Transsexual Lesbian Femme

The Recognition Economy of Lesbianism

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Outside, somebody is smoking beneath the broken neon that paints everybody the same impossible pink. Two dykes are arguing over whose turn it is to buy cigarettes. A butch is laughing so hard she nearly spills her drink into the street. You catch her eye for a second, smile because that's what femmes do, and for one suspended heartbeat your whole life hangs on whether she smiles back as though she's looking at another woman or correcting herself mid-expression. The smile comes. She will never know what needing it cost you. Your shoulders unclench before you even notice they'd risen.

Femme recognition has to be earned before it can be given away. You learn that on the day you need it and don't get it, standing somewhere doing the work of seeing another woman correctly while your own right to see anything at all is still, invisibly, up for a vote. After that day it's the shape of an old ache, finally fitted with a name.

The femme looks at the butch and names her correctly, knows the difference between her masculinity and a man's, knows the softness inside the presentation because she's close enough to touch it. That naming is labor, and like most labor assigned to women, it goes unaccounted for.

Recognition doesn't arrive from nowhere. It comes from a body the world already accepts as a body, a woman the surrounding scene has already agreed to treat as someone who gets to look rather than be looked at and found wanting. Before she can extend that gaze to a butch and make it land, the femme has to have secured, somewhere upstream of that moment, her right to be the one doing the extending instead of the one waiting to receive it.

Cis women don't have to solve that problem in that order. The gaze simply arrives first for them. For everyone else, it has to be built.

Hortense Spillers, in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" (1987), draws the line between body and flesh, and once you have the line you can't stop seeing it. Body is what you are when you move through the world inside a grammar that covers you, a set of social meanings organized to register what happens to you as something that happened to someone. Flesh is what you are when that grammar doesn't reach you, when what happens to you happens in a register the surrounding language has no word for. Your violation lands in a zone the law of the scene has already decided is outside its jurisdiction.

A woman adjusts her lipstick in the reflection of a darkened window. Nobody questions why she belongs there. The gesture is so ordinary it disappears while it's happening. That is what being body looks like. Nobody applauds it. Nobody even notices it happened. Across the sidewalk another woman checks her reflection twice before putting the lipstick away. She doesn't doubt the lipstick. She's spent enough years wondering whether the reflection belongs to her at all.

A transsexual femme on that sidewalk isn't guaranteed to be body. She could be flesh, still, at thirty, at forty, no matter how long she's been living as exactly who she is. Her womanhood is being adjudicated in real time by people who never asked her for her side of it. She's being asked to do the naming that femme is for, the work of looking at a butch and returning her masculinity to her as belonging to women rather than men, while her own right to be the one doing the naming is still under review two feet away from where she's standing. She has to do the looking before the bar has finished deciding whether she's the kind of thing that looks.

Nobody puts that cost in the accounting.

Monique Wittig argues in "One Is Not Born a Woman" (1981) that woman is a political class, produced and maintained by the heterosexual contract, by the economic and sexual relations that require a feminized position available for extraction. The lesbian refuses the class by refusing the contract. Somewhere a teenager is lying awake rehearsing the sentence "I like girls" into a pillow because saying it out loud still feels dangerous. Somewhere else another teenager is rehearsing "I'm a girl" with exactly the same fear. One inherits a room and walks out of it. The other spends years building the walls before discovering she wanted the woman standing in the doorway all along.

The lesbian withdraws her body from the contract that manufactures "woman" as its productive input.

Wittig's lesbian is refusing a seat she was handed. The contract reached her at birth, without application, and she spends her whole life not filling it out. She gets to walk away because someone already built the chair.

A transsexual lesbian's relation to the same contract runs backward. It never reached her the way it reaches a cis woman. It reached her sideways, tried to manufacture something else out of her body entirely, and she spent years and money she may not have had and fights with clinics and courthouses that should never have had a vote, building, by hand, the very seat Wittig's lesbian was born into and simply declined. Then, having finally gotten inside it, she kept walking, straight out the other side, toward women.

Transsexual lesbian femme names a woman who did that work first and then still had to become legible enough to do the one thing femme is actually for: looking at a butch and telling her, correctly, what she is. Butches gave femme its theory of activity. The theory never once asked what the activity costs a femme who had to finance her own admission before she was allowed to perform it for free.

The admission fee was written specifically for her.

In 1989, a sexologist named Ray Blanchard published a paper in a psychiatric journal arguing that transsexual women split into two kinds. Every woman eventually discovers there's a file about her somewhere, written by someone she's never met. Most never have to read it. Some do. Some find it at nineteen, at three in the morning, typing a feeling into a search bar and getting a verdict back. They discover that strangers have already narrated their desires before they ever got to kiss another woman, that somewhere their future was converted into diagnostic language years before they knew what they were feeling.

One kind is attracted to men, feminine from childhood, and gets to be, in his word, homosexual: a category he was willing to treat as real. The other kind is everyone else. Blanchard had a different word for what was happening to them. Autogynephilia. The love of oneself as a woman, reclassified as arousal, a man aroused by the thought of his own femaleness, wearing the idea of a woman the way another man wears a specific and namable thing he'd rather not mention at dinner.

The only thing separating his two categories is who she wants. Want men, and her womanhood gets to be simple, almost tender in how easily it's granted. Want women, and the same womanhood becomes a costume, and she becomes a case study instead of a woman, and the fact that she also, separately, loves women gets folded into the diagnosis as further evidence against her, because loving women was never going to be allowed to just be a fact about a lesbian. It had to be explained. It had to be pathology. A trans woman who wants men can be pitied into womanhood. A trans woman who wants women has to fight for it, in a paper, against a man who published his conclusion before he asked the question.

Is it possible she doesn't actually feel like a woman, and what she actually feels is arousal at the image of one, dressed up and mistaken for an identity because the mistake was easier to live inside than the truth. Is it possible what she's wearing is skin on loan. Is it possible the whole thing is a man in a costume who has forgotten it's a costume.

Julia Serano spent a chapter of *Whipping Girl* (2007) taking the theory apart at the joints, and kept taking it apart for years afterward, because theories like this do not die when they are refuted. They wait for someone new to cite them. Her point was not delicate. The arousal Blanchard built a diagnosis out of is not rare and it is not confined to trans women. Cis women report it. The studies recruiting exclusively from gender clinics were never going to produce anything except confirmation of what they assumed walking in. By 2010, in a paper called "The Case Against Autogynephilia," she had the data lined up against Blanchard's own sample. By 2015 she had a replacement model that required no pathology at all: female and feminine embodiment fantasies as one entry in the very large catalogue of things bodies get erotically excited about, no diagnosis attached, because wanting to feel like yourself has never been a disorder in anyone else.

None of that reaches the bar at midnight. The paper wins in the journal and the feeling stays in the body. She still has to do the femme work, the correct naming of a butch's masculinity, standing inside a theory that says her own wanting is the symptom, that the door behind her was a wish with a hinge painted on it. She dances anyway.

The song is loud enough that nobody has to explain themselves. The butch beside her knows exactly where to place a hand on the small of her back without asking permission from a psychiatrist. For four minutes the world contains no taxonomy, only rhythm, perfume, sweat, and two lesbians who understand one another more completely than every journal article ever written about either of them combined. Then the lights come back on, and language returns with the bill.

A paper cannot close a door a woman already walked through. It can only make her carry the paperwork for the rest of her life, producing it at every bar, for every butch, before the recognition she's owed gets extended back to her the way it was always going to be extended to a woman who never had to fight for the right to give it.

Closing time empties the room in pieces. Lipstick stains dry on forgotten glasses. Someone is carrying her boots because they started hurting an hour ago. Somebody kisses her girlfriend in the parking lot without realizing she's just become part of another woman's memory. The bartender locks the door.

---

**Works cited**

Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." *Diacritics*, 1987. The body/flesh distinction: the difference between a person the world's grammar covers and a person that grammar leaves exposed. Used here to describe what a transsexual femme has to resolve about her own legibility before she can extend recognition to a butch.

Wittig, Monique. "One Is Not Born a Woman." In *The Straight Mind and Other Essays*, Beacon Press, 1992 (first published 1981). Woman as a political class produced by the heterosexual contract; the lesbian as the figure who refuses the class by refusing the contract. Extended here to the transsexual lesbian, who has to build her entry into the class before she can refuse it.

Blanchard, Ray. "The Concept of Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male Gender Dysphoria." *Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease*, 177(10), 1989, pp. 616-623. The taxonomy that splits transsexual women by object choice, treating attraction to men as legitimizing and attraction to women as diagnostic. Named here as the paper trail behind a specific accusation aimed at transsexual lesbians.

Serano, Julia. *Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity*. Seal Press, 2007; and "The Case Against Autogynephilia." *International Journal of Transgenderism*, 12(3), 2010, pp. 176-187. The methodological rebuttal: the arousal pattern isn't exclusive to trans women, and the clinical sampling guaranteed the conclusion. Used here as the counter-paper trail.

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