The story of cross-dressing Hollywood DJ Tatiana Alvarez has recently gotten attention—mostly because Warner Brothers has bought the rights to her story. Alvarez dressed as a man and booked her gigs using her male persona (Matt Muset aka DJ Musikillz) for an entire year after she got tired of being judged by her looks and losing bookings because of being a woman. She enlisted the help of friends to complete the transformation for gigs, and she found that, indeed, posing as a man immediately caused others to trust her as a DJ and to focus on her talent—rather than her pretty face.
According to an article in The Telegraph, “As a ‘man’ Alvarez was treated differently: offstage, she was ignored (‘People don’t look at you as much’); onstage, she was trusted to do the right thing. ‘When you’re a female, there are always other people on stage watching what you’re doing. They think you’re stupid and say the most condescending, amazing things, but when you’re a man they just leave you alone.’”
Alvarez’s recent experiment has brought renewed interest to the topic of women who have passed as men in the past, including writers, politicians, journalists, soldiers, doctors, and others. A different article in The Telegraph, and a similar one on HuffPost contain a brief introduction to the historical context for female cross-dressing and provide similar lists of “infamous” female cross-dressers, including Tammany Hall politician Murray Hall (Mary Anderson), novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), physician James Barry (Margaret Ann Bulkley), and WWI reporter Denis Smith (Dorothy Lawrence).
The reasons for women to cross-dress in the past are obvious; restrictions on women’s lives prevented women from voting and taking part in politics, attending university, and going to the front as either a soldier or a reporter. In the case of writers and artists, women’s creative output was often maligned or unfairly judged as substandard merely because of the author’s name and, therefore, gender. At the same time that George Eliot was publishing under her male pseudonym, other female authors who published using their real names were referred to as “Mrs.”, as in “a novel by Mrs. Gaskell.” In earlier time periods, women often published anonymously to avoid social censure for presuming to take up the pen at all.
It is both saddening and infuriating to see just how differently the abilities of men and women are still judged today—Alvarez’s story being a clear example of how men and women are treated differently. Many female authors continue to publish under male pseudonyms, or, like J.K. Rowling, choose to adopt a gender-neutral set of initials so that their work is not judged by their gender. Even book covers differ depending on the author’s gender, as publishers presume that books by women will only appeal to women. Author Maureen Johnson started a project online called “Coverflip” to draw attention to this discrimination against women authors, and the results are fascinating.
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While it is heartening to see that the stories of cross-dressing women are becoming more and more well-known, there is a danger that such stories will end up as mere fascinating fact rather than a rallying-call to change. Some articles that take up these stories of cross-dressing women, like this one at Time.com, suggest that we can learn from the women of the past who cross-dressed in order to fight in armed conflicts. Elizabeth Heideman writes that the valor and strength of female soldiers like Sarah Rosetta aka “Lyons Wakeman,” who fought in the American Civil War, demonstrate that women can indeed be as strong as men on the battlefield: “Today, as we raise the question of women’s readiness for combat, we only have to remember Rosetta Wakeman—and the countless other women who’ve secretly served alongside men—for our answer.”
Many of the laws that previously barred women from public life have been dismantled. Women today can attend university and major in whatever they choose to major in—yet few of them choose to major in certain fields, including computer science, engineering, finance, philosophy, and physics, to name only a few from different disciplines (for more on how major affects future earnings, look here). Women can take part in politics, but our newest Congress only has 20 female senators out of a total 100, and 84 female representatives out of a total 435.
Of course, the way that we train girls from a young age to think of themselves, their self-esteem, and their abilities is part of the problem. But the way that women continue to be perceived by men as less able, less intelligent, and less rational than men is a major issue. How else are we to explain the success of “DJ Musikillz”? Or, more poignantly, the continual bias against women (and minorities) in the academy, supposedly a bastion of liberal thought and progress (or tradition and stagnation, depending on your point of view)?
We cannot control how others think and we cannot force change overnight, but maybe there is still something to be learned from the cross-dressing women of the past. Their devil-may-care attitude, their bravado, their daring, and their determination to pursue their passions in spite of social expectations and even legal restrictions can be an inspiring example. I don’t think we should forget, however, that the world only accepted those women for their daring because they pretended to be men.
