not that i still watch glee, but:
i heard a few weeks back that dot-marie jones’ character on glee, Coach Beiste, had recently been rewritten as a trans man for the show’s last season. after 4 years of playing a strong, tomboy-ish, very masculine cis woman who identified with womanhood and identified as straight, jones is now going to play a trans man (presumably gay) — which has also been a convenient excuse to write glee’s black trans girl character out of the show.
this development makes me really angry as a butch woman and as a feminist. Jones was quoted in People, saying: “I just didn’t want to let down the girls who are straight and tomboys that my character represented the last four seasons…But I got the script and I was, like, ‘Oh my God. This is amazing.’ ”
the problem is that this does let down girls and women who do not fit the stereotypical definition of womanhood or who don’t conform to the norm of compulsory femininity. coach beiste was an island of representation, especially for straight masc women who are frequently assumed to be gay because they don’t fit the boxes laid out for women. now that representation has been turned into something else, which has the potential to leave these girls and women confused about who they are and leaves them with no real media representation.
as a masculine woman, i often - so often - feel out of place, othered by my non-performance of femininity, by the ways i perform masculinity, and by what feel like my failures to ever achieve a masculine ideal. i share little with many feminine women with regard to social performance, but i cannot deny what i share with them in our identities, our attitudes, and often our experiences as well.
i have felt pressure to transition; i question my gender all the time and have felt a pull towards immersing myself in masculinity and coming out as a man if only to reduce my cognitive dissonance and others’ inability to put me in a box. i am made to feel like what i am cannot be what a woman is, even though i live as proof to the contrary.
when a person like coach beiste identifies as a woman, that helps to expand our definition of what women are, who they are, and from a feminist perspective helps to distance women from heteropatriarchal ideas of what they can and must be. same when someone like myself identifies as a woman.
part of why i think coach beiste’s coming out and transition are harmful is that glee is reneging on all of the mind-expanding work the character did as a straight masculine woman, who loved being a woman and loved being attracted to men. i know that many trans people do not come out or are not safe enough to come out until late in life, and that does not in any way invalidate their experiences. i know that many are resolutely and often self-destructively or defensively attached to their assigned genders at birth, and that this is a common cover-up for people who have yet to come to terms with their identities. but i think glee is doing this for ratings and PC brownie points, and in the process they are conveying that no matter what coach beiste said in the past about loving being a woman, that doesn’t make any sense and is forgotten in his coming out as trans; they make a mockery of coach beiste’s experience as a masc woman and stand to harm gender non-conforming women — and really all women — by tossing out beiste’s womanhood so cavalierly.
A great point worth remembering: not all “gender nonconforming” women are lesbians. I do watch Glee, and Coach Beiste’s transition was a letdown.
