Visible Man: Trans interpretations

Jamison Green offers a man's POV on life in the trans lane. Opinion, advice, and information from an internationally respected leader of the FTM community.

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Transpeople are increasingly replacing gays and lesbians as the mainstream culture's shock troops. Nowadays it seems we are everywhere! Or at least someone's concept of us is frequently available as an iconic target for fun or fearful reflection.

From talk shows to sitcoms to serial drama characters to plays and films, writers and producers use transpeople to add an element of glamour, of trash, of the titillating revulsion that has long captivated audiences like Barnum and Bailey freak shows. No, it's not all bad, but how transpeople are used and perceived through the media is still problematic.

When transgender or transsexual fictional characters do appear in mainstream media, it pays to wonder why. How are these characters supposed to be received by audiences that have no education about real transsexual or transgendered lives? John Lithgow's great transsexual character in "The World According to Garp" is all but forgotten because the mainstream didn't know what to say about her. They quickly forget "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" and "To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar," and though they may be moved by the true events of "Boys Don't Cry," which was widely interpreted as a lesbian story, most people just don't relate to what motivates characters like these. They don't know what to think. The transsexual types in "Silence of the Lambs" or "Dude, Where's My Car?" and the zaniness of "Some Like It Hot" reinforce typical concepts about crazy trannies and deceitful (but harmless) cross-dressers.

"Hedwig and the Angry Inch" is a brilliant film, with an amazing performance by John Cameron Mitchell as writer, director and star, plenty of gender bending in the supporting roles, and a very queer sense of humor and pathos. There's so much to look at and listen to in every scene that the film begs for repeat viewing. It is entertaining, to say the least. It can be moving, even empowering. But underneath all the makeup and fabulous outfits, the device of a transsexual character, while intellectually clever, tying all the concepts together, still leaves the audience with stereotypical notions. Hedwig is a transperson with real soul, and that is rare in fictional representations, but she was coerced into her sex change and we never hear her claim a female identity, rather a transgendered "girly-boy" identity. She's angry about what happened to her, but "it's what [she has] to work with, honey." And she works it well. Yet once the point is made that no matter how many changes we make we still end up with ourselves, the ending (which I won't give away in case someone hasn't seen it) could be interpreted in a number of ways, at least one of which is downright dismissive, or even derisive, of transsexual people.

"Southern Comfort" is also a terrific film, 180 degrees apart from "Hedwig" in style, tone, structure and verisimilitude. A documentary I wrote about in this column last year when it came out, this film shows a real person, Robert Eads, a transsexual man dying of ovarian/cervical cancer, and his relationships with his lover, family and a small circle of friends. Different from the typical transsexual documentary, this one tells a story about love and determination, about friendship and loss, not just reflections on the mechanics of sex change or theory about what makes us want to transition. It's a real story, so it isn't flashy or dramatized with rock 'n' roll, and what viewers learn about transsexualism is that it may not be what they thought when they watched that episode of Jerry Springer during sweeps last February. More significantly, viewers come away from "Southern Comfort" feeling real compassion for particular people and real concern for the lives of others like them. Will audiences be able to connect those feelings with their own lives and hold onto them? Time will tell.

Both "Hedwig" and "Southern Comfort" won significant recognition at the Sundance Film Festival last year (2001), "Hedwig" taking the audience award for best director, and "Southern Comfort" receiving the nod for best documentary. "Hedwig" will probably make more money, though, because its irreverent exuberance, creative energy, flash and catchy tunes will definitely draw attention. And this typifies the difference between stories of male versus female sex/gender crossing: Images of "men in dresses" are always more entertaining, more sparkling, more fashionable, more visually challenging. Material about "women who become men" is so far more earnest, more realistic, more visually drab, though often more thoughtful and evocative of deeper emotions, and frequently ends up with someone dying. Really -- those FTMs are just not as much fun as those MTFs, and everybody gets more titillation from all the obvious penis jokes and incipient fantasies the audience can indulge in while watching male bodies do the female thing, anyway.

Of course, dozens (maybe hundreds) of short or experimental films are made each year by aspiring artists trying to get their vision, their message about transgender or transsexual experience, out to the world. Some of these works may be seen at GLBT film festivals, but many are too rough or too provocative to risk exposure even in those venues. This year's San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival will screen a record number of trans-focused films. Still, the few transgender film fests that happen in some major cities or on college campuses are the only places many of these films will be seen by audiences larger than the filmmaker's circle of friends. Eventually I hope our culture becomes more willing and able to hear a multiplicity of voices and see a multiplicity of visions, but that will require people giving up the paradigm of superiority/inferiority that causes people to build barricades against change. We have much work to do before a paradigm of real equality and respect can be firmly established in our collective mind.

Certainly television has done its part to reflect greater trans visibility in western culture, and trans characters are gradually becoming humanized, just as gay characters have become homogenized for mainstream palates over the past decade. But I'll bet that characters like John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig, just like Tim Curry's Frank in "Rocky Horror" will continue to pull deliciously on our collective entertainment-seeking chain for a long time to come, because real life, even for transpeople, isn't a musical.