Artifact 4 - Beauty Standards Tweet - @hazelrosedee

I find this tweet by @hazelrosedee to be both something I’ve heard and seen considered in transfeminine spaces many times before, yet also something put so bluntly as to be satisfactorily unique. In popular culture and discourse, trans people are sometimes held up as always bravely carving their own path in gender expression and “ignoring” the expectations of society, and while that holds a lot of truth, nobody is able to truly escape expectations surrounding physical attractiveness. Page 127 of Gendered Lives explores how, quite often, despite knowing that the expectations are unreasonable we still find ourselves subjected to and living in accordance with them. I would even argue that this counts as gender dysphoria, even when it’s a cis woman who’s contending with feminine standards. Thus, I would argue that the line between gender dysphoria and beauty standards drawn in the tweet isn’t quite as clear cut as it is stated, but however an example of the interesting dichotomy between our abstract knowledge of gendered standards and how that ends up actually playing into our daily emotions.