I was on a ferry from Minori to Salerno, basking in the majesty of a coastal sunset, with its blue-purple skies with honey-gold haloed clouds, when I got an email. GQ’s Watch Editor was checking my interest in writing a piece on the alleged popularity of a certain Casio watch among trans men. My gut reaction was dismissal. Do trans men have a cultural identity with symbols as specific and commodified as a particular watch brand? Should we? Does this stratification effort indicate any “progress” beyond trans men’s emergence as a group recognizable enough to be a discreet target of advertising? To be sold back to ourselves, our agency and self-determination reduced to consumption? I clicked on the hyperlinked TikTok cited as evidence in the email’s body. “Why do all trans men have this fuckass Casio watch?” asked the creator. I looked down at my wrist; I was wearing it.
Of course, correlation is not causation. The Casio F91-W is the best-selling watch of all time (okay, technically the Apple Watch has surpassed it in sales, but to me, that’s not a watch; that’s a sad, tiny computer). The popularity of the Casio makes sense. The brand’s watches are durable, reliable, attractive, but not fussy. They also play well with any budget. They’re rarely at the top of anyone’s mind, but if you start looking out for them, they’re everywhere.
As it happens, my first Casio was the F91-W, which my ex-boyfriend (cis) got for me as a gift—one I explicitly said I wanted. I first noticed and started desiring the Casio during my freshman year of college, when another ex-boyfriend (trans)informed me he got his from American Apparel in high school in the first half of the 2010s. This was during the first wave of ‘90s-nostalgia-fueled hipsterdom.
If we zoom out, maybe it makes sense that if trans men were to have any cultural identifier, it should be a watch. It can be argued that wristwatches themselves are inherently transmasculine as they began as an accessory predominantly worn by women prior to WWI, at which point men adopted the style because checking your pocketwatch during battle is embarrassing (like, what? You have somewhere to be ?) Every watch you spy upon a wrist is just the crest of a wave pushed into view by innumerable personal, political, historical, cultural, and social forces. Of course, any object that generally serves one function but ranges in price from about $20 to “price upon request” is going to be laden with symbolic meaning.
So what does the Casio F91-W announce about its wearer? What does the popularity of Casios among trans men indicate about this group? Are Casios even disproportionately popular among trans men? To gauge the veracity of the supposed phenomenon, I turned to the amateur ethnographer’s field of study: Instagram Story polls. People love to weigh in, and I knew that if I designated a survey answer that cis people could click on despite not being the subject of the study, engagement would soar (not that this stopped a number of cis people from responding to the parts of the survey designated for trans men only. I love you dominant culture heads’ passion for participation!). The data supported the hypothesis. Of 929 self-identified transmasculine participants, 51% reported wearing a watch. Of the transmasc watch-wearers, 47% wore a Casio, while 53% wore a different brand. Of the transmasc Casio watch-wearers, 45% wore one like mine (the silver digital watch), 21% wore the same model in gold, and 34% wore a totally different Casio, such as a calculator watch or one with a plastic band.
