Are We Really Getting Mad Over Feminine Cis Straight Men?
By: Kravitz M.
Tags: Identity, Queer, LGBTQ, Kravitz M, Gender

Source: Wikimedia Commons

For the umpteenth time, cisgender straight men engaging in gender-nonconformity is becoming a heated debate. It isn’t just homophobes demeaning who they find degenerately effeminate, though — LGBTQ folks and “allies” hopped on the bandwagon, too. Coincidentally, this round of criticism seems to be happening at the same time conservatives are once again rallying to “bring back manly men,” this time in response to Harry Style’s recent Vogue photoshoot. The “queer” retaliation reveals some disturbing beliefs about other members of our demographic.

Say What?

A now-deleted tweet showcased a TikTok of a (presumably) cisgender straight teenager dancing to music in a skirt. One user, Mark, replied with:

Personally, if a man isn’t queer, I don’t want to see him in a fucking skirt, or with painted nails. It just never seems genuine and is literally for female attention.

Another, Flávi, added:

[I] guess like if the boy [is] comfy doing this even if he’s not queer, is great[,] but if the boy is doing for attention, he’s just getting stuff from queer culture to prey on girls which is scary[.]

Someone else, while not directly in response to the aforementioned TikTok, said:

The way cis men dress feminine has nothing to do with rejecting modern[-]day gender roles and everything to do with them using it an alternative way to attract women and mimic queer people without actually facing any of the backlash of being actually queer. [You’re] not painting [your] nails and wearing skirts because [you] ‘hate toxic masculinity[,]’ you noticed that you get applause and attention when you do these things.

Many more utterances of this rhetoric can be found floating around. Although they frequently express concern for LGBTQ people, these generalizations often directly antagonize many of us.

Hurting Our Own

Now, it would be foolish to act like oppressors don’t use progressive lingo and the affectations of the oppressed to disarm others. Men use feminist language to earn womens’ trust and hide their misogyny; even conservatives pick up on our buzzwords and weaponize them. Are there straight men who use femininity for exploitation? Of course. But that doesn’t mean that the two are inherently linked, and we must keep caution about how we discuss this phenomenon.

The “criticisms” we find in these tweets are rife with transphobia (especially transmisogyny) and biphobia, crude judgment against people already routinely painted as dangerous perverts by (primarily cisgender) straight and gay people alike. Not to mention, how many times have we been told by bigots that we’re only LGBTQ “for attention”? When and why did wanting attention — being the social creatures we naturally are — become something to be ashamed of in the first place? Why does dressing a certain way need to “seem genuine”? Did we forget that drag, too, is just a performance?

A Tale as Old as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The “man in a dress as villain” trope is hands-down the most popular example of transmisogyny in the media, particularly the horror genre. We find the latest example in JK Rowling’s new book, Troubled Blood (2020), featuring a male serial killer who crossdresses to stalk and gain the trust of his female victims. An incredible number — arguably, the vast majority — of transmisogynists envision transgender women precisely like this: predatory men who disguise themselves as women to “infiltrate women’s spaces.” Need we remind ourselves yet again of the controversy behind letting them use women’s restrooms?

Assuming people’s intentions for dressing or acting a certain way that they may simply enjoy is ridiculous enough. However, the mindset that (straight) men’s gender-nonconformity is motivated specifically by a desire to exploit women (curiously, no one ever says it could be to trick gay or bisexual men) is especially dangerous to transgender women regardless of sexuality (though in different ways; people accuse transgender women — deemed male by society — seeking relationships with men as trying to “tricking” them into homosexual activity,” while equating transgender women seeking relationships with women with abusive straight men).

Believing that men are, in general, naturally predatory (or naturally anything, really), only works if one believes that the categories of “man” and “woman” are natural, immutable, and mutually exclusive to begin with. Besides all the other dangers that come from this rhetoric (including, but certainly not limited to, excusing female abusers, silencing male abuse victims, and encouraging the racist visions of black men as rapists) this gender essentialism demonizes — and just plainly fails to account for — transgender people. It’s one of the main contributors to the notion that transgender women are irrevocably “socialized male,” thus particularly hazardous or even straight-up misogynistic for “trying to be” women.

When we still live in a society that disregards transness and teaches us to assume gender on sight, characterizing men in these ways directly endangers transgender people, especially transgender women.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bisexual?

When the London Lesbian and Gay Centre opened in 1984, bisexuals were banned for five years due to the belief that bisexual men sexually threatened lesbians. Sheila Jeffreys — who also wrote that “transsexualism should be seen as a violation of human rights” — also claimed that bisexual men were “potentially just as bothersome to women as any heterosexual men.” Bisexual men were unwittingly thrust into the spotlight in the ’80s thanks to the AIDS crisis. It wasn’t good publicity. We were consistently portrayed as transmitters of AIDS leading unfaithful double lives, leading to the media trope of us being “sexualized killer[s].”

In an article detailing bisexuality’s dubious status in British gay liberation politics in the 1970s, Martha Robinson Rhodes notes that:

[Robert] Baker argued, “There builds up a distasteful portrait of a man who despises homosexuals and despises women but will cheerfully stick his cock up the arse of either before swaggering off to enjoy the missionary position and a deep meaningful relationship with ‘his woman’”. Crucially, the review did not just criticize [Colin] MacInnes [author of Loving Them Both: A Study of Bisexuality and Bisexuals] as a lone individual. His “rampant male chauvinism” was used to make a wider point about bisexual men’s dominance. For example, Baker responded to MacInnes’s suggestion that bisexual men would “behave as ‘males’” during sex with men as well as during sex with women by arguing that this behaviour meant “being vicious, egotistical and sadistic I suppose”.

People frequently hurl the “sex-crazed” characterization onto bisexuals regardless of gender, but bisexual men receive much more explicit forms of this stigma, not only due to our same-gender attraction (thus sharing the hypersexual stereotype with gay men) and the fact that different-gender attraction is often discredited in LGBTQ circles (that people often act are just “gay” circles), but because men’s sexuality is generally painted as violent.

A number of people envision men’s sexual attraction to women as misogynistic and predatory almost by design (radical feminism is often a hotbed for this belief). This, combined with the global denial that bisexuality actually exists, means that straight and bisexual men (and, by extension, cisgender and transgender straight men — yes, some transgender people are straight!) are rarely distinguished when it comes to this thought process. No wonder most bisexual men bury themselves in the closet.

Too Queer for Society, Too Bisexual for “Queer”

The aforementioned tweets have something in common: they paint “queerness” as incompatible with different-gender attraction, which, ironically, virtually half of LGBTQ people experience. Plenty of self-identified queer men actively want to attract women and plenty of self-identified queer women fancy gender-nonconforming men. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Many gay folks, whether they realize it or not, treat the word “queer” as just a stand-in for “gay” (we see its historical dismissal of bisexuals and transgender people quite a bit) despite the insistence otherwise that this term is all-encompassing and fluid. The alienation of straight transgender people aside, this is just one example of how people force bisexuals into an “in-between” position, “half this, half that,” and how many gay people still cling to an illusory gay/straight (or queer/straight) dichotomy.

LGBTQ People Aren’t Immune to Abusive Behavior

Acting like using gender-nonconformity as a manipulation tactic is merely a heterosexual problem obscures the problem of abuse in LGBTQ communities. It makes potential victims in same-gender relationships blind to red flags (if you think abuse won’t happen to you, you won’t keep an eye out for warning signs) and gives LGBTQ abusers an escape route, as they can use their identity to insist that “they can’t be abusive because they’re [X]” or even accuse people of bigotry for calling out their behavior. Why do we single out straight self-expression here? Is it really widespread? Or is there a chance that we fixate on it because they’re dressing in ways they’re “not supposed to”?

The Right Clothes on the “Wrong” People?

Of course, gender-nonconformity doesn’t necessarily negate heterosexual privilege, and we can undoubtedly see that gender-nonconforming cisgender straight people often receive lighter treatment than gender-nonconforming LGBTQ people. In fact, some of them are straight-up heterosexist. People are allowed to point out these problems. I often find “let people do what they want, no matter what” to be a simplistic conslusion — we should always keep a critical eye.

Still, there are several peculiarities behind saying that if a (cisgender) straight man dons a skirt and eyeliner, that “he’s just getting stuff from queer culture,” “mimic[ing] queer people without actually facing any of the backlash of being actually queer.”

Gender-nonconformity is not inherent to LGBTQ people — masculine man-loving men ridicule their effeminate counterparts so much that there are articles about it — and even if we were all gender-nonconforming, we would still in no way “own” the practice. We did not invent it. People have cross-dressed for various reasons ever since we assigned gender to clothing, and anyone can pick up an article of their “opposite” gender’s clothes and wear it.

Furthermore, the idea that gender-nonconforming people simply don’t face backlash or violence if they’re straight or cisgender is plainly ignorant. Our society operates on a gender binary that dictates that everyone obey the roles assigned to their respective gender. Those who don’t do this are an automatic threat, regardless of sexuality. Gender-nonconformity is routinely demonized (see: the horror genre). Crossdressing was outright illegal in the United States not too long ago.

Plus, since gender ideals and heterosexuality are still very much linked (sexual inversion theory suggested that gayness is a result of “an inborn reversal of gender traits”), people assume that gender-nonconforming people aren’t straight anyway, which is why 1) accusations of “appropriating gay culture” are being thrown around in the first place, and 2) the idea that “straight men are gender-nonconforming just to attract women” is strange; most women will assume they’re gay.

Transgender activist Laverne Cox points out: “When kids are bullied and called anti-gay slurs, it’s rarely because the victim seemed to be attracted to members of the same sex. It’s because the child did not conform to gender expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth.”

Ultimately, a homophobe calling a straight drag queen a “faggot” isn’t going to apologize if he clarifies that he’s “doing it in an alternative way to attract women.” That doesn’t suddenly mean he can reclaim the slur, but it’s important to remember that bigots don’t care about the nuances of our identities. Gender-nonconforming people inherently place themselves in a vulnerable position by being gender-nonconforming, even if they truly have ulterior motives.

Queerness as a Border

As we’ve seen, a number of LGBTQ people dislike gender-nonconforming (presumed) cisgender heterosexuals and accuse them of routinely having ulterior motives for dressing in an “alternative” way. Arguably, one reason for this lies in those who adopt a staunch “us vs. them” mentality regarding LGBTQ oppression.

Many folks in this population embrace defying norms and deliberately confusing the (cisgender) heterosexual public — which isn’t bad on its own, I’m quite a fan of it — but they prioritize these individual acts over collective activism and resistance. They often conceptualize straightness as the enemy (nevermind that “straight” and “LGBTQ” are not contradictory groups), and in order to do this, “queerness” must distance itself as far away from its inverse (i.e., heterosexuality) as possible.

While this is not an article on the concept of queerness itself, a New Discourses introductory article on queer theory says:

Queer Theory exists, in a nutshell, to antagonize norms, normativity, and the normal — that is, anything that can be considered normal by society (even in accurate, neutral description)… […] [Being queer] shouldn’t be mistaken for being LGBT because being queer cannot accept normalcy or stability even within those categories. In fact, there should be no categories at all other than “queer” (which is to say woke or critically conscious under the doctrines of queer Theory) and “not-yet-queer” (thus, bad)… Queer Theory elevates only one identity as authentic: the queer identity, which ceases to be queer the moment it is accepted or even able to be categorized.

In the essay “Identities and Ideas: Strategies for Bisexuals,” Liz A. Highleyman states:

The evolution of the concept of “queer” has had a reciprocal effect on the concept of “straight.” If “queer” implies radical politics and sexual and social liberation, then “straight” implies conservative or reactionary politics, boring whitebread culture, and a resistance to sexual and social diversity.

The crowd who subscribes to the aforementioned ideas typically view themselves as radicals and vehemently oppose any notion of “acceptance,” deeming identities “digestible” to cisgender heterosexuals “assimilationist” — ignoring the fact that virtually any victim of heterosexist discrimination or violence will tell you that most cisgender heterosexuals are certainly not digesting any of our identities, even if we pray to the gods of respectability politics.

Regardless, the things people consider “gay” or “queer” (e.g., gender-nonconformity) serve as an alleged boundary between the “straight world” and the “gay/queer world” (I could get into how bisexuality inherently threatens this worldview, but I’ll let Kenji Yoshino do that). LGBTQ folks who champion queerness above all else need these two concepts divorced from one another — the same way that, to preserve a male/female dichotomy, nothing “manly” can be feminine — otherwise, there’d be no point of reference for queer identity, no way to signal one’s distinction from “normal” people.

Cisgender heterosexuals disregarding gender boundaries thus directly threatens the core of this queerness. If it describes a set of mannerisms and mindsets, a deliberate subversion “reserved” to LGBTQ folks, but people seemingly antithetical to that group can dress, act, and think exactly like “queers,” then what is the “essence” of queerness — if it exists at all? What wall do we construct now? Do we create a new enemy out of LGBTQ people who “act straight” (and who decides what “acting straight” means, if exclusive attraction to the opposite gender doesn’t cut it)?

A counterculture naturally cannot exist without the original culture. There is no antifascism without fascism, no nonbinarity without the gender binary, no gender-nonconformity without gender roles. Ergo, seeking to preserve queer identity, people resist blurring the lines between it and straightness, inadvertently enforcing the norms we need to destroy. If they didn’t do that, they’d — God forbid — get the “acceptance” they fear, ceasing to be as unique as they once were.

In saying that “straight people are not allowed to do this; only we are,” we essentialize sexualities (that don’t necessitate any particular physical attribute or even behavior), ignoring that every category we use is socially constructed. We naturalize the societal expectations that suppress us. If we insist on guidelines for the “in” and “out” groups, that only makes it easier for our oppressors to identify us and single us out.

What do we gain from demanding that others follow rules just so people notice more when we don’t? More cisgender heterosexuals should be gender outlaws. It’s a good thing. They should realize that our gender categories are artificial and man-made, thus policing how others express it is nonsensical and unfair. We should encourage them to adopt more radical views on gender and sexuality, not impel them to remain close-minded. We must remember that heterosexism represses everyone’s liberty, even those with iron fists.

Erase the Line in the Sand

Gender roles were formed to construct “superior” and “inferior” classes, originally having supposedly obvious, unmistakable, and immutable differences. Obfuscating them threatens the systems that require them to maintain the dominant social order and can protect the oppressed.

If (cisgender straight) men wearing dresses became unremarkable, transgender women and man-loving men could express themselves in more ways without raising suspicion or outing themselves. This causes a problem for hate groups and bigots targeting these people because the criteria of certain gender presentations and sexuality signals now apply to multiple identities.

Swelling the realm of what’s acceptable blurs lines, and blurred lines make it harder for society to divide and conquer us. When our wide variety of selfhoods are normalized, “normal” ceases to be a useful category at all, let alone one that can ostracize and oppress. So yes, more feminine straight men! More masculine straight women! Self-expression should be as open-ended as possible; we should always challenge what society says we can(’t) do with it.

We’ve said for a while that clothes have no gender — they don’t have sexualities, either. Try not to automatically fume at fabric on an “unexpected” body.