hari nef is a barbie. i know her. i don’t really know her. i know people who know her. we’re from the same hometown. i went to North for high school, she went to South. i saw her in a play, playing i can’t remember if it was Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. it might have been Parade? and now she’s a barbie.
she started transition much earlier than me, maybe even a decade. she is hot svelte and femme. she passes easily, to my eyes anyway. i think deschamp-braly did her face. it might have been harrison lee, though, i don’t remember. it might have been spiegel, which would make sense; his practice is in our hometown. i had a video consult with him. he called me ten minutes early, while i was on the toilet. i was flustered. he was an asshole.
barbie is a movie about a fake woman becoming a real woman. she is a flattened image of a woman, a repository for every unattainable stereotype and body norm. she’s horny collective psychic runoff poured into an hourglass mold.
she has a crisis of self, crumbling under the weight of expectation. she goes into the real world and learns what real women experience. she decides she wants to live as a real woman, with all the pleasure and pain that entails. at the end of the movie, we know she has become a real woman because she has a pussy now. it’s a big joke, and people wrote articles about it.
in barbie, anyone can be a barbie, and barbies can be anyone. there’s a fat barbie, brown barbies, and the aforementioned trans barbie. the barbies hail each other. hi barbie, hi barbie. i don’t remember my althusser well enough but he wrote that the act of hailing is an act of categorization, jamming a unique individual into a legible category. you, there. excuse me, sir. how many, sir? sir. hi barbie, hi barbie. margot robbie and hari nef are both barbies, because anyone can be a barbie, and when you’re a barbie, everyone recognizes you as one. they can just tell.
i had surgery on my face at the beginning of 2023, and i got more in early 2024. i’d been on hormones for about eight months when first i got it, which is early in transition, probably too early. the idea of this surgery is to make you look more feminine. what that means is kind of an open question. there’s the phrenological aspect of it, getting closer to a “woman’s skull,” with its particular proportions and contours. when you do research on reddit, it’s a lot of that. there’s a lot of talk about brow ridges. you can spend a lot of time staring in the mirror, wondering about those.
but more the surgery is about the net effect of those features, and the impression they collectively create in producing the face the world sees, and how they interpret it. what color light your face sets off in their brain, pink or blue. how you’re hailed. excuse me sir. hi barbie.
or it’s about the face you see in the mirror, and whether it feels like it’s yours, or if you could at least come to accept it as yours. whether it makes you elated or nauseous. whether seeing a photo of you that you yourself didn’t take feels radioactive, and whether opening the text containing it feels like psychic russian roulette.
and then there’s the question of subtle or aggressive. whether you’re okay with looking like you’ve had work done or not. i read reviews of one doctor i consulted with, renowned for pioneering complete face transplants; he has his own wikipedia page. girls say he only makes one kind of nose, the narrow swoop kind. hari nef has that nose, god bless her.
my nose looked pretty similar after my first surgery, a little straighter and narrower at the tip, though i had a hard time seeing the difference. it was still recognizably my nose, which is nice, recognizably semitic, but i worried the work was too subtle, that it still reads as a man’s nose, whatever that is. people tell me they can’t tell i had work done, and i don’t know whether to be thrilled or panicked, whether it succeeded or failed. if people can tell you had work done, they at least know you’re trying for something.
when people talk about the surgery, they usually insist, it’s about what you want, ultimately. it’s your transition. i had more of my nose shaved as part of my revisions. my doctor did the opposite of what i asked, making the ridge more concave in profile, rather than convex with the kink in it preserved. it’s got a swoop to it now. it’s kind of funny. i made one decision, he made another, and that’s my nose now.
hari nef has high full cheeks and a narrow jaw, a narrow nose, sharp brows, soft eyes. her voice is maybe a tell but mostly if you’re attuned to Trans Girl Voice. she’s an actor. she knows how to move, how to emote, how to make herself read female. she is, recognizably, legibly, a real woman. hi barbie.
i get misgendered a lot. sometimes it ruins my day and sometimes it’s fine. it’s happened less since revisions, though a lot of the time people avoid gendering me at all. “look out for that person,” people tell their kids. kids and men stare at me. i spend a lot of time staring at my reflection, at different angles, trying to see what needs revising. i don’t get “miss” very often; usually on planes, when i’m masked. i consider it a success when someone at least doesn’t know how to categorize me. go ahead, sir. go ahead, miss. go ahead.
when i watched barbie i felt an intense pang of yearning every time hari was on screen. there is an alternate universe where i am the one who transitions at 20, or whenever, around then. i came out to a friend at the end of high school, and then i went back into the closet. in that alternate universe i keep all my hair. hormones make my hips grow and my pelvis tilt. my neck and shoulders are svelte. my skin is tight, my cheeks are high and full. i am her. i am the kind of girl she is. i can be whatever kind of girl i want, because everyone knows i’m a girl. everyone can tell. i could even cut my hair short. can you imagine? in the movie, the barbie with short hair is the fucked up and ruined one; she’s played by kate mckinnon, who is unbelievably gorgeous. hi barbie.
in the movie, the Big Monologue tells us that womanhood is fundamentally a bond of shared pain. the impossible tightrope, never being too much or too little. tip your head in one direction and that’s how cis women draw the circle of their radical feminism to exclude trans women – you don’t get to skip the line if you haven’t suffered like we’ve suffered, cried like we’ve cried, bled like we’ve bled. tip your head in the other and it’s how cis women draw the circle to include us – hate your face and body? feel like no amount of effort’s ever enough? welcome to womanhood, sis.
either way, there’s a circle, carefully drawn. if you’re in the circle you’re a barbie and if you’re a barbie you’re in the circle. and who wouldn’t want to be in the circle. there’s a fun sexy party in there (sure, it’s mostly skinny femmy cis women, but look, there’s a skinny femmy trans woman in there too now). and if the circle is drawn in pain, shouldn’t you be willing to endure any amount to get in? didn’t hari?
i read Females a couple years before i transitioned. andrea long chu says femininity, and transfemininity, is about desire, not essence, or at least that’s what i remember from it; i’m better at gists than specifics. lack and desire, and especially being penetrated by other people’s desires. transition is a form of finally surrendering to your own desires. i’m probably getting that wrong. in barbie, at the finale, she becomes a real woman through an act of will, a statement of desire. she opens herself to the world. she wills herself into having a pussy. it’s very second wave. we should all be so lucky.
the world has penetrated me with desires. it’s impregnated me with them. at least i can be pregnant with something. i want to be legible, so badly. i want it so badly sometimes i feel like i don’t have enough breath, and i will fold over at the waist and die. if i think too hard about the possibility that that might not be possible for me i want to die. i want to be hailed, neatly and cleanly, without confusion or fuss. hi barbie.
does that require a particular kind of nose? do my lips need to sit at a particular point between my chin and nose, to achieve a particular ratio? did my doctor get that right, or will i need to go back under? do i have enough skull left to shave? anyone can be a barbie, with enough time, money, the right health insurance, the right employment situation, the right skeleton, access to the right doctors, enough of a head start, a big enough support network. if nobody kills you, you can be a barbie too, visible and invisible, DJing for the other barbies in insert shots.
supposedly i can become a real woman through an act of will. but women look a particular way, even if they can look any way they want. anyone can be a barbie, and a barbie can be anyone. i don’t remember if that was the exact line. all that collective psychic runoff is sloshing around inside me, too, but i don’t get tits out of it, just a narrow set of prescriptive desires, for a trajectory that arcs like the textbook rhinoplasty ski slope, cute and graceful and ever upwards, a sheer fatal drop off on either side that we simply won’t think about, a legible medical plasticized-but-natural transition, until i’m simultaneously barbie and real woman, with the pussy to prove it, seen by all, loved by all, like hari, like margot, hi barbie, hi barbie.