Castration Anxiety in Depicting Transgender Women in Comedy

In class, we’ve broadly discussed the male castration fear when confronted with a woman.
“But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified.” - Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema” 840.

Another aspect of castration fear has not been explored by the articles we have read. This aspect we see often in modern comedy, and I should like to take How I Met Your Mother as an example. This is the fear that the gorgeous woman who has tricked the male protagonist into dating her, but actually has a deep dark secret: the absolute deal breaker, the ‘fatal ‘O’-moment’. This is the point where the male protagonist finds out that the women he’s dating is transgender, and either has male genitalia or used to have male genitalia. I’ve added three video examples.

Video 1: from 2.00-2.58

The first video is a fragment from season 2, episode 9, titled ‘Slap Bet.’ In this video Robin hides a secret from her friends and boyfriend, Ted Mosby, about why she doesn’t like to go to malls. Ted worries about this, wondering why she won’t tell him. Barney tells him he ought to be happy about the fact he doesn’t know everything about Robin, so there’s lesser chance he might experience the ‘fatal ‘O’-moment. Het explains that this is the moment that you find out that one detail about a person that is going to be a deal breaker. Barney’s deal breakers are women that do not want sex, women with eating disorders and women over thirty. Like we’ve seen in the presentation in the third class, the age of thirty seems to be a deal breaker for a lot of men in television and movies, and for the spectators as well. Ted disagrees with Barney, and thinks that the ‘O’-moment should be sooner rather than later, because the alternative is finding out on your wedding day that you cannot marry the person you’re in love with because of their damning previously hidden characteristics. In Ted’s worst scenario case, this means that the person he’s marrying suddenly declares that she used to be a man. Used to be, and since Ted is not a ‘waiting until marriage’ guy, supposedly he and his girlfriend would have had sex already, so his girlfriend will have transitioned completely. Moreover, he is in love with her and is going to marry her. But finding out she’s trans and used to have a penis is a deal breaker.  This deeply transphobic joke points to another kind of castration fear. When men look at women they note her absence of the penis and fear that they might undergo the same fate. When men in comedy look at transgender women, they see a woman that used to have a penis but actually had it removed, or they see a mutilated man, since often a transgender woman is because of how her body used to be in the past denied her own gender identity. This is the castration fear made real and tangible, and arouses such fear in a man that he could not continue to be associated with her anymore.

Video 2: from 6.00 - 6.13

Since How I Met Your Mother often shamelessly recycles its jokes, we see the same joke in the second video, a fragment from season 3, episode 8, titled ‘Spoiler Alert.’ Ted’s friends have noticed something about his new girlfriend, but they won’t tell him what, since it will be the ‘glass-shattering moment’ (new name, same thing) that will make Ted want to break up with her. His mind goes into overdrive again, and wonders again if she told his friends that she used to have a penis. In response Barney spits out his drink; he is the only one we see reacting. Had this scenario been real, it would certainly have meant an end of their relationship, even if his girlfriend completed her transition. Ted cannot overcome his castration anxiety.

Video 3: 14.30 - 15.00

However, a woman not having fully transitioned or a transvestite is not accepted either. The third video is a fragment of season 7, episode 6, titled ‘Mystery vs History.’ The joke is essentially the same. Ted has decided not to look up his date online beforehand, since it takes the fun out of dating. However, Barney and Robin have found out something about Jenny, his date, and urge him to look at it. In his mind, Ted is freaking out over what might be Jenny’s ‘deep, dark secret.’ The first option is that Jenny is actually a prostitute and was only interested in Ted’s money. The second option horrifies Ted even more, which is that Jenny has a penis and is either a not fully transitioned transgender woman or a transvestite man. This is not castration anxiety, because Jenny still has her penis. Ted probably immediately makes a sexual connection and since his preference for female genitalia makes him unable to have sex with this woman, he recoils in shock. His ‘O’-moment might be the same as Barney’s, namely ‘no sex’, or it could be his fear of the breaking of a gender binary he experiences as fixed.

According to Mulvey, the male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: “preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object, or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.” (Mulvey, 840).

Neither of these avenues are depicted with the castration anxiety invoked by transgender women; in modern comedy the possibility that she is transgender is followed by the implication that if she was, she would be completely removed from the story. But ‘luckily’, she never turns out to be transgender. The fear is used as punchline, for a cheap laugh, and that’s the end of it. Is this because the fear invoked by this castration anxiety is not manageable and there are no avenues of escape?