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By Root 1899 0

still largely a function of youth and beauty. Women of all ages spend an inordinate amount of their time and resources maintaining an attractive appearance. Young women are indoctrinated into this feminine cult at a young age, with girls typically beginning to shave, pluck, paint, and perfume at around eleven or twelve years old. Throughout adolescence, girls learn that their perceived value as people is tied to their appearance; they must be fit, fresh-smelling, and fashionably attired in order to lead happy, successful lives. The pressure to maintain a pleasing appearance increases as we age. Few straight men spend as much time on the scale, in the salon, or at the gym as their female counterparts. Why spend so much time, energy, and money to look young, fit, and fertile if being a middle-aged woman is not somehow related to a loss of prestige and power? Middle-aged men seem immune to this pressure. One of my sources—a surgeon transitioning from male to female at age fifty—told me that her spouse simply cannot understand why a successful middle-aged man would surrender his cultural power to assume the lower-caste status of a middle-aged woman. “Who will want you?” she asked, a poignant expression of the creeping sense of invisibility and insignificance many aging women feel.

Male privilege remains a very real phenomenon in our supposedly postfeminist society. Many of the transmen (female-to-male, or FTM, transsexual people) I interviewed noted that, as men, they are treated far more respectfully and deferentially than they were as women. “I get a lot of white male privilege. Oh, my god! I can’t even believe that. When I would go into stores before, they had security guards following me around, because I was this sort of big motorcycle leather dyke. Now, they’re like, ‘Can I help you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?’ “ says Tom Kennard, a burly, middle-aged transman. “They will give men power, and you just have to take it. I have to figure out how I can use that power responsibly.”

Those who travel in the other direction, from male to female, are conversely aware of the loss of privilege that is an unavoidable consequence of their decision to transition. In giving up their maleness, transwomen often give up high incomes, social status, and, very often, the ability to support themselves in their chosen profession. Trans-women tend to be more visible, and thus less employable, than trans-men. They are more often the victims of violence and discrimination, simply because they are seen or “read” in a way that transmen are not. But they also have surrendered the social protections of maleness. Though men can be sexually violated, they are not usually victims of rape except in all-male environments such as prisons. Transwomen seem to be at high risk for rape, however, both before and after their surgical transition. This may be because, as one source told me, transwomen aren’t raised with the “don’ts” that most natal women absorb from their mothers and other women. These spoken and unspoken prohibitions (don’t go home with strange men, don’t walk down dark streets by yourself, don’t open the door to strangers) circumscribe our lives, but they may also provide some measure of protection. Transwomen learn late the painful lesson most natal women absorb in adolescence: that being a woman automatically confers vulnerability to sexual assault. This is true even if one retains the (hidden) insignia of masculinity, a penis. As a woman, I know intimately the sense of physical vulnerability that transwomen encounter when they assume the social role of women. That sense of shared vulnerability is one of the strongest bonds I have felt with the transwomen I interviewed for this book.

Fear and mistrust of men and masculinity still permeate discussions of gender. Neither women nor individual men appear to trust or think kindly of males as a group, a prejudice that seems justified when one considers the disproportionate propensity of males for committing acts of physical violence and aggression. As I have researched this