the thing about passing is that for the vast majority of trans women, it’s not something that just *happens.* a cis woman with short hair, no makeup, wearing t shirt and jeans, putting no effort into appearing conventionally “feminine” still gets gendered correctly most of the time. which is as much of a nightmare for trans men as the opposite is for trans women. for a trans woman to pass effortlessly, she almost certainly has to have transitioned early or have one of those perfectly non-clockable body types, which is genetic lottery and super rare. for most trans women, passing at the high end requires expensive surgeries and procedures like laser hair removal/electrolysis, facial reconstructive surgery, hair transplants, and at the low end requires hours of makeup, voice training, posture discipline, outfit coordinating, etc etc etc, and not a lick of it will matter if you’re even in the neighborhood of six feet tall, because most people don’t choose how they gender people they just do it automatically based on silhouette. so if your goal is to pass, you have to build your entire appearance and aura around that abstract ill-defined social instinct.
that’s a lot of money and time for a population that’s chronically impoverished! for someone like me, a 34 year old trans woman who didn’t realize i was trans until 27 and started hrt at 28, the baseline expectation for getting gendered correctly in public just feels impossible. my hair is thinning, i still haven’t been able to afford LHR on my face let alone better clothes or shoes or jewelry or makeup etc etc etc.
so when i see a fictional trans woman who passes perfectly, never gets misgendered, whose gender isn’t a point of contention or conflict, that isn’t good representation to me. that isn’t even representation, as far as i’m concerned that’s just a cis woman that you’re calling trans for brownie points! when the only trans people i see in media are drag queens and cis-passing rich celebrities, i see the binary society imposes on my femininity. if i’m not one, i must be the other. no hate to anyone in either group but that’s just not me! i don’t WANT the surgeries, i don’t WANT to get good at makeup, and i feel like the right of a woman to be respected regardless of how she presents is a cornerstone of real feminism!!
you want to know what’d make me feel less like shit about myself, about my place in the world and society? if there were more clocky trans women in media. not only would i ACTUALLY feel represented, that would also help to normalize the existence of clocky trans women to cis people who only ever see the drag queen / celebrity side of transness. if there were more clocky trans women in media getting aggressively gendered correctly, their pronouns defended and enforced by other characters in the show, that would ACTIVELY make my life better because it would make normies aware that this tension even exists. because i know it’s not intentional nine times out of ten! if we all agree that media plays a huge role in shaping how society sees minority groups, then we should be advocating not for media which only shows the glossy happy perfectly prettily acceptable side, but media which accurately reflects the lived experiences of real trans people in the real world.
also clocky trans women are hot and i like looking at them