Hey everyone, today we’re talking about the importance, or non-importance of “passing”.
If you don’t know what “passing” is, it’s essentially what gender people perceive you as.
So you’re “passing” as a woman if people perceive you as a woman.
Technically “passing” applies to everyone -- if you’re a person, you’re probably
“passing” as a man or a woman to strangers, although it’s not really that simple and
we’ll get more into that later.
But in day-to-day life, “passing” is mostly just by trans people to talk about being perceived
as the gender they really are.
So a trans woman who is “passing” is seen as a woman by others, while a trans woman
who’s “non-passing” is not seen as a woman by others -- and vice-versa for trans men.
Usually I put air quotes around the word “passing” just because I think it’s not as simple
or binary as most people think it is, and so I think the air quotes help illustrate
that while this is a real thing worthy of discussing, it’s kind of a nebulous concept
that’s more complex than it seems.
Obviously I’m not going to use air quotes throughout this whole video cause I’m going
to be saying the word “passing” a lot, but just know that the air quotes are still implied.
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Anyway, back to the video!
So, the first aspect of this I want to talk about is basically, why would a trans person want to pass?
And obviously, I can’t see into the minds of every trans person, we haven’t all telepathically
connected like that, yet -- but as far as I can tell, there are two main reasons.
The first being that passing alleviates dysphoria.
And this is proven over and over again in research where suicide rates go down when
trans people are acknowledged as the gender they are.
When trans people pass, in general, they’re happier.
Passing can make trans people feel good, and validated, and loved because it means other
people are seeing them how they see themself.
On the other hand, trans people might also want to pass not just for how it makes them
feel personally, but because passing makes you safer -- in a lot of ways.
A trans woman who passes can usually use a women’s restroom without a problem.
A trans woman who doesn’t pass probably couldn’t use a women’s bathroom, and if
she tried, she might be harassed or mocked or attacked.
And some folks might say that the non-passing trans woman should just use the men’s restroom,
but it’s not that simple.
For one, it could be very dysphoric and uncomfortable for her, but also if she looks feminine in
any way -- either she’s wearing a dress or makeup or whatever -- she could be harassed
or mocked or attacked for going into the men’s restroom because of the way that men in men’s
restrooms tend to aggressively enforce gender roles.
She might be safe going into a men’s restroom, but it’s a big risk.
Lots of men, especially in spaces just for men, hate when other people they perceive
to be men act or dress in a feminine way.
So a non-passing trans woman who likes to express herself in a feminine way is in a
situation where she can’t safely pee in either bathroom, while a passing trans woman
is more likely to have a safe experience.
Likewise, a trans woman who passes is likely to be safer in most aspects of her life.
Like, all people who are perceived as women deal with some level of public harassment
and lack of safety, so I’m not saying that trans women who pass are perfectly safe by
any means, but non-passing trans women are particularly vulnerable.
Trans women face outrageous levels of violence, and if it’s clear to strangers that you’re
trans -- for example, if you’re a non-passing trans woman dressed in a feminine way -- that
can put you in even more danger.
There’s such a long list of reasons for this, from the way that men often enforce
gender roles to the way that men are often violently afraid of being attracted to trans
women, but that’s a topic for another video.
What you need to know here is that trans women who are visibly seen as trans are at a high
risk of violence just for existing.
And so passing can be a way to be safer, to avoid some of that violence.
And it’s not always that simple, passing isn’t the end-all-be-all to safety as a
trans person, and we’ll get more into that later, but that’s the jist of it.
Trans people often want to pass for comfort, happiness, and their own personal wellbeing
-- while they may also want to pass simply so that they can navigate the world safely.
Next, I want to talk about *how* trans people pass.
This is different for every trans person, but I’ll go over some of the most common things.
For trans woman, it’s often a combination of taking hormones, facial surgery, bottom
surgery (AKA genital reconstruction surgery), breast augmentation, and voice lessons.
For trans men, it’s often a combination of taking hormones, having top surgery (AKA
a mastectomy), voice lessons, wearing packers (which are things you wear in your pants to
make it look like you have a penis), and sometimes bottom surgery (AKA phalloplasty).
Non-binary folks, that is people who don’t identify strictly as either men or women,
might take some or all of these steps as well depending on what they want.
Depending on where you live, the cost for all of these things can be enormous -- like
tens of thousands of dollars kind of enormous.
I think in mainstream media we tend to think of passing as flipping a simple switch.
You get a ~sex change~ and all of a sudden you’re a different gender!
But it doesn’t work like that.
Medically transitioning is often inaccessible to a lot of folks, either because of the huge
price or because of a medical condition they have or a fear of surgery or other risk factors
that could complicate taking hormones.
And even for those who can access the services they need, medically transitioning can be
a long and slow process.
Nobody “passes” overnight.
It very often takes years from the point someone comes out publicly as trans to the time they can “pass”.
And in the meantime, there are a lot of times when trans people kind of pass.
And I think that’s a really important time period to talk about, because I think it illustrates
really well the idea that what gender people are perceived as is not as clear-cut as so
many people think it is.
I mean so many trans people exist in this “in-between” space where sometimes they
pass and sometimes they don’t.
And even for the trans people who pass really well -- there will still be transphobes who
will over-analyze every part of them and try to find reasons to not believe that they pass.
What I mean by that is like, even if as a trans person you pass 100% of the time to
strangers, if a transphobe finds out that you’re trans, it’s likely that you’ll
stop passing in their eyes because they’ll now be trying really hard to see you as a
gender you are not.
Basically, passing for trans people is conditional upon who is perceiving them and what information
they have about the trans person.
And so the safety that comes with passing is also conditional.
I just think it’s important to recognize both that passing is a kind of privilege within
the trans community that can afford you some safety, and that all trans people face oppression
regardless of whether they pass or not.
But for those trans people who sometimes pass and sometimes don’t, I think the implications
of that for like gender in general are pretty interesting.
Because, I don’t know, the societal norm seems to be that people think you can tell
what gender someone is just by looking at them, but that’s just so far from true.
In the past, I’ve been called sir and ma'am in the same day, wearing the same clothes,
speaking in the same voice.
What gender you’re perceived as is so subjective.
I mean I even have cis friends who’ve been misgendered just because they’re, for example,
a girl with short hair.
So it’s always weird to me when someone says like, “I see you as X and therefore
you are X and everyone else sees you as X” because in my experience that just hasn’t
been true at all.
People will misgender me all day every day on the internet and then I’ll walk outside
in sweatpants with no makeup on and be called ma'am.
Like it’s very clear to me that lots of people 100% think they have someone’s gender
perception all figured out when they’re not even close.
And that’s important to note, because it affects how we talk about passing.
Just because you think someone is passing doesn’t mean they always are.
Just because you think someone is non-passing doesn’t mean they don’t pass to other people.
This stuff is so subjective.
I just need to point that out so we’re not putting these labels on people, like passing
or non-passing, and then giving that no wiggle room for the variance in people’s perception.
So that’s essentially an overview of why a trans person would want to pass, how they
would go about doing that, and how subjective passing really is.
But what I want to talk about next is: Do trans people need to pass?
And is that even the end goal for all trans people?
Obviously, I believe that trans people do not need to pass to be trans or to be the
gender they say they are.
A trans woman is a trans woman regardless of what she looks like, end of story.
But a lot of people don’t feel that way, and I want to get into some of the arguments for that.
The main group of folks that I’ve seen make the argument that trans people need to pass
is transmedicalists, often referred to as truscum.
They’re basically people who believe that all trans people need to have like debilitating
dysphoria to the point that they’ll die if they don’t have surgery and hormones
and stuff as soon as possible.
These folks aren’t accepting of nonbinary people and they enforce a very outdated binary
view of transness.
To me, this perspective seems to come from like a cisgender understanding of what being trans is.
For so many queer identities, when they’re first brought into the mainstream, they’re heavily medicalized.
Being gay was listed as an illness in the DSM until 1987, and being trans only stopped
being listed as a “disorder” in the DSM about five years ago.
For cis straight people, medicalizing queerness seems to be one way of being able to understand
it while also keeping it super separate from them.
While being gay is largely no longer seen as a mental illness -- at least, in the US, and
even then, not by everyone -- lots and lots of people still think of transness as a mental
illness, hence the popularity of the transmedicalist point of view.
But, I’m really hoping that one day we’ll get past that, and we’ll see that being
trans is just another way of existing.
Gender dysphoria is a thing that people can experience to varying levels and degrees,
and it often requires treatment, but it’s not an illness per se.
I mean, if a person wears glasses or needs laser eye surgery because their eyes don’t
work perfectly, we don’t say they have an illness.
Their body is just different and needs a little help to function at its optimum level.
So if someone’s body is making the wrong hormones or they aren’t comfortable with
their genitals, I don’t see why we’d call that an illness.
They might need some treatment but that doesn’t mean there’s something mentally wrong with them.
It doesn’t make you sick to be trans, it just makes you different from cis people.
And there’s nothing wrong with being a little different.
And even though most trans people experience some level of gender dysphoria, not all of us do.
Being trans is an identity.
It means you aren’t the gender you were assigned at birth.
Gender dysphoria is a medical condition that requires a specific level of discomfort over
that misassignment, and not everyone who is trans meets that threshold to have gender dysphoria.
Some people just don’t give a shit about their gender, even if it was assigned wrong at birth.
They’re still trans.
Because the second we start gate-keeping the trans community and saying “You must have
this much gender dysphoria to ride this ride,” it just becomes arbitrary, and it defines
our identity on the pain and discomfort we experience, which seems like a bad way to
define ourselves.
And so it’s these transmedicalists who hold what I would consider to be some very anti-trans
views, like saying that trans people need to pass.
Because to them, “passing” is a vital part of being trans and performing transness "properly."
For them, trans people need to “act” trans enough to really be trans.
I think non-passing trans people make them uncomfortable because they’re outside the
norm of what they think transness is.
But what we thought being trans was a few decades ago doesn’t still have to be what
we think being trans is.
Our conceptions of this can change and grow over time as our understanding of it grows.
And plenty of trans people are out here saying that they’re nonbinary or that they experience
low or no levels of gender dysphoria, and I think it’s important we believe them and
update our idea of what it means to be trans.
And I should say that some folks who have the transmedicalist perspective are actually
trans themselves.
And I feel like their view is shaped by how cis people have made them jump through hoops
to access medical care, so they’ve kind of internalized that the very medical route
is the only way to be trans.
Plus, often they had to suffer from so much transphobia and do so much to prove their
transness, and so they kind of enforce that on other trans people.
They think that if they had to suffer, so do the rest of us.
But I don’t think that’s fair, I think we should be trying to move forward into a
world where trans people don’t have to suffer or jump through all these hoops.
And the other group of folks I’ve seen arguing that trans people need to pass is those who
believe that trans people who pass are our best chance at convincing cis people to accept us.
They think that non-passing trans people are a risk to the fight for trans rights because
they’re harder for cis people to understand.
I understand where these folks are coming from, but I also think that it’s a terrible
concession to fight for trans rights at the expense of non-passing trans people and nonbinary trans people.
At that point you’re only fighting for a subset of trans rights -- you’re fighting
for the rights of passing trans people.
And I think it’d be wrong to leave so many trans people behind just because it’s the easy way.
Fighting for trans rights should mean fighting for the rights of all trans people, even if
it’s more difficult to explain, even if it’s harder for cis people to understand.
Otherwise, the acceptance we earn is minimal, and it’s conditional on a misunderstanding
of and a medicalization of transness.
At that point you’re accepted based on how well you can perform, and how long you can
keep that performance up.
You’re not really accepted for who you are.
Sometimes trans women aren’t going to be the peak of femininity.
Some trans men aren’t going to be the peak of masculinity.
Some non-binary people aren’t going to look androgynous.
That’s just reality.
And we need to fight for trans people to be able to express themselves however they want
because I don’t think it would be acceptance at all if we all just have to perform femininity
or masculinity to such an extreme.
Like I pass, for the most part.
The vast majority of the time when I go out in public I’m called ma’am and she and
her, even when like my hair is in a bun and I’m a mess.
But I’m not the most feminine person.
And I would never want to perform femininity the way that those people would want me to.
I’m a kinda futch lesbian and that’s just me.
I’m not gonna repress that and be super feminine.
That’s not who I am.
It would feel wrong as hell for me to perform that kind of hyper-femininity.
So I’m not interested at all in leaving behind trans people who don’t pass or trans
people who don’t perform femininity or masculinity properly because it would leave me behind
and so many other people.
I don’t care if we might be able to convince more cis people to like us if we all ignored
who we are and put on an act.
I came out so that I could be myself, not so that I could be something I’m not to appease others.
Like, if you want to perform a little bit to be safer or to be taken more seriously,
I get that. That totally makes sense.
I understand the personal aspect of wanting to be seen as the gender you are and so you
up the femininity or masculinity a little bit.
I even understand dishing out that advice to other trans folks to help them cope in
a world that, right now, forces us to perform femininity or masculinity.
I’m not trying to bash that at all or say you can’t or shouldn’t do that.
Do what you gotta do to protect yourself and to be taken seriously.
It’s only when you start prescribing that to other trans people who don’t want it,
telling them that they have to perform in the same way you do, that I have an issue with it.
Instead of taking issue with the non-passing slightly-more-masculine trans girl, take issue
with the people and the society that says she’s less than because of those traits.
Direct your anger where it should go: at the system, not the trans people just being themselves.
Plus, our existence itself shouldn’t have to be political.
Not every trans person is out here fighting for trans rights.
Some of us are just existing.
And I hate the idea that they would have to perform femininity or masculinity too just
because we’re politicizing their existence.
Let people be who they are.
And lastly, enforcing “passing” as the standard for who is what gender means that
you’re enforcing that on cis people too.
There are cis women who’ve been told they had to leave a women’s bathroom because
they “looked like a man”.
Perception of gender is not as simple as we think it is, even for cis people.
And when you rely so heavily on your perception of what you think someone’s gender is, you
end up policing everyone’s appearance, regardless of whether they’re cis or trans.
It forces all women to be hyper feminine, and all men to be hyper masculine.
And where do nonbinary people even fit into our ideas of passing?
Because our range for what we consider acceptably “androgynous” is very small and most nonbinary
people don’t fit it.
Plus not even all nonbinary people want to be androgynous,
there are feminine and masculine nonbinary people.
I mean, hi, I’m one of the femme nonbinary folks.
But I mean the whole concept of passing mostly relies on us recognizing people as either
men or women.
Moving our perceptions of gender past the binary requires putting far less importance on passing.
It requires us to accept that a person’s gender might not line up with what you perceive them as.
And that involves fighting a lot of your ingrained ideas, but I think it’s worth it so that
we can strive for a society where anyone is free to present themselves however they want
while still being recognized as who they are.
So yeah, basically, “passing” is a shit concept that shouldn’t determine a trans
person’s worth or validity.
But at the same time, it can be important for some trans people to feel good about themselves
or to feel safe.
And fighting for trans rights means fighting for the rights of those who pass *and* those who don’t.
So do trans people need to pass?
Of course not. Not even all trans people want to pass.
And we should strive to make this a world where we don’t even need to ask that question.
Anyway, that’s all I had for you today.
Remember to check out the link in the description to get started with the Dollar Shave Club.
Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.