Can I be attractive in a wheelchair… do I want to be?
As a transgender woman I don’t easily conform to typical standards of beauty. My hands are large enough to grip a volleyball in one palm. My shoulders are so broad that people would be forgiven for mistaking me for an aircraft carrier at first glance. And I’m taller than everyone in most rooms. When I used to wear heels I would set off warnings in nearby air traffic control towers whenever I stepped outside. But it’s the world’s perception of trans folk that most undermines my sense of myself as attractive.
Trans women’s sexuality is often fetishised, such that the notion of trans women being attractive is seen as its own niche proclivity. Viewed through the lens of male desire, as women so often are, trans women’s attractiveness is frequently the subject of the gaze of men motivated to conceive of themselves as strictly heterosexual. Sometimes such men can see our alluring feminine forms as camouflage for our secret monstrous masculinity hiding beneath the surface, like cuttlefish Barbie. Attraction to us by men can, therefore, appear to them a threat to their heterosexuality and thus their hegemonic masculinity. Trans women who are attractive are frequently seen as deceptive, and attraction to us is sequestered to the secret, shadowy corners of sexual desire.
The sexuality of trans women is a taboo of its own, mysterious and misconstrued to the point that it even has its own pathological classification, autogynephilia. I’m a psychologist and the history of this theory still leaves me aghast whenever I’m reminded of it. The scientist who originated the idea asked trans women about their experiences. Not finding what he expected, he adjusted the analysis to compensate for what he described as the well known propensity of transgender people to lie, and then surprisingly found support for this appalling notion. Autogynephilia is the deeply discriminatory concept of trans women only identifying as such because they find women so attractive that they become excited by the idea of themselves as women. We’re so sexually magnetic that we arouse ourselves into existence. It would be laughable if it weren’t still taken seriously in some scientific publications.
It is no surprise, then, that trans women have a tough time dating. I’m currently reading Shon Faye’s ‘Love in Exile’, and I adore everything she writes, but this book is something special. Shon describes guys questioning their sexuality when they find her attractive, finding their misogyny both disturbing and strangely affirming, and feeling a constant underlying desire to apologise for being her. Shon’s description very much reminds me of my own experience. I don’t date, I’m married to someone I love deeply, but I still experience that deep river of shame for the influence I have had on her life. And I still fight the compulsion to apologise to her and her family for who I am. Because this trans woman feels like a poor substitute for what might otherwise have been.
As a trans woman, a sense of myself as attractive is like sand, hard to grasp without it slipping right through my fingers. As I enter my 40s things only seem to get harder as I inch further from the capitalist beauty standards of mainstream judgement. And this is all long before we even consider the influence of MS on my self-concept, or the far reaching effects of my wheelchair.
Capitalist beauty standards value those who are young, cis (not trans), and ‘healthy’. I am none of these things.
When I began my transition I had to rebuild my self image, understand how my new embodiment in the world changed how people saw me and treated me. I think people don’t easily see women as knowledgeable, and I found suddenly that people spoke over me at meetings. When leading training sessions I found that I’d need to inject more charm, more humour, to hold delegates’ attention, as they more easily mulled their phones, or got distracted by butterflies, or started comparing foot sizes with neighbours. Things got really weird when I realised that I could hold attention more easily in meetings and in trainings by dressing up, by getting my makeup right. What I didn’t realise was that my worth was being ever closer tied to my attractiveness.
I learned how to be me in this world, though. I fought hard to be seen as me, to see myself as me, and with effort and hormones I started to see in the mirror a realised version of myself. Someone I liked. Someone I even admitted might be considered cute in the right light.
MS arrived less like an Amazon delivery at my front door and more like a lost Uber crashing into my living room. I was out in the world, glamorous and professional. Up early every morning to do makeup and get my clothes just right. I was confident. I’d go to schools for my work, meet parents on their worst days, solve complex problems in the most difficult conditions. I’d do it all as the fully realised woman I had become.
And then, suddenly, everything changed.
I went numb in one leg, I lost my sense of taste. I had doctors’ appointments and referrals and MRIs. I didn’t even do my makeup to meet my neurologist when he told me the information that would change everything in an instant - ‘Consistent with MS’. Pain and fatigue became a fixture of my life and I began the urgent search for a disease modifying therapy that would stem the flow of skills from my grasp. I switched into survival mode. I went from being an able-bodied professional woman out in the world, working too hard, loving every moment, to becoming disabled.
My sense of who I was changed overnight. I could no longer be the woman I had become. I tried. I’d be unable to walk after meetings. My fatigue would grind me to dust. My legs would spasm and fail. I’d develop problems with my bladder. I’d buy my first wheelchair.
The wheelchair changed how people saw me so abruptly that it threw off the last fragments of my cute and competent professional persona entirely. The guy on the train wasn’t opening the door to ask me for my number, he was asking if I was cold. People in the street didn’t give a lingering glance admiring my dress, or my hair, they’d give lingering looks of sadness, or with sympathetic smiles. People didn’t try to get closer to me, they’d try to get out of my way.
It’s true to say that I now don’t know how to be beautiful in my wheelchair. But I think feminism is about to hit me like a train, because who the hell am I trying to impress? I’m not even into guys! Why am I trying to be the glossy, polished, perfect subject of male gaze?
When I think about the women I admire it isn’t for their outer beauty. I admire Shon Faye for her art, her writing. She can shake the very Earth with her words. I admire Ardra Shephard, a woman who is the personification of fashion, who is defiantly herself. She is the only person I’ve seen who can make a rollator look so damn glamorous. I admire Abigail Thorne, a successful content creator and actor, being her wonderful self openly and honestly. The women I admire are full, complete women in the world, and I admire them for their many talents and skills, their defiance in the face of rules they so powerfully transgress. If I don’t admire these women for their arresting outer beauty then why am I holding myself to an impossible beauty standard?
We live in a culture of bullshit capitalist beauty standards. But my value, our value, isn’t found there.
I know that I’m the same woman who roamed around schools solving problems and helping kids long before MS found me. I know that I’m the same godsdamned shieldmaiden who fought every norm and expectation to be realised. And I know that these outer beauty standards are just a new set of rules imposed upon my life by ableism and by capitalism. We’ve faced rules like this before.
Still, as a girl with MS, in my wheelchair, my instinct is to shy back from standing out. To try to fit into expectations better. To make myself small. Not to take up space. To apologise. To behave.
Somehow I’ve forgotten the most important lesson of my life: social norms are not the only way to live in this world.
Seeing these social rules and expectations for what they are, the doors and bars of a psychological prison, I can see what I need to do. I don’t need to shape myself to fit into the prison better.
I need to break free.
I don’t need to fit the world’s idea of who I should be, I never have. It’s time to take up space, to remind myself who I am and to embody her unapologetically. I’m a scientist. I’m a colleague, a friend. I’m a writer, blogger, and podcast host. I’m not bound to a wheelchair, I’m the pilot of the Rocinante. I’m a transgender disabled woman.