Abstract
The good news: coverage of transgender stories in the British media is mostly getting better. The bad news? The Jenner-fest that followed THAT Vanity Fair cover, and all the attendant publicity about Caitlyn Jenner's transition, from internationally renowned and outwardly male sports star to the latest and most famous instance of gender reversal, was not part of that improvement.
Better is less obsession with “deadnaming” (the practice of insisting on maximum coverage of an individual's pre-transition name), less insistence on pre-transition pics and a great deal less of the clumsy stumbling from old pronouns to new. Journalists are starting to get it and this is reflected in the fact that just being trans is no longer the instant news feature it once was.
The entry fee to media interest has been raised to “trans and famous”. Because the message of recent high-profile transition stories, starting from the boxing promoter Kellie Maloney, is that the public appetite, and therefore the press appetite, for trans topics is nowhere near sated. Still, there are major issues with the coverage, outwardly reflecting a shift from “we just don't get you”, and therefore trans as freak show, to a presumption that everyone now understands what it is to be trans.
Thus, Jenner becomes “everytrans”, presumed to mirror the community of which she is part – the focus for wall-to-wall interviews in which her least passing remark is given a weight quite disproportionate to her status or experience. Understand Jenner, the message seems to be, and you will understand transgender.
Yet this is so wrong: on a par with selecting one woman to speak for all women, one Brit as typical of all UK citizens. Every trans story is different, shaded according to whether the individual is old or young, rich or poor, black and ethnic minority or white, male or female. Trans means different things to different people: it encompasses cross-dressers and the non-binary, those who do not identify as male or female.
The bottom line is far more prosaic: if you understand Jenner, then you understand Jenner, and maybe a few others of similar background, age, upbringing. That is all. But does even Jenner understand Jenner? In trans terms, she is the merest babe, and while she has been transitioning for years, she is also at the beginning of her journey For her, this is a time of coming out and of sudden and exciting change. In developmental terms, it is akin to a second teenagehood.
If you want deep insight into the state of the economy, you'll certainly obtain opinion from a first-year economics student but you might think twice about hyping such opinion into global significance. So too with trans. It is interesting to watch how Maloney, so easily enticed into careless soundbites in the weeks and months after her first public announcements, has since rowed back, discovering that she knows less than she thought she did and taking more nuanced positions in the process.
Thus, a dabbling in right-wing politics pre-transition, including support for Ukip, saw Maloney endorsing positions that were both sexist and homophobic. She didn't help herself by initially attempting to defend her previous remarks. Whereas now she is clear, she was wrong to say much of what she once said and she gets, as previously she did not, that life and sexuality are a good deal more complicated than she imagined.
Similarly, few in the trans community subscribe to the old-fashioned idea of male and female brains. It is useful shorthand when talking about personal experience, but not well founded in any academic discipline. Yet Jenner has only to use the phrase and once again the critics of transgender are out in force. The views of one are instant stand-in for the alleged thought crime of all, creating a critique of an entire community on the back of one individual's thinking aloud.
So much presumption. So many scare stories. Elsewhere, especially in the tabloids, there remains a constant drip feed of stories alleging NHS profligacy on behalf of the trans community. These too are frequently based on the atypical or the ill-informed. The Daily Star is one offender. In June 2015, it tutted disapprovingly over what it described as a “sex swap splurge”, with the revelation that the NHS had “splashed out £345,000 for 31 sex swap operations to be carried out at a private hospital”. Though it is not entirely clear what the issue is here: if the NHS is to support gender reassignment, as it is by law, it has to spend money on doing so and gender reassignment surgery takes up less that 0.003 per cent of the overall NHS budget.
Also surprising is Sky News, combining all of the above in one neat little tale. A survey into public attitudes to trans issues is juxtaposed with comment from the high-profile columnist, Julie Bindel, taking issue, rightly, with Jenner's remarks. But this is a straw man discourse, deliberately set up by Sky News. Completing the hatchet job, the piece rounds off with quotes from one optimistic trans model hoping for a boob job from the public purse, presented as, presumably, typical. Such reporting incenses a public eager to scent out the merest whiff of NHS waste and unfair advantage.
Not reported is just how vanishingly rare it is for such a wish – the boob job – to be granted, how minimal the support granted to most trans patients. Equally unreported is the 12-year waiting list for treatment in one UK region, the toll in mental illness and suicide among those forced to wait. The discrimination in jobs, in education, in housing. The violence on the streets. These, it appears, are less news than the coming out of one high-profile individual.
Then there's the issue of beauty. Here, trans experience, and especially the experience of trans women, overlaps directly with that of women in general. For not everyone is beautiful. Not everyone has the natural looks or the surgical budget to claim the front cover of a national magazine. Or rather, the images that editors consider appropriate to adorn such spaces remain narrowly bounded in terms of conventional prettification. Fail to adhere to such standards and you have somehow failed as a person.
It is a social sickness, causing intelligent women, rendered inadequate and somehow less by the fact that they don't look like movie stars, to spend millions every year on looking better. Its contagion spreads far and wide, afflicting the trans community too. For even if the press no longer overtly poke fun at those whose transition leaves them looking like a “trucker in drag”, the focus on “passing” and on extolling the virtues of pretty trans women has a corrosive effect on the ordinary majority.
Jennie Kermode, chair of Trans Media Watch, an organisation that has campaigned long and hard for better representation of trans people in the press sums it up. Looking back over the past six months, she says: “While we welcome the fact that coverage of Caitlyn Jenner's transition has generally been supportive, the fact is that life remains difficult for many trans people who do not share her advantages. We're glad to see positive stories in the media but it's important that the voices of those who face social exclusion, poverty and violence are also heard, because sadly transphobia is not a thing of the past. Not every trans woman can be beautiful but all these women matter.”
I couldn't have put it better. Press coverage is no longer hostile or negative. At times, it may even be outwardly supportive. But it is still a long, long way from insightful, let alone perfect.