Here’s a compliment I get more often than I care to count. It’s a weird one, no matter how you twist it, and I’d like to talk about it.
It usually comes from someone who has been appraising me from a distance. It usually comes as the person is about to leave. They tell me, It’s so important what you do.
What, if you please, is it that I do? I am drinking wine. I am making faces at my friends who are trying to rope me onto the dance floor. I am discussing, right before you come over, how I ‘trick’ horny men by not being the woman they think I am. Then you come over and tell me that you think what I ‘do’ is important. So, please, what do I do?
If you’re willing to follow me down this path, there are a few things that occur to me. The most common angle is this: according to you, I could be an obvious dude1 wearing make-up and a dress. In that case, what you’re reading into me is bravery, a sort of standing up to the status quo. The compliment is then for a battle that you imagine I am fighting. Whether or not I am actually fighting, this assumption shows me that this is not about me, but about how good you are for accepting me. For how liberal you are. It’s the more common variety of virtue signaling.
The compliment could be for me being visibly unconstrained by the gender binary. If that’s the case, you’re already aware of the different burdens on and expectations of women and men. Your compliment, then, is preaching to the choir, isn’t it? If that’s the intention, maybe just tell me I look great. That would be good. I love hearing that.
I am guessing that what I ‘do’ is exist. That’s true. But that’s not brave. That is the inevitable outcome of surviving, and of choosing to present as my true self. Simultaneously, it is not cowardly to not be out. Not everybody is afforded the luxuries I have. My privilege is that I can be out, in the first place, and to not worry about being attacked for existing in the second place2. So no, I am not brave. That’s not something I do, either.
I’m not discounting the compliment wholesale. There is likely a good intention behind it. It also takes guts to walk up to someone queer and compliment them. I am easy-going, but I understand that fabulous strangers can be intimidating. But if you compliment them so you can show them how good of a person you are, I am not here for your feel-good-quota. And if you compliment them for how pretty they are ‘for a man pretending to be a woman’, then perhaps you need to think long and hard about your intentions.