Anger Management
Dec. 23rd, 2018 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unknoughtRecently I was unfortunately reminded of the existence of Anger Management, a terrible Adam Sandler comedy from a decade and a half ago.
There's a trans woman character in the film. She's a sex worker. She's only onscreen for a couple minutes but in that time her genitals and her body more generally are repeatedly portrayed as nauseatingly disgusting and her mind as not altogether there. Her flirting with the main character is shown as hugely violating specifically because of her transness. She leaves calling the main characters "freaks", which is another joke, get it, because of the absurdity of the idea that she could think she has any room to apply that label to someone else.
One day when I was in seventh grade, a teacher got sick and we ended up being shown that movie to keep us quiet in class. That was the first time I ever encountered the idea of trans people.
I didn't realize at the time that the character was intended as a mockery of a real group of people. I assumed she was just sort of an... aggregate of disgust, a grab-bag of sex and gender norm violations thrown together to be as repulsive as possible. The scene stuck in my head and I thought a lot about what specific parts were supposed to be disgusting and why. I wasn't sure exactly what I was being told, but I knew I was being told something about acceptable and unacceptable ways of being. I knew I had to be as little like that as possible.
I've faced a lot less direct transphobia than most of the other trans people I know, and a lot of the time I feel like I've been pretty like and I don't have any room to complain. But it's easy to forget things like how deeply fucked up it is that I learned that trans women were disgusting and pathetic and threatening all at once long before I learned that trans women exist.
There's a trans woman character in the film. She's a sex worker. She's only onscreen for a couple minutes but in that time her genitals and her body more generally are repeatedly portrayed as nauseatingly disgusting and her mind as not altogether there. Her flirting with the main character is shown as hugely violating specifically because of her transness. She leaves calling the main characters "freaks", which is another joke, get it, because of the absurdity of the idea that she could think she has any room to apply that label to someone else.
One day when I was in seventh grade, a teacher got sick and we ended up being shown that movie to keep us quiet in class. That was the first time I ever encountered the idea of trans people.
I didn't realize at the time that the character was intended as a mockery of a real group of people. I assumed she was just sort of an... aggregate of disgust, a grab-bag of sex and gender norm violations thrown together to be as repulsive as possible. The scene stuck in my head and I thought a lot about what specific parts were supposed to be disgusting and why. I wasn't sure exactly what I was being told, but I knew I was being told something about acceptable and unacceptable ways of being. I knew I had to be as little like that as possible.
I've faced a lot less direct transphobia than most of the other trans people I know, and a lot of the time I feel like I've been pretty like and I don't have any room to complain. But it's easy to forget things like how deeply fucked up it is that I learned that trans women were disgusting and pathetic and threatening all at once long before I learned that trans women exist.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-24 06:46 am (UTC)