I’ve been on a crusade this week. There’s a meme that’s been circulating on some of the trans Discords that pisses me off every time I see it, and so I decided that I was going to do something about it. I feel like it promotes a lot of bad ideas about being a trans woman, history, and self-concept all in one cutesy package.
First off, here’s the meme:
Let’s start with an overview of what’s happening in the image. We see the caption “trans women in the fifties. we’ve always been here.” Then, a three-up of black and white photos of group shots of women, all with cat ears on. Finally in a different font below, we see the words “its all catgirl? always has been.”
The second caption at the bottom is a reference to the It’s All Ohio? meme, where two astronauts are looking down at the Earth, which is apparently all Ohio, and one astronaut (“always has been”) is holding a gun to the back of the questioner's head, presumably to keep the terrible secret of Ohio. So this meme is about hidden history of the world. By repurposing the meme here, the meme author is asserting that it is a secret truth that trans women have always been catgirls.
Except that this just isn’t true. The bulk of the meme, sans ears and lower caption, is from a now-deleted tweet written in 2019 by Magdalene Visaggio, a well-known artist and influencer. Someone took Visaggio’s tweet and added the cat ears and meme text. Visaggio also got her dates wrong, none of the photos are from the 1950s, all are from at least 1960.
When I first saw the meme I instantly recognized the top left photo as a group shot of the performers of Le Carrousel, a short-lived club in Paris in the late 50s and early 60s. I had been exploring the Digital Transgender Archive the week beforehand, and was struck by the beauty and energy of the original photo. The women in the photo are drag queens and trans women and all sorts of flavors in between, the boundary being blurred quite a bit more in their time.
After some sleuthing, I was able to determine that the top-right photo was of a group of famous actors and musicians visiting the performers at a well-known club in New York City called Finocchio’s in 1961. Finocchio’s was often home to “female impersonator” acts, and the infamous Harry Benjamin wrote about the sex work happening there performed by some of his clients, early recipients of Hormone Replacement Therapy.
While I have been unable to locate a primary source of the bottom-right photo, a number of drag, transvestite, and “femulator” websites have it labeled as also coming from Le Carrousel in 1960. Most of the women in the photo are identified and can be located in other female impersonator material, like the profiles in Female Mimics 1963. One woman I want to call out in the photo is Marie-Pierre Pruvot, aka. Bambi, a performer who went on to become a college professor. Bambi was one of the first women to have Gender Reassignment Surgery performed by Dr. Georges Burou, inventor of penile inversion vaginoplasty.
Seeing these photos made a huge impression on me because a part of transition that I continue to experience has been the development of what I want to call a spiritual connection to my “trancestors”. I was raised in a protestant salad with some evangelical bacon bits thrown in, and eventually decided I was an atheist when I was about 15 or 16. While I remain an atheist today, something that changed for me in transition starting with my mirror moment was a growing sense of the spiritual that was never present for me during my religious upbringing. When I look at these photos my heart feels pulled to these women in a deeply personal and transcendent way. I feel a connection to the past like I have never felt before when I look at photos like these or read transition accounts. My spiritual connection to my trans ancestors is one of the biggest motivating factors for why I write this blog, because I feel like I have a responsibility to be another link in the chain.
This week I’ve been reading and re-reading the book Trans Girl Suicide Museum by hannah baer, author and incredible meme artist. I was so struck by her book after my first read through on an eBook that I bought a physical copy and did a second pass with a highlighter. I think I’ve highlighted something on every fourth page. Here’s baer on her connection to the past and also what it means to impose present identity constructions on the history of transness:
Like, I actually do believe in my spiritual connection to a legacy of gender variant people (in part because of the emotions I felt in my childhood and adolescence reading and hearing about queer and gender variant people in all different contexts). I also believe trans women have always existed in some way, because I can feel it in my body. I can feel a sense of ancestry. This idea of gender-variant time travel is a construction too, of course, but it’s one that gives me life.
I also feel like it’s important to be careful about mapping contemporary definitions of transness onto historical peoples, partly because it’s a. little boring and b. kind of imperialist. So I don’t go around saying “trans women have always experienced themselves as spiritually connected to each other in a legacy.”
…having solidarity with trans people involves not imposing a universal idea of what transness is on anyone, while at the same time also staying suspicious of trans narratives that give power over to cis doctors, cis law makers, cis media moguls… (p.130-131)
baer is explicitly calling out here the dangerous tendency to project modern constructions of identity into historical contexts because it redefines the past based on present sensibilities an a way that takes agency away from older, more ambiguous narratives. The eponymous Suicide Museum that baer spends the book visiting and describing is a metaphor for how categorization of gender, rule construction and enforcement, gender sensitivity training, having everyone go around the room and say their pronouns, etc. etc. is a way for broader society to encapsulate and protect itself from facing the ambiguities of transness without having to address the actual problem of having to respect trans people. Society is willing to measure and stuff and preserve in formaldehyde its trans members, destroying their private complex experiences of gender, in the guise of protecting them. To slap pairs of cat ears on these women depicted in the photos in order to make them conform to modern ideas about transness seems not only deeply disrespectful to me, it’s a colonization of the past that declaws it and sticks it in a museum exhibit. It’s historical revisionism in the name of a lame joke. And I haven’t even written about the whole trans-catgirl-thing yet.
I’m deeply suspicious of “trans women are catgirls” memes. The catgirl trope - outside of transness - is about cuteness and heightened femininity, softness, sexualization, and emotional volatility. I can understand the appeal to trans women in embracing this trope as part of their identity because so much of transfem transition involves reexamining one’s relationship to all of these concepts. One trans author who I believe has done a good job of using the catgirl trope as a metaphor in this way is Xanthippe (Xan) Hutcheon in her comic series Pandora’s Tale. For the most part though the memes I see around trans women as catgirls often mask elements of sexism, sexual objectification, misogyny, and more than anything infantilization, a being less-than-human, “just a little helpless kitty cat”.
Having come from a place where I was very uncomfortable initally with describing myself as a woman I get the hesitation around claiming that descriptor and why some might find “catgirl” as a safe place to dwell. But to paint with a broad brush on other people - to say “this is how trans girls talk - meow meow meow” - is stereotyping. And to replace the complex past of bold and multifaceted femininity exhibited by our ancestors with “always was catgirl” takes away power, humanity, our ancestors’ agency as women and trans people. To neuter the past in this way reminds me of the weaponized fragility I’ve written about before - at worst promoting ideas of helplessness in trans people is a way for the transphobic culture to grind down the will to live, to form community and organize, to love with each other as full humans.
It’s important to recognize the often messy histories of those who went before in gender-diverse lives because they remind us trans people of the present to be bold like they were, to continue to act with conviction and to reject boundaries as is necessary in order to exist. Our ancestors do not deserve to be treated like taxidermied animals in a museum diorama. Their complexity and their inability to be categorized was their power and it is ours as well.