I'm this Gender because I Want Bikinis and Chipped Nail Polish

In a rather odd episode of Falling Down the Rabbit Hole, I discovered this quote of quote quoted by Rod Dreher:

In a recent piece for n+1, the feminist and trans theorist Andrea Long Chu argued that the trans experience, contrary to how we have become accustomed to think of it, ‘expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire’. Being trans, she says, is ‘a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants’. She goes on:

I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my make-up in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.

Chu's comment (I really should link the original source but don't have the stomach to find it) put me in mind of Caitlyn, formerly known as Bruce, gushing about wearing nail polish until it chipped. To which I responded: Ewww. Chipped nail polish is gross. Which is why I wore no nail polish at all until, what, the last five years and only on my feet. 

Then there's the obvious shallowness of this list of supposed feminine perks. And might I add, these are perks for only a certain type of girl -- for instance, the bikini tops and Daisy Dukes. Breasts are really inconvenient when you're not nursing a baby. You might notice that few sports favor girls with figures. For that matter, few sectors of the modeling industry do so either. (A C-cup is considered big in the fashion world.) So I peer at the shirt bags offered by Everlane wondering if there's a modicum of chance that I too could look chic in sustainable and ethically sourced fashion. 

Further, the speaker wholeheartedly embraces this entire list as positive goods. As least seems to. She treats them as guilty pleasures because they counteract a certain narrative, not because their inherent worth is doubtful. There's no inkling of a struggle over whether gossip, mascara, lipstick, bikinis, and other items of minuscule clothing have a place in her life and what that place should be. She just wants them. When I should start wearing makeup was not a small decision for my parents. Gossip has no place in anyone's life. I've decided to go for the burkini look (it's still plenty revealing). Long distance telephone friendships might have gotten cheaper in the last couple decades but unlimited text and talk doesn't count the cost of whether it's worth anything. And a man craving the "benevolent chauvinism" of "microagressions" really just cracks me up.

Chu might rage at me, but this list of what one wants simply shows someone lonely. Yes. You are lonely.

The strange honesty of the list, along with the inane comment from Caitlyn Jenner, expose what I've wondered all along. This isn't about becoming comfortable in one's own skin and harmonizing inner and outer. It's about becoming someone else altogether.

To wrap it up. Some time ago on the social medias, about the time that Bruce was transitioning, a meme floated around stating that no one could truly know what it was like to be a woman without period cramps, labor pangs, hot flashes, etc. But not every woman experiences these things. Experience, anatomy, and accoutrements do not a woman make. There's something about our wiring that makes us female. It's in our DNA, for pete's sake. Deep in the invisible chromosomes. I function as woman even when I'm not thinking about anything remotely connected to my sex. Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf sound so oddly feminine to me, even when their womanhood is completely out of frame. I don't understand it.