As the media has existed, there have been representations of trans people throughout it, both positive and negative alike. I am here to day to both explore these representations and explain what they mean for the overall media representations of trans people, and how these stereotypes spill over into our daily lives.
One of the most damaging representations of trans people within the media have been the 'psycho transgender slasher killer' sub genre, in which cis men are known to have dressed up as women in order to murder other women. This is most widely seen in Hitchcock's 1960 classic 'psycho'
Within this film, the antagonist Norman bates, is depicted as a 'victim' of his own psyche, and as a result he turns to crossdressing as his mother and murdering women. This chapter within trans media has to be scrutinised with the knowledge that the 1960's were a different era, one in which defying the gender binary was seen as something 'freakish' or 'monstrous' and the idea of murderous transvestites is something that persisted within Hollywood and the media, included in such films as 'freebie and the bean' 'Dr Jekyll and sister Hyde' 'Dressed to kill' and the portrayal of the character 'buffalo bill' from the film ' the silence of the lambs'
The fictional monsters that are most popular within society often reflect that society's fears and anxieties, mostly around marginalised groups of people. An example of this phenomenon includes some of the most infamous monsters in history: Frankenstein's monster and the Werewolf. Frankenstein's monster is a racial hybrid of human parts sown together, and the werewolf is a hybrid of species, both of which have often been noted as a representation of racial selection and eugenics. I mention this in regard to trans representation in media because the common appearance of trans people in horror films, more often as the antagonist/ the serial killer, sets a precedence of violence and 'otherness' that surrounds trans people even to this day, with accusations against trans women being based on the hypothetical violence they could commit against cis women.
One of the most common arguments against the idea that Psycho has planted transphobic roots in media is the argument that there was in fact, a real life cross-dressing serial killer, Ed Gein.
However, not all portrayals of trans people in the media are negative, in fact in recent years they have started becoming more and more positive, as well as more inclusive to the people who exist outside the gender binary as a whole.
Meet Viktor Hargreeves, one of the 7 main protagonists of the hit Netflix series 'The Umbrella Academy'. In series 3 of the show, Vanya surprised and delighted us all when she turned to her siblings and announced herself as Viktor, and that she was actually a he. I'm gonna be brutally honest with you all here when I say I sobbed. Before this moment i had never seen someone like me on TV, at least in a way that wasn't an offensive caricature, and this moment meant so much to me. I never understood why people got so emotional when seeing someone like them on the screen for the first time until I saw someone like me. Personal feelings aside, Viktor's transition was handled in a way that was respectful, both to the trans community and to Elliot Page, who had come out as trans himself in 2020.
At its core, The Umbrella Academy has always been a show about discovery. Set against a backdrop of impending apocalypses, a talking fish being the head of the time police and different dimensions, the show has always been about identity and discovering who one is when stripped from the lack of childhood that the main cast all suffered through. Throughout the three seasons we see the siblings come to terms with their trauma and their queerness, in order to discover who they are, what they want, and how they can rebuild their relationships with each other in light of their estranged fathers death.
I wanted this post to be a representation of how far the media has come in terms of trans representation, and not just a compilation of where the media has gone wrong in their representation of trans people, so i looked around, and i found 9-1-1 Lone Star.
9-1-1 Lone Star is the beginning of a new era for trans media, with the character Paul Strickland (played by openly out black trans actor Brian Michael Smith) being the first Trans-Masculine character to be a series regular on a mainstream TV series. This character symbolises the creation of an era where trans people are allowed to break free from the stereotypes enforced onto us by cis- heteronormative society and a media that enforces these roles. This character represents the idea that trans people can live normal lives without the stigma of being trans hanging over their heads their entire lives, and we are already beginning to witness this change in our lifetime
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