This morning I woke up to an ongoing conversation in my Twitter mentions where a couple people were debating whether The Crying Game has merits that outweigh the lasting harm it’s inflicted on trans women in general. I jumped in to explain the exact form that harm took, educating and rightly horrifying the person who had previously been playing devil’s advocate for the film. I love clearing up disconnects like that and leaving people more aware of serious issues, and I figure this one is plenty common, so let’s get into it here too.
As a quick aside before getting into my main point, let’s all consider our understanding of albinism thanks to pop culture. Generally speaking, I think we’re all aware of the bizarre problem of Hollywood consistently making everyone with albinism in film some kind of over the top villain with supernatural powers. And we generally congratulate ourselves for our ability to separate fact and fiction, knowing that here in the real world, they’re just regular ordinary people with white hair and skin, and red eyes who you don’t have to worry about killing you with their minds. Except the red eyes thing isn’t actually true either. Not all forms of albinism effect the eyes at all, but even in the ones that do, people have the normal range of eye colors, it’s just that photos of them are more likely to get the “red eye” effect from camera flashes, and we all got so used to that it became our idea of “normal” and fictional depictions started depicting it consistently.
We all pick up a lot of “common knowledge” from pop culture sources that’s complete BS without realizing it, no matter how much we’re convinced that we can tell the difference. Carrots are bad for rabbits, but we all think of them as The Thing they eat, because we collectively lost the context for a movie reference in an old cartoon. And our brains are absolutely terrible at drawing a line between the facts we actually researched and the “facts” we just picked up from pop culture or local idiots.
All that in mind, The Crying Game, more so than any other source I can think of, is the movie that popularized the myth that “trans women are out there, dating guys, and not disclosing that they have a penis until they’re about to have sex.” That’s what the movie’s known for, and that’s what’s known about the movie. I’ve never even seen it, personally, but I still somehow managed to pick up on the meaning of the phrase “a Crying Game type situation” and it’s still a phrase people are using 24 years later. That’s a pretty big impact. Also, you’ll note I say it popularized a myth, because this isn’t actually a thing that really happens.
Think about it just anecdotally for a moment. I’m willing to bet that you, personally, have never been undressing with a woman in preparation for sex, and suddenly hit with the realization that she has a penis. Further, I’m willing to bet that you don’t even know anyone who has. At best, you might be familiar with a real world version of this story having been told by someone standing trial for murdering a trans woman, because that’s actually a valid legal defense.
A funny thing though about the cases you can actually point to is that invariably, they involve taking the murderer at his word, because the victim is dead, and can’t testify to the contrary. You would think, if this were something that actually happened, most examples wouldn’t end in murder. The man, enraged at having been tricked, would stop at a mere beating, or a long period of enraged screaming, or would try to murder the woman but fail. Those stories though, you never hear. Nor do you hear the stories you’d have to figure should be out there where a woman goes to bed with a man, and only finds out he’s trans when he suddenly reveals his lack of a penis in the bedroom.
Meanwhile, here’s some things which very much do happen. A man murders a trans woman and claims he was “tricked,” then witnesses show up to testify that they had dated for quite some time, and he was absolutely aware from day one that she was trans. Or it comes out that he had specifically sought her out on a dating site specifically set up for men to find trans women, or made a specific request from an escort service.
And if you talk to trans women who date men, you’ll find it’s quite common for them to have stories about brushes with death at the hands of men who were very much aware they were trans the moment they first met, if not earlier. Plenty more have stories of being assaulted and groped, with a particular focus around the crotch. A good number of trans women who don’t date men have stories of this nature as well.
Trans women are very much on the supply side when it comes to us dating men. Just do a quick search, anywhere really, for the T-slur, “T-girls,” “dick girls,” “futanari,” “futa,” or “TG” and look what comes up. Google, tumblr, any sort of art site and look at how much trans woman porn comes up. Odds are you can find even more with “forced fem” “trap” or “sissy,” if you want the really specialized stuff. We are as rare as redheads, and just as disproportionately represented in men’s fantasies. Any trans women who are interested in dating men have an overabundance of suitors constantly asking them out specifically for that reason, and the idea of someone needing to trick a man into thinking she was cis is absurd just on that level, not even getting into the obvious problem that the ruse must break when the clothes come off, and your date would then be allowed to murder you.
Meanwhile, the guys consuming all that porn mentioned earlier, fairly frequently, get bold enough to check out a real life trans woman. So they’ll look for a dating service, trans friendly bar, whatever, and look to hook up with one of us. Then, sometimes, partway through a date or whatever, their fragile masculinity will send them into a panic that they’re doing something gay, they won’t want to be outed, and they get violent, sometimes murderously so, and decide their cover story for the whole thing will be to claim they ended up in “a Crying Game type situation.” It makes sense to them, because hey, we’ve all seen the movie, that’s a thing that happens. And anyone they’re forced to give that explanation to will recognize it as a common occurrence, because they, too, have seen that movie, and know it to be a common thing.
So, women like me, even those of us who wouldn’t be caught dead in bed with a man, get demonized as part of these fragile dudes’ cover stories, plus we have to deal with the reality that any given sleazeball can grab one of us off the street, murder us, maybe raping us first, and probably get away with it, just by lying and saying it was “a Crying Game type situation.” And that’s a valid legal defense.
So fuck that movie. It’s exploitative trash, and more importantly, it has a body count.
