3/19/2023 0 Comments Tv tropes presentable liberty![]() ![]() This report is in two pieces, in the first I will discuss broadly what I discovered, and the second is a list of every trans character I looked at and a brief description of their role. In some cases, it was difficult to discern who was or wasn’t a trans character because the language we use to talk about trans people (and even how trans people describe themselves) has evolved so rapidly and changed so dramatically over the past five decades, and many early portrayals were categorized as “cross-dressers” or “transvestites.” Some of those roles I left out, but some I included because regardless of terminology, those images contributed significantly to how people perceive trans women and I wanted to include at least a few. We did not include sci-fi/fantasy/supernatural characters, because that gets a little confusing/tricky, and it was hard to know where to draw the line there. If I couldn’t find the episode anywhere online or at the library, I used the aforementioned sources to describe the episode. The majority of these 105 characters were one-episode appearances, and over the course of six weeks, I logged over 50 hours of television watching and reviewing. Using The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV, Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television as well as Wikipedia, TV Tropes, Wikias, imdb, message boards and recaps, I was able to discover 105 characters who seemed to be, either overtly or subtextually, trans representations. I was also unable to find any singularly comprehensive reference book for this topic, which surprised me. ![]() But the deeper I got into the material, the more I just felt like this information needed to be gathered and presented in its entirety, because the repetitive tropes at play here are both truly horrible and rarely discussed. Partially I’m motivated by wishing I’d had something definitive to point at when people argued the Charlotte reveal was no big deal, or that Caitlyn Jenner’s existence has summarily ended the misrepresentation conversation. So, I set out to do a thorough and comprehensive analysis of trans female representation on American television. The bar for positive representation is so low that in 2010, Seth MacFarlane described the following Family Guy storyline as “probably the most sympathetic portrayal of a transsexual character that has ever been on television, dare I say”: a main character’s parent comes out as a trans woman and then sleeps with another character who, when told about his lover’s trans status, vomits for 45 uninterrupted seconds. Charlotte embodied every negative trans stereotype possible: she was deceptive about her trans status to a romantic partner and everybody who knew her, she manipulated and murdered innocent people, she wore disguises, she had mental health problems, she was referred to as “she/he/it,” she devoted her life to malicious and vengeful behavior and, after being outed, immediately turned suicidal. When the show returned in 2016, Charlotte lasted just long enough to embody one final trope: she got murdered. It turned out that Charlotte was actually Allison’s long-lost sister, cast out of her family for being trans and subsequently gone bananas. This legacy of disrespect is what prompted an intense fan backlash when Pretty Little Liars revealed that its six-season villain, the mysterious “A,” was a trans woman named Charlotte, who the characters had previously known as Allison’s friend CeCe. ![]() It remains acceptable, even today, to be openly transphobic and transmisogynistic on television. Trans women were treated as inhuman, basically. If any cis people in the story had a change of heart by the end of the episode, it was considered a positive portrayal, no matter what they’d already put the trans woman through. They were violently outed and interrogated about their penises, and this was considered okay. They endured misgendering and slurs from their loved ones and laughed along when humiliated. Trans women were pathetic, violent, disposable, or the butt of a joke. This widespread defamation has absolutely impacted the national perception of trans women as a group. It certainly had an impact on me growing up - not knowing any out trans women in real life, all I knew about them was what I saw on TV and in the movies. Until about five years ago, it was nearly impossible to find even a mildly positive portrayal of trans women on American television.
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