It will surprise no readers of PJ that media have seen dollars rather than people when looking at trans lives over the past 100 years. From conservative German papers selling copy through attacks on Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft to paparazzi chasing Christine Jorgensen, the press first palmed its anti-trans blood money through the selective hounding of very few targets. Even so, lurid tales of perverted attacks on Aryan masculinity or the glamour girl ex-GI any man would want to bang — if you could stomach knowing her past — were so successful for their publishers and broadcasters that the stage was well set for the 60s sexual revolution.
The 60s saw more stories focussing on gay men, not surprisingly, than general issue trans women, built to media stereotype by that very media. But by the end of the decade Jan Morris’ Conundrum was released, sparking another feeding frenzy. Morris was a public figure before transition, and her book included a publicity tour, but this time smaller markets with lesser outlets were not left only to rehash national paper’s and broadcaster’s story about a sole public trans figure. Times having progressed and gender clinics having begun to appear, 1969 to 1979 saw a rise in stories about the local transsexual woman. Outside of the largest cities, there was much, “Can you believe it happened here?” energy to the coverage. This trend culminated in 1979 with a documentary that broadcast video of one woman’s surgery, that of Dr. Jeanne Hoff. Hoff herself was a psychiatrist experienced in treating trans patients, and a hugely important person in the history of trans health care and activism. Filming a documentary about her transition was her way to demystify trans lives, hopefully breaking stereotypes and reducing stigma.
Though such profiles of the local trans person continued to be sold to readers and viewers (I, myself, was the subject of a local station’s interview on what I presume was a slow news day), the 80s introduce a new format: the talk show. From Phil Donahue to Ricki Lake, trans people were popular guests for producers under pressure to trot out another spectacle of the week. Though Donahue and Lake were both, by all accounts, friends and allies to trans communities, it’s also certain that we would never have featured on their programs (and similar others) if we weren’t making money for stations and studios.
From Wong Foo, to Priscilla, to Crying Game, the 90s moved trans and drag personas to the big screen, frequently making little if any distinction between drag queens and trans women; all gender rebels fit the same narrow mold, and among other things, that mold was MtF. It would take 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry to break the MtF focus and centre trans humanity rather than glittery spectacle in these films inspired by trans and gender-bending lives.
While some might date pro-trans media coverage to Hoff’s efforts, carried forward by Donahue and Lake, it’s hard to argue that Hoff’s documentary would have been broadcast in full without salacious footage of her surgery, or that talk shows would have brought in so many trans guests without the bread-and-circus dynamic of live audiences cheering and jeering in real time to this or that disclosure, this or that argument, this or that rhetorical (or sometimes physical) blow. Like the footage of Hoff mid-surgery, those talk shows stripped trans people naked, not cis gender dynamics.
All of this is to say that the last twenty years of improving media coverage of trans lives is an aberration from the 80 that came before, not a natural extension of it. The media is still corporate, in fact now more so than ever. All the stories they run, from calls for Biden’s resignation to breathless analysis of the latest Deadpool vs Wolverine trailer to cis people playing white Elvis on trans health care, all of them are for profit.
For a time, the idea of a trans person standing up out and proud was itself a novelty. The media presented stories of the out and proud not because they ever believed deeply that the time had come for gender liberation, but because in that historical moment the novelty of a trans person without shame speaking on behalf of lesser, poorer, unknown trans people (in what was imagined to be generosity whether it was or whether it came from Caitlyn Jenner) was itself a spectacle that captivated readers and viewers. It was a spectacle that, of ultimate importance, sold advertising.
While today we have Erin in the Morning and Wonkette, the vast majority of media of any kind — the vast, VAST majority, even Out and The Advocate and Pink News — are focussed on profit not progress, lucre not liberation. In the more friendly outlets you’ll see stories about trans celebs discussing the casting process for their latest project or breathless praise for David Tennant’s latest t-shirt or soundbite. (I, myself, am a sucker for stories about my secret boyfriend’s talented tongue.) These aren’t stories that particularly advance equality or liberation in any meaningful way. These aren’t activist stories. These are stories that draw enough readers to sell enough ads to keep the servers humming.
And that’s fine. By our natures, humans require distraction, entertainment, things to think about other than the next task necessary to keep ourselves alive until we die anyway.
But make no mistake: money rules trans coverage.
Because of the recent trend toward the seemingly-sympathetic story of trans pride, it is easy to be convinced that we’ve turned a corner. That the coverage can only get better. But what we’re actually seeing is that coverage of trans lives is getting worse, much worse.
The monetization value of trans pride has crashed like AOL’s marketshare. If that meant that trans people simply went back to 1960s levels of media coverage, many people would have been disappointed, but the community would have been fine. The problem for trans people is that the marketable spectacle in the 2020s actually does still exist, but it is anathema to trans humanity, trans autonomy, even trans life.
The current spectacle is a Can-you-believe-it? horror story of sexual abuse of children, mutilating doctors caught up in pon farr, radical rapists who want nothing more than to assault solitary women in public restrooms. For 100 years, media coverage of trans folk has been dominated by lurid spectacle-for-silver profit taking. While I don’t mean to imply that capitalism treats any other human beings better than commodities, it has been easy to see the exploitation in trans representation. And it has been disappointing for many to realize representation is not progressing towards justice, that rather it remains an expression of the changing fads of the crowd.
The giant media corporations exist to profit, and if trans people better serve their bottom lines in Radio/TV Mille Collines-inspired shock pieces on the new Tutsis, they will sell us as the new Tutsis. If J. K. Rowling, having ceased to write Harry Potter novels, is more valuable to them as the very model of a modern woman Hutu, they will sell heroic Rowling battling the cockroach swarm.
And again, this isn’t some unique problem facing trans people in the sense that capitalism is so quick to humanize others. The problem is only more severe for trans people in this moment because gender reactionaries have done for free, out of loyalty to ideology, the work of spreading stereotypes that mainstream media can coopt for their newfound emotional power in selling la-panique-du-jour.
The United States, and other countries for that matter, not least the UK, have returned in the 2020s to the German coverage of the 1920s. Because the corporate media is looking for what sells rather than what does good, as the popular spectacle shifts from the novelty of trans pride to the horror of the politico-medical destruction of women, girls, and femininity, Tavistock became the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and every clinician who speaks up in favour of compassionate care became Hirschfeld himself: a devil of deviance, a sexual Satan.
This may appear a dolorous and hopeless analysis, though I don’t mean it to be. Rather, I hope we can understand media coverage as an outgrowth of the zeitgeist rather than a determiner of it. Ideologically committed to a project of reactionary gender retrenchment, the theocratic and gender critical right wing movements (yes, they overlap, but not entirely) have crafted a popular narrative that makes trans-hostile coverage profitable for, and thus attractive to, big business. But if they can do it, so can we.
This is one thought that allows me to see potential in the ongoing occupation of the Wellington House facade. By climbing the building housing the London headquarters of the UK’s National Health Service, trans teens have created a new spectacle, a hopeful, determined, heroic spectacle, that major media companies can use to sell advertising without harming British kids.
In times past, I was quite the little direct action devotée. One of the Lesbian Avengers’ Portland, Oregon chapter, I ate fire, breathed fire, spit fire, all quite literally, in the service of metaphorically fire-breathing messages. There is history — and art, and humour, and fun! — in the spectacular confrontation of injustice by the heroic just. Today I want to breathe my fire into you. This historical moment, with courts crowning kings and rejecting rational rule, rule of law and democracy, with paediatricians equated to pedophiles, with children hounded, sometimes to death, by the education officials charged with their well-being, this moment can seem impossibly desperate. But pacé Galen, Erasmus, and Hippocrates, the requirements of this moment do not include legs or arms. In a woman spitting literal fire or a group of activists hanging the banner, “We are not your pawns,” on the walls of a symbolic building, the rare and spectacular can save us from quotidian hatred.
What can you do — today — to create a new story, a different story, a loving story, a heroic story? In this capitalist, commercial world, the revolution will not be televised until after it has already been sold to the masses. Be someone who makes new stories compelling; be someone who makes justice sexy; be someone who loves, fiercely, defiantly, publicly.
The cissexists are selling horror in a world in which Stephen King is immensely popular. But Barbara Cartland is popular, too. Shakespeare wrote one Titus Andronicus, but wrote love story after love story, Nights and Dreams and Merry Ado and Comedy Tales, in Winter and Windsor, in Venice and Verona. Spectacles one and all, that have changed the world
Let’s sell a love story. Let’s sell a spectacular, heroic love story to the world, and the change we crave will come.
> Let’s sell a love story. Let’s sell a spectacular, heroic love story to the world, and the change we crave will come.
This is more Canadian than American, but did you see Backspot? It was executive-produced by Elliot Page after CBC and Rogers dropped their funding. It's like Bring It On, but gay, and when I say gay, I mean _gay_. I mean "queer is the default and straight is the aberration" gay. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any trans people in the cast (or at least none who pass as cis), but when the executive producer is a trans man, I think one could make a case for trans authorship here.
BRAVA!!!