Today in Transphobia

This morning, Shaker koach forwarded me the link to this AP story about queer seniors who come out and/or transition later in life. It's a pretty good article, quite moving in places—even though, like many articles in the mainstream media dealing with gender and sexuality, it's imperfect, and the Herald Tribune headline, "Gay seniors come out late, start second life" erases trans people altogether, which is particularly obnoxious given that the article opens with the story of Chrissie Farthing, a trans woman.

At the other end of the visibility spectrum—but at the same damn end of the lack of respect spectrum—is Slate's news aggregator The Slatest, which shares the story under the gobsmacking headline: "More Grannies Are Becoming Trannies." Seriously.


[Screen capture of headline.]
Shaker itoodislikeit is piping mad:

Let me pull a little quote from the first paragraph of the article you are linking, Slatest: "On his 75th birthday, Bill Farthing decided to be reborn. In the six years since he'd buried his wife of 45 years, he'd felt as he did long before: Lonesome, different, outcast. He wondered if he was going crazy; he contemplated suicide." In other words, this is a serious article about changing social norms and PEOPLE MISERABLE ENOUGH TO CONSIDER SUICIDE, and your idea of appropriate coverage is to make a TRANNY JOKE.

Really, what can I add? Perhaps only this: The Slatest isn't a queer space; it doesn't even specifically identify as an ally space; Slate isn't a safe space (nor does it try to be); the author of this item isn't identified. Thus, there's no possibility of an in-community use of "trannies" here—and it's not being used ironically, to indicate the Othering of trans people by a group attacking them, either. The appropriateness of either of those uses can be debated (though not in this thread, please), but my point is that it's neither of those things, anyway. It's literally just the straightforward and wildly insensitive and indefensible use of "trannies," frequently used as a slur by violent transphobes, to make some suck-ass rhymy headline.

It's exactly this kind of casual bigotry that made me stop reading Slate years ago. In fact, I'm pretty sure this was the day I unbookmarked them, and I've never deliberately made my way to the site again.

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