1. Rant
[1.1] November 30, 2021: (note 2) I'm so fundamentally, mundanely, chronically angry that I have no idea where to begin this discussion, not because of any immediate incident but as a general state of being endemic to my place as a (white) nonbinary trans woman in a ciscentric society (see Bornstein 1995; Stryker 2006). In her pivotal contribution to trans studies, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix," Susan Stryker (2006) describes this state as "transgender rage": "Transgender rage is a queer fury, an emotional response to conditions in which it becomes imperative to take up, for the sake of one's own continued survival as a subject, a set of practices that precipitates one's exclusion from a naturalized order of existence that seeks to maintain itself as the only possible basis for being a subject" (253).
[1.2] Stryker's (2006) conceptualization of transgender rage makes explicit a queer monstrous solidarity through the voice of the Creature from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ([1818] 2003). There is ample literature on the connections between queerness and monstrosity, and indeed questions of desire and embodiment are foundational to how the gothic is structured: "Gothic literature and culture embody [societal] anxieties, and necessarily depict gender variance as violent, monstrous, and demonic" (Zigarovich 2018, 3). Among queer and trans people, there is simultaneously a great deal of frustration with the blatant bigotry of this coding as well as intense identification with monster characters, which often contributes to resistant readings of texts. Stryker explains the connection: "Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist" (2006, 245).
[1.3] This process of constantly pushing back against discursive restraints on one's existence is a cathartic outlet for the rage at having been nonconsensually theorized in the first place (Stryker 2006). To be clear, transgender rage is not innate to transness per se but emerges in trans subjects due to the negative and destructive affects generated in our intra-actions (see Barad 2007) with a ciscentric world (Stryker 2006). Mine is a rage both my own and shining down upon me through several points of diffraction (see Weaver 2018), and these diffraction patterns of monstrous affect shape my reading of cyborg characters and the rage they both engender and express. Moreover, the structures of writing I undertake here are also shaped by this intersection of affect and technology; my rage is not bound by a singular discipline or method or topic but circulates between them haphazardly. Therefore, as is common in trans theoretical texts (Bornstein 1995; Stryker 2006), I call upon a variety of modes of address to allow the venting of this rage. Because rage "is located at the margin of subjectivity and the limit of signification," (Stryker 2006, 253), I cannot fully transmit it through straightforward language and must instead diffuse it throughout the text.
[1.4] March 23, 2022: A frustrating consequence is that cramming thirty-one years of transphobia into a standard-length academic article requires a level of contextualization and streamlining (not to mention professionalism) that makes it near impossible to articulate the significance of this rage. I've never felt like I have the right to be angry or the leeway to express it without being read as masculine; as the pressure of that suppressed anger built, so did the desperate need for outlets for it. Writing has often been that outlet for me, and the diary form is especially conducive to ranting and other expressions of affect. But I'm not (just) writing a diary entry, I'm writing an article, which means I have to think about tone and relevance and argument and structure and audience and stereotypes about trans women and—
2. Deep, centering breath (introduction)
[2.1] Segue: In this autoethnography, I apply Stryker's notion of transgender rage to texts I engage with as a fan by questioning the technologies that facilitate the expression of this rage. Cyborg figures such as the catfish—people who pretend to be someone else online—illustrate how gender transgression and passing politics are baked into the birth of computing itself, making the digital sphere a crucial mythological locus of power for and against trans subjects. Overlapping cultural fears about both the dangers of technology and the existence of trans people mean that catfish characters in shows such as Glee (Fox, 2009–15), Pretty Little Liars (PLL; ABC Family/Freeform, 2010–17), and Gossip Girl (GG; The CW, 2007–12) serve as omnipresent, menacing, villainous abominations who threaten cisgender heterosexuality through their usurpation of white femininity.
[2.2] As a white trans woman, these purported representations of my identities hail me in complex ways, which makes me ambivalent toward these characters and spurs me to take a disidentificatory approach to them. The frequent lack of clear motivation for these characters' actions allows their catfish personae to function as vectors of transgender rage, expressing the trans/cross-gendered character's frustrations with their world. By projecting my own rage onto/through these characters, my disidentification with them helps vent my bitterness at cis society. However, there are limits to the efficacy of disidentification as a survival strategy, and my experiences bumping into those limits shape my reading of the trans significance of catfishing. These characters are, after all, fables for how not to express rage healthily, albeit fables that justify hatred for (and, ironically, cyberbullying of) trans subjects. To explain and demonstrate these various connections, I revisit an essay I once wrote about PLL and my viewing journal from when I first watched GG.
[2.3] December 29, 2021: Autoethnography describes a variety of writing approaches that aim to combine autobiographical experience and ethnographic inquiry to look at the intersection between self and culture (Ellis 2004). Autoethnography is a very popular methodology within fan studies, to the point that the overrepresentation of autoethnography has created calls for different fan studies methods and methodologies to shine through (Evans and Stasi 2014). Autoethnography is often considered to run the risk of being ethically suspect, overly emotional, and not academically rigorous, even in fan studies (Ellis 2004; Hansal and Gunderson 2020). It is simultaneously true that for many marginalized fans autoethnographies give us an opportunity to express subjugated knowledges, especially in the face of discrimination in both fannish and academic spaces (Ellis 2004; Wanzo 2015). Furthermore, autoethnography is uniquely suited for exploration and transmission of affect (Ellis 2004; Hansal and Gunderson 2020), and since my topic is transgender rage, the approach seems apt for this project. Significantly, this approach of centering affect and personal reflection is deeply rooted in feminist epistemology (Hannell 2020) and is a foundational tenet of trans studies (Latham 2017). Therefore, autoethnography seems a useful tool for interrogating the transmisogyny of catfish plotlines.
[2.4] One crucial tactic for engaging with the emotions engendered by transphobic media is disidentification, which José Muñoz (1999) theorizes as "a mode of performance whereby a toxic identity is remade and infiltrated by subjects who have been hailed by such identity categories but have not been able to own such a label" (185). It is specifically "the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship" (Muñoz 1999, 4). Disidentification can provide a temporary outlet for my trans rage by rooting for the trans villain: for Muñoz, "rage is sustained and it is pitched as a call to activism, a bid to take space in the social that has been colonized by the logics of white normativity and heteronormativity" (xi). Because trans people are rarely depicted as anything except monsters and villains, embracing my monstrosity allows me to appreciate the venting of the character's rage at a cisnormative society. However, Muñoz is quick to point out that "disidentification is not always an adequate strategy of resistance or survival for all minority subjects" (5, emphasis in original), and my journey in these pages will show some of the pitfalls and limitations of a disidentificatory approach.
[2.5] March 29, 2022: I make use of the diary form in this article for several reasons. Part of the entire purpose of a diary is to vent unwanted or socially unacceptable feelings relatively privately. Although diaries are curated documents anticipating surveillance and not actually unmediated glimpses at the psyche, they are personal and rarely edited except in preparation for publishing. What often gets erased in the editing process is the messy, affective, nonlinear experience of doing research, which I hope to keep present in this piece because "it is not enough to simply accept that the research process is emotional. It is important to view the engagement with emotional aspects as a part of research work. If emotions are seen as antithetical to research, information may be lost" (Hansal and Gunderson 2020, ¶7.2). Diary is a common method within autoethnographic writing for this reason; Michael Taussig (2003) says of anthropological field diaries that they "can offer precious, if elusive, testimony to truths otherwise impossible to render" specifically by "claiming to be little more than…a strategic sample of reality." The entries and passages chosen are indeed strategic markers of rage, but in keeping with the premise of autoethnography, I must also stitch these personal reflections together with theory. Thus, I do not use these entries as simply evidence/archives to be analyzed from a more objective position but as the method of analysis itself.
[2.6] September 12, 2022: In the next section I tease out the trans politics of catfishing, the Turing test(s), and passing, which will allow us to examine catfish characters such as Unique in Glee, A in PLL, and the titular Gossip Girl of GG. Glee will serve as an example for the "Meta/Theory" section, whereas "Manifesto" and "Journal" are excerpts from my real-time engagements with PLL and GG, respectively. As primary sources of sorts, they document the motion of affect between the texts and myself and the ambivalent structures of disidentification required for me to navigate those texts safely as a trans fan.
[2.7] Academic writing is one major coping tool I use to process my emotions about media I consume; the inadvertent disappearance of "I" in large chunks of these passages highlights a subconscious distancing through academic language I employ as either a defense mechanism or a nerdy indulgence (note 3). Either way, this habit is useful for our purposes, as these excerpts can double as theoretical arguments about representations of gender and technology in PLL and GG.
3. Meta/theory
[3.1] November 30, 2021: In a digital context, the nature of transfeminine people's purported monstrosity is encapsulated in the cyborg figure of the catfish, a false online persona designed to obscure someone's age, gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, or other aspects. I mean this both literally and metaphorically—catfishes are literally cyborgs in that they are digital masks for physical people, and metaphorically they embody Donna Haraway's (1991) cyborg mythology:
[3.2] [A] significant aim of [Haraway] is to present a "myth" (the myth of the cyborg) that should be viewed from two contradictory perspectives: the cyborg as a symbol of absolute control, the imposition of technological domination on human existence; and the cyborg as a symbol of fearless and pleasurable kinship between animals, humans, and machines. For Haraway, it is crucial to keep both of these contradictory perspectives in mind rather than deciding for one side or the other. (Pohl 2018, 30)
[3.3] Catfishing is made possible by the ease of stalking in a surveillance state and the pleasures of digital anonymity.
[3.4] December 29, 2021: On three separate occasions I was correct in guessing the trans nature of a catfish's identity in fandoms I was engaged in. Like Glee's katie_xoxo arc, to which I will return shortly, PLL and GG are driven by central mysteries of identity: Who is A? Who is Gossip Girl? GG and PLL are both based on young-adult novel series aimed at teenage girls, and both added a trans subtext in the translation from book to series. GG is never identified in the Gossip Girl book series, and A in the Pretty Little Liars books is multiple people, none of whom is openly trans. I. Marlene King, the showrunner for PLL, specifically wanted to make A a trans woman: "It just felt like the right story, so I wanted to be truthful and tell it in an honest way but also be sensitive to the transgender community…She is not A because she's transgender, she's A because she's mentally unstable and she comes from a very crazy family" (quoted in Corriston 2015). Although the intention is commendable, it doesn't do enough to address the transphobic (and ableist) history of such a reveal. The aggressive gendering and technologized nature of these catfishes means that the person the (cis) audience would least expect to be behind these personas is often the trans character or the one most trans coded. Though the ancient meme "there are no girls on the internet" (which implied all female avatars were secretly men roleplaying in disguise) is patently false and rarely deployed seriously anymore, it still underpins cultural conceptions of digital femininity as excessive, dangerous, monstrous, and a screen for a physical body that's "really" a man.
[3.5] November 30, 2021: Catfishing is practiced for a variety of reasons and is only sometimes used to allow men to portray women (Cassada Lohmann 2013; Kottemann 2015). The documentary that coined the term, Catfish (2010), centers around Nev Schulman and his relationship with Angela Wesselman-Pierce, a middle-aged painter who pretends to be her daughter Megan on Facebook. The film portrays Wesselman-Pierce rather sympathetically as a frustrated, lonely housewife who wove a tall tale that got out of hand. However, even here the underpinning transphobic logic of the catfish trope appears when Schulman first starts to suspect Megan isn't who she says she is; after finding proof the songs she reportedly recorded for him are ripped from YouTube, he exclaims, "They're complete psychopaths! I've probably been chatting with a guy this whole time!" (Catfish 2010, 24:45). Even as the catfish can be used as a general mask for myriad social factors, the fear the trope animates is cultural anxieties about gender on the internet.
[3.6] The transphobic violence of the trope cannot be overstated; the underlying fear represented by the catfish is that men and transfeminine people (who in this framework are also men) invade cis women's spaces and entrap women and straight men into nonconsensual intimacy with them (Bettcher 2007; Phipps 2016). Because being trans is itself often considered a deception by cis people, and especially because the internet allows many closeted and questioning trans people to explore our genders for the first time, trans people are caught in a double-bind:
[3.7] On the one hand, visibility yields a position in which what one is doing is represented as make-believe, pretending, or playing dress up…On the other hand, to opt for invisibility…generates the effect of revelation, disclosure, or exposure of hidden truth. Hence, some of the possible consequences are: (1) living in constant fear of exposure, extreme violence, and death; (2) disclosure as a deceiver or liar (possibly through forced genital exposure); (3) being the subject of violence and even murder; and (4) being held responsible for this violence. (Bettcher 2007, 50)
[3.8] The cross-gender catfish is not an incidental consequence of digital anonymity but is the foundational mythology of artificial intelligence dating from the invention of the computer. The original Turing test, as designed by gay mathematician Alan Turing (1950), was based on a parlor game called "the imitation game":
[3.9] It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman…It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification [i.e., pass as a woman]…The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. (434)
[3.10] Turing goes on to adapt this model to what has become the "Standard Turing Test" (STT), substituting the computer for the man/A, but there is considerable debate in computer science and philosophy about whether the "Original Imitation Game" (OIG) (i.e., can a computer win the imitation game) or the STT (i.e., can a computer convince the interrogator it's human) is the intended or most useful version (e.g., Genova 1994; Hayes and Ford 1995; Pinar-Saygin, Cicekli, and Akman 2000; Sterrett 2003). But regardless, the Turing test is an exercise in passing, whether as a woman, a man, a human, or a man pretending to be a woman. The OIG relies on an essential, binary understanding of gender and the notion that one can convincingly be a man or a woman (Shah and Warwick 2016; cf. Genova 1994) such that in substituting the computer for a human player, "the [OIG] is not a test of making an artificial human, but of making a mechanical transvestite" (Hayes and Ford 1995). However, even in the STT—where the test can be on any subject, not just gender—the computer could still be described as a mechanical transvestite because the Turing test is usually (but not always; see Pinar-Saygin, Cicekli, and Akman 2000) predicated on the computer's ability to pass as human. And in a cisnormative society, to pass as human is to pass as a man or a woman.
[3.11] I have written of the passing politics of the cyborg through the notion of "meatsuit realness" (Publius 2021). "Realness" is a term originating in African American Vernacular English from the drag ball scene; according to Dorian Corey (as presented in Paris Is Burning, 1990), realness is "to be able to blend…If you can pass the untrained eye, or even the trained eye, and not give away the fact that you're gay, that's when it's realness" (18:06). Corey clarifies that realness isn't about parody or satire like some other forms of drag. However, as a ball category, realness only becomes realness by drawing attention to itself; otherwise, it's illegible as anything but passing (Butler 2011). Importantly, realness is not just a performance category but a safety issue: "When they're undetectable, when they can walk out of that ballroom into the sunlight, and onto the subway, and get home, and still have all their clothes and no blood running off their bodies, those are the femme realness queens" (Paris Is Burning, 1990, 21:49). Corey's usage of realness emphasizes both the survival necessity of passing and the space, when safe to do so, to playfully point out this passing. Meatsuit realness is then "the ability of a cyborg to pass as human, or to give the illusion that there is an unmediated body ('meatsuit') performing," while simultaneously drawing attention to itself whenever possible (quoted in Publius 2021, 93).
[3.12] My borrowing of the term did not address this history in the Black ball scene, yet the racial implications of such a model of realness are just as foundational to its operation as gender. Meatsuit realness plays a significant role in blackfishing and other forms of digital blackface, which refers to the underpinnings of blackface minstrelsy that characterize internet meme culture and digital performances of identity (Wong 2019). Blackfishing is a specific version where a non-Black person tries to pass as Black or racially ambiguous to the extent it's profitable, especially online (Cherid 2021). Like other forms of catfishing, blackfishing borrows images, body practices, speech patterns, and other aspects of Black bodies to create a Black digital persona that can cash in on the limited cultural capital of Blackness without the major consequences of being Black in a white supremacist society (Cherid 2021; Wong 2019). Meatsuit realness is thus an ambivalent strategy of digital embodiment that can both disrupt and reinforce dominant ideologies.
[3.13] Conversely, meatsuit realness can also be a survival strategy for racialized people in digital environments, which we see with Unique in Glee. A dramedy about high schoolers in a glee club, Glee is well-known for its ample (and controversial) queer representation. In season 4, Black trans girl Unique is frustrated with the transphobia of another glee club member, white cis boy Ryder. To connect with him, she catfishes him under the persona katie_xoxo, using the picture of one of her classmates. It's instructive that here Unique isn't just trying to pass as a (cis) girl, but as a white girl. While this double passing seems primarily intended to make it more difficult for the audience to guess who the catfish is, it also points out the ways that transmisogynoir operates to posit white femininity as the hegemonic standard for being read as a girl. To quote Unique, "you don't know how long it's been since I felt this close to someone without all of this [gesturing to her body] getting in the way" (Glee 2009–15, 4.22 "All or Nothing"). Furthermore, it inadvertently invokes the tropes of both the threatening trans woman and the threatening Black man, even as it tries to humanize her by showing how the situation was a point she was trying to make that got out of hand and not anything malicious. For Unique, catfishing is a tool that allows her to sublimate her transgender rage through educating Ryder, but one that ultimately destroys the possibility of any relationship with him once revealed.
4. Manifesto
[4.1] December 19, 2021: In the fall of 2013, I wrote an essay for my master’s-level Gender and Communication class about PLL, which at the time was halfway through airing season 4. In that essay I argued for a trans reading of A, the mysterious cyberbully controlling the main characters' lives, because of the then-recent reveal that a male character was potentially A. Significantly, this was written before the season 6 confirmation that A is indeed a trans woman. I have adapted it for this current article because it holds the first kernels of my central thesis about how inherent to the catfish trope transgender rage is, and because it is itself a historical node of my own transgender rage.
[4.2] Because PLL is an ensemble show, it might be useful to flag the various relationships in play. Alison "Ali" DeLaurentis is a typical mid-2000s mean girl; prior to the series, she was abducted from a sleepover with her four friends, and they are trying to figure out what happened to her. Aria, an artsy former expat, is having an affair with Ezra, who turns out to be her English teacher. Hannah, an Ali clone who suffers from an eating disorder, is best friends with Mona. Spencer, an overachiever who is essentially the group's leader, is dating Toby. Emily is a (closeted at first) lesbian swimmer who had a crush on Ali growing up. CeCe is Ali's friend and is later revealed to be her sister; CeCe became A after being institutionalized for being trans/attempted murder (which are portrayed as related).
[4.3] October 1, 2013: I plan to show how PLL makes explicit a cyborg process of disruption and coalition through the character A and/or the A-Team as a performance of transgender rage, made explicit by the constant recoding of the character(')s(') gender(s) throughout the series.
[4.4] PLL ostensibly centers on "the Liars"—Aria, Spencer, Hannah, and Emily—four friends who are haunted by the disappearance of their childhood friend. They begin receiving texts containing information only Ali knew, and they are all signed "A." They hope this means Ali is alive, but they discover by the end of the pilot episode that Ali is very much dead (for now). Thus spirals out of control the driving mystery of the show: If Ali isn't A, then who is? As the show progresses, A relentlessly stalks, bullies, taunts, frames, outs, sabotages, and extorts the Liars and everyone they care about. Every time the Liars think they've caught or unmasked A, another puzzle awaits them. Arguably, the main character(s) of PLL aren't the Liars at all but A, as manifested through the show itself; the series "employs first-person camera shots to focalize from A's perspective," and the editing creates the paranoid feeling of surveillance in ways A can't always manage in diegetic time (Whitney 2017, 367).
[4.5] A is visibly cyborg in innumerable ways. A is constantly stalking the Liars through unknown and unknowable means, using a combination of surveillance equipment, a network of informants, technologized mind-games, and personal visits. A's technological prowess is not just electronic, but it is in this digital-textual realm that A shines. A loves theatricality and artifice, is disruption and chaos, embodies plurality and espouses coalition, hates unity and the heterocentric cisgendered project, and has no discernible beginning or end. All of these aspects make A the quintessential Haraway (1991) cyborg.
[4.6] If A thus operates menacingly in the trans space of the cyborg, then perhaps A is also transgender. The transness of A is communicated through A's own reliance on incoherent gender cues and the maintenance of androgyny. The basic A uniform is a dark hoodie, dark jeans, and black gloves. The body is purposefully illegible. Red Coat—a personality of A recognized easily enough by a red overcoat and blonde hair—employs explicitly feminine cues in later seasons, as a later burlap cowl outfit does masculine cues. The writing style in A's texts is a playful blend of masculine violence and feminine bitchiness, to use stereotypical notions of gendered aggression (Brown 2016). By constantly hiding the body/ies behind technological gendered artifice, electronic or otherwise, A is able to divorce A's gender(s) from A's body/ies.
[4.7] Textually, the Liars engage in the language of transgender abjection through their pronoun usage in reference to A. In the pilot episode, the Liars believe A to be Alison, thus referring to A as she/her. When it is revealed that Ali is dead, the gender shifts. Often, they will retain the usage of she/her but will sometimes use he/him. Meanwhile, the audience knows that there is more than one A, and thus they/them proliferates in extradiegetic discussion, but the Liars are still wrapping their heads around this fact in season 4. The Liars refer to A exclusively with feminine pronouns when they know that CeCe is Red Coat, then shift definitively to masculine pronouns when they find the lair of Big A. Tellingly, a running joke early on in the series was to refer to A as "he, she…shim" (2.1 "It's Alive"), emphasizing both the genderqueer space in which A operates and their disavowal of that project using the transphobic "shim." As a trans(ed) subject, A is rather blatantly enacting transgender rage in A's cyberbullying of the Liars.
[4.8] It should not escape attention that, both figuratively and literally, there is no A; discursively, A is impossible to represent as real because A is not one coherent subjectivity (see Whitney 2017). "A" is a myth, a stand-in for several characters who occupy this transgender/alchemic space of rage throughout the series. At the end of the second season, Mona is revealed to be A—at the same time it's revealed that she isn't working alone. CeCe and Ezra were revealed in season 4 to be on the A-Team as Red Coat and Big A, respectively. Part of the economy of the show's structure is that they can show us A as many times as they want, but there will never be a definitive answer as to the boundaries of A precisely because A is the no-man's-land (pun intended) beyond those boundaries. As the embodiment of transgender rage itself, the A-Team is a space for these (narratively) marginalized characters to enact this rage at the embodiment of cisgender female power.
[4.9] Whether or not any (or perhaps all) of these characters is transgender is irrelevant. What matters is their huddling under the transgender umbrella, however temporarily, to enact this rage. Speaking personally as a trans woman, the more the show progresses, the more I come to identify with A as the abject trans Other and A's frustration at the hypocrisies of the Liars. In the act of writing this very article, I am able to stand in solidarity with A/the A-Team as we voice our transgender rage.
5. Journal
[5.1] December 27, 2021: Space prevents me from contrasting the previous vision with the explicit representation of transness in later seasons of PLL, which at least attempts, however clunkily, to be respectful. Moreover, I'm less interested here in trans representation per se than in trans affect. In early 2019, I watched the original Gossip Girl for the first time and kept a journal of my thoughts as part of my dissertation work. I did so knowing Gossip Girl (GG) was a man and with the attitude espoused in the previous paragraph, such that I disidentified with GG as a vehicle of transgender rage. This journal archives and demonstrates the affects that circulated within me, as well as identifies the strengths and weaknesses of a disidentificatory embrace of transgender rage.
[5.2] GG is the show's narrator and the administrator of a website that chronicles the high school rumor mill of New York's Upper East Side, frequently featuring wealthy it-girl Serena and her best friend Blair. Dan is an upper-middle-class scholarship student at their school, and his frustrations with upper-crust society spur him to start blogging as GG, which gets complicated when he starts dating Serena and his sister Jenny joins her social circle. Two of Blair's love interests, boy-next-door Nate and bad-boy Chuck, and Dan's best friend Vanessa round out the main cast with their various intrigues. This journal only chronicles the first two seasons and the finale.
[5.3] January 13, 2019: The title sequence for Gossip Girl teases, "And who am I? That's one secret I'll never tell." Given the arguments I've been making, it should come as no surprise that the big reveal of the series was that GG was a man. I had been told this before going into this project, but right now I can't remember which guy is our narrator. Having just seen the first episode, I'm going to lock in a prediction based on what I know about the catfish trope and cinematography. If we assume, based on the first mention of GG's name over a shot of Dan at the computer, that Dan is GG, then even from the first episode a trans rage narrative emerges. Dan, distanced from his classmates by social class, is disillusioned with the elites among whom he finds himself, and he has a crush on Serena, the mysterious girl whose return spurs the events of the series. GG too has a network of spies that inform her digitally of every scandal in Manhattan, which means her singular, corporeal body does not limit her access to information or power. In many ways, GG is the prototype for A, although whereas A is distinctly violent, GG is more a passive, bitchy commentator on events instead of a driver of plot.
[5.4] January 14, 2019: My FBI agent must be trolling my Netflix because while I had planned on not looking up the identity of GG, a meme my friend posted on Facebook confirmed that Dan is indeed the queen of New York gossip. I didn't want to be correct because that means this trope of the angry trans catfish is more pervasive than the shock value conceit of it implies. But as I did with A, I want to reclaim GG because I think her transgender rage is productive, especially because GG herself escapes much of the explicit transphobia that A must endure. Furthermore, while I certainly resonate with A's story, GG is much more palatable a figure because (at least from my vantage point halfway through season 1) she is not actively abusing those on whom she reports and she is presented more as an outlet for, well, a Lonely Boy (her codename for Dan). In fact, I'm glad I know from the start that Dan is GG because in retrospect the trans narrative is palpable and relatable.
[5.5] In the first episode, Jenny teasingly reveals that she knows Dan reads Gossip Girl, a point that flusters him and causes him to quip, none too convincingly, "What? I don't read Gossip Girl, that's for chicks" (1.1 "Pilot"). In combination with the earlier shot implying him to be the blogger, this reads as exposition for a trans narrative. Dan, unable to present femininity openly in meatspace, must turn to the internet to express his secret investment in the female world of the Upper East Side. This is a cliché narrative to employ, but it is a common experience in queer communities nonetheless (e.g., Quint 2018). The more Dan gets embroiled in the plot, however, the more GG must report on his exploits, which sets up a strange distancing where GG is commenting on his own life as if she weren't him. Granted, this protects her identity, but it also fragments and destabilizes it.
[5.6] January 16, 2019: Perhaps I'm projecting, although that's partially the point of this exercise. What does a trans reading of GG uncover? For me, it provides a difficult look at a closeted sapphic trans woman whose only shred of public femininity is her rage.
[5.7] I take back what I said earlier about GG being a milder form of A. Knowing Dan is GG makes her bitchy comments about Serena much more sinister because he basically puts his girlfriend on blast anytime she does something he doesn't like. GG becomes a retaliatory device through which he can bully his girlfriend under the guise of objectivity. This makes Dan's reasons for breaking up with Serena not only hypocritical but extremely toxic. And, of course, the whole project of the website is textbook cyberbullying. CeCe has clear motivations and is directly attacking those she's manipulating whereas Dan has no discernable motive for constantly tearing down those around him other than because he can.
[5.8] December 19, 2021: I think what I was picking up on was the distinction Brown (2016) notes between how GG and PLL present surveillance. GG presents a more accepted overall condition of surveillance than the targeted menace of PLL.
[5.9] January 20, 2019: Okay either Dan is the most brilliant actor and fastest typist of his generation or him being GG doesn't make any logical sense, given the impossibility of some of the posts in terms of timing. I'm willing to give the writers some benefit of the doubt because the actual maintenance procedures of the blog are not fully explained at this point in the series, and I'm only noticing this now because of my foreknowledge (note 4). What this tells me, though, is that Dan being GG is more a matter of ideology than storytelling because the notion that one and only one person can be GG, and that that person has to be Dan, is strange. A major clue to the ideological nature of the reveal is how Dan has, throughout the series, been the everyman who is scathingly critical of the entire social structure and the representative of white, postfeminist, (upper-)middle-class masculinity (Bindig 2015). GG, meanwhile, is the (dis)embodiment of the mean girl, whose bitchiness and obsession with gossip are staples of ideas about white femininity. Dan being exposed as GG only in the final episodes is intended to end the series-long question with a transphobic mindfuck for shock value. Moreover, it underscores the hypocrisy so central to Dan's characterization. Dan as GG reifies the nice guy trope's romanticization of stalking (Bindig 2015) and "reiterat[es] the stereotypical gender hierarchy of boys' superior technological use and expertise" (Nygaard 2013, 243). It doesn't matter if upon closer inspection it doesn't quite make sense because the subliminal point of the reveal is that he's a hypocrite and a creep, posing as a girl to enter women's private spaces and gain women's trust, which is a perennial anti-trans myth used to justify our exclusion from affirming single-gender spaces (see Phipps 2016).
[5.10] On the one hand, Dan's reveal is less troublesome because he's not canonically trans, whereas PLL is quite clear (despite King's assertions; cf. Corriston 2015) that A's abusive behavior is directly related to her being trans. On the other hand, A's reveal happens well before the end of the series, allowing CeCe to have a redemption arc and for her survivors to process what they've gone through at her hand. At this point, I think I have to watch things out of order and see the last episode to ensure my analysis of the reveal is correct and to better understand the canon evidence for Dan being GG as I go along.
[5.11] 38 minutes later: Well, that was a mistake (note 5).
6. Refraction
[6.1] Segue: "You can't just go through life not caring about who you hurt" (GG 2.9 "There Might Be Blood").
[6.2] Rage is not the only affective effect of these trans coded characters; rage is a resistant disidentificatory reclamation of the deep trans anger that can only be suppressed lest we burn the whole world down. The other, more poisonous affect that these characters can engender is fear. I am writing this paragraph to prevent myself from having an anxiety attack; ironically, I have to stop feeling my feelings in order to write about feeling them, echoing the strategy Stryker (2006) takes in "My Words" as she switches from Journal to Theory. This fear animates the anti-trans violence done to us. Trans people face disproportionately high rates of violence, sexual assault, domestic abuse, and suicide (James et al. 2016). These characters invoke every cis fear of trans people that undergirds the stereotypes about us, even weaponize that fear as the driving conflict in the series. But it is also the trans fear of exposure, ridicule, violence, madness, and self-destruction. These characters seem designed to make cis people scared of us and us scared of existing.
[6.3] December 30, 2021: In attempting to disidentify with A and GG, I had forgotten a crucial clarification Muñoz (1999) provides:
[6.4] To disidentify…is not to pick and choose what one takes out of an identification. It is not to willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful components within an identificatory locus. Rather, it is the reworking of those energies that do not elide the "harmful" or contradictory components of any identity. It is an acceptance of the necessary interjection that has occurred in such situations. (12)
[6.5] Part of the problem with using disidentification as a strategy is knowing when to identify and when to disengage, how to hold the affirming and the harmful simultaneously without destroying yourself. While it can mitigate the damage of harmful media quite effectively, it cannot remove that harm, and ultimately we must be vigilant that in our attempts to find ourselves in whatever scraps are available to us, we don't lose sight of the fact that we're not actually monsters; we're just drawn that way.
[6.6] Rage is a very dangerous feeling because venting it improperly can cause real harm to people, which I think is the lesson A and GG are meant to convey. In many ways they represent white feminist power fantasies of the girlboss, where (white) women in a position of power present themselves as righteous and progressive while building that power through gaslighting, gatekeeping, and other abusive practices (Abad-Santos 2021). Yolanda Machado's (2020) description of the power fantasies of white feminism fit A and GG well: "the reason she feels she can do whatever she wants the second she gets a little bit of power is because she has been oppressed and terrified for her whole life." Women of color rarely have the same opportunity and are often socially conditioned to express their rage in other ways to avoid tropes such as the "angry black woman" (Walley-Jean 2009). I also recognize that using this article itself as a conduit for transgender rage runs the risk of "capitalis[ing] on the personal and deflect[ing] critique by marginalised groups whose realities are invisibilised or dismissed, even as they are spoken for" or "participat[ing] in selective empathies where we discredit the realities of those who articulate opposing politics" (Phipps 2016, 304, emphasis in original). Kate Bornstein's (1995, 83) advice comes to mind: "I think that anger and activism mix about as well as drinking and driving. When I'm angry, I don't have the judgment to select a correct target to hit out against. I do believe that anger is healthy, that it can lead to a recognition of the need for action, but activism itself is best accomplished by level heads who can help steer others' anger toward correct targets."
[6.7] Yet all this built-up transgender rage has to go somewhere; since it has passed through many texts to shine so strongly upon me, it is now my duty to dispose of it properly. Regrettably, the inherent relationality of affect necessitates some of it being transferred to you, becoming your problem just as at the end of Frankenstein Victor leaves responsibility for his creation with Walton. I'm sorry. Another portion has been squeezed to fit the confines of language that facilitate such a transfer relatively safely through this article. The rest continues to roil within me and the other monsters as it becomes clear that catfish characters such as A and GG are not (just) outlets releasing transgender rage but cis-authored generators of that rage; the machines have passed as trans. I will continue to rage against/through this development while reminding myself of the necessity of "situating [my] first-person politics through structural analysis" that attends to intersectional solidarity and not just personal pain (Phipps 2016, 304). At the end of the GG finale (and in the 2021 sequel), a new Gossip Girl has taken over, because like New York City, bullying and transphobia never sleep—unfortunately for them, our rage doesn't sleep either. —xoxoGossipXAviA