Aesth-ethics
Written By: Rachel Case
There is a wart on my right knee, immediately south of my patella. I’m not sure how long it’s been with me but if pressed I would guess it’s in the order of a couple months. Being underemployed in shorts season, the wart’s presence occupies far more of my mental load than I’d prefer to admit beyond the confines of psychiatric discretion. I worry at it with my fingers, who can feel it there, and it can feel my fingers, and I can feel the tissue beneath the wart being pushed into my knee’s soft tissue; my finger presses into the wart and the wart presses into my knee. But I don’t feel the wart, I can push the bar of an earring into it without the same prick I feel in the surrounding skin. My skin. This is how I can be sure bodily blemishes and imperfections occupy some different realm than “self”, and how I can feel justified in any lengths I’ll go to correct such imperfections.
I cut the wart off with scissors at one point. No it didn’t hurt very much and besides; I am no coward. The Artist with True Vision has long been inured to such distractors as physical pain anyway. I cut it off with sharp scissors and then cleaned and dressed the wound. For a couple weeks at least I did feel better, this haunting was exorcised and when shaving my legs, my Gillette Fusion 5 had no impediment. Of course though, the wart grew back, that cutaneous hydra, and now it’s bigger than it was before I’d tried to destroy it. Since then we’ve come to an uneasy detente. It’s unaware of my general practitioner’s canister of liquid nitrogen.
Although I’m just biding my time ’til I can kill the wart dead it’s taught me a humbling lesson about body integrity, and body image. I’ve been fixated on body image in some way for all the time I’ve been a sex-dysphoric mess of an adult and probably longer too. I’ve been oestrogenated full-time for nearly a year now, and in the process of confronting smouldering body issues related to testosterone-poisoning, the psychic effects of estradiol have flared those embers into a scorching blaze. Suddenly, with the time and the emotional clarity to properly attend to my lifelong transsexual ache, my hands, my skull and my hips have stretched, ballooned and dramatically narrowed, respectively. My shoulders and back, of course, have become broad and robust enough to carry all the gendered world’s sins, as is the trans woman’s fate.
I say all this to admit that I’m shamefully obsessed now with beauty as perfection. Women female since birth; don’t worry. I can hear you sighing “Welcome to the club”. Please; don’t roll your eyes too dramatically or they’ll drop out your skull and shatter on the floor. It’s not worth discussing the gruelling psychic churn of repressed sex dysphoria when there’s a proper feminist point to be made because nobody wants to hear that shit anyway. Save it for open mic. Things have changed for me this past year, notably my targeted advertising:
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Et cetera, et cetera. One good one was for a probiotic tablet (pessary? I really hope not) that promised my vaginal flora would overnight be transformed to the sweetest bouquet there is. (Wishful thinking, honey. Aftermarket parts don’t quite work the same, and besides I haven’t worked out how to arrange “compassionate release” of $30K from my superannuation. Some days I wish they’d just compassionately release me to hell)
So it’s clear that I’ve been experiencing some of whatever it is that Simone de Beauvour claimed constructs “the woman”. I haven’t got enough hair, but I’ve also got too much, and the hair I do have isn’t coated with enough claggy dye. The way my body looks is everyone’s bu$ine$$, and whatever anxieties I had before about my appearance must be violently agitated, because there’s billion-dollar industries reliant on me hating my body just as much as any other well-adjusted woman living in this horrible world. With this in mind the transsexual, cursed as she is with a body deformed by her androgenic adolescence, stumbles into womanhood weighed down by very particular baggage.
Us early-transition dolls, with our Swiss-army-knife kinda bodies, suited best to various kinds of deeply ungraceful manual work, are forced to decide how to confront our setbacks. These days in my particular sociogeographic niche, the no-brainer is to slap that estradiol patch to your thigh, sit back, eat a high-carb diet, and watch as that unyielding, angular mannish flesh softens into relaxed curves. But without the sting of the surgeon’s knife most of us keep the brow ridge, the jawline and the flared nostrils of the Leading Man/Head of State/Estranged Deadbeat Dad at Family Court. If we want to move through the world in a way that gives more Venus than Apollo, we’ve got to drape ourselves in signifiers of womanhood. Starve the body, pierce the ears, paint the nails. Shave the legs and show them off. If it’ll get a man called a faggot (as you know so well), it’s gotta be done if you want to pass for woman.
Let me elaborate. Despite what phobes will tell you, it’s not impossible for trans people to pass. I’ve been tranning openly for about a year and sure- I’m clocky as hell, but boomers “Miss Darling” me just as regularly as I get Sir’d. Thanks to hormone replacement therapy, the way I appear confuses people because of the superhuman mix of sexed traits that are obvious on my body. I’ve got large hands but my knuckles aren’t hairy. I’ve got a broad chest, but breasts are visible under my shirt. In short- I’m like if a man and a woman had a baby. Performative femininity is the crucial next step. Feminine clothing, particular grooming habits and (ahem) tasteful application of lippy and mascara can prompt the narrowed, tranvestigating eye to ignore the brow’s ridge, or the cheek’s razor burn, and classify me correctly as woman. Perhaps to cis readers this sounds incredible but all I can do is report my experience of life as a trans woman with honesty and in good faith.
Is it fair that women’s bodies are scrutinised, critiqued and commodified? No! But this is the state of the game we are forced to play. It is up to every woman to determine for herself how far she goes in pursuit of the Instagram benchmark for feminine presentation. The dangers inherent to this game have been elaborated for decades and I do fear that my desire to pass for female could chip away at my self image and self worth. If you make yourself smaller and smaller to accommodate expectations placed on women you may find yourself completely abolished, which is why you’ll never catch me encouraging any sister of mine, trans or otherwise, to engage in these sinister rituals. That said, for trans women, doing what we can to blend in keeps us safe from harassment, humiliation and outright danger in a way that is fairly peculiar to, and inseparable from our experience. Feel free to ask me how I know this is true!
And here it is. I desperately want to be recognised for who I am: a woman. All of us do. We’re happy to be strange women, sure, but there’s a desperation among trans women to be seen and taken seriously for who we are that demands certain concessions against our feminism. We can’t easily allow ourselves the luxury of neglecting to shave, or dressing butch, or forsaking skincare and cosmetics in the same way that a more traditional lesbian may be able able to. For us to push back on our anatomical destiny, we clasp shackles on our limbs we’d gladly tear off any of our cisters. The transfeminine commitment to performative femininity puts us often at odds with other queer women; on some level many of us dream of appearing as garden-variety femmes, while they’re often marching in the opposite direction. I will say with my whole (flat) chest that we’re digging ourselves out of the same pit; society’s contempt for woman and policing of her body.
Let’s return to that miserable bastard, the wart on my right knee. It beat me once and has mocked my hubris ever since. Yes, it’s a blemish, a flaw, a humiliating reminder of the march of fate and coming destruction of our flesh. But a wart on a knee is not a gender signifier, and the papillomavirus that caused it is no political actor. Perhaps I could learn to accept this minuscule bleb of skin, and next, my clockiest, most dysphoria-inducing features? I think it’s reasonable to expect that as HRT continues to alter how I look, I might one day feel settled enough to return to the convenience of a short haircut. My experience with obsessing over a small imperfection, impulsively and painfully ridding myself of it only to find it has not meaningfully changed how I view myself demonstrates that brutalising yourself is no substitute for graceful self-compassion.
I still do plan to remove the wart, and I still plan to submit myself to the urologist. Perhaps the facial surgeon as well, if finances allow. The drive to be recognised as a trans woman, and to retain some sense of individuality untouched by algorithmic blackmail can be a dreadful balancing act. Most days though, I genuinely do feel like I look okay in a queer kind of way, and that I’m at last building a personal-political agency I can be proud of. That’s probably the main thing.
