What Is Art? What Is Gender?

Let's explore...

Note: this is just about my experiences as a trans woman. Trans men, and non-binary people, all have totally valid experiences, but I can’t tell their life stories. Other trans women may also have wildly different views and that’s fine. The only journey I’ve been on is my own. There are also a million other pieces of art that could be explored here, but this is just what’s been on my mind.

During my teenage years, I listened to a lot of indie rock music. Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, that kind of stuff. This isn’t intended to disparage that music. Most of it was good, in many ways better than what I listen to now (some of it wasn’t, but that’s a story for another day). It was also a very small piece of a much grander lie I told myself.

I spent much of my adolescence trying to repress every feeling I ever had that was coded feminine. This expressed itself in a lot of ways, many of which were genuinely harmful, but none more straightforward than telling myself what popular culture I was “supposed” to like. I can remember watching 13 Going on 30 and desperately attempting the mental gymnastics needed to convince myself I didn’t enjoy it. I shut it all down. I denied any joy from art that didn’t fit the mould of what a 14 year old cishet male was expected to like. I only listened to bands consisting of white men playing guitars and making “real” music.

Obviously my own experiences do not exist in a vacuum from the rest of society. It’s not an accident that I felt the easiest place to hide was white male culture. It let me reinforce the lie that this was all I really wanted, that I just had “better” taste than those who watched teen shows and rom coms, or listened to pop and hip hop. Obviously, all of this is just empty signifiers and no genre is innately more value than any other. And this works both ways. Plenty of people who just consumed the same stuff as me really were just being honest about what they liked, and I still think a lot of it is good and enjoyable. But it’s also the easiest possible type of art to proclaim as good without any kind of real dissent.

Understanding yourself as trans involves reconsidering a lot of preconceived notions about your life. A lot of things you assumed were universally felt by everyone in your assigned gender were in fact key clues that you were not where you belonged. For me, a part of this was realising that plenty of art I claimed to be irrelevant was, in fact, very much my thing. The only things that had been stopping me from enjoying so many things were stories I told myself.

So I revelled in it. I devoured the TV work of Amy Sherman-Palladino, full of the coded feminine aesthetics and women characters I could finally admit to myself that I related to. I watched films like Clueless and Mean Girls, works I had avoided as part of the denial that I could ever connect with anything made for girls, lest something might stir inside of me. I realised that I had never been more wrong about anything than about Lady Gaga, an artist I once naively dismissed as inauthentic without noticing that this is the entire point.

Authenticity is something of a strange concept when viewing the world through a trans lens. On the one hand, the traditional understanding has been of a separation between our “true”, authentic selves and how we appear. The book not being judged by the cover, as it were. On the other hand, we very much look to challenge the idea of the authentic being that which is natural. The idea that the real self is the stripped down, untouched version is alien to transness. Being trans is about breaking the rules and having the power to reshape everything you were supposed to be.

This is in part why it feels so vital to let trans artists tell their own stories. Scottish electronic music producer SOPHIE has been a frequent listen for me recently. Her second album, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, is an excellent listen from start to finish, but it’s the track Faceshopping that stays with me.

“My face is the front of shop,
My face is the real shop front,
My shop is the face I front,
I'm real when I shop my face”

The vast majority of popular culture’s depictions of cosmetic surgery have been highly critical. This is not without warrant, as it’s clearly a part of an industrial complex which seeks to tell people they are wrong or broken, and monetise the necessary “corrections”. Trans women have suffered from the failure to meet socially constructed normative beauty standards as much as anyone. But SOPHIE, unlike most cis narratives, does not seek to say that, because real beauty is found on the inside, we should all simply embrace the blemishes we were born with. It instead seeks to place it as another form of self-expression, almost akin to fashion or make-up. When SOPHIE states that she is “real when [she shops her] face”, she’s defying the narrative about showing authenticity. For an artist who, with the exception of one track, spends her albums using the voices of other women, this is key to her art. Her genuine voice might sound deep and crude, and certainly she uses it for effect at times, but it is not who she is. Through the use of electronic sounds and the voices of others does she most clearly show her true self.

Obviously the Wachowskis are the most prominent trans filmmakers in Hollywood. I happen to be a big fan of theirs, so this mostly works for me, and we can see specifically trans elements across their work. Jupiter Ascending was derided by many as incoherent, sloppy and nonsensical, and it certainly is all of those things. But it’s also unbound from restrictive genre ideas, attempting to jump wildly between different tones and visual aesthetics at will. This is a trademark of so much of the Wachowskis’ post-Matrix work, and it seems to infuriate others as much it delights me. There are many examples of moments in their work that feel noticeably trans, but I particularly like this tracking shot in Jupiter Ascending. The way the camera observes Mila Kunis’ dress is almost dysphoric. It captures the feeling I’ve felt at many black tie events.

And so we must talk about surely the most popular work of art made by trans women in the era of modern communications. The tendency to read The Matrix as trans art has been done so thoroughly as to be cliche at this point, though it remains not without at least some merit. This is a film about discovering that the entire world we live in is a complete social construct, that the identities we are living are fake lives, that the disconnect we feel from what we are supposed to be doing is because it is all artifice. And it features this line:

“What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

If that’s not a trans statement of intent, I don’t know what is.