I'm the last to deny the value of art, literature, and cinema in enlarging our moral sensibilities, etc., etc., but look: the idea that one filmmaker's take on a man who transitions out of love and suffers for it is going to reveal a deep and universal truth about gender expression or identity is simply nuts.
The claim seems to be that this story (man falls for straight man, man becomes woman, man is still rejected by his beloved) is an example of the purported fact that our gender identity is primarily about gender presentation, and how we wish others to respond to this presentation. And I'd be a fool to deny that having others respond to one as an X is a big part of--a psychologically necessary component of, I'd say--identifying oneself as an X. But this just doesn't get Helen anywhere near what she wants (I'm assuming that What Helen Wants is to be warranted in saying "one ought not take up deviant gender identities; others are right to shame those who do; social institutions ought to discourage their creation, proliferation, and persistence").
I have to say, I'm not even sure I see where her argument is supposed to be going. It looks something like this:
1. The value in performing a certain gender role is in others' social validation of it, rather than in its congruence with your inner self;
2. And men want femmes;
3. And so does God, for that matter;
3. So strap on those stilettos, laydeez; that you prefer steel-toes is irrelevant.
Well, I would say that at least this makes more sense than the Underpants Gnomes' business plan, (Step 1: Collect underpants. Step 2: ? Step 3: Profit!) but I'm actually not sure about that. Remember that the whole dialectic (see here, here, and especially here) is Helen's attempt to give an internal critique of subversive gender roles--one that doesn't rely on their supposed Harm to Society (inevitably based on shoddy social science). So what she needs to show is that pursuing deviant gender identities is somehow self-defeating, and this she fails to do. After all, it is simply not the case that validation from social/sexual interaction is a monotonically decreasing function of distance-from-conventionality. Even if all we got out of gender performance was others' approval (or lack), many people would feel more validated by a subculture's acknowledgment of their genderqueerness than they would by 'passing' with the mainstream.
But Helen's mistake goes deeper than that. She seems to hate authenticity, so I'll avoid the term, but my preferred understanding of the philosophy of action makes me think that social recognition and acknowledgment matter as much as they do precisely because we need to maintain a sense of meaningful identity over time. That is, we need to understand our lives as narratives that matter, and this can't be done if we see ourselves as windowless monads acting out individualized scripts. The quest for personal identity (and even, gasp, authenticity) isn't in opposition to sociability, normative constraint, or tragic loss; it requires at least the possibility of all of these.
Helen's argument needs it to be true that subversive identities are doomed--that genderqueers will always fall in love with squares who can't deal, that transmen will inevitably find their sense of self disrupted by pregnancy, etc. But this is not merely bleak, it's wrong. Thomas Beatie seems to have no problem being a pregnant man; sometimes marriages continue when one partner transitions. Those few people willing to be openly gender-subversive typically derive not just pleasure but meaning from it, which is why, like the Christians in ancient Rome, they continue to do it despite persecution. About the only group for whom Helen's story seems remotely apt is the "ex-gay" movement, populated as it is with folks who found homosexuality incompatible with their religious beliefs, but anyone who takes the time to read through Disputed Mutability's archive (in comparison to, say, Eve's) must surely acknowledge the folly of prescribing that path for all.
Moreover, insofar as the tragedy with "ex-gays" derives from the difficulty with integrating deep aspects of sexual desire into a personal identity marked by precisely the traditionalist, religious norms Helen is trying to defend ... well, it looks a lot like her theory has a tragic narrative of its own: believing in it makes it true that one will experience the very moral dissonance and tragedy that the theory insists is inevitable. Well, no, thanks. Not when all it takes is reading, e.g., Sugarbutch to see just how much goodness and value--how much meaning--can be derived from what Helen would condemn as intrinsically deficient.
Look. It's true that gender identities are deeply entangled with sexual identities and preferences. What turns one on--what represents the beautiful, the sublime, the cute, and all the rest; what makes sex delicious or sacred or just fun--all of this has a lot to do with gender roles, with archetypes of social presentation (rather than just anatomy). And vice versa. So maybe this is what's driving Helen's about-face on butchness--if gender roles and sexual preferences are entangled, and we stop repressing deviant gender roles, might we arrive at her oft-ridiculed dystopia, that world where nobody knows who to fuck anymore?
Not so much. I've been ridiculing that dystopia for a reason; it's nuts. People would still need to find meaningful identities for themselves as sexual beings in a world with other sexual beings, and those identities would necessarily reflect extant traditions and practices, just as they do now. Even if sexual desires are quite socially relative, they're not particularly mutable for most individuals; even a society fully accepting of gender diversity would find that diversity anchored by both the need for social recognition and that relative immutability of desires. If anything, a flourshing of alternate gender identities would encourage everyone to be more thoughtful and conscientious about sexuality and gender. Helen fears a world of 12-year-old wallflowers, too bereft of shared understandings of sexual interaction to even get dates on Craigslist, but it's precisely our current, outmoded, ill-fitting gender dualism that leads to those wallflowers--and the 20- and 30- somethings that are their benighted future selves, the Nice Guys who can't get beyond the roles to see the people, and the all-too-common males who simply have no idea what they want out of sex or relationships because they've never had to think about it. (I'm sure there are equivalent female pathologies.)
So. Sure, most straight guys don't go for butch women. But substitute in "tomboy" or "Amazon" and suddenly "most" seems quite contestable; and Helen's corresponding assertion that there are no straight butches is just laughably wrong. Yes, sexual desire--both one's own and that of others--shapes gender identity and expression, and yes, most people throughout history have had tragically cramped understandings about all three (IBTP). But it's a blessing, not a curse, that economic, social, and technological shifts have increasingly provided space for gender and sexual deviance to flourish.
And once we see that flourishing for what it is, see those who reach for it as no more doomed or tragic (though certainly more vilified, and perhaps more self-conscious) than anyone else, then there's just nothing more to be said about arguments like Helen's. If you believe (straight) masculinity and femininity have value because of the way they enable flourishing through the constraints of tradition, if you're attracted to the metaphors of genre and poetic form, you should be on the front lines at the next Pride march.
If you want to argue God, of course, or make consequentialist arguments about social change--well, I don't think there's much to be said for those claims, either. But that's a different topic altogether.
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