In that post, Jay linked to a string of posts over at Midwestern Transport about ftm representation on The L Word:
But, well…something about the petition troubles me, and I can’t tell if that trouble is just me coming from a place of gender privilege. This may be one of those cases where I’m being the “what’s the big deal” jerkoff in the room. Feel free to comment and call me out if that’s the case.
But still my response to women making sexist comments, is kinda, “Are you freakin’ kidding me? What land do you live in?” And maybe it’s a way that I treat transmen differently than I do non-transmen, because if I know that someone has been raised as a woman, I expect a little compassion and a little understanding.
(Oooh, good one. I should talk about this.)
and (3), in response to a commenter:
To date there are no established stereotypes for Transmen. There ARE and HAVE been for centuries established stereotypes for people of color. AND these stereotypes persist. Our images have been in entertainment for YEARS re-affirming established stereotypes. If there is a desire to equate the trans-male representation with the representation of people of colour I say, “Fuck You.” I say Fuck You to a relatively new (to the American Populous) community getting it’s panties all in a bunch because it’s had one or two not so good representations. Try a lifetime.
I agree that it’s wrong to compare the two histories of representation. There are no mainstream established stereotypes of ftms, because they haven’t gotten that far. They have to acknowledge us as a discrete category first. Needless to say, I can’t wait.
But there are, too, established stereotypes of ftms. They’re just currently established within the dyke and queer women’s communities. You know, the ostensible target demographic of the show. They include but are not limited to the following:
Ftms are all white. (Ditto genderqueers.)
Ftms are all butch dykes.
Ftms are all stone.
Ftms are all tops.
Ftms are all masculine.
Ftms are all faggy little bois.
Ftms are all married to the queer women’s community.
Ftms all fuck queer women over as soon as they get the opportunity.
Ftms all see their identities as complex.
Ftms want to be seen as men, full stop.
Ftms hate women.
Ftms have special insight into feminism.
Ftms are better than cisgendered men.
Ftms are even worse than cisgendered men.
Ftms are all twenty.
Ftms are hawt.
Ftms are ugly.
Ftms like femmes.
Ftms all go gay.
Ftms are to T as a fox terrier is to a fistful of snausage.
Ftms turn into assholes/teenage boys/violent sociopaths/horndogs as soon as they start T.
Ftms treat transition as a trend.
…etc. They are there. We are different, therefore scary, therefore in need of reducing. A group is stereotyped whenever it is visible. Oh, also: Lesbians understand and respect ftms.
The L Word, as the first mainstream-venue lesbian thing since Ellen, is the bridge between the queer women’s community’s interaction with transpeople and the mainstream media’s understanding of them. In other words, it’s a great way for these stereotypes to start bleeding through for everyone to use and enjoy. And since The L Word has some pseudo-progressive cachet, because it is supposedly affiliated with a group of people who supposedly would never, ever hold irrational prejudices about ftms, people who encounter this show will think that they’ve got a real source. I know that’s stupid. It’s still true. And as far as this:
a) Max’s aggressive behavior and latent misogyny have accurately reflected my experience with some transmen. Not all transmen, certainly – I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a stereotype as Eli Green does (also, a stereotype to whom? Most people have so little exposure to transmen that I’m not sure stereotypes about transmale behavior exist in a broad sense) – but when I first started hanging out in more progressive queer circles, I was frankly stunned by some of the misogyny I heard coming from the mouths of the men I met. It struck me that sexist comments such as the ones I heard would never be accepted among those circles people from a man-raised-male (recognizing the inherent problem in using that phrase), but was somehow ok in this context.
I agree that it is not okay to be misogynist. I agree that ftms can exploit their male privilege, and I agree that there’s no trans exemption from anti-sexism. Having lived as a woman is no excuse for forgetting everything you experienced when you lived as a woman. But are some examples justification for promulgating a stereotype? The point of a stereotype is that it presumes upon all members of a group; to the extent that a portrayal references it, that portrayal supports that universal presumption.
…I think I’d argue as well that ftms have the right to complain because Max, as DGI said, is being treated partly as a character and partly as an object lesson:
And there have been moments when Max’s character has provided the catalyst for some interesting discussions to take place, such as when Kit and he discussed why it was important for him to transition rather than changing cultural definitions of what a woman is.
See? Transmen don’t need to see this shit. Cisgendered people do. This isn’t an ftm onscreen. This is other people processing the concept of female-to-male transsexuality. So, fine: if Max is a teaching tool, let’s take a good long look at the syllabus.
[...] sterners calling for the reformation of Islam is due solely to an imperial Western ambitionTransmission In that post, Jay linked to a string of posts over at Midwestern Transport ab [...]
Lemme start by saying that in many, many ways I agree with you, and I’m partially playing devil’s advocate here. The lessons — intentional or no — that come through in such selective representation are always worth looking at, and those of us who find them to be negative should bitch about it. That’s partially the problem with having such limited representation — that the core of the character becomes their tranniness, in this case, reducing all of the other character’s qualities down to an assumed basis in that. I’ll bring that up again in a minute, I’m sure.
But here’s the thing:
This isn’t an ftm onscreen. This is other people processing the concept of female-to-male transsexuality.
But are some examples justification for promulgating a stereotype?
These are two different sides of the same argument, IMO. Either you’re for a complex character that isn’t about “teaching a lesson” or you’re for a character that is representative of some generalized trans community, something which intrinsically is about “teaching a lesson” — because most of us real people deviate from that generalized community in one way or another. In the case of a complex character, we can’t assume that we’re supposed to take Max to be representative of transfolk in general — which means that any flaws or weirdness in the character have to be tolerated, IMO, as part of that specific character. If those flaws aren’t okay, then we’re saying we want a transperson who will provide a non-negatively-stereotyped example for the viewer. But that is, in effect, reducing the character right back down to a single dimension.
Fundamentally, I don’t think this problem is going to be solved until there’s just a much wider diversity of trans representation in pop culture in general and in queer pop culture specifically. The more such examples are drawn, the less we will have to rely on any one to represent “the tranny”. It’s just like back when I was the only queer in my social group, and everything I did was therefore analyzed on the basis of my queerness — something that drove me insane until those friends met enough other queers to understand that (shockingly) we’re all very different people.
Also:
such as when Kit and he discussed why it was important for him to transition rather than changing cultural definitions of what a woman is.
I tend to think the vast majority of us who are both trans and have many feminist friends have had to have this conversation about a million times, no matter where we stand on our views in it. I see this, personally, as a perfectly valid piece of the experience of both people being portrayed — I think it would be weirder, frankly, if the show tried to avoid the subject in this case.
Anyhoo, I’m having a too-much-caffeine-not-enough-attention-span day, so I just hope any of that made sense. Being coherent is not a strong suit of mine, most of the time.
Damn this shit is so complex.
I like your list of stereotypes, piny, and I wish I had something coherent to add. I am trying hard not to react to the comments on dirtygirlfromill, because my first response is to say, “Hey, ftm’s do so experience oppression!’ Which is just dumb and obvious.
So let me try to harness that into something more constructive. It seems to me that comparing oppressions by saying “Being trans is like being non-white” is not a wise move. On the other hand, neither can you quantify oppressions between different categories of identity in order to tell the category of ‘ftms’ (who are not all white, and who do not all pass) that they don’t know what oppression is. Does it have to be one or the other?
On the other hand, I understand anger from someone who feels that this outrage at a bourgeois media-form reveals the privilege of the outraged, who expect their lives to be mirrored by that form by default and are baffled and frustrated when they’re not. This does mean a differentiation within the category of ‘ftm’: I doubt there are many non-white ftm’s out there whose identification or disidentification with Max from the L Word is so simple as ‘He’s an asshole, that’s not me, this show sucks!’
At this point in the identity politics mash-up I go back to Wendy Brown, who brings it back to an analysis of political economy, and is also cognisant of the destructiveness of constituting identity categories through injury and then quantifying it, as if there were a limited amount of resources or awareness of violence to go around and everyone has to compete for those resources or awareness.
I would like to second the “Damn, this shit is so complex” statement. Of course, I then, like a good postmodernist, immediatly realize that this is not universal: for many, transgender may be exceedingly clear – this is who I am, end of story. So I can only say that as a cisgendered woman, damn, this shit is complex (and I mean all gender, not just transgender).
This leads me to the problem of being a tiny minority. The single transperson that most people have met/read about/saw on TV becomes the representative sample. There is no diversity. Before blogs, I had no way of glimpsing the inside language of a diverse transcommunity. I just had my one friend, and I was not going to quiz her constantly on “what it’s like”, because I didn’t want to make her a stereoytpe.
But we can’t rely on just increasing the diversity of transfolk in the media, because chances are, most people in small town America will still never know (and I mean “consciously interact with” not meet unknowingly at the supermarket) a tranperson face-to-face. The population density outisde the cities is just not enough.
So, how do we deal with this? Until the glorious day when all people are accepted for thier own personal hawtness, we humans will classify people based upon what we have been exposed to. So no matter if the writers of The L Word are trying to create a “learning tool ftm” or not, that’s what they are doing. You can’t step outside the current level of conversation, even if you try.
That’s why these conversations are so important. Because for me, it’s not just about learning to navitgate the language of gender. It’s about learning how to listen, and really hear, what another person thinks and feels.
It is a conversation that is part of our human evolution. It is long, complicated and without end. But ever since we first self-consciously examined why we desire one person and not another, this conversation has been expanding.
Thank you, piny, for keeping the circle growing.
“I’d never transition–I’m too feminist.”
“Oh, fuck y–I mean, I know a lot of really feminist transpeople.”
…Yeah, okay, that was not a terribly thoughtful thing to say. Thinking on this comment and the one about “I want realist complexity!” vs. “No referencing negative stereotypes!” I think I wasn’t really thinking about this conversation, but about the ones I haven’t heard about.*
I agree that this problem will not be resolved unless and until portrayals of transpeople (or x people) are common and unremarkable enough on television that multiplicity just plain happens. However, I think that there are ways to imply multiplicity even if you can’t actually script a character to portray every one of the infinite possibilities within that group.
That brings me to the conversations I haven’t heard about. How many other transguys has Max sought out and spoken to? Has he been to a support group? Has he met them online? Has he seen and talked to them in bars? Has he gone to trans-focused events? Has he talked about doing that? Does he admire these people or despise them? Do they make him uncomfortable? Have trans extras sought out and spoken with him?
Where’s his community?
Rightly or wrongly, I think I call tokenism not when I see a single character, but when I see a character in the kind of isolation that people in marginalized groups generally do their utmost to mitigate. And in this case, we’re talking about a group that usually needs to make those contacts in order to do any of the things that Max has started doing.
*(Sigh) I need to get the DVDs after all, I think. This is starting to get a little pajamas-media-esque.
super ju-
because chances are, most people in small town America will still never know (and I mean “consciously interact with” not meet unknowingly at the supermarket) a tranperson face-to-face.
Really good points in your post.
I actually think that small-town America has to deal with this shit more than most people realize — it’s just that people don’t often talk about it openly. Most of us weren’t born and raised in the urban areas in which we often wind up, and that means that “back home” there’s usually a network of old family and friends who do deal with this, to the degree that we are or can be open with them.
So no matter if the writers of The L Word are trying to create a “learning tool ftm” or not, that’s what they are doing. You can’t step outside the current level of conversation, even if you try.
This is a point with which I totally agree, actually. The problem for me comes because I also write — and there is no way to make a character more boring and one-dimensional than to write with too much awareness of that character as “learning tool”. I think that every representation of any person outside the dominant-mainstream winds up becoming something of a learning tool for people — it’s the problem with not having that “default” status. It’s why looking at media portrayals is so important. But in forming those portrayals, I also think that trying too hard to push a “positive lesson” through a character winds up just being a different form of the same problem — because then what you’re doing is reducing the character’s importance down to that single difference from the mainstream.
I think that there are other ways to help break the cycle down a little bit. I think that more media portrayals that just question aspects of gender would help immensely, frankly, even if they’re not directly portrayals of transpeople. Because IMO a lot of the problem is that people have a very simple view of how gender works — if those waters get muddied for people, I think it becomes a lot easier to understand that there’s no one answer to “what do transpeople think”.
Wow, I’m really muddled today. Apologies for that.
piny — a really great point about the isolation. There are a lot of ways the show could make a much better effort to show at least some trans diversity in order to mitigate some of the token-tranny problem, and I think you’re absolutely right that Max’s lack of community does wind up strengthening his token status. It would be so easy to include as a side piece of plot — it might be “lessonish”, but the “we’re not all alike” thing is an awfully important lesson — sort of the anti-lesson to the lessons we’ve been talking about.
And yeah, I should actually point out, since you brought up getting the DVDs, that I really haven’t watched most of the show I’m talking about. Good thing I got good at that book-report-without-reading-the-book thing back in fifth grade.
Hee. In Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right, Richard Goldstein talks about how he got to interview James Baldwin when Goldstein was just a callow young gay. He asked Baldwin something about how it feels to give up the privilege you’re born with when you come out, and Baldwin just gave him this…look.
(For fun, here’s a review of his next book from Amazon:
“The author starts out by labeling homocons as “heartless.” He thus sets up a definition with no real standard, other than his own bias. Those who do not fit his artificial and arbitrary definition are then castigated. I happen to be gay and fairly conservative – in other words, I will not vote Democrat. I have many well thought out reasons for this. But I do not think I am heartless. If homocons are “heartless,” are homolibs then “brainless”? I wouldn’t have thought so, but his construction seems to beg such a rejoinder.
The purpose of this book seems to be to set off alarms and to rally others to the cause of “stopping” the gay right. If I were to set out to “stop” the gay left, or anyone else on the left, I’m sure the author would label me as a “fascist.” In any case, let him and others try to “stop” me. They will be sadly disappointed.
Nevertheless, this is a good book. It provides yet another glimpse into the mindset of those who would use the concepts of “diversity” and “tolerance” as cover for intellectual oppression.”)
how it feels to give up the privilege you’re born with when you come out, and Baldwin just gave him this…look.
That’s really, really funny. I just had to repeat it.