On Goth’s Love Affair with Trans Femmes

Make it stand out

I am in the all tranny bathroom. The frenzied guitar of The Virgin Prunes is slicing through the air of the waiting area, and girls are checking for stubble in the intensely, almost cruelly lit mirror while devouring the first of many free packets of sour patch kids. I am oscillating between the incompatible anxieties of wanting to dance, eyes cast to the ground like a sad apple-picker moving in half-time, and the intense need to stand in the stall, free to garden hose my piss down the toilet bowl. Riley is taking a long drag off their estrogen vape, and it is covered in black lipstick by the time I take a hit. For the first time all week, I feel like I can breathe.

There are few places in America where this would be allowed to happen. To most, it is an aberration that the women's restroom should be overrun by transsexuals. In some jurisdictions, it is a crime. When I first started transitioning, Riley taught me that it's probably best to just not drink water, because going to the bathroom is just a shitshow. But here, in the dimly lit, cigarette scented haze of blue which fills The Merrow, we are not just tolerated, but have found something of a home. The stick figure gender drawings on the bathroom doors function more like a suggestion of what you might (or might not) see than a mandate upon your existence.

What is it about goth which attracts so many trans people, and what explains goth's love affair with transness? To the trans femme, there is a practical element to this, in that a highly stylized gothic femininity is one which is more easily inhabited than, say, a "clean girl" femininity, which asks only that you be naturally beautiful and feminine (read: rich and white). Consider Imogen Binnie's trans makeup tips in her novel Nevada. To draw "the beholder’s eye toward your eyes" and "away from your beard shadow area", you can "put lots of black shit around your eyes...You will look kind of goth. Can you pull off kind of goth? Do you want to?" Goth makeup distorts and feminizes the face in a manner which doesn't register as an attempt at feminisation. It nearly escapes gender: it allows you to be fashionable rather than tragic, and its dark mystique can overpower or quiet the disgust elicited by transness. It offers transfeminine people a protective mask composed of stark shadows and harsh angles, once which says to the world, to use Yohji Yamamoto's phrase, "I don't bother you - don't bother me".

“A highly stylized gothic femininity is one which is more easily inhabited than, say, a “clean girl” femininity, which asks only that you be naturally beautiful and feminine (read: rich and white).”

But the relationship of the trans femme to the gothic is not just cosmetic; it is rooted in more than practical necessity. The goth community has a nearly neurotic obsession with its claim that goth is all about the music, not the look. This frequently elicits cries of "gatekeeping" from half-woke TikTok feminists, but the gatekeeping has its roots in legitimate concerns. Goth arose in admiration of and in opposition to both glam and punk, but was notably more visually amateurish than both. For all its posturing about individuality, punk was far more intensely uniformed than goth, being styled by the likes of Vivienne Westood and others. This sat uneasily with goths. (Genre pioneer and fashion icon Robert Smith claimed in an interview that the "uniform" was precisely "what was wrong with punk"). 

The gothic look, at its inception, was not nearly as rigidly policed or dogmatic as it is now. Bands like Joy Division wore standard, utilitarian clothing, and many of the more stylized goth musicians strayed away from the all-black look now most associated with goths (see Robert Smith in blue button downs and Siouxsie wearing yellow in the video for Spellbound). The reduction of the gothic to an aesthetic preference strips away its artistic and philosophical intricacies and lowers it to a consumer category for the Hot Topics and Dolls Kills of the world to appropriate and market to the masses. To many goths, it is profoundly saddening that black nail polish and fishnets should be more symbolic of the gothic than, say, the cries of Ian Curtis. 

So why, if goth is all about the music, should we discuss gothic glamour at all? The clothing and makeup are the most legible ways we have to observe goth's relationship to the body, and through them we see the articulation of the anti-organicism which lies at the bleeding heart of the gothic. Anti-organicism, is, broadly, the refusal to privilege organic life over whatever lies outside that category, be that death, the synthetic, or the immaterial. Goth is "anti-organic" in that its aesthetics subvert the tendency to exalt vitality as an aesthetic or ethical ideal (consider how a gothic pallor drains "the life" out of the wearer's face, or how "Natural" drives are considered ugly or horrifying within goth). which lies at the bleeding heart of the gothic.

Words: Cyrana Martin

The Siouxsie look is, of course, the best and most extreme example of this, and we can learn a great deal about it from the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher's masterful essay on the topic, "FOR YOUR UNPLEASURE: THE HAUTEUR-COUTURE OF GOTH". He argues that Siouxsie's look is "a replicatable cosmetic mask - a literal effacement of the organic expressivity of the face by a geometric pattern, all hard angles and harsh contrasts between white and black." Her femininity is one which rejects not just the body, but also the obsession with the female body's capacity for reproduction, for Motherhood, for Life, in favor of replication. Motherhood (as well as sexuality more broadly), while often conceived as the highest achievement/goal for a woman, is reframed by Siouxsie through the lens of body horror. Fisher argues that the female gothic "pathologises pregnancy" and views it as the "gradual take-over of the body by an entity that is both appallingly familiar and impossibly alien".  As such, goth does not reproduce itself through nature or the body, but instead propagates itself through signs and clothes which seek to destroy "the illusion of organic unity and propagation". Siouxsie is like an anti-Barbie, desiring precisely not to be the "real thing", but rather the pure, disembodied idea.

It is obvious, then, why goth might appeal to transfeminine people. Where more well known trans enclaves like hyperpop offer the joy of campy, Kim Petras style hyperfemininity, goth instead gives trans femmes the alternative they already know: a disdain not only for their own bodies, but also for the expectation that their bodies should conform to some arbitrary and oppressive ideal of Natural femininity. The gothic disrupts even the dichotomy between drag and trans identity as the categories of realness and authenticity begin to lose their importance. 

It is artifice, not realness, which is central to the gothic, and who could be a better model of this than a doll? Goth creates a space which does not require us to reject or ignore the abject horrors of the trans body and trans existence for the sake of some vapid sense of "self-love", but instead invites us to cherish it as something very much our own, something which doesn't need to be denied or overcome, but something which might be, in its own, grimly profound way, so grotesquely beautiful.