[Dylan]

Transphobic Trope (#5 according to Lisa Harney)

Transpeople As Deceivers and Liars

Originally Posted by Lisa Harney

This might seem to be two tropes, and indeed they can and do work separately, but I’m going to do them together because I think they very often work together (especially in the criminal justice system). This one is trans women specific.

First, there’s the frequently touted idea that trans women are really just men in dresses. The man in a dress is a pitiful figure, trying and failing miserably to pass as a woman. The notion occasionally touted by some online feminists that trans women will be immediately and obviously be readable as trans–and hence able to be kept out of womyn’s “safe space”–relies on this idea. This is often the figure of trans women in popular culture, the laughingstock who can’t gender themselves properly (always played by a cis man, with bonus hilarity points if there’s facial and body hair).

This second half, the stealthy deceiver, is closely allied to my first trope (“Really a [assigned birth sex]“) except that it posits the trans person as actively fraudulent. The idea is that appearances are deceptive, that we are able to mimic cis femininity so well that we can trick innocent people (usually men) into believing we are something we are not. To live your life in your gender, and most particularly, to expect to have sex with someone, is inherently a lie.

This is the trans person as surprise plot twist that fuels movies like The Crying Game, though it’s more pervasive and pernicious than sheer entertainment. The figure of the stealthy trans woman fuels the notorious “trans panic” defense that seemingly every murderer of a trans woman seeks to defend themselves. Unsurprisingly, it is nearly always almost an enormous bloody lie, the evidence frequently conclusively points to murderers having known their victims were trans and then cold bloodedly killing them.

What remains profoundly foreign to this trope, of course, is the perspectives of trans women ourselves, that being born forced to attempt to live in a male gender role and sexed body might have been far more a profound lie that living as women.

So, these tropes seem to in one sense be wildly opposed – in one, transness is immediately apparent, in the other, it is a secret. But in another sense, they work together, because one can easily move from one to the other, because a cis view of trans people tends to scrutinise, looking for signs of inauthenticity, of our “real” genders. So, trans women are placed in the double bind of coming out – either come out and have your gender disregarded and ridiculed, or remain stealth and risk being exposed as a deceiver.

Both, I should point out, have incredible risks of violence.

What is more incredible is how they can both appear at the same time. Trans women are ridiculed for the obvious and apparent inauthenticity of our genders – massive bloody attention is paid to appearance, to make-up, clothing, shaving, to shoulder size, to Adam’s apples. See, for instance, this article about the murder of Sanesha Stewart:

Stewart, more than 6 feet tall, was known to wear stylish, provocative outfits with towering high heels, neighbors said.

Stewart also apparently had undergone surgery to give him larger breasts and other female characteristics, neighbors said.

“She looked like a girl but when she turned around, you knew it was a man,” a 17-year-old neighbor said. “She had a big jaw and an Adam’s apple.”

And yet the original title of the story, I should point out, was “Fooled John Stabbed Bronx Tranny” (until GLAAD complained and the title was changed). The article proceeded typically, without any evidence whatsoever besides the fact that Sanesha Stewart was a trans woman of colour, from the later-proved-to-be-faulty assumption that she was not only a sex worker, but a stealthy deceptive one at that. The incoherence of this, that she was somehow both immediately and obviously trans, and yet able to fool a man into thinking she was cis, should be immediately obvious to anyone with even a quarter of a functioning brain. And yet.

Transphobia doesn’t work on the level of literal sense, instead it proceeds along a path mapped out long before, relying more on a cis common sense of how things “should be” (and therefore are) than on any real knowledge of trans lives. And so, this trope appears again and again and again – in Kellie Telesford’s trial, she was described as possessing a man’s strength (ludicrously unlikely given the time she’d been on hormones), yet simultaneously she was able to deceive the defendent into having sex with her.

The point is then, trans women do not have stable position in cis-sexist discourse, moving instead through incoherently contradictory counter-propositions as needs permit, but all the while denied an authenticity and truthfulness for our identities which cis gender normative people take for granted.

The Link

Julia Serano on the topic

Originally Posted by Julia Serano

As a transsexual woman, I am often confronted by people who insist that I am not, nor can I ever be, a “real woman.” One of the more common lines of reasoning goes something like this: There’s more to being a woman than simply putting on a dress. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why it’s so frustrating that people often seem confused because, although I have transitioned to female and live as a woman, I rarely wear makeup or dress in a particularly feminine manner.

Despite the reality that there are as many types of trans women as there are women in general, most people believe that trans women are all on a quest to make ourselves as pretty, pink, and passive as possible. While there are certainly some trans women who buy into mainstream dogma about beauty and femininity, others are outspoken feminists and activists fighting against all gender stereotypes. But you’d never know it from the popular media, which tends to assume that all transsexuals are male-to-female, and that all trans women want to achieve stereotypical femininity.

Trans people—who transition from male to female or female to male and often live completely unnoticed as the sex “opposite” to that which they were born—have the potential to transform the gender class system as we know it. Our existence challenges the conventional wisdom that the differences between women and men are primarily the product of biology. Trans people can wreak havoc on such taken-for-granted concepts as feminine and masculine, homosexual and hetero-sexual, because these words are rendered virtually meaningless when a person’s biological sex and lived sex are not the same. But because we are a threat to the categories that enable male and heterosexual privilege, the images and experiences of trans people are presented in the media in a way that reaffirms, rather than challenges, gender stereotypes.

THE TWO CHOICES
Media depictions of trans women, whether they take the form of fictional characters or actual people, usually fall under one of two main archetypes: the “deceptive” transsexual or the “pathetic” transsexual. While characters of both models have an interest in achieving an ultrafeminine appearance, they differ in their abilities to pull it off. Because the “deceivers” successfully pass as women, they generally act as unexpected plot twists, or play the role of sexual predators who fool innocent straight guys into falling for “men.”

Perhaps the most famous example of a “deceiver” is the character Dil in the 1992 movie The Crying Game. The film became a pop culture phenomenon primarily because most moviegoers were unaware that Dil was trans until about halfway through the movie. The revelation comes during a love scene between her and Fergus, the male protagonist who has been courting her. When Dil disrobes, the audience, along with Fergus, learns for the first time that Dil is physically male. When I saw the film, most of the men in the theater groaned at this revelation. Onscreen, Fergus has a similarly intense reaction: He slaps Dil and runs off to the bathroom to vomit.

The 1994 Jim Carrey vehicle Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, features a “deceptive” transsexual as a villain. Police lieutenant Lois Einhorn (played by Sean Young) is secretly Ray Finkle, an ex–Miami Dolphins kicker who has stolen the team’s mascot as part of a scheme to get back at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino. The bizarre plot ends when Ventura strips Einhorn down to her underwear in front of about 20 police officers and announces, “She is suffering from the worst case of hemorrhoids I have ever seen.” He then turns her around so that we can see her penis and testicles tucked behind her legs. All of the police officers proceed to spit up as The Crying Game theme song plays in the background.

Even though “deceivers” successfully pass as women, and are often played by female actors (with the notable exception of Jaye Davidson as Dil), these characters are never intended to challenge our assumptions about gender itself. On the contrary, they are positioned as “fake” women, and their secret trans status is revealed in a dramatic “moment of truth”. At the moment of exposure, the “deceiver’s” appearance (her femaleness) is reduced to mere illusion, and her secret (her maleness) becomes the real identity.

In a tactic that emphasizes their “true” maleness, “deceivers” are most often used as pawns to provoke male homophobia in other characters, as well as in the audience itself. This phenomenon is especially evident in TV talk shows like Jerry Springer, which regularly runs episodes with titles like “My Girlfriend’s a Guy” and “I’m Really a Man!” that feature trans women coming out to their straight boyfriends. On a recent British TV reality show called There's Something About Miriam, six heterosexual men court an attractive woman who, unbeknownst to them, is transgendered. The broadcast of the show was delayed for several months because the men threatened to sue the show’s producers, alleging that they had been the victims of defamation, personal injury, and conspiracy to commit sexual assault. The affair was eventually settled out of court, with each man coming away with a reported $100,000.

In the 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge, the protagonist is a trans woman who heads out to Hollywood in order to take revenge on traditional manhood and to “realign the sexes.” This apparently involves raping an ex-football player with a strap-on dildo, which she does at one point during the movie. The recurring theme of “deceptive” trans women retaliating against men, often by seducing them, seems to be an unconscious acknowledgment that both male and heterosexual privileges are threatened by transsexuals.

The Link

GLAAD Blog about an article in Seventeen magazine about a 'lying' FTM and how he 'deceived' a poor innocent young woman (two actually). Click here If you want to read the article that was published in the magazine, there's a link from GLAAD's site.

This 'lying' and 'deceiving' trope is used allllllllllll over the media...even when reporting the deaths of transpeople at the hands of those they (allegedly) 'deceived'. It's classic. And, as has been pointed out, it's been used to justify the 'trans-panic' defense (anyone remember the gay-panic defense after that Jenny Jones show aired?).


Dylan