#transmasc/butch lesbian daniel rights

[vaperarmand]

conflicted t4t devil’s minion anon. have decided to keep it t4t, w armand as a femme tgirl and daniel as a transmasc butch lesbian type. it’s for a sugar mommy armand, 1970s human au. i am a sideblog and so can’t send pictures but here’s a snippet: “New York’s known for making loners of everybody. Concrete jungle where you don’t focus anywhere but the grayness ahead and you don’t stop to smell the flowers. It’s a world of dead kids on the television and cigarette butts in green parks and calloused hands from secondhand electric guitars. Daniel’s good on her own, so fucking good, but the nights are colder here than they ever were in California, and money is tight. So she has Armand to take care of her. Daniel’s her sugar baby, her muse, her lover, her friend, her doll, her pet, her sister of a queer sort.”

doing this to you right now

[variousqueerthings]

daniel is just lovely and that's the most unforgiveable thing (I wrote this opening last and now I want to make it an opening to a fic - alas, the below the cut is not a fic, do not be mislead)

I think people struggle so hard with that, even people (especially cis guys) who genuinely like his character -

they try to catch him out and find his cynical badness, to prove that he's not "better" than them, even though he's literally fictional, the goodness of daniel larusso won't jump out of the screen and judge you (the "judgement" btw - the "self-aware that I'm the good guy" judgement - is the thing the cobra kai writers write into him for that reason, even though -and I mean this - I think they sincerely are doing their best and like his character + I think there are ways to be very interesting about that --- I too would get a bit fucking tired of everyone's drama invading my space after 35+ years --- I too would be wary of allowing that mentality into my space even if I was on the same side as the person who acts that way --- plus with a heavy dose of grief. so it's not like you can't make it work, but I don't think that's quite why the writers do it, I don't think they can conceive of what his masculinity is, because it's so foreign to them -- it is, in fact, a masculinity that is far more spoken of in queer spaces --- it is, in many ways, a queer masculinity)

moving on:

I wonder if that's fear of what he represents thematically, hitting so hard because it's one of the most intense masculine anxieties - what does a man look like who isn't self-consciously attempting to Be A Man? what is a man who isn't concerned with that?

he doesn't contain the kind of masculinity that needs to be upheld through some kind of reactive violence, either towards the self or towards others -

he doesn't try to be the smartest or the strongest in order to "perform correct masculinity" and he doesn't self-hate (as, I assume some of these "critics" believe, he should) just because he's not these things

he doesn't put down girls and women around him to make himself bigger + he doesn't have anxieties about "not being the perfect guy" for girls to like (as is quite common in male characters who aren't beefy or smart, because the self-insert is usually meant to represent the nerdy guys who make the story - maybe because neither RMK nor John Avildsen were this guy??? and nor do I think was ralph macchio for that matter)

(his anxieties around this are mainly class anxieties, however even these aren't rooted in "better" masculinity, like he's not trying to get money to hook up with a girl - by accident or by design it's fascinating that neither ali nor kumiko are ever prizes, they're fully onboard for this guy practically the second they see him)

he's not self-flagellatingly trying to become the kind of man that a violently self-hating father would him to become to uphold the Legacy Of Masculinity, as is common for boys' coming-of-age stories and/or the men they grow into in later stories, because that figure didn't exist in his life. both miyagi and, from the sounds of it, his birth father, never created those anxieties within him

for the most part he's not even super concerned with questions of masculinity. he's in sports movies - some of the most classical vehicles for "what makes a man" themes - and he's basically going "nah, I'm okay actually, weird though that other dudes are so obsessed with me, I'm literally just there" but it's kind of a perfectly created character, because yeah, real life men have reacted in the exact same way, even, at times, towards ralph macchio himself

which is also why discussions around "was daniel the real bully and/or instigating and therefore equally bad" are kind of rooted in that weird gotcha mentality, because like

1. obviously not

2. they're just one version of all the ways this fictional character bleeds into the psyche of guys so threatened by a dude whose sole difference is not being afraid of himself, that they have to invent violence on his part for him to make sense in their minds - what even is a man who doesn't express himself through violence, either against himself or others????? why doesn't he hate himself for being "weak"?? why isn't he afraid dammit???? of expressing his emotions, of looking like an idiot, of being physically weaker than other men, of all the ways he doesn't measure up to what masculinity ought to be according to these narrow, violent criteria??? (sidenote: am surprised not more non-queer people read him as queer - maybe because he gets the girls and bisexuality wasn't invented until tumblr //sarcasm)

how dare the narrative allow a man like this to win - he needs to be taken down a peg. that's what he deserves! this has nothing to do with my own opinions of masculinity!

anyway I'd love to see more characters like this - he's a rarity, kind of a blip of the same kind that created river phoenix movies or patrick swayze in dirty dancing (but then, patrick swayze was also in road house, because he could butch up for it, but also in to wong foo - the range)

more complicated depictions of men - why are male directors so obsessed with the anxiety of masculinity? and also - at what point does the complication of gender-depictions onscreen become the queering of gender-depictions onscreen?

[this is basically just a ramble that is so close to bleeding into my "transmasculinity can challenge the mythos of masculinity in film" essay in which I also namedrop daniel larusso anyway]

[pentanguine]

1. Do you use any other terms to define or explain your gender?

So…I got a little carried away. Most of these posts will not be this long, but I had a lot I wanted to say, and a long drizzly afternoon to work on saying it, so.

Aside from genderqueer, trans, and nonbinary…

I’ve started feeling more at home with the word transmasculine this year, after several years of circling it warily and ultimately running away because it would just be ALL TOO SHOCKING. Other people interpret transmasculine in a wide variety of ways, many of which make me deeply uncomfortable (eg “Transmasc = physically transitioning in all the same ways trans men usually do;” “Transmasc = trans man but woke about it;” “Transmasc = I have aligned myself against women and forsaken feminism and I love asserting my dominant gender role”), and voluntarily using a word that’s ripe for misinterpretation made my control-obsessed brain fuck right off.

But ultimately it’s not really about using words (what does that even mean? putting them in your tumblr bio? buying the pride flag?) so much as knowing, however privately, that you are a thing. And I’m transmasculine! It’s a word that feels comfortable, and homey, and exciting. Other people who use that word sound like me! They look like me, and they look how I want to look! I get such a blooming, leaping, light-filled feeling in my chest when I see these people, because I instinctively feel that these are People Like Me. I recognize myself in their experiences of gender, and sometimes I feel like my whole body’s going to shake apart with a euphoria that’s like being on fire. Every time I read something by Daniel M. Lavery I end up rolling around on the floor in paroxysms of delight and Feeling Seen, and my brain lights up like a fireworks display when I see awkward bi men with curly brown hair and glasses. There is still a little part of my brain that’s convinced referring to myself as transmasc will make everyone deeply disappointed in me, and obligate me to go out and befriend a footballer named Chad, but I’ve been casually referring to myself that way since May in semi-public venues and the sky hasn’t fallen in yet.

Transmasc feels like a useful word for me because it makes me feel more settled. I think a lot of times nonbinary gender is simplified to gender neutrality (which it is for some people!), while for me it’s more like a stewing mess full of things that don’t make coherent sense in anyone’s mind but my own. So I can like masculine words and gender presentations, and that doesn’t mean I’m equating neutrality with masculinity, and I can also express my gender in the numerous non-masc ways that feel natural to me while still having that anchor to come back to. Ultimately, I think it just means that I have a more meaningful relationship with masculinity than I have with femininity, neutrality, or androgyny, and that I’m deliberately moving in a more masc-coded direction that the one I started out. And that’s it!

--

The other big gender-conceptualization-thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the complicated muddle of doubleness and inversion that I feel between gender identity, gender presentation, sexuality, and gender expression. I don’t feel bigender, because that sounds like I have two discrete gender experiences sitting side by side, and I’m not genderfluid, because it’s not like my gender actually changes, but I do feel like I’m part woman-affiliated agender person, and part genderqueer guy with the genderqueer dialed up to eleven and the guy dialed down to two. Part of me feels apart from gender, but nebulously attached to queer ideas of womanhood (lesbian! spinster! middle school girl at a sleepover who promises to love her friends more than any passing crush!), and then part of me feels apart from gender, but like I picked Guy Gender to steal for myself and imitate and relentlessly queer by virtue of not taking it seriously enough. But it’s all mixed together, you know? Like paint swirling on a palette, or light bringing out iridescence on fish scales. Sometimes it will be more like one thing, sometimes more like another, but it’s always whole and completely intertwined.

Earlier this year a Miriam Zoila Perez quote about being a faggy butch was going around, and man, that gave me a lot of gender feelings. I first encountered the term fairy butch on this old blog called The Butchelor, and while I loved it then, I didn’t use it because of a radfem-induced trepidation that it was all an elaborate joke everyone understood but me. I also have an extremely annoyed relationship to the word butch, because I’m not butch at all, and I doubt anyone else would think I am, but this seems to be the only word anyone is capable of using to describe queer masculinity. It’s like other people are determined to smash you into yet another binary (ironically, a binary that’s jealously guarded by the same people who keep enfolding you in it) because you’re afab and like wearing ties. It’s annoying!

But the phrase fairy butch just seems so delightful to me, because it’s whimsical and complex, and also so genderfucky. I’m not masculine in any of the ways that usually cohere to the word butch—I don’t have the interests, or the mannerisms, or the sexual propensities or the haircut or the total dislike for anything feminine-coded (why is masculinity always all or nothing, and all about absence?). I love my socks with the sparkly pink foxgloves, I love smiling (why must men never smile?), I like sitting with my legs crossed and talking with my hands. I’m not feminine, I’m effeminate. I’m a double invert, gay for women and gay for men, a too-boyish-“woman” who doubles right back around as a too-feminine-“man.” Maybe I’m not a butch, or even a (faggy) butch, but dammit I’m a fairy/butch. Two queers in one, two inextricable, contradicting queernesses that complicate and complement and mitigate and enhance each other.

--

The idea that I’ve been slowly winding towards is that contradiction is part of my gender. It’s not something that’s going to get smoothed out one day when I find The Perfect Word, and the questioning and revisiting isn’t going to end when I reach The Final Stage of Transition or whatever. I read an article a few weeks ago that nebulously cited Jack Halberstam as saying “refusal to resolve my gender ambiguity has become a kind of identity for me,” and that’s something that resonates with me so, so much. I don’t have to make myself neat and appropriate for consumption, because my gender doesn’t exist at the mercy of other people’s understanding. I’m not a problem that has yet to be shoved into a “woman-aligned” or “nonvir” box, I just am. Sitting amidst the dissonance of things that other people tell me are impossible to feel at the same time is my identity. I never want to cohere.

It reminds me of the way I feel about historical figures like Katharine Hepburn and Daphne DuMaurier, who were definitely genderqueer as fuck, but also closeted to the outside world for their entire lives, and unclassifiable in modern terminology. They were real, complex people who existed, and are now gone! It would be really weird to assign them a coherent identity, like “Hepburn was a nonbinary trans man” or “DuMaurier was genderfluid” or what-have-you, when all you have are decontextualized fragments of their gender feelings. (I feel comfortable calling them genderqueer because that can be used as an adjective to describe cis people who queer gender, which they definitely did)

Anyway: I feel very deeply connected to these people, and the way they saw themselves as being boys, or like-men, or men-in-certain-contexts, or men-and-women, or women-who-wanted-to-be-men. But the thing is, wherever they may have wanted to go, they never arrived. Would Hepburn have preferred to be known professionally as Jimmy, gone by he/him pronouns in all areas of life, and identified as a proud trans man? Barring some spectacular archival discovery, we’ll never know, because that was never a viable option in Hepburn’s lifetime. And that space of possibly-wanting, but not-arriving, feels like a destination to me. That gap, between wanting and actualization, or fantasizing and pursuing, or playing around and Identifying As, feels like it is part of my experience of gender. I’m not a man, I’m a woman-who-wants-to-be-a-man. There has to be that distance, and that wanting.

I’ve gone on for an absurd amount of time here, but ultimately: I’m queer! My gender is queer! Some people are men, some people are women, and I’m a queer.