When cis people craft jokes that are only funny if the idea of a man in a dress is funny, we hear that they are not safe for us. An especially insidious one I heard recently: a man in a position of power joked he’d only wear a dress if it was a very expensive brand - a drag queen offered him one, and he declined with a panicked expression; they were my heroine in that moment.
But the joke he made only makes sense if “a man in a cheap dress” is inherently absurd. That is what trans femmes look like when we come out as adults. We did not have friends and family help us learn to dress and style ourselves when it was safe and accepted to make mistakes - if we had that kind of safe home environment that was emotionally attuned to us as the femme people we were, we would generally have come out as children. Even if we have steady work and resources, which many trans femmes do not, buying a totally new wardrobe is a daunting task. We’re gonna look a mess, at first. And we know it.
There’s a further twist of the “comedy” knife: we, the joke’s audience, are being asked to laugh. Trans femmes who transition during adulthood often are just waking up to the layers of denial and coping mechanisms that kept them safe and alive to reach the point they can finally meet themselves and transition. They may well not have a strongly established sense of self-worth, yet. Their traumas are raw and likely still hidden from their own view, emotional triggers that have not even been identified yet, let alone confronted. And these emotionally vulnerable people are being told to laugh at themselves, to degrade and devalue the tiny flickering light of hope and happiness they have painstakingly coaxed into being.
The naked cruelty of that is hard to overstate.
I honestly don’t give a fuck that comedy is hard to write if you cannot punch down. Do better. Don’t say things we cannot unhear.