(Yet) Another Trans Mockery

Not to be outdone, the very next day, the De Gustibus column in the Wall Street Journal made fun of transpeople. More sophisticated than Olbermann (what wouldn’t be?), the author reached for an example of how absurd, how totally ridiculous a liberal college education has become. Stephen Moore blames those liberals for all the “transgender studies and Che Geuvara classes.”  Don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen either one in a college syllabus.

No matter, point made — anything to do with transgender must be loony, nonsensical and ludicrous.  This is not the first, and I would bet not the last time, the Journal uses transpeople as the butt of the joke. We are one of the right’s favorite whipping boys right now. Here’s the letter I wrote in response:

Olbermann’s Trans Mockery

The first thing that happens when some new minority becomes visible is that people often start making jokes about it. This is a natural impulse in dealing with novelty and discomfort. On the left this impulse is usually reigned in by a certain degree of political awareness — or at least political correctness. On the right, there is no such restraint, and so the jokes usually tend towards mockery.

In the last few days, however, both sides have been ridiculing transpeople. First, Keith Olbermann introduced a segment about a particularly unpleasant government employee by showing her as a man in a dress. Needless to say, it had to be a man with heavy, dark, beard growth in an ill-fitting blouse and cheap, long blond wig. This combination is the one I see most often used to illustrate the complete absurdity of a man in a dress.

That’s so gay.

There was an interesting article in Judith Warner’s NYT blog a few weeks back that has had me thinking. It’s about teasing among teens with “that’s so gay.”  There are two interesting things about this kind of social bullying.

First, it is not about who someone is attracted to and it’s not mainly a gay slur. It’s not even totally a slur. Maybe it’s cold comfort, but sometimes those kinds of little shifts are what progress look like.

So what is “that’s so gay” really about it?

To me, it’s about reinforcing gender stereotypes. It’s about stigmatizing anything which is not stereotypically male, meaning anything that does not demonstrate the kind of sweaty strength, aggression, and toughness Real Man (or in this case Real Boys) are supposed to exude, or at least aspire to.