Between Cis and Trans Women

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Mary Pratt, Barby in the Dress She Made Herself, 1986

I asked my followers what I should write about next. This response, from a girl named Emma, was the highest liked response. It is also a somewhat evergreen topic, as I find in my own trans life, my perception of how cis women relate to me changes greatly year to year. I imagine the same is true of many trans women. I am going to try and be as objective as possible within what is ultimately a highly emotionally fraught and mercurial topic. Emma said:

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between trans women and cis women recently. Mostly due to some off experiences with cis women, which to be fair is not representative. But it is often a kind of challenging thing. That relationship always tends to mediate my thoughts about assimilation and liberation for trans women. I really feel a strong desire to just be one of the girls, but I often feel purposely alienated by cis women as well. It feels like it’s more difficult to confront. Specifically with friendships or even just casual respect, there’s this wall I find. Perhaps it’s just me, but the dynamic often feels off. Not with every cis woman, but enough that it sticks in my head. So, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, cause my social circle is entirely trans, part by choice, part by lack of options.

This is an immense topic, as I am essentially being asked to sum up the relationship between groups with incredible amounts of diversity within them. There’s also a significant amount of existing work on this topic, that I can only begin to reference. For my cis readers who may be unfamiliar with the existing literature, probably the best places to start are Chapter 8 of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, “Dismantling Cissexual Privilege” and Chapter 9 of her most recent book, Sexed Up, “You Make Me Sick”. I would also recommend Susan Stryker’s essay “My Words To Victor Frankeinstein Above The Village of Chamounix”. Lastly, it is worth reading Talia Bhatt’s “What Is A White Feminist Anyways”. I will not be rehashing their work. I’ll also be avoiding making the complaints that I cover in “The Second Feminist Sex War” and “How To Be Sexually Normal”. My goal today is to avoid polemics and anger. I’ve been having a weirdly good go of it with cis woman friends of mine lately, and am aware that I have an increasingly large cis readership, and I’d like to produce something that is useful for both trans and cis women. Afterall, it would be great if cis women could change their ways, and they’re not going to do that if they find articles on the topic too offputtingly anger. Lastly, my coverage of intersectionality is going to be minimal here. That is a conscious choice I am making both for the sake of space, and because other authors do it better. I am going to structure this response categorically. To some extent it will be a temporal categorization (the changing dynamic depending where you are in transition), and to another, it will be categorical (types of women, and their interactions). My goal is to be honest, and via that honesty, fair. I want cis women readers to fell welcomed to this text, because much of what I address in it are perspectives I presumed my cis friends could intuit about my life, but which when I explained it to them, they found fascinating and eye opening. I know that this is a long read, but I promise if you stick with it, you’ll get something good out of it regardless of your gender modality.

Early Transition

A trans woman’s early transition (first year) can be one of the most volatile in her relationship with cis women. There is a strong likelihood that she has cisgender female friends from before she came out. These friends were likely drawn to her because of their perception of “him” as a soft, sensitive, queer boy. Whether she was their gay best friend or a more sensitive lover turned friend, these cis women were likely aware that “he” was in some unnameable way different from the other men in their lives. This was something they highly valued in “him”. She, likewise, probably chose her female friends in part due to their openness to queerness and effeminacy is men. Perhaps some are lesbians or bisexual themselves. These women were also likely of the type that believe in the possibility of real friendships with men, and may have even relished the idea of having a deep friendship with a man. In this way, the friendship allowed both parties to “be more real” than they otherwise normally could in a cross-sex interaction. All of these factors often lead to an initially very good experience of coming out for the trans girl. Her friends seem excited, seem welcoming. She is relieved. She is likely to dismiss the warnings of other trans women to be careful with her old friends. She tells them that while their concerns are real she is “just really lucky” to have “such good accepting friends”.

During this same period, these cis girls are likely genuinely excited by their friend’s transition. They want to help. Cis women have been trained by patriarchy for their whole lives to help. Helping is a form of socializing. And they’ve especially been mentally trained to help men. In recent years women have talked more about this, about how their boyfriends expect them to gentle parent them, and about how their training from youth has trained them psychologically to do so. Women do an immense amount of unacknowledged and often unperceived emotional and physical labour for the men in their lives, especially the ones that they care about. Likewise, no one is more aware than women how much work, skill, effort, and training goes into being a woman. If you are cis, you become a man simply by aging. If you’re a woman, you become a woman by working at it. Some of this work can be deeply enjoyable (learning fashion and makeup). Some of these cis women enjoy it, love it even. So, it is only natural that they are eager to teach the newly out trans woman all about it. They want to help. They’ll take you shopping. They’ll excitedly beg to do your makeup.

The problem with this, is that it is parenting. It isn’t always entirely unwanted. But when cis girls do it poorly, it ends up being deeply condescending. The trans girl feels like a dress up doll. Or she feels like the cis girl’s are fulfilling their secret dream of being a drag queen’s makeup artist. She has heard “welcome to womanhood” so many times, in so many different tones, over the past few months that she’s ready to set fire to JC Penny’s. No adult woman wants her friends and peers to treat her like a child, and that goes for trans women too. No matter how aware she is of her woefully inadequate woman skills, there’s likely a line can’t be crossed in terms of how much she can be reminded of that. For me, that line was a cis friend of mine trying to give me all of her used, expired makeup. It was also cis women constantly trying to do my makeup, instead of sitting me down and teaching me how to do it myself.

Tensions are likely to arise, and friendships likely to dissolve, once the trans woman begins to put her foot down and assert autonomy. In her mind, she does not want to be her friend’s ‘project of the week’. She wants to be her friend, not her hobby. The cis girl is likely to interpret this as a lack gratitude, as rudeness. She might also look at how far her friend still has to go and think that she is breaking off her tutelage too early. In fairness to the cis girl, she is likely right that the trans girl still has much to learn. In fairness to the trans girl, the cis girl is setting herself up as a judge of when you’re sufficiently woman. She might even be less likely to invite you to events or public hangouts if she’s worried about how you look. That embarrassment and punishment is unfair to you. It is not okay for a cis girl to leperize her friendship with a trans girl. Once the dress up doll starts asking for autonomy, many friendships dissolve.

Joining The Trans Community

As the trans girl begins to get more comfortable in her transition, she is likely to begin to make friends (both online and offline) with fellow trans women. She wants to have friendships where her experience is instantly understood, where she doesn’t have to explain things, where she doesn’t feel incredibly self conscious, where she is not reminded that the people around her view her as “on the road to womanhood” rather than as a woman. These newfound friendships open up an incredible world to her. Likely, during this period, she’ll begin to meet other trans people who find her attractive and validate her sexually as a woman. Many of her friends will be in this same stage of their lives and their transitions. The sexual norms within the trans community are already far more sexually liberated than within the cis woman, and even the cis lesbian community. I often say that one of the reasons trans women especially are so sexually open is because it is a form of reassurance that the person they are having sex with views them as human. This is not an easy concept for cis women to understand. For cis women, sex is often what cis men attempt to trick or coerce them into providing. Cis women exist within a structure where sex is the “good” or the “object” that they are reduced to being both the embodiment of and the guardians of. In the minds of many men, cis women are what you have to get past to get at cis women (aka, their sex). Sex is something to be done with someone you can reasonably trust views you as more than just sex. Sex is something, that if you engage in it too carelessly, might reveal itself as the only reason your acquaintance was maintained at all. Meanwhile, for trans women, who are construed, both by right wing Christo-fascists and hyper anxious trans-exclusionary feminist hate machines, as embodied sexual predation waiting to happen, someone having sex with them, or even just coming onto them, is often a sign that they are being perceived as safe. Sex feels like proof that you are being talked to like a woman, and not managed like a predator, like a male pervert. Thus, sex comes to have two very different meanings between cis women and trans women.[1]

This confusion can manifest in a myriad of different ways, largely depending on both the cis woman’s comfort with sex, and with how pre-established her friendship is with the trans girl. It is not a coincidence that my oldest close cis girl friendship is with a porn star. I cover a lot of this in “The Second Feminist Sex War” and “How To Be Sexually Normal,” so I will try and be brief. In the best case scenario, the cis friend of the trans girl hitting this stage is charm and bemusement. It is “go get it girl”. It is a fascination with the strange, quirky, and alien culture that is trans feminine culture. Sometimes cis women get really into it, but more on that later. In a good but not ideal outcome the cis woman is a little offput by the openness trans women have in both discussing and engaging in sex. She realizes that while she does not understand it, it is not harmful to her in any way. Perhaps part of her a little curious about it. But part of her is also overwhelmed and confused. She can’t understand what is going on, but she says to each their own and leaves it at that. Maybe some day she’ll get a little drunk or a little high and work up the courage to ask some semi-invasive but fun to answer questions about it all. Unfortunately, these two responses are not the norm.

Unfortunately, many cis women view the sexual openness not as a means of assuring each other of each other’s gender, nor as is commonly thought, an overflow of liberation after being full of self-hate and repression for so many years. Instead, many cis women view trans women’s sexual liberation as proof that trans women are secretly men. They see it and think, “yes this is how men would behave if they woke up one day as women.” While this is hardly true, it is unfortunately a common reaction. It is often intermixed with the fact that these trans women are often not put to the cis woman’s standards of performed womanhood. Their makeup is still not great. Their fashion seems like a teenager’s attempt at femininity (because that is what first attempting to learn to dress yourself as a woman looks like). And, estrogen has yet to fully work its magic. Any surgeries the girl might desire, be they feminization or bottom surgery, are still a year or more off, if they are ever to be attained. She wonders why the trans woman has not adopted any feminine hobbies yet. She sees her clinging to the basement dweller nerd hobbies that she associates with poorly socialized men. It is easy for the cis woman to ungender the promiscuous trans woman. It is easy to project onto them the image of men larping. The cis girl has the good sense not to say anything, but she sees ‘how it looks’. That is, she projects onto it.

This situation can become exacerbated if the trans woman starts to notice a decreased candor in the cis woman’s relationship with her, if she notices the nerves or discomfort. It can feel like, and often is the case, that the only way the trans woman is able to maintain her womanhood around her cis friends is by amputating her sexuality. The cis woman often becomes paranoid, or is already paranoid, that trans women are going to make sexual advances on her. This sexual advance is construed as some sort of nebulous harm. At best, it is construed as harmful because this cis woman views all sexual advances on her as harmful. More realistically, it is construed as harmful because this cis woman views any unwanted sexual advance on her as harmful (despite in most situations there existing no way to know if an advance is unwanted until it is made).Worst, and usually unconsciously, this cis woman views the unwanted sexual advances of men as harmful, implicitly gendering her trans woman friend as a man. This is exactly what this trans woman is afraid of. It is exactly why she has learned to perceive being hit on as a sign that she is safe. She needs to know that her friend doesn’t think of her as a male pervert, but as a liberated woman.

In the most excruciating of cases, the trans woman does make the mistake of hitting on her uncomfortable cis woman friend, usually out of a desperate need to know that she is being perceived as a woman, that her fears are unfounded. This, of course, results in her fears becoming founded. What ensues is a long argument about feminism, trans politics, the politics of sex, accusations of negging, gossip, and the persona-non-gratafication of the trans woman. In other cases, the trans woman doesn’t even need to make a move. Some nebulous action is perceived as highly sexual. Once, I had a coworker who after asking me what I was reading, and I suggested Pulitzer Award Finalist Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (back when it was a stand-alone novella and not part of Stag Dance). I was threatened with an HR complaint for supposedly recommending erotica. This was a woman with a PhD in geography from York University (the most leftwing department in the most leftwing university in Canada). She thought of herself as queer and a trans ally. She should have known better. But she didn’t. She’d allowed herself to become paranoid. Over the next few months, she made my job absolutely unworkable. Literally, I had to quit. I am doing my best to be epistemically generous to cis women in this piece, but there is behaviour that is simply inexcusable and it is everything in this paragraph. If you’re a cis woman and you’ve let your paranoia that a trans woman might be attracted to you, or did politely flirt with you, result in social, financial, criminal, or biological harm against a trans woman, you are not forgiven. At least, you’re not forgiven by me. Try her. Go out and try and repair what you’ve done, if there’s still time, if she’s still alive and free.[2]

Transitioned

There comes a time in most trans women’s lives when they consider themselves fully transitioned. They’re done. Anything else they do to their bodies is upkeep or improvement. But they’re done, they’re really really done. They know how to be a woman, and they view themselves as fully inhabiting that role. They’re no longer transitioning to it. They’ve achieved it. What they’ve achieved often looks very different. This can vary between class, region, personal preferences, and social sphere. It must be mentioned that those who’ve suffered too much mistreatment are likely to exist within largely trans-exclusive social spheres. Sadly, many trans women understandably retreat from cis life because cis people treat them poorly. This is not a reflection on how those trans women comport themselves. Often it has to do with the cis environment they’re adjacent to, as well as unchangeable or expensive to change physical features that cisgender people consider it appropriate to ostracize a woman for possessing. These trans women often had a different womanhood to conform to, a less strict one, a trans one. That additional freedom, and those shifts in aesthetic norms, is the upshot of being ostracized from cis, that is, mainstream, life. People often presume that because those girls are like that they never got accepted by cisgender friends. In fact, what I’ve seen has mostly been the opposite. Trans girls allow themselves to dress how the cis would consider cringe once it has been made clear to them that no matter how much they try to be accepted, they will not be. However, that’s all I have left to say about these isolationist trans women. Since my subject is cis and trans women’s interactions, I have to turn my attention elsewhere.

The two remaining groups of trans women are either assimilationists, who wish to blend in fully with cis culture and eschew all trans culture, or they are trans women, who like myself, have learned to code switch. We know how to behave around trans women and how to behave around cis women, and ideally, we occupy spaces inhabited by both as often as possible. Unfortunately, code switching and perfect behaviour is often insufficient, and most trans women who hang out with cis women still have to talk down the strangely paranoid, or suffer slights from friends. Just last week a friend of mine, a fellow trans woman, was having a conversation with a cis friend of hers and things went south. This friend often describes her sexuality to me as “phallic”, and while she is a bisexual, the femme she was talking to was certainly not her type. The conversation was a group one, casual, and fun, until the femme said “my eyes are up here”. Thankfully, no one for a second believed that my friend had been staring at her friend’s breasts. People came to her rescue. And yet, my friend was still reminded, to some cis women, even cis women she believed herself beyond reproach with, comfortable with, she could still quickly be imagined as the male pervert. Trans women are over four times more likely to experience sexual assault than cis women.[3] Yet, we are imagined by cis women to be perpetrators, not victims. Do you know what that does to a victim’s psychology, to be implicitly synonymized with the men who attacked us?

I do not understand the skepticism that cis women will often continue to hold for even the most privileged trans women. Being a trans woman frequently feels like learning womanhood better than any cis woman ever did, stifling one’s sexuality, humour, and ultimately personality around cis women. It is feeling the cis gaze breathing down your back while you wait for them to accuse you of something awful, while you wait for their paranoid delusions to take over. There’s nothing left you could possibly change to make yourself more appealing to the cis gaze, and yet, it is not enough. You look like a cis woman, but many of your friends still think deep down that you look like a man, because that’s how they think of you. They act confused when strangers gender you correctly without a second thought. They ask how well you pass. They seem confused by the idea that it is near perfectly. They might have asked you, but they’re not believing your answer.

Beyond the strange obsession with whether the trans woman near them is flirting with them, this perception-belief that many cis women hold about their trans woman friends is among the most bizarre. Their perspective bias is so strong, their implicit desire to artificialize trans genders, their ungendering[4] so automatic, that they presume that the world sees their friend as the man in the dress that they perceive her as. When told that the majority of people perceive something different, see a woman and a cis woman at that, they refuse to believe it. As a trans woman, having cis women do that to you can be extremely unsettling for your self image. You never know how to behave in the room. How is your friend seeing you right now? Hopefully she isn’t thinking about your gender at all, and to the extent that it exists unconsciously, is thinking about womanhood, not some variant that is ultimately a lesser-than. But sometimes it becomes apparent that this isn’t the case. Then the trans woman ends up worrying, how often she is being actually being considered as a woman, rather than merely being seemingly treated as one.

Being a trans woman is to be an individual who constantly might be being perceived not as an individual, but as a type. What your friend Gracie thinks of your friend Sarah is purely about Sarah. This is the norm. Very few times in my life has someone said to me, “oh I’ve never actually met a Jew before”. Don’t get me wrong. It has happened. But it is rare. And when it does happen, I am aware that I might be playing a greater influence than I should on that person’s opinions on Jews going forward. However, never am I worried that I am being reduced to “the Jew”. If this was 1970, maybe. But even if I attend someone’s Christmas party, I am not rendered in that space as “the Jew”. The closest it comes to that is that I’ll turn down some ham and they’ll say, “oh right, you’re a Jew”. Or maybe they’ll ask me, “So what do Jews do on Christmas?”. Still, I am never reduced to “the Jew”. I am often reduced to “the trans woman”. I’m the person at the queer event that girls are glad is there so that the room looks inclusive, yet is not approached with any casualness. If I am approached, it is with weight. The cis girl walking up to me wants to feel good because she is including “the trans woman”. If I am not approached, it is because no one had the guts or desire to include “the trans woman”. I know this because when I am approached there is rarely a reason given. No one says “Hi, I really like your tattoo and wanted to know more about it”, or “Get a load of that chump”. This happens in other spaces. But in spaces with only queer cis women[5], they approach me like I am a bird that has fallen out of my nest, that they do not want to scare.

The Trans Hag

This is already getting quite long. I had intended to go into cis and trans woman lesbian relationships, but I think that I will save that for a second essay. The goal of that one will be to articulate the various power structures involved that both partners of that relationship might not be considering or fully aware of. If that sounds like something that would interest you or would be useful in your life, subscribe and it’ll be out in a few weeks. With my remaining time I would like to talk about the trans hag.

The trans hag is a cis woman who has become friends, and possibly lovers, with a significant amount of trans women. If you know of a few trans woman friend-groups, you probably know this girl. There’s a joke about her in Castration Movie Pt.2. A cis girl is a member in a trans cult, yes a literal cult, and she feels like she belongs there so she’s just hoping that no one notices that she is cis. Obviously it is a joke, but there are plenty of cis women who’ve decided that trans social spaces are better than cis lesbian social spaces. These women are usually lesbian or bisexual, nerdy or ex-nerds, and victims of bullying. They are women who never quite lived up to the idea of womanhood, who strongly associated themselves with queerness, and who, for whatever reason, struggle with cis lesbian norms. Sometimes it is because of their memories of being bullied, sometimes an ADHD or Autism diagnosis plays a roll, or sometimes they just want a more sexually liberated environment. I don’t really care about the why right now. If you do, I suggest reading this series.

Instead, what I care about is that the trans hag exists at all. I am not perplexed by the idea that some cis women might prefer the company of trans women. Afterall, we rock. What does confuse and depress me is that more often then not it is an either/or situation. The trans hag gives up her life among the cis to mostly hang out with trans people. The groups remain segregated, just now there’s a convert. I think that this says something very interesting about the way cis women perceive trans women. Trans women are not trying to exist within a segregated society. Most of them, like the commentor who began this essay, want to be “just be one of the girls”. To the extent that trans women do segregate themselves off, it is because of shitty experiences with cis women that has led to a fear of them. Yet, this is not the real or primary cause of the segregation that is occurring here. You see, when a lesbian event starts to attract trans women, it quickly becomes vacated by cis women, until that “dyke event” is now really a “trans event”. Trans women do not want this. We want to be accepted into the events, not to take them over. Yet, cis women are frequently so bigoted, that they behave the same way men do when an event or space gets too many women frequenting it. It’s called “pre-emptive flight”. Cis women who get trans friends or who go to “trans” events (aka events that the cis have flew away from) become converts. The space does not desegregate. The trans hag simply acquires the metaphorical dirtiness of transness. She becomes unclean.

And it is not about how trans people dress, look, or behave. It is not about how slutty we’re perceived as being, or how awkward, or weird. There’s weird girls all around you. I’ve been watching Hacks lately and it through me for a loop because queer women were on display being awkward, messy, and saying jokes and social missteps that would have a trans woman burned on a pyre in the center of town. The cis woman community is full of weird, strange, and not socially perfect women. It is only when a trans women is weird that her life is destroyed, not when cis women are. When a trans woman is weird she learns quickly why other trans girls hang out primarily with other trans girls. The trans hag is a convert who is attracted to the weirdness that trans spaces permit, but she is never so weird as to have been segregated out of her cis spaces until her weirdness comes to include hanging out with trans women.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Younger lesbians are the most likely of any demographic to say they are “supportive” or “very supportive” of trans people (96%)[6]. Lesbians stand by us politically. They will vote for our rights. They will and do fight for us. They just don’t yet feel comfortable with us in their friend groups or consider us as legitimate sexual or romantic options. The situation is such that we’re primed for a remake of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, except it’s Guess Who’s Coming To Pearl’s. Can’t you picture it? Lemme help you: a butch-femme couple have been organizing the same lesbian cruise for the past three decades, it sales out of Key West every June for the wildest time on the waves that any womyn could imagine. But this year their daughter (they did IVF in the early 00s) is bringing her fiancée on the cruise with her. The young couple met in Seattle and this cruise will be the first time the fiancée meets the parents. They agree to meet at Pearl’s Guesthouse the night before they set sail, only to discover that their daughter’s fiancée is a trans woman. The cruise doesn’t have a “womyn born womyn” policy, and the older lesbian couple are aggressively trans inclusive in their good liberal politics, but no trans woman has actually come on one of the cruises before. Hilarity ensues as the inclusive liberal politics of the parental lesbians is put to the test and found lacking.

My point is that there is room for growth in the bonds between trans and cis women, especially in “sex segregated spaces” like lesbian events. This growth will require effort from both sides. Trans women will have to be open to taking risks, to socializing with cis women, will have to understand and forgive minor errors or presumptions, and will have to see the worth and joy in traditionally feminine hobbies and interests. However, the greatest amount of work will have to come from cis women. Cis women need to stop obsessing over trans women’s past, stop transforming the perceived behaviour of individuals into stereotypes and group pathologies. Cis women need to be comfortable with trans women as fully women, not as some secret third sex, or eunuch bestie. If the cis woman is a lesbian, she will have to consider the possibility of sleeping with or dating a trans woman. Afterall, surely there is at least one trans woman out there who meets your “type” or “tastes” as there is as many variations of trans womanhood as there is cis womanhood, and they overlap to some extent in all conceivable ways (even chromosomally since some intersex people exist in both categories). It would also behove cis women to remember that while yes trans women have much that we can learn from cis women’s strengths and social habits, so too does the trans community have much to offer cis women. Our community does some thing better than the cis lesbian community does them. We can build something stronger together.

Happy Pride.

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[1] I want to make a point that this especially true of bisexual and lesbian trans women. This is likely less of an issue among straight trans women. Straight trans women are easier to bond with for cis women because they can still be perceived as gay men, as drag queens. Or, in a more generous reading, cis women can bond with them over shared experiences of injustice and injury in dating men. However, that this is still an issue for bisexual trans women, indicates that the “lesbian panic” and specifically “trans lesbian panic” still plays a role.

[2] If you’re the woman who tormented me out of that job, if you’re C, I’ll accept a year’s pay from you. Then I’ll forgive you. I know you’re a landlord. I know you’ve the money. Otherwise, rot in hell.

[3] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-press-release/

[4] “upon discovering or suspecting that a person is transsexual, we often actively (and rather compulsively) search for evidence of their assigned sex in their personality, expressions, and physical bodies. I have experienced this firsthand during the countless occasions when I have come out to people as transsexual. Upon learning of my trans status, most people get this distinctive “look” in their eyes, as if they are suddenly seeing me differently—searching for clues of the boy that I used to be and projecting different meanings onto my body. I call this process ungendering, as it is an attempt to undo a trans person’s gender by privileging incongruities and discrepancies in their gendered appearance that would normally be overlooked or dismissed if they were presumed to be cissexual. The only purpose that ungendering serves is to privilege cissexual genders, while delegitimizing the genders of transsexuals and other gendervariant people.” –Julia Serano, Whipping Girl p.130

[5] Straight cis women usually can’t clock me, only the queer ones are in enough spaces with trans women to be able to tell I am one.

[6] https://justlikeus.org/news/2023/03/31/trans-day-of-visibility-ally-lesbian/