In the News

I’m going to rant. You might want to prepare yourself. This might mean getting up now, while you can, to get a hot water bottle, put on a good tear-jerking movie, call your brother, put on a little Norah Jones, whatever “preparing yourself” means to you. Do it.

I’m fucking tired of the way the media treats trans people. I give up. I can’t just sit back anymore and say, “well, you know, they’re just trying to please people and talk on a level everyone will understand.” Or, “well they have to say that or the rednecks will get mad.” I can’t say that anymore.  I cannot keep making excuse after excuse after excuse for how my brotherhood is treated. And my sisterhood. There are no more excuses I can make that will make me feel any less that what the media and reporters and newspapers are doing is wrong. In case you have not seen the kinds of things the media likes to say about trans people, I’ve prepared a list of examples. They’re all about Brandon Teena (aka Teena Brandon, Teena Ray Brandon, Brandon) because, since the release of the feature film about his life, Boys Don’t Cry, his life and death have received a lot of media coverage. Also because we have the same name and so his death, for some reason, hits me harder.

These are some of the things that papers have said about Brandon Tenna over the years:

“Riding the Iraq roundabout.” Canberra Times [Canberra, Australia] 9 Aug. 2008: 8.

• “When Boys Don’t Cry was released in 1999 it was a sensation, with Hilary Swank in cropped hair as Brandon Teena, a girl who preferred a male identity until found out as biologically female.”
• I don’t know any girls named Brandon. I know butches and boys named Brandon, I don’t know any girls named Brandon. And, quite frankly, I don’t know any girls who prefer a male identity. Female-bodied people who prefer male identities, sure. But girls who prefer to be boys? I just call those people boys…unless they tell me not to. That’s all pretty petty though. My main disgust about this sentence lies in the “who preferred a male identity until found out as biologically female”. It should really read, “who preferred a male identity until found out as biologically female and was raped, beaten, and then killed.” Because really, I’m pretty sure he never stopped identifying as male, so really it should just be “until he was killed”.
  

Dwyer, Michael. “Stop-Loss.” Irish Times 25 Apr. 2008, sec. Film Reviews: 12.

• “IN 1999 Kimberly Peirce made an arresting feature-film debut with the emotionally wrenching Boys Don’t Cry, a factually based drama unflinchingly exploring the life and death of Teena Brandon, a young woman who felt more comfortable in a male identity, reversed her name to Brandon Teena, and was murdered in Nebraska.”
• Not going to mention the ‘woman in a male identity’ thing again, because I’ve done that already. If a person reverses their name so that their feminine-sounding first name is now their last name and their masculine last name is now their first name, I think they might be hinting at something.

I’m just going to take this time to say I love Kimberly Pierce’s work. Stop-Loss and Boys Don’t Cry were both fantastic movies. My intention is to point out the reporters’ gross (as in large) ignorance around trans issues even though there have been many attempts to inform journalists and the media world about how to approach trans-ness.

“Cry, beloved country – New Film.” The Economist 05 Apr. 2008.

• “NINE years ago Kimberly Peirce’s first feature film, “Boys Don’t Cry”, won Hilary Swank an Academy Award for her portrayal of Brandon Teena, a young woman who is murdered for living as a man. The hero of Ms Peirce’s poignantsecond film, “Stop-Loss”, is also called Brandon, but is different in every otherrespect. A man’s man, this Brandon (Brandon King, played by Ryan Phillippe) is a decorated veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who returns at the beginning of the film to a hero’s welcome from his hometown in Texas.”
• At first, I thought this was a step-up, because the author of this article did, at least, recognize that Brandon Teena was killed for living as a man (read: for living as a trans person). But then the author goes on to say that the Brandon King character, in Stop-Loss, is a “man’s man”. Which, to me, signifies that Brandon Teena is not? From what I gather, Brandon Teena wasn’t a misogynist pig, but was definitely a man. I mean, I’d probably have called him a “man’s man”, if I was the kind of person who said that kind of thing. I’m not though.

Lepage, Mark. “Hilary Swank Homeroom Hero.” The Globe and Mail [Toronto] 5 Jan. 2007.

• “To become transsexual Brandon Teena for Boys Don’t Cry, Hilary Swank spent four weeks “strapping and packing” — her breasts and crotch — to pass as a man. She got double-takes in public, and her first Oscar.”
• This is very nice.
  

I want to hear your comments. What do you think of the way the media treats trans people?

I meant to write. I really, really did. But I think part of me hoped someone else would, when they realized I was on vacation *coughcough*. Alas, they didn’t. And I was on vacation. The internet connection at the hotel I was staying at in the Dominican was not fast. It usually took about three or four vodkas before it would load a page. No, no. Seriously, I could have made a paper mache dead horse in the length of time it took to load Gmail. It didn’t even try to load WordPress. It just quipped at me in Spanish that there was no connection. Fair enough. So this, my friends, is why I have not posted since before New Year’s.

I hope you had a happy one.

So, right now, I’m working on planning a performance night. To bring in a little much-needed cash because the search for a job has turned up transphobic. So I’m working in the arts.

And actually, on that note, I think I’m going to talk about jobhunting.

During these “tough economic times”, this “Global Economic Uncertainty”, this “Global Economic How-Could-We-Have-Seen-It-Coming?” (I’ll tell you how!), many people are losing their jobs. Sure, Shoppers Drugmart employees are safe because their wage can’t be lowered and people will always need Tylenol, but in general, a lot of people are losing their jobs. Given this situation, it strikes me that trans and queer people are probably having an even harder time finding employment (of the minimum-wage sort or otherwise). Everybody who has lost/is losing their job will now, or eventually, turn to minimum wage jobs and will be “better qualified” and will, in most cases, probably be straight and non-trans. The people that unemployed trans and queer people rely on for survival – their parents who they call monthly for a small loan; their partner(s) who they promise will get paid back as soon as they have a job; their brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and anyone else who hasn’t disowned them, who they call when they’re about to lose their apartment again – are feeling the effects of this economic bullshit, too. It is getting harder on them to say ‘yes’, harder on them to lend away some of their money. It’s harder for them to justify to the rest of the family why they are feeding the black sheep. And this does not bode well for us. Us transpeople and queer people who already work so hard to get what little we can get to survive. And at the end of the day, the people we’re depending on may very well be saying to us now, like they always have, “Why can’t you just get a job?”. Maybe, in a few months, if the economy continues as it is going, we will be able to turn our heads to face them and ask, “What happened to yours?”

2009

It’s the first day of 2009. What the fuck, seriously. I didn’t think I’d live this long.

Have a happy new year everyone!

I’m taking off for a week because I’ve been working on everything way too hard and it’ll give me some time to philosophisisisize and write and mull over the world so that I have doubly-interesting things to post when I get back. Maybe someone will post whilst I’m gone. I’m not sure. Happy new year though.