When trans women are mocked and made into jokes in the media, I get very upset, and I am often told “Kay, you can’t go through life getting offended every time someone makes a joke.” And I sputter and object but they don’t hear me. So I want to be clear for once, about why the jokes make me angry.
I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.
And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.
And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.
That is, if she doesn’t kill herself first.
I know this is a really heavy post but if you read it and you appreciated it, I’d appreciate it in return if you reblogged it. This is really important to me and I want people to read it and understand it. Thank you.
The thing people who say things like “you can’t go through life being offended over every joke” don’t see is that it’s not just being offended over any joke. In this joke, the punchline is that the person is trans. Or gay. That’s it. That’s the joke.
From the TV tropes page called “queer is funny”:
“There is a tendency for works, particularly older works and works aimed at young men, to treat same sex relationships as being inherently funny. Obviously, gay people and gay relationships can be funny for lots of reasons — for example, if the characters are incredibly mismatched, or if the behaviour of one character is amusingly offputting, so this doesn’t just apply to any humour derived from gayness or from gay relationships, only when the punchline is that it is gay. Litmus test — if this were heterosexual, would it be (roughly, if not quite) as funny?”
And that is the issue. It’s not seeing a joke about characters like you that’s the problem - that’s just the strawman that people like to pretend it is so they can continue making/laughing at these jokes.
It’s when your existence is the joke. That’s the problem.
