A few weeks ago, MSNBC host Ed Schultz did a segment on his show about Chaz Bono appearing on Dancing with the Stars. His guest to discuss the topic was Raw Story blogger and Managing Editor Mike Rogers, a gay man. During the interview, Schultz asked Rogers if the kind of negativity directed toward Bono by Dr. Keith Ablow and others on the political right leads to hate speech and gay bashing. A viewer relatively unfamiliar with transgender people and the issues that impact our lives probably wouldn't have noticed anything amiss in this interview, but for transgender people and those who know and understand us, the problems were all too clear and familiar.
The first concern is also the most obvious. Given that Chaz Bono is a female-to-male transsexual man, one has to wonder why Ed Schultz invited a gay man and not an actual transgender person to appear on his show to speak on the topic. It's kind of like hosting a discussion on issues faced by African Americans with a white person presented as an expert, and makes just about as much sense.
The second problem is more difficult to recognize unless the viewer is already familiar with Chaz Bono himself. Bono is a man who is in a serious romantic relationship with a woman. He is therefore heterosexual, not gay. By asking Mike Rogers if the media attacks on Bono lead to gay bashing, Ed Schultz revealed his clear lack of understanding of what a transgender person is, as well as his ignorance of the difference between sexual orientation, the gender of the person one is sexually and romantically attracted to, and gender identity, whether an individual personally sees themselves as male, female, or something else entirely, a gender identity that doesn't fit neatly into either of those socially constructed boxes.
Those who saw the segment and took it as accurate and representative of the reality of transgender lives would likely be led to believe that all transgender people are gay, that being transgender is just another form of homosexuality. The problem is that they would also be completely wrong.
Regardless of whether a person is a famous author and celebrity or just an average working class Joe or Jane, coming out and publicly identifying as a transgender person is no easy task. Even in the best of circumstances and in the most progressive of political climates, transgender identities are usually hard-won, generally involving reams of paperwork and documentation, court appearances, and psychological evaluations, not to mention completely reorganizing one's personal and professional life to accommodate their new gender presentation. Depending on the laws of the jurisdiction a transgender person lives in, works in, and was born in, transitioning from one gender to another is often a tedious, expensive, and time-consuming process, sometimes even actually impossible to accomplish entirely. While a gay or lesbian person can come out of the closet by simply declaring their identity to others, transgender people must fight for our identities, sometimes for years, before we will be legally and socially recognized in many quarters as the people we know ourselves to be.
Many people look to the mainstream news media for a better understanding of topics and issues with which they are unfamiliar. When the journalists and pundits creating that media fail to educate themselves on the topics and issues they report on and then directly or indirectly misinform their audiences as a result, that's a problem. For a minority group as socially and politically persecuted as transgender people, when this kind of misinformation appears in mainstream media, it can be nothing short of disaster.
It's important to recognize that when we're talking about transgender Americans, we're talking about a group of American citizens who in 35 states can still be legally fired, denied employment entirely, or refused housing and access to public accommodations for no other reason than because we are transgender.
A recent study conducted by the National Center For Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that transgender Americans suffer an unemployment rate of 13 percent, double that of the national average at the time the survey was conducted, with 97 percent of respondents experiencing harassment or mistreatment on the job. Other findings include 47 percent experiencing an adverse job outcome such as being fired, not being hired, or being denied a promotion, and 15 percent of respondents living on incomes of $10,000 or less, again double the national average. For transgender people who are also members of racial and ethnic minorities, and especially for African Americans, the numbers are even worse.
In the political arena, some areas of the country have been moving quickly to protect their transgender citizens from discrimination, with Nevada, Connecticut, and Hawaii successfully enacting transgender-protective laws just this year. Other states, however, such as New York, Delaware, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts, have passed laws protecting their gay and lesbian citizens from discrimination, with some even legalizing their right to marry, but continue to deny those basic civil rights to transgender people. Still others, such as Tennessee, have actually passed laws repealing already-enacted local anti-discrimination protections, and even specifically forbidding transgender citizens born in those states the right to change their birth certificates to reflect their lived genders.
Despite all these obstacles and roadblocks to living our lives and pursuing our own versions of the American Dream, transgender Americans persevere. We keep fighting tooth and nail, day by day, moment by moment, just to be who we are and to be recognized by the rest of the world as the people we know ourselves to be. Large portions of our lives are spent striving to break free of the stereotypes and inaccurate labels others constantly seek to saddle us with, some because they bear genuine animosity toward us and the way we live our lives, and others, like Ed Schultz, because they simply don't get it.
Transgender people need to be able to rely on those in mainstream media who choose to cover us to do so properly. We need mainstream journalists and pundits to take the time to do their homework and educate themselves well enough on transgender people and transgender-relevant topics and issues to be able to avoid misinforming their audiences about us, be it through getting the facts wrong or by casting us in an inaccurate light by substituting their own perceptions of whom and what we are for the truth.
In the end, it comes down to this: quality news media deals in facts and dispels inaccurate perceptions; it doesn't validate and facilitate them. When the coverage concerns transgender people and the issues that impact our lives, mainstream news media audiences, and especially transgender people who are directly impacted by that coverage, should be able to expect nothing less.
Follow Rebecca Juro on Twitter: www.twitter.com/beckyjuro
Transgender - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Transgender 10-Year-Old, Jackie, Born A Boy, Happier As A Girl
Most Americans do not care about this until they are confronted with this issue. Then there are those people that just think it is bull$H1t and don't want anything to do with the subject. Those are people that think transgendered individuals are freaks and less than human and cannot tolerate anything that are out of the narrow minded view of the world. That makes it okay to bully, harass, beat or even murder.
All the statistics are great, but that is just a portion of the entire gender challenged population. It does not put a face on the issue. Neither does interviewing a gay man about trans issues.
There have been documentaries about being trapped in the wrong body, interviews with trans-people about their lives, but no TV program has ever delved into the hate and mistreatment of these brave individuals.
I think anyone who transitioned in the seventies and eighties, when gay theorists often described what were then called transsexuals as self-loathing, homophobic gay people who would rather change sex than be gay, would be particularly hurt by this kind of misrepresentation.
I think most people don’t realize that there are a lot of trangenders who, after a period of transition, find more acceptance in the straight world than they do in the gay community. I am aware that there are also transgenders who do consider themselves gay or queer. It’s hard not to let one group usurp anothers voice, but someone has to try, because the very fact that trans issues are put on the gay voices page illustrates a de facto elevation of one group over another.
I haven’t known any transgenders for a couple decades, and the ones I used to know probably weren’t representative (every one of them eventually had genital surgery), but your voice is the first I’ve seen on Huffpo that speaks up for my old friends.
Though I have to say, because it's my big grammatical pet peeve, transgender, just like transsexual or simply trans, is an adjective, not a noun.
And yes, 29% of trans women, according to the same survey Rebecca cited, identify as lesbian (I'm one of them.) and 23% identify as bi/pan, with 23% identifying as straight, and the rest as queer/asexual/other.
Of course, in the 70s and 80s, most doctors refused to treat trans lesbians, having decided that real women were straight... [expletives deleted]
Here is the beginning of it:
Welcome, Rebecca, to the world of Huffington Post blogging. Although I am not personally familiar with your activism work, it's no small feat to be selected by the Huffington Post folks as one of their contributors. Congratulations.
There is no doubt that we both agree on the overarching theme of your post; the mainstream media must be more thoughtful and inclusive when discussing the lives of transgender Americans. The dearth of transgender spokespeople on TV (and people of color, working class people, etc.) is something we all have an obligation to address, particularly those of us who work in progressive media.
For the rest of my comments about Rebecca's piece, visit here: http://www.blogactive.com/?page_id=3607
Mike
Becky
I wish I didn't have GID. I've been miserable most of my life because of it. Having to pretend to be something I'm not or get picked on or worse for doing what I want.
In the state I live I'm pretty sure they tried to make it as difficult and as expensive as they could for someone looking to get their gender changed. Between that and the fact you face losing friends and family just for trying to be yourself. It starts to seem hopeless and it's easy to fall into depression or worse.
We would all start from a better point if he first recognized that each human being is an individual and not the member of some group. The problems begin when some starts categorizing individuals into groups and then treating the individuals that the label slapped on that group. Our Constitution makes it unlawful to take an individual, classify him/her into some group, and then discriminate against the person due to the Group label. Thus, any laws against Gays or Transgenders are an unconstitutional deprivation of Liberty.
Thus, the general public needs to learn more about the differences among human beings. When people heard about LGBT, they're confused. It sounds like a sandwich. Most don't know what the letter stands for other than G = Gay, if they think about it, a large percentage of people know that L = Lesbian. Does that means Lesbians are not Gay? As for B and T, few people know.
People do not know because the amount of information is limited. If we would accept that each human being has the same moral worth as each other human being, then we'd be at a good starting point to learning a little more about biology.
As some have noted, there's no shortage of transgender people who are able to speak to these issues in the media from a position of both experience and expertise, but for some inexplicable reason Mike Rogers, a gay man, was chosen as a spokesperson for transgender people, a group which he is not a member of, apparently for no other reason than because he himself is gay. That further bolsters my point that Schultz was operating from a position of ignorance and didn't do his homework here.
1) Do you think Mike Rogers should have declined the interview because he's just a gay man and not transgender?
1a)What role do LGBT people have in helping to push each other's stories and struggles out into public?
2) Would you give any credit to Ed Schultz for trying to bring some of this to light in the "mainstream?"
I think that praising someone for trying to bring out a relevant story with some helpful advice on how to better present is better than berating someone for "not doing his homework,"
2. Schultz gets credit from me for intent, but not for execution. It's great that he wants to cover us, but it's incumbent on Ed Schultz, as the guy who's name is on the door, to cover the issue properly and not validate false stereotypes based in ignorance.
Good work, and keep up the protest! Maybe one day we'll have a society where a huge range shades of being are valued and included. I hope I'm still alive to see it, even if I am a very old lady by then.
And we are all grouped together because we are the last remaining Americans who do not enjoy equal protection under the law.
its people like you and this author that draw such stark lines that it only serves to further separate rather than unite. you said "there are plenty of actual transgendered people who can speak for themselves." there are millions of non-trans people willing to stand with them and other LGBT. jsut because they might not be gay or trans, doesn't mean they can't understand it and it doesnt mean I'm going to stop them or consider them second-class activists or something... its just the wrong battle to be fighting.
Almost 20 years later we have strong individuals & organizations that have made some amazing progress on behalf of the transgender community. Donna Rose & Mara Keisling at NCTE to name but some. But, as Rebecca Juro indicates, education is still the key, & articles like this & continued efforts to be more visible go further than any legislation or edicts from above.
Unfortunately, even in publications like this, their is much to do. Today's HuffPost features an article on a transgender bodybuilder (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/01/transgendered-bodybuilder-chris-bruce-comes-in-second_n_1069535.html?ref=gay-voices) where the headline still uses the (to me) offensive term "transgenderED". [UPDATE: I pointed this out & it seems to be corrected, although it still appears as the lead in on the Gay Voices Section.]
And do I/we object to being in the "Gay Voices" section on Huff Post? A little, yes. I am not gay, have never been a gay man & never identified as gay. I was with one person, a woman, for 20 years, have three kids, & have, since transition, been with men exclusively. You could say I have always been "straight" & at the same time "queer".
3 things, in my opinion, matter. Education, education & education. We should speak out if we can, & be as visible as is comfortable. Maybe then, Ed Schultz will ask the writer, or Mara or Donna to be the talking head & speak out... as we all should if we can.
I am still upset at how that was placed in "Weird News" and the cruelty of many of the posters was exhausting and hurtful.
I didn't know that "transgendered" was considered offensive though... I just figured it was the adjective form, like "gendered" is to "gender." Could you explain why this is objectionable to some people?
BUT... in the end I am not that strident about it. Its just me, and i don't want to fall out with anyone about it. There are far more pressing things to be concerned with and, once again it is a part of the tyranny of labels that beleaguers us all and is one of the bricks in the foundation of most inequality.
The conflating of transgender & gay issues is a complicated issue that will, I imagine, take some time & effort to resolve.
As a transgender activist in the early 90's I led a push to ask the Human Rights Commission (HRC) to include gender identity in their mission statement, which they subsequently did. However, as the debate unfolded I came to believe that, in reality, the issue is with the transgender community to address & resolve.
At the time there were very few effective, or at least well known, national transgender activist organizations. The transgender community seemed to want to turn to established LGB organizations to fight their case, instead of mounting education & activists movements themselves. The analogy I used at the time (flawed & creaky though it was), was to imagine that the movement that arose out of incidents like the Stonewall Riots, The Gay Liberation Front for example, had also spawned a parallel & vigorous "Transgender Liberation" movement. & that in the 90's the, for example, BDSM or "Leather" communities had approached us to include their values & goals in our mission statement. Whilst sympathizing with these objectives, the issues are different & we might have kindly suggested that our movement was not for them. It seemed that HRC was saying just that.
more...
That type of courage and having that large a capacity to be true to oneself needs to be celebrated in a society that places too much value on the inane.