It is clear from reading public comments attached to various articles and blogs on ABC's upcoming new show Work It, which revolves around two masculine men forced by economic circumstances to seek work as women, that the general public does not comprehend why the transgender community is upset about it (also here, here, and here). (I expect similar comments to be attached to this post, so if you're writing to say, "It's just a joke," save it.) If transgender people were on a full and equal footing with the rest of society, if we were completely respected as a minority group, if we had full protections under the law like those based on race or religion, then I suppose we could view it as a little good-natured ribbing and take our lumps the same as anyone else.
The problem is that we are not. Here are just some of the findings in a survey conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality. Transgender people surveyed:
Additionally, of the transgender people surveyed:
We are the most discriminated-against minority group in America. This isn't a little, innocent jab at your best bud. This is kicking down people already at the bottom.
It really doesn't matter if this show is about transgender people or only about masculine-identifying men masquerading as women. The general public will still conflate the two. The jokes at the expense of the main characters will turn into water-cooler jokes about trans people. The depictions of the lives and experiences of the main characters will become the cultural assumption about the lives and experiences of trans people. ABC's ability to craft and mold cultural attitudes, assumptions, and opinions blows away anything we in the transgender community can do for ourselves.
Take for example the very premise that two men struggling in a job market that favors women can simply dress up as women and have a better shot at finding employment. This is the polar opposite of the reality for actual transgender women. It is far, far harder to find work as a trans woman than it is as a man or a cisgender woman. Long-term unemployment is an extremely common consequence of transition, and underemployment is often the best that can be hoped for. If this show is successful in convincing audiences of its most basic plot element, they will also be successful in convincing the American public that life must be pretty easy for trans women. They will have people thinking that finding work is a snap and that giving us protections from discrimination in employment would be like giving tax cuts to the wealthy. It would undermine our attempts to gain relief from the greatest hurdle we face in our survival.
And while there are those who say that because these characters are not transgender women, the story has nothing to do with the transgender community, I have to point out that what these characters are trying to do is superficially the exact same thing trans women are forced to do: find employment and navigate in a world that is intolerant and discriminatory, sometimes violently, toward men who violate masculinity. This is an outrageously difficult challenge for anyone who has gone through it, and it is always approached with enormous fear. Few people can imagine the fear experienced by the transitioning transsexual. It is hard to imagine any kind of economic hardship that could drive a masculine-identifying man to go through that, and even harder still to imagine him being successful at it. These men would be exposed for what they are by lunch on their first day on the job, probably in the first hour or minutes -- I guarantee it. For such a plot line to be depicted even remotely plausibly, these two men would be the absolute only people in their workplace who would think they were pulling it off.
This is where it becomes impossible to avoid conflating these characters with transgender people. For the premise to have any credibility, every other character in the story would just assume that these are two trans women but would be too polite to say anything about it. Thus, the story and the humor would turn on two men trying to pass as women while the audience knows that everyone around them sees right through them. Yes, this must become a story about transgender issues.
If ABC wants to salvage this show in the eyes of the transgender community, and perhaps even the larger American audience, they must commit to making it a show about, and sympathetic to, transgender people. They could use it to depict the challenges transgender people face every day. They could draw these two main characters into the transgender community, show the transgender experience through their eyes, include transgender characters played by genuine transgender actors, and make the show the transgender equivalent of Will & Grace rather than a remake of Bosom Buddies. Make the humor about the genuine experience of trying to live as a transgender person; make the victims of that humor the bigoted and sometimes well-meaning but ignorant characters they encounter, while occasionally punctuating the humor with the harsh reality of confronting prejudice and discrimination. There are indeed humorous situations in the lives of trans people, but you cannot honestly portray our lives in a Seinfeldian stream of nonstop, nutty humor. The humor must at times be poignantly interrupted by bitter reality or you will not have been true to the lives of the people you portray. You can't get a laugh showing someone learning to walk in heals without also showing the pain of not being able to go home for Christmas because your family has rejected you. If they're going to do this, they have to be fair and show both sides.
I could submit my own review, but I’ll defer to the experts on that to assure objectivity. It’s not trans-people-hate-it bad. It’s everybody-hates-it bad. Here is an excellent, extremely intelligently written, dead-on review of "Work It" which clearly illustrates that this show is not going to be salvaged:
http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/the-fien-print/posts/tv-review-abcs-work-it
Even if I choose not to watch it, I still have to walk out into a world full of people who have. Maybe I can boycott this show and even Disney, but I can’t boycott my job, my city, my state, or my nation. The issue isn’t that they might put something up on a TV screen that I don’t want to see. The issue is the impact this program will have on the perceptions and opinions of transpeople that will result in the collective mind of the non-transgender majority. No measure of boycotting on my part will change that effect.
if we really wanted to shut down negative portrayals, going after Springer would be the main target IMO.
These shows are CLEARLY playing for laughs the concept of a man reluctantly or temporarily forced into a female role for laughs, NOT the idea of a man trying desperately (and comically unsuccessfully) to BE a woman.
IF the plot was "let's laugh at these funny weirdo men who think they ARE women" - THAT would be incredibly offensive. but that's not the plot.
Is the show sexist? Oh god yes, and is protestable on those grounds.
Is it monumentally un-funny? it certainly seems to be and ought fail miserably on those grounds alone.
Is it trans-phobic? not in my opinion, and I'd further say that we as a community ought to be very careful about coming off as TOO prickly, lest we lose credibility when an ACTUAL transphobe appears and we speak out.
http://thelowerfrequency.com/2011/02/23/drag-race-entertainment%E2%80%99-fascination-with-black-actors-in-drag/
But that said, I think your view that the show needs to address the transgender experience whether it wants to or not is absolutely right. I spoke to a WB exec last spring when they picked the show up. I saw a picture of the guys in drag and said, “Who the hell would think for a minute that these were real [i.e. biological] women? Everyone would take one look at them and immediately assume they’re transgendered.” I couldn’t and still can’t imagine how the writers thought they could sustain the premise that these singularly inept female impersonators would somehow succeed in fooling their co-workers week after week. Making the characters deal with the perception they’ve unwittingly created that they’re trans women in (very early) transition would at least give the show a slightly more credible storyline to pursue.
But even with that approach, good luck milking it for even one season’s worth of episodes. There’s a reason the most successful cross-dressing comedies have been films and not TV series.
the problem with your suggestion, IMO, is a real transwoman not finding work because she's trans is ANYTHING but funny.That would have to be a drama. Which, BTW, no network would pick up.
A real positive representation of transsexuals in a comedy, to me, would be something like this - take Tim Allen's new show "last Man Standing" for an example - the show is already premised on a "man's man" surrounded by a houseful of women.
what if. from the beginning of the show, along with his wife and daughters, Allen had an adult (say, 19 or 20) son who had come out as trans and was trying to transition in the home of a "man's man" who was trying to overcome his own persona enough to accept his new-found daughter.
Say he gets that daughter a job at his "manly" outdoor company and has to balance his man'y-man reputation with his co-workers against their tendency to make a joke of his child.
in other words, the transwoman is a secondary but important aspect of the series, but not the central figure.
I still doubt any network would pick it up but i could see it being a very positive image.
There are two basic, primary things holding back the social advancement of transpeople: 1) those who actively oppose us out of highly motivated hate, typically driven by religious bias, but often cultural bias, and 2) those who would otherwise be tolerant, but are just ignorant about transpeople, what they are really like, and the issues they face. Fortunately, the latter group is much larger than the former, and if reached and educated, they can be persuaded. The problem for us is that there's too few of us and we have too weak of a voice to reach them. The real turning point in the history of trans people will be when some popular, mass media presentation, like a TV show, starts representing us accurately and sympathetically to the American people. We don't control the media. We can't completely dictate what that presentation will be. If this show became that, I would take it.
As for Tootsie, it helped tremendously that Dustin Hoffman received help from the trans community, and the fact he was doing the character as a sympathetic, yet strong character. He wasn't playing Dorothy Michaels for a cheap laugh, he was playing the character as a *real* actor would!
This dreck from ABC is more in line with sophomoric humor, as in "haha I can get away with this" with the requisite cheap laughs and tawdry dialogue. Whomever came up with this piece of crap should be forced to dress up 24/7 and see what it's *really* like for us transfolk who have to fight tooth and nail -- not only for our basic civil rights, but our very lives!
I highly doubt "Work It!" will show the guys getting surrounded by a street gang, and watch as they get clubbed down, knifed, or shot like so many other transwomen do. I also highly doubt there will be an episode of the guys being pulled over by the cops and arrested for being sex workers, either!
In other words, this show will be about as realistic as Barbie's Dream House.
Reality is that 30-40 years ago short skits may have been funny, as transsexuals are now trying to 'Make It' in the workplace and facing dramatic challenges in doing so, 'Work It' doesn't work. Some commentators have equaled the meme of the sitcom and actors to drag queens, this show is not about drag, it is not.
The reality that people transitioning within the workplace is a common one today, but society is still challenged to accept us, they analyze everything we do, we say, we wear, how we speak, how we move, and most importantly how we look.
This show will not help see that we can, and do pass, but that in order to do so, many of us must undergo significant, and costly surgery. And before we do that we have to work 24/7and as you do clearly pointed out, many cannot do that once they inform their employers of their medical and therapeutic needs.
thank you again for your article.