Purple Girls

I’m trying to reconstruct versions of conventional womanhood I can live with here, so be nice.

Ask a transgender girl what her favorite color is. It’s probably purple.

Why purple? She might not say. She may not know why, or she may know and not want to admit it. But she likes purple because it isn’t pink.¹

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I here propose the following taxonomy of Purple Girls:

Purple Girls are defined by not being Pink Girls [like oppositional sexism but not evil]. Therefore in order to create an interpretive framework of Purple Girls we must first put together a workable definition of Pink Girls.

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I. PINK GIRLS

The Pink Girl is central. She is not necessarily the protagonist but she is part of the social web binding characters together. She typically presents as conventionally feminine; she is often blithe — or employing the appearance of blitheness towards her own ends. Likewise with morality, norms, and culture: she exists within a system, whether she passively accepts her lot or uses that system to her advantage. She is a girl’s girl. She is often blonde, and many people confuse blondeness for Pinkness. She is often femme, and many people confuse femmeness for Pinkness.

Barbie is Pink. Galinda Arduenna Upland is Pink. Madoka Kaname is Pink. Princesses, from Cosette to Daenerys, are Pink. The Pink Girl may lack agency but Pinkness does not mean incompetence or a lack of internality; Elle Woods, Kit Kittredge, and Nancy Drew are archetypically Pink. Plucky girl protagonist-types like Lyra Belaqua, Princess Cimorene, or September Morning Bell (of A Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, which goes as you would expect given a title like that) are Pink almost by definition — each of those three would much rather wear pants and that can absolutely be a Pink trait, as Pinkness can be associated with sensibility, in both senses. Gideon Nav is Pink, actually. Katniss Everdeen is a Pink Woman’s badly-written idea of what it would be like to have Purple Girl traits; Finnick Odair, sold for his body and fomenting rebellion via social connection, is Pink. Nanny Ogg, the actual strongest Witch on the Disc, is Pink. The threat Makima represents is as Pink as Pink gets. Rosemary Kierstein’s Steerswoman novels are dear to me as precious stories about cartography and science as Pink woman-coded enterprises (although of course men are welcome to participate).

Having many expertises is Pink. Knowing what to reach for and where is Pink; knowing when you’re in over your head and calling a friend with subject matter expertise is Pink. Assessment is Pink; control, over others and the self, is Pink; awareness of the delineations between soft and hard power is Pink. Effective management, delegation, and teaching are all Pink virtues. The Pink Girl grows into a woman who is confident in her womanhood — or at least, a woman annoyed by the way people treat her because of her womanhood, not with womanhood itself. The Pink Girl is defined by her relationship to convention: she is bound by it, manipulates it, or even creates it.

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II. PURPLE GIRLS

Purple Girls are defined by not being pink girls. But not usually in like a butch way.²³ The Purple Girl is not central to any community; she has a few close friends, if that. If the Pink Girl has a few scrappy friends, she may be part of an evil organization; if the Pink Girl serves authority, the Purple Girl is often a recurring thorn in her side. Rather than cultivating a network she may devote herself to a specific skill or expertise. Girls visibly flouting the rules or morality of their societies are almost always Purple.

Hermione Granger⁴ is Purple. Elphaba Thropp is Purple. Homura Akemi is Purple. Witches, from Agott Arklaum to Sycorax, are near-universally Purple because magic is definitionally in defiance of the Normal. Likewise, Purple Girls are often associated with physical violence. Motoko Kusanagi, Lisbeth Salander, and Saber (as the perfect emotionless King) are of this type — though even (or especially) in a setting where physical violence is common, the Purple Girl excels at committing it. Harrowhark Nonagesimus is Purple, and wants very badly to be Pink; Ianthe Tridentarius is Purple to Coronabeth’s Pink. Despite her hair color, Hitori Gotoh is Purple; Kita is her Pink Girl. As a bassist, Ryo Yamada is inherently Purple. Hornet is a princess but she’s Purple contextually to Lace (and Pink contextually to Shakra). Jo March is Purple. Baru Cormorant and Taylor Hebert, skilled and isolated control freaks, are extremely Purple. Granny Weatherwax, the begrudging leader the Witches don’t have, is Purple. Every major woman in Chainsaw Man who isn’t Makima is defined by Not Being Makima and is therefore Purple.

Self-destructing beautifully is Purple. Doubling down is Purple; martial arts are Purple; competition is not inherently purple but visibly playing to win often is. Cathartic Female rage is Purple; the Pink solutions are to either shut up about it forever or work puppet strings until the man responsible is dealt with. Purple virtues include independence, patience, subject matter expertise, and the calmer tsundere-nature. The Purple Girl is defined by her relationship to convention: she chafes at it, exists peripherally to it, or even, on rare occasions, escapes it.

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III. COMPARISONS

Now obviously every woman has contextually different feelings on every rule norm social more etc. Pink and Purple are interesting tendencies, not hard lines. But it’s a fun framework to play around with. Let’s define some binaries:

Purple Girls tend to be “Not Like The Other Girls”, until one of the Other Girls reaches out and is nice or they find a smaller, better-fitting group and can enjoy being Purple in peace. Pink Girls tend to have a very hard time accepting deviance, especially from themselves, until somebody explains to them the importance of diversity or they manage to figure out a way to connect to individual Purple Girls. This is what middle school is for.

Pink narratives want a Purple Girl to join them and use her abilities for good, validating the power of relationships, or, failing that, for her to be vanquished and social order restored. Purple narratives want a Pink Girl to be vapid, evil, or an accepting friend.

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IV. APPLICATIONS OF FRAMEWORK TO TRANS

Transgender women are basically always Purple Girls. This is unintuitive to me, as coming into one’s womanhood reads to me as a fundamentally Pink narrative. But there are a few reasons I think that account for this:

Pinkness is highly socially regulated. If you want the privileges (such as they are) of the gilded cage (It’s better than starving alone in a forest!) you’d better be compressible into the part, and transgender women haven’t been groomed for years for it.

Pink ideas of womanhood often contend with womanhood as objecthood, and transgender women, as women and human beings, aren’t interested in being treated like an object except for sexually sometimes.

The Purple Girl is alone, and trans women are always alone.

1. if she likes red, she is also a kind of purple girl but one who narratively frames herself as having agency. And a chuunibyou.

2. young proto-butches who haven’t quite figured it out yet have a tendency towards alt styles, like purple girls, but move past this.

3. Pink butches do happen; see Utena Tenjou or Beebo Brinker, at least in I Am A Woman where she bears symbolic community weight; further stories make her more Purple.

4. Sorry. It is, incidentally, very interesting that Hermione is a Purple Girl given how her author positions her, especially in light of tendencies that her author has.