This weekend, the New York Times opted to publish a
transphobic and hateful opinion editorial piece by Elinor Burkett, who apparently considers herself the judge of ‘what makes a woman’—and that definitely doesn’t include trans women. The piece sparked commentary and anger across the internet, particularly in the trans community, given its deliberately inflammatory and incendiary language, but it’s part of a larger trend.
No, that trend isn’t the flood of thinkpieces from cis people following Caitlyn Jenner’s historic Vanity Fair cover. Rather, it’s the trend of media deliberately trolling trans women and creating an environment in which the fundamental humanity of trans women is denied. That has real implications—when the paper of record prints an opinion stating that trans women are not people, it sends a very clear message to readers and the public at large.
The continued tolerance for media trolling of transgender women is a telling testimony to their value in society, because these kinds of pieces have a very real impact on the lives of transgender women in the United States and elsewhere. Trans women are at a highly increased risk of sexual and physical assault simply on the basis of who they are. Their dehumanisation contributes to high discrimination rates in employment, housing, and other settings. Being outed is dangerous—unless, like Caitlyn Jenner, women can ‘successfully pass,’ adhering to cis and patriarchal notions of beaty. Notably, Jenner was the subject of crude speculation and criticism earlier in her transition, when people suggested that she looked like a man in a dress, but now that she’s been on the cover of a national magazine in a pinup pose, suddenly the cis community embraces her. Message received: Jenner’s allowed to consider herself a woman because she ‘looks like’ one.
Burkett’s hatred-laced piece played upon every possible stereotype involving trans women, pitting cis against trans and suggesting that feminists were ‘afraid’ of trans activists and their evil attempts to redefine gender. She expressed rage at Jenner’s very existence, dehumanising her and turning her into an object utterly undeserving of respect; she raged against fights for inclusive language and a cultural shift towards creating a world in which people of all backgrounds and genders are treated equally, and can all live safely. In her ardent defense of cis womanhood, she exposed trans women to incredible danger, and was quite comfortable doing so.
She’s not the first. In 2014, popular self-indulgent site Thought Catalog
published a transphobic essay—since taken down, in a cowardly attempt to erase the site’s history—written by Gavin McInnes, sparking a large internet controversy. The site attempted to hide behind the notion that all opinions have value, but, like the New York Times, it could have opted to decide not to air those opinions—the media do have a duty of care to readers and are not in fact required to run everything submitted to them for publication.
The piece, ‘
Transphobia is Perfectly Natural,’ referred to the trans community, particularly trans women, in breathtakingly hateful terms—trans people were delusional, he argued, and ‘mutilating’ themselves. While some argued that it was written to be deliberately provocative, rather than as a genuine opinion, they missed the point: It provoked people, no matter what the intent was, and it was clearly meant to, acting as a trolling effort targeted at the trans community, to deny their humanity and whip up cis sentiments against trans women.
Even moderate readers who were put off by the op-ed and troubled by the arguments made were still internalizing defenses for transphobia and discrimination, with the trans community speaking out against it but often being left out in the cold. That was particularly obvious for trans women, who are frequent targets for ‘commentaries’ like these. The goal of this piece, as with others, was to keep transphobia in the public eye, and to validate the opinions of those who think that trans women are not people. For every liberal expressing concerns about the piece, there was another transphobic conservative—or liberal, or moderate—reveling in the fact that the internet was seconding transphobic opinions.
Also in 2014, the National Review published an infamous piece, ‘
Laverne Cox is Not A Woman,’ later picked up by a number of papers, including Chicago’s Sun-Times. Protesters targeted the Sun-Times, correctly realizing that the National Review would remain unmoved in the face of criticism, and the
paper gave in under pressure, pulling the piece down. Once again, however, transphobic trolling had risen to public prominence and gathered readers along with it—for surely, if a nationally respected paper says that Laverne Cox is subhuman, she must be.
This came in the same year that a transgender woman committed suicide in fear of outing courtesy a feature in Grantland, which defended the decision to run the piece that cost a woman her life. Transgender readers, particularly women, acutely understood and identified with her fear, but cis readers didn’t; the idea of feeling threatened to the point of no return by outing was utterly abstract.
The media hates transgender women, and this is not particularly surprising. They show up dehumanised, misgendered, and nameless in back page reports about murders or beatings, or they show up as rare success stories (always featuring those who pass, those who ‘look like real women,’ those who perform gender in a socially acceptable way). Trans people don’t show up as nuanced actual human beings; they’re dead, or they’re transition narratives for the consumption of an eager cis readership, or they’re very special success stories for everyone to marvel at.
These kinds of depictions don’t just turn transgender women into hollow objects for public consumption and speculation, though. They create an actively hostile and dangerous environment that positions them on a fragile knife edge by justifying continued hatred of trans women. For every opinion editorial, terribly reported story, or careless comment comes another tiny cut for trans women, and sometimes those cuts magnify into big ones. Burkett’s op-ed served to reinforce the opinions of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, of whom she is most definitely one, and seeing those opinions promoted in one of the most respected papers in the world gave them weight.
Even allegedly progressive communities took the opportunity to promote ‘debate’ and ‘discussion’ about the nuances of gender via Burkett’s op-ed, but there was nothing nuanced or discussion worthy about it. It was hate speech, and slapping transgender women repeatedly in the face with it was also hateful; suggesting that it should be read and discussed was akin to suggesting that readers take the propaganda of the KKK seriously in an honest conversation about race in the United States. We all understand that some opinions do not in fact have value, and that pretending they do is actively harmful and destructive, but evidently the Times did not, and its editorial board made a decision with very serious implications.
The failure to understand the implications of running pieces like these is a testimony to the fact that the alleged ‘transgender tipping point’ in the United States is a line of hokum. The United States is nowhere near the point of understanding its transgender population, let alone having respect, sympathy, and compassion for trans people—it can’t even admit that transgender women are human beings, let alone stop publishing the opinion editorials that kill them.
Amazingly, even as the Times was running hate speech against transgender women over the weekend, it was covering trans-friendly children’s literature on the front page, in an utterly bizarre act of cognitive dissonance. The paper evidently saw absolutely no conflict between strutting its trans street cred on the front page and burying its real opinions deep in the opinion section. But perhaps we shouldn’t beat on the Times too much: It’s only doing what every other opportunistic media outlet in the United States is doing, riding on the wave of trans coverage to publish inflammatory content in the hopes of getting a rise out of the public, and reiterating harmful attitudes along the way.