On Thursday Feb. 3, 2011, San Diego News 10 did a story regarding transgender veterans’ goal of having transgender people eventually being able to serve openly in the military.
The video story was pretty favorable in the sense that it presented transgender views on open military service for transgender people and the barriers to them being able to serve openly in the military, fairly.
Those barriers, by the way, include that Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is still included in the fourth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV). Much as homosexuality was included in the DSM prior to 1973. Channel 10 used an attorney in their piece, who has represented transgender people being discharged from military service, to talk about that barrier.
Another barrier also includes social conservatives, who consider transgender people to be “men in dresses,” “freaks” and “creepy.”
Fortunately, Channel 10 News didn’t have someone from the religious right, such as a pastor from a local evangelical church get on camera and explain why people like me are sinful, or how we shouldn’t be allowed to share bathrooms or showers with either male or female service members.
The downside in the Channel 10 video piece included a gratuitous scene of a cross-dresser in a red dress trying to look sexy, and doing a dance. It was as if Channel 10 News was saying this is how transgender people would behave in battle, if allowed to serve openly.
Another scene in the news piece showed an upshot of the heels on the boots I was wearing, which were kind of chunky and all of two inches high.
To explain why the high heel scene was not exactly germane, let me explain it in terms of a game called The Transgender Documentary Drinking Game. That drinking game has a few variances to it, but the rules have a lot to do with how the media seems to be fixated on stereotypes and clichés about transgender people. Some examples of when to take a drink while playing the game are:
• Putting on makeup.
• Doing anything better done in jeans and sneakers in heels and a skirt. For example, cleaning the house, shoveling the sidewalk, yard work and walking the dog.
• Finish the bottle if the only thing you can find on TV that has to do with being transgendered happens to be The Jerry Springer Show.
The shot of the high heels seems to fit into the category of tired clichés. It seems that Channel 10 News wanted to visually portray me as a male who’s trying really, really hard to be female, and perhaps even has a high heel fetish.
To quote Gwen Smith, who originated The Transgender Documentary Drinking Game, “I would rather like to see a documentary where transgender people are not stereotypes, where people can see just how diverse we really are. I want to see that transgender people are not all Caucasian. I want to see transmen, I want to see gender queers and I want to see others who are just living their lives without a concern for genitals.
“I want to see transwomen and transmen defined by who they are, not by dated notions of gender. I want to see people called what they want to be called. In short, I want to see reality, not clichés.”
I’ll drink to that.
The two scenes I mentioned about the dancing cross-dresser and the upshot overemphasizing the two-inch heels on my boots were pretty gratuitous. These scenes would be similar to having a scene from Birth Of A Nation inserted in the middle of a piece on an African American activist, or a scene of a Playboy Bunny dancing inserted in the middle of a piece about a feminist activist.
Unless the inclusion of those kinds of scenes about African American or feminist activists were germane to the story the media was telling, the scenes would be considered offensive by the respective communities. Showing the cross-dresser dancing, and highlighting the height of my heels, within the Channel 10 News piece on transgender veterans degraded and sexualized transgender community members as a group.
So even within a balanced piece by San Diego News 10 on transgender people wanting the ability, at some point in the future, to serve openly in the military, transgender people like me just don’t seem be able to get away from mainstream media using dehumanizing, sexualizing imagery to portray us.
It’s somewhat depressing that a local media outlet needed to stoop to tired clichés and visuals that degraded and over-sexualized transgender people like me.
How was that necessary in order to tell a story about transgender people who just want to eventually see transgender people serve openly in the U.S. military services?
