Transgender Awareness Week runs from November 12th – 20th, it’s purpose is to raise awareness about trans people, including intersex and non-binary people, our lives, our humanity, our struggles, and our joys. It ends with TDoR, Transgender Day of Remembrance, on November 20th – a day to remember the trans people around the world who have been lost to murder. It is also a day to affirm our resolution to fight for the living, and to end all stigma, discrimination, and violence against trans people.
This Transgender Awareness Week, we have a simple message for Aotearoa New Zealand: Trans people exist, and that’s a positive thing.
Thanks to our friends at RainbowYOUTH, OUTLineNZ, and Like Minds, Like Mine, our transgender diversity posters are up in Whangarei, Auckland, Tauranga, Rotorua, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin this week.
Invercargill and Hamilton can also expect to see them on November 18th.
Big shout out to trans folks in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas – let’s work together to make sure every local community embraces us fully and gives us the opportunities, respect, and love we deserve.
Kia ora whanau, please take time this weekend to fill in the Counting Ourselves survey that we helped to develop, so we have large scale national data on takataapui, trans, and intersex people’s health.
Click this link to find out more and fill in the survey, which takes about 30 minutes to an hour if you’re a slow reader and typer like we are (totally worth it to have proper data). http://countingourselves.nz/
This survey is for all takataapui, taahine, MVPFAFF, LGBTQI+, and others who aren’t totally hetero and/or who have gender stuff going on. It closes in September, so please make the time to fill it in soon.
The other current survey which we were part of developing is the Honour Project Aotearoa. This survey is specifically for Maori people who are takataapui, taahine, LGBTQI+ or not totally straight and/or have gender stuff happening. It closes August 31st, so make time for this one soon too. You can find out more about Honour Project Aotearoa and fill the survey here https://tewhariki.org.nz/hpa-survey-2/
These are a sample from the Transgender Series of videos which were recently made by Re: News. We don’t usually write blogs about media articles but these are quite timeless resources which we think would be great for many young people and their whanau, as well as others.
We put them in our list of resources here, but the formatting was messed up and we couldn’t fix it, so we thought we’d put them in a blog post and link to that instead.
For many years, people have been producing films about trans women, or featuring trans women. Representations of trans women are seen in films of varying quality and popularity.
However, the ways trans women are represented are often misrepresentations: they are not accurate, realistic, or empowering, and are often one dimensional, stigmatising, and actively harmful.
There are films which use trans women as the butt of jokes, to shock or inspire fear, for pity, ‘for edginess’ and sex appeal, to sell a fantasy. Some films seek to be socially conscious and represent trans experiences and lives in ways that create more acceptance and positivity. However, more often than not, these films show stereotypical misrepresentations, which cause more confusion and well-intentioned harm with their more subtle transmisogynist undertones. [7][8][9]
This pamphlet touches on some of the ways in which trans women are misrepresented in film.
Due to systemic discrimination, trans people do not often end up in the director’s chair on large movie sets. The movies that get made about trans women are made by cis people, from their perspective, and with cis audiences in mind. There are always going to be things about other people’s experiences that people miss out on experiencing and fully understanding, which isn’t to say that cis people can’t make great films about trans people but that films made by trans women about the lives of trans women offer very different and important perspectives. [8][9]
The Joke
Many films with trans women in them feature a trans woman in one or two scenes, as a throwaway joke; the punchline of which is often based on clichés discussed here. It is incredibly common for all parts of trans women’s lives to be treated as fodder for comedy, from laughing at the violence that trans women experience, to inaccurate jokes about genitals. This not only directly disrespects trans women’s right to be taken seriously as human beings, but also objectifies and dehumanises trans women by reducing their existence to a joke.
The Murderer
The cliché of a murderous crossdresser features in many popular horror movies, and while trans women are not crossdressers, films often conflate and confuse the two. Trans women are portrayed as deceptive, sexually deviant, and dangerous. This feeds fear and violence toward trans women. [5]
Only the Transition
In contrast to those types of stories, the other most common story is the transition narrative.
There is nothing inherently wrong with writing a story about transition, but there is more to a trans woman’s life than her transition. Showing trans characters who have no depth beyond their transition, or showing stories that centre on that transition, make it hard to show trans women who live rich, rewarding, and challenging lives, both before and after transition. [6][8][9]
The Beautiful Death
Many ‘positive’ stories about trans women end with their death. This cliché aims to show the struggles that trans women deal with for the full breadth of their lives. However, when many stories about trans women end with their death, it not only tells trans women that they will live lives of struggle and inevitably die tragically, but it also often moves the narrative from being about trans women and their own lived reality, to being about the ways that cis people deal with the deaths of those women. [4][7][9]
Violence and Rape as Plot Devices
Portraying and speaking about the systematic violence, street harassment, sexual and physical violence that trans women face is important. But often, in an attempt to show this, movies gloss over the full context and extent of the violence. Rather than offering insight into violence as part of trans women’s everyday lives in small and large ways, the physical beating or rape of a trans woman is dramatised for consumption in a scene created for shock value, which offers no analysis of the deep societal roots of that violence, or the emotional effects on the lives of trans women. [8][9]
Misgendering
Trans women are women, and should be addressed as such.
Portrayal of the struggle of being misgendered is sometimes appropriate for the story being told, but often it is shown in gratituious ways, or the misgendering is not corrected by the narrative. [4][10]
The scripts of many “progressive,” popular and current movies about trans women refer to those women as ‘he’ throughout, rather than the appropriate ‘she.’ When the script itself does not respect trans women at the most basic level, it is not a film which respects trans women at all. [7]
Fetishisation/sexualisation
Trans women are sexualised on screen in similar ways to cis women – the camera will linger on their bodies and their clothes, the script will call for them to be shown in a sexualised way, they will be defined by their relationships. This is common to misogyny; but trans women face a further type of sexualisation. Trans women’s gender is often portrayed as being overly sexual, with sensual imagery or sexualised film techniques being employed while trans women engage in common parts of femininity – everyday details which would not be shown if cis women were engaging in them – such as getting dressed, putting on makeup, using the bathroom. This even extends to sexualised closeups of trans women’s genitalia. [6][7]
In many cases, even trans women’s ”desire to be women” is sexualised, which feeds directly into the idea that trans women are dressing up for sexual kicks; a narrative which has been used to target trans women with violence and legal discrimination for decades. [7][10]
The Crazy
Trans women are often portrayed in ”positive films” as being mentally unstable, and while many people do suffer from mental illness/lack of access to support, and portrayal of that is important and valuable, most trans narratives do not portray mental health accurately. Mental health issues are portrayed as stemming from people being trans, or causing people to be trans. This is an inaccurate and damaging portrayal of both mental health, and being trans. [5][10]
The Pathetic/Pitiable Trans
Often, films about trans women will focus intently on their supposed ‘failure’ to be women in a normative fashion. The focus on trans women’s makeup and dress is often done in order to highlight ways in which they differ from cis women. This also goes beyond trans women’s gender presentation and often focusses on their bodies in ways that highlight how they are different from cis women. Very often, this is framed as a ‘failure’ and the viewer is encouraged to feel pity.
A trans woman’s womanhood is just as much womanhood as a cis woman’s, however the portrayal of trans women’s ”difference” as being sad and pitiable is based on essentialist ideas of gender and presentation, which imply that there is a ‘right way’ to be a woman – and that trans women do not fit into that. [6][10]
Men in Dresses
Many people mistakenly think of trans women as being men who want to wear dresses. This common stereotype is supported when men, wearing dresses, are cast to play trans women. This stereotype leads directly to discrimination. [1][2][3]
The cis people who portray trans women often perform exaggerated stereotypes of femininity based on other stereotypical portrayals of trans women. This is also harmful. [6][10]
Cis actors being cast in roles as trans women also feeds into employment discrimination. There are thousands of trans women who are incredibly capable actors, who would love to act on the big screen. When not enough effort is put into finding them, and when people of other genders are chosen over them, it simply keeps the sexist status quo. [1]
Not the Real Story
The full history of trans issues and trans community is rich, beautiful and important. But when supposedly historical stories are delivered in the same ways, hitting the same notes, and ending the same way, the details which get cut out of these stories are the important details.
Trans women have been telling their stories hundreds of years and writing down their experiences for decades, however, their stories are presented in limiting ways – crammed into small pre-defined boxes which at times actively erase and contradict the real history. It is essential that these histories be honoured and that the complexity, the humanity, and the very lives of trans women are recognised, affirmed, and valued. [6][7][8]
So it’s transgender day of visibility and I wanted to write something about the last time I felt really visible as a trans woman.
This happened a couple of days ago. This was while I was traveling back from Australia to New Zealand, after having spent a lovely couple of weeks with my girlfriend – who is also trans – hanging out, seeing some bands play, catching up.
When I’m with my girlfriend, I feel she sees me for who I am. I don’t have to be cautious about how people will understand what I’m saying through the lens of my gender. She truly accepts me as the gender that I am, and so I can share parts of myself that otherwise would open me to scrutiny – things like my sexuality, silly jokes, and simple thoughts I have about my existence as a trans woman.
But this isn’t the way that I normally experience visibility.
Crossing borders between countries is always a stressful action. The ever-increasing militarisation and restriction of borders across the globe continues to inflict exclusionary and hegemonic violence by enforcing imperialist political agendas on regular people.
I am an anxious person, and struggle with social interaction, especially when I do not understand exactly what is expected of me. This can make things as small as booking a haircut quite stressful to me. When faced with officials from the Australian Border Force, who have the power to imprison me indefinitely, or simply make me miss my flight, this anxiety can be quite high already.
I don’t know if it’s this anxiety or paranoia, but I feel as though I am often singled out for extra attention as I pass through customs. Not to the nearly the same extent as people of colour suffer, but I do think people notice something about me, my transness, my anxiety and paranoia, and decide I am suspicious.
This is the visibility that I am used to.
This trip through the border was no exception. As I placed my belongings in a tray to be scanned, and was left clutching my passport as if a security blanket, shoeless and nervous, I was beckoned over to the body scanners.
Body scanners in Australia use radio waves – which bounce off skin and metal, and pierce clothes – to render an image of your body. The idea is that they will make items hidden beneath your clothing visible. Automated target recognition then paints yellow indicators over the image, to show where “suspicious” objects may have been detected.
If these objects are detected, you will not be cleared to fly until a pat-down has followed up, investigating the suspicious areas beneath your clothes.
I stepped into the cylinder of the scanner, and raised my arms above my head, following the mandated procedure to provide a clear image.
My body, rendered visible to the machine’s logic, was detected as suspicious. I stepped out of the machine to be greeted by an image of highlighting my crotch as a “suspicious area.”
The security officer monitoring the machine asked me if I had anything in my pockets. I felt like crying. I knew had nothing in my pockets. I know how my body is seen as abnormal and wrong. I knew exactly what was happening.
My transness, rendered visible from beneath my clothes, painted me as a target. According to the logic of the airport’s security theatre, my genitals needed investigation.
I wanted to cry, but again I know that if my sadness was visible it would register as hysterical or suspicious according to the security protocols and manners required of me. Trying not to shake, trying not to let my anxiety and upset become visible, I tried to lightheartedly suggest setting the machine to “male” and seeing if I was still suspicious.
The woman at the machine accepted that, and I stepped back into the machine. When I stepped out again, the panic fully set in. Australia has a “no opt-out” policy for body scanners. There was going to be no way of escaping this. The machine had not targeted my genitalia this time, but had rendered my breasts as a target for investigation.
I had a brief discussion with the security forces, indicating my body, pointing out that the detected “objects” were parts of my body.
The security officer asked me if I wanted to be patted down. I was trying hard to still keeping my voice steady.
Images of breaking down crying, my emotion getting me carried off to gosh-knows-what ordeal went through my head. It kept me calm on the surface, and deepened the wide panic inside.
I told them I would prefer not to be patted down. They told me I would not be cleared to fly unless I accepted. They asked if I wanted a woman to do it. Most of the sexual assaults I’ve experienced have been by women. They asked if I wanted a private room. Most of the sexual assaults I’ve experienced have been in a private room.
My body, my private parts, had been rendered visible, and they needed to investigate.
I made it on to my flight.
I spent a couple of hours by the gate before the flight. Teary-eyed, crying, trying not to be too obvious in my stricken state, not wanting to call any more official attention to me.
I’m home now, safe, tired, not too physically traumatised by the event, but I still can’t stop crying when I think about it for more than a minute.
The way the airport made my body visible, labelled it a target to be investigated. My self, the body I can only change with expensive surgeries – which are only really available overseas. The idea that my body is suspicious.
![[Mis]Representation of Transgender Women in Films](https://i0.wp.com/genderminorities.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Misrepresentation-of-Trans-Women-in-Films.png?resize=1080%2C675&ssl=1)
