One of my roommates recently got me hooked on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a sit-com about four horrible people who own a bar together, and the hilarious hijinks which ensue. The characters on the show are consistently petty, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and on, and on, and on. But since they always lose in the end, you feel OK laughing at them.
Intermittently, starting in the first season, one of the boys in the show becomes involved with a ‘tranny,’ as seen here (sorry it’s not a great clip – someone lemme know if there’s a higher quality version):
No, I'm not pretending I'm the cute blond in the middle.
A few months ago, I was having dinner with some friends after our circus class. We were chatting about relationships – I was bemoaning my lack thereof – and someone mentioned how her boyfriend was an awkward geek. I said, “Well, as an awkward geek myself, I feel obligated to stand up for my fellow geeks.” Both of my friends turned to me, and simultaneously said something along the lines of, “You’re not awkward. And you may be a geek, but you’re a hot geek.”
I don’t say this to toot my own horn, because I didn’t (and don’t) particularly believe them. But I do bring it up to talk about a perspective flip I’ve had over the course of my transition: I’m now seen as the cool, geeky, girl.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I’ve been watching The Big Bang Theory. I think the show is pretty funny, as I’m a sucker for a show that makes good, accurate jokes about comic books, general relativity, Lord of the Rings, particle physics, video games and more. It’s funny even if you don’t get all the references, but their jokes are obviously well researched and even funnier if you know what they’re talking about.
At the same time, the gender relationships of the show are kind of predictable: four smart-but-awkward boys befriend their pretty-but-uneducated female neighbor. And I find myself very torn over who to sympathize with when they butt heads.
Just finished watching the latest 30 Rock. I do love their take on the Comcast takeover of NBC, as they’re spot on: Comcast provides no minimal service to its customers. (She says, typing away on a computer connected to the Internet via Comcast.)
But the final twist in the episode was “Kablevision” (the 30 Rock stand-in for Comcast) attempting to double its porn profits by providing “porn for women.” Specifically, attractive male models who will look at the camera while smiling and nodding. All for $24.99 an hour. Because the only thing women want is “to jabber,” which conflicts with the only thing men think about: sex. They take the train of thought to its logical conclusion, with one character saying “I mean, I’m more than a pair of ears! I’m a brain, too! A brain that thinks about sex every seven seconds.”
( Spoilers abound in this post. Consider yourself warned. That said, I haven’t even finished the first season, so please don’t provide any spoilers beyond episode 15 or 16 of the first season in the comments.)
I just got into the first season of Ugly Betty. The show is – very broadly – about Betty as she tries to make it in the magazine publishing industry. I started watching because I’d heard good things, and because I heard it had a trans character.
Honestly, I enjoyed the show so much that I straight up forgot about the trans character, so her introduction a little more than half way through the first season came as a bit of a surprise. It didn’t hurt that the show very openly parodies (or maybe not) ridiculous soap-opera-ey storyline shifts, so revealing a presumed-dead character was really in hiding to come back as a woman is pretty in line with the tone of the rest of the show.
What did surprise me (or, at least, has surprised me so far) is how respectfully the show handles the trans character, Alexis, even within the wholely silly and over-the-top world of the show.
I’m an increasingly big fan of Glee, a show on Fox about a high school glee club. (There will be spoilers, so stop reading now if you’re worried about that.) Initially, I felt like all of characters were incredibly obnoxious, and excessively flawed to the point of driving me crazy. Now, however, I think they’ve done a good job humanizing all of them, and they’ve all really grown on me. (With the exception of Will’s wife. She’s obviously supposed to be disliked, but I think the writers have gone too far with her. She was one of the initial reasons I doubted the show, but they’ve focused more on other characters in the last few episodes.)
I’m conflicted about this past week’s show, though…
I think I’ve mentioned before that I have a bit of an obsession with TV Tropes, with tropes defined as “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” It’s as great a time-killer as WikiPedia, with more mass media and less actual “knowledge.” In addition to describing the trope, each page also has a list of comics/books/movies/shows/etc that demonstrate the trope (and often have snarky commentary as a nice bonus). Basically, it’s this.
Anyway, I’ve been bookmarking TV Tropes pages about gender, sexuality, and trans issues. As a culture-related site with a page about the Whateley universe, they have some good pages that seemed like they were worth sharing.
We’ll start with Transsexual. Their definition - “people who are not at all happy with the sex they were born with (more clinically, whose gender identity is out of whack with their biological sex)” – actually isn’t too bad. They also go on to differentiate between transgender, transsexual, transvestite, and so-on.
How I Met Your Mother is a funny show. I’m not going to lie and say it’s not. I really like the cast, I really like the characters, I really like the writing, and I consistently laugh when I’m watching it.
I’m getting more and more upset by the transphobia. That is, by jokes told at the expense of transgender women. Two big examples spring to mind:
When discussing how relationships work until the ‘oh’ moment, one of the examples is Robin saying “I used to be a dude.”
When trying to figure out why his girlfriend, Cathy, should be dumped, the third scenario has her saying “I used to have a penis.”
But I know there are more out there. In both examples, a potentially attractive female partner is rendered unattractive by being trans. I realize the show makes fun of a lot of different minority groups, but there seems to be a difference between having a positive gay character on the show and laughing with him, than simply making fun of how no one in their right mind would want to have a relationship with a trans woman.
As a trans woman, it really sucks to hear characters I thought I liked casually dropping things that would be incredibly hurtful if directed at me as a joke. I can’t imagine my little blog is going to have a huge effect on the show’s viewing audience (though I am also posting this to the show’s forum) but the very least I can do is speak up in the face of what is, in all likelihood, ignorance.
I’ve been trying really hard to bike to work when I’m able to. I biked today, but didn’t head home until after the show was done, at about 9:30PM. I have a route that I take to work and another one I take home if it’s late (different streets that are slightly less direct but I feel safer on). I was in a less-nice neighborhood (in this case, that’s code for ‘poor’ or ‘black,’ depending on your perspective) and a group of black kids was walking on the other side of the street from me. I had a moment of nervousness, then got mad at myself for having an initially racist reaction, then tried to tell myself it was a class issue and that I would have had the same worry reaction to a group of white kids who were similarly dressed. Then one of them jumped out at me, saying “Gimme that!”Don’t worry – I’m fine. He went back to the group and they all laughed and laughed at the way I swerved and sped up in my panic. So I (apparently) was never in ‘real’ danger. But, while I’m obviously upset that it happened at all, I’m also A) pissed at myself for having that initially somewhat racist (or even ‘just’ classist reaction), and B) pissed at them for somewhat living up to my poor expectations.
But now I’m all upset and trying to figure out where it’s coming from. I like knowing where my emotions come from, and estrogen isn’t horribly helpful for that… I’m also trying to figure out how or if what happened tonight is linked transitioning issues. I’m watching Six Feet Under (which is a really good show) and an episode where one fo the characters gets carjacked and then taken forced at gunpoint to take the carjacker around town, and feel like it wasn’t horribly helpful to my emotional stability, particularly because the character who was carjacked was gay and there were lots of calls of ‘faggot’ being tossed around by the carjacker. Likewise, at Julia Serano’s talk, she mentioned the potential dangers of having gender expression not matching legal papers, with asshole cops and the like.
I was just talking with SS, and used the word ‘vulnerable’ about the situation. It really sort of threw me – I wouldn’t in a million years have used it to describe how I felt or am feeling. I’ve admitted to feeling emotionally vulnerable before, but don’t know that I’ve ever said “I felt vulnerable” about a physical fear. I don’t like that that’s potentially a part of transitioning, or of living in the world as a woman (hell, it’s not potentially a part, it’s definitely a part). Again from Serano’s talk, she said some cissexual women (see this post) will brush off transsexual women’s complaints of feeling objectified or fearful of interactions, as it’s ‘just’ part of ‘shedding male privilege.’ (These are not Serano’s words, and not even her words of other people’s words, just my impression of how some cissexual women see the situation.)
I don’t know. I’m kind of rambling. I’m just unhappy to find an intersection of two of my least favorite things: feeling vulnerable and feeling unsure of where emotions are coming from…
-R
PS – Gods, I like asking questions as the title of posts.
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