When trans women are mocked and made into jokes in the media, I get very upset, and I am often told āKay, you canāt go through life getting offended every time someone makes a joke.ā And I sputter and object but they donāt hear me. So I want to be clear for once, about why the jokes make me angry.
I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about āmen in dressesā, about people who āgot their dicks chopped offā, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.
And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldnāt bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.
And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And theyāre still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.
That is, if she doesnāt kill herself first.
I know this is a really heavy post but if you read it and you appreciated it, Iād appreciate it in return if you reblogged it. This is really important to me and I want people to read it and understand it. Thank you.
The thing people who say things like āyou canāt go through life being offended over every jokeā donāt see is that itās not just being offended over any joke. In this joke, the punchline is that the person is trans. Or gay. Thatās it. Thatās the joke.
From the TV tropes page called āqueer is funnyā:
āThere is a tendency for works, particularly older works and works aimed at young men, to treat same sex relationships as beingĀ inherentlyĀ funny. Obviously, gay people and gay relationships can be funny for lots of reasons ā for example, if the characters are incredibly mismatched, or if the behaviour of one character is amusingly offputting, so this doesnāt just apply to any humour derived from gayness or from gay relationships, only when the punchline isĀ thatĀ it is gay. Litmus test ā if this were heterosexual, would it be (roughly, if not quite) as funny?ā
And that is the issue. Itās not seeing a joke about characters like you thatās the problem - thatās just the strawman that people like to pretend it is so they can continue making/laughing at these jokes.
Itās when your existence is the joke. Thatās the problem.
I hope all the tme people, queer or not, reading this who consider themselves allies to trans women really pay attention to this and critically examine your own behavior, because so many of you will skim this, nod to yourself, call yourself a good ally for it, and then immediately resume reblogging to posts with slurs that fetishize and demean us for the sake of comedy, whether itās tr/p or s/ssy or f/mb/y or some new transmisogynist flavor of the month that surfaces arter I post this.
Donāt pretend to care about trans women if you donāt even care enough to stop making and sharing jokes where weāre the punchline
@wearequeer-andwearehere
