In Gayle Salamon’s “Transfeminism and the Future of Gender,” there is a section devoted to the preoccupation with the physical bodies of trans men and how those physical entities signify other processes and concepts that might not immediately be apparent. I was struck by the double standard when it comes to dealing with “women’s” bodies and “trans men’s” bodies in their relationship to their genitals and/or “obviously sexed” body parts, especially when there is a surgical intervention involved. The text presents two main positions, one of which condemns trans men’s surgical transformations and articulates them as a “mutilation,” speaking of the altered chest in terms of “removed breasts” that, in turn, symbolize a “relinquished femininity.” What’s interesting about this position is how it completely opposes the other, where “women” are seen as being defined by—not even created by, but defined by—something beyond their mere body. This idea invokes essentialist notions of being because it supposes that there is some sort of womanly essence that predates the body and is thus neither created nor informed by the physical, making women seem to transcend their physical manifestations and exist more truly and fully on another plane.
In that sense, the very arguments seem hypocritical and completely contradictory, because how can one explain that the breasts on a “woman” are not the ultimate signifiers of her femininity and her belonging to the group of “women” while at the same time, state that for a trans man, the removal of those very breasts means losing the most vital piece of womanhood? Of course, the point of getting surgery for many trans folks IS that very rejection of body parts that do not correspond to their identities, but it is not a removal of just one piece; instead, it is a removal of multiple pieces that make up a whole and create what is seen as a “male” or “female” body. The problem with the arguments presented in the article is that they assign different degrees of importance (or, actually, assign a value or a lack thereof) on the same body parts. They are contradictory and mutually exclusive ideas because there is no continuity to the valorization of the breasts; there is an opposition between the constructivism and the essentialism implicit in those very values. Thus, both points of view cannot be adopted and promoted simultaneously as true by a single individual without running the risk of being heavily criticized and called out on their hypocritical double standards.
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The funny thing is, this is the approach I take toward my hair. For me, my hair is certainly not all there is to me and it’s not the most important thing in my life. My hair doesn’t fully define me or constitute me. HOWEVER, I use my hair as a tool to define myself. I color it, cut it, put hats on it, you name it. First and foremost, in the name of personal desire and aesthetic pleasure, but secondly in the name of socially and physically constructing my identity. It simultaneously means a lot and very little. So I guess I just argued against my own actions in the previous essay and established my views about my hair as contradictory and complicated at best, and hypocritical at worst. XD But I think I can redeem myself somehow…even though the valorization of my hair is contextually contingent, it’s not the ULTIMATE marker of identity (unlike in the previous case, where the breasts were taken to be THE marker of feminine identity), so…yep.
