For some time now I've been considering the subject of drag. I'm still not sure about the relationship between drag and trans. I've asked quite a lot of people, without coming to any firm conclusions.
One thing is certain. Drag, as a form of entertainment, has really hit the big time, and become much more mainstream lately. I'm certain it's due, more or less completely, to RuPaul (which, I just discovered, is actually his birth name) and his various shows, which have become popular all around the world (even here in New Zealand).
Condragulations!
But my main discussion of drag will need to wait for another article (or twelve!). I'd been wondering for a while whether drag would have something useful to offer me, to improve my presentation. In particular, I have quite oily skin, and I find that, no matter how much primer and setting powder I use, my face starts to look shiny after only a couple of hours when I'm out--especially when it's warm! Meanwhile, drag queens do dance routines under hot stage lights, and they seem to still look fine. Secondly, I wanted to see if perhaps drag queen shapewear could improve my fem shape (that's for another time!).
So I was quite pleased when a NZ drag queen, Piper Blaster, was offering a Drag Makeup Workshop in a (very cold and draughty) local theatre, and I duly signed up and went along with a friend. Piper took us through the whole makeup routine, in a workshop lasting about three hours. And this is the result!
There were some makeup techniques that I already knew about, such as applying glue to your eyebrows to conceal the brow hairs completely against the skin, so that you can paint new brows in more dramatic places. But most of it was completely new to me, including the many, many layers of makeup you need to apply (I basically lost count of them!). The makeup was also heavy and theatrical--as Piper says, you're putting on a face which has to be seen from the back of the room. So the contouring is deliberately emphasised to maximise contrast.
I have to say the finished outcome wasn't quite what I expected. I'd hoped to find some tricks to look more feminine, more passable, but instead I found the look too overcooked. But what did I expect? I went to a Drag Makeup Workshop and came away looking like a drag queen! This isn't, in any way, a criticism of Piper--or her excellent workshop.
Miss Vivi Section?
Piper says that for her, the drag character emerges once the false eyelashes are in place. That's the moment when the look becomes real for her. I didn't really experience the emergence of my inner drag diva. Although I had fun striking poses with the other people there, I didn't feel dressed for the part (since I'd come in wearing a pair of jeans and a pullover!).
Would I do it again? I'm not sure I would. First, drag is about over-the-top, flamboyant performance. I'm definitely not the sort of person to strut into the centre of a room and greet friends and strangers alike with a shrill cry of "Eat it, bitches!" That persona, whether genuine, or merely a performance, just isn't me!
Secondly, I didn't especially like the look, although with time and practice, and learning new techniques, and a bit of costume, it could definitely be improved, and perhaps personalised--obviously the drag queens we see on television have spent years honing their appearance. From a personal point of view, I seem to have discovered that drag queen makeup stays put because there is just so damn much of it!
A little digital magic from FaceApp has let me polish up one of the pictures into something a bit nicer, but I don't think RuPaul is going to be beating down my door to get me to come on the show any time soon!
It's taken me a while to come round to writing the second part of this article. You can read the first one (written in March 2015) here. Now that I read that article again, I am amazed to realise how far my journey has come.
Much as I adore Freakonomics Radio, that wasn't where I first heard the idea of Faking It. Instead, it was a British TV show which premiered in the year 2000. The premise was simple: they would take an unlikely ordinary person, have them intensively transformed and coached by a team of experts in a particular field--for a short time--then the contestant (known as the "faker") would have to perform in front of a panel of judges (who know they are looking to spot a fake), to see if they could pass.
Title card for the show
As one example, take the very first episode. Alex Geikie, a gentrified English youth from the Home Counties of England, who liked to ride horses, had to pass as a hard-man bouncer in an East London pub. He was coached by Tony Agastini, a kick-boxing champion. Alex shaved off his hair, gradually ditched his pukkah accent in favour of East-End hardman talk (think Guy Ritchie movies), learned to fight by getting beaten up by Tony's girlfriend (!) in the boxing ring, got fake tattoos, and finally worked as a bouncer for a night, among real, hard-bastard bouncers.
Guardian: At RADA, Alex was coached in talking common: "The word fuck is desperately important to all Londoners. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck off! Lengthen the vowel. Let the breath be the impetus. Farkin' 'ell! Don't smile! Mean it." In grammar: "I was, you was, she was, they was."
After a month's training, Alex was one of several bouncers at the Hippodrome on the night of the England v Germany match and the head of security failed to spot the imposter ("Nah! Honestly?"). Tony was much moved. "It's like seeing your kid walk and talk for the first time, innit? Very proud. Very proud. But he should be proud of himself too."
The show drew very positive reviews (such as this one from the Guardian, which is where the quote above comes from, written by Nancy Banks-Smith). Subsequent episodes featured burger flipper Ed Devlin who was trained to be a chef (by Gordon Ramsay, no less); classical cellist Sian Evans who was trained to be a nightclub DJ; and cleaner Sharon Pallister who was trained to become Scarlet Fever, a burlesque performer, by Immodesty Blaize with input from Dita von Teese. You can see this last one starting here on YouTube.
I've already mentioned on this blog how I believe that there is something liberating about stepping outside your normal life, and being someone else for a while, and how I wonder if some actors and other performers enjoy this aspect of their work. It's this, I think, which the show attempts to recreate.
The show has several brilliant features. First the fakers are deliberately selected to be hopelessly inappropriate for their adopted roles. Almost all are quiet, soft-spoken, lacking in self-confidence, set in their ways. They all have a metaphorical mountain to climb to pull off their new roles. Second, the mentors, often in initial despair or exasperation, become fond, and eventually proud of the fakers. Third, the fakers almost always manage it: to pass unnoticed by judges and onlookers. Finally, it's clear that the experience of the training--and the faking--opens up new and undiscovered vistas for most of them; they discover qualities in themselves that they never knew they possessed. In short, it is visibly life-changing, and often this is very emotional for them. It all makes for extremely compelling television.
The producers made at least one follow-up episode, where they revisited the fakers a couple of years later. Almost without exception, they had reacted positively to the experience. I notice, for example, that the Scarlet Fever episode was uploaded by Scarlet Fever herself on her own YouTube channel.
Drag: Dave Lynn
There are only a few episodes of Faking It available on YouTube, and this is not one of them. However, the Guardian reviews are very helpful and give a real flavour of the episodes.
One episode featured an ordinary bloke (who has asked me not to mention his name) who was to fake it as a drag queen. His mentor for the show was veteran British drag queen Dave Lynn. This episode was one of the most popular episodes of Faking It ever produced. The normal hour-long episode was stretched out to 76 minutes, because there was so much good material to include.
Lynn and the Faker strike up an unlikely friendship, helped perhaps by Lynn's straightforward, matter-of-fact approach to a man shaving his legs, wearing stilettos and false eyelashes, tucking ("you sort of shove them back in their sockets"), and all the other activities required to become a drag queen.
We follow the Faker through a series of increasingly uncomfortable experiences. More than once, the producers may have thought that their show wasn’t going to happen.
But he sticks with it until the end. Later, he struts his stuff on the stage, in full drag, and the judges don't spot him as the fake. At the end of the show, the Faker muses about his initial prejudices; how he felt he had overcome them, and how shallow and misplaced he now felt they were. It's a powerful moment.
Guardian: But what made Faking It so gratifying were the clear, measurable results of the experience for both student and mentor. The Faker was euphoric in his realisation that life is a great big fruit salad, and that "prejudice is just balls" (and therefore best tucked out of sight). Dave Lynn, the hardened old pro, softened up and admitted that he'd learned even more about his place in the world. The two bosom buddies closed with a duet of Stand By Your Man; seldom have the words "sometimes it's hard to be a woman" rung so true.
The episode resulted in Dave Lynn getting a considerable boost in popularity, and he made several subsequent appearances on TV. He’s still doing drag.
So what relevance does this show have for me? I don't especially have any affinity for drag as an art form. I've never been to a drag show. I think drag is a form of performance art, whereas Vivienne feels very much part of my identity; an inextricable part of me, not some persona that I adopt when I get dressed.
I suppose the first part of it is that I am envious. Our Faker gets four weeks of intensive tuition in performing as a woman: make-up, clothes, hair, shoes, gait, the works. Perhaps four weeks would be too much, but I certainly feel I could use a few tips from the experts about how to improve my overall look as a woman.
Second, there is permission. All of the fakers in the show get encouragement, verging on a requirement, to step outside their ordinary world and embrace something entirely new: a new way of doing just about everything. Some of the rest of us (i.e. me) hesitate at every tiny step outside the comfortable boundaries of what others expect of us. The fakers blasted those boundaries wide open, and did it with the support of those around them. And for each of them, that must have been a very powerful and long-lasting experience. Faced with the end of my marriage, I am contemplating what the new me will be like. Some of those boundaries will need to be redrawn: but which? And I will need to make my own permission to make it happen.
Ultimately, though, the people in the show are literally faking it. After the credits roll, they can, if they choose, return to their previous lives and pick up where they left off, as if nothing had happened. This is not true of me: Vivienne remains an awkward, uncomfortable part of my life, and my future life will need to include her, one way or the other. The faking it, for me, was pretending Vivienne didn't exist.
For those of you who don't live in Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual tournament of pop music which involves most European nations (and a few which are not, strictly speaking, in Europe, such as Israel). The rules are that each country submits a brand new song by a chosen artist (often a newcomer act), which must be performed live on the night of the contest.
What's the Wurst that could happen?
The contest has given rise, over the years since 1956, to some very famous acts, such as ABBA, and even Celine Dion, singing for Switzerland in 1988. However, the tendency of some acts to compete in bizarre costume and with bizarre lyrics (who could forget the majestic poetry of Ding-a-Dong?), lends the entire contest an air of camp, verging at times on the farcical. It's screened live all over Europe, and it's a wonderful evening's entertainment, albeit pretty low-brow.
The other problem with the contest is the tendency of countries to vote for their political allies, regardless of the artistic merit of the songs. Each country, including the minnows like Malta, is allocated an equal weight of voting in the contest. This tends to make for some tension, as occasionally obviously good songs get gradually nudged downward in the rankings by political voting.
This year, of course, the winner was Austria, whose artist, Conchita Wurst, won by a comfortable margin. So far, so normal. What is different about this contest (and the reason I am writing about it) is that Conchita Wurst is a drag queen, with a beard. (I love that in German, wurst means sausage). Take a look:
Before Wurst even sang in the contest, she came under fire from Russia, Belarus and Armenia, who demanded she withdraw. Russian lawmaker Vitaly Milonov branded Eurovision a "hotbed of sodomy", while Armenian competitor Aram Mp3 described her as "not natural". Russia, in particular, has been institutionally homophobic for many years.
If the Wurst comes to the Wurst
Though I haven't listened to all the songs for this year, I don't think this one, Rise Like a Phoenix, is all that brilliant. Even allowing for the handful of songs by fishwives in knitted shawls with accordions, which we are usually treated to in Eurovision, I can't believe this one, though it's all well and good, is actually the best in the competition. (The second-place song,Calm After the Storm by the Netherlands' Common Linnets, is, I think, a much better song).
And that leads me to believe that something else is responsible for Wurst winning the contest.
The most obvious thing which strikes one about Wurst is her appearance. Conchita Wurst is the drag persona of Tom Neuwirth. As a woman (i.e. without the beard), she would be absolutely dazzling; a knockout. On the other hand, the beard looks very odd indeed, very disturbing and out of place (while everything else, from the exquisitely curved eyelashes to the lip gloss, to the flowing gowns and fabulous shoes, screams "gorgeous woman!").
But perhaps gorgeous drag queens are too common; too mainstream? Perhaps an "ordinary" drag queen wouldn't have captured everyone's attention. The beard, without doubt, is the hook. The beard is also cosmetically enhanced; it looks just too perfect. And yet, Wurst is beautiful, in a strange and unusual way. Like chilli pepper on fruit salad, the whole package kinda works. I think it may be because she reminds me of another figure, with long flowing hair, a light beard, and deep, soulful eyes.
Wurst bears an unmistakeable resemblance to popular depictions of Jesus. There is no evidence that this is intentional, but it is (at least to my eyes) inescapable. Before you deluge me with hate mail, I intend to draw no further parallels between those two figures (and other commentators have noted a resemblance to a much more secular figure, Kim Kardashian).
Wurst hasn't been the first gender-blurring competitor in Eurovision. Israeli transsexual Dana International won the competition in 1998, with her song, Diva. Wurst isn't even the first bearded woman in the contest: France's 2008 entrant, Sebastian Tellier, had a backing group of five women with false beards (to match his natural one), when he sang his song Divine.
Kim and Conchita. Which is Wurst?
When she won the competition, a delighted and emotional Wurst took the microphone:
Wurst: This night is dedicated to everyone who believes in a future of peace and
freedom. You know who you are - we are unity and we are unstoppable.
I dream of a world where we don't have to talk about unnecessary things like
sexuality, who you love. I felt like tonight Europe showed that we are a
community of respect and tolerance.
Wurst's particular appearance is more in alignment with genderqueer than anything else I can think of. Nonetheless, from her personal website, it seems clear that tolerance is her most deliberate and explicit message. And for this, I think she deserves our congratulation and support. Though her motivations for wearing a frock may differ from my own, I think she is doing positive things to further acceptance of trans people in general.
And I think the reason that Wurst won Eurovision was the combination of those two things. First, that gimmick: an outrageous bearded drag queen, eye-catching and flamboyant, beautiful and proud. This might not have been enough to do it, but set against the background of Russian homophobia, it gave the more progressive Western nations the opportunity to poke one in the eye of those stuffy old Russkies; a chance which they couldn't pass up.
No sausages were harmed in the writing of this blog post, though some had the Wurst night of their lives. No more puns on the name: I promise!
=== Addendum 22nd May 2014
Some of my commentators, including Janice, below, have pointed out that Conchita Wurst's name, although it translates as sausage, was chosen because of the German phrase es ist mir Wurst, meaning it's all the same to me. Whilst I accept this argument, I can't help thinking that sausage is also an excellent drag queen name, because of it's suggestive nature. Mind you, in the context of drag queens, it's hard to find the name of any fruit, vegetable or foodstuff which is free of suggestive connotation!
But taking the name literally, one Austrian butcher has produced an actual Conchita Wurst, a sausage with her face on every slice. How wonderful is that?
Meanwhile, the trans blogosphere has been convulsed with debate about the exact place (if any) that Conchita Wurst occupies, and whether she is doing us good, or harm, by her antics.
One viewpoint seems to be that Conchita Wurst is the female drag persona of a male entertainer, and that therefore Wurst isn't trans at all. A second viewpoint seems to be that, as a man in a dress, Wurst is perceived as being trans by the general public, whoever they might be, and is (whether we like it or not) going to get lumped in alongside the rest of us crossdressers, transsexuals, and so on. A third viewpoint, from the trans community (and expressed by Tasi in the comment to this article) is that, by deliberately mashing together a beard and a beautiful woman, Wurst is doing harm to the trans community by furthering a popular perception that we are all a bunch of weirdos.
I have been struggling with my own feelings about Wurst, but nobody has put it better than my correspondent Janice Lacey. With her agreement, and building on her comment below, I am quoting her here:
Janice: Firstly let me state that I wasn’t at all impressed with the bearded lady thing and deleted nearly all the posts on the social group I follow referencing it. I personally felt threatened by someone dressing as I like to, and also sporting facial hair. That being said, I eventually put aside my own fears of this subject and dived in with both feet.
I read about a boy with a desire to dress as a girl. I can identify with that. He was restricted from doing so and I can identify with that too. He is
teased because of his desires and I can identify with that. At some point, when he had gained the confidence and tough skin one needs to be dual-gendered he creates a character that goes beyond the envelopes of discrimination. Not just wearing a dress, but wearing fabulous dresses. And why not? Just add in the beard to really irritate those that hate him and discriminate against him. Conchita was born.
As Conchita, Tom is allowed to wear a dress. The little boy that only wanted to wear a dress is now allowed to dress as he pleases. The beard, in my opinion, represents the male child. Tom is a performer and loves to sing, and as a drag performer is able to earn a living singing while wearing a dress.
Lastly let me summarize my thoughts: Tom Neuwirth and Conchita Wurst are a threat to me as a trans-gendered person. So much is being said about her being “Trans” that people are going to be looking at me and wondering if I am like her.
I AM MOST DEFINITELY NOT! I stand for something deeper, more significant, more important, and more meaningful!
Whoa there! What did I just say? My statement could also be made by my coworkers, my friends, my parents, my wife, or perhaps your parents, friends, co-workers and wife that can’t accept you as you are completely. How can I be who I am, as both Janice and James, and expect the general populace to accept me while I stand in as judge and jury against someone so totally different from myself?
Tom/Conchita is unique, but not all that different from me really.
I vote to support his cause, for in doing so I am released from my own fears.
One of my correspondents wrote of Wurst: She makes us look ridiculous. She's neither man nor woman but a half-assed caricature of both. And while I can completely understand this viewpoint, from someone who wants to look as feminine as possible, I can't help thinking that, actually, that same comment could equally be applied to me, or other crossdressers.
Janice's comment has crystallised it for me. I cannot demand acceptance for myself as a crossdresser, and refuse that same acceptance to someone else who has a different way of presenting themselves.
I think advertising is an excellent barometer of society's attitudes. It's not so much about what products people want to buy, but the way in which they are marketed which interests me.
I have seen a lot of television from all over the world, and I think certain patterns can be discerned. The UK, for example, seems to favour understatement ("Try our product. It's actually quite good and you might find you like it."), whereas the US seems to favour overstatement ("Our product will change your LIFE by how good it is!"). Of course, there are many exceptions to this sort of broad statement.
TV ads have 30 seconds to grab your attention, interest you in the product, and burrow into your memory so that the next time you go shopping, the product resurfaces in your mind and you go and buy it. The means by which these goals are achieved is sometimes clever and interesting, and sometimes dull and banal. Agencies seek to associate the product with something attractive: sex, humour, happy children. Advertising jingles are an especially insidious way to drill a brand into your memory: I loathe their irritating jolly little melodies and instrumental stabs.
But a really good ad makes you laugh, think, or sit up in surprise. And it gets progressively harder to do any of those things because all the good ideas (the low-hanging fruit) have all been seen a thousand times before (and some of them, like brand slogans or jingles, have been done to death). It's no suprise to me that there are now awards for good ads, where someone in a tux reads out the results in reverse order from the back of a golden card.
Ads which speak to women about femininity (whether that be clothes, cosmetics, perfume, or even chocolate), speak right to the heart of crossdressers too: that's how I want to look! That's how I want to feel! Where can I get some of that product? (I might explore this a little further in a different post).
Let's take a look at some advertising featuring cross-dressing. Take a look at this one first:
In this UK commercial for kitchen paper, we meet "Brenda" and "Audrey", two blokes in drag, complete with bristly chins and big square hands. I saw a series of such ads on British TV; though they have since stopped, thankfully. (This was the most typical of the series I could find on YouTube). I suppose the ad agency is trying to get a new angle on the "overworked housewife" archetype. You know the one: youngish, pretty but not gorgeous, struggling to keep up with baby poo and toddler dribble and slobbery dogs with dirty paws and sinks which won't drain properly. Perhaps what she really needs is a big hairy man in a dress to do her chores for her.
This sort of ad is just awful for me. The crossdressers here are figures of ridicule, and this sort of sniggering and poking fun at grotesque crossdressers has never been funny; not even in a 1960's cartoon seaside-postcard sort of way. This exact trope is regularly found in the comedy show Little Britain, where "rubbish transvestite Emily" parades around insisting she is a "laydee" and fooling no-one. I cringe when I see this: I stopped watching the show because I found it so distasteful. Little Britain has a lot of very clever comedy (and is very popular), but this just misses the mark for me. However, the shows creators, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, continue their comic crossdressing in other shows such as Come Fly With Me.
So let's move on. When I first saw this ad, I thought it was my worst nightmare come to celluloid:
This ad works in a whole different way from the kitchen paper one. Once again, I saw this on TV in the UK, and found myself bracing myself for the inevitable slew of ridicule. However, it didn't take place. The young, attractive and cool driver of the car sees the drag queens in the queue for the club. We assume his look of surprise is horror at recognising his father (although he probably doesn't dress like that for the office!). However, then we release a collective "phew!" when we realise the driver isn't shocked at his father's appearance; he just wants in the club.
I like this sort of ad. In fairness, the drag queens in the queue are much too gaudy for my personal taste (though I suppose for the advert's purposes, they need to be unmistakeable; a convincing crossdresser wouldn't cut it here at all). On the other hand, the message of the ad ("We live in modern times") carries (for me) a great note of positivity. Okay, it says. Some men like to crossdress. Get over it. Hey, son, bring your friends and we'll all go partying together.
Here is my third offering. This is one I never saw on the screen, but found on the Internet. Take a look:
Very different in tone and theme this time. This advert makes no attempt at humour at all, but still attempts to surprise us. (Whose idea was that awful music?) If you hadn't seen this before, you would know from finding it here that the girl in the dress was really a boy, but in a bit of a breach of the traditional plot element, you might not have spotted that the boy in the suit was really a girl. And the discussion which follows renders all my careful use of pronouns to be a confusing waste of time. I shall do my best.
Interesting though this ad is, it doesn't quite hit the spot for me. The girl in the dress looks amazing. The boy in the suit looks convincing enough to begin with (he seems to have miraculously acquired a bit of makeup by the time he takes his hair down). Both of these actors make me think of the model Andrej Pejic, a man who is so androgynously beautiful he can successfully model both men's and women's clothing on the catwalk, and is in considerable demand to do so (What does that say about our idealised image of women?).
I am sure the ad agency (and I think this ad has a European pedigree) is trying to show that its Italian aperitif may look similar to other drinks, but underneath it is quite different. On the other hand, I am not sure that the final bit of action, spilling the drink on the dress provoking the big reveal, is meaningful in any way, although I am sure they needed some pretext for it. Does this imply a restitution of social norms somehow? Maybe I am overthinking it. I find myself coming away saying "Hmmm....ok", rather than "Hey! Wow!"
Once again, though, I take some encouragement from this ad. Both protagonists are beautiful, whether as a boy or a girl. Both are enjoying their crossdressing, publicly and successfully. They are not in drag; they are not grotesque or overcooked. There is an undertone of the forbidden or the spicy, but I suspect that's what the agency is trying to associate with the product, and I certainly associate with crossdressing myself. Overall the ad doesn't grab me or make me want to buy the product, but it doesn't repel me and want me to shout at the screen (like the kitchen paper ad).
So the winner for me is the Twingo ad, with Campari in second place. Congratulations. A wooden spoon with two golden raspberries to Bounty. Sorry lads.
The Internet has dozens of ads featuring crossdressing. In a future blog post, I might get on and talk about a few more.
A lot of controversy has been generated this week by a New Zealand television advertisement for tampons. The brand, Libra, produced a 30-second commercial featuring a crossdresser and a genetic woman in the ladies' room. (It was also planned to be screened in Australia).
The ad features a "competition" between the crossdresser and the girl, as they attempt to outdo each other in an "anything you can do, I can do better" manner: applying lip gloss and mascara, and jiggling their boobs. Finally the girl "wins" by pulling out a small box of tampons, at which the crossdresser stalks out in an apparent huff. The closing line of the commercial is "Libra gets girls".
Cherise Witehira, President of Agender New Zealand, said the ad was "blatantly transphobic" and called for a public apology and the ad to be withdrawn. Although no apology has been issued, the ad has been taken off the air after only a couple of screenings. Thankfully we have YouTube, where we can all watch it as often as we like.
In her interview with TVNZ, Ms Witehira claimed that members of the public, who are not familiar with different categories of transgendered people, would be confused about whether the crossdresser in the ad was a drag queen or a transsexual.
However, the main point of contention seems to be that the ad is claiming that transgendered women are not "real" women, because they don't menstruate. Some very powerful comments to this effect have been left on Libra's Facebook page and in other public fora.
In addition, some commentators are pointing out the ad is just in poor taste. It's not offensive, it's just not that funny.
In fairness, not everyone hates the ad. There are some positive comments in response to the NZ Herald's article about it. Serena writes: The trans community is not speaking for me here. (I'm a 10 years post-operative transwoman). The character is clearly a drag queen, the advert is gentle and funny, and a whole lot of people need to lighten up, they are NOT helping the trans community in any way be being up in arms about nothing. How can people be "disgusted and offended" by this? next they'll get upset by knicker and bra adverts. I'd love to be able to disown the lot of them.
So what do I think about this?
First, one sure fire way to stimulate a great deal of public interest in something is to protest about it. By protesting so strongly, Cherise Witehira has undoubtedly scored an own goal: she has given the ad substantially more publicity than it would otherwise have generated. (It would probably have been screened late at night a dozen or so times, before being eventually dropped).
Second, I deeply sympathise with the plight of transsexual people of all kinds. It's an unspeakably painful experience to go through. Every one of them I have ever met has made enormous sacrifices to be true to themselves: their job, their friends, their marriage. So it's quite understandable that this sort of ad presses an especially tender button with some transsexual people: What do you mean I'm not a real woman?
Third, from an ordinary viewer's perspective, the ad is quite funny, though not a side-splitter. I find ads for feminine sanitary products to be, in general, quite unstimulating. Proving how many gallons of blue water a sanitary pad can absorb is not especially entertaining. I can see how the ad agency was looking for a new angle with a bit of humour thrown in, and I applaud this effort.
And Libra have always tried to inject a bit of humour into their advertising. Take a look at this one, which I think is hilarious, and provoked no complaint at all:
Fourth, it's not quite clear to me what "category" of trans person the ad is supposed to be depicting. It seems the transsexuals are quite clear that they don't identify with the person in the ad, who is described as a "drag queen" in some circles. Is she a drag queen? Or just a glamorous transvestite? It doesn't matter! I confess to being a "lumper" rather than a "splitter", in this regard; which is to say that, as a man who loves to dress as a woman, for me the motivation is less important than the behaviour. Another way to put it is to say that I think there is more than unites us than divides us, and insisting on somewhat arbitrary categorisations is unhelpful. In any case, I wish I could look as good as that!
Finally, from a crossdresser's viewpoint, the ad is quite cool. A person (who is not at first glance a crossdresser) walks into a ladies' room. At second glance, we realise there is something a little different about her (she looks great, IMHO), and we "read" her. So does the girl she is standing beside. Nobody runs screaming. Nobody calls the police. Nobody, in fact, thinks that this is a particularly inappropriate thing for her to be doing. In fact, the crossdresser and the girl begin to size each other up, and compete with each other, on the same terms. The only way in which the girl can "win" this competition is by changing the terms: you look as good as me, you dress as well as me, you can apply as many cosmetics as me, but I've got a uterus and you don't. (This is actually a cheap shot, which makes the girl (not the crossdresser) look bad, and is one reason why the ad doesn't succeed: the tampon wins, but does not win without (just a little) cruelty).
But stepping aside from this parting shot, the scenario of the ad is quite positive. It implies that crossdressers can just go out to bars like everyone else, and adopt the role and persona of women without anyone being upset by it. And the very premise of the ad is that it's acceptable for crossdressers to behave in this way. Surely some encouragement can be taken from that?
