#gwtr meta

[waterlilyvioletfog]

“Man in A Dress”, Gone With The Rain

TW: discussion of misogynistic and especially anti-trans tropes/stereotypes/rhetoric in media. I use male pronouns for a character who may be interpreted as transfem, for clarity.

Caveat: I’m white, I’m queer but not transfem, I haven’t watched the whole show and I haven’t read the novel the show is based on. Spoilers through Episode 18.

So it’s a reasonably common trope in cdramas I’ve watched recently to have a male character wear women’s clothes for Sneaking purposes (not usually Sexual Sneaking, but still uncomfortably close to that anti-trans trope) and it’s always played for laughs and it’s always like “oh doesn’t our six foot tall male lead with big broad shoulders look so silly in this maid costume hur dur”. Some dramas (Starry Love) can manage to make this not blindingly offensive, but other dramas like say, Blood of Youth, may have scenes where the male characters are in drag and look ridiculous and “unwomanly” and awkward. Lots of furtive looks and hunching down and hissing because They Are Men.

Gone With The Rain has two examples (so far, I’ve just gotten through ep. 18) of a “male” character dressing in women’s clothes… and they both feel different (at least to me) from this trope, or at least like there is something more substantial and meaningful at work than mere “man in dress lol” anti-trans misogynistic jokes.

The first case is in the first arc when Bai Moxi, our main heroine, dresses Wan Jiagui (a young loyalist soldier trapped in a rebel-controlled city) in women’s clothes and has him act as a body double for her so that he (and originally also she) can escape the city. Wan Jiagui is initially hesitant and embarrassed by this because He Is A Man and also your crush buying you women’s clothes is apparently emasculating or whatever, but the execution… Wan Jiagui is wearing clothes made to fit his body, not borrowed clothes, and there’s nothing sheer or form-fitting going on. The costume he and Moxi both wear isn’t the sort of thing she usually wears, either, with a big draping scarf as part of the bodice instead of her usual jacket, and cool tones where she’s so far mostly worn reds and oranges. It’s still not men’s clothes, but it’s not something that we would expect either character to wear. This makes the dissonance doubled (both characters are out of their usual uniform) and thus reduced (Wan Jiagui doesn’t necessarily look weirder to the audience than Moxi does). And beyond the initial discomfort Wan Jiagui displays, there isn’t much comedy to the disguise. The costumes serve a purpose, it makes sense that he’d dress as her, and he acts pretty much as he has for the last several episodes, including having a chase scene full of tension and danger, all while wearing women’s clothes. The male character isn’t wearing women’s clothes to sneak around the women’s quarters at the palace, he’s wearing them as his most practical choice of outfit for escaping a dangerous situation, with the co-conspiracy (actually, primary conspiracy) of the female lead. Instead of sinister or silly, it’s smart.

The second case is Wu Yin. Wu Yin (played by actress Liu Meitong) is an ostensibly male character who has disguised himself as a woman to infiltrate a women’s school. This, on the surface, is like, the DEFINITION of the predatory man in drag anti-trans trope— male character dresses as a woman to deceive women and enter a women’s-only space. But, as Bai Moxi notes, he’s not there for “promiscuity”, as she puts it. This is the primary reason why she doesn’t tell anyone when she discovers that Wu Yin is AMAB. If Feng Ming, who’s been harassing Moxi and her cousin Fengyao, had done the same thing, she’d scream to the rooftops. Bai Moxi does blackmail Wu Yin regarding his gender, but evidently feels no fear towards him and sees no harm in his continued presence. She blackmails Wu Yin because it’s a point of leverage and she’s a shady, scheming opportunist, not because she thinks what Wu Yin is doing is wrong.

Wu Yin (in situ) does behave differently from the rest of the class, but it mostly comes off as “Wu Yin is a stick-up-the-ass bluestocking surrounded by silly beauties who dance all night”. Wu Yin’s just naturally proper and somber, not uncomfortable. Additionally, we have another comparison of female characters wearing traditionally male clothes in the other class, who are top students who learn archery. Gender nonconformity is expected, textually and visually, and there’s a female character who belongs to that other class who has exactly as many hidden agendas and secret plans as Wu Yin does.

Most crucially for me are the scenes after the Marquis’s visit (Wu Yin wore traditionally masculine clothes for this time) where Wu Yin presents as a woman again. Everyone in the school knows Wu Yin is AMAB. Wu Yin just dresses as a woman because this is a women’s school and he should dress the part. Wu Yin’s words! The idea that a male character could willingly return to presenting and living as a woman, for no material gain— that isn’t anti-trans at all. That’s as close to a trans-positive narrative as you can get without explicitly making a character trans.

If you treat Wu Yin as a genuine portrayal of the transfem experience, Wu Yin’s guilt when Moxi calls him a man reads as self-internalized transphobia, or fear of being outed; wearing male clothes when acting as an official and returning to women’s clothes after comes across as a trans person closeting themselves around their co-workers and family; Wu Yin presenting as male becomes inextricably tied to loyalty to Wu Lang and his conformity is closeting for a transphobic parent’s love and approval; and Bai Moxi and Chen Wende both saying Wu Yin looks good in women’s clothes comes off as support and gender affirmation, demonstrating that trans individuals can be genuinely attractive in their gender identity, that the desire isn’t a one-way street for trans people.

All of this is not to say that the creators of this series intended to make a genuinely positive portrayal of the transfem experience or to show a transphobic and misogynistic joke played straight where a cishet male dude can just wear the fucking dress and kick ass— I’m sure that you can make the opposite case, and I’m not an expert in trans storytelling or stereotypes and can’t speak to the transfem experience personally. But it’s a way that a person with the lens of feminist, trans, and queer coding could feasibly interpret the text, and I think that’s interesting.