I’ve been a very bad blogger of late because I have been busy dealing with a bunch of things that are extremely annoying, some of which you will doubtless get to hear about in due course. In the meantime I also had to go on ShoutOut to do a “year in review” thing from a trans perspective. Because the ShoutOut folks are incredibly efficient that broadcast is already edited and available online. Hopefully being steaming furious about other things will have made my ranting about the evils of the Gender Recognition Panel and lack of recognition for non-binary people event more heartfelt.
As I’m probably not going to get much sleep tonight (Thursday), I might as well spend some time pouring that pent up fury into something else, though I’m going to publish this in the morning just in case the Internet falls on my head as a result.
I still haven’t seen The Danish Girl. I don’t have the time, for starters. And also to do a thorough deconstruction of the web of lies that the film weaves I need to have read the novel it is based on and Lili Elbe’s memoir, so that I can pin down what has been changed by whom. However, other people have seen the film, and this evening I came across this fascinating conversation about the film between trans author Casey Plett and Jonathan Kay from a Canadian website called The Walrus.
I think that Kay is genuinely trying to engage in discussion here. He does, after all, give Casey the last word, which is rare in such circumstances. However, he also comes across as rather clueless in places, and his blinkers are pretty clear for all trans people to see.
I’d like to start with the introduction to the piece as it sets the tone in a way that will inevitably get trans people’s backs up. Firstly Kay uses the term “transgenderism”. This is a TERF dog whistle term. It is intended to imply that being trans is a political philosophy, not anything innate to human beings. It is used to claim that being trans is something made up by trans people and the Patriarchy in order to oppress women. Please don’t use this word, people. Ever.
Kay also refers to Lili as a “biological man”. This is a rather more problematic term in that it does have some status as a scientific term. It can be used to mean someone with XY chromosomes. But being “biologically male” in that way has nothing much to do with being male in a practical sense. Humans are much more complicated than that. Someone who exhibits Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome is a “biological man” but will be assigned female at birth, will look exactly like people with XX chromosomes, and in some cases can even give birth. The phrase “biologically male” is often used to imply that trans women (and some intersex women) are “really” men, so it is best avoided except in specific scientific contexts.
On to the film now, and I want to focus on a few of the issues that Kay and Plett raise that illustrate just how distorted a picture of trans women the film gives.
Firstly there is the question of historical accuracy. As I have noted before, the film is not based on history, or on Lili’s memoirs, it is based on a recent fictionalization of Lili’s life written by a cis man, David Ebershoff. Apparently the film includes scenes of Lili writing her memoirs in a bid to make it seem more authentic. That sounds to me like a deliberate attempt to claim an authenticity it doesn’t have. Anyway, as Plett says, Lili’s memoirs are available. How much they have been edited before publication is uncertain, but they do provide a different, and far more contemporary perspective on what really happened.
One thing that Plett doesn’t raise in this regard is the fact the Lili claimed to be intersex. This is completely ignored by the film. I don’t know why, but I suspect that the producers wanted to avoid complicating the issue. Possibly the claim isn’t in the novel either. There is a definite tendency for cis people dealing with trans memoirs to assume that they are full of lies. After all, if someone claims to be a woman when they are “really” a man, then surely everything else they say must be suspect. You can’t believe what crazy people say about themselves.
Something that leaped out to me from the conversation was this comment by Kay:
Lili sometimes is shown to be unhinged, and can act callously to long-suffering Gerda—especially when Lili refuses to stand by Gerda just at the moment when her own paintings (of Lili, in fact) turn her into an artistic sensation. When an exasperated Gerda declares at one point to her sexually transitioning husband, “It’s not always about you,†she has the audience’s sympathy.
He later makes the seemingly reasonable point that this is good source of drama in the film, and it is. This is one of the main reasons why I hate transition narratives: the trans person can’t win.
If the trans person is married, the cis audience will have sympathy with the deserted wife (it is always a wife, never a husband). If she is not married, the cis audience will have sympathy with the poor, confused co-workers and the employer trying to cope with a seemingly impossible situation. If she’s a young person the cis audience with have sympathy with the parents and siblings. (See the book, Luna, for example, which is all about how awful it is for a teenage girl to have a trans sibling.)
Concern for deserted wives is precisely the justification used by the Home Office for imposing the infamous Spousal Veto.
Of course some couples do stay together through transition — Jan Morris and Sarah Brown have both stayed with their wives, for example — but movies and novels require drama so that can’t be allowed in fiction. The trans woman (it is always a woman) has to be shown as obsessed and selfish.
Do any of these cis writers ever pause to consider that trans people might actually care about their families and friends? That we might actually worry about what transition does to family relationships? That we might spend years, decades even, making bad decisions about our lives because we don’t want to hurt our families? That we might start to take seriously the advice that we get that we would be better to kill ourselves than bring shame upon our family? That some of us might act on that advice?
Even when trans kids are thrown out on the street to fend for themselves there will still be people who will tell them that they should be ashamed of the pain they have caused their families.
Also I can assure you that, even as recently as the 1990s, psychiatrists working in gender services would tell patients that if their families were causing problems then they should abandon their families and make new lives for themselves. I can tell you that because it happened to me. I refused, and that was a big risk because I could have been denied further treatment for refusing to do what the psychiatrist said.
I have no idea what actually went on between Lili and Gerda. I’m sure they had different views on the issue anyway. But I do know that the obsessed, selfish trans woman is a dangerous meme that I would like writers to avoid.
Then there’s the scene where Lili gets beaten up. As Plett notes, this is entirely fabricated. It never happened. Someone, either Ebershoff or the scriptwriters, felt that a film about a trans woman wasn’t complete without a scene of her getting beaten up. Why do you think that might be?
I don’t think the issue here is whether the book, or the film, is written by cis people or trans people. I don’t even think it is whether Lili is played by a cis person or a trans person, though that’s a question that deserves a whole separate blog post. The issue is whether or not the people writing the story deal honestly with it. Unfortunately far too many cis people writing about trans characters do so by playing into cis people’s negative expectations of trans people. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the film’s ending.
SPOILER ALERT
You all know that Lili dies at the end, don’t you? The film has to conform to the Tragic Trans Person narrative. Lili can’t be seen to live happily ever after.
And actually she did die, but not as it is portrayed in the film.
In the film Lili dies as a result of genital surgery: something that I and thousands of other trans people have lived through, and did so even back in the early 20th Century, including Lili.
Lili did not die from an operation to give her a vagina. She died from an attempt to give her a womb, through transplant surgery, which was being trialed decades before any surgeon understood the complexities of tissue rejection. It was an operation that was doomed to failure at the time, and has never been attempted since (though a few successful operations on cis women have now been undertaken, which gives us hope).
The film, and possibly the book, changed Lili’s story to have her die from a perfectly safe operation. It did so in order to make Lili’s life fit another meme about trans people.
I do trans history. I spend a lot of time reading about eunuchs. For thousands of years, large numbers of eunuchs were involved in government bureaucracies, armies and choirs in many countries around the world. And yet if you read history books you have to wonder how this was possible, because whenever eunuchs get mentioned the historians, especially the male historians, start going on about how dangerous the surgery was, and how many people died from it.
The Danish Girl is lying about Lili’s death, and it is doing so because it wants to make the point that for a man to lose his penis is to lose his life.
This is the problem with cis men writing about trans women. Far too many of them simply cannot accept our existence, because the whole idea of losing one’s penis fills them with terror. They have to pretend it is deadly, even when it manifestly isn’t.
It’s OK, boys, really. No one is asking you to cut your dicks off. Lots of trans women, on the other hand, manage very well without one, and go on to have long and happy lives having got rid of theirs. Lili could have done so too, had her doctors not been completely ignorant about the risks of organ transplants.
So that’s one of the main reasons why The Danish Girl makes me so angry. It doesn’t just want you to believe that trans women’s lives are tragic, it wants you to believe that they are wasted. How they can be any more wasted that they would be if we killed ourselves, which was the prevailing recommendation when I was young, is a mystery to me. In any case, transition makes trans people happy, and many of us go on to have very successful and fulfilled lives as a result.
The other thing that really annoys me is the whole forced feminisation narrative. This encourages viewers to see trans women as mentally ill, and to believe that psychiatric cures for trans people would work. It also blows a huge hole in the deserted wife narrative, and turns the film into a bizarre re-working of Frankenstein in which we are expected to accept that the monster is to blame both for coming to life when Victor asked him to, and for abandoning his poor father after having done so. However, I really need to see the film to make a full case for that one.
