Last night the UK got episode 5 of the second season of I Am Cait. This one focused on the Trans Day of Remembrance and took place in St. Louis because the city was creating a memorial garden to commemorate murdered trans people.
The episode provided an opportunity to let Caitlyn see what sort of lives most trans people have, and in particular trans women of color. It featured Chandi bravely confessing her criminal past, and introduced Caitlyn to the idea of “survival crime” — crimes you commit because you are homeless and have no source of income. Slowly but surely, Caitlyn’s education proceeds.
It is an episode that I’m sure would prove valuable to Fay Wheldon who is launching a new novel based on her amazing new theory that trans women are “really” alpha males who have it all and are jealous of femininity. I wonder how many lobster & Bolly lunches it took her to come up with that ingenious concept.
Of course Caitlyn is Wheldon’s idea of the typical trans woman. For all of the work that the show does to try to dispel that myth, it isn’t watched by many cis people so it won’t disabuse the likes of Wheldon of her strange ideas.
On of the things that Wheldon told The Guardian is that she finds it significant that Caitlyn is still, “still speaking with a man’s voice”. Clearly she has no idea how difficult it is to get your voice sounding feminine after having gone through male puberty. You can’t just chose to sound all girly and have it happen by magic. Nevertheless, this does raise an issue that has puzzled me.
Back when I transitioned, the important things you had to work on were voice and body language. If you got those right, we were told, people could pick up the subliminal cues and you could get away with being tall, heavily-built and square-jawed. Now I totally accept that trans women shouldn’t have to do all of this stuff if they don’t want to, but back then it was very much an issue of personal safety, and for many of us it still is.
Anyway, another element of last night’s show was the introduction of Scott, the recovering alcoholic ex-boyfriend of Kourtney Kardashian and the father of three of Caitlyn’s grandchildren. Mostly this showed Caitlyn at her most patriarchal, but Scott, perhaps because he’s family, also picked up on things that hadn’t changed. Given the amount of money that Caitlyn has obviously spent on her body and looks, it seems odd to me that she apparently hasn’t done anything about voice or body language. It is her choice, obviously, but I’d like to know why.
The show also featured the ongoing saga of Candis’s unsuccessful love life, with yet another guy unprepared to date a beautiful woman simply because she’s trans. It also briefly introduced us to Van, a friend of Zachary’s who lives in St. Louis. Van is now happily married to a cis guy, but she explained that she has been through transition twice. The first time that she tried she found it impossible to get work and had to go back to living as a man for a while. And this is the point where Caitlyn confessed to having started transition back in the 1980s but backed out. She didn’t say why, and that I am not going to ask, but that is totally going in my trans awareness class. Transition is difficult and scary, and no one should be thought less of, or thought wrong, for changing their mind, regardless of whether they try again later.
I find the voice thing particularly interesting as I think it’s an area where there is a lot of pressure to sound like the sex you are assigned is ‘supposed’ to sound. I vividly remember being in a room with bunch of other female students having a discussion about something serious when a male student came in; all the other female students voices went up a few pitches and the serious subject was dropped. It made me start watching for the behaviour which was clearly subconscious and finding I saw it in most women. I think it’s one of the things that makes a lot of women sound less authoritative to many people, not just that they naturally have higher voices, but that they are using even higher voices than they would have naturally and so they sound very slight strained a lot of the time – not really obviously, but there if you start to listen for it. I don’t think I do this, though it’s hard to be sure, but I was brought up with five brothers, one did rather have to shout to be heard and it’s difficult to shout in a high register!
It surely is. I hardly ever raise my voice these days because of what it does to the pitch.
Oddly enough, many of my female friends tell me that they are jealous of my radio voice because it is “authoritative” rather than “girly”. They wouldn’t say that if they got misgendered every time they made a phone call.
Chris got into a huge row over the phone with a representative from his bank because they refused to believe he wasn’t a girl because his voice on the phone is quite feminine, while I was told off at my former job for not asking a million intrusive security questions to someone who was transitioning and had phoned up to change her name….