tboy swag

Trans mascs are obsessive about extremes of taste and anti-taste. I’ve never met so many people who love to insist that we’re tacky sons of bitches (/tacky nonbinary bitch-children) while also spending so much time and money on looking good. We buy nice pens and loud pants; we decorate our rooms with succulent forests and clashing animal prints; we wear suits on casual occasions. We go goth after our time. I’ve known mascs whose aesthetics ranged from normcore to New Romantic, but I also seem to know a lot of people whose style goal is not to stake out a specific territory, but to define and furiously defend an entire cheetah’s range of styles.

Anytime I ask why trans mascs are like this, at least half the answer is that we’ve been suppressing something vital for years, and now we need to come out wild and springing, like Max Fischer’s cheerleading routine in Rushmore. But I also think our desire for all the taste, all the time comes of being constantly accused of artifice. “You’re not acting according to nature” is something that folks say to trans people all the time. It’s also something they say to women: “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.” We’re told it’s natural to want to be men, but the barest artifice to actually try it. So there’s never really been a time when trans mascs weren’t accused of being not only fake, but inherently fake, despite the obvious contradiction in terms.

We can react to this in a few ways. We can strenuously defend our authenticity, which is possible, but requires constant labor. We can throw ourselves into an aesthetic of the artificial — “I’m Joe Orton, blah blah blah, cheap clothes suit me ‘cause I’m from the gutter.” Or we can reject the dichotomy of the fake and the real, of the tacky and the classic, and just be openly, excessively try-hard until we die.

But I think there’s a reason we tend to be so intense, both in our search for Savile Row tailoring on a barista budget and in our search for The Most Coat. The heart of it is a disinterest in dichotomies of taste that we needed to adopt in order to come out at all. All that stuff is nonsense anyway. Everybody knows that understatement is just the ostentation of the rich, and most of us know that camp is a conduit for sincere emotion to travel through the thick skin and straight to the blood. Trans mascs just know it better than most.