The Femininity of the Shemale

This being the case, shemales, accepting their lots in life with joy, rather than sorrow, do all that they can to appear, feel, and behave as though they are, in fact, women. As the transvestite Dil of The Crying Game tells Fergus, her male genitals are but easily ignored "details," and their presence, she implies, are not a hindrance to her perception of herself--and her hope of being perceived by others as well--as being a female. Shemales style their hair, wear bras, panties, and other feminine attire, wear makeup and jewelry, carry purses, wear stockings and high-heeled shoes, and walk, talk, and otherwise act like women. In all these details, they are women. However, the "details" of their male genitals remain as testaments against their completely feminine gender. Still, since English grammar allows, in addition to the neuter, or sexless, gender, only the masculine and the feminine, shemales must be classified as one or the other, and they are categorized according to the sex and gender that they profess and want to be, not because this is what they want, but, mostly, because, in a patriarchy, women's social status is less than that of men's.

Within the limits of biological and physiological laws, shemales are expected, as women, to accept and to model the female role. They can't have children (although lactation among shemales is not an unknown phenomenon), but, otherwise, they are bound by the same set of sexist and chauvinistic prejudices and biases and by the same social expectations that apply to women per se, whether they like it or not or whether it is right or wrong to require that they do so. The shemale, like the female, becomes, in Deborah Tannen's terminology, a "marked" woman.

Not all children that are produced as a result of interracial unions are accepted even by the ethnic group that occupies the lower level of social status. Depending upon the communities in which they live, some are rejected by both races, the black and the white, although such rejection is relatively rare.