I was at a party in Berlin six months ago with a friend of mine who is both gorgeous and visibly trans—she is what some might call a “doll”. A gay guy in the queue for the bathrooms turned to us and asked her, “Are you a model?” When she answered no he said, “Then it’s giving sex worker,” which was blatantly misogynistic and specifically transmisogynistic. It was the first because it is misogynistic for a man to feel he has the right to comment on a woman’s profession based on her looks, and the second because they were the only two jobs he could conceive of a trans woman doing. I laid into him, told him how inappropriate it was, and he and his friends sheepishly avoided our gaze for the rest of the time we stood together.
My friend was upset by the interaction. She is a sex worker, and while she is open and unashamed of it, the assumptions that led that guy to asking that question are disconcerting and dehumanising. On top of that, he unknowingly said that in front of another sex worker, me, but I didn’t fit into his vision of what a sex worker looks like. I wonder if he would have felt equally as comfortable commenting on my body and aesthetic if he’d wanted to, or if he somehow saw her as more available for public critique by virtue of her being trans.
Afterwards we were outside, and I was chatting to a different gay guy, one who had mutual friends with us, about misogyny in gay spaces. I spoke about how muscle gays would often try to push us off the dancefloors. The guy said, “Well, we don’t like straight people in our queer spaces.” When I retorted, affronted, “Well, I’m a lesbian,” he apologised. Cis men, both straight and gay, often assume that I am heterosexual because I am a femme lesbian. This was not the first time—and it won’t be the last—that my presence in a queer space is questioned.
I know that my ability to pass as a straight woman is a privilege, allowing me safety when travelling across borders for example. I also know that I partly appear so “straight” for economic reasons, because my income relies on appealing to straight men. I have shaved legs and long hair, and I am unusually tattoo-less for a queer woman, which is because I make more money as a cleanskin, especially from men of an older generation who have negative associations with tattoos.
My friend’s choices regarding her looks are also related to economics and safety, however she has hyper-visibility next to my invisibility. Being hyper-visible is more threatening than being invisible, but both invite misogyny, even from within our community. Perhaps experiencing misogyny is part of being a woman—a young girl friend of mine once excused her boyfriend for treating her badly in public because she said it made her feel like a woman, that it reaffirmed her gender. To me this warped logic is a bit like saying that a partner really loves you when they’re abusive, as if abuse is the ultimate signifier of love. Our womanhood shouldn’t be defined or affirmed by what we are subjected to. Certainly, neither of us felt more like women in those club interactions. We were simply angered and offended.
I understand that historically queers have used aesthetics to send signals to each other in coded ways. Aesthetics remain an important form of communication between us. But we need to be careful not to reduce each other to stereotypes. Of course, sometimes the voicing of assumptions can be playful or flirtatious, but that depends entirely on your relationship with the person. I often think gay men feel entitled to speak upon women in the community by virtue of their sexuality, forgetting that a gendered dynamic still exists between us.
