Will trans acceptance push women to look more feminine?

In his post The Left pushes America down a slippery slope Larry Kummer contemplates the implications of the latest round of the culture wars with the inclusion of a “transgender woman” in the current Miss Universe contest:

If he – or she, as you prefer – wins, it will be a milestone. That is, a meaningless even by itself but marking progress on a path going somewhere. We can see only a few of the implications.

• As the guys at 4Chan said long ago, this shows that men are better at everything than women – including being women.
• It shows the glitterati is hard-left, contemptuously poking in the eye their mostly traditional and mostly male audience.
• It shows that the far Left is winning, remaking our society in a form more pleasing to their ideology. Almost uncontested.
• It means the West is going full Weimar. That didn’t end well last time.
• It probably means other things. Things of great significance but beyond my pay grade to see.

I’ll add a speculation of my own to the list.  I suspect that as men dressing as women becomes more and more common, we are going to see women start to fear being mistaken for men.  For many decades the trend has been for women to ape men, starting at least in the 1920s with Amelia Earhart and her peers.  This has progressed so far that today we have two kinds of clothing and styles:

1. Clothing and styles everyone can wear.
2. Clothing and styles men must not wear.

For a woman to be seen as “crossdressing” she has to not only put on the apparrel and hairstyle of a man, but she has to make a concerted effort to pass herself off as a man.  This isn’t true for men.  If we see a dude with a full beard but with a woman’s haircut and wearing a dress, we still recognize this as crossdressing.  We would in fact recognize it instantly if he were merely wearing women’s shoes.  But a woman not wearing any women’s clothing (there is no longer men’s clothing) with a butch haircut isn’t seen as crossdressing unless she goes by a man’s name and speaks with a false deep voice.  It is possible for a woman to crossdress in our society, but it takes extreme effort.

Yet as men are pushing the envelope from the other direction this creates an entirely new problem for feminists.  While they want to be like men, they don’t want to be mistaken for a man, or at least for a transvestite.  They may applaud Jenner, but they don’t want to be mistaken for him.  Making this all the worse is that transvestites very often do want to be mistaken for women.   This can create very uncomfortable situations for women who just a few years ago would have been seen as having great moxy;  now they aren’t seen as women dabbling at being men but the reverse!

For an admittedly extreme example of this, see the NY Post story Grandma sent to all-male jail after mistaken for transgender man.  In that case, a woman who doesn’t look that out of the ordinary was mistaken for a transvestite.  She does have a very manish expression about her, but this is commonplace for women in this age.  Tragically her jailers refused to believe her when she assured them she was a woman, and she spent a harrowing 10 hours locked up in a holding cell with 40 men.

When a corrections officer asked the nurse if she had physically examined de Veloz, she brushed her off, firing back, “She’s a man” — and then walked away, the Miami Herald reported.

…

“You are a woman. Good luck if you’re alive tomorrow,” a corrections officer told her, according to the suit.

It may seem obvious that the nurse should have physically checked to see what kind of bits de Veloz has, but we live in a complicated world.  While de Veloz is suing her jailers for not checking her bits, The NY Post has another story about an inmate suing jailers for doing just that: Transgender woman forced to show genitals in jail, called a ‘he-she’: suit

A transgender woman in Texas was forced to show her genitalia to jailers who questioned her sex in Dallas County after she was arrested on a weapons charge, an explosive lawsuit claims.

…

“Ms. Jackson has suffered trauma, felt demoralized, anxious, stressed, a loss of dignity, and fear,” the lawsuit states, adding that county officials violated the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, which prohibits jails from examining transgender or intersex detainees solely to determine their gender.

But it isn’t just jailers who face confusion on the issue.  As crossdressing becomes more and more accepted, even promoted, we will all face this quandary.  After all, if you looked at both women in the respective news stories (here and here), the man dressing like a woman looks more feminine than the manish woman.

I suspect that just as we have seen men responding to women trying to look like men by growing beards and lifting weights, we are likely to see women’s fashions similarly react to men encroaching on women’s territory.  If I’m right, this won’t just show up as a resurgent appreciation for skirts, dresses, and non-sensible shoes.  I suspect this will show up in women’s facial expressions as well.  Today nearly all women are terrified of presenting a quiet, gentle spirit.  But as men continue to get better at looking like women, women are going to find themselves more and more afraid of being mistaken for men.