Advantageous: Be the you you were meant to be

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Advantageous, 2015

When I was younger, I thought I knew exactly who the me I was meant to be was, and if the Center for Advanced Health and Living existed and could do what its marketing says it can do–seamlessly, painlessly transfer your consciousness into a new body–I might have jumped at the chance to take advantage of its services.

In the absence of such possibilities. all I could do was fantasize and pray. In middle school, I wanted nothing more than to wake up one morning and find that the grand cosmic error of my life had been corrected, that everyone now saw me as the girl I was. So that I could live honestly. So that I could be the me I was always meant to be.

But despite the fact that over the past two years I’ve undergone a few dramatic and difficult medical procedures that have helped to reduce my own gender dysphoria and let me live a somewhat happier life, I also now feel that “the you you were meant to be” is an unknowable ideal, the pursuit of which is pointless. 

In her spiel above, Gwen says, “Shouldn’t every woman be defined by the totality of her choices, rather than her race, height or health? These are things she often cannot control.” (You can add “the gender she’s assigned at birth” to that list.) But what Gwen isn’t saying or acknowledging is that those things we often cannot control have a direct impact on the choices we do or don’t get to make for ourselves. In fact, those things we don’t get to control have such a profound effect on how we’re seen and related to by individuals and by our culture as a whole that they cannot help shaping, to some extent, who we are.

As an example, my particular feminist awakening was a direct result of me experiencing certain facets of our culture first from the privileged position of being perceived as a straight white male, and then from the very different position of being seen as a white transgender woman. It illuminated power structures and value systems that had previously been practically invisible to me. 

Every time I’m misgendered, or reminded that many people don’t see me as a woman, it feels like my body is betraying me, and so I still sometimes think that my life might have been less painful if I’d been assigned female at birth, or even if I’d been able to seamlessly transfer my consciousness into a cisgender female body. But if that had happened, I’d also be a completely different person today, because my experience of the world would have been so different. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have the same convictions that I do. Can I really say that these convictions, which may be a direct result of something that I once longed to change about my life, are not part of “the me I was meant to be”? 

I liked Advantageous, which is streaming now on Netflix. It’s a sci-fi film that acknowledges the existence of the power structures and value systems I was talking about. Gwen, who is immensely skilled at her job but is also around 50 and Asian (things she cannot control) finds herself cast aside because more value is placed on other qualities that should be less important.

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I think I have some idea of what Gwen is feeling in that moment, thinking that maybe the things she cannot control (and that shouldn’t matter) are counting against her. People said that to me, too, the day I lost my job. “You’re going to land on your feet.” And in a way, maybe I have, or maybe I will. I still don’t really know. It all still feels scary and uncertain. It hardly ends up being easy for Gwen, either.

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Yes. There must be. But the market doesn’t always see it that way, and some “human existences” are given more value than others.

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So Gwen decides to offer herself up for the Center’s own breakthrough procedure, to let the Center take control of the things she herself cannot control. 

I won’t reveal what happens in the film’s final act. I will say that I think a big ethical issue goes unaddressed, and that I was hoping the film would explore the kinds of things I’ve been talking about, the ways in which our sense of ourselves is influenced by how other people perceive us and treat us. What would it do to Gwen’s sense of who she is, for instance, not only to look in the mirror and see someone who society places a different value on, but to experience that difference in the way the world treats her? 

The film has different things on its mind in the end, but still, it made me think about what Gwen lost, and about what I might have lost, too, if I’d gotten what I prayed for all those years ago, and had seamlessly, painlessly become the me I believed I was meant to be.