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“Call Me Caitlyn”

I do not know Caitlyn Jenner. I do not know anybody who knows Caitlyn Jenner, nor anyone who has worked with Caitlyn Jenner and, to be honest, Caitlyn Jenner does not take up a great deal of my time. I say this to ward off the inevitable questions, because being trans in a post–Caitlyn Jenner world is a little bit like being British and visiting small-town America: no, I do not know your cousin Gary who lives in Brighton; no, I do not drink tea every day at 4 p.m.; I have never met the Queen; and I’m sorry, but I don’t miss Princess Diana.

Caitlyn Jenner might well be the most famous trans person in the world, but I don’t know a single trans person who would call her a trans icon. I don’t say this to be cruel, but because I am confused as to why the mainstream press—the Washington Post, NBC, MSN—would give her that title without the support of trans people. Mey Rude, trans editor for the online magazine Autostraddle, sums up everything I’ve heard from my own London-based community here:

Apart from being a big moment, this is also a pretty strange one. It’s strange that a trans woman who, so far, hasn’t done any work in the trans community has been crowned our queen. It’s strange that a trans woman who is famous, rich, white and conservative, four things that do not describe most trans women, is now the face most cis people think of when they hear the word “transgender.” It’s weird that people are saying that a famous, rich, white, conservative and conventionally attractive trans woman is humanizing trans people to a whole new group of people. Why didn’t Janet Mock or Laverne Cox do that for them? Why didn’t CeCe McDonald? Why didn’t Islan Nettles?

But look at this phenomenon in a historical context and I guess it isn’t so surprising. The Caitlyn Jenner story, the Caitlyn Jenner brand is, for all the newness, all the talk of being game-changing, following a path that has been trodden before. Christine Jorgensen, labeled the “GI Joe turned blonde bombshell,” hit the headlines in the early 1950s and stayed there for nearly twenty years. Born in New York in 1926, Jorgensen traveled to Denmark to pursue medical transition after a brief spell in the army. She left the States a “shy, miserable person”—she returned to see her story on the front page of the New York Daily News. Coverage of her transition garnered more press attention than the news of the polio vaccine and, in her role as glamorous media darling, Jorgensen’s fortune was made.

An examination of the trans success stories of the past seven decades, as measured by media celebration, attention, and payout, reveals a well-established pattern of which Caitlyn Jenner is simply the most recent example.

The first ingredient is the “can you believe it?” element. A dramatic shift from hyper-masculine to hyper-feminine, or vice versa, is more shocking, more titillating and makes for a better scoop. Even if this sudden change is at odds with the actual story—how the trans person in question experienced their growing self-knowledge and transition—it can be used as a frame and a guide. “Before” and “after” photos are necessary props, preferably as stereotypically masculine and feminine as possible.

Next comes the Cinderella moment. Nobody wants to hear about waiting years for a doctor’s appointment, waiting to see what dose of hormones works best, trying to unpick gendered expectations, trying to make sense of a frequently hostile world. Instead, what works best is an almost overnight “sex change”; not an ordinary life lived in stages and negotiated with compromises and setbacks, but a magical transformation, granted with the wave of a wand.

And finally, in this most popular trans media script, there is the focus on simplification and exceptionalism. Instead of focusing on trans communities, and the most common and the most pressing issues faced by trans people, these stories focus on personal fulfillment and the desire to fit in. Transphobia is relegated to personal slights suffered, rather than a deeply entrenched, multifaceted problem. The trans subject becomes one of the “good” trans people: not angry, ground down, and difficult, but seemingly eager to jump through the hoops set for them by the cis majority.

This is not a personal attack on Caitlyn Jenner. I don’t know her. I know that she has raised money for trans causes, and that she has raised awareness of young trans people contemplating suicide. I know that we have very different ideas about what it is to be a woman or a man or any other gender. I know that her political choices are not my choices. I know that I don’t know anything of her private life, her character, the struggles that she must bear, as we all bear our own struggles. I know that she is not my icon, and not my representative, though I wish her every happiness.

I know that this conversation is so much bigger than the public figure of Caitlyn Jenner.

And I know that this historical link—between Caitlyn Jenner and Christine Jorgensen—extends to the trans communities impacted by this double-edged sword of media success and successive waves of visibility. And that we have a chance to do things better the second time around.

I BELIEVE THAT the reason why so many trans people today feel ambivalent toward Caitlyn Jenner is because she is our Christine Jorgensen. And because, half a century later, the members of our community who are suffering the most are still being ignored in favor of a glamorous makeover and a tell-all story.

During the years when Christine Jorgensen was working on the movie adaption of her autobiography, there were many other trans people in the United States making waves of their own. Unlike Jorgensen, the media paid them little attention. Unlike Jorgensen, they didn’t get compensated for their work. The Christine Jorgensen Story was proposed in 1960 and hit cinemas in 1970, complete with lurid marketing and the tagline: “Did the surgeon’s knife make me a woman or a freak?” For Jorgensen, just another aspect of the media machine; for those without her privileges, a life-or-death question, most often answered with hatred and violence. It was not a situation that could hold for long.

Nineteen sixty-five saw one of the first in a line of protests that would lead to the famous Stonewall riots, considered by many to be the birth of the LGBT movement we know today. Dewey’s Lunch Counter in Philadelphia had been refusing to serve gender non-conforming customers: queer and trans people who didn’t look the way society thought they should, who didn’t act in a so-called appropriate manner. So those same customers—more than one hundred and fifty of them—turned up, sat down, and wouldn’t leave. They handed out leaflets, and waited for the management to back down—which they did. The majority of the protesters at Dewey’s Lunch Counter were black. They had taken some of the tactics from the civil rights movement, tried them in another setting—and won.

Another major protest followed the next year, at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco. In her groundbreaking 2008 work Transgender History, historian Susan Stryker recounts the details: that, again, it was the most vulnerable queer and trans people who came under attack, who were pushed too far, who fought back. What began with the usual police abuse finished in an all-out street fight. No date is available for the Compton’s Cafeteria riot because recording it wasn’t thought of as important: there was no press coverage, the police report disappeared, and when the surviving participants were interviewed, years later, they couldn’t remember the exact day.

The reasons why it all kicked off are depressingly familiar to many trans people, and our wider communities, today: racism, classism, the pressures of gentrification, and the abuse of trans women by the police. Stryker explains:

The police could be especially vicious to “street queens,” whom they considered bottom-of-the-barrel sex workers, and who were the least able to complain about mistreatment. Transgender women working the streets were often arrested on suspicion of prostitution even if they were just going to the corner store or talking to friends; they might be driven around in squad cars for hours, forced to perform oral sex, strip-searched, or, after arriving at the jail, humiliated in front of other prisoners. Transgender women in jail often would have their heads forcibly shaved, or if they resisted, be placed in solitary confinement in “the hole.” And because they were legally men… they would be placed in the men’s jail, where their femininity made them especially vulnerable to sexual assault, rape, and murder.

The same people who paid money to gawk at Jorgensen, who might even call her “brave,” were all too often complicit in making and maintaining a world savage in its punishment of her trans siblings.

Which is not to say that this was Christine Jorgensen’s fault, or that she did not do a great deal of good in the world—clearly, demonstrably, she did. She was a lifeline to hundreds of thousands of people, and her openness inspired compassion and hope in many. Her story, and her willingness to tell it, spread knowledge and spread ignorance, enlightened and erased. Both of these things can be true.

OF COURSE, THERE are worse things than being ignored.

The last time I saw a trans woman on television—or, more correctly, the character of a trans woman on television—was during the latest series of The X-Files. I couldn’t resist the pull of nostalgia, but wished I had with the introduction of “Annabelle.” A minor background character, she appears only to flesh out the monster-of-the-week story. A black woman, a sex worker, and, as is quickly explained, a trans woman who is also a drug addict. Who’s had “the surgery”—you know, on her genitals.

That’s it. That’s the joke. That’s the reason for the character to exist: to be a black trans woman, who is a sex worker and a drug addict, because being that kind of woman, combining those particular traits, is apparently intrinsically funny. In a show designed to stretch credibility in all kinds of glorious ways, credibility disappears in an instant as Annabelle reveals her vulnerabilities to the FBI agents capable of arresting her and holding her in a men’s prison—all for the sake of a punch line.

The inclusion of marginalized trans women as jokes or victims only is not a new trend. The long-running series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has found a particular niche in sensationalizing vulnerable trans women for ratings, offering us a psychotic trans murderer, numerous dead trans women (complete with genitalia jokes), and a “delusional” trans woman stabbing herself to death.

Even an actress as gifted and groundbreaking as Laverne Cox has played these roles, early in her career. Before her breakthrough role in Orange Is the New Black, Cox appeared in Law & Order, in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and in the role of “Transsexual Prostitute” in Bored to Death.

As noted by Bitch magazine: “In a 2012 survey, GLAAD found that transgender characters were victims in 40 percent of appearances. Additionally, 20 percent were sex workers. These are the roles people associate with transgender people, especially women.”

This is not about only wanting “respectable” trans people to be portrayed.

This is about asking why these facts—that many trans people are sex workers, that many trans people turn to drugs and alcohol, that many trans people suffer violence both at the hands of those they know and at the hands of strangers, and that trans people who suffer from the effects of racism are most likely to suffer further violence and abuse—are suitable fodder for light entertainment, but not for an urgent and sincere investigation into the oppressions which are killing the most marginalized members of the trans community.

Instead of reporting on the whys of all of this—the scandals that are endemic racism, endemic transphobia, the particular hatred of trans femininity and womanhood that is transmisogyny, the daily ways in which it is decided that some people are not as worthy of protection, of life, as others—instead, the lives of marginalized trans women are used as fodder for schlocky drama series, the background hum of an oversaturated media machine.

In the rare instances where real-life reporting does take place, the narrative tends to follow the fictionalized example. Scandal and titillation, the wrong names and the wrong pronouns, lurid accounts of violence committed and theories as to why (it’s hinted) that violence could be justified. It can seem as though the journalists writing these reports forget the reality of what it is they’re covering—very often the ending of a human life, the final, desperate moments of another human being—and instead write as though they’re recapping an episode of the latest crime serial.

When leading human rights lawyer Sonia Burgess was pushed to her death on the London tube tracks in 2010, the mainstream media coverage was, in the opinion of many trans people and our supporters, depressingly lacking in sensitivity. Some reporters focused on unconnected and salacious details of the victim’s sex life; most misgendered both the deceased and the accused, a fellow transgender person. Headlines such as “Sex Change ‘Woman’ Accused of Killing Cross-Dress Lawyer on Tube” felt like a trivialization of a tragedy. The behavior of the media was so upsetting that it led to the founding of All About Trans, a UK charity devoted to ending transphobia in the press.

Five years later, Senthooran/Nina Kanagasingham, the person responsible for Sonia Burgess’s death, was found dead in their police cell. They had suffocated to death with their hands bound and a plastic bag over their head—fellow prisoners reported hearing them shouting “Help me” before their body was discovered. None of the newspapers that had so readily reported on Kanagasingham’s appearance and demeanor when on trial could be bothered to record the result of the inquest into their death: “self-inflicted,” according to the National Offender Management Service Deaths in Custody Database.

And it’s not only this exploitation of the suffering and deaths of the most marginalized trans people that does so much damage, but the ways in which it is only this suffering, these deaths, which are considered newsworthy. In all the trans-related media I’ve consumed, I could count on one hand the mainstream outlets that have covered the lives of marginalized trans people in an accurate and respectful way, rather than simply capitalizing on their pain. A “sensational” murder may be worth a headline, but nothing of the artists, lawyers, advocates, protesters, activists, everyday and extraordinary people resisting and fighting and thriving. The 2015 film Tangerine, following a day in the life of two trans women of color, received widespread critical praise—but has nothing like the reach of a popular TV show or tabloid newspaper. There’s a reason why so many trans people are such fans of prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black: where else do we get to see such a realistic, respectfully written trans character, beautifully portrayed by a trans actress, highlighting real issues faced by trans people? Activists who flip the script on who gets to be the subject of the news, who gets to write the story and what that story contains—women like Monica Jones, Miss Major, and Lourdes Hunter—are rightly praised by online LGBT outlets, but I have yet to see their groundbreaking work covered by the mainstream press. There is a strict dichotomy of trans narratives which are deemed “worthy” and those that are not. There is endless space available to speculate on whether Caitlyn Jenner will detransition, or to number trans women of color as misnamed, misgendered victims of violent crime. For documenting the richness of the lives of those challenging this system? Not so much.

THESE ARE THE two sides of the coin, the two ways in which trans people—overwhelmingly trans women—are portrayed. On one the glamorous “sex change” and, on the other, the victim, the freak, the joke, the threat. For one, power (of a kind), and for the other, none.

And maybe this is why, after all, I do have something to say about Caitlyn Jenner. Because, despite her wealth, despite her whiteness, her prestige, and her celebrity, huge numbers of people still laugh at her. They call her a man in social media memes, and journalists are paid to write op-eds in which they deny her the right to define her own gender. You can purchase a Caitlyn Jenner Halloween costume, complete with lingerie and mask, and you can rip her apart in a comedy routine. You can make her pronouns conditional; watch the liberal “she” turn into “he” when she says something out of line. She is protected from the worst of what trans people go through, but the received truth of her gender is still predicated on the goodwill of the cis majority. The received truths of all our genders are too often predicated on the goodwill of the cis majority. One side of the coin is far safer than the other, but that safety is not guaranteed, and not often ours to secure. There is a spectrum of experience, from danger and prejudice to safety and success: Caitlyn Jenner is further along that spectrum than the majority of trans people, but cannot escape it. We are all still linked.

And this, then, is the reason why, despite not knowing Caitlyn Jenner, I can feel let down by her actions. Because one of the reasons for her popularity is that she’s seemingly cool with this media narrative, seemingly okay with the assumptions and limitations—at least in public. Instead of using the advantage she has to tackle a hatred that hurts us all, she plays into the stereotypes, laughs along with the jokes, positions herself against the less palatable (more “political”) members of our community, and aligns herself with those who are doing the most to hurt us. One of the saddest things I’ve learned, consulting with members of the mainstream media on trans coverage, is that there are plenty of cis people in the industry who don’t like what they usually hear from trans activists: please stop hurting us, please stop misrepresenting us, please stop demeaning us. If Caitlyn Jenner says it’s not that bad, then they would rather believe her. If Caitlyn Jenner’s made it, why haven’t you?

It is, perhaps, old-fashioned to believe in the idea of moral debt and moral duty. It’s certainly not something I could impose upon anyone else, and I understand the opposition to it: Why should Caitlyn Jenner be expected to do more for trans people, simply because she’s trans herself? Why should trans people have to work harder, be less selfish, than everyone else? But when I think of how much has been given for so little reward by all the trans people before us—when I realize that neither I nor Caitlyn Jenner would exist as we are without the suffering and sacrifices of our shared communities—then I can’t pretend that that debt isn’t there, acknowledged or not.

I’ll say it one more time—I don’t know Caitlyn Jenner. I don’t know if the insults hurled against her, the denial of her reality, hurt her—they would certainly hurt me. But the real-life implication of the attitudes she lets slide—that trans woman are actually men, that the underlying issues of inequality and prejudice matter less than looking right and fitting in, that you can’t expect cis people to do better—those attitudes feed the foundation of apathy, ignorance, and cruelty that harms trans people without her protections.

Caitlyn Jenner is, most likely, the most powerful trans woman in the world. Think of what she could do, if she wanted to.