{"id":22985,"date":"2017-11-03T15:50:32","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T19:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=22985"},"modified":"2017-11-03T20:48:56","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T00:48:56","slug":"trap-haus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2017\/11\/03\/trap-haus\/","title":{"rendered":"On Trans ‘Realness’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Content Warning: Descriptions of anti-trans violence and transmisogyny<\/em><\/p>\n

In the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning<\/em>, ball scene queen Pepper Labeija opines that realness is \u201cto be able to blend…[to] not give away that you\u2019re gay, that\u2019s what\u2019s real\u2026to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart.\u201d In this, realness is an imaginative take, in the safe space of the ball, on passing, either in terms of one\u2019s gender or sexuality. Contestants can masquerade, lampoon, subvert, enact, or actualize those identities denied to them in the outside world. What Paris is Burning <\/em>also illuminates, however, are the violent repercussions when one\u2019s performative identity is read against their intention, when they don\u2019t pass. The most heinous example in the documentary being the murder of trans performer Venus Xtravaganza before the film was completed. In this, passing is quite literally embodied survival praxis.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In 2017, twenty-seven years after the release of Paris is Burning<\/em>, more transgender people than ever<\/a> before have been murdered, the overwhelming majority of which are trans poc. On September 1, after speaking out against white privilege, trans model and activist Munroe Bergdorf was fired<\/a> by cosmetics company L\u2019Oreal. The violences one must confront, adapt to, and resist as a transperson are multifaceted and ever-changing. As Micha C\u00e1rdenas has argued<\/a>, a \u201cmodulation of visibility\u2026is the specialty of trans women of color who face multiple forms of violence on a daily basis, shifting their body and appearance as necessary for survival, at one moment passing invisibly as a cisgender woman and at another standing on stage speaking out against racist, transphobic violence.\u201d To C\u00e1rdenas it is not so much a static visibility or invisibility that characterizes the trans woc experience, but a constantly mutating technical relation to visibility, a forced hyperawareness of one\u2019s body at all times.<\/p>\n

To this, there is a scene in the 2015 film Tangerine<\/em> where Razmik, a taxi driver, cruises a specific street in LA searching for a sex worker to proposition. He finds a woman who gets into his car and directs him to a more private spot where they can complete their transaction. She begins to go down on him before he insists that he would like the opposite, to perform oral sex on her. When he begins to do so, however, he is outraged, repeating \u201cwhat the fuck is this, where is it?\u201d Razmik angrily takes his money back and kicks her out of his cab, telling her not to walk that street anymore, as it isn\u2019t for her<\/em>. Razmik is appalled that he has been duped, that the sex worker is in fact not trans, but a cisgender woman.<\/p>\n

Thus, Tangerine<\/em> seemingly inverts the \u201ctrap\u201d trope that has long characterized many on-screen representations of trans women. Typically, a beautiful, feminine, presence is shockingly exposed as “a man,” played for either comedic or horrific effect (or more likely both) through the revelation (or allusion to) a penis. Yet Razmik is disgusted precisely because this particular woman has no penis. This is a tension that carries throughout the entire film, especially as in the main plotline Sin-Dee, a trans sex worker who has just gotten out of jail, spends the entire movie attempting to chase down the cis woman her pimp boyfriend has cheated on her with. Tangerine<\/em>, thus, exposes both the inadequacies many trans women are meant to feel when compared to cis women, while also lampooning our expectations of what attributes we are meant to find desirable.<\/p>\n

Razmik importantly, however, embodies a separate kind of problematic relation to transness, the chaser. The chaser fetishizes<\/em> transwomen. The chaser makes transwomen into an object to be bought and sold. The chaser demands that transwomen be made visible as such for his own viewing pleasure. Like the TERF or the fundamentalist transphobe, the chaser reduces transwomen to a fictive bioessentialist reading. The chaser also makes readily apparent the kinds of media fixation transwomen are made subject to: as spectacle, as perversity, as commodity and, as problematic relation to authenticity<\/em>. Thus, the chaser insists on a definition of the parameters of trans identity as solely defined through their fixations, their pleasures, their desires.<\/p>\n

We can see a digital corollary on 4Chan and Reddit forums, which have \u201ctrap\u201d communities where trans women post images of themselves, nude or otherwise, that are deemed convincing enough to pass for cisgender women. As the sidebar of r\/traps reads, \u201c\/r\/traps<\/a>\u00a0is for the posting of photos and video of\u00a0young<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0beautiful<\/em>\u00a0trans girls and individuals who would love to trap! Content can be from\/of anyone as long as they\u2019re passable [and] feminine.\u201d Passing in these spaces becomes a mechanism to reify the normative boundaries of the gender binary. Whereas Paris is Burning <\/em>posits realness as a subversive revelation of the performative foundations of identity, providing a space of free expression for marginalized peoples, the chaser \u201crealness\u201d of Razmik, 4Chan, and Reddit maintains a misogynistic gaze fundamental to commodifying women\u2019s bodies.<\/p>\n

All of this is not to say that the free expression of gender identity through digital nude shares is always reducible to misogyny. Mastodon instances, discord servers, and group texts patently prove otherwise. The very language of the \u201ctrap,\u201d however, insinuates a demonizing moral valuation of transwomen, one that blames them for the inordinate violence they face. Let’s burn it down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Trans people are not reducible to the violence committed against them, but nevertheless it is important that their names be remembered. This is by no means a definitive list of those murdered in 2017.<\/p>\n