In 2013, the death of a transgender elementary school teacher became one of the few cases of a transgender woman’s death making international news. Lucy Meadows committed suicide three months after her private transition was deemed newsworthy by multiple media outlets, including the UK’s Daily Mail. A coroner told the press “shame on all of you” as he ruled the public outing Meadows’ cause of death, singling out the Daily Mail for “ridicule and humiliation” and “character assassination.”
A year later, a story was published in Grantland that initially drew mass praise from readers. “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” was a piece of investigative journalism about a magical golf club that got a little too investigative when the reporter couldn’t find evidence of the degree of the scientist who invented it. After realizing this was because she was trans, the reporter outed her in the longform article. The story’s last chapter involved the scientist committing suicide.
These are the women who don’t have the option of turning their private struggles into a lucrative Vanity Fair cover story and subsequent reality television series. Or, as in the case of filmmaker Lilly Wachowski — who came out as a transgender woman yesterday following a disturbingly familiar threat by the Daily Mail to do the outing for her — are simply not ready to.
“My sister Lana and I have largely avoided the press,” Wachowski wrote in a witty but poignant open letter last night. “I find talking about my art frustratingly tedious and talking about myself a wholly mortifying experience. I knew at some point I would have to come out publicly. You know, when you’re living as an out transgender person it’s … kind of difficult to hide. I just wanted — needed some time to get my head right, to feel comfortable.”
Wachowski then recalls the Daily Mail as playing a large role in the outing of Meadows, before diving into the real issue: outing transgender people paints them as somehow fraudulent where in reality they are the victims. Psychological attacks on transgender people can certainly have devastating consequences. Statistics show that the increase of trans narratives on television definitely doesn’t mean less violent attacks on the street, in subway cars, or in public restroom facilities. More murders against transgender people were reported (reported being a keyword) in 2015 than in any other year
“…though we have come a long way since Silence of the Lambs,” Wachowski writes, “we continue to be demonized and vilified in the media where attack ads portray us as potential predators to keep us from even using the goddamn bathroom. The so-called bathroom bills that are popping up all over this country do not keep children safe, they force trans people into using bathrooms where they can be beaten and or murdered. We are not predators, we are prey.”
Wachowski has the privilege of money and a supportive family, which she readily acknowledges. For the 32-year-old school teacher, or the transgender man who inexplicably became the subject of a New York Times advice column suggesting the woman he was dating out him to her friends, the choice to not make public appearances isn’t exactly a viable career move.
Violence against transgender people isn’t only scarily common. It’s also scarily easily to score a Get Out of Jail Free card in these cases. In literally every state except California, the “trans panic defense” is still a legitimate excuse for someone to murder a trans person without facing legal repercussions. Precedent for this defense allows that “repulsion” is a good enough reason to commit such a horrifying act of violence, effectively blaming trans people for their own deaths. Even if the victim lives to tell their side of the story, a legal system that thinks trans people are so different as to be terrifying is unlikely to give their testimonies much weight in court. Combined with demonizing “news” stories, such defenses are incredibly dangerous.
Lastly but crucially, a news cycle hell-bent on breaking clickbait is a great way to ignore the nuances of the trans experience. “…these words, ‘transgender’ and ‘transitioned’ are hard for me because they both have lost their complexity in their assimilation into the mainstream,” Wachowski writes. “There is a lack of nuance of time and space. To be transgender is something largely understood as existing within the dogmatic terminus of male or female. And to ‘transition’ imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another… Binary is a false idol.” It seems a luxury to demand people understand your complexities when your primary focus is staying physically safe, but it’s also really damn important.
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Image via Windy City Media Group