TRANSform Me: Is the transgender Queer Eye a good thing?

TRANSform Me, a new reality show in which three transgender women give cisgender women makeovers, premiered on VH1 Monday. The show stars Laverne Cox from I Want To Work For Diddy (and this Transgender Basics video), Jamie Clayton, and Nina Poon. The three leads give cis women makeovers while relating these women’s experiences to their transitions.

TRANSform Me is open to pretty much the same critique as any other makeover show. It celebrates a certain standard of beauty, exemplified by its three stars who, while trans and racially diverse, all meet a very mainstream definition of female beauty. The trio does emphasize that a physical makeover is really just one part of changing how someone sees themselves, though. This gets to what really makes the show different, at least in its first episode – the leads focus on the personal identity and positive self-image aspects of the makeover, connecting the feelings of Nicole, their cis subject, with their feelings and reasons for transitioning.

No, I don’t think a makeover and a gender transition are equivalent. And comparisons do downplay the difficulties of transitioning. But the two do have similarities – both involve trying to bring physical appearance more in line with an individual’s desired self image. The comparison helps trans folks make a little bit more sense to cis folks who see us as wildly outside their life experience.

The show is much more deliberate about doing educational work than Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy. The earlier show normalized gay men for a
straight audience to some degree, but this was very much in a
stereotyped role, with gay men becoming acceptable because of the very
capitalist ways they were useful to straight folks. TRANSform Me
has its leads playing a very similar role, but there’s clearly an
emphasis on explaining trans experiences – the show’s
website even include links to the Audre
Lorde Project and GLAAD.
The show’s not really about makeovers for cis folks. It’s about
explaining trans folks to a mainstream audience using the format of a
VH1 reality show, a pop culture form that fits this work fairly well.

And it’s important for a mainstream audience to hear about our lives
from trans folks. As
GLAAD points out:

When Nicole asks Laverne Cox the naïve but typical question
“You used to be man?”, Cox laughs and then gives the nuanced answer,
“Sort of. We’re transgender, so we always felt like we were little
girls inside, but when we were born what was on the outside suggested
differently.”

It’s great to have a trans woman saying that on TV! I was never a
man, but this is one of the most difficult aspects of trans experience
to explain to cis folks, and the “used to be” narrative is constantly
coming up. Cox does a great job of shifting the way the audience
understands trans women in short, simple, clear words.

The one aspect of the show’s format that really bothers me is the
“surprise” of being made over by three trans women. Makeover subjects
explicitly don’t know the trio are transgender before they show
up. I can sort of understand the
reason Cox gives for this – they want to show cis folk’s actual
reactions and let the audience watch as these people soften after
interacting with the three leads. But I think this plays way too easily
into the way too prevalent idea that trans folks, especially trans
women, are
“deceptive,” which is used to justify “trans panic” defenses.

I was expecting another Queer Eye – good for visibility
maybe, but deeply problematic in the stereotyped and palatable form of
visibility. I’m still not a fan of makeover shows, but TRANSform Me
actually had me somewhat pleasantly surprised.