One of my favorite things is when a story tries to explain how you brainwash someone into being a woman (“The Skin I Live In” for instance) because it generally ends up being very revealing of how cis people *think* gender is conditioned into us.

You see it all over certain kinds of fic as well, but generally less arty or thoughtful. It boils down to predator/prey stuff, nurturing imagery and sounds, and lots and lots of pink, soft things. you just marinate a character in girl stuff and gender osmosis happens

What’s interesting about it to me is that
A. this is basically what they do with their children
B. it doesn’t work

It’s weirdly kind of totemic like “if we surround you with Barbies the girl spirit will be pleased and enter the child.”
But we have lots and lots of evidence that there’s a basic feeling of attraction or interest to gendered things that can’t be trained out.

In a sense then, surrounding a young girl with feminine objects is just giving her a series of objects and texts like putting her in a library full of botany books and hoping she gets interested in botany.
(and then of course, social discipline if she doesn’t)

An interesting part of “The Skin I Live In” for me is how Vera (already a dressmaker) recreates a lot of what she’s being fed but in such a way that it reflects what’s going on in her own inner world. Why recreate Louise Bourgeois sculptures? To express something new.

But these are essentially similar to the originals she is basing them on and copying which makes the state of her prison at the end of the film a really interesting imagined artifact: everything there is designed to say “I have mastered these symbols and materials, I am a woman”

And yet, for example, her adoption of the image of a woman’s body with a house in place of a head reads completely differently than it would on first viewing. Everything in the room is about survival in the face of dysphoria. But it reads cis and feminine.

I feel familiar enough with the things I made in my first twenty years to say that this isn’t just fictional behavior, it’s a legitimate survival strategy. But I suppose if you’d never experienced massive dissonance with the gender you were given the objects might not read.

So one small observation that I make from forced femme brainwashing scenes is that cis people more often give unambiguous power and value to the objects themselves as training tools.

It makes sense to me that a trans audience would see a different meaning in a brainwashing scenario: rather than having to work against the grain and to hide anything that doesn’t fit, the wild possibility when given the “right” set of tools and objects or at least not the wrong

That the restrained and disciplined elements of oneself might start to leak out and to find joy in certain situations and objects, but still mediated by the fear that we would in such a scenario be found out and disciplined.

In forced fem and TF fic what you often find is that the “discipline” is an advancement of the behavior, or in other words, encouragement and validation *framed* as discipline. Is that *just* to get out of having to admit that the reader likes girl stuff? That feels unlikely

I think it’s also an acknowledgement of deep-seated feelings of being scrutinized and the learned expectation that embracing certain things WILL result in some form of discipline or consequences, whether from parents, friends, teachers, relatives, employers, or the law.

So in a sense we’re always waiting for discipline even if it comes from ourselves as we try to blend enough into the cis worlds around us. And I think that helps explain the role of the “jailer” who in fantasy scenarios helps a trans character.

Permission and freedom are obviously great and what we should be doing for kids. But in adults who have already been through this system it makes sense to me that a lot of us don’t find simple wish fulfillment satisfying.

It can feel like a trick to be told that there’s no more discipline or that it’s now just diffuse transphobic shit that will be everywhere. Where’s the person who tells you what you’re supposed to be doing and acting like? Where’s the parental figure, the big sister?

I think that’s why fictional scenarios so often have either uncontrollable forces at work, or conceits like hypnosis and brainwashing and conditioning, things of that nature. The “force” isn’t always about not being willing to own desire for femininity but for a guiding hand.

Maybe that’s more difficult to understand if you’re cis and especially straight: that the people around you wouldn’t necessarily give you that except in mostly negative terms. We don’t have someone to just passively emulate and receive encouragement from.

I find it really sympathetic in other trans women who are open about looking for guiding hands, of all sorts, and I also find it understandable when there’s shame and fear accompanying that desire. After all, it’s “normal” (cis) for adulthood to mean movement toward independence

Psychoanalytic theory is based on a world where examples and exemplars of adult roles abound. This doesn’t work for trans people necessarily, there are fundamental differences between us and most of our parents that mean we will never be the same type of person.