How Transphobia Harms Me, a Cis Woman
“Ding dong - Doors opening. Step back and allow customers to exit…”
As I stand at the opening Metro train car doors, I sense another passenger behind me.
“They’re just letting men wear dresses these days, huh.”
It’s 10:30 at night and I’m coming home from work. I get a pit in my stomach and reassure myself there’s no way he’s talking to me. I’m a woman, and always have been.
However, we are the only ones in this train car, and I am wearing a dress.
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I am over six feet tall, with a build better described as “statuesque” rather than “model-esque” – broad shoulders, flat chest, without the soft curves that would mark me as belonging to the ranks of the fairer sex.
This fact has been thrown in my face as long as I can remember – the fact that I am larger than most men and always will be.
Judith Butler, misunderstood feminist theorist, writes that gender is a performance. You are a woman because you perform the stereotypical social role of “woman” and wear the costume of “woman”. However, when your performance of woman isn’t convincing enough, the audience doesn’t believe you are embodying the role.
Are you really a woman? You don’t look like a woman. You aren’t doing womanly things.
Especially for those of us who don’t meet either of those requirements – looking or acting feminine - we are doubly punished.
A recent example is Olympic gold medal boxer Imane Khelif. In one of the matches at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, Imane’s Italian opponent quit after 46 seconds in the ring. When Imane’s hand was raised in victory, the opponent dropped to her knees in tears.
This image, and the image of the opponent shaking off Imane’s efforts to console her went viral.
In these images, Imane looks much larger than her opponent. Imane is 5’10” (1.78m). She is also broad shouldered, flat chested, and as muscular as you’d expect an Olympic athlete to be. Notably, Imane is also not white, while her opponent is.
Misinformation began to spread online that Imane was born male and is competing in women’s sports, along with racist images likening Imane to a beast. Imane was born female, raised female, and still is, female.
Other Olympic athletes, like rugby player Ilona Maher and world record holder Katie Ledecky, receive similar treatment – accused of being born male because of muscular bodies and broad shoulders.
It is modern-day phrenology where online sleuths examine images of public figures like Serena Williams, Zendaya, Scarlett Johanssen, and others for “body markers” that are thought to be exclusively male traits.
These “transvestigators” decide, based on the width of their shoulders, the length of their limbs, the presence of a brow ridge, these women must be secretly male.
The public figures listed here share some common features. For one, most of them are not white. African-descended and Black women have long been accused of being men due to the numerous historical, racist, tropes and myths about them.
Secondly, many of them have a body shape that doesn’t fit within mainstream understandings of how women’s bodies “should” look. For transvestigators, not fitting a narrowly defined feminine ideal doesn’t just make a woman ugly or undesirable, it precludes her from being female at all.
In the supposed fight to “protect women” from the specter of trans women, cis women are now getting caught in the crosshairs. As trans video essayist Natalie Wynn said, “when there are no trans people to persecute, they have to invent them”.
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There is a special kind of humiliation that comes from being compared to or outright called a man when you are born female and identify as a woman. It isn’t the “well you’re ugly anyway” response from men whose advances you reject. Instead, these humiliations are rooted in indisputable facts, not a subjective judgment of beauty.
It all started for me at five years old. I was already larger than all the other kids in my age cohort, and one bad late- ‘90s bowl cut led to consistent misgendering from adults, irrespective of how much pink I wore.
As a six-foot-tall teenager, girls seeking dominance during co-ed hang outs would cruelly compare my size to the tallest male in the room, demanding I compare my hands to his.
As an adult, men in bars walk up to me unprompted and tell me I’m too tall or ask me what NFL team I play on.
Security guards, if they don’t follow me into the women’s restroom, do a double-take when I leave it.
My body, because it is so large and so unfeminine, becomes an object of commentary and surveillance from strangers.
While I’m always sure to portray an aloof coolness in all these situations, it still affects me. I get a burning, sinking feeling my stomach. It feels dehumanizing. It can be scary. I surreptitiously glance at the faces of the people who are calling me a man, trying to divine their intentions.
I am bigger than most men, but I am not stronger than most men.
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I don’t look behind me as I dart out of the train car. My dress swishes and heels click a staccato on the tiles of the Metro platform as I stride towards the exit.
Of course he was talking to me.
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