Trans Like Me by CN Lester

Author:CN Lester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

IN THE ABSOLUTE worst cases of denying the authenticity of trans genders, we find a toxic mix of transphobia, misogyny, and homophobia known as the trans panic defense. People who claim this defense try to excuse their behavior thus: that finding out that someone, usually a woman, is trans sparks a feeling of disgust, fear, and rage so strong that the perpetrator of any subsequent crime can be excused their actions. To exist at all, this idea has to play on cruel and incorrect ideas of what it is to be trans, what it is to be a woman, and what it is to be straight or gay. Let me be very clear: trans women are women, and it does not make a straight cis man gay to be attracted to a woman. But the way trans panic plays out—in just one of its erasures and attacks—is in a cis man’s fear that he will be considered queer, because the woman he’s attracted to was assigned male at birth.

The trans panic response can be found in all kinds of places. The Crying Game, Neil Jordan’s 1992 movie, depicts a classic example of type. Fergus, our anti-hero, discovers that the woman he’s involved with, Dil, is trans; he hits her and rushes to the toilet to vomit. You can find similar reaction sequences in movies and TV shows throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Sometimes it’s played for tragedy, sometimes for titillation, and sometimes just for laughs.

It’s a trope that’s been used so often that Family Guy, infamous for its need to be more shocking than shocking, had to find a way of outdoing the standard. In the 2010 episode “Quagmire’s Dad,” they did this by having one of their main characters sleep with a trans woman, and then vomit for thirty seconds straight on learning her trans status, later referring to her as a man. In advance of the episode airing, Seth MacFarlane had noted: “It’s probably the most sympathetic portrayal of a transexual [sic] character that has ever been on television.” When the airing of the episode was criticized by LGBT and feminist groups, MacFarlane doubled down on his comments, explaining the necessity of all that vomit with: “If I found out that I had slept with a transsexual, I might throw up in the same way that a gay guy looks at a vagina and goes, ‘Oh, my God, that’s disgusting.’” I find this idea of the necessity of vomiting a fascinating, albeit depressing, one. I’ve made out with people whom I didn’t find attractive, but it’s never made me sick. I’ve also been turned on by people I didn’t particularly like, people I didn’t want to go any further with and, again, no vomiting, nor any desire to publicly express how sick they’d supposedly made me. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, least of all theirs, that we weren’t compatible, and I had nothing to prove. In this trans panic trope, vomiting is a public sign of disgust, a signal to cancel out what would have been implied by a kiss, a caress, an erection.

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