I had posted in another thread, "...remember we are trying to create a sort of illusion, and being more femme than born femmes is just part of the way it is done, or at least a short cut to it."
Since pursuing that topic in that thread much further would seem to be to draw it off topic, I think we need a thread of its own to follow it up. I know talking of imitation and role playing, drives many on this site crazy, but it is a subtle distinction that does not conflict with such deeply felt convictions that one has transitioned because one is "naturally and authentically a woman," (and from this it follows that your expression of this, even in an original way is okay.)
But you and I are not alone in the world. Human beings are social animals. "Birds of a feather flock together, " is an old saying on this, and after transition you will have shed the male plumage and acquired the female plumage, huh? Like, that is part of it. It means that you will be keeping the company of women more than men, once "you have left the blue team and are now playing on the pink team." You have to fit in with your new situation and changed milieu, in other among other things, to conform, if you have much in the way of social insight and social instincts at all. It is the lack of those instincts in transwomen, or gaps in them, that more often makes us look foolish in our expression of are femaleness, and makes us the target of mockery, more seriously and profoundly than conscious imitation itself. (Imitation is the kind of expression of being female, and we can choose and modify that to some degree by trying to, and doing so does not put into jeopardy the idea that we are, real women deep down, if that is your doctrine.
(Then too, the nature of being authentic has been discussed by French existential philosophers. The psychology that claims that we are all playing roles, all the time, like the psychiatrist C. G. Jung and many sociologists too, is beyond the scope of detailed argument here too, of course.)
If we try to make way for unique trans "way" and embrace a revolutionary and radical destiny not just as women but as transwomen, we are not necessity going to be able to pass and are going to be harassed and experience other forms of blow-back. I think society will accept us, if at all, if we do not start to re-engineer the whole universe of discourse and conceptualizing of gender definitions. A little little patching up of the old system is good enough; getting society to accept us as real women when we are legally women in our country, would be more do-able right now. As for making a trans utopia for us to live in, that is not for me.
That is what it is It is one of the perils of transition. Like children making dumb mistakes using language before they have learned the meaning of certain taboo words properly. We trans are learning as we go along, by trial and error.Originally Posted by S1m0ne
Yes, the idea that we trans imitate, and that would seem to imply that we are poor imitations of women, has given us a very bad reputation in the past. In part, the word imitation bothers some people. Should we look at it instead, as cis-gendered women role modelling many of the solutions to coping with being a woman, that transwomen can profit from adopting. But I still think that recognizing what we are dong, partly sincerely acculturating in our new identity, by imitating as well as imitating just to try to pass in the present, will help us with this misperception among the general public. The general public is not yet ready to embrace what Laverne Cox called for, considering as beautiful all the ways transwomen are different from cis-gendered women.
