Is Stephen Colbert Listening?

You may have noticed that I stopped posting about the Daily Show/Colbert Report. They didn’t stop saying transphobic things, but I got tired of documenting it all. But Tuesday night Stephen Colbert reported on a Florida non-discrimination bill and I could see a markable improvement. It makes me wonder if perhaps he’s hearing the criticism – or at least reading his wikipedia page, which now seems to link to my blog.

Here is the segment in it’s entirety:

A tip of the hat to palm beach county where according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel “transgender is quietly becoming a protected class.” Of course the transgender class, famous for it’s quietness. Now I’ve long had a problem with the tranny community and I’m not talking about post-operatives, at least they’ve picked a side. But, there are too many people drifting in the middle of the gender continum. Great Robert Ludlum book, by the way. But here’s the reason why I’m saluting palm beach county. To get this protection these fair-weather-females and fence-sitting-fellas will have to identify themselves. They will no longer shock and confuse young reporters on assignment in a new town who happen to appreciate ladies with big hands.

Here’s my rundown of what’s going on. First, the good stuff.

• He doesn’t use the term “Shemale.”
• He’s reporting on actual events, not just calling a person transgender as an insult.
• Is it my imagination, or is he alluding to discrimination on the basis of being genderqueer (or maybe just surgical status) as a distinct issue than trans discrimination?
• The butt of the joke is transphobia, not transpeople.

I think that last one is probably a sign of the most improvement. It parallels the way he jokes about LGB issues by demonstrating the ridiculous homophobia of both his character and the people he interviews. At the end of the segment, the audience is laughing at his motivation for transphobia – that he finds himself attracted to transpeople.

The bad

• He uses the term tranny, a much less derogatory word being reclaimed, but still frequently used derogatorily.
• Bashing folks based on surgical status or non-binary gender is ambiguously presented and may not be seen as a problem.
• He further exemplifies that being attracted to transwomen is scary.
• He’s factually incorrect (at least I hope so). There is no other reference I can find anyway about the Palm Beach non-discrimination policy requiring transpeople to identify themselves. Having to carry around documentation of your gender is a scary thing which my town narrowly avoided.

It’s just one segment, so I’m hoping he doesn’t just go back to jokingly calling political figures “shemales” tomorrow. And I’m not going to start trusting him on this issue any time soon. It’s still frustrating watching him bumble around it and not being able to separate feigned transphobia where the transphobia is the joke and feigned name-calling where transpeople are the joke.

More transphobia on the Daily Show

On a bit Samantha Bee did last night focused on the issue that anyone could be an “american insurgent” i.e. someone who thinks the war in Iraq is going poorly.  “The profile is simple, a young white male, or black, or asian, or possibly hispanic, or old, or female, or whatever this is.”  And shows a picture of a transwoman.  Great, there’s not even an attempt at hiding the bigotry.  Transpeople apparently aren’t human and get to be referred to as objects instead of as people.

Stephan Colbert likes the word ’shemale’

More trans jokes in the Colbert Report last night.

“By the way, turns out Hermoine is a dude. Spoiler alert.”

What was interesting is what happened when his guest, Jessica Valenti of Feministing, takled about using swear words in her book Full Frontal Feminism.

Jessica: “It’s just the Queens coming out in me. I can’t quite help it.”
Stephen: “Oh you mean the place of Queens?”
J: “Yeah.”
S: “I thought you were going to reveal something there. I thought that perhaps we’d have a shemale on our hands here.”
J: “No. No.”
S: “But that’s cool. That’s cool. If you did I’d have no problem with that. Got nothing, got no problem with that.”
J: “Good. I’m glad.”

In many ways, this really could be a lot worse. I mean, Stephen even says that he’d have no problem with “that”. But what’s frustrating is that these jokes have no point. His false bravado and homophobia, for example, serves to indict homophobic arguments (and suggest that many homophobes are gay). However, these jokes are much more in the line of “OMG! Tranny!” It ends up serving to invisibilize transpeople as a community and a movement and reduce us to plot twists and hollywood movie references. Considering that I’ve seen some good posts on trans issues at Feministing, I would have hoped that she could have interupted that. At the very least she could have inserted the word “transgender” into the conversation instead of repeating Stephen’s use of the term “shemale” in their later referencing that conversation.

Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Transphobic jokes

So, I have to admit, I love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I honestly believe that I can get more accurate and more useful news from them than from any other television broadcast source. Not to mention the fact that it’s all pretty funny. But I can’t help but notice a sharp increase in the number of one-liners maligning transpeople.

Last night’s example comes from Stephen: “These serviceman are just innocent small town kids wandering a big city rife with temptations… Left to their own devices, these brave young souls could fall prey to some very dangerous characters. [shows clips of Sex in the City] By which I mean trannies.”

I’ve been watching for years now, and while there has always been an occasional photoshopped image of Dick Cheney or other conservatives in dresses, there hasn’t been anything directly naming or directly targeting transpeople until much more recently. I can’t recall any direct derogatory references to transpeople before, I don’t know, maybe 3-6 months ago. Since then, it seems like there have been 2 or 3 such “jokes” each month.

Now these statements aren’t nearly as horrible as what’s being said elsewhere in the media. But what’s rather dissapointing is that this is coming from what is generally considered ‘with it’ progressives who should know a lot better. I’ve noticed that there race commentary is often somewhat unfortunate, however, I’ve always been impressed that the queer jokes on each show are usually done in a very conscious and aware way. I mean, they often feel like the kind of jokes my friends and I would tell. In contrast, the dreogatory references to transpeople seem to have no real purpose.

In last night’s example, what is the point? That Sex in the City chararcters are trans-like? That soldiers need to be protected from deceptive transpeople? It’s just a random slam which reflects a complete ignorance of trans issues while perpetuating some rather inane stereotypes. Frankly, I’m much more worried about the soldiers hurting the trannies than the other way around. The whole idea of the deceptive tranny often feeds the whole “trans panic” defense and further justifies the killing of transpeople. So, while this is only a drop in the Ocean, it has some real impacts too.

Since I watch both shows already (they’re just about the only shows I watch regularly these days), I think I’m going to start documenting every time one of these derogatory references happens. If I get a chance, I might try to go back and document some of the derogatory trans references that have happened in the past couple months.