A clear memory I have, almost too predictable in its sensibilities, is one where I cut all the hair off my Barbie dolls—shortening it to a near-buzz cut, messy plastic strands sticking out in all directions where long, luscious hairdos once adorned their plastic heads. I didn’t have a particularly loving connection to my Barbies; cutting their hair off symbolized to me the same type of rebellion that cutting my own hair off years later would—a self-making of sorts. In destroying these plastic toys that are, in many discussions about their qualities or dangers, considered “fake,” I destroyed a part of myself that felt “fake.” I expressed authenticity with the act, just as I expressed authenticity in cutting my own hair short and vandalizing it with bleach and shiny colours.
This memory isn’t predictable only because of my identity on the transmasculine spectrum. It is also shared, in varied forms, by others—though not necessarily those who identify as trans. A 2009 New York Times article mentions a “memorable” study on Barbie dolls that “suggested that even little girls who owned boxes of Barbies eventually expressed ‘violence and hatred’ toward the doll, as one scholar put it, manifested in burning, smashing or microwaving.” Young girls (mostly), gifted with a toy that enforces and implies a set of expectations of them, revolt against gendered expectations by revolting against the toy. And young trans people, like me, revolt against people’s very understanding of us by revolting against the toy. The plastic of the Barbie doll in this little parable-esque story symbolizes inauthenticity, and our destruction of it symbolizes authenticity.
Our authenticity as trans people is a self-made one; it inhabits a state of fluctuation and change. In recent years, trans people have been shifting toward a definition of transness that relies on gender euphoria rather than dysphoria. We centre our choice to become, rather than our suffering in not becoming. “To be trans is to—forgive me—transcend the primacy of the flesh,” writes Morgan M Page in her newsletter Valley of the D. Instead of rebelling against the static, immovable existence of the plastic, we turn to its other qualities and use it to rebuild something that is truer to us.
But the question of authenticity is always a question of how authenticity is defined. Think of the simplest of examples: It’s not news to claim that the fight for bathroom rights is not, at its core, a fight about who gets to pee where. Nor is it shocking to assert that bathroom rights, when posited as a discussion, pose to the public the question of authenticity versus inauthenticity. The question of who gets to pee where translates into who gets to define themselves as what; the question of who gets access to gendered spaces or recognition of their needs translates into who is declared authentic and who is declared inauthentic. Trans people, by and large, are examined through a prism of “inauthenticity,” forced to prove ourselves time and again.
“Our authenticity as trans people is a self-made one; it inhabits a state of fluctuation and change.”
Authenticity is, then, a double-edged sword. What we build as trans people is not perceived as who we are, our self-creation examined under the light of “fake” plasticity. Plastic as in waste. Plastic as in plastic surgeries and Botox procedures, considered fake because they are imitating an impossible beauty standard. Plastic as in cheap versions of luxury products, considered fake because they imitate an impossible standard of life. As in the plasticized image of celebrity culture and Instagram influencers, considered fake as they imitate “real” human beings. As in the plasticized voices of pop stars using autotune and who lip sync on stage, who are accused of “faking it.” Plastic, according to one Oxford English Dictionary interpretation, is synonymous with “artificial,” “unnatural,” “superficial,” “insincere.”
Even though trans people’s self-creation is, at its core, more closely related to a young girl’s rebellion against the Barbie doll—an authentic assertion against plastic, against what’s assumed about us—Western culture often views it as more closely related to the way we define plastic itself. The problem lies not in the act of self-creation or our uses of plastic, but with our binary definitions and conceptions of the “authentic” and the “inauthentic”—and, by extension, with our binary definition of plastic. This binary, like most other binaries, is too constricting. It constricts our capability to accept self-creation as an act as natural as being born. As author Daniel M. Lavery writes in their latest book, Something That May Shock and Discredit You: “God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”
Maybe we can change our limited view of self-creation by taking another look at plastic. Plastic can also mean “a material that can be (easily) moulded or shaped; pliant; pliable; that readily takes a new form.” Plastic can be as flexible as trans identity. Yet, we revolt against conceptions of plastic that are more fluid, that create something else or something new, just as much as we revolt against the fixed impositions of our Barbie dolls. We demand an impossible standard and condemn the use of plasticity to achieve it; we see no other understanding of plastic than that of “faking it.” We equate the use of plasticity in trans culture—whether it’s the physical procedures we often seek or our “rebranding” with new names, faces, genders, sometimes even freer personalities as we become our freer selves—to those “artificial,” “unnatural,” “superficial,” “insincere” definitions.
“Like trans bodies, identities and people, plastic is malleable, durable but not inflexible. Plastic can be what we make of it.”
In an essay on heteronormativity in the Western architectural world that examines the way architects and architecture critics reinforce a narrow view of gender and queerness through their design and their words, Canadian academic Lucas Crawford offers a queer reading in textures. By deconstructing “the crumple” and “the scrape” into textural examples of queer sensibilities and showcasing the unique possibilities those textures offer when used in architectural design, Crawford examplifies what he calls the “heterotexturality” of Western culture’s understanding of buildings, and offers a less restrictive alternative. Similarly, our definition of plasticity can become twofold if we only let it—and with it, our reading in the authentic and the inauthentic.
Like trans bodies, identities and people, plastic is malleable, durable but not inflexible. Plastic can be what we make of it, how we use it, not an essence that is simply “good” or “bad.” Even the simple act of recycling changes our observations on plastic objects. Take, for example, the previously mentioned mechanics of autotune. Using it to self-create does not necessarily mean a singer is “faking it”—it can also express what’s inexpressible without it. In a Pitchfork article, writer Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard discusses how trans musicians make use of the autotune feature to explore gender. Rather than using it to fix a pitch or make natural the unnatural, the article notes, autotune and other electronic voice modulations are used in the vein of the “impressionable” definition of plastic: Of its pliability, creativity, modificality. Plastic doesn’t have to be just one thing or the other, it can be an exploration.
Plastic has more to offer than the credit we currently give it. We can redefine self-creation through our redefinition of plasticity as nothing that is necessarily good or necessarily bad, just something that is possible. It’s possible to become rather than be, it’s possible to endlessly change without one thing being false and the other thing being true. As one famous Tumblr post asserts: “baby every me is me, we are the mask and the wearer.”
Self-creation is not necessarily an expression of authenticity or inauthenticity, it’s only necessarily an expression: Of something other, else, new, different, of humans taking part in the act of creation, of people being pliable to the course of their lives but not breaking. The binary of the authentic and the inauthentic hurts us. We’re allowed to, in the spirit of gender euphoria, constantly mould and modify to become who we want to be. It’s what we do, anyway—cis people and trans people alike. That’s plastic, baby.
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