Guest post written by Girlmode author Magdalene Visaggio
Magdalene Visaggio is the Eisner- and GLAAD Media Award–nominated writer of the cult-favorite comics series Kim & Kim, Eternity Girl, and Morning in America as well as the acclaimed graphic novel The Ojja-Wojja. She is also a pretty solid rhythm guitarist. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, she now lives in New York City.
About Girlmode: A recently transitioned girl tries to figure out who she is—while trying to manage who everyone else wants her to be—in this funny, unexpected, and affecting new graphic novel from Eisner-nominated writer Magdalene Visaggio and artist Paulina Ganucheau.
A few years ago, it came to my attention that my then-girlfriend, now-wife, had never once seen the movie Clueless. That was baffling to me; she, like Cher Horowitz, is a SoCal girl, and maybe it’s just my East Coast presumptiveness, but I kinda figured it was required viewing over there. I mean, if it could reach all the way over to me in Virginia; but no, she had not, so I resolved to correct that. Clueless, after all, is one of my all-time favorite movies.
The rewatch, my first since transitioning, was revelatory. This, I realized, is a trans movie. Not explicitly, of course; it was 1995, you couldn’t get away with that. Even To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar couldn’t get away with it, dressed it up in camp and drag. I had always identified with Tai (the late, lamented Brittany Murphy), the grungy New Yorker who Alicia Silverstone’s Cher Horowitz takes under her wing, but seeing it with new eyes, I understood why. Tai has to be taught How To Be A Girl, gets attention and instruction and encouragement to open up this new part of herself, first trying to be a Cher-clone before spinning out into a new synthesis of the person she was and the person she could be, the person she thought she “should” be. None of that gets centered, of course, because it’s Cher’s movie, and consequently much more focused on her journey from self-centered control to recognizing the special unique beauty of other people. But what if we set the spotlight on Tai? What kind of story would that be?
As an adult and as a trans person, I found that Tai’s story assumed greater depths for me.
There’s a sardonic quality to the movie I never caught when I was young, a critique not only of Cher’s behavior towards Tai but also the worldview that she tries to push Tai into. It’s not an accident that the makeover scene, which I glommed onto in adolescence as a kind of insane fantasy, is accompanied by a song about how shallow prettiness really is, and how the image of the supermodel limits what girls could dream of. All I could see was the smile on Tai’s face at the end of it, when she looked in the mirror and saw the girl she thought she was supposed to be. I could relate to that. But I had neither the time nor the experience to recognize how little content there was in her transformation, and sadly, the movie’s ending is rushed and far too neat to fully resolve it. Cher mellows out, Tai flirts with her original crush (the one Cher warned her against), and everything’s perfect.
Girlmode started out as my trying to answer the question as to what Clueless could have been if it had brought Tai to the front: a story of someone learning how to be a girl and then realizing she had only been taught someone else’s idea of what a girl was supposed to be. It would have been so easy to cast my Cher as a villain, but that wouldn’t do, either. Cher herself suffers under the very same yoke she tries to shoulder onto her new friend: the idea that girls exist to be pleasing to the boys, and that the proper practice of girlhood is to master the arts of our own commodification, making ourselves into objects. It’s an idea that is only somewhat refuted over the course of Clueless; ultimately, all the girls end up paired off, and none of them are meaningfully changed by the experience except in whether and how they articulate their preferences. It’s a little forced, and it’s very pat, and it’s never satisfying.
So I set out to tell that story: a girl struggling with traditional femininity gets schooled in the arts of grace and beauty by someone who has mastered them, only for both to realize how much they have been entrapped by the roles expected of them and then do something to break out. Phoebe (my Tai) is a trans girl, newly out and suddenly on the other side of the country. She’s awkward and nerdy and doesn’t know how to even begin fitting in. Mackenzie (the Cher of the story) decides to teach her everything she knows about being a girl. Everything goes great!
Until nothing does.
Critically absent from my story is a meaningful accounting of the experience of transphobia. Unrealistic? Probably. But I don’t want the only stories we get to tell be stories of suffering, and it was really important for me to treat Phoebe like a normal teenage girl, because she is. Here, transphobia is ultimately depicted as a specific version of the misogyny teenage girls generally experience, and not the overwhelming, bigoted, violent force it so often becomes. Phoebe does not spend the book dealing with Capital-G Gender or agonizing over her Identity, also capitalized. She’s a girl dealing with girl stuff in a girl way alongside her girlfriends. It’s the transition I wished I could have had when I was her age, the one I tried to scheme to create behind the scenes, occluded by AOL and absent parents. It’s the life I dreamed of, with all its bumps and bruises, all its troubles: acceptance, normalcy, peace. And, ultimately, it’s the life I was able to eventually make for myself.
I want this book to be there for every girl out there, cis or trans, out or closeted, to find in it some answer to the question of their lives. Girls have it so hard: awakening to the fact that men want something from us, are suddenly treating us differently in ways we can’t quite parse at first. I learned that lesson in my thirties, but I am a comparatively late bloomer, and I at least had some tools to cope with the change in circumstances. As we transition younger and younger, we need books that treat us like young women, and respect our experience as young women, and which understand the things that unite us with our cis peers: the experience of misogyny, the pressure of impossible expectations, the way boys can and will use us for their own ends. That’s universal.
That’s something we share. And we all deserve better.
