Effemimania and Feminine Expression
If you ask crossdressers their opinions about why this is a predominantly “male” phenomenon, most will mention the gross disparity between what is considered acceptable and unacceptable cross-gender expression between the sexes. While a hundred years ago, much of society considered it deviant for women to wear pants or other traditionally “male” articles of clothing, today women can wear such items without anyone making a fuss. In fact, a female-bodied person pretty much has to be dressed in full male-specific attire to even be considered crossdressed, whereas a male-bodied person may be considered a crossdresser if they wear a single female-specific article of clothing (such as a dress or a skirt). Thus, the liberalization of dressing norms that women have experienced over the last century has not been reciprocated to nearly the same extent for men.
While all crossdressers are cognizant of this double standard, some mistakenly view it as a form of “reverse” sexism—i.e., that men are specifically denied a “right” regarding attire that women take for granted. I would argue instead that this double standard stems directly from traditional sexism. After all, these days it’s not so much a legal barrier that prevents most crossdressers from incorporating “women’s” clothes into their daily wardrobes as it is a class barrier. Because femininity is seen as inferior to masculinity, any man who appears “effeminate” or feminized in any way will drastically lose status and respect in our society, much more so than those women who act boyish or butch. But it’s not just that males who act feminine lose the advantages of male privilege; rather, they come under far more public scrutiny and disdain. This is because, in a male-centered world, women who express masculinity may be seen as breaking oppositional sexist norms, but they are not a perceived challenge to traditional sexism (i.e., their “wanting to be like men” is consistent with the idea that maleness is more valued than femaleness). In contrast, males who express femininity challenge both oppositional and traditional sexist norms (i.e., someone who is willing to give up maleness/masculinity for femaleness/femininity directly threatens the notion of male superiority as well as the idea that women and men should be “opposites”).
In my own experiences, I have found that this obsession and anxiety over male expressions of femininity (which I called effemimania in chapter 7, “Pathological Science”) extends far beyond critiquing men who wear “women’s” clothing. In the years just before my transition, when I was living as a male who was open and comfortable with my own feminine inclinations, I regularly experienced gender anxiety from other people over the most trivial things. On more than one occasion, I was questioned about the fact that I had a bright red umbrella (“Is it your girlfriend’s?” or “Are you just borrowing it?”). I was also interrogated regarding my tendency to color-coordinate my T-shirts and sneakers (“Is it just a coincidence or do you make them match on purpose?” or “Why would you do that?”). Another time, a friend asked me to hold her purse for a minute and then ostracized me for strapping it onto my shoulder (“I asked you to hold it, not to wear it!”). And I was regularly subjected to strange looks and comments for using words like “cute,” “adorable,” or “pretty” in a nonsarcastic way. I have hundreds of anecdotes like these—of people commenting, critiquing, and expressing concern over even the slightest manifestations of my femininity, given that I was male-bodied.
Unfortunately, I have found that many women fail to appreciate effemimania as a very real and pervasive form of traditional sexism, one that oppressively restricts and undermines feminine gender expression in male-bodied people. During a question and answer session at a gender-themed event I participated in, a trans woman brought up the intense ridicule a man can face for the simple act of wearing a pink tie. The audience, who was made up predominantly of people who were socialized female, laughed at this remark in what seemed to me to be a highly unsympathetic way, as though they believed that the hypothetical man in question suffered from some irrational form of male paranoia. This sort of thinking not only makes invisible the role that women often play in employing and propagating effemimania (in fact, all of the effemimanic remarks I described in the previous paragraph were made by women), but entirely dismisses the severity of this form of sexism. In my five years of living as a woman—one who very rarely wears makeup, who regularly dresses like a tomboy, who often goes long periods of time without shaving her legs or armpits, who sometimes curses like a sailor, who is sometimes very physically active, and who is unafraid to take on supposedly masculine tasks such as using tools, lifting heavy boxes, etc.—I have not experienced a single gender-anxious comment or critique regarding my masculine gender expression that has even come close to the level of intensity or condescension that I regularly received for my feminine expressions back when I was perceived as male.
Effemimania is not merely a phenomenon that affects adults, but rather one that begins early in childhood; this is highlighted by a recent study carried out by Emily Kane, who examined parental responses to gender nonconformity in their preschool children.1 Kane found that the parents she studied often encouraged gender nonconformity in their female children and few offered negative responses when they engaged in stereotypically masculine activities. On the other hand, while the parents sometimes reacted positively when their male children engaged in certain stereotypically feminine activities—specifically those related to domestic skills, nurturing, and empathy—other activities related to what Kane called “icons of femininity,” such as wearing pink or girl-specific clothing, wanting to wear nail polish, and expressing interest in dance, ballet, or Barbie dolls, were generally greeted with negative reactions by both fathers and mothers, and in parents of varying race, economic class, and sexual orientation.
Many of the consequences of this society-wide effemimania are chronicled in Stephen J. Ducat’s book The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. Ducat describes the ways in which male development and thought processes are shaped by effemimania and cites studies that show that feminine boys are viewed far more negatively, and brought in for psychotherapy far more often, than masculine girls.2 As Ducat explains, “I don’t think that it underestimates the damage done to girls and women under the regime of patriarchal gender norms to say that males suffer certain constraints and conflicts from which females, with a few notable exceptions, are largely exempt. Specifically, boys from early on learn that cross-gender behavior is a taboo often enforced with predictable ferocity by family, peers, and the larger society. For example, unlike girls, boys who do play with toys of the other sex often try to hide it from others.”3
This very much resonates with my own experiences as a young boy. Some of my earliest childhood memories (around the ages of five and six) are of censoring of my own thoughts, behaviors, and desires because I was worried that they would lead me to be perceived by others as feminine. I vividly remember anxiously describing anything having to do with girls as being “yucky” or “dumb,” not because of any actual strong negative feelings that I had, but because I was aware that I was expected to have such an attitude toward anything feminine. In first grade, when a female friend invited me to her birthday party, I hid the invitation because I was embarrassed to have been invited to a girl’s party.
This feeling, that a boy must hide female or feminine gender inclinations, helps explain why many MTF spectrum children and teenagers channel those inclinations into very specific and private occasions, unlike their FTM spectrum counterparts, who typically express their masculine interests and mannerisms in an open and regular way. In other words, effemimania drives many MTF spectrum children and teens to develop strict divisions between “boy-mode” (i.e., public) and “girl-mode” (i.e., private). Such distinctions often persist well into adulthood and are typically considered to be a hallmark of the crossdresser identity. However, it would be an oversimplification to claim that crossdressing is simply a form of hiding one’s feminine side or remaining closeted. After all, many crossdressers continue to maintain their split male/female personas long after they come out publicly as crossdressers. To fully understand the boy-mode/girl-mode dichotomy and the fascination surrounding women’s clothing that typifies the MTF crossdressing experience, we must first take into account how the marginalization of women in our society affects those who are raised male.