[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Girl_On_Fire

I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here.

My irritation at this comes from the way the couple is representing an entire community. Not themselves or their love or their relationship.

I am not and was not judging them as people. Whether it was the show or the article or a combination of both, something rubbed me (and a lot of others) the wrong way. It just didn't sit right that the description of transgender was somehow reduced to a "loophole" to get married. I don't think it should have been minimized like that.

Was it their right? Of course. It's their life. It's just upsetting to me that this will be the take-away for so many people who grossly misunderstand GLBT culture.

If queer people are truly to be accepted, the media needs to focus less on stories that marginalize and more on the lives and the common, everyday struggles of queer couples and relationships.

It's like the pictures in the paper from pride events that depict only the 6-foot-tall screaming drag queen in a pink feather boa and completely ignore the loving hugs, hand-holding, kissing, and celebrating among couples that makes up the other 90% of the event.

I think media coverage like that is a sneaky way of marginalizing by focusing on the extreme. Eventually, this is the automatic picture an uneducated person has in their head in relation to the queer community.

It only makes them cling tighter to their prejudice beliefs.

Girl,

The media has a job to do, a product to sell. The media can transform anything into a 3 ring circus. Anything out of the ordinary or which can be made to look like it is out of the ordinary catches peoples attention. They will even fill up space using opinion and conjecture when "facts" are not available.

That is the reality of the media. And it is not just the mainstream media. I have seen some stuff in the queer presses and the feminist presses that are just as exploitative and annoying.

As long as there is a profit motive, whatever sells will be used. As much as we say we dont like it, the majority of people love other peoples drama. If they didnt, sensationalism wouldnt be used.

What we need to be careful not to do is to feed into the frenzy or to start pointing the finger of blame or shaming one another. None of these is at all helpful to us as a community or to educating those who are not part of our community. All of these are detrimental to us as individuals and as a whole.

To say this couple represents an entire community is erroneous. To say this couple has to present or explain themselves in a certain way or face the consequences, is not in anyone's best interest.

We are all fighting to be and live our authentic selves, whoever and however we choose, whether in private or in public. One can not be authentic if one has to live up to some arbitrary standard of acceptableness or someone else's standard of acceptable.

To say the media is at fault or that this couple should have done thus and so is a "yeah but" kind of thing. They have the right BUT. Either they have the right or they dont. There are no buts.

And this brings us back to diversity. Either we believe in diversity, free from our own needs to see it done a certain way, or we dont.