December 2007
Transgender issues get greater respect—but anatomy remains destiny By Julie Hollar
Transgender is hardly a new concept, but until recently it’s been considered by the media to be a topic for tabloid talkshows, not serious news programs. The tide is turning, though; as more and more public figures are coming out as having a gender identity different from their birth-assigned sex, and transgender characters are finding their way into more mainstream entertainment media (on TV shows like All My Children and movies like Transamerica), transgender stories are likewise moving from Jerry Springer to
CNN at a remarkable pace.
As of this writing, the major network and cable news programs had nearly doubled their coverage of transgender issues in 2007 compared to the same period of time in 2006. But while it’s an encouraging start, quantity does not necessarily equal quality, and coverage is still plagued with a narrow uniformity of subjects and a relentless and invasive fixation on anatomy.
The explosion of coverage this year can be traced in part to the public coming out of two relatively high-profile figures: Largo, Florida city manager Steve Stanton was outed as transgender by the
St. Petersburg Times on February 22; just two months later, longtime
L.A. Times sportswriter Mike Penner announced in a column that he would henceforth be writing as Christine Daniels (4/26/07).
Stanton, who had served as city manager for 14 years, had developed a detailed communication plan for transitioning from male to female at work that was pre-empted by the
St. Petersburg Times’ “scoop”; city commissioners fired Stanton a week later. It was hardly the first time a transgender person has been fired for transitioning, but it got an unusual amount of media play, no doubt because of Stanton’s high-level public position.
Daniels’ coming out, too, received a good deal of attention, though it was done with the support of the
L.A. Times—another indication of media’s shifting attitudes towards transgender issues—and thus resulted in a less dramatic and shorter-lived news story. When Daniels told her boss at the
Times that she was planning to transition from male to female, the paper arranged for her to make the change in a column in the paper, and added an online blog for her to write about the process; the feedback, according to Daniels, was overwhelmingly positive and supportive (LATimes.com, 4/30/07).
‘One ugly chick’Newsweek soon explored gender identity in a cover story (5/21/07). And similar stories have been cropping up in other outlets across the country; the
Boston Globe, for example, recently published a lengthy two-part feature on a local family practice doctor who transitioned to female (8/12/07, 8/19/07), and the
Rocky Mountain News (9/1/07) profiled a detective who did the same.
The increased attention and apparent seriousness with which media are taking transgender stories today is remarkable; the idea of
CNN inviting a transgender media critic to explain to them on the air the appropriate terminology to use when covering transgender issues (11/29/05), for example, would have been unthinkable not long ago, and both the
Associated Press and
New York Times style guides have recently added editorial guidelines to ensure that transgender people are covered using the name and pronouns they prefer, regardless of their biological or anatomical status—in other words, calling a transgender woman “she,” for example, regardless of whether she’s had any sort of surgery, taken hormones, or looks masculine or feminine to the reporter. It may seem like a small or simple detail, but for transgender people who had long been denied the right to define themselves—with media calling them by names and pronouns they don’t identify with—it’s an important step in the right direction.
That’s not to say that tabloid coverage has disappeared from the mainstream media; both the
New York Post and
New York Daily News headlines regularly refer to transgender people as “trannies,” often in stories emphasizing crime or scandal. The
New York Post (6/13/04) ran an article on transgender Medicaid recipients getting critical hormones under the headline “Tranny RX Sex Scams,” and has no compunction about referring flippantly to transgender people with sensational and dehumanizing terms such as “he-turned-she” (6/2/07) or “transvestite hooker” (11/17/06).
MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, too, regularly brings up transgender news items to scorn or make fun of them; he has called being transgender a “profound personality disorder” (2/23/06), declared sex reassignment surgery “an act of a crazy person” akin to “setting your hair on fire or blinding yourself” (2/23/06), and often makes derisive and immature comments about transgender people like “That dude is one ugly chick” (10/25/06). “Just because you’re castrated and have a fake set of boobs does not make you a woman,” Carlson insisted (6/1/06).
And sometimes the transphobia is slightly more subtle, as when Paula Zahn introduced a segment on a transgender teenager (
CNN, 3/9/07) as being about “a family dealing with a truly bizarre problem,” or Barbara Walters explaining in a preview of her special on transgender children (
ABC, 4/27/07) that “only by compassion, and understanding, and enlightenment can we accept them.”
A uniform narrativeWhat’s notable about so much of the more ostensibly “good” coverage, though, is how uniform and narrow it is. The narrative is by now quite familiar: A somewhat prominent white, middle-to-upper-class man comes out as a transgender woman, her long history of feeling “trapped in the wrong body” is detailed, and her struggles and surgeries are documented, as are the struggles of those around her to understand and embrace her change.
The focus on white male-to-female transgender people isn’t terribly surprising, considering media’s long-standing bias towards white male newsmakers (e.g.,
Extra!, 5–6/02); people like Stanton, Daniels, the Boston doctor and the Colorado detective, originally living as men, were all in reporters’ and editors’ sphere and on their radar, and so theirs are the stories that tend to make the news.
While
Newsweek’s cover story broke that mold with a think piece on gender and gender identity, it was accompanied by five online profiles (5/13/07) of transgender individuals, every one of whom was a professional, white male-to-female. Most of the profiles were simply personal coming-out stories, with only a hint of political critique here and there. In fact, the piece most focused on discrimination was a profile of a vice president at Prudential, who talked about corporations’ advancement in transgender rights and what it’s like to come out at work—from a white senior manager’s perspective. While it’s perhaps simultaneously heartening and depressing that the worst challenge she identified was suddenly experiencing sexism in the workplace, the profile, the
Newsweek package as a whole and the prevailing media narrative all project a vision of a transgender reality that hardly reflects the struggles of the many transgender people in positions of less power in their workplace, or those who can’t even get a job in the formal work sector, or those who otherwise face discrimination compounded by factors of race and class.
Statistics are not easy to come by, but one study found that in Washington, D.C., only 58 percent of transgender people surveyed had paid employment, 15 percent reported losing a job due to discrimination and 43 percent had been the victim of violence or crime (Gender.org, 2002). A similar study in San Francisco found that nearly half of transgender respondents had faced gender identity–based employment discrimination and over 30 percent had faced discrimination while trying to access healthcare (NCLR.org, 2003). It’s these stories that go missing while
Newsweek muses to the Prudential VP, “Switching from slacks to panty hose cannot be easy.” . . .
