On Hedwig and Transgender Identity

To be fair, Hedwig and the Angry Inch was created a long time ago in trans representation terms.  The off-Broadway show opened in 1998, after The Crying Game but before Boys Don’t Cry.  This was ages before Laverne Cox, Caitlin Jenner, and the present still-messy-but-generally-trying-to-sort-itself world of trans representation.  All of which is to say, I expect Hedwig to get stuff wrong, and I don’t expect its portrayal to be entirely without offense.  (A few spoilers.)

That said, there’s still some craziness here, enough that I tend to think of Hedwig as transsexual, a term I usually bristle at, rather than transgender.  That’s because I don’t really see Hedwig identifying as female prior to her mishandled gender reassignment surgery.  The impression I get is that, pre-operation, “slip of a girly boy” Hansel merely wants to pose as a woman to get out of East Berlin with his American boyfriend.  He would maybe reassume the pretense on occasion for Green Card purposes, but it seems to me that it’s only intended to be “pretend.”  It isn’t until Hansel’s boyfriend points out that they have to marry before they leave – which, in East Germany, means a complete physical – that surgery is proposed and Hedwig is born.

So, instead of a trans woman whose gender reassignment is botched, we have a gay man who “becomes” a woman in a desperate bid to escape Communism, whose “sex-change” is botched.  That’s different.  It’s also totally wild, more of a comment on how much East Berlin sucked than an exploration of trans identity, with a helping of how rough it must’ve been to be gay in East Germany in the 1980s.  This is so different that I can’t get too outright upset at Hedwig for it (it’s also the reason I don’t really mind men playing the character.)  After all, this is a blatantly fanciful scenario that doesn’t pretend to resemble the lives of trans people.  Its greatest sin is that it can confuse the conversation and reinforce the false notion that someone “decides” to be trans.  To be sure, these aren’t small potatoes, but again, the whole story is so outrageous that I hope most would know not to use it as a crash-course in trans identity.

Despite the muddle, however, the show still provides some interesting insight into gender, even if it’s not as trans-specific as one might initially think.  I’m intrigued that, even though Hansel never gave any indication of identifying as female, once the surgery is over, Hedwig absolutely considers herself a woman, from the pronouns on.  Due to the complications with the operation, she feels “in-between,” not entirely one or the other, but after the surgery, she definitely lives as female.  I wonder why this is.  Is she simply making the best of “what [she has] to work with?”  Is it because she likes the wigs, heels, and glitter, none of which are categorically female but tend to be coded that way?  Is it because, having lost her penis, she feels she’s not allowed to be a man?  It isn’t until the very end of the show that Hedwig seems to come around to a more male identity again.  It’s not entirely clear; the change in Hedwig’s tattoo shows that the two half-faces have come together, so it may be that Hedwig is acknowledging herself as equally male and female, and she’ll decide in her own time what that looks like.  What is evident is that this is when Hedwig appears to come to terms with herself.  This could take us back to problematic territory if it’s suggesting that Hedwig has stopped “pretending” and has gone back to being male as he was “supposed to be,” but then, if Hedwig didn’t originally identify as female, it shouldn’t be wrong to stop doing so.  Still, if the outside concerns can be put aside for a minute (not to downplay them, but this whole situation is so tangled that it’s hard get much traction,) that finale image of Hedwig, at peace with whoever she or he may be, is a strong one.