"I need feminization surgery..." is a common statement (or motif) I see occasionally on social media from trans acquaintences and others on the spectrum.
"Why?" I think. To which the answer is, usually, fair enough, along these lines: "So I don't get misgendered, made to feel invalid, like I haven't left my assigned-at-birth gender, or feel humiliated".
But - as I see it - this is buying into the problem, which is the persistance of oppressive modes of judgement, of assumption, of prejudice, which not only enable the general population to perpetuate their assumptions, but convince others that they 'cannot be' or 'cannot look like' their new gender without conforming to those prejudices and stereotypical Ways of Seeing. Because obviously, a woman with a heavy jawline cannot be a real woman - or if she is, then she must be a lesbian, as she's unluckily configured contrary to the Western aesthetic acceptance of what 'feminine' physiognomy must be. This goes beyond mere 'standards' of beauty (which of course are fluid, and shift from one generation, and one era, to the next) but a far more insidious level of deep-coding which seems to infect, in a seemingly rhizomatic manner, almost every aspect of aesthetic discourse, from popular to academic media.
As Shon Faye summarizes, "...many trans people consider body shape, facial hair, voice and facial features to be much more important [than genital surgery] in daily life, allowing their true gender to be recognized by others." * Coming across this line in a cutting-edge, published-this-year title of incredible importance, made me stop and think that we still have light years to travel yet in breaking out of the restrictive socio-cultural systems of perception and judgement which self-perpetuate both in the viewer, and in the viewed subject - and how those subjects feel obliged to present themselves back. We haven't even begun to scratch at the surface of alternative physiognomies yet, in which any cis gendered woman with even the faintest trace of facial hair must be read in negative, or mocking, terms - or, at least, assumed unequivically to be queer - as though physiognomies must conform to some archetypal schematic, much as physical bodies seemingly do to their signified representatives on the public doors marked 'ladies' and 'gentlemen'. Such radical divergences tend to enter the realms of what are termed 'abject' (Kristeva), 'grotesque' (Bakhtin, Stallybrass & White) or simply socially unacceptable**.
This is a subject which has pre-occupied me since the end of the second year of undergrad study (2017), and has continually informed my own shifting sense of personal presentation - and how happier I am at looking 'more' ambiguous, and in putting out work which deliberately challenges these ingrained attitudes. "Don't judge by appearances" runs the boring old cliché - yet all of us do, every single day, every time we meet someone for the first time. We need a radical new way of looking at people, literally without prejudice, without assumption, and without assigning gendered attributes to random, arbitrary features and forms.
*Shon Faye, 'The Transgender Issue: an Argument for Justice', Allen Lane, 2021, p. 86
**As I note elsewhere (in my undergrad dissertation), see such opinions as "RJ Coady’s critique of Constantin Brancusi’s 1916 sculpture Princess X...[as] a 'deliberate attempt to do something different, and not in the manner of the big and great but in the spirit of the short-haired lady and the long-haired man'".
