Okay so you've seen the "how to do gender swap filter" trend all over TikTok. Everybody and their actual grandmother has done it. Last Tuesday night, it was like 1 a.m., I had cold coffee going stale on my desk, Lazarus the pothos was drooping (he does this for drama, not because he's actually dying, it's his whole thing), and I'd been staring at lyrics for three hours straight. I needed a break that didn't involve doomscrolling actual news so I opened the filter.
Meet Victor Rae.
Strong jaw, some stubble the filter imagined up, same green eyes I have in real life. He looked... honestly like someone who'd be taken seriously at a guitar shop. And I sat with that for a second. Then I sat with it for about an hour, because it cracked something open that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.
the filter is a parlor trick that reveals real things
I want to be clear, I'm not trying to make this into a Deep Philosophical Crisis. It's a TikTok filter. But what the gender swap filter does that's actually kind of genius is it forces you to confront the packaging. You look at this version of yourself with completely different social capital built in and you can't help but think about all the places where that capital would cash out differently.
Victor Rae would walk into a music venue and not get asked if he's there to pick someone up. Victor Rae would post a chord progression video and not immediately get twelve comments about his hands or his hair. He'd say something blunt and opinionated in a band rehearsal and it would just be called "having vision." When I do it there's still, STILL, in this year of our absence of the lord, a beat where someone has to decide whether to characterize it as difficult.
I'm not bitter about it the way I used to be. I've done enough internal work (and enough therapy I couldn't afford) to be more amused than angry most of the time. But the filter brought it back into focus in a weirdly specific, visual way. that's what the same brain and the same voice would look like with different armor on.
Gender as Performance, Gender as Packaging
Growing up evangelical, gender was not a performance. It was a divine assignment. And God had Opinions about what that assignment meant: modest clothes, a quiet spirit, submission to leadership (male, naturally), the spiritual gift of supporting someone else's calling rather than having your own. The girls in my youth group who were funny, loud, and opinionated, we were called "a lot." Said affectionately sometimes, but with just enough edge to mean dial it down, honey.
I was absolutely "a lot." Still am. I've just stopped apologizing for it.
But here's what the church accidentally taught me about gender that turned out to be accidentally correct: it IS performative, at least in part. Not in a dismissive "nothing is real" way, identity is real, it matters, it's felt in the body. But the way gender gets read by the world? That's entirely about cues, packaging, presentation, voice, space-taking. The church tried to control my packaging to keep me small. The irony is that all those years of being told exactly how to present "femininity" taught me to see the whole construction clearly.
Victor Rae doesn't have the same constraints built into his packaging. And when I saw his face on my phone screen at 1 a.m., I thought: yeah. I know exactly what you'd get to skip.
what "Victor" would have been allowed to feel
I've been writing a lot of heavy stuff lately, working through a song that's been giving me hell for weeks, trying to get the emotional truth of it right without tipping into performance. It's about anger. Real anger, not the stylized kind. The kind that lives in your chest and doesn't have a clean resolution at the end. And I keep running into this thing where I have to calibrate: how much is too much? Not in a "I'm censoring myself" way, I don't do that anymore, but just the lived awareness that angry women are categorized differently than angry men.
An angry man in music is passionate. He has conviction. He's a truth-teller. An angry woman is unhinged, or she's using her pain as content, or she needs to be careful not to alienate people who just came for the hooks. I've written about the angry woman narrative before and I'll probably write about it again because it keeps showing up in new containers.
Victor would get to be angry without the footnote. that's what I kept thinking. He could record the scream at the end of the track and nobody would need to explain it, contextualize it, make sure audiences knew he was okay. The scream would just be the scream.
I'm recording it anyway. Obviously. But I notice the weight I carry doing it that I genuinely believe Victor wouldn't.
The Specific Ways I've Been Treated as a Musician
Let me tell you some extremely real things that have happened to me in music spaces. Not catastrophic things, nothing I need a hotline for. Just the low-grade, constant, background-radiation stuff that you stop noticing until you do a gender swap filter and suddenly can't stop noticing.
I have been asked, at an open mic, if I was performing or "just watching." I was holding a guitar. I have had someone "helpfully" explain to me how the EQ on a PA system works. I run my own recording setup. I have been complimented on my "bravery" for writing personal songs, as if making autobiographical art is a special achievement that requires courage rather than just being the basic premise of singer-songwriter music. I have had my influences listed back to me as a compliment, "oh, you sound like [female artist], [female artist], and [female artist]," by someone who'd clearly never consider saying that to a male artist whose reference points were entirely male.
None of this is world-ending. I'm also aware that other people have it infinitely harder. But it accumulates. It's the weight of the packaging, the constant tax on existing in these spaces while being perceived as a woman.
Victor Rae would not pay that tax. that's just true.
the thing I actually want to say
Here's where I land, and this is important to me: I don't want to be Victor. I'm not interested in the alternate timeline where I got to skip the packaging tax by having different packaging. Because the packaging I have, the red hair, the tattoos, the voice, the whole chaotic creature that I am, that's actually the thing that makes the music. The anger in the songs is specifically a woman's anger. The grief in the songs is specifically about having been told my whole life that my job was to shrink. Victor Rae could not write "Not Your Object." He could cover it maybe, but he couldn't have written it from that place.
What I want, what the filter made me want more clearly, is not to be Victor. I want Victor's freedom applied to Vixen. I want to take up the space and be taken at face value in it. I want the scream to be just a scream. I want to walk into the venue and be the one they're expecting.
I'm working on it. The record I'm making is part of working on it. Every song I finish and refuse to sand down is part of working on it. Every one of you reading this who gets it, you're part of it too.
The other thing I noticed when I sat with Victor Rae's face on my screen: I wasn't jealous. Which surprised me, honestly. I expected something more like envy, the clean simple kind that says I want that. But it wasn't that. It was more like recognition across a distance. Like meeting a sibling you didn't know you had, who grew up in a different house with different rules, different reception from the world. Same starting material, different experience. I saw him and thought: I know who you are. You just didn't have to fight for the same things I did. That makes us related, not identical. And the thing I've been fighting for, the right to be taken seriously on my own terms in my own voice with my own anger intact, has made the music what it is. Victor doesn't have that specific thing. He doesn't need it. But I do, and it's mine, and the songs that come from it are worth something that couldn't have come any other way.
The thing about that filter experiment that I keep coming back to: I posted about it on TikTok and the number of women in the music space who replied saying they'd done the same thing and thought the same things was kind of staggering. Musicians, producers, engineers, just people who make things. All of us had that same split second of recognition looking at our filtered face. All of us had a version of the same thought. So maybe that's the real utility of a dumb TikTok filter at 1 a.m. Not the philosophy, but the confirmation that you're not alone in noticing. that the tax is real and other people are paying it too and none of us are imagining it. That matters more than I expected it to.
Lazarus perked back up by morning, by the way. He always does. I think he just does the dramatic droop to keep me company at 1 a.m. Solidarity, little guy.