The DJ has the tempo pinned at 140 bpm – the fuck rhythm. Other than the green lasers, it’s murky dark. The beams crawl over a 50-man ruck of hairy bellies and butts and big shoulders and beards. They mostly wear harnesses and straps. Sturdy men writhing over each other in pounding 4/4 time. The unmistakable and vaguely foul aroma of anal sex wafts in and out of the mensroom. Some people find this stench electrifying. Everyone else finds it stomach-churning. It was a conservative’s view of hell. Yes, I was at a party… apparently, the wrong one.
The penny didn’t drop until I made it through the darkness of the warehouse to a booth to sit with my friends. This had been promoted as a regular queer-kink party at a public venue, but the leather daddy community had not only taken over the dancefloor … but the entire event. Out of several hundred people, I – in pencil skirt and corset – was the only trans-femme in attendance. I went to buy a drink.
Behind me in line for the bar was a pretty twink – a femboy in the leather hotpants and chest harness set that seemingly every member of the masc leather community wears. One day, he’d grow up to be one of those hulking stomping daddies on the dance floor. But for now he was still a clean-shaven youth, slim yet muscular. While I waited to be served, he tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and he yelled over the techno din “You’re fucking disgusting!”. Then he leaned in to growl through his pink lipgloss “You better watch yourself”.
That little story serves as my preamble to answering “are femboys transphobic” … Yes, femboys CAN be transphobic, but the story doesn’t end there…
Why did the twink hate me?
I found the question that triggered somewhere online and it got me thinking. It seems to assume that transgender and femboy are independent and can’t overlap. I’d argue that transgender and femboy can and do overlap, and can do it in ways that a femboy isn’t aware of.
Note: for the purpose of this article, I am going to talk about MTF transgender issues because that is what I know more about. The lived experiences of FTM people encountering femboy transphobia are outside my ken.
First, what is a femboy anyway? As always, I like functional definitions. A femboy isn’t something you “be”, it’s something you “do”. And that means femboys adopt the appearance and mannerisms of a kind of delicate waifish femininity. Why they do this may be for social reasons, self-directed reasons or both. By definition, being a femboy involves some degree of “cross dressing”. This however, may be limited simply to adopting the cosmetic practices associated with women, rather than dressing “like a woman”. Also femboys are young – teens and twenties. And this is important. (And also begs the question: what happens to femboys when they grow up?)
“LGB without the T!”
Anyway, being a femboy does not imply one is trans or gender-queer. The term is usually, but not always, adopted or applied to someone who is a gay cis-male. How can a gay person be transphobic? Easy! The queer collective is not a monolith, there are many people and factions who despise the identities of other members and factions. The trans-exclusionary aspects of the broader “queer” collective are obvious. There are some infamous groups that belabor the fundamental difference between the LGB and the T in the acronym. The difference, as I’ve heard it coarsely put, boils down to: LBG is about who you want to fuck, and T is about who you want to fuck as. In more polite terms, it is sexual-orientation advocates demanding that gender identity issues be considered separately from their agenda.
These people take the position that gender identity is a threat to an LGB movement that they define by certain cisgender sexual orientations. That is the line they draw. It is the wall around their terf. To these people, acceptance of diverse sexual orientations has nothing at all to do with acceptance of diverse gender identities. It is not always so extreme, of course: one can be pro-acceptance and anti-inclusion of transgender people: “You are welcome in my town, but not in my church”. For a femboy it is very possible for them to accept their sexual orientation – likely to be homosexual cis-male – while rejecting (or remaining in the dark) about their gender identity – which could be anything at all, including transfeminine.
Jealousy = insecurity
To discover your gender identity is not what you wanted or assumed is a destabilising thing. An easy thing to reject. And in rejecting it in yourself – in finding it distasteful or repellent – it’s only a short jump to finding it repellent in others. Moreover, for young femboys, like any outsider, when they have “finally found” people they feel safe and validated by, they tend to be fanatic about the purity and norms of that group. Much more so than established members, they jealously defend the group because they feel their grasp on membership is so valuable and so insecure.
Now, if a lost and lonely femboy finds validation in the leather daddy scene, which prizes the macho and welcomes twinks because some respectably macho members are attracted to them, then the new twink is unlikely to expose themselves by criticising the group’s ways. Those secure members of the leather daddy group probably have no issue at all with transwomen. They probably see us as fellow, but distant, travellers. As we have observed, femboys also tend to be quite young. Thus they lack the life experience, sense of self-security and critical thinking gifts of maturity. So the “shun the outsider” effect is doubled.
So, yeah, it is easy for femboys to be transphobic and there are various reasons why they might be that way.
The next twink at the bar
After I was threatened by the twink, I turned away from him and shrugged. If he was planning to bash me, it wouldn’t be in a crowded nightclub while surrounded by partygoers and in front of security. If he was planning to bash me, it would be later when I was alone. And I did not plan to be alone that night. So, I got my drink and went back to my friends. I was a little shaken up, but not really worried. His comment was more about his personal disgust that I was AMAB and presenting femme. And he was a man who liked his men big, lumbering and hairy. I was the flagrant opposite of what he liked and was poisoning his preferred atmosphere by breathing it. To him I was a cockroach in the custard. In any event, I stayed and kept partying.
Later, I lined up to get another drink. Again I was tapped on the shoulder by someone behind. I turned. It was another very pretty femboy twink. Do you know what this one said?
“Oh my god, honey! I just had say you are so fucking beautiful”.