I believe I have experienced transphobia first-hand
The specific incident I'm about to tell of occurred in 2022. I'd spent the better part of several years transitioning socially and had been on HRT for over a year by that point. I needed to find a new place to live and found an agency in the Phoenix Valley that would do most of the legwork to find an apartment. I went in and talked to the VP of the branch to make sure they were a good fit, and she assigned my file to one of her agents, who then told me and my GF (yes, of the "Real Conversations with my GF" series of posts) to meet him at a complex that had a vacancy that Friday.
Upon arriving, we discovered the apartments didn't even have an open front-office, no postings for a vacancy, and no staff on-site that day. Their open hours were, in fact, only Mon.-Thurs.
I called the agent and he apologized and said he'd gotten busy with another client and must have gotten the days mixed up. I sighed and agreed to meet him at another complex the following week.
This happened in nearly the same way every single time we arranged a new place to look into that supposedly had a vacancy. I'd show up, agent didn't, the place was closed and/or had no vacancies listed. The only place where we actually did get to see some of the staff that worked for the complex not only confirmed there were no available apartments but said they had no idea we were coming.
With time drawing short for the deadline we had to move out of the place we'd been living for nearly two years, I decided I'd had enough, so I drove my GF and myself to the office and asked to speak to the VP who originally interviewed with us. I explained what had been happening. I did so calmly and dispassionately, simply stating the facts as we knew them. The VP got a very darkly conflicted look on her face. She clearly didn't want to believe what we were telling her, but at the same time she clearly had seen many people come in and get apartments from both her and her team of agents and, given what she knew of our credit history and the interview, there was no reason for us to not have a place by then.
She asked us to excuse her for a moment and crossed the office. It wasn't a big place, so we could just barely hear the pair of them murmuring between themselves but not the content of the conversation. I could see from their body language that the impromptu meeting was very confrontational and the VP was not happy. She snatched our file from the stack on the man's desk and made her way back over to us, sat down, opened the file to review the documents, and started a search for us.
We had a signed lease to turn into the main office for our new apartment within an hour.
Now; can I prove that this incident occurred due to transphobia? No. Not without the agent stating outright and on the record that he didn't want to rent out to someone like me. Do I care enough about a small mind who crossed my path enough to make a case about it that would get such an admission? No. I have a life and a job and things to get done. Does the circumstantial and anecdotal evidence support the supposition that I was discriminated against? Yes.
Did the agency do anything about the agent? I have no goddamn clue and don't care to investigate, especially after the amount of time that's passed.
I bring this up in the wake of the surfacing of accusations against Hans Zimmer vis-a-vis transphobia. I have said for nearly two decades now; show me the receipts. What we do have is two items that have resurfaced in a flurry of reposts/reblogs in the last 48 hours or so as of the time of this writing; a tweet from a trans-woman from 2021 after she was fired by Zimmer and news articles reporting that Zimmer has agreed to be the composer for the score for the new Harry Potter series.
So far as evidence supporting the allegations of transphobia, there is the report from Lauren Bousfield that cited Zimmer's 'pattern' of abuse as why she was fired, but there was no investigation and no response from Zimmer, et-al. (I feel like this is one of those times I should be using the word 'alleged,' though by this point some people see that as a dog-whistle...and in fairness, it has been used as such quite a bit since Trump's first term.) The testimony of a trans-woman who's experienced what may well be a confrontation with transphobia is something that should never be discounted, and though I'd liked to have seen something come about (a press release, a journalistic investigation, a lawsuit), given my own antipathy to pursue what was a very negative bump in my particular road, I can understand her similar lack of spoons and bandwidth to pursue some resolution beyond a social media post that gets lost in the pile for several years before it gets attention.
There's the additional report that Zimmer has signed on to work on the score for the new Harry Potter series (now with 100% more transphobia), and while I want to say that a sure-fire way to determine if someone is evil simply because of their association with a known holocaust-denying transphobe, the sad truth is that not enough people KNOW that Rowling has gone full Nazi-apologist. (Rowling's publicly admitted transphobia isn't the subject of this piece, though if this the first you're hearing of it I strongly encourage you to read up on the matter.)
Every time the subject of Harry Potter comes up between me and my ex-wife (who, to her credit, has been trying to understand my world and experiences the last few years), I have to explain the latest bat-shittery surrounding Rowling's ongoing campaign to eradicate trans people by any means necessary. This is a woman who has had queer and trans culture pretty much in her face at least 2-3 times a week for the last decade-plus and she hadn't heard of what Rowling was up to until I told her around the time Trump got elected the second time. Yes, that recently.
I have zero honest clue whether Zimmer is transphobic, though now I'm starting to give his career a side-eye, especially if the reports that he's working with Rowling are true. If the new HP series comes out and his name isn't attached, then bonus. I'd still want an official statement, but a silence when there's no evidence for or against can sometimes be the best policy in the world of doom-scrolling news and entertainment, especially when word tends to spread via piss-on-the-poor websites like Tumblr.
The thing for me is; his music is good! He's produced the most iconic scores for cinema and streaming media for a couple decades now and just the other day me and a couple other transwomen were enjoying one of the Spider-man movies and commenting on how iconic Zimmer's leitmotifs are. Music is the language of emotion and every time you listen to and process the emotions connected to a piece of music, that's some pretty significant emotional labor. When I write, I craft playlists as a set of emotional and mental bookmarks for specific characters and scenes that the music lends weight to.
Nearly every playlist I have built in the last five years has a Zimmer piece.
That's a LOT of emotional labor to undo and then find alternatives for.
(This isn't to say I'm not willing to do it, should Zimmer, indeed, prove to be transphobic.)
And, of course, there's the reported partnership with Rowling...but if we're judging someone based on their working partnerships, then factor in that Hans Zimmer worked with Bastille to produce the frankly epic and phenomenally moving Pompeii MMXXIII.
Bastille has spoken out in interviews as being highly supportive of the queer community and spoken harshly of the recent wave of transphobia. From a 2022 interview:
“Touring with our last album, we intentionally had a big sparkly rainbow drum kit, like a Pride flag, because that’s something that’s getting more polarised,” says Woody.
“We often get people in the front row with Pride flags. If you have to nail your colours to the mast, these are ours. We want it to be a safe space for everyone.”
On the subject of hatred directed towards transgender people, Dan adds:
“It’s such a tragedy that has become a battleground. There’s room for everyone.
“Obviously we are massively supportive of the trans community and try to be as good as allies as we possibly can.”
(In-Common, "Bastille interview: songwriting, fame & being allies", Aug. 2022)
Applying the same logic to the business relationship between Zimmer and Bastille as one might to the business relationship between Zimmer and Rowling would draw the "obvious" conclusion; Hans Zimmer "can't possibly" be transphobic because he worked with known allies. But then he's working with Rowling so he "obviously" must be transphobic. So is he or isn't he? While sometimes association does, indeed, prove character or allegiance...sometimes it's just business.
Obviously, Zimmer is his own person and can hold his own opinions, no matter how heinous or virtuous they may be...but what we have isn't evidence that the man has a history or pattern of transphobia beyond the single testimony without corroborating evidence. And deciding that he is or isn't based solely on business partnerships is obviously a bust given the very wide swath of several industries he's worked in. While, yes, it may feel tone-deaf of the man to work with people like Rowling that are iconic in our very narrow trans vertical while also working with an ally that has painted their drum kit Pride colors in support of our community, I can easily imagine he's got a life and a business and things to get done and simply hasn't had anyone sit him down to make him understand that working with the likes of Rowling is ultimately very damaging. There's so little evidence that we can make a sound judgement on that any loud declarations made on the issue right now would be no better than the harpy that tried to sic the management of the grocery store on me for the horrible crime of >checks notes< "using the bathroom."
Oh, I haven't mentioned that? Yeah, it was another example, this time MUCH more blatant, of being the victim of anti-trans bigotry. I'm sure you've read the headlines of similar incidents; transwoman goes to use the woman's bathroom, some cis woman decides to make it everyone's problem. The grocery store management took my side, btw. I still shop there even though it's a good 20 minutes out of my way to do so because of that.
At this time, I'm going to reserve judgement. Through... "means" (🏴☠️) it's very possible to separate a musician's art from the artist in the most meaningful way possible, I certainly won't be listening to the HP soundtracks (any of them) regardless of who makes them, and should more definitive evidence come out on the issue, I can go about the process of replacing all of Zimmer's music on my many playlists. I've set up an alert to flag any new articles so I won't be in the dark going forward, and should (through some miracle) I get the chance to discuss who would be scoring the series for any of my original novels in a streaming/movie adaptation, the first question I'll have for Zimmer (should he still be producing at the time and interested) is what, exactly, his stance on trans folk is.
