Okay, so I have a lot of feelings about Forced Gender Reassignment and Cattle Decapitation as a whole. Both positive and negative.
I do want to mention the positives first. Chief among them, I think, is that the members of Cattle Decapitation are just phenomenal musicians. Their music is fantastic. Travis Ryan’s vocals are some of the most versatile and powerful vocals I’ve listened to and they get better with each album. The guitar work is phenomenal and I’ve stolen tricks and techniques from their songs myself. Forced Gender Reassignment is a song I listened to a lot growing up, and I still listen to it. It’s a really good song.
It’s a song (I think) about a serial killer murdering people who are vehemently transphobic. In the plot, they perform gender reassignment surgery on those transphobes before killing them. (Note: these surgeries are generally called gender confirmation surgery in the real world. That does not seem to apply here.) The whole idea is to present the idea of “What if you were stuck in the wrong body” to a primarily cis audience. Which I applaud. And I’ll be honest, I don’t really mind the extreme gore and violence. Cattle Decapitation has a history of trying to argue for good, progressive policies and causes using extreme gore. I don’t know how effective it is, but it’s fun in the same way horror movies are fun. What gets me though is the hyperfocusing on the genetalia of trans individuals. As if the primary “source” and determiner of our gender is our genetalia.
Maybe I’m asking too much from a silly, gorey song about murdering transphobes. And it’s not like there are a billion songs or pieces of media about the trans experience that are primarily consumed by a cis audience. So just having some representation is nice. I just dislike the way that our existence, dysphoria, experiences are so often focused on sex and genital discomfort. It’s a problem in media in general, I think. This website is just me rambling, and this is more rambling. But as much as I love this song, and as much as I sometimes need a story of transphobes getting horribly murdered, I think it still carries some of the biased perspectives through which trans stories are told, even if by accident.
