Passing The Word

I have started to really dislike the word “passing.” I resent it, and my resentment has blossomed fully, if you can imagine some sort of carnivorous and tentacular flower. At this point even the whiff of it makes me cranky, because it has come to represent a particular kind of backwardness in thinking about gender that, to further torment the horticultural metaphor, really frosts my pumpkin. And because I spend so much of my time talking and thinking about questions of gender, someone seems to need to talk to me about passing every day.

Passing, you know. “I pass as a man almost all the time.” “Sometimes I pass as a girl, but only until I speak.” Passing, one of the few words in the transgender lexicon that’s not a medical legacy word. We did ever so much better with this one: it’s a racist legacy word, a legacy of the time that Africans were stolen from their homeland to be enslaved in the United States. If you’re not familiar, a hierarchy of race developed in which the lighter your skin was, the more attractive and intelligent you were considered, and someone quite light-skinned could sometimes “pass” for white and live in white society. Even as I write that paragraph I snort and sigh and shake my head, thinking, okay. I know I am a word geek. But could we not do any better?

Passing is a word loaded with problems, all of which you may rest assured I will complain about before we’re done here, but by far the biggest for me is that it assigns all the responsibility for other people’s experience or understanding of a particular person’s gender to… the person in question. Not the people doing to observing, but upon the observed. It is your job, the word passing communicates, and what’s more your solemn responsibility to create a presentation of gender that conforms well enough to the prevailing standards of whatever context you find yourself in to call forth from onlookers the gender attribution you desire. Like transpeople need more work to do.

If this does not occur, you have failed; when it does you have succeeded. Not just that, but in the matrix of many Transsexual Treatment Programs those verb forms become their nounal counterparts: if you do not pass, you are a failure. If you do, you are a success. Successes may have access to hormones, surgeries, legal remedy with regard to documents, and other such interventions as they require as a reward for having played the game well. Failures are sent home in disgrace, and this is marketed as the natural way of things. Obviously, the thinking goes, someone who is really and truly a transsexual would be able to make a visual, corporeal case for hirself instinctively (or perhaps with a little time spent with Dr. Google), but certainly there are no medical nterventions to teach you how. If you cannot do it on your own, you’re a failure.

To be a success, one must begin by gaining some measure of expertise in, if not mastery over, enough psychology, anthropology, gender studies and improvisational theater to create and constantly modify a gender presentation that seems male enough. Merely being masculine, and even knowing yourself to be absolutely and utterly a man will not be enough if you cannot also deepen your voice, comport yourself in a stereotypically masculine fashion, and create the right appearance. If your authentic masculinity is a little faggoty, you probably cannot express it until you’ve had chest surgery and grown a beard or at least a good crop of stubble. And though this racist legacy word is not, technically, a medical legacy word it is nonetheless well and frequently adopted by doctors and if you can do all of these things, if you can pass – then, yes, they will let you be a man. Because, of course, what you think or feel or need has much less to do with it than the opinion of someone with medical training. Clearly.

Carrying on what has now clearly become a rant, I would also like to discuss the connotations of deception or trickery that come with the word pass; the whiff of sneakiness it carries. I can join other fantastic thinkers and write about the myth of the deceptive transsexual until my fingers fall off from hitting the keys too hard, but not nearly as many people will eventually read this essay as will hear from or about a transperson, passing. Passing as what, may I ask? Does no one else hear the echoes of passing herself off? Passing a bad check (ironically the very crime which led to the eventual execution of Brandon Teena)? This construction of passing is a tertiary definition of the word - and yet somehow transpeople have been saddled with it nevertheless. The addition of the word ‘as’ makes the comparison between the then and now, between the “natural” and the “constructed” inherent. When we talk about passing, however much we may mean it in a neutral or even positive way, I wonder and worry about how many of these lexical hangers-on are also making the trip. The loss of that certain personal veracity that transpeople face may have something to do with the fact that every time we talk about how we are in the world – how we legitimately and (mostly) authentically are – we use a word that is embedded with a question of legitimacy.

And, while we’re at it, legitimately what, exactly? While we are busy sticking transpeople with the burden of proof in every single arraignment in the court of public opinion, we simultaneously fail to examine the nature of that court. It is all very well indeed as North Americans, to imagine that we know things, immutably and everlastingly, about gender but any anthropologist worth a pencil can tell you we don’t know a damn thing. That gendered cues change radically according to cultural context, particularly in terms of race, economic class, religious background, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability status. No one likes to mention this, because it threatens to interfere with our sense that gender is knowable, definable, and absolute, but in fact gender cues are not read in the same way everywhere. Leaving aside even some of the more fabulous example (because I fear they exoticize cultures that are less well understood by westerners), consider the legion of heterosexual and gender-normative German boys strolling the strasse in pink or purple socks and Birkenstocks (yes, at the time time). Or the masculine men of Montreal, who greet everyone including one another, manfully, with a kiss on each cheek, or the farm women of northern Maine who wear blue jeans and flannel shirts from L.L. Bean and are considered perfectly and precisely gender-normative for their time and place. If you moved either of the above groups into Manhattan or Chicago you would almost certainly conclude that you were in a gay bar (because North Americans reflexively map non-normative gender expression onto queer sexual orientation) and would quite likely begin to speculate on the genders of some of the patrons.

Why is this a problem? It’s not, as long as the socks stay in Germany and the farmers in Maine and the kisses in Montreal. But when those people – entirely Normal within their cultural contexts, absolutely cisgendered in their personal identities – arrive in Austin or Boston, their genders may well be read as suspect, as other. And the reverse is true of transpeople. Can you imagine a transwoman, from that farming community in northern Maine, meeting a physician from South Carolina? Each has hir own idea of what a woman looks like or does or needs to be; each has a clear mental map of how femininity is achieved and maintained. Each idea is, again, entirely culturally correct and totally valid within a context. But they conflict.

So who do we declare the winner? The transwoman, because she has authenticity on her side? The doctor, for having a medical degree? Do we hew to the demands of the American ethos and privilege the privliged, awarding the passing points to the person of higher economic class status? How would this transwoman pass? Perhaps more importantly, and more to the point of my everlasting problem with this word: with whom would she pass?

(And no fair mumbling about most-people-and-most-places, either. If nothing less than my life, my wellness, to say nothing of my ability to get medical or legal intervention should I want it are at stake, and the entire burden of making myself acceptable falls to me alone, then I think I can expect a little consistency, can I not?)

It seems clear to me that this passing concept is not really viable at all, certainly not for actual people. It may have worked in a limited way for a minute, as long as all such medical and social transactions took place among people whose cultural contexts and demographic locations were all pretty tidily lined up (or so vastly disparate that those with privilege were free to exoticize and disenfranchise freely). And even with that, the word passing always carried with it the strong aroma of exactly what some people think about transfolk. It suggests that they are passing themselves off as something they are not, that there is something undeniably deceptive about them; that there is something superficial or merely cosmetic about our identified and/or expressed genders. But now what do we do? Perhaps even more importantly: now what do we say?

My suggestion is that we put the burden where it belongs: on the observer. Imagine a construction of language that, rather than reinforcing an idea of transgender or transsexual people as creating a falsehood, supported the notion that our genders are perfectly natural and inherently truthful. For that to be the case, however, some blame needs to be assigned in cases of disagreement (and no one will allow me to just blame the media culture and its great love affair with the binary, regrettably). I say we assign it to the cisgendered. Rather than talking about who passes, let us instead talk about who reads.

“They read me as a man.” See how this works? In typing, that sentence assigns to gaze to the person or people doing the seeing, rather than further objectifying the object of it. Not just that, but in the sentence it is not clear what the identified gender or assigned-sex at birth of the speaker is. It could be, in that person’s eyes, either a successful or a failed attempt by someone else at correctly parsing their gender, but the onus is elsewhere. The actions of bystanders, rightly and reasonably, do not reflect on the transperson in question (though of course they may affect hir). The idea that someone is attempting to pull some sort of gendered fast one does not make the transition from a sentence constructed with passing to a sentence constructed with reading; nor is there any sense of endeavor. In no way does the language indict the efforts of the person being read, they are more or less what they are in somewhat the same way a book is what it is – engaging or boring, quick or slow, but these things are well-understood to be in the eye of the beholder. Which is why we have Amazon rankings and reviews on librarything.com as opposed to, say, a governmental assessment and eternal branding with same. Ahem.

I am ever in favor of better language: more compassionate, more precise, more lyrical, more aspirational. When we continue to use the word pass we continue to hamper ourselves in the reinvocation of a narrative of deception, not to mention the legacy of racism, the cultural arrogance, and the spectacular level of objectification it brings with it. I do not believe we need this, and what’s more I do not believe it’s good for us. I would rather move the burden back where it belongs, to the observer, the person whose cultural lens and personal locations on so many axes are in so many ways the real deciders of this. To be read, indeed, is something that happens to all people and carries none of the stigmas attached to its new or old meaning; it is also done by all people, and is not a special test applied only to hapless trannies with the temerity to leave our houses. What is more, maybe most: passing is fleeting, tricksy and temporary. But what it takes or means to read depends, rightly and righteously, entirely on who’s doing it.


(And no fair mumbling about most-people-and-most-places, either. If nothing less than my life, my wellness, to say nothing of my ability to get medical or legal intervention should I want it are at stake, and the entire burden of making myself acceptable falls to me alone, then I think I can expect a little consistency, can I not?)

It seems clear to me that this passing concept is not really viable at all, certainly not for actual people. It may have worked in a limited way for a minute, as long as all such medical and social transactions took place among people whose cultural contexts and demographic locations were all pretty tidily lined up (or so vastly disparate that those with privilege were free to exoticize and disenfranchise freely). And even with that, the word passing always carried with it the strong aroma of exactly what some people think about transfolk. It suggests that they are passing themselves off as something they are not, that there is something undeniably deceptive about them; that there is something superficial or merely cosmetic about our identified and/or expressed genders. But now what do we do? Perhaps even more importantly: now what do we say?

My suggestion is that we put the burden where it belongs: on the observer. Imagine a construction of language that, rather than reinforcing an idea of transgender or transsexual people as creating a falsehood, supported the notion that our genders are perfectly natural and inherently truthful. For that to be the case, however, some blame needs to be assigned in cases of disagreement (and no one will allow me to just blame the media culture and its great love affair with the binary, regrettably). I say we assign it to the cisgendered. Rather than talking about who passes, let us instead talk about who reads.

“They read me as a man.” See how this works? In typing, that sentence assigns to gaze to the person or people doing the seeing, rather than further objectifying the object of it. Not just that, but in the sentence it is not clear what the identified gender or assigned-sex at birth of the speaker is. It could be, in that person’s eyes, either a successful or a failed attempt by someone else at correctly parsing their gender, but the onus is elsewhere. The actions of bystanders, rightly and reasonably, do not reflect on the transperson in question (though of course they may affect hir). The idea that someone is attempting to pull some sort of gendered fast one does not make the transition from a sentence constructed with passing to a sentence constructed with reading; nor is there any sense of endeavor. In no way does the language indict the efforts of the person being read, they are more or less what they are in somewhat the same way a book is what it is – engaging or boring, quick or slow, but these things are well-understood to be in the eye of the beholder. Which is why we have Amazon rankings and reviews on librarything.com as opposed to, say, a governmental assessment and eternal branding with same. Ahem.

I am ever in favor of better language: more compassionate, more precise, more lyrical, more aspirational. When we continue to use the word pass we continue to hamper ourselves in the reinvocation of a narrative of deception, not to mention the legacy of racism, the cultural arrogance, and the spectacular level of objectification it brings with it. I do not believe we need this, and what’s more I do not believe it’s good for us. I would rather move the burden back where it belongs, to the observer, the person whose cultural lens and personal locations on so many axes are in so many ways the real deciders of this. To be read, indeed, is something that happens to all people and carries none of the stigmas attached to its new or old meaning; it is also done by all people, and is not a special test applied only to hapless trannies with the temerity to leave our houses. What is more, maybe most: passing is fleeting, tricksy and temporary. But what it takes or means to read depends, rightly and righteously, entirely on who’s doing it.
doing it.