Queer films in context

[liv]

Someone on Twitter linked to this article: How I broke, and botched, the Brandon Teena story by Donna Minkowitz. It's about the real life rape and murder of a trans man depicted in the film Boys don't cry.

Minkowitz explains that being extremely ignorant about trans people [l]ike many other cis queer people at the time, she saw Brandon Teena's as a continuation of the rich, creative conversation going on in the early Nineties in the lesbian community [...] about feeling free to “be” male, to some extent, in the psychic fantasy arenas of our own minds, and out in the world.. Hence she, and in a lot of ways the creative and marketing teams for the film, saw Brandon Teena as a butch lesbian rather than a trans man. Minkowitz also talks about how she glossed over the other victims of Teena's murderers, one of whom was African American, because she identified with the white 'lesbian'. There's a photograph of the original heavily misgendering article included in the link.

I really needed to read that article, because I have spent most of the last 20 years upset about Boys don't cry. It came out in 1999, when I was an undergraduate student in a relationship with a woman, and just starting to discover Queer community. There were pretty much two scenes at university: the gay men's party and casual sex scene, and the intellectual feminist lesbians. As a bi woman with minimal political awareness (I wasn't identifying as a feminist at the time, and I knew basically nothing about lesbian politics), I fit slightly less badly with the intellectual feminist lesbians, and I got somewhat less politically ignorant by hanging around them. They weren't TERFs in that they didn't go out of their way to hurt trans people, but if a trans woman wanted to be part of their circle, she had better be prepared to provide a rigorous theoretical justification for why a trans woman should be accepted.

Anyway, there were very very few mainstream films about lesbians at the time, and the feminist lesbians generally disapproved of porn or anything male gaze centric. And they were really really excited about Boys don't cry. I saw it with my girlfriend, and it was literally the first ever time we saw on screen people having sex in a way that even slightly resembled how we had sex. I was massively upset about it; I closed my eyes through the explicit rape scene but that didn't change the fact that this supposedly ground-breaking "representation" was about someone nominally like me being raped and murdered. What I said I was upset about was that it was telling a fictionalized story about a case that was still going through the courts; the scrolling text at the end said that the people accused of murdering the protagonist were appealing against their conviction. Having now read Minkowitz' article, I am more able to articulate why the whole thing felt so wrong to me: it was being sold, both by the marketers and by the nearest thing I had to a Queer community as a lesbian film, which didn't really fit.

I'm reminded also of being hugely traumatized by Rocky Horror in the early 90s. Again, I saw it in hugely the wrong context: I have no idea why the counsellors though it would be a good idea to show it to a bunch of 12-year-olds at Jewish youth camp, but it was a very straight environment. There was some amount of messaging that "we" shouldn't bully or discriminate against those poor unfortunate gay people over there, but absolutely no possible idea that anybody in the audience might in any way relate to the gender stuff in RHPS. I'm not saying that the film is Problematic, and I now understand that it was really really important to a generation of gay, trans and genderqueer people. In the 70s when it was released it was a lot of people's first exposure to any possibility of anything outside the gender binary, and there was a whole community around it where people got to dress up and experiment with gender expression and kinky aesthetics and so on.

To naive little 12yo Liv, though, the whole thing seemed to be about people being forced against their will into gender presentations and sex that they didn't want, and it was just terrifying. As an adult, I understand that forced feminization is an actual kink, and it's like rape fantasies, there are any number of reasons why someone would enjoy imagining a situation where they give up control and agency. But as a child, the message seemed to be not one of liberation and permission to play around with gender and have non mainstream sex, it seemed to be message that if you transgressed any kind of strictly heterosexist vanilla existence in any way, you would be punished with rape, humiliation and cannibalistic murder.

I think some of this is that there was a shift in thinking about trans identity round about when I was first starting to be aware of this. I'm not sure I have this quite right because I'm talking about memories of an era when I was quite young and very much on the periphery of the scene. But I get the impression that up to about the 90s, gay men, transvestites, drag queens and actual trans women were more or less lumped together as an identity group, with the other side of the divide being lesbians including butches and trans men. Whereas now the dominant model is that the main groups are cis people regardless of gender or sexuality, and trans people who absolutely are the gender they say they are. I met back then, and I still know now, plenty of trans women for whom the old grouping was massively painful: they constantly had an uphill battle to prove that they were in fact women who happened to have the wrong letter recorded on their birth certificates, not fetishistic men.

There's something about this in the tension between feminists and the trans community, too. Some TERFs are just evil and hate trans women out of sheer bigoted cruelty. But I think there's also quite a few like Minkowitz, who are still thinking in the old paradigm, who want the freedom to be masculine while still identifying as women, and who are uncomfortable with the idea of a connection between feminine gender presentation and female identity. That assumption isn't even slightly trans people's fault, of course, it's a lot more about gatekeepers who assume that you have to be 'feminine' to be a woman, so if someone isn't accepted as a woman, she kind of has to live up to that stereotype to avoid being misgendered.

Certainly the old system of dividing the LGBTQ community into 'masculine' and 'feminine' had loads of problems. But possibly the new system of dividing us into 'cis' and 'trans' isn't perfect either. For example, it makes it hard to find space for drag and genderbending, which are an important part of historical Queer culture. There are occasional tensions between non-binary people and binary trans people, because some expressions of those identities can undermine people in the other group, if everybody has to be either cis or trans. And I think there probably are people who don't fit neatly into either the cis or the trans bucket.

Which certainly doesn't make it ok to disrespect other people's gender identities! I think it's much more reasonable to tell Brandon Teena's story as being about trans man than about a lesbian. If someone tells me he's a trans man, I'm going to believe him, I'm not going to lecture him about how it's ok for women to present masculine. I wonder if there's a healthy way for lesbians to be in solidarity with people like BT, without appropriating his identity as happened in the original article and the film. I'd like it to be a positive solidarity, too, not just a commonality of being oppressed by overlapping groups of homophobes.

More on this hopefully soon, I have loads and loads of thoughts bouncing off that article and other stuff I've seen or watched recently.

Comments

[ambyr]

That was a really interesting article; thank you for sharing it.

Certainly the old system of dividing the LGBTQ community into 'masculine' and 'feminine' had loads of problems. But possibly the new system of dividing us into 'cis' and 'trans' isn't perfect either. For example, it makes it hard to find space for drag and genderbending, which are an important part of historical Queer culture. There are occasional tensions between non-binary people and binary trans people, because some expressions of those identities can undermine people in the other group, if everybody has to be either cis or trans. And I think there probably are people who don't fit neatly into either the cis or the trans bucket.

I have lots of vague thinky thoughts for this. In my own Queer community, I feel like I'm constantly fighting back against a general push to collapse "woman" and "femme" into a single category--like in the rush to embrace the "trans men are men" narrative (which is important!) we have abandoned women's identity categories like butch (which . . . are also important). I had a really tense discussion with a friend over a survey in which she asked for write-in gender and then in the final write-up collapsed those write-in gender definitions into two categories: "femme" and "masc." She did not understand why I might write "woman" but not want (in fact, found it intensely dysphoric) to be sorted into "femme"; I did not understand why she thought it was appropriate to assign people gender categories with fairly specific meanings.

[kore]

She did not understand why I might write "woman" but not want (in fact, found it intensely dysphoric) to be sorted into "femme"

Oh boy, do I get that. Of course as a six-foot-tall woman with an alto voice I don't get sorted into 'femme' a whole lot anyway, but early on I took a 'you can't fire me from your stupid gender binary categories, I quit' defiant attitude. Which of course covered up a lot of pain from the constant misgendering and mocking and the dysphoria caused by the social beauty standards that make it weirdly possible for women to be ONLY women, and also failing at 'being' enough of a woman if they're not acceptably femme.

[altamira16]

I am here with you worried that woman is being collapsed into some very narrow femme identity that a lot of women do not even want to participate in.

And I am not sure about the whole non-binary category and where it fits in.

[liv]

Yes, very much so. It's partly that I'm out of touch with the current generation, but I really hate the 'women and femmes' construction. I think the idea is that misogyny hurts people perceived as feminine regardless of how they identify, which can be a positive thing to acknowledge. But sometimes it's just lazy search-and-replace, it's somehow more PC to say 'women and femmes' than just 'women' so people automatically substitute without thinking about whether it makes sense in context. Also sometimes 'femmes' has all kinds of dodgy connotations, it can mean something like, non-binary people whom the speaker perceives as feminine. Or it means AFAB people because changing the language provides deniability for misgendering trans men. Or it means, I don't want to hang out with people who fit my stereotype of 'men', but I want to make excuses / exceptions for my Queer male friends. (I also hate the terms 'cishet' and 'cisgay' in most contexts.)

Assuming all women are femmes is another step worse, very much sympathy on having to deal with that. I definitely agree with you about women's identity categories, it's part of what I'm worrying about with this very strict cis versus trans binary we seem to have ended up with.

A way it affects me, which is much less bad than your experience, is that sometimes when I happen to turn up to a social occasion wearing a plain button-down shirt, waistcoat and trousers (my usual style of dress is feminine-to-neutral, mostly skirts and tops), some people very politely and carefully gender me as male. And it's totally well meant, but I don't suddenly become male just because I happen to put on trousers.

[ambyr]

I definitely agree with you about women's identity categories, it's part of what I'm worrying about with this very strict cis versus trans binary we seem to have ended up with.

I feel, having spent a little time hanging out with teens and early twenty-age people lately, like the up and coming generation may actually be handling this better than my generation, partly because they've never known a time in which nonbinary wasn't a valid gender choice. Like . . . people of my generation (30s) are speaking Modern Gender As A Second Language, and everyone is very worried about getting everything precise and correct and the result is, as you say, strict binaries and stiff boundaries. But the people coming of age into a world of a multitude of genders seem to be overall much more flexible . . . I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong! Time will tell.

A friend who works for the US census mentioned recently that they were doing some small-scale surveys on 18-20-year-olds, and sixty percent of people in that age bracket identified as some form of trans, nonbinary, or genderqueer. That's a world that's hard for me to imagine. It will be interesting seeing what it looks like.

A way it affects me, which is much less bad than your experience, is that sometimes when I happen to turn up to a social occasion wearing a plain button-down shirt, waistcoat and trousers (my usual style of dress is feminine-to-neutral, mostly skirts and tops), some people very politely and carefully gender me as male. And it's totally well meant, but I don't suddenly become male just because I happen to put on trousers.

That sounds very frustrating indeed.

[ambyr]

ETA, because I want to vent: Today I saw a theater production by a company that “supports women-with-an-x [womxn?] artists, by which we mean everyone who didn’t have the fortune to be born a cishet man.”

I just...I don’t get it. If you want to be a theater company that supports minority and disadvantaged artists, say that! Redefining “women” to include gay men and trans men (and gay trans men) is not helping anyone. Intersectionality is complex and sometimes difficult; you don’t solve that by collapsing all axes of discrimination into one term.

[monanotlisa]

Interesting thoughts! I think you're identifying a lot about, well, identity. I remember watching Boys Don't Cry and being both elated and devastated.

[sfred]

I remember hearing about Boys Don't Cry, and then seeing it, and it being exclusively referred to as a lesbian film. All the representations I could find (in my teens and early twenties) of people like me were labelled "lesbian". I knew I was in many ways a boy; it's not a surprise that I didn't realise I was trans until my thirties.

here from network

[kore]

This is a really interesting take on the film -- it feels right. I remember from reading the article that the main stigma seemed to be people would think Brandon and his girlfriends were lesbians, that he was "really" a woman and a lesbian and therefore his sexual partners would be lesbians too. IIRC the original article presented Brandon's girlfriend as sort of sweetly deluded for insisting he was a man.

Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain are both excellent films I saw once and never again, they were both acutely painful experiences.

[siderea]

Yay! I liked this post a lot.

I wonder if there's a healthy way for lesbians to be in solidarity with people like BT, without appropriating his identity as happened in the original article and the film. I'd like it to be a positive solidarity, too, not just a commonality of being oppressed by overlapping groups of homophobes.

I would hope so. I mean... my passion about gender liberation seems to me to be an absolutely natural, if not inexorable, outgrowth of my ardent feminism. When people start policing other people's gender identities, I take that very personally as a threat. Nobody gets to tell me what gender I am, and if they have an opinion about how I am performing my gender, they are welcome to insert it firmly and deeply into any orifice in their body. I'm not even what anybody thinks of as genderqueer, just an ordinary killjoy feminist harridan who has zero tolerance for anyone telling any woman she's doing woman wrong, and by extension anyone telling any man he's doing man wrong, or any fabulous transcendental gender pioneer that they're doing fabulous transcendental gender pioneer wrong. ABSOLUTE GENDER LIBERATION NOW.

*hops off soapbox* This all seems totes obvs?

[silveradept]

This is a thoughtful piece, and a good reminder of why we get shirty at people who think the kids have gone too far with making identity into an electron cloud, rather than the axes they are most comfortable with.

More and more, I see stories of people saying "I didn't think there was a word or phrase to describe my identity, until I saw someone who was clearly doing it, or I read someone who had the same experience, and now I feel like I've found my spot." I cannot imagine what it must have been like to have very popular movies happening that showed the thing that people were looking for, and then applying the wrong label and identity to it.

[flippac]

It's tragic how few can understand what it is for a trans woman to explore masculinity or butchness having freed herself from "man".

I'm done, personally. But it's left me with a way of moving through the world when I'd never be accepted as [conventionally] femme. Talking of which, confusing femme with mainstream-conventionally feminine never really helped anyone either.