[Gemme]

Originally Posted by aishah

Girl_on_Fire, i think some of the disagreement comes from the issue that - is it really this couple's responsibility to bear the burden of representing an entire community? i don't necessarily see that they were trying to do that. yes, people may take it like that, and certainly the mainstream media profits off of exploiting people's stories in that way, but is that actually the fault of the couple themselves?

i personally tend to lean towards the argument that that burden should be on the transphobic world we live in and the way mainstream media screws up representations of trans people, if only because trans folks whose stories are in the media do not necessarily get to control how they are represented. in this case oprah, and the prejudices of our society that turn every single media event into a monolithic representation of an entire community, are what is at fault. the couple has no control over the fact that that is how the media, and our society, respond to any representation of trans folks.

While I agree with you that no one person or no one couple should represent a group (and I do agree that they have every right to make whatever decisions they feel they need or want to as a couple), they are the ones that agreed to sit down with Oprah recently. And Christine went on TV those years ago. So, yes. They bear some burden for the image they represent. They could have said no. But they didn't. They sought that attention out for whatever reason and there's going to be fallout from that.

Public attention comes with a lot of baggage, some of which includes being lumped together and representing our community as a whole.