Exasperated Tranny Hits Out at Media Cliches

This morning I woke up with a hangover. I took some painkillers. I bought eggs, but couldn't face food. Eventually I had a coffee; I read the paper and listened to the radio, and I wondered what I would have for dinner. For the record, I'm leaning towards shepherd's pie.

By the way, I'm transsexual.

Suddenly it's not just a mundane hangover is it? "Sex swap drunk starves self after shameless booze binge!" It might even make the front page.

Whenever a trans person appears in a news story, whatever the context, their gender takes centre stage. Trans people are constantly being dehumanised in the press and portrayed as lust-driven hedonists, conniving frauds whose only aim in life is to trick people into believing their gender disguise, and then probably have sex with them or murder them, cut them up into little bits and dance widdershins by moonlight around the pieces. I exaggerate, but not by much.

This was brought home to me recently while researching another article about the treatment of transgender people by the prison service. I came upon an article by the BBC with the headline "Transsexual man jailed in women's prison". At first I thought I had found exactly what I was looking for, a case of a trans person being sentenced as their assigned gender and not their true gender. However, on closer inspection, I was even more horrified to discover that the article was in fact the total opposite, with willful disregard for the correct use of pronouns. The 'transsexual man' in question was a male-to-female transsexual called Alexandra Macrae, who made history by being sentenced as a woman.

Although brief, this article reads like a checklist of what not to write about a trans woman. Incorrect pronouns abound, she is referred to as the "son of a church of Scotland minister" and the piece is peppered with details about her life which would be mundane to the extreme - but in light of her trans status they somehow take on a seedy salaciousness. The little detail about her father, the fact that she was a rugby prop in her former life (she played sport?! But that's so manly, goodness how amusing, I bet she looks a right old state now, etc etc). Even more bafflingly, the article closes with the fact that she was "formerly married to a Ghanaian woman".

This article was printed in 1998, although in the intervening years things have changed little. While it is true that leaps and bounds have been made in what is often termed 'public acceptance' of transsexuals (implying of course that transsexuals and the public are mutually exclusive), everyone loves a good tranny story. The New York Daily News recently ran the headline "Fooled John Stabbed Bronx Tranny", about the murder of trans woman Sanesha Stewart. Once again, quite aside from the dehumanising slant the article has taken, there is a clear implication that this young trans woman had set out to 'fool' someone ('john' is American slang for the client of a sex worker) into accepting her gender.

Sensational coverage and the use of language which is at best misleading and at worst downright wrong helps to perpetuate the myth that all trans people are strange, exotic, weird, sex-crazed non-people. The justification that such stories are of 'human interest' assumes that the readership does not contain trans people, as if we are somehow outside the normal loop of everyday life. The habit of withholding the correct pronouns in articles until an individual has had surgery creates the feeling that there is some invisible finishing line that trans people are all struggling to cross. On a recent Channel Four documentary, Transsexuals in Iran, even trans women who were living as women full time were referred to as male until they had had surgery. Isn't it about time that trans people were consulted on how we would best like to be addressed, rather than being handed down a set of rules cobbled together by sloppy and confusing journalism?

The rules couldn't be simpler - just show a little respect.