There was a recent uproar over a skit on the Late Show with David Letterman, with most national gay and transgender organizations charging transphobia. Though the joke was about Amanda Simpson, a transsexual woman appointed by President Obama to a government post, the offense was rooted in homophobia, not transphobia. It isn’t helpful to a nation just learning about transgender issues to confuse them with the inappropriate use of a word.
On the program in question, announcer Alan Kalter ran from the stage in horror when Letterman announced that Simpson was born male. The humor was supposed to come from Kalter realizing that he had been intimate with a woman without knowing that he had been with someone born male. His reaction of disgust was not to Simpson’s sex reassignment surgery but to his horror that he had been involved with a man. That’s homophobia—the fear and hatred of homosexuality in others or in ourselves. Transphobia is a fear and hatred of the transsexuality of others or of ourselves.
I recall with great annoyance the scene from the film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in which Jim Carrey is so disgusted from learning that a woman he kissed was actually a man that he brushed his teeth and gargled as if he had eaten feces. I was deeply offended that my kisses with Ray would be framed in such a way. Carrey’s antics are a good example of homophobia, not transphobia, and we’ll never know how much self-hate was generated by that scene. One wonders, though, what the national reaction would have been had Ace Ventura discovered he had kissed a woman who was black rather than white as he had supposed, and resorted to the same mouth cleansing. That behavior would be a good example of racism.
As Directors of Diversity and Inclusion, and members of corporate Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) work to educate senior managers and other colleagues about gay and transgender issues in the workplace, they need to be clear about how the two groups of valued employees are different from each other, and what challenges they share. If a company prohibits discrimination based upon a person’s gender identity or expression, as will be required if Congress passes and the President signs the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), it is especially urgent that employees are clear on what behaviors are found disruptive to the workplace and why.
Most transgender people—both cross-dressers and transsexuals—are heterosexual in their sexual orientation, just as most left-handed people, tall people, blonds, Mormons, and other minority groups are heterosexual. The sex of others that attracts us romantically and erotically determines our sexual orientation (not "preference"). The gender that we call "home" determines our gender identity and our gender expression. If people hate us because they find it disgusting that two people of the same sex are physically intimate, that’s homophobia. If people hate us because we have transitioned from one gender to the other, or because we express our gender in non-conforming ways, that’s transphobia.
Every negative attitude against a person who happens to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual is not homophobia, just as every negative attitude toward a transgender person is not transphobia. Sometimes the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender person, like their heterosexual and non-transgender colleagues, are simply irritating people, bad workers, slovenly, unprofessional, or otherwise difficult to be around.
Behaviors that make the workplace feel unsafe for the average gay person, or which create an atmosphere in which he or she feels unvalued because of their sexual orientation, is homophobia and a violation of most corporate policies and the laws of many states. Behaviors that do the same for the average cross-dresser or transsexual, whether covered yet by policy or law, impede a company’s ability to effectively attract and retain the best and brightest employees, and to successfully market to all consumers.
David Letterman, his announcer, Alan Kalter, and his staff of comedy writers all need diversity training unless they wish to offend large segments of their viewing audience, and perhaps—if the unacceptable behavior is frequently repeated—their advertisers. Likewise, if the leaders of national gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender organizations want to be taken seriously as educators by the media and the general public, they need to be clearer and more accurate in why a word or a behavior is offensive.
Good point, Brian. As a professor of law specializing in transgender workplace law and policy, I echo your comments. This area does require some knowledge, and it’s not enough simply to be a person of good will but no understanding. I’m glad you’re out there doing this important work.
Amanda Simpson is a woman, the assumption that “sleeping with her is sleeping with a man” IS transphobic.
I find your comments not just misguided, but outright offensive. Each year we go through the same trials after men murder transgender women. They uniformly defend themselves with the defense that they were “fooled” and that transgendered women have some obligation to place a large T on our clothing to warn off any heterosexual males.
This is exactly the same concept that the Letterman joke was based on. A concept covered with the blood of women like Gwen Araujo and Andrea Zapata. This is the very essence of transphobia.
Accept that this is not all about you as a gay male and that you do not know better than transpeople about what transphobia is. You are wrong, and in serious need of some diversity training yourself.
I’m a trans woman (post-op for what it’s worth) and I was hurt and offended by the sketch on Letterman. You certainly have a right to be upset as well, but doesn’t insulting trans women have a more direct impact on us than it does gay men? I’ve been rejected by guys because I’m transgender, so I really hate stuff that encourages men to think they should be disgusted by being intimate with me.
The distinction between homophobic jokes and transphobic jokes can be blurry, but I think this one is primarily transphobic. Kalter yelled “Amanda Simpson used to be a man?!” which is transphobic on it’s face. She never was a man, she just used to look like one, and disregarding someone’s gender identity like this goes to the heart of transphobia. Kalter at least needed to have that transphobic mindset before he got to the possible conclusion, “and that means I had gay sex,” but it’s certainly possible that the negative reaction was pure transphobia. So even though you certainly can read homophobia into this, the trasnphobia is more explicit and the target here is a trans woman; I’d give it the edge.
Anyways, this discussion is somewhat academic since we both find this sort of thing totally inappropriate; good luck working to stamp it out! It’s also natural for you to be more attuned to sniffing out homophobia and fine for you to be offended on your own behalf. It’s just important that you give us the right to name our own oppression and speak up for ourselves; attacks that target us need to be called transphobia.
“His reaction of disgust was not to Simpson’s sex reassignment surgery but to his horror that he had been involved with a man.”
A woman is a woman is a woman. There is nothing gay about intimate relations with a woman, cis or trans. To intimate that kissing a trans woman is being ‘involved with a man’ is in itself transphobic. Are you saying that not wanting to be involved in same-sex relations is homophobic? Isn’t that just having an orientation?! Yes, the sheer level of distress suggests homophobia but he wouldn’t even HAVE such a phobia without the transphobic assertion that somebody assigned male at birth isn’t a woman, totally.
The meaning of the words homophobia and transphobia extend beyond that which results from fear or mistrust. Or are you agreeing with the statement that many bigots seem to be making these days? “I am not homophobic, I’m not scared of gays, I just hate them”?!
I’m curious what qualifies as transphobia in your mind, since there’s not a real distinction in this case — it’s directed at a trans, the joke couldn’t have happened if it WASN’T a trans person, etc.
I really am curious, because any transphobic action directed towards a trans woman is under the assumption she’s “really a guy”. Just like this. Wouldn’t this technically qualify *any* transphobic action as being homophobic instead?
I agree and disagree with you. Rather than just labeling the joke as transphobic or homophobic, it really needs to be dissected further because it’s actually a little of both. There are two ideas at work: one is the homophobia that you’ve identified and explained. It seems to me that the other is a transphobia that is evidenced by the “Amanda used to be a dude?” line.
That comment also contains elements of cissexual assumption and gender entitlement: Kalter acts like he assumed Ms. Simpson was a cissexual female and the punchline is an act of privileging Letterman’s and Kalter’s understanding of Ms. Simpson’s gender over her own. Transition doesn’t affect the fact that Amanda “used to be a dude” and her trans identity is belittled.
Both the homophobia and transphobia have at their root what Julia Serano calls oppositional sexism– that there are two opposite and mutually exclusive sexes, and that people are targeted when they don’t adhere to the gender norms prescribed by that belief.
Call it homophobia if you insist but what straight America fears is the gender non-conforming person – whether gay,lesbian or trans. It’s about demonizing queer behavior/identity.
Letterman and his ilk, need to be told every time that it is wrong to use this type of humor. I don’t expect them to change much unless they hire inspired writers who are more cutting edge and less pandering weasels.
The joke was rooted sequentially in transphobia, then homophobia. It starts off with the transphobic assumption that she is not a woman, which then makes it possible to appeal to homophobia.
Just out of curiosity, you do realize that transphobia not only includes, but is specifically centered around, the belief that transsexuals are actually their birth genital sex, rather than their identified sex, right? So anyone saying that a transgender woman (born physically male) is a man is a transphobe.
Horror at sleeping with a transwoman is both transphobia and homophobia. The transphobia comes first. Without it, the man would just accept he had sex with a woman, and homophobia couldn’t even enter the picture. (Although a non-trans woman sleeping with a pre-op transsexual women in the belief that she was a man might have a homophobic reaction later.)
Of course, in the minds of the typical ‘phobe, gay and transgender are the same thing, so most bigots are both homophobic and transphobic.
By the way, there are a lot more transgender categories than “crossdresser” and “transsexual.” And while crossdressers normally identify with their birth sex, transsexuals do not. So they’re two very different things, and I’m not even sure why crossdressers are being brought up in this particular essay.
One wonders, though, what the national reaction would have been had Ace Ventura discovered he had kissed a woman who was black rather than white as he had supposed, and resorted to the same mouth cleansing. That behavior would be a good example of racism.
Speaking as one white person to another, that was a messed up thing to say. It is wrong for white people to use black civil rights progress as an analogy for their own self benefitting civil rights work.
Like, while that WOULD be messed up and racist, it is not strongly analogous to what happened in the Letterman situation. Race and gender are both issues of identity that can form the basis for overt or subtle discrimination, but they both distinct from (and orthogonal to) sexual preferences, with their own particular details and historical contexts.
Being a good ally means understanding intersectionality and recognizing that sometimes all you should be doing is speaking from a place of privilege (like as a white person) to recognize and seek to reduce discrimination that primarily targets other people.
Piggy backing on the political credibility of other people who are less-powerful and more-targeted is a sort of “political theft”.
The relevant comparison for that part of your post is not a “gay vs black” comparison to see who is “more of a victim” or something messed up like that. The correct comparison is manifold with “white vs black” AND “male vs female” AND “straight vs gay” operating simultaneously – which means you need to be more nuanced because you’re a white man.
And *really* of course, the actual situation you’re supposedly responding to doesn’t even involve race – you just brought up race out of the blue all on your own. The thing you should really be worried about are the complexities of the intersection of “cis VS trans” discrimination AND “straight vs gay” operating simultaneously.
In almost every respect, as a white gay cis male you’re not being a very good ally, but your white privilege (as opposed to cis privilege) is more visibly on display because you’re the only person who brought up black people, and you seem to have done it only and exactly to steal their credibility using a weak analogy, and race is *very* distinct from gender (whereas issues of brain sex and sexual preference are frequently conflated in the minds of cis people as a matter of course).
I don’t mean to jump all over you. You’re fighting against defamation and I appreciate that work. I just wish you would adjust your tactics in the future, so that there was less friendly fire between various groups working to dismantle systems of cultural oppression.
If you’re going to fight, learn to do it without hurting your allies
“The humor was supposed to come from Kalter realizing that he had been intimate with a woman without knowing that he had been with someone born male. His reaction of disgust was not to Simpson’s sex reassignment surgery but to his horror that he had been involved with a man.”
IF that was the case, the whole skit was terribly transphobic. But Brian, what you saw for it to be funny to *you* was to translate it into something gay men can perhaps more easily understand – a joke about a drag performer, perhaps. But Amanda Simpson is not a man in drag, and I didn’t see anything in the skit that indicated that Kalter had ever kissed Amanda – the reaction looked to me to be based on his *mistaken* idea that Amanda was a man.
When I saw the skit, being a transsexual woman myself, I thought the humor was aimed at the transphobia – that it was funny and pathetic that Kalter ran out of the room based on an erroneous belief that Amanda Simpson was “really a man.” I laughed at Kalter for being/acting-like an idiot. Now, THAT was funny on the same level that Liberty University, which gives out doctoral degrees in science based on six-day creationism, is funny. (It’s a place where they teach that the dinosaurs died out because they somehow couldn’t fit into the ark.)
In Ace Ventura, the former place-kicker for the Miami Dolphins was portrayed as a pre-op transsexual woman who had been kissed by not only Carrey but apparently the whole police department. What they showed was the “ick factor” that straight men get when they think about the idea of themselves “kissing a man.” Even there, what would make it funny is the absurdity that kissing a trans women is the same thing as kissing a man. The “funny” is over the fact of the “ick factor” – not that the trans woman is “really a man” but because Carrey and the straight cops are all reacting as if she was.
Essentially, the humor in both the Carrey and Letterman skits may derive from both transphobia and homophobia, but may not be transphobic or homophobic since it’s the transphobia and the homophobia that are being laughed at. (Well, Brian, since you are a gay man, and I am a trans woman, neither uf us know for sure what the straight people are *really* laughing at – and yes, it is possible they could be laughing at trans women for being trans, or for being assumed to be gay men. The two main media portrayals of trans women are either as “pathetic” or “deceivers.” Either of these could be made funny to the ignorant, rather than the ignorance itself being made funny.