when will it become not okay to make fun of transgender and transsexuals?
August 23, 2009 - 8:44am
I think the time is now. I am writing to raise awareness about the site called Best Week Ever. They have columns about celebrities and tv shows.
They wrote some offensive remarks about a transgender woman dancer on America`s Best Dance Crew. Please write to them and tell them it`s not acceptable. Here is what I send. Send your message to them : info@bwe.tvI am writing to bring attention to the offensive and demeaning remark that is permitted to be published on your site. Not only are the comments defamatory, they also violated the Terms of Use Agreement as established for the users of your site.
According to the Terms of Use Agreement, located at http://www.bestweekever.tv/privacy, users at Best Week Ever are not allow to use the site that in a manner that is ", defamatory, indecent, vulgar or obscene, pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive, racially, culturally, or ethnically offensive, harmful, harassing, intimidating, threatening, hateful, objectionable, discriminatory, or abusive, or which may or may appear to impersonate anyone else"
With this in mind, I want to bring to your attention of a columnist Michelle Collins, who regularly makes disparaging and offensive remark about a transgender woman as seen on America's Best Dance Crew.
In reference to http://www.bestweekever.tv/2009-08-17/tranny-beyonce-more-convincing-than-actual-female-beyonce/, the columnist called her a "tranny", and compared her appearance to an extremely unflattering picture of an infamous picture of Jocelyn Wildenstein, who is often treated as a comedy due to her numerous plastic surgeries.
From another column dated August 20th , as seen in , http://www.bestweekever.tv/2009-08-20/americas-best-dance-crew-creates-computer-wallpaper-of-dreams/, the transgendered dancer is described as a "beyonce-ish creature who just happens to have a couple of extra inches of manflesh down below"
I would like to ask, what part of the above is not "offensive, harmful" to the transgendered dancer and all the transgender and transsexual teenagers and adults who visited this site? I hope that this unfortunate incident will be corrected because such insulting and hateful messages should not acceptable reading materials for the majority of the youths that visited this site.
Thanks for this topic, takeitslowly.
I"m moving this to our new LGBTQ forum.
Sorry, I didnt even know there was one!@
info@bwe.tv
I regret your bashing of transgender folks on BWE.
Let me know if you ever decide to outlaw such discrimination, and I will be glad to return to your site.
Martin Dufresne
thank you, martin! It means alot to me that other people will speak up for trans people!
I was such a dumbass, the links above did not work, i put an extra comma after the web address.
These are the correct ones:
http://www.bestweekever.tv/2009-08-17/tranny-beyonce-more-convincing-tha... http://www.bestweekever.tv/2009-08-20/americas-best-dance-crew-creates-c...
Well, this lady is plain unfunny, but, asking my friends about it, and making sure I wasn't coming out of left field, I have no problem having general idosyncracies made fun of and having humorous characters portrayed who are also transgendered. The idea that being the target of satirical humor is only for the univerally privileged is ultimately more limiting. It's the underlying social problems that I'd like to attack.
To use a hypothetical argument, let's say a young, ambitious, obviously privileged young white man, perhaps in the neighbourhood, scouting out real-estate, for the sake of argument, is accosted by a group of young men of colour. He's verbally aggressive in asserting in what he perceives is his 'right' to be in this space, swarmed, and beaten severely for the crime of being other, for representing something that these men fear. . He has a roughly 85% chance of surviving his injuries if treated properly. When the ambulance arrives, the two black paramedics discover the skin colour of the white man, "Oh sh** it's a cracker!" is quickly exclaimed by the lead paramedics who are seen by witnesses to spend the next five minutes telling jokes that castigate white privilege and ethnic idiosyncracies before he's loaded onto an ambulance. He languishes for two hours in emergency untreated before succumbing to injuries.
That would never happen. That did happen to a transwoman in Washington DC. That's privilege. Getting society convinced to not make jokes about you is not privlege, it's pity, and pity is limiting in its own way. So, to answer your question, I hope it never becomes not okay to make jokes about us. I also hope it becomes not okay to miraculously lose resumes, rent out houses just an hour ago, hurl random abuse, (but I get this when appaearing cis too, so there's a question of how much of it is transphobic and how much is transphobic for the sake of saying something likely to hurt. Hanlon's razor and all that.) and be more likely to be victims of violent crime, and gatekept by the medical profession and budgeters who are stingy about the real incidence of gender dysphroria... Oy with the gatekeeping. Get rid of that stuff and you can make me stand-up comedian fodder all you like.