On Monday I went to a fascinating talk by Juliet Jacques, as part of LGBT History Month. Although the mainstream media are now far better at discussing the L and G, B still gets very little coverage and T… well, T is still so very misunderstood. Even though it’s now 2012! Because of this, Juliet thought long and hard about writing her Transgender Journey blog for The Guardian but decided that covering her transition in detail for a national newspaper might help the media get over their obsession with that aspect of what it means to be trans. This might enable them to move on to cover other issues instead.
Whatever good the blog has achieved, it’s pretty obvious sometimes that only Guardian readers are paying attention. Recently I have seen articles entitled “Sex addict who claims she had slept with 1,000 men… used to be a MAN herself” in the Daily Mail, and “Five-year-old boy trapped in wrong gender living life as a girl” in the Metro. Crystal Warren is cast by the Mail as someone out to ‘fool’ men, whereas the poor kid is outed by her parents and then misgendered throughout the entire article. Every time a piece of this sort appears in the mainstream press, it adds to the public’s misunderstanding of trans women and men. Trans Media Watch has a handy guide for journalists to help them understand the subject they are writing about, so why do so many newspapers continue to ignore it?
The reason I decided to post about this today, as part of my Feminism Friday series, is because radical feminists are another group which continues to mistreat trans women and it’s sickening. I detest the idea that someone could lump me in with such hateful people. Why can’t everyone make more of an effort to understand others? It’s not difficult. It’s not as if there’s no information out there at all! Hateful people make me want to burn things, and I’m usually such a ‘nice girl’.
Image via NS Newsflash‘s Flickr photostream.
Don't call those types “radical”; they aren't at all.