Passing Sideways
‘Nvr Pass’ by She/Her/Hers starts with a blistering opening guitar, the lead singer screaming that she’s “never felt more alone than I do right now, never felt like I was more out of the closet”. When I was going for counselling at the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic, I used to talk about that song a lot, how it spoke to me in its simultaneous anger at not being able to pass, and the concept of passing itself. I can’t listen to that song anymore without feeling dysphoric, and I think that speaks to my (trans) age. Even when I was three years out into transitioning, I still had most of my ways to go — hormones were still settling, I hadn’t had bottom surgery yet, the laser hair removal still needed organising. Back when I used to listen to that song, the insistence that “I’ll never pass” felt like “I’ll never pass as I am now, but I will in the future”; today, the weight of ‘never’ feels heavier, as in “I will never pass, regardless”.
And we know by now, surely, that the concept of passing, as in blending into the cis world, is a normative and cisheteropatriarchial view of aesthetics. The ultimately assimilationist aim that we look just like the normal cis people around us. This thin view of performativity states that if I just observe as many attributes of (white, middle class, straight) womanhood, I can replicate them on my body in order to be accepted by those that watch. That there is a fundamental, essential set of scripts that I could tap into if only I tried hard enough. As an autistic woman, I am pretty good at reading and navigating scripts — they’re the main way I mask my mental health and sensory overloads — but I feel I’ve roundly failed at replicating cis womanhood, and despite years of trying to key into those scripts I rarely if ever blend into a cis background.
To be clear here, I am not saying that I think I’m less attractive than the eternal cis woman in my head — I am desired as a woman (or more clearly, as a dyke) by the people I’d like to be desired by, and they generally reflect back the ways I flag my queer womanhood in an affirmative way. That said, it’s not insignificant that the majority of the people I attract are either trans themselves, or are cis women that have many trans people in their lives. I have this whole load of scripts that are pretty much redundant outside of my circles (and circles like them); chainmail, harnesses, hankies, a copy of Darryl in my hand, a Lezbag, antifascist patches on my backpack, a mullet with a severe undercut. These all speak my own aesthetic understanding of myself out into the open for those people that understand those signifiers to hang their attraction on. But, the point still stands that I get misgendered on the phone, that the plumber calls me bossman, that the sexual health nurse signed me up for the msm tests not the trans woman tests etc.
And it’s hard to know where that leaves me, because passing moves from a singular “I do (not) pass to a universal cis subject” to a more plural, contextual “I am (not) passing to this particular person in this particular way”. It’s no longer that I can aim to pass vertically, to a higher-up adjudicator of my aesthetics, but instead have to think about the smaller passings that happen between and inside circles of people. This is inflected, of course, by my neurodivergence and my gender expression. My autistic / Tourettic modality means I can’t wear many of the signifiers of womanhood, like tights and makeup, that I otherwise might want to. And likewise as a butch woman, I lean into hardnesses that are anathema to the cis womanhood I would be otherwise gesturing towards. It’s also inflected by my experience of the UK transitional healthcare system, which simultaneously demanded a sort of womanhood that I needed to rebel against, and provided me with little substantive, long-term support in finding an aesthetic that worked for me. Failures are almost always simultaneously individual and systemic, and it’s less about blaming anyone for my lack of passing as realising that I have actively and productively failed to transition to something that is legible to cis cultures.
I have this wonderful body that I have laboured in the collective to produce, and it has turned out that the product of that handicraft is something relatively unaprehendable even to the structures that I relied on to construct it. And so I don’t pass, in a real sense will never pass, at least not to a cis God-eye that fucks the world. And that leaves me with something a bit abject, monstrous, that I can play with and hold up to the light of other desiring dykes.
What is sexy isn’t necessarily what is safe.
