Thursday, January 26. 2006Trannyshack: Why mainstream media coverage of transgender issues is a real drag One of the biggest myths around is the myth of 'the liberal media.' Eric Alterman has persuasively debunked this hoary myth in his book, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (Basic) ( excerpted in The Nation)The mainstream media are (note 'media' is the plural for 'medium') not really liberal; rather, mainstream media in the United States are corporate, which means that they often reflect the worst of market-based imperatives, above all, the need to generate a profit for owners and investors. Nowhere is this un-liberal profit motive more in evidence than in media coverage of transgender issues. Consider an article in the New York Daily News from January 25. In "Welcome to the drag race! Gender benders are crossing over, into your living room," Joe Neumaier writes,
So transgendered people are nothing more than 'the real sex story du jour'? Leave it to the mainstream media to sexualize, fetishize and exoticize gender identity and trivialize the lives of transgendered people. And while drag queens and drag kings are (in my view) a welcome part of the transgender community, that community also includes transsexuals, crossdressers, genderqueers, and many other types of gender-variant people, most of whom do not regularly lip-synch on stage for fun or money. For most of us, our gender identity is not just a performance that we put on for the amusement of non-transgendered people, much as the oh-so-liberal mainstream media might mischaracterize transgender as a phenomenon.
The breezy tone & the mix-'n'-match way Neumaier throws transgender identity, film and television depictions, and drag venues into the same pot in this Daily News piece is really off-putting. To the unsophisticated eye of a tabloid pseudo-journalist, these may all look like the same thing, but there's a very big difference between an exploitative reality show like "He's a Lady" and a the sensitive portrayal of a transsexual transition in "TransAmerica" or the real-life stories of real transgendered youth in "TransGeneration." This article in the Daily News is accompanied by a photo of Felicity Huffman in "TransAmerica" and the News reporter even quotes from Huffman's eloquent speech accepting Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a drama. But even while Neumaier quotes Huffman, he simply doesn't absorb the message that she sent to the Globe audience, saluting people "who brave ostracism, alienation and a life lived on the margins to become who they really are." Kudos to Felicity for understanding what the mainstream media -- including this Daily News reporter -- do not. Transgender is not some chic lower Manhattan kinky sex trend, but an emerging community of real people living really difficult lives as they attempt to actualize their identities in the face of a still largely hostile society and uncomprehending and not all that liberal media. If major media outlets such as the New York Daily News were really all that 'liberal,' this would be a piece of advocacy that delves into the reality of transgender lives, which includes pervasive discrimination and violence. Instead, the piece is accompanied by a sidebar on four venues (two clubs and two restaurants) in Manhattan that feature drag performers. One of these is Lucky Cheng's, a restaurant in the East Village that features drag hostesses serving rather bad Chinese food. Being a transgendered Asian woman, I would be a prime candidate for a job there, but when I visited the restaurant, I felt very much like an animal in a zoo being stared at by the clientele, mostly non-transgendered straight white tourists and suburbanites who come to gawk at the exotic trannies. While I appreciate the fact that Lucky Cheng's provides much-needed employment for transgendered women, many of whom have few alternatives other than sex work, the 'feel' of the place is anything but 'community.' The fact that this sidebar ("Cross-dressing all across town" by Heather Fletcher) is attached to the longer piece on transgender media visibility shows just how unserious the Daily News is about coverage of transgender issues. True, the News reporter did contact both the National Center for Transgender Equality (Mara Keisling, NCTE's executive director, is quoted briefly) and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Cindi Creager, GLAAD's director of national news is also quoted). But Neumaier also felt compelled to get a quote from the Concerned Women of America, presumably for 'balance.' When do reporters ever come to transgender advocacy organizations for quotes to balance news stories about the religious right? Not long ago, a male-to-female transsexual incarcerated in a prison upstate sued the State of New York to cover the cost of his/her sex reassignment surgery. I got calls at the office of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy from as far away as Kansas City. What I was wondering was why the papers that shamelessly sensationalized the case -- including both the New York Daily News and the New York Post -- never call the NYAGRA office to interview me about discrimination or violence against transgendered people. If the mainstream media were as 'liberal' as the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of this world keep on telling us they are, mainstream media coverage of transgender issues would be far different from what it is now, a sensationlizing but ultimately marginalizing and exoticizing trivialization of transgendered people and transgender lives. Trackbacks
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Right on!
The Daily News is a sham. It still astonishes me when I see folks reading it on the subway because the articles are just so damn offensive.
I enjoyed your article.
I have met Heather Fletcher. Your intuition is very astute: she's a Republican from the Midwest (Ohio) and her dad's military. That right there. She has worked as a contributor and editor in the city for several years. I haven't seen her article, but the headline doesn't give me much hope that it was sensitively rendered. In person I found her to broadly sympathetic to queer issues in general, but I can also say for certain that she knows little about the issues and concerns of the transgendered. It's a shame these assignments like these are so frequently given to people who neither know nor particularly care about them. I think you do the community a great service by calling these offensive stories out.
"I have met Heather Fletcher. Your intuition is very astute: she's a Republican from the Midwest (Ohio) and her dad's military. That right there. She has worked as a contributor and editor in the city for several years."
Incorrect. Ms. Fletcher is a Republican as much as Zell Miller is a Democrat. Since she is the one that proposed the entire transgender article many months ago, the result, an abbreviated sidebar, is of no connection to her original intentions. The fact that the original author of this blog was looking for something that would apply specifically to him/her in The Daily News, a paper aimed at as many readers as possible, is a silly way to play the "woe-is'me" attitude of supposedly unreprestend minorities. Media criticism is not equal to whining, as Godard said, "the best criticism of a film you can make is to make another one." Take it upon yourself to write on the issues you find important, don't worry about how the mainstream press, which will only ever focus on the salacious, flashy, and celebrity oriented material handles what you hold dear. "I haven't seen her article, but the headline doesn't give me much hope that it was sensitively rendered. In person I found her to broadly sympathetic to queer issues in general, but I can also say for certain that she knows little about the issues and concerns of the transgendered." The headlines are not written by the author, rather by editors trying to grab your eye, as it obviously did with the author of this blog. In terms of Ms. Fletcher, the headline that accompanied her piece was quite bland and timid, lacking even the groan inducing Entertainment Weekly style puns normally associated with The Daily News. Seeing as you haven't read the article, you are not exactly equipped to make any assumptions about it or Ms. Fletcher, but I doubt that if the article ran as intended, a more in depth piece on drag clubs and drag life, it wouldn't escape your criticism, as it wasn't written from the "correct" perspective, just written by someone on the right. Such is the shame of many members of supposedly repressed cultures (one of the clubs mentioned in her article, the Esquelita, has been around for 40 years, and is always packed, suggesting there is no worrying about whether or not transgenders are spoken for), once there is an attempt to espouse light on their situation, they are unwilling to accept any interpretation that is not worded in the exact way that they picture it, it is an unnacceptable besmirchment, a crass insult upon their person that doesn't deserve to see the light of day. "It's a shame these assignments like these are so frequently given to people who neither know nor particularly care about them." So, if she kept pushing for it, that means she didn't care? Apparently someone doesn't know how things work at major newspapers, where someone has to pitch and pitch and fight to get their stories in. If they didn't care about what they were writing they wouldn't bother. "I think you do the community a great service by calling these offensive stories out." A story that you didn't read? Nice that you make judgments on people and articles without any knowledge about them even if you would be offended if someone did that to you. Actually the whole notion of taking offense to even the mildest of supposed mischaracterizations is such a depressing trend in the world of the attention-seeking narcissist. Those who are marginalized have to be just as strong as those who are "in control," and making the issue about having your feelings hurt, as opposed to standing up for yourself and stating your piece, is something even a child realizes is trite.
Thanks for the comment Sadie. Please note that Big Queer contributors write their own articles AND their own headlines.
"The headlines are not written by the author, rather by editors trying to grab your eye, as it obviously did with the author of this blog."
Sadie Truthseer,
The headline in The Daily News was not, as you say, "bland and timid." On the contrary, the headline entitled "Cross Dressing All Across Town," is dynamic and eye-catching and it does two things immediately: it sensationalizes the life experience of the transgendered and it belittles their personhood. That was the extent of my original comment, and the source of my original objection, and that is all. (You are quite correct to say that I should not comment on a story I have not read, but you are incorrect to claim that I have done so). Again, as I've said, I knew and worked with Heather Fletcher. I liked her very much. And yes she is a Republican (or she was deceiving me when she said so, repeatedly, which is a circumstance that I frankly doubt). In newsrooms stories are assigned by editors quite as often as they are pitched, so it's patronizing to claim some kind of kabalistic special knowledge of how editorial rooms are run that the uninitiated supposedly can not fathom. Neither Heather nor I could claim to be authorities on the subject of trangenderism, and I know that I would have refrained from tackling such a complex subject for a tabloid newspaper. Looking at the final result in its entirety, it's little more than a Barnum and Bailey bowdlerization, trivializing and fetishizing the lived experience of the transgendered as though they were merely a new trend in fashion. It's risible. Pauline Park, who's activism (and writing) is known to many, took offence at both the tone and content of the entire Daily News coverage. Looking at it, I don't blame her. She summarized her main objections quite eloquently, and her response covered all the main issues that arose. And I did not perceive a "woe is me" tone in her response at all; rather I perceived an understandable degree of exasperation and even anger, caused by the Daily News articles that she quotes from extensively. Nor did I strike a passive “woe is me” attitude myself; if I have been given offence you will certainly know about it. And then here you are telling us that there is no substance to these claims at all. I would like to know how you have come to this blanket assessment? I confess that I cannot decipher the meaning of your fourth paragraph at all. I have tried to parse it to no avail. You do finally acknowledge, however, that Heather Fletcher writes from a "right" perspective, which baldly contradicts your earlier claim that she does nothing of the kind. I wonder why you bring up the persona of "the attention-seeking narcissist?" And what compelled you to write about shame? Specifically the "shame of many members of supposedly repressed cultures." I am troubled by these insulting and free wheeling associations, which have been used for centuries to menace and mark queer people, and I wonder at your decision to employ them here. In America, believe it or not, transgendered people, and gay and lesbian people, are not "supposedly repressed" - they are actively - and frequently violently - oppressed. Are you ignorant of these facts or simply ideologically hostile to them?
The media's controlled by the Left? As if the star of Transamerica is a true transsexual. The motivations behind producing the flick are as much (if not absolutely) about an award-winning stage performance as a motion toward respecting transsexual rights.
The film industry's steered by fiscal concerns--what's Left about that? Top-dollar production companies won't touch an almost-documentary concerning the trials of a truly marginalized person (Boys Don't Cry was small-budget, plus almost didn't happen). Felicity Huffman did right in her Golden Globes acceptance speech by calling out discrimination (unlike Ang Lee's team). But at the end of the day, William H. Macy as the Transamerican would've damn well nailed the TRANS into transgressive, and really turned the mainstream head to see on which relative political end the media generally falls. Please visit www.bigscreenblog.com for opinions on how sexual dynamics and queerness are portrayed by the film industry. |
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