Movies about Transphobia
I looked at how trans characters are rarely portrayed as dynamic within film. False representations of trans lives is both a result of transphobia within our society and serves as a force that maintains and perpetuates transphobia. Transphobia manifests in two distinct ways, first as erasure of nonbinary identities, and secondly as delegitimizing trans identities through a combination of problematic plot elements, transphobic character development, and casting decisions that are not privileging of trans actors.
I examined multiple films, as well as one television series. The first film being Boys Don’t Cry,which centered around narratives of violence against trans people. Boys Don’t Cryalso features problematic production elements, as no trans people were included in the entire production of the film, thus disallowing trans people to selfnarrate stories of transness.
The second film is Albert Nobbs,which is violent in both its depiction of transness and its production. The film relies on portraying a trans man as an “in fact” woman, who is dressing as a man in order to avoid violence. This is egregious in its portrayal in that trans men do not face external violence, when actually the opposite if correct.
Following the conversation on transphobia in film, I looked at how problematic portrayals of transness are damaging to the trans community. With heightened rates of violence directed at trans people, inaccurate portrayals only reinforce damaging stereotypes that directly result in violence. In all of these cases, trans people rarely selfnarrate, and typically exist in film for the benefit of cisgender people. Portrayingtrans characters in this way does nothing except create an incredibly toxic socioeconomic environment where trans people are forcibly located within close proximity to violence, specifically egregious violence that is exacerbated by a distinct lack of mental and physical health resources for trans people, thus rendering them in distinct social isolation and unable to attain basic health care.
Poznámky
Removed from view at request of the author.
TV and films have long taught audiences transphobia
Today’s political assaults on trans rights build on media depictions of trans people as dangerous
Perspective by Traci B. Abbott
Traci B. Abbott is an assistant professor of English and media studies at Bentley University and author of «The History of Transgender Representation in American Television and Film Genres» (2022, Palgrave Macmillan).
14. července 2022 v 6:00 EDT
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So far in 2022, a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills have filled up state legislative dockets, with more than 300 proposed in over 35 states. The legislative focus centers on the trans community by banning trans people from spaces such as bathrooms, locker rooms or athletic teams that fit their identity.
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Worse, some are designed to prevent trans people from existing at all. These proposed laws criminalize gender-affirming care for trans children and adolescents, ban legal changes of gender for trans adults and bar discussion of trans identities in the classroom.
Such anti-trans rhetoric can seem startling, but a closer look at how American television and film have portrayed trans characters demonstrates a troubling history that probably still contributes to many of the sentiments and stereotypes underpinning these legislative efforts.
For decades, popular culture has relied on assumptions about the trans community that implies there is something different, even disturbing and dangerous, about them. The origin of this stereotype is most likely Ed Gein, an alleged cross-dresser in Wisconsin who murdered two local women in 1957. According to recent scholarship, local investigators linked Gein’s “transvestism” to his grave robbing and desecration of his victims during a forced confession, and leaked the revelation to the press.
Robert Bloch used the case to create his murderous protagonist in the novel “Psycho” (1959), following on the popularity of other trans psychotic killers as in “The Lady was a Man” (Shane, 1958) during this starkly homophobic decade. Bloch’s novel became the basis of the film “Psycho” (Hitchcock, 1960) and influenced the plot of an episode of the television show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (NBC, 1965) soon after.
Although sodomy and cross-dressing laws were already in place at this time, the mid-20th century began a more explicit war against gender and sexual nonconformity. Already struggling with the post-World War II restabilization of gender roles, society roiled when faced with new scientific theories about the commonality of non-heterosexual behavior and advances in surgical and physiological treatments which enabled transsexual women such as Christine Jorgensen to physically transform themselves. Medical transition techniques commonly performed today, like jaw and forehead reshaping, breast augmentation and vaginoplasty, could effectively “erase” one’s sex as assigned at birth, adding to concerns about how to identify “real” women.
By the 1970s, an archetype of a violent trans criminal had become firmly entrenched in popular entertainment. Variations on this archetype appeared on the most popular television crime dramas of the 1970s and 1980s, from “The Streets of San Francisco” (ABC, 1974) and “Police Woman” (NBC, 1976) to “Magnum, P.I.” (CBS, 1982) and “T.J. Hooker” (ABC, 1984). These psychotic mass murderers impersonated nuns or nurses to target women but were ultimately “exposed” as men, often with a dramatic wig reveal.
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During this time, horror films and thrillers — freed from the restrictions of network television with regard to more explicit sexual references and depictions of genitalia — began to sexualize the trans murderer more explicitly. The disturbed incestual longings of Marguerite in “A Reflection of Fear” (Fraker, 1972) and Dr. Elliott’s sexual frustration in “Dressed to Kill” (De Palma, 1980) led to perhaps the most famous trans serial killer, Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs” (Demme, 1999). His erotic “tuck” dance before the mirror connected his grotesque decortication with gender dysphoria, a durable image that the American public has never forgotten.
Comedic satire also contributed to these negative depictions. The film “Myra Breckinridge” (Sarne, 1970), an adaptation of Gore Vidal’s best-selling 1968 novel, featured a trans woman who graphically raped a blond young actor using a strap-on. Reviews, like in Time magazine, called the film a “nadir in American cinema,” reflecting not only this tasteless act but the added presumption that a trans woman would transition to seek out sexual dominance over heterosexual men. This ridiculous notion also supported commonly accepted attitudes about homosexuality as a mental illness, its official diagnostic category until 1973, as well as ongoing debates on female sexual power during this period of second-wave feminism.
This deceptively sexy female aggressor with a “secret past” persisted into the 21st century. Handsome young men in films such as “American Wedding” (Dylan, 2003) were hit on by a conventionally attractive woman with a deep voice, height or musculature. During such performances, a woman’s “real” sex — and the men’s fearful disgust — becomes comedic fodder. And yet the persistence of these stereotypes may be why some Americans continue to believe trans feminine predators exist despite ample evidence to the contrary.
In fact, trans women are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of homicide, and trans people are four times more likely to be the victim of a violent attack than their cisgender counterparts. But even on this point, television and film have generated a narrative that portrays trans women as responsible for their own victimization. Or, as a 2005 “Law & Order” episode noted, it’s their own fault for “playing a dangerous game.”
In this way, more recent scripted narratives may sympathize with trans victims of assault or harassment but still suggest that the world isn’t “ready” to embrace the trans community. Even if a trans character is attacked by her boyfriend’s business partner as on “Law & Order: SVU” (NBC, 2016), a stranger as on “Doubt” (CBS, 2017) or other children as on “Council of Dads” (NBC, 2020), this transphobia is presented not as an indictment of misguided social attitudes but as an admission of intractable prejudice, something to shrug at rather than work to change. Even the usually unflappable Detective Tutuola on “SVU” admits during a trans woman’s murder investigation, “This whole gender fluidity thing is coming out more nowadays, but the truth is, it’s confusing, and a lot of people can’t make sense of it all. Me included.”
Divoce nezábavný anti-Trans film Daily Wire má na Rotten Tomatoes uživatelské hodnocení 95 %
Nadšeně anti-trans internetoví uživatelé zaplavují transfobní sportovní filmy Lady BallersováStránka Rotten Tomatoes s pětihvězdičkovými recenzemi publika.
Lady Ballersová byl vytvořen Daily Wire+, produkčním studiem pravicové publikace Daily Wire, výhradně pro streamování na jejich platformě. Scénář, režie a hlavní roli CEO Daily Wire Rob Boering, takzvané komediální hvězdy Boeringa jako Roba Gibsona, nešťastného basketbalového trenéra, který znovu sjednotil svůj bývalý středoškolský mistrovský tým a zapojil je do ženských sportovních akcí v roce doufá, že konečně vyhrajeme nějaké zápasy.
Po vydání 1. prosince Lady Ballersová má aktuálně 95% sledovanost na Rotten Tomatoes na základě 2,500 XNUMX hodnocení. Hodnocení, mimochodem, může zanechat kdokoli.
„10/10 se podívá znovu a ukáže se mé třídě třetí třídy,“ napsal jeden recenzent.
«Jsem tak nemocný z filmů, které signalizují ctnost, bylo to osvěžující,» řekl další.
„Lidé, kteří si stěžují na politiku: to je velká část pointy filmu,“ dodal třetí recenzent. «Nemohl jsi to udělat.» Táta v sukni dnes. Takže film si je vědom sám sebe – říká všechna slova, která nesmíte říkat.“
To ale neznamená Lady Ballersová nezískal spravedlivý podíl kritiky od posluchačů.
„Denní telegrafy udělaly film nějak horším než jejich politické komentáře,“ napsal jeden člověk v půlhvězdičkovém hodnocení.
Recenzent, který dal filmu jednu hvězdu, řekl: „Kdyby byl tento film promítán bratrům Lumierovým jako příklad toho, co by jejich výtvory nakonec způsobily světu, spálili by veškerý svůj výzkum a pak i sebe.“
Lady BallersováStránka Rotten Tomatoes obsahuje pouze čtyři recenze od kritiků. V negativní recenzi pro RozhodčíSpisovatel John Serba popisuje film jako „rasistický, sexistický, transfobní a antisemitský“.
„Možná [Boering a spol.] zápasí s myšlenkou společenské změny; možná nevěří vůbec ničemu a jen se ohánějí věcmi, kterým nerozumí, nechtějí rozumět a nikdy se je nebudou snažit pochopit,“ píše Serba.
Během nedávné epizody Show Ben Shapiro, člen obsazení a konzervativní komentátor Ben Shapiro – jehož předchozí zásluhy zahrnují téměř 45 minut strávených vztekem nad Barbie existence filmu — řekli, že původně zamýšleli natočit jako dokument. Pak ale zjistili, že (zalapal po dechu!) skupina bigotních cis mužů ve špatných parukách se ženským sportům jen tak věnovat nemůže.
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