A brief look at media influences

THE emergence of Christine Jorgensen onto the tarmac at New York’s Idyllwild International Airport on 13 February 1953 caused a media sensation unlike anything seen before in America.(1) Whilst countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Germany had been performing sex reassignment surgeries for some 30 years, this was the first time that the American public had been exposed to the intimate, personal details of an individual’s transition experience.

Headlines promising shock and titillation screamed ‘EX-G.I. BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY: OPERATIONS TRANSFORM BRONX YOUTH’ and allegedly drove news of hydrogen bomb tests off the front page of newspapers around the world. Christine’s story was covered by TIME, People, and The American Weekly, and talk shows such as The Dick Cavett Show. Four editions of her autobiography were published as well as numerous biographies. Her life story inspired at least two films: Glen or Glenda (1953) and The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), as well as numerous documentaries.

There was little restraint. Most of the media coverage focused on the ‘sensational’, and the ‘freakish’. The media were not interested in the medical or psychiatric details that underpinned the diagnosis of transsexualism nor did they appear interested in what led Christine to make such a monumental, life-changing decision. Rather, they were interested only in the lurid and extremely personal details of her life. The media hounded Christine with highly inappropriate questions concerning her sex life, her anatomy, and her choice (or lack thereof) of intimate companions.

Perhaps one of the most well known contemporary media reports involved a female-to-male transsexual called Brandon Teena. Brandon’s rape and brutal murder in Falls City, Nebraska, in 1993 sparked sensational media headlines across the world. His story was recorded in books and films in much the same way as Christine Jorgensen’s was. While the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry (1999) tried to portray the violence, brutality, and fear that many of these teenagers and adults live with on a daily basis, it was a largely stereotypical representation of Brandon himself.

The fictionalised Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry was portrayed as a ‘confused’ and immature young person whose gender and sexuality were defined by his stereotypical presentation as a masculine female or butch lesbian. His innate-sex as a heterosexual boy struggling courageously to live with a body that betrayed him remained ill-defined at best, doubted and denied at worse.(2)

While this subtlety may not be lost on other transsexual men and women, it is on the average citizen, for whom gender and sexuality are blurred into simplistic and often derogatory representations of frocked-up she-males or self-hating women claiming male social status.

Some print media headlines in the years since Brandon Teena’s murder include: ‘Billy Tipton Is Remembered With Love, Even by Those Who Were Deceived’ (The New York Times, 1998), ‘Transexual [sic] steals Miss Universe-China show’ (China Daily, 2004), ‘The Murder of a Boy Named Gwen’ (Rolling Stone Magazine, 2005), and ‘First sex-swap mayor is sworn in’ (BBC News, 2007). In each case the reality of the individual’s struggles and respect for their genuine need to live as their true selves is regularly portrayed as a calculated deception.

The use of stereotypes is a common device for the media. Some theorists argue that stereotypes are valuable “verbal shortcuts” and play a positive and important role in communication.(3) While this may be useful in the case of well-known groups, the use of stereotypes for lesser-known groups such as transsexuals tends to have the opposite effect.

Stereotypes do not educate. Men and women with transsexualism often find their medical condition and personal lives are used to cynically generate a lurid or shocking scandal to sell newspapers by the mainstream media. Television and film are no more enlightened. Popular television shows such as CSI, Gray’s Anatomy and the UK’s Coronation Street have all resorted to stereotypes, relying on simplistic representations of ‘otherness’, and ‘deviance’, when portraying transsexual men and woman.

More disturbing is the American talk-show. This genre has the capacity to be a ground-breaking tool, providing quality information about transsexualism and transgenderism. But even when hosts, such as Maury Povey, do make some serious attempt to examine the journey of the transsexual men, guests are still asked the inevitable questions about sex and genitalia.(4) The camera remains focused on the audience’s unbelieving and shocked reaction at the individuals’ complete transformation.

Myths and misconceptions about the condition are used to generate income for the media networks, whether it be print, film or television. The most obvious example is the infamous Jerry Springer Show, with titles such as: ‘I’m Pregnant by a Transsexual’, ‘My Man is Becoming a Woman’, ‘Midgets Fight and Todd Dates a Tranny’, and ‘Transsexuals Attack’.

So what has changed in terms of media coverage of these men’s and women’s lives since that fateful day in February 54 years ago? As Jennifer Boylan(5) argues, much media representation seems to go out of its way to find individuals who are “unstable, unwell or who have been convinced to appear on camera in their most vulnerable moments.”

It seems the transsexual community has become ‘the one minority group that everyone [is] free to bash’.

A brief look at historical influences
A brief look at media influences
Myths and misconceptions about transsexualism

References

Thanks to Jakob Randle for considerable assistance writing this section – ‘Media Influences’

Califia, 1997.
Jones (1996), presents Brandon Teena as a troubled and manipulative masculine lesbian, rather than a transsexual man.
Dyer, 1993.
The Maury Show, aired on 13 October 2004 (US).
Boylan, 2007.