You'll probably meet Dorothy at some point.
*Spoilers for Ranked Competitive Breast Growth*
I think about a lot moments in Ranked Competitive Breast Growth pretty frequently these days but there's not a single scene in this story that sticks out at me and has had quite as much impact on me, as the scene between Nichole and Dorothy at the cafe.
In the 20th entry to the serial, an elder trans woman, Dorothy, lends an ear and many awful opinions, to Nichole. Now I hate Nichole with a passion, if you have read my previous post about RCBG you know this. This, however, is one of her few redeeming scenes, one that comes at a serious low point for her. When she is brought inside from the rain, after an absolute train wreck of an evening, she is given hot cocoa and a soft place to recover by this gentle older woman. She listens to Nichole's problems and gives some input of her own.
Now Dorothy came up during a much less tolerant time. A time where the adversity towards trans people was much worse than now. And while the circumstances we are under now still allow for such an absurd premise as the RCBG server to believably exist, despite being total satire. Her material circumstances led her to many conclusions others believe to be unnatural. At this time, Nichole still believes that Kathy is a man pretending to be a woman, for an online competition. So when Dorothy asks “What’s the boy’s problem?” Nichole is only taken aback by the surprise of such a telepathic assumption, not the assumption of heteronormativity, a term neither of them probably even know.
The conversation continues with an admission by Nichole that she is “drop dead gorgeous” since transitioning and that such progress didn’t solve her problems. Hardly a humbling concession, yes yes, poor you for winning the boob lottery. Following is a description of what, not whom, she has lost. A best friend, specifically someone who will take her side in anything, a yes-man. She claims that Kathy is hurting her and can’t keep up with the person she has changed into. A change that from the reader’s perspective is a transformation from a poorly-constructed masculine facade, to an incredibly vapid blank slate devoid of a self to even introspect upon who is taking advantage of her friend and failing to communicate in any meaningful way. I mean I could have maybe worded that less angrily but like I said, not a fan of Nichole. Anyway. Now the part where Dorothy opens her big stupid mouth.
So Dorothy opens her big stupid mouth and begins by absolving Nichole of responsibility, in possibly the most backward and derisive way imaginable.
“You’ve grown up with all this being sold as something easy, some fun new trend for kids to hop onto with multicolored highlights and atrocious fashion sense”
Really incredible! Right off the bat showing her fully ignorant, generationalist understanding of basically nothing at all. Dorothy is already full of disgusting opinions in her first breath of response. She goes on to repeat all the nasty trans-medicalist myths that have been holding back progress for years. “This is a curse, it’s a fucking disease” At this point she has done nothing at all to console Nichole emotionally, nor even relate to her ‘boy trouble’ aside from a comment about how she does not have a “hunky baker closing up,” All she has done is take up valuable oxygen while using Nichole’s problems as a platform to spout her vitriol against her own sisters and she continues doing so for a lengthy rant, before Nichole spouts “It’s so obvious now,” in response not to Dorothy’s rhetoric, but the awareness that Dorothy is “just as bad as the rest of them.” Dorothy’s life experience is not growth of conscience, she’s not better at understanding herself than Nichole’s friends, or compassionate in any meaningful way to the struggles of trans youth going as far as to invalidate their experience with every flap of her lips. Her reasoning for the coming revelation is not made obvious in the text, but her conclusion at the sight of Dorothy’s messed up views, is that Kathy is actually trans! Which she exclaims as a profound discovery to her host. Yes girl! Finally caught up with the rest of the cast!
At this new information, and the realization that she’s been insulted by a lesbian, or some kind of phantasmic man-in-woman’s-spaces thing that these weird essentiallists are so worked up about, Dorothy kicks her out back into the rain. It’s not explained which of those things is going through Dorothy’s mind, only that she shows a disgusted look on her face. It’s up to you to make that assumption in your reading of it. Honestly it doesn’t matter which is true to Dorothy because she’s no longer relevant to the story after this scene. As you’re reading this passage you think, finally Nichole is going to get some much needed guidance from an elder trans woman. She’s going to drop some wisdom and some tough love or compassionate advice, and send her towards being a better woman. Instead you are very quickly shaken up by the reality of this person’s warped thinking and realize, damn this lady sucks. Well I’m here to tell you that lady exists, you’re going to meet many trans women who believe that the way that things have progressed is less than ideal, even more so that the old ways are better. That’s okay. The ideas that she developed served her as she made her way through an unforgiving and violently transphobic world. She carved a path through a system designed to see her destroyed and came out the other end, a twisted awful woman, but a woman nonetheless. She survived worse times, and developed some pretty awful ideas because of it. Dorothy and those like her are a sign that the times really have changed for the better, a dark result of the past circumstances, and maybe some day I’ll be seen that way too. I can only hope so.
