TRANSform Me: Phaea

In this episode of “TRANSform Me,” the makeover subject is Phaea, a woman in her late twenties who desires a makeover for her upcoming engagement party. The three transgender makeover specialists arrive in an ambulance called the “Glambulance,” portraying a sense of urgency, which heavily correlates with the life or death rhetoric depicted in “Intervention.”

Once the three “transgender women” arrive in her home, a term that is often repeated to reiterate their capacity for conducting visible “transformations,” they immediately draw attention to the ways in which her clothing may or may not “turn on” her husband. Her “walk around the house clothing,” is then stigmatized as that which does not adhere to the normative belief that female-bodied individuals must embody a position of a hyper-feminine sexualized object. They emphasize her choice of underwear as that which is too “frumpy” and not “sexy” enough for her husband’s sexual delight. In focusing solely on her appearance in terms of her contribution to her heterosexual relationship, the show is situated within a heteronormative discourse, implying that only normative (heterosexual) women are capable of cosmetic rehabilitation. This sense of rehabilitation is supported as the transgender women often discuss beauty as that which comes from the inside out, as well as by displaying images of the women from when they were previously “more together” in their appearance. The makeover specialists explicitly state that they are “uniquely qualified” to conduct such makeovers, as they have similarly unleashed their own “inner womanhood” on the outside, as well as on the inside. Phaea herself even states, “I was almost intimidated because they’re so much more ‘women’ than I think I could ever be,” reaffirming the hyper-femininity of the transgender women as that which all women should embody.

The episode proceeds as makeover specialist Laverne takes Phaea away to “have a heart-to-heart,” in which they discuss the root cause of her “affliction,” while the other makeover specialists Jaime and Nina search through her closet, situating Phaea as a spectacle in which her feminine presentation is infantilized. In her heart-to-heart with Laverne, Phaea cites her mother’s lack of femininity as the cause of her “unhappiness” and “lack of control” with her appearance. This rhetoric of “being out of control” is essential to the rehabilitative process, as that which necessitates this process, and one that which we have found is integral in all rehabilitative reality television shows. In stigmatizing the non-normative, the viewer is made to believe the universal underlying potential for all to be “rehabilitated” to appear more visibly normative. As Jaime and Nina search through her closet, they often comment in disgust upon items of clothing that “do not belong in a female closet” and “ew, boys clothes,” reinforcing seemingly uniform clothing in adherence to gender binaries, and re-stabilizing their own femininity.

The episode progresses as Laverne, Jaime, and Nina attempt to make Phaea “more sexy” from the inside out beginning with a burlesque photo shoot that is to act as an “empowering” step. They dress her in a purportedly “sexy” outside of garters and a bustier, which Phaea feels is “not sexy” because it seems to be a “fake sexy,” rather than authentic. This constructs strict and static boundaries of “sexy” for the viewer, and resituates Phaea as a spectacle due to her desire to embody a “sexiness” that exists outside of those boundaries. The makeover specialists encourage her to proceed with the photo shoot, as it will allow her to exhibit this sense of “inner sexiness,” although the act of photographing her “sexiness” dehumanizes her as a sexual commodified object, to be consumed by her fiancée.

Phaea’s rehabilitation is completed with the reveal of her cosmetic makeover to her fiancée, family, and friends at her engagement party. Laverne, Jaime, and Nina appear at the engagement party wearing similar sparkly dresses, making them appear uniform in presentation and depicting to the viewer a notion of a seemingly static visibility for transgender women through emphasizing their ‘othered’ identities as transgender women. The fiancée’s positive reaction is the most emphasized during the reveal, marking the success of the makeover as one that rehabilitated Phaea to fit within a heteronormative framework of feminine sexualized embodiment. The episode ended with us feeling pretty…weird, because we thought she looked better before her “rehabilitation”… And her name means ugly in Spanish... Weird..