“My culture is not your costume” was a popular phrase that circulated the internet just a few years ago regarding the cultural appropriation of customary and traditional outfits from various cultures, that people in Western countries were sporting for their Halloween costumes. These costume renditions were often skimpy, poorly constructed and inherently sexual. Any semblance of their original forms and purposes were completely lost and disregarded.
Many social activists and individuals within the parodied minority groups spoke out on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram (rightly so) and the social uproar began. Women wearing tiny kimonos and skimpy remakes of Indigenous ceremonial garb were being publicly shamed and berated for appropriating and misrepresenting cultures that were not their own. People were infuriated that the legacy of their cultures were being reduced to cheap fast fashion that you’d find in the discount section of a Party City.
For the most part, this uproar was met with change. Over the past few years, the amount of cultural costumes has dramatically dropped and most people seem to understand the boundaries of respect that surround the cultural identity of many different groups. We have worked hard to cultivate a sense of sanctity surrounding cultural identities and what they mean to individuals within those groups. Because of this, I cannot understand why the same respect has not been granted to the concept and experience of biological womanhood.
Over the past two years or so the climate surrounding womanhood and what that entails has become increasingly hostile to biological women. Women are expected to watch men parodying and projecting their misogynistic ideas of womanhood, while saying nothing. We are expected to welcome these people with open arms and to grant them access to the collective experience of womanhood that they have somehow unlocked by painting their nails and by buying their first matching lingerie set from the Victoria’s Secret mall store. We are expected to open up our spaces, our restrooms, our locker rooms and even our gender-specific dormitory floors to men who will never truly understand that womanhood has nothing to do with what flavor chapstick you have in your tote bag or which pair of earrings you are going to wear today. We are sitting by and watching as womanhood is reduced to nothing more than a collection of stereotypes and cliches.
Popular creators such as Dylan Mulvaney and other transgendered individuals have become internet sensations for publicly documenting their ‘transitions’ and all the shallow emptiness that entails. Dylan’s depiction of womanhood is an infantilized caricature of women and often plays on the ‘bimbo’ stereotype that has plagued biological womanhood for decades. Dylan touches on many prevalent issues that women are facing today such as “Which sleepover snacks are we choosing?” or “Can we play mermaids in the pool today?”
Real Women's Issues are being shoved underneath the carpet and invalidated by the need to comfort transgendered individuals and validate their fragile and feigned sense of femininity. The empathic and caring nature of true womanhood is being taken advantage of as we continue to make space and make ourselves smaller in order to make transgender women comfortable in a space that does not belong to them.
Womanhood is not a feeling, a specific look or even a body type, each woman wears it uniquely and in her own way. Many transgender women pay for procedures and surgeries that leave them all looking alike and something akin to a blowup doll or a woman constructed to fit in line with the male gaze. Transgender individuals scream “dysphoria” when faced with their naturally flat chests and narrow hips; seeming to forget that these too are natural feminine features that many biological women themselves have. They do not want to participate in womanhood unless it aligns with their own carefully curated and misogynistic notions of “what a woman is.”
Just like the Western women who got to take off their cultural Halloween costumes when the party was over, stripped bare from the burden of discrimination and oppression that actually comes with the culture itself; transgender women too, have the privilege of wearing the cheap costumes of “womanhood” with none of the consequences and burdens that come with the real thing. They are playing a caricatured part with none of the true hardships involved. And with this, I think that it is finally time to say “my culture is not your costume.”
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