Now that we have begun to explicate the theory of gender underlying Natalie’s work, we can see how this theory manifests and continues to develop in her controversial video The Aesthetic. This video once again adopts the pretense of a debate between two of Natalie's characters. The first character is named Tabby: a furry who wears an antifa pin and represents a caricature of radical leftist trans women. Tabby is uninterested in passing, uninterested in appealing to cis people’s sensibilities and expectations, and focused on political militancy. In stark contrast to Tabby is the second character in this video: Justine, a conventionally passing trans woman with an emphasis on passing and appealing to dominant notions of gender.

While Natalie has insisted that neither character speaks for her, it is worth noting that one is dressed as a cat and regularly grooms herself throughout the video, while the other is a conventionally attractive trans woman who more or less argues that cis people’s expectations ought to be taken seriously. Natalie can insist that Justine does not speak for her, but the framing of Tabby as a pathetic and patently absurd caricature of radicalism already frames her position as comical and naive. Meanwhile, Justine reflects the views that a cis audience would already bring to the table and is also coded as serious and rational. This frames her view in a favorable manner. Regardless of Natalie’s intentions, Justine is framed as a protagonist in this conversation. Moreover, the views that Justine puts forward fit in well with Natalie’s previous theory of gender and appears to reflect some of Natalie’s own views.

The main part of the video begins with Justine chastising Tabby for her “ridiculous” appearance in a previous debate with another character: Dr. Abigail Cockbane. In this previous debate Tabby responds to misgendering at the hands of Abigail by exclaiming “that’s a human rights violation” before lifting a baseball bat and threatening to “smash your fucking face.” While it is obvious that this is a satirical depiction of trans radicals, we might wonder why Natalie feels the need to use caricatures of angry trans women for laughs.

Justine insists that Tabby ought to wear a dress because, “if you want to get misgendered less, it helps to femme it up a little.” She continues to object to Tabby’s behavior in this previous debate, arguing that it constitutes a bad representation of trans women. When Tabby replies that, “it is not morally wrong to stand up to your oppressors,” Justine retorts that it is not “much worse than morally wrong, it was aesthetically wrong… it’s bad optics, it’s bad aesthetics.” Tabby, predictably responds that not everything is about optics and that she is a woman even though she is unfeminine and not socially perceived as a woman. She insists that her womanhood is a matter of reality. To this, Justine asserts the central claim in her argument: “Reality plays no role in politics; politics is aesthetics.”

To substantiate this thesis, Justine argues that politics is not driven by philosophy but is driven by aesthetics and pageantry. She concludes that politics needs to be undertaken by trans women through their own involvement in pageantry and aesthetic production. Justine points to the ascendancy of Trump as a evidence for the dominance of aesthetics and spectacle within the political sphere. The rise of a “reality show president” is understood as indicative of the fact that we live in an age of spectacle, not an age of reason. Justine points to a live stream debate that Natalie previously had with Blair White to prove her point. She argues that while Natalie had better arguments, this was irrelevant because Blair looked in charge and passed, while Natalie “looked like an awkward dude in an anime wig.” While this is an obviously cynical interpretation of events, it reflects Justine’s central thesis that politics is not about reason.

This leads Justine to assert another cynical claim: to be a trans woman with a sizable public following, you have to “look like a fucking woman.” Tabby responds by pointing out that this is meaningless because women can have a variety of visual appearance that can include beards or baldness. In response, Justine points out that society has a very low opinion of those women.

The video then devolves into a comic back and forth between Tabby and Justine before returning to the philosophical content of Justine’s argument. She suggests that Tabby ought to read up on Judith Butler (previously mentioned in What is Gender), who she interprets as saying that “gender is performance… womanhood is not what you are, it is what you do.” She argues that there is a sense in which trans women are pretending to be women, precisely because being a woman is to perform an ideal notion of womanhood. Furthermore, she explains that gender nonconforming cis women are punished by society precisely for their failure to perform correctly. For Justine, womanhood is defined experiential, but that experience is conceptualized primarily in terms of performativity. In this sense, Justine develops the experiential theory of gender previously deployed in both What Is Gender and Terfs.