So everyone favorite gay celebrity, Neil Patrick Harris, is guest-hosting in what is now Kelly Ripa's morning show until Regis is permanently replaced. During the opening banter segments, he offhandedly makes a stunningly disrespectful transphobic joke, about sounding like a "tranny" by DEEPENING his voice. Because AHAHAHA!!! Trannies are men in dresses amirite? Ohhhhhh that's so hilarious!
Well, unless of course you're one of the millions of trans women who will face verbal and physical abuse today just for leaving the house trying to be themselves. We don't find dehumanizing humour that funny.
Now of course we all know that if NPH had made a joke about sounding like a black men and then done a "Sho 'nuff Massah, I shines it up reel gud fuh you!" voice, the media, the NAACP, all sorts of people would be ripping NPH to shreds for such blatant bigotry. But we're just trannies, it's still okay to tell hateful, hurtful dehumanizing jokes about us. We need to lighten up you tell us. Don't be so damn sensitive you tell us. Learn to laugh and take a fucking joke you tell us.
We hear such condescending dismissals a lot. Sadly we get most of it from white gay men.
Popular and widely read Gay Blogger Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God has a pretty good track record for being supportive and respectful of trans issues. He's posted positive articles, deleted blatantly transphobic comments, and generally been a decent guy to trans folk.
Well, that is until trans activists targeted Dan Savage. Dan Savage is a popular influential wealthy white gay advice columnist with, (I'm sorry, suck it the fuck up, it's the fucking TRUTH), a long documented history of transphobic bullshit.
When trans activists glitter-bombed him twice, out of very justifiable anger, well, suddenly Joe changed. He stopped deleting blatantly anti-trans bigotry from the comments on his blog, and according to his blog entry about the afore-mentioned NPH slur, now apparently finds it perfectly okay to be condescending and dismissive of trans people when a white affluent gay celebrity makes a tasteless, unfunny, hurtful and casually dangerous transphobic joke.
I expect the bullshit that you see in the comments on his blog. I'm used to Joe's readers showing nti-trans bias. The majority of his commenters seem to think the following as a rule.
1) It's just a joke, we shouldn't take it so seriously.
2) We're oversensitive crybabies blowing things out of proportion.
3) We should focus only on the religious right and not attack our gay "allies".
Let's answer those one by one shall we?
1) No it is NOT "just a joke". Transphobic jokes of that nature are told purely at our expense. Trans people themselves are the punchline. Jokes like that feed off of the worst and most-reinforced negative trans stereotypes. When the ONLY point of a joke is to emphasize how weird and different and freakish someone is, it's not comedy, it's negative affirnation of the stereotypes that get us beaten up or murdered just for existing. I know, I've been hospitalized by teenagers shouting tranny and other lovely things at me as they bet me.
2) Trans women, especially trans women of colour, get beaten up, bashed and outright murdered at near ten times the rate of gay men. So tell me how, knowing this, we're blowing things out of proportion? And yet a gay man getting beaten up or killed will always be widely and extensively covered by gay media, while most trans assaults and murders barely get a mnention in their own local news, let alone much notice online.
3) We focus on the religious right AND our gay "allies", because the bulk of gay activists have repeatedly proven they simply DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT US.
There are boatloads of evidence of this. In attempting to get ENDA passed, gay activists kept cutting more and more trans-inclusive clauses from the bill, until we were essentially erased from it entirely. They claimed this was to make the bill easier to get passed, and that they'd come back for us. But it was really just throwing us under the bus. Once gays have equal rights in every aspect, they won't care about helping us. Most gay men look down on us anyway. They view us a lesser because we've happily thrown away the masculinity they so cherish.
There are so many fights going on across the USA to push for gaty marriage, gay adoption, gay job and housing protections. But bills try to grant those same rights to trans people rarely get much attention except from Religious Right assholes drumming up fears of crossdressing rpists in bathrooms to prevent thebills passing. Where are most of our gay allies then?
"We'll get to you, honest. We just gotta finish our stuff first. Try not to get killed while we fight for marriage!"
I'm sorry but, well, fuck you Joe Jervis. You crossedthe line, and now you're just yet another privileged white gay man throwing us under the bus when we become inconvenient.
You may have just lost a regular reader.
