I am reminded of the first time I really saw a transgender story in a movie. I came out in 1998 when I was 16 years old and I devoured every part of gay media available to me at my local bookstore and Blockbuster. I rented a movie titled Better Than Chocolate, a 1999 Canadian film focused on the lives of two lesbians and managing their families. One character, Judy, was transgender. Judy was what everyone understood to be ‘transgender’ before 2015. She transitioned to a woman and attempted to live as one. Judy’s story-line was of building a new life, reconnecting with her family and her crush on a lesbian character named Frances who was conflicted on the idea of dating someone who was not ’really’ a woman.
It was about this time in my identity development I began exploring the idea that I too was transgender. I certain felt like I was female as a child and up until my focus became overwhelmed with my sexual orientation, I assumed as an adult I would somehow magically become a girl. Seeing Judy was curious to me. Judy was not the typical ‘woman trapped in a man’s body’ stereotype in that she was also attracted to women. It had not occurred to me then that a heterosexual man would become a lesbian woman. Ironically it was the most progressive and activist lesbian character in the movie most uncomfortable with the new idea that a straight man could become her lesbian partner.
But the movie in many ways encapsulated the transgender experience. Judy was not an easy transition being visually masculine and struggling with her voice. At one particular moment of weakness she reverts to her deeper masculine voice. Judy was real. She embodied the emotional and physical reality of what transgender transition was like. She was dedicated even when nearly everyone she wished to receive love from struggled to get past that part of her. She wanted to be a woman, not a lesbian, not a trans woman, not an advocate. She simply wanted to be.
The movie ends with her parents buying her a brand new home. The gift is, unfortunately, also a goodbye letter stating they never want to see her again. Frances finally breaks through her wall and kisses Judy in an uncomfortable but passionate embrace. You cared about Judy and felt a sense of hope for her.
The movie, like most gay themed movies of that era, is focused on personal choices and empowerment. The characters have made a choice to live out their desires and develop a sense of who they are outside of the comfort and security of their families. There are consequences to this with some being good and others emotionally difficult. But in the end the character owns their choice fully. This is a message that inspires compassion, understanding and even support from most viewers. It humanizes the social narrative.
Today’s gay left, sadly, has forgotten this message and has chosen the path of bullying scold rather than advocate for personal freedom.
Today the LGBT movement consists of people who seem to define their entire sense of advocacy on complaining that people are not accepting them enough or appropriately. It isn’t enough that transgender people are included in popular media and culture despite being only 0.3% of the population. The way transgender people are included must be carefully managed. When director Mark Ruffalo cast popular actor Matt Bomer as the transgender lead in his film Anything, the response to a mainstream actor/director making a mainstream movie involving a major transgender character staring a mainstream gay actor was: Outrage. Similar to the above quoted tweet, the anger was focused on the idea that a non-transgender person would be playing trans in a movie.
“There are many qualified trans actors and writers who could have played in and advised on the construction of the scenes you’re about to edit into a motion picture. They will lose more work because of this,” Mya Byrne, a trans musician and poet wrote on HuffPost. “We know you have good intentions. But those intentions have far-reaching after-effects that you, as cis men, don’t experience.”
Clayton plays Nomi on the hit Netflix original Sense8, a trans woman in a lesbian relationship. Her story on the show is almost identical to that of Judy’s in that she struggles with her family accepting her new identity and the lesbian community’s hot and cold receptiveness to her as a real woman. But the point here is that she plays a trans woman. Just like Laverne Cox does in Orange is the New Black. The characters are both interesting and unique and both provide a sympathetic look into this experience, but the reality is the actors themselves have limited their own potential. Ironically a decade ago it was viewed as progress and social acceptance for straight actors to play gay roles and vise versa.
How does bitterly scolding mainstream influential voices, one who is gay himself (Bomer), advance the pursuit of transgender acceptance? It seems this particular branch of the identity movement no longer cares. If the cult classic 1995 movie Jeffrey were to be made today the LGBT left would be chastising Patrick Stewart and Steven Weber for appropriating gay roles. Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo would be lectured on how one should hope they will do ‘actual good’ for the gay community one day after starring as drag queens in the film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
If memory serves, Tom Hanks was not a gay man living with AIDS when he filmed Philadelphia.
The absurdity that actors must match their character’s various identities in order to be authentic or ‘good’ for any particular community is beyond reason. Worse, the attitude itself limits creativity and shames artistic interpretation. They really should have cast a real sex worker in the movie Pretty Woman rather than a famous rich actress! It is nonsense. And yet it is the currently path the LGBT movement has chosen.
Zack Ford demonstrates this attitude better than anyone. Ford holds great influence in the gay community as the editor of the LGBT section of ThinkProgress.com. The notion we are segregated to our own section should be silly enough but it is common today (Huffington Post Queer Voices, Buzzfeed Queer and so on). He most recently championed a witch burning against Out magazine for the crime of profiling a conservative gay man, Milo Yiannopoulos. He is, however, best known for denouncing anyone even hinting at questioning any part of the trans movement as ‘bigots’ and ‘transphobes.’
In this particular self-righteous rant Ford was responding to a series of questions on the basic nature of what being transgender means. When challenged with a completely reasonable question by David Marcus, Senior Contributor to The Federalist, as to what empirical test could be used to determine if someone is a woman, Ford responded simply with ‘Asking.’ Providing the current LGBT-led assumption that gender is determined solely by the person experiencing it. It is a reasonable question, yet the response is dismissal and shaming.
In another exchange between Marcus and Ford over the nature of ‘woman’ versus ‘trans woman’, detailed by Bre Payton of The Federalist, Trans Activist: Using Pronouns That Align with Biology is Just Like Saying the N-Word, Ford again dismisses the very idea that transgender ideology can be questioned at all. Instead he insists on a specific language, set of standards and understood principles before even engaging. Without submitting to those requirements he refuses to entertain anything said as other than inherently bigoted.
It is this attitude that I believe creates hostility between differing cultures of people within the same physical and social space. Before 2015 or so (before the bathroom wars began) transgender people were generally understood to be a part of the population. No one really gave it much thought. People didn’t ‘come out’ as transgender, they simply lived as their chosen sex and moved on with their lives. The legal battles were largely won in the last century and it was possible to obtain a complete legal status change to reflect your new gender. As a society it seemed the transgender issue was settled.
But the left is never satisfied. It wasn’t enough that adults could pursue gender reassignment if they wanted to. I, for example, explored it and decided it was not right for me. I affirmed my birth sex as my gender and built a comfortable sense of self around it. In previous times this would have been completely normal. A previous employer of mine even covered reassignment surgery and hormone treatment for transgender employees. I worked with a transitioning person here and there, saw them mid-way out and about and literally no one gave it a second thought.
But now the LGBT left has decided that transgender people are oppressed because companies do not hang signs saying ‘If you feel you are a woman, please use the women’s restroom!’ and completely non-transitioned teenagers can’t go into the locker room of their preferred gender. The things transgender people managed day-to-day for decades without concern or fuss are civil rights issues of the highest order today. Pronouns, once a polite part of society, are now weapons of intimidation and coercion. Children are being transitioned without their consent and parents are being told if their 5 year old son tries on a princess costume they are morally required to begin hormone therapy.
Average people are relabeled ‘Cisgendered’ and tilt their heads in disbelief at the dozens and dozens of gender options primarily 20-somethings currently conjure up on a daily basis. All the while being accused of ‘transphobia’ and ‘bigotry’ for even questioning the validity of it all. In the 1980’s parents worried their child might be gay and get AIDS (a legitimate concern). Today they fear their child will be convinced they are the other gender at school and they will be shamed as oppressive and hateful if they try to reason with them afterwards.
There will be a backlash as you can only badger people so long. In everyday life people roll their eyes and convey annoyance whenever the topic is brought up. People cringe at the uproar over Halloween costumes and most seem to think the bathroom issue is absolute nonsense. Most importantly, people do not want to care. If you asked most people they would shrug and say, ‘I don’t care what you do, I just don’t want to hear about it every day.’ But that isn’t good enough for the left.
The right is concerned about freedom of choice. The left is concerned about accepting the new Utopian order. We don’t care about adults making life choices, we just don’t want ideology providing predators access to children, children being influenced into making permanent life-long decisions about their bodies or state and federal regulations demanding recognition of a radical new concept of human nature and biology imposed onto the masses. The left is concerned that somewhere someone used the wrong pronoun when speaking about a transgendered person and the federal government needs to intervene.
Resentment, annoyance and rebellion are natural responses to smug indignation. Call me a bigot long enough and I am going to start enjoying saying and doing things that cause you to flail madly around your room with your hair on fire. The left creates the cycle. They manufacture a crisis, repeat it with wild aggressive accusations of malicious intent, the population eventually gets tired of it and lashes back and then the left indignantly declares they were right all along.
Sadly for transgender people the road is not going to get any easier. Had the LGBT left not chosen to foist this manufactured nonsense onto the nation they would have continued living their lives in relative peace, facing only the shallowest of concerns. Now their sanity, validity, stability, reach of influence and respect for their choices are all up for grabs. By demanding that we are the ignorant ones unaware of science, the very foundation they base their identities on is closely examined and challenged. We never would have cared before.
People who would have never given a second thought to calling a trans woman ‘she’ now feel a sense of principle against being forced or shamed into doing so. Where people may have laughed it off before but never gone any further, now they feel a sense of satisfaction saying ‘No, you are in fact crazy. Stop lecturing me.’ And no one wants any of this to be imposed on kids. The move from ‘Just let me live my life’ to ‘Why won’t you affirm me?!’ has turned imaginary opposition into genuine criticism of their worldview.
While I disagree that ‘hatred’ exists towards LGBT in general but transgendered people in particular, resentment and discomfort are certainly rising. As usual, social struggles always begin with the left. If transphobia exits today, it is entirely their doing.
It is harder to be transgender in 2016 than it was in 1999 because of the LGBT movement. This is why more voices and perspectives need to be heard. This is why reasonable gay people and rational liberals need to recognize why a centralized approved narrative for all things only creates turmoil and chaos. We used to persuade and now we intimidate and its the duty of everyone who wishes to live in true equality to stand up against the LGBT bullies.