A few days ago, I saw Ladylike, a play in the Toronto Fringe Festival featuring famous transexual Nina Arsenault, and although the play itself wasn’t amazing, it really made me think of what it means to be a woman.
Ignoring Arsenault’s penis, you could probably argue that she’s more of a woman than I am. When it comes to the physicals, she certainly has done her part to look the female archetype, and when it comes to personality, she does have the stereotypical girl-thing down pat (or the script makes it appear as though she does).
For a while, I feel that there has been a sort of pressure on girls to become more masculine. On the more personal level, whenever there is some sort of statistic announcing that there are more guys than girls in some sort of role/emotional state/ profession, I feel as though I should strive to take on the masculine role to help eliminate this inequality. Maybe this is just me, after all, I did grow up going to camps like ACTUA , the girls-only engineering camp. But Arsenault strove to become the “female archetype”, as she put it, it felt surreal, like that extreme femininity was what made her less believable as a woman.
It really made me think when the show mentioned the “has she gone too far” aspect of Arsenault’s surgery, among other things. A lot of the time things like boob jobs and facelifts seem insulting the uncut portion of us, like, is the female body not good enough as it is? In other ways, the overanalytical part of me jumps to the women in the quiverfull movement (you know – have all the kids you can possible have because God wants you to) that have been denounced as “anti-feminist”. What if that’s honestly what makes these people happy? Do we have the right to condemn this, especially in the name of accepting the freedoms of different female identities?
If people like Nina Arsenault can be nice to their inner woman, I should be able to, too. In a world where guys are afraid of being girls and girls are afraid of being too girly, sometimes it’s nice to get a clear perspective from someone who isn’t technically a woman but who is proud of being ladylike.
