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?