence. This
is due to things like the aforementioned “deception” issue (which, it
suddenly re-occurs to me, is already explicitly coded into the term
“passing” itself… handy, these implicit associative chains, aren’t
they?), and “deception” (via “passing” as “something you’re not”) is
very strongly tied to transphobic violence. But more subtly speaking,
most murders are not committed by strangers. They’re committed by
people you know and trust. A trans woman who is visibly so is going to
be alienated from cis culture and individuals. People will harass her
much more, yes, but ultimately they’re not going to emotionally invest
themselves in her enough to care enough to commit murder. By virtue of
her alienation, she’s paradoxically protected from that level of harm,
and insulated by her social connections being primarily comprised of
those who are already accepting of her gender. Whereas a “passable”
trans woman will be able to assimilate into cis communities, and will
typically feel the desire to do so, often as stealth, and won’t have
any warning or buffer insulating her from letting violently hateful
people into her life, trusting them, and allowing them the emotional
investment that can fuel violence.

There’s also an element of the “passing privilege” discussion that
ends up being used as fuel for internal conflicts and resentment.
Speaking from experience, one of the most intensely insulting and
frustrating things one can experience in the trans community is having
another trans person lashing out at you because they assume from your
appearance or age that you “had it easy”. None of us have it easy. And
to be honest, I’ve seen a lot more of this sort of behaviour than of
the inverse, or people being shunned on account of not living up to
some kind of idealized standard of “passing”. Though there is that
whole creepy “I don’t want to hang out with other trans women unless
they’re super-duper passable because then I’ll get clocked too!”
thing.

Yeah…ur… there are a lot of very good reasons I don’t go to trans
support groups anymore.

But more than any of that, there’s a hell of a lot of problems in the
“passing” concept that simply reframing it as an issue of privilege
fails to address. Like what about the question the question of how
this relates to dysphoria, and the physical drives of transitioning?
Where does the line lie between that which we do simply to ease our
dysphoria and that which we do to attempt to “pass”? Is it even
POSSIBLE to draw such a line? So if it’s such an extension of the one
universality all transsexual people have in common, the desire to
adapt our bodies so as to reflect our genders, and so as to feel at
home in them, what exactly are we doing when we politicize it? Maybe
it’s better to treat “passability”, or the conditions that produce it,
as being an issue of dysphoria, and body image. To not allow
resentments to fester.

Though that leaves us with the problems that are quite explicitly
political in nature, that can’t be divorced from the tension between
collective and individual needs. Such as how passability affects our
visibility, as a community, along with all the deep importance
visibility has <http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/02/23/coming-out-fourth-...>
to our ability to move forward as a movement. And maybe there’s an
important difference between kinds of visibility? The chosen and the
imposed?

And that issue of visibility connects back to the subjectivity of the
dysphoria. If a questioning soon-to-transition person only ever sees
transition through a lens of people who don’t “look like” the cultural
standards for their identified sex, that’s a hugely discouraging
factor. Not just in terms of feeling like they’ll have to make immense
social sacrifices just to transition… but also in terms of developing
the impression that it doesn’t matter, they’ll never be able to ease
their dysphoria anyway.

I mean… damn. What are we supposed to do here? These are conversations
we need to have and need to avoid. Concepts that are deeply personal,
intimate and subjective but inherently political in their scope and
implications. Privileges that often play out as risks. A stable
condition that’s somehow emergent from ridiculously vague, scattered,
gradiated, overlapping, non-delineated things. An issue of presenting
ourselves as who we really are by not explicitly presenting all of who
we really are. The paradoxes start stacking up the very moment you
begin trying to wring any kind of answer out of “passability’s”
Adam’s-Apple-less neck.

I don’t know… maybe others are right in saying we need to ditch the
term entirely. Maybe these paradoxes only appear because I keep trying
to analyze a “something” that isn’t really there. Maybe the problem
with passing is that there is no problem with passing. Only a problem
with humans having a really inadequate way of perceiving gender. Maybe
it’s one of those situations where it’s only an important
“indispensable” issue because we’ve made it one.

But we all worry about it, don’t we?

Or are we really worrying about something else?

Is it really our worry, or are we just doing the grues’ work for them?

What are we really talking about when we talk about passing?

I’m not sure I passed this particular test.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/13/pass-fail/