the women who decide what a woman can be

viral chic/unchic lists, aesthetic surveillance, biological essentialism, and how queer women perform gender

I spent the better half of the last month recovering from my first covid infection. I actively participated in nostalgia culture by losing my sense of taste and being isolated in my home, which was objectively less fun today than in 2020 when I was going on a lot of walks and drinking fernet with a straw after my daily 20 minute YouTube HIIT class.

The brain fog and fatigue prevented me from getting any work done. I was operating at bare minimum capacity, and then punishing myself for spending the 12 days I tested positive laying around doing nothing, feeling bad for myself, and missing the taste of chocolate cake.

I had a lot of time to catch up on my pop culture, especially the kind that requires almost no brain power. In all of the content I read and watched, I noticed a trend that I can't seem to get away from even on Substack. An endless scroll of the same opinions chewed up and regurgitated on every platform, by women posing as cultural authorities, demanding that you take them seriously when they’re talking about what the cool girls are doing, what trends are so over, and what they believe is fundamentally unchic.

The Unchic Lists

Here is a non-exhaustive list of unchic things I’ve seen mentioned:

• Tattoos

• Visible brand logos

• Anything Lululemon

• Baggy denim

• Profanity

• Long fake nails, especially with loud nail art

• Crocs

• Wearing sports jerseys “in an unironic way”

• Pyjamas in public

• Any leggings outside of the context of a gym

• Camo

• Wearing clothes that don’t fit—specifically when they are too small

• Patchy lash extensions

• Girls that flirt with other girls’ boyfriends

• Big hoop earrings

• Visible bra straps

• Clear plastic heels

• Short nails

• Fake tanning

• Bright colours

• Smoking cigarettes

• Ugg boots

• Button down blouses that tie at the bottom

• Having roots

These creators sell content like this as harmless, albeit bitchy, opinions that no one has to listen to or agree with. First amendment rights! But the most interesting thing about what these everyday taste arbiters are saying is what they’re not explicitly saying. It takes almost no effort at all to recognize the subtext.

Participating in outdated trends like wearing leggings/letting your roots grow between hair appointments/not having perfectly filled lash extensions sends a message that you’re poor.

Being poor is unchic.

Wearing big hoop earrings, jewelry that has long been worn by Latina women as a symbol of pride in their ethnic identities, is unchic. Similarly, long nails with nail art, which were pioneered and popularized by Black women, are unchic.

Deviating from whiteness is unchic.

Wearing clear plastic heels—you know, the same ones often worn by strippers—are unchic.

Sex work is unchic.

Wearing clothes that are too small for you means you can’t be bothered to update your wardrobe when your body expands, or you don’t care enough to adhere to ideas of what fit is “flattering” for your figure.

Evidence of a woman’s weight fluctuations, or wearing small clothing in a fat body? Unchic.

Failing femininity 101

It’s a trap, obviously. One that functions through a sophisticated system of surveillance that is trained to look for cracks in the performance of femininity, and demand that it be fixed. And these girls, almost all of whom are white, thin, with freshly highlighted blonde hair, lips brimming with filler, sitting in their massive houses while holding a glass of rosé, or talking at the camera while beating their face into oblivion with $600 worth of makeup, are positioning themselves as the pinnacle of femininity and superior taste, while ignoring their immense privilege and access.

A woman’s aesthetic choices being right or wrong is also an admission that to perform femininity demands constant labour, and that labour is meant to serve cis men and the various structures they’ve created and enforced throughout history. A woman with chipped nail polish or exposed bra straps suggests that a woman might have priorities outside of acceptable gender performance, and that represents some fundamental failure in her.

But the silent competition of who is most authentically feminine goes so far beyond internalized misogyny that it makes the term sound cutesy. At best it’s designed for exclusion, and at worst, it’s a far-right, anti-trans dogwhistle.

The misogyny to biological essentialism pipeline

Aesthetic policing of gender, like what we see with these unchic lists, involves the same set of skills used to police trans people. It’s rooted in biological essentialism—the idea that expressions of femininity should reinforce biological sex. These lists intend to “help” women scrutinize the correctness of their own gender expression, but in doing so, they also train us to scan the bodies and aesthetic choices of everyone else and evaluate them using the same criteria.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this content is taking up so much space online now, because it’s also a moment where the very definition of who’s even allowed to call themselves a woman is being debated by the same governments that have proven to the world over and over that they don’t actually care about the safety or health of their citizens, cis or otherwise. In America, it’s deemed more acceptable for a child to be shot in the head with an AK47 by an incel during third period, owe a hospital $750,000 for cancer treatment, or be forced to drink lead poisoned water, than it is to express a gender that doesn’t align with the sex organs you were born with.

Those in power are completely obsessed with biological essentialism, a concept that also relies on the silent agreement that to be a woman is something that must be earned, and to earn it often means to suffer. Women suffer biologically by keeling over in pain and bleeding every month, enduring childbirth, experiencing the hormonal fluctuations they call us crazy for. It’s also social suffering—living in a constant state of fear of the men who believe they have legitimate reasons to hate us, the constant monitoring and adjusting of behaviour, the sharing of stories of harassment and dehumanization.

We treat the ability to identify as a woman like some violent hazing ritual that only people with a uterus “get” to experience. The reward is a membership to a life of more of that same violence. Transphobes conveniently ignore that trans women also suffer in many of the same ways cis women do, in addition to lifelong hormone treatments, gender affirming surgeries, being the subjects of constant scrutiny, and existing with a heightened threat to their physical safety.

This framework of earned womanhood through suffering creates the ideal conditions for women to police each other. If femininity must be achieved through aesthetic choices, suffering, and constant vigilance, then any woman who appears to be failing at this performance becomes a threat to the entire system. The focus is almost always on the ways that men subjugate us—because we expect them to. But it’s women that are some of the worst offenders of perpetuating the system men set up by surveilling and policing femininity on their behalf. This is effectively the most successful pyramid scheme of all time. It’s trickle-down sexual politics. And in the barely concealed eagerness to define each other, cut each other down, and force each other into appropriate gender compliance, we reduce womanhood to a game that can be won or lost.

These videos and op-eds are like a modernized finishing school that prepares girls and women to adhere to more insidious forms of compliance. When we accept that a random tradwife online has the authority to determine what’s unchic or unfeminine, then we also accept that a woman’s body and her choices are up for public debate. The same eye that decides what manicure is most appropriate, is ultimately the same eye that decides if someone’s bone structure is too suspiciously masculine for them to identify as a woman.

They transvestigated the new Pope, btw.

Queering self-awareness

Queerness, especially queerness that is divorced from the centering of cis men, offers a different framework.¹ Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity has explored this well. She suggests both queer and heteronormative expressions of femininity are a performance, but one key distinction is self awareness. While many straight women have at least some awareness of the damaging nature of traditional beauty standards for women, they often find themselves embodying and reinforcing the binary anyway. While there are straight women who resist certain forms of gender policing, most still unconsciously rely on the validation of men and other women to affirm how consistent (thus good) their performance is.

A queer feminine experience is far more self aware of that performance. In-community labels like masc/femme/butch offer proof of that. A femme may appear indistinguishable from a straight woman—she may even reinforce certain gender expectations, but because she's not performing for the validation of men, she's subverting the narrative. And for many queer women, gender expression is more fluid, often shifting over time—meaning it's inconsistent, and thus can't be evaluated in the same ways straight women are. This makes queer women often less susceptible to and more critical of gender rules imposed by other women, like the unchic lists.

It’s important to note that queer women don’t have some magical immunity to these systems entirely. Queer communities also have their own aesthetic hierarchies by which members are judged. But what the community offers is a gender performance that exists outside of heteronormative expectations, and that also makes it harder to argue that any form of femininity is biologically natural.

Anecdotally speaking, the vast majority of queer women (mercifully) couldn’t care less about the concept of authentic femininity, especially in reference to who passes as a woman, because their own performance of femininity isn’t as reliant on regulation, and many wouldn’t believe that it’s something that’s earned. They have the distinct awareness that gender is a performance. And when gender performance isn’t bound by heteronormative standards, or oriented towards cis men, people are less invested in policing gender, and there’s some data to support this. A 2023 survey in the UK found that 84% of cis lesbian women and 84% of cis bisexual women felt positively about trans people, whereas only 65% of cis gay men felt the same.

What this all suggests is that gender policing—from unchic lists to transvestigation—isn't inevitable. It's a choice. Every time we participate in these systems of judgment, we're not just forcing harmless opinions onto others, but we're reinforcing the very frameworks that women have been working for years to dismantle. And maybe if we just become a little more aware of it, we can be a little more free, too.

Until next time,

Ines

1. This comes with a footnote because there are still pockets of the queer community that are trans-exclusionary, and it would be wrong to suggest that issues of fatphobia, white supremacy, and economic discrimination don’t exist within it either.