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bookblather asked about crossdressing for December 15th, which is a surprisingly difficult post to write. OKAY.

So pretty much everybody knows that PLUCKY CROSSDRESSING GIRLS is one of my ultimate instant-sell tropes. Like, show me a crossdressing girl and no matter how cheesy the narrative, I'm there. AND I'LL PROBABLY LOVE IT. Like, I really, honestly loved She's the Man. Which tells you a lot.

(If you're curious, here is a post I wrote about some cross-dressed girls in fiction that I love. Please note that this list TRAGICALLY EXCLUDES a whole slew of kdrama characters I encountered since I first wrote it, most notably Kim Yoon Hee from Sungkyunkwan Scandal.)

I've spent a lot of time sort of squinting sideways at this particular susceptibility of mine -- so much so that I eventually wrote my undergraduate Honors thesis about crossdressing in YA novels, and what makes it such a viscerally appealing plot for teenaged girls. It was not a very good thesis and I'm afraid to run a count on how many times the word 'liminal' appears in the text. BUT IT'S VALID, because the thing I was sort of trying to get at there is, like --

Okay, so one way to look at the trope of the cross-dressing girl, as it plays out in narrative fiction, is that it's as problematic as it is progressive; the heroine dresses like a boy to achieve agency in the narrative, because you have to act like a boy to be an active agent, but she's really a girl, it's really okay for her to make out with her boy love interest because we all know what's real under her boy-clothes, and that's not questioned. It's cheap girl-power, it's a way of pretending like you're transgressing gender boundaries without really destabilizing anything at all. And I'm definitely not going to argue with anyone who sees it that way, because in a very real way that's true, and it's part of the reason I've spent so much time trying to put my id under a microscope.

But I'd rather look at it this way: the trope of the cross-dressing girl is, I think, kind of like a training-wheels trope. With the cross-dressing girl, you can start to dig at at complex ideas about gender and identity and the kind of relationships between people that transcend the boxes they start out in. What if the physical traits you're born with don't have to determine your identity? What if attraction between people doesn't fall neatly along gender lines? What if most of gender is performance, anyway?

It's a gentle destabilization -- unthreatening, because everybody knows how the cross-dressing girl story goes, that everything goes back to gender norms at the end. Except it doesn't always. Start from the familiar, unthreatening trope of the cross-dressing girl, and you can get to Jacky Faber, who swaps gender performance as rapidly as she swaps boyfriends and girlfriends; you can get to Go Eun-chan, whose hitherto-straight boyfriend, finally and happily invested in his gay relationship, is shocked and betrayed when she reveals to him that she's a girl; you can get to Dororo, who isn't actually a crossdressing girl at all, actually; who will never become a woman, who is a man forever.

Or you can stay with Alanna, and her journey to accept that, hey, femininity is not an awful thing or something to be ashamed of; that's still an important story to tell, too. I LOVE CROSSDRESSING GIRLS, OKAY.