Why Does “Transvestigation” Happen?
On Gendering, Ungendering, and (Mis)Perceiving Trans People
Transvestigation has been in the news a lot lately. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to the practice of scrutinizing people’s appearances for supposed tell-tale signs that they are transgender. There are hardcore “transvestigators” who spend much of their time poring over pictures of celebrities, with some believing that large swaths of Hollywood are secretly trans — several articles and YouTube videos have chronicled online communities that are dedicated to this endeavor.
Then there’s the recent “gender critical” and conservative meltdown over Olympic boxer Imane Khelif who, despite being born and raised female, and verified by the International Olympic Committee, was mercilessly attacked online by JK Rowling, Elon Musk, and the entire Fox News Cinematic Universe for supposedly being a “man.” That is to say, these people presumed that Khelif was a trans woman. The Boston Globe even ran a headline to this effect, despite the fact that there weren’t any trans women competing at this year’s Olympics.
Most accounts of “transvestigation” that I’ve come across either portray the phenomenon as a “bizarre” conspiracy theory, or the inevitable byproduct of “transphobic brain rot” (i.e., individuals who’ve become so consumed with transphobia that they’ve lost their grip on reality), or some combination thereof. While all these things may certainly be true, this framing seems to imply that the rest of us see gender and trans people “normally” or “correctly.” And frankly, nothing could be further from the truth! In reality, as individuals, we often see and interpret gender in wildly different ways.
I have written at great length about how we perceive sex and gender in my most recent book Sexed Up. And I explored the many obstacles these ways of seeing create for trans and other gender-nonconforming people in my first book Whipping Girl. In this essay, I will draw on some of those ideas to explain what “transvestigation” really is and why it happens, but also to explore more mundane (yet nevertheless fucked up) ways in which we perceive and interpret gender and sexual minorities.
Part 1: The Two Filing Cabinets Mindset
In the Introduction to her decidedly anti-trans book Trans, gender-critical activist Helen Joyce claimed that “Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognise other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex.” In a now deleted tweet speculating that Imane Khelif must be intersex, columnist Megan McArdle similarly claimed that “People are shockingly good at visually distinguishing males from females, even when you choose relatively androgynous models, and even when you strip visual cues like hair.”
This assumption — that “sexing” or “gendering” (categorizing other people as male or female) is a finely honed human skill of near-perfect precision — is a cisgender delusion. As I put it in Sexed Up (p.25): “For most people, this confidence probably stems in part from their own experiences with being correctly gendered by other people on a regular basis. After all, if you identify as a man, and everyone you come across correctly presumes that you are a man, then that might leave you with the impression that gender categorization is a straightforward and foolproof process.” I go onto say, “In contrast, those of us who happen to be transgender or gender nonconforming often have very different experiences — being perceived as both female and male at different points in our lives or, in some cases, within the same minute — that may shed light on how we (all of us!) see gender.”
In Chapter 1 of Sexed Up (“The Two Filing Cabinets in Our Minds”), I provide an overview of this process. I begin by describing the large body of psychological and sociological research into how young children come to understand gender — after all, we don’t come out of the womb seeing women and men. It’s a learning process. It’s usually around the ages of one or two that children become consciously aware that some people are boys and other people are girls — this has been called the “gender identity” or “gender labeling” stage. Yet even after understanding that distinction, young children rely on very different cues than adults, largely based on gender presentation (such as clothing and hair length) rather than physical traits (which adults tend to rely on). They also have a more flexible and fluid view of it. For instance, if you show young children a photo of a boy, then a second photo of the same boy in a dress, they will often presume that the boy’s gender has changed.
It’s not until ages 4 to 7 that children tend to learn “gender constancy” — the belief that a person’s sex will remain the same over the course of their life. Researchers back in the 1960s and 1970s imagined gender constancy to be the most sophisticated stage, although from a trans perspective today it seems more like an overgeneralization or faulty assumption that children in our society learn.
The rest of the chapter discusses my personal experiences transitioning. Specifically, when I was at my most “in between stage” (several months after being on hormones), rather than being in “gender limbo” where no one knew what to make of me, people almost always read me as either male or female, it’s just that I could not predict which one. It wasn’t unusual for two individuals in the same room to come to differing conclusions. And once a person made that determination, they invariably acted surprised or skeptical if I told them that I was actually the other gender — this happened in both directions.
In other words, once we categorize someone one way or the other, we tend to filter away any gender-ambiguous or conflicting cues — this “filtering process” has also been described by sociologists who’ve studied the issue.
Anyway, based on these and other experiences, I make the case that it’s as if we have two metaphorical filing cabinets in our minds — one for male and one for female — in which we unconsciously file people into immediately upon seeing them, and which makes it difficult for people to contemplate trans and intersex people, especially those who are nonbinary. Once again, this is all learned behavior and thus not written in stone. Some cultures have what are sometimes referred to as “third genders” outside of male and female, so it’s quite likely that they learn to gender people in a somewhat different manner. It’s also possible to gradually unlearn this Two Filing Cabinets mindset, for instance, upon becoming more familiar with gender and sexual minorities and communities — I will return to this point a bit later.
Gender-critical activists like Joyce will often insist that “biological sex” is strictly dichotomous and immutable — when they do this, what they’re actually asserting is the fact that they perceive the world that way: It appears strictly dichotomous to them because of the two filing cabinets mindset, and they presume it to be immutable because they’ve internalized gender constancy. And because the act of perceiving sex involves filtering away any gender-ambiguous or conflicting cues, many people literally cannot see (and are thus reluctant to believe) any evidence to the contrary.
Part 2: Ungendering and “The Look”
The combination of the Two Filing Cabinets mindset (relentlessly sorting everyone we see into either female or male categories) and gender constancy (a belief that people’s sex cannot change) leads to cis assumption — that is, we presume that every person we meet is cis/cisgender/cissexual by default. We often talk about trans people being “closeted” or “coming out” as trans, or we discuss them “passing” as cisgender or being “read” or “clocked” as transgender. None of these concepts would exist if we didn’t first assume that every person we meet must be cis.
In Whipping Girl, Chapter 8 (“Dismantling Cissexual Privilege),” where I first wrote about cis assumption and the unconscious process of gendering other people, I also introduced the term ungendering:
When we presume a person to be cissexual, we generally accept their overall perceived gender as natural and authentic, while disregarding any minor discrepancies in their gender appearance. However, upon discovering or suspecting that a person is transsexual, we often actively (and rather compulsively) search for evidence of their assigned sex in their personality, expressions, and physical bodies. I have experienced this firsthand during the countless occasions when I have come out to people as transsexual. Upon learning of my trans status, most people get this distinctive “look” in their eyes, as if they are suddenly seeing me differently — searching for clues of the boy that I used to be and projecting different meanings onto my body. I call this process ungendering, as it is an attempt to undo a trans person’s gender by privileging incongruities and discrepancies in their gendered appearance that would normally be overlooked or dismissed if they were presumed to be cissexual. [Whipping Girl, p.172]
I also describe several instances of “the look” in Sexed Up. Sometimes it would occur when people initially read me as female (as I was taking estrogen at the time), but then “discovered” that I was “male” (either because I was still going by my old name and/or other people referred to me as “he/him”). Other instances of “the look” took place when I came out as trans to people who had previously known me as male, most of whom hadn’t even noticed the feminine changes in my appearance up to that point (likely because they were filtering out those inconsistencies). A third variation happened when people who knew me as male didn’t even recognize me after my transition because they initially gendered me as female upon seeing me; it was only after I told them who I was that they gave me “the look.”
If I had to define “the look,” I would describe it as a conscious reappraisal (and sometimes recategorization) of a person’s sex/gender. Because it’s a conscious process, it usually takes a few awkward seconds, unlike the unconscious snap judgments of gendering people. While I have found it uncomfortable to be subjected to the look, I don’t think it’s an inherently bad thing. For instance, some of the people who gave me “the look” in the aforementioned situations were “re-filing” me from the “male” to “female” filing cabinets in their mind.
But where “the look” most definitely sucks is when people use it to “ungender” you. This is what I described in the Whipping Girl passage above, where individuals who had previously viewed me as uncomplicatedly female suddenly scrutinized my body for any real or imagined signs of “maleness.” To be clear, not everybody does this upon learning that I’m trans. But some do.
So why do people resort to ungendering trans people like this? Well, if you strongly adhere to gender constancy, or sex/gender essentialism, then you might insist that my “real sex” is male and attempt to “excavate” it from the “facade” of my femaleness. To be clear, this is not how transitioning works — estrogen has physically changed my body in all sorts of ways — but essentialists do tend to imagine trans people as having “real sex” interiors that are obscured by “false sex” exteriors.
On top of this, knowing that I understand myself as female, a sex/gender essentialist might intentionally harp on my (real or imagined) male sex characteristics as a way of invalidating my gender identity.
In other words, undgendering is often an explicitly anti-trans ideological endeavor.
But sometimes people who are not explicitly or ideologically anti-trans will ungender us for other reasons. In Chapter 9 of Whipping Girl (“Ungendering in Art and Academia”), I discuss this tactic of ungendering trans and intersex subjects in order to evoke emotions in audiences and/or to make some broader point. Here is a pertinent passage from that chapter, in which I react to philosopher Michel Foucault’s writings on Herculine Barbin (who was intersex) and sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s writings on Agnes (who was trans):
The fact that both Foucault and Garfinkel claimed to be making larger points about gender and society (Foucault: that society imposes a “true sex” on all of its members; Garfinkel: that we all actively manage and produce our gendered sense of self) makes their subject choice seem rather dubious. Wouldn’t their cases have been stronger if they’d focused instead on subjects who were not gender-variant — who were not such obvious exceptions to the rule? I would argue that Herculine and Agnes were chosen as subjects not because their conditions offered any unique insight into social gender, but because their gender-variant status facilitated their depiction as specimens. After all, one only has to look at how apologetic people become when they accidentally misgender another person, or how insulting it is generally considered to be to suggest that someone’s femaleness or maleness is suspect in any way, to understand that ungendering is an inherently demeaning process. If Foucault and Garfinkel had instead chosen to pick apart the gender identities of young people who were not gender-variant, the process of ungendering would have undoubtedly (and appropriately) seemed intrusive and disrespectful. But because society typically views transsexual and intersex people as illegitimate and unnatural — even inhuman — Agnes and Herculine could be depicted as mere objects of inquiry without any chance of the audience identifying with them or sympathizing with them. [Whipping Girl, p.206–207]
In other words, the act of ungendering is intuitively understood to be invasive and demeaning when applied to cis people, but deemed warranted or justified when trans and intersex people are subjected to it.
With this information in hand, we can now define “transvestigation”: the act of ungendering a cis person under the rationale that they are “really” or “secretly” trans.
In support of this definition, online transvestigator communities will sometimes have rules against transvestigating people who aren’t famous (which seem designed to prevent them from ungendering one another) and some members will even post evidence “proving” that they are cisgender (see e.g., this video 11–13 minutes in). In other words, they seem to understand that “transvestigation” is inherently invalidating and disparaging and should only be conducted on people who supposedly “deserve” it (read: trans people).
This also explains many trans people’s ambivalent feelings regarding the whole Imane Khelif ordeal. Speaking for myself, I thought what happened to her was horrific — I could very much relate to it as someone who experiences very similar ungendering and transphobic harassment on a regular basis. But at the same time, I was extremely frustrated by the many cis commentators who seemed to go out of their way to say that what Khelif experienced was cruel and unfair because she was born female and raised as a girl. Once again, this seems to suggest these commentators would be okay with said ungendering and harassment if it was directed at the “proper targets” (e.g., someone like me).
This is why I entreat you, dear reader, to ditch the word “tranvestigation,” as it’s rooted in the fucked-up notion that it’s justified to ungender trans people, but not cis people. Instead, let’s simply call this what it is — ungendering — and admit that it’s invasive and demeaning to do it to anyone.
Part 3: Delusions of “Gaydar” and “Transdar”
So now we know what “transvestigation” is. But we still need to explain why it happens. Specifically, why does it target people who most of us would agree are clearly cisgender? And why do the individuals who engage in this practice seem to do so rather compulsively?
To address these latter issues, we need to talk about one of my least favorite topics: “transdar.” Which is analogous to “gaydar.” Which I also hate. Since most people are more familiar with “gaydar,” I will start there.
“Gaydar” is the supposed ability to determine whether an individual is gay (or not) by simply observing them. In my experience, it is usually espoused by people who have some, but not extensive, familiarity with LGB communities. And more often than not, the imagined sign(s) of gayness is gender expression — whether a person’s mannerisms, dress, behaviors, and interests are masculine and/or feminine. The problem is that it’s well documented that sexual orientation and gender expression are separable traits that do not always align within the same person — e.g., some lesbians are feminine, some gay men masculine, and many LGB people come across as quite average or unremarkable in their gender expressions.
In Sexed Up, I cite several studies that show that gaydar is merely an assumption rather than a verifiable skill (see Chapter 8, Notes 13–15). I want to highlight one of those studies here: Mitchell and Ellis (2011), “In the Eye of the Beholder: Knowledge That a Man Is Gay Promotes American College Students’ Attributions of Cross-Gender Characteristics.” Basically, they found that if you tell observers that a man is gay, then they will rate him as being less masculine and more feminine than observers who are not given this information.
This is further evidence that we are not purely objective observers who see the world for what it is. Rather, what we believe to be true influences how we see other people. And there’s a self-reinforcing aspect to this, where if we know or believe or suspect that someone is queer, then they will look even more queer to us! And this is just as true for imagined “transdar” as it is for “gaydar.”
There was a time in my early twenties when I felt like had developed a sense of “transdar.” I had done a ton of pre-internet research on trans people in order to make sense of my own predicament. This included seeing lots of pictures and a couple documentaries about trans folks. After having done this, sometimes I’d be walking down the street and I’d see someone and think to myself, “I’m pretty sure that person is trans.”
Sometimes my hunches turned out to be correct. I remember when The Crying Game first came out in the early 1990s and everyone kept talking about there being a big plot twist in the movie. Upon seeing a TV commercial for the film, I immediately “read” the character Dil as trans. And I further assumed (not unlike Helen Joyce) that everyone else must plainly see what I was seeing! So I honestly went into the movie assuming that there must be some other non-trans-related plot twist. I realized I was wrong about mid-way through the film, during the now infamous scene where Dil disrobes, and the rest of the audience gasped in shock. Which in turn shocked me. I mean seriously, she performed a torch song in what was obviously a queer bar earlier in the movie! Didn’t any of you see that?!?
As I said, we don’t always see the same thing with regards to gender and sexuality.
So anyway, my supposed “transdar” seemed to work in that case. And sometimes, in real life, I’ll meet a person who strikes me as trans, and it will turn out that they are actually trans.
But there have also been times when I assumed that someone was trans, but it turned out they weren’t. And still other times when I presumed someone was cis but they turned out to be trans. I’ve even had a few experiences back in the day where other trans people didn’t believe me at first when I said I was trans (likely because I am quite short for someone who has experienced a male puberty).
The more time I’ve spent in trans and queer communities, the more obvious it is to me that we simply cannot predict another person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or personal history by simply looking at them.
This is part of the rationale behind the relatively recent custom of sharing pronouns. Cis people who presume that they can gender other people “with exquisite accuracy” tend to view pronouns in email signatures or conference badges as trans people pushing our beliefs (so-called “gender ideology”) onto other people. But frankly, it’s quite the opposite — it comes from a place of understanding what we do not know. It comes from recognizing that we cannot trust our own assumptions when it comes to gendering other people. Having had firsthand experiences of being gendered in disparate ways by different people, we know full well that you cannot “always tell” whether someone else is a woman or man, or whether they’re cis or trans (this is especially true for nonbinary people, who are often not “seen” at all). You can only know for sure if they tell you.
Part 4: Dismantling the Two Filing Cabinets Mindset (for better or worse)
While “transdar” is fallible and unreliable, allow me to put a more positive spin on the phenomenon: It represents an intermediate step between the naivety of cis assumption (presuming that every person you meet is cis by default) and the more nuanced view I just espoused (that we cannot always accurately determine other people’s genders).
In discussing the Two Filing Cabinets mindset earlier, I emphasized that it involves filtering away any gender-ambiguous or conflicting cues. I’d argue that what “transdar” is — or at least, what it entails — is noticing or picking up on those same cues and taking them into consideration rather than discounting them.
While I have been calling these cues “gender-ambiguous,” most of them actually represent similarities or natural overlap between female and male sex characteristics. I delve into this at great length in the “Sex Is Multifaceted” and “Sex Is Variable” sections of my Trans People and Biological Sex: What the Science Says video; here, I will briefly touch on three main points: 1) Biological sex is not a simple singular entity, but rather a collection of sex characteristics or traits. 2) Most human traits are complex traits that arise through the interactions of many factors, and thus give rise to bell-curve-shaped spectrums (where most individuals are clustered around some average outcome, but there will always be outliers who differ from the norm). 3) With regards to sex characteristics (or “sexually dimorphic traits,” as they are sometimes called), the result is overlapping bell curves. In some cases (primary sex characteristics such as chromosomes or genitals) there may be relatively little overlap between the sexes, but for others (especially secondary sex characteristics that arise in response to hormones during puberty) there may be significant overlap between the sexes.
We are all familiar with this human variation and overlap between the sexes. For instance, while men on average tend to be taller than women, all of us know tall women and short men. And while men tend to have more pronounced body hair than women, we all know relatively hairless men and hairy women. Furthermore, it is not unusual to come across short men who are quite hairy, or tall women who are fairly hairless, and so on. In other words, people are not “fully male” or “fully female.” Rather, each of us exhibits a wide array of sex characteristics for which we may be gender-typical for some traits and gender-atypical for others.
So which of these many traits do we rely on when gendering other people? Well, in everyday situations, we usually cannot see other people’s primary sex characteristics, so we rely almost entirely on their secondary sex characteristics — that is, traits that often exhibit large overlap between the sexes — and (to a lesser degree) their gender expression (their clothing, mannerisms, etc.).
Crucially, we do not rely on any singular trait when gendering other people. As I put it in Sexed Up (drawing from sociological studies on gender perception):
“When we categorize people according to gender, we do not rely on any singular cue. Rather, our assessment is based on our overall impression of the person — or, as some of my statistics-inclined friends might say, gender perception is ‘in the aggregate.’” [Sexed Up, p.24]
In addition to that, the relevance of any given trait may vary significantly depending on the circumstances:
“All gender cues are contextual, both with regards to perceiving an individual in isolation and assessing a large group of people. For example, at a prom (where all the women are wearing gowns and the men tuxedos), clothing becomes a highly relevant gender marker. But this would not be particularly true at a goth concert, where most people, regardless of gender, are dressed in black with elaborate hairstyles and makeup; there, we might rely more heavily on other cues.” [Sexed Up, p.24]
Knowing all this, we can finally understand “transdar” as an intermediate step. Back in my early twenties when I surmised that Dil from The Crying Game was a trans character, I also found myself paying more attention to gender-atypical traits in virtually everyone. For instance, I remember noticing how female news anchors tended to have somewhat deeper voices or more pronounced jawlines than the average woman — I presumed that this was due to sexist presumptions about what comes across as authoritative. To be clear, I never once thought these women were “secretly trans.” And I wouldn’t describe what I was doing as ungendering them — after all, I never questioned whether or not they were “really women.” I was simply beginning to truly see and appreciate the natural variation in sex characteristics that human beings exhibit.
Rather than continuing to call this “transdar,” a more productive way of thinking about it is that I was beginning to dismantle the Two Filing Cabinets mindset that had previously shaped how I perceived gender. I began noticing atypical sex characteristics more often, but I didn’t presume that they signified anything in particular. Over time, I began to see most people as potentially cis but also potentially trans (insert Schrödinger’s joke here).
Recognizing all this ultimately helped me to realize that transitioning was a possibility for me. Back when the Two Filing Cabinets mindset shaped my perceptions, it seemed as though there was an insurmountable chasm separating female from male, one that I could never hope to cross. But once I learned to appreciate the many similarities and overlaps between the sexes, I realized that while my voice is deeper than the average woman, I have met cis women with even deeper voices. And while some of my other features may be more masculine than I’d prefer, I learned that other people will tend to overlook them if enough other cues strike them as feminine.
While this isn’t every trans person’s experience, a lot of us come to understand firsthand that gender perception involves overall impressions and is highly contextual. Which is why it can be so frustrating to discuss this subject with trans-unaware cis people. Many of them see gender as strictly “black or white” (due to their unquestioned Two Filing Cabinets mindset), which makes it extremely difficult to convey the nuance and complexity that we’ve personally experienced.
But of course, with increasing trans visibility in our culture, many cis people are becoming more familiar with our existence. And upon repeated exposure to trans people, they too may begin to dismantle the Two Filing Cabinets mindset. But in a bad way. Or perhaps I should say, some of them seem to learn the wrong lessons from it.
I was struck by this Twitter exchange a few years back:
This exchange was widely shared on trans Twitter at the time because 1) Herzog has written and podcasted about trans issues in a manner that many (including me) have found biased against trans perspectives and 2) people found it hilarious that she mentioned “eyes” here, as they are not significantly sexually dimorphic (I’ve never once heard of an actual trans person being “clocked” because of their eyes). These tweets are from 2021, which was before the online “transvestigator” phenomenon started garnering attention — and to be clear, I am not insinuating that Herzog is a so-called “transvestigator.”
But this does seem to be an example of dismantling the Two Filing Cabinets mindset in a bad way. Rather than appreciating that people — whether woman or man, cis or trans — come in various shapes and forms, Herzog says that when she sees people who are gender-atypical with regards to size (and possibly other traits), she will “assume they are trans.” It’s been several years since that post, so hopefully she’s in a better place now — like I said, imagined “transdar” is often an intermediate step.
But some people do seem to get stuck in this phase. And I’d argue that this is what’s driving the phenomenon of so-called “transvestigation”: people who have some (but not extensive) familiarity with trans people who develop an overactive or compulsive “transdar” that could readily be resolved if they simply recognized the vastness of human gender and sexual diversity, rather than dwelling on the existence of (real or imagined) trans people.
Or as I tried to convey in this “galaxy brain” meme:
Part 5: Believing Is Seeing
I began this essay the way that many recent accounts of this issue have, namely, by citing online “transvestigators” who believe that most celebrities in Hollywood have been gender-swapped, along with prominent anti-trans activists who insist that Imane Khelif is “really a man,” and presenting them as though they are all part of the same phenomenon.
While both groups do appear to be stuck in the overactive “transdar” phase that I just described, they nevertheless perceive gender very differently from one another and often come to wildly different conclusions. For example, I cannot possibly imagine JK Rowling (given her past history) arguing that Henry Cavil and Ryan Gosling (famous cis male actors), as well as Dylan Mulvaney and Caitlyn Jenner (famous trans women), were all “born female.” Yet these are all claims that the online “transvestigator” community has made.
So what is going on here? Well, earlier I mentioned the Mitchell and Ellis “gaydar” study, where observers rated men as more feminine if they are told that he is gay beforehand. In other words, to some extent, people see what they expect to see. And this is also true for gendering.
Back when I first started presenting as female in public (prior to transitioning), I preferred to go to mundane settings, such as suburban malls, because nobody would ever pay any attention to me there. I wasn’t “read” as trans in those spaces largely because nobody expected to see any trans people there. But nowadays, despite having transitioned, if I attend a trans conference or event, I know that lots of people will immediately pick up on the fact that I’m trans. And it’s not necessarily because people in those spaces have “advanced transdar.” Rather, it’s because they are expecting to see trans people in those settings, so they are primed for it when it happens. In fact, I’ve heard multiple stories about cis partners being “read” as trans themselves at such events — not because their appearance was especially gender-ambiguous or atypical, but because people in those spaces were expecting to see trans people.
So what are “transvestigators” expecting to see? Well, in the case of online groups that focus on celebrities, many of them apparently believe in “Elite Gender Inversion” — a conspiracy theory that (according to Teen Vogue) “essentially holds that every famous person is secretly trans, part of a cabal who are transgender as part of a ritualistic initiation of some kind.”
Since these individuals have been primed to believe that every celebrity is “secretly trans,” they will (consciously or unconsciously) seek out any and all cues (via ungendering) that confirm that prior. This is what allows them to “perceive” Ryan Gosling as “secretly female” and Farrah Fawcett as “secretly male” due to the shape of their clavicles, while “filtering out” the rest of their bodies (as well as their well-established cisgender life histories). And even if Fawcett and Gosling had gender-typical clavicles, these conspiracy theorists would inevitably find some other supposedly gender-atypical trait (their pelvis, jawline, height, eyes, or what have you) because in their minds these celebrities are transgender a priori.
And yes, this will strike most of us as ridiculous. But then again, is assuming that all celebrities are trans (and filtering away any evidence that they are cis) fundamentally different from assuming that all celebrities are cis (and filtering away any evidence that they are trans, à la the Two Filing Cabinets mindset)?
In stark contrast, gender-critical activists and many conservative pundits subscribe to a very different narrative. They believe that “transgender” is simply a ploy to allow “male misogynists and sexual predators” to infiltrate women’s spaces in order to “harm women” and/or “groom children.” This too is a conspiracy theory (see last three links). And this narrative primes its believers to be on the constant lookout for trans female/feminine people (the supposed “male predators/infiltrators”), while disregarding trans male/masculine people (who they imagine as merely “young girls” who have been “seduced” by the “transgender agenda”).
This narrative creates humongous blind spots in their gender perception, such that if you show gender-critical activists photos of the trans boy who was forced to wrestle girls because his league refused to recognize his gender identity, or a bearded trans man in a women’s restroom making a point about what anti-trans “bathroom bills” would entail, they will often compulsively interpret those individuals as trans women invading women’s spaces, because that is the distorted lens through which they see gender.
In Matt Bernstein’s YouTube video Transvestigating (with Contrapoints), around the 30–33 minute mark, the two of them discuss a recurring social media joke: If a gender-critical activist is ranting about trans women, sometimes people will show them a picture of JK Rowling (or some other cis woman) and ask them “so do you really think this is a man?” And many times the gender-critical activist will retort “YES, THAT IS DEFINITELY A MAN!” It’s funny in a way, because it undermines their assertion that they “can always tell” when someone is trans, and in the case of Rowling (who relentlessly ungenders trans women on Twitter), it gives her a taste of her own medicine.
But this tendency can also be quite scary, as we saw with the Imane Khelif ordeal. While I was appalled by what happened, I was not at all surprised. For many years now, gender-critical activists and conservative pundits have been whipping up a moral panic about “trans people in women’s sports” and “trans predators in women’s restrooms.” They have primed their audiences to perceive anyone who is gender-ambiguous or gender-atypical in any way as a trans woman (read: a “man” who is infiltrating women’s spaces with the intent to harm). All the fact-checking in the world won’t change their perception — indeed, Rowling is still tweeting about Khelif several weeks later. It’s nearly impossible to “unsee” something if you are deeply committed to believing it.
Part 6: Other Perceptual Biases (or why trans women, gender non-conforming women, and women of color, are especially fucked)
It should be clear by now that there isn’t any singular or correct way to perceive sex and gender. Instead, there’s merely a host of different mindsets and narratives and cues that may influence us one way or another. In this final section, I want to quickly mention a few other perceptual biases that also seem to be playing a role here.
In my writings on gender perception, I often quote Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna’s seminal book, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. This summary of one of their studies appeared in my book Outspoken (p.100):
They showed participants a series of drawings of people who had a mix of typically male and female attributes: short or long hair, flat chest or breasts, narrow or wide hips, body hair or not, and of course, either male or female genitals. They found that male cues always tended to trump female cues — in other words, figures with a mix of masculine and feminine attributes tended to be read as men rather than women. This disparity was particularly acute for genitals. If the figure with mixed gender attributes had a vagina, people only saw it as female 64 percent of the time — in other words, 36 percent of the time other male cues trumped the presence of a vagina. The reverse was not true: If the figure had a penis, it was read as male 96 percent of the time, often even when all of the other gender attributes were feminine.
Kessler and McKenna attributed this tendency to societal-wide male-centrism, not unlike how people often use the pronoun “he” when speaking generically. Whatever the reason, this tendency likely leads people to “read” trans women as trans more frequently than trans men. But it also makes gender-nonconforming cis women especially susceptible to ungendering, as simply having one or two masculine-coded attributes (such as being tall or having short hair) may result in others misperceiving them as trans and/or men.
Here is another perceptual bias I discuss in Sexed Up: Several studies have shown that white U.S. subjects tend to stereotype women of color (especially Black women) as being more “masculine” than white women (see e.g., Johnson et al., 2012; Galinsky et al., 2013). On top of this, there’s a long history of nineteenth-century sexologists and other purveyors of scientific racism claiming that white people (especially Northern Europeans) exhibit the highest levels of sex differences between women and men — the implication being that non-white ethnicities are inherently more “gender-ambiguous” (discussed in Sexed Up, Chapter 7). While not supported by contemporary science, these perceptual fictions continue to persist in the white imagination in many Western countries, and have almost certainly influenced the recent Imane Khelif ordeal, past debates over Black athletes like Caster Semenya, and the relentless right-wing conspiracy theories purporting that Michelle Obama is “secretly trans.”
Finally, throughout Sexed Up, I examine the myriad ways in which marginalized groups — especially people of color and LGBTQ+ people — are routinely (mis)perceived as “excessively sexual” relative to the dominant/majority group (in this case, white and straight people). This most certainly informs the aforementioned gender-critical and conservative stereotypes of trans people as “sexual predators” and “groomers.” Since writing Sexed Up, I’ve penned two online essays that further investigate this tendency: Anti-Trans “Grooming” and “Social Contagion” Claims Explained and Penises, Privilege, and Feminist & LGBTQ+ Purity Politics.
Conclusion
Nearly everybody assumes that they see the world “normally” and “objectively.” As it “really is.” It is my hope that this essay has disabused readers of this fallacy.
I have stressed the importance of recognizing the panoply of human gender and sexual diversity, and how this has personally helped me to realize that transitioning was a possibility for me. But there was one other crucial piece to that puzzle: I also had to transcend anti-trans stigma. It took some time, but I eventually overcame all those twisted yet pervasive notions that trans people are “gross” or “weird” or “defective” or “mutilated” or “abominations” or “predators” and so forth. These too are perceptual fictions that we should strive to abandon.
I can assure you that if you refuse to relinquish these stigmatizing notions, then you will perpetually ascribe far more salience to transness than it deserves.
In all honesty, trans people are rather mundane. Not in the sense that we are boring, but in the sense that we are everywhere. According to current statistics, we make up about 0.7% of the U.S. population. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, granted. But there are more trans people in the United States than there are plumbers, or people who live in Delaware. According to Pew Research, 42% of Americans today say they know someone who is trans. Seriously, there is no reason why anyone should be making a big deal about our existence nowadays.
Today in 2024, if you find yourself fixating on trans people, or feel concerned because you suddenly “see us everywhere,” please consider the possibility that this is a “you” problem. Not everybody sees the world that way, and it is definitely possible for you to transcend your current predicament. I sincerely hope that this essay provides some help in seeing your way through it.
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