Double Gaslit — Transfeminine in America
By: Arabelle J.
Tags: Gender, Transgender, LGBTQ, Gender Roles, Women

Double Gaslit — Transfeminine in America

It’s time to rethink how we define gender

Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash

It’s a marvel the manipulations that society works into the minds of women. Why do we need smooth legs or arms? Or big breasts, small waists, or an army of tiny bottles holding nail polish and makeup?

The answer is simple: As women, we’ve been gaslit.

Society has manipulated us, psychologically, to believe that we’re somehow less than, inferior, found wanting without all of these things ‘smart’ marketers tell us that we need. And we’re told to be humble, cooperative, agreeable, and — always smiling — while society keeps gaslighting us.

Being manipulated to feel bad about the ‘faults’ that society creates for us is the definition of gaslighting. But, we’d be called aggressive feminist bitches for saying it.

Gaslighting²

So, what happens when you’re transfeminine too — a woman who is told, repeatedly, that she’s male to the point that she questions her own mind, identity, and sanity?

When you’re assigned male at birth, the world of the ‘well-meaning’ comes to help you be tough, strong, brash, confident, independent. Maybe they come to you — bringing their ‘helpful, encouraging’ messages — at church, at a counselor’s office, in your own home. They tell you how lucky you are to not have to deal with all that ‘girl’ stuff, so lucky. … but, everyone in society, regardless of gender identity, is gaslit. The only thing that changes is the expectations.

Somewhere, buried beneath your ‘social self’ and all that scar tissue from the gaslighting, your inner self stares out, screaming, at the world through your eyes.

The war in your mind starts just like this: You hold yourself against one set of unreachable standards while being cast against the rocks of another.

You feel trapped between the worlds of masculine and feminine, looking out, invisible — unable to comfortably fit into either.

How much time did I spend as a transfemme teen shaving and lotioning my legs, to a sheen as smooth as polished marble, to then just hide them under a pair of baggy, men’s jeans so that no one would ever see them?

Society is messing with our psyches. We’re being gaslit, twice — double gaslit, if you will.

Photo by Mario Azzi on Unsplash

But, I want your social burdens, not mine

Wherever you fall on the gender spectrum — cis, trans, nonbinary — we’re assailed by gendered expectations from all sides every day. Expectations are thrust at us, so that the world can keep going on, as it has, during the years and generations before us. Society wants to maintain that status quo, to keep the world comfortingly familiar for those not ready to move on.

It’s social inertia, instead of social change — and transgender people bear the onslaught of two sets of opposing expectations, those we strive toward and those we cast off.

We often miss the irony that ‘smart marketing’ has reinforced — and in some cases, created— each set of artificially gendered expectations, even the set we so heartbreakingly chase. We’re told we need to wear makeup, have the right clothes, get the right surgeries so that our inner selves can be visible, acknowledged, and accepted by society. It’s the only way we can reach the equilibrium between how people see us, how we see our souls, and how we want to be seen, or so we’re told.

By accepting the social burdens thrust upon the gender with which we identify, we feel closer to our true selves, even if those expectations may just be social constructs designed to sell razors, makeup, surgeries, or weight loss products.

Do we really want to take on the pink tax attached to feminized products or the arbitrary, time-consuming beauty rituals thrust upon women in our society?

We do because society has gaslit us too, convinced us that these will help us reach that acknowledgment of femininity so often denied to transfeminine society. Marketing creates needs and division where they didn’t exist and then convinces you that you can fill those needs by paying extra for the flowery shaving cream in the pink can.

Messaging everywhere, telling us who we are (and aren’t)

Photo by Author

Society tells women to be pretty, men to be productive.

Beyond the blue/pink thing going on in the covers of the magazines above, just look at the most prominent messages from the Girls’ Life cover: makeup, the pressure be popular and go to parties, relationship advice, hair tips, and some mysterious magick known as girl power.

Cis or trans, the expectations and judgment are there — for those who are forced into society’s construct of femininity and for those who have been forced out.

Meanwhile, over at Boys’ Life, boys are told to just bundle up, head outside, and have fun. The girls will take care of the rest.

The Boys’ Life cover doesn’t even show the model’s face. Maybe he’s wearing make-up. How would we ever know? The point is, obviously, that it doesn’t matter.

Rethinking Gender and Gender Identities

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

We’re programmed to see gender as a binary system, and our own gender as the one we’re assigned at birth. That model hasn’t worked for the LGBTQ+ community — and it’s not working in the larger world, just now awakening to the idea of gender identities that fall outside this mold.

We can’t see within our brains and see where innate gender ends and the gaslit social constructs about gender begin. When we spend our lives breaking away from one set of gendered expectations just to run into the prison offered by another, we reinforce the gaslighting — the idea that we’re not enough without buying into the messaging that society has thrust at us for that gender.

In the end, we chase some elusive ideal, created outside of reality and reinforced by society, marketing, social media, and even our own thoughts. What would femininity or trans-femininity be like, if all the voices grew quiet and just let us be, so that we could each just find our own equilibrium? Would we still be at war within ourselves?

As a society, we need to do better in listening to each other, and acknowledging the selves that members of the LGBTQ+ community reveal to us. As individuals on the gender spectrum, we need to gain the confidence to show ourselves as we are so that others looking for community know they’re not alone.