Transgender people are multidimensional and deserve to have a constructed narrative that reflects their inherent humanity.  As the current gender order becomes more entrenched in the mass media, the identities of trans identified people will be distanced further from the norm. Some smaller transnational discourses are appearing and, should they reach American viewers, have the potential to open up a critical dialogue on the values espoused in modern mass media. The scholarship on these issues, especially Judith Butler (1997), challenges the public to reexamine the construction of gender and realize that real people live in a world of fluidity where identity is truly what one makes of it

Acosta, Juan Carlos

English

The College at Brockport, State University of New York: Digital Commons @Brockport

Dissenting Voices
Volume 1 | Issue 1
8-21-2012
Transnational Discourses on Gender Variance
Juan Carlos Acosta
The College at Brockport, jacos1@brockport.edu
This Opening Voices is brought to you for free and open access by the Women and Gender Studies at Digital Commons @Brockport. It has been
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Acosta, Juan Carlos (2012) "Transnational Discourses on Gender Variance," Dissenting Voices: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 6.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dissentingvoices/vol1/iss1/6
  
Transnational Discourses on Gender Variance 
JC Acosta 
Gender could be thought of as one of the easiest things in the world to do. Most 
people do gender everyday without stopping to think about it. At the same time, talking 
about gender is one of the hardest things for people to do. While gender is preformed in a 
public way, thinking about gender takes people into a private space. It is in this duality 
that gender is able to have a fluid and multilayered place in a person’s identity. Gender 
becomes in a way the public consciousness and performance of meanings assigned to one 
or more gendered categories (West & Zimmerman, 1987).   Gender presentation is the 
individual person’s response and reaction to the larger gender ideology which informs 
everyone in society about which behaviors, dress, and attitudes fit into one of the gender 
categories, almost always corresponding to a biological sex (Butler, 1990; Lorber, 1994). 
Most people have congruence between their sex, gender presentation, and their 
internal sense of gender identity.  Most recently the category of cisgender or “gender 
normals” has been created to describe these individuals as juxtaposed with transgender, 
which describes any individual who does not identify in some way with the accepted or 
hegemonic gender ideology (Schilt & Westbrook, 2009).   In many ways transgender has 
become a catch-all term comprising a diverse group of individuals, many of whom reject 
the transgender label, viewing it as part of the same system they view as oppressive. But 
the “trans” identity firmly remains a space claimed by people outside of the hegemonic 
gender prescriptions however they define them.  
As individuals negotiate these larger categories of identity in society, it is difficult 
to avoid the influence the media plays in prescribing gender roles. Modern mass media 
Dissenting Voices, v. 1, issue 1, Spring 2012 29
  
occupies a position where the messages millions receive are whichever images the 
network executives choose to portray. Early in the history of mass media, people 
discovered that media could be used as a tool to communicate values. At its worst, the 
mass media has been a vehicle for propaganda.  Many of the formal mechanisms that 
promote propaganda have been dismantled, but the informal structures influencing social 
consciousness continue to inform the public. This isn’t to say that movie studio 
executives are dictating exactly how people should behave; however, they are through 
TV, cinema, and advertisements, creating symbols and role models for each person to 
identify with, which sets a standard or expectation for behavior. When a system of 
surveillance and control causes people to act in certain ways, it is called panopticism 
(Foucault, 1977).   For trans identified people, this comes as a balancing act between the 
normalized behaviors of cisgendered people and the constructed images of trans 
identities.  
Almost everyone portrayed in TV shows or in movies is a cisgender person. 
Where this becomes problematic is when individuals who do not identify with the 
cisgendered space of identity are left out.  This is the process of symbolic annihilation 
because as the media creates a picture of society, the people who are not in line with that 
picture lose their place in the social construction of society (Giovanelli & Ostertag, 
2009).   Power becomes vitally important in the social construction of society as those 
with it have the ability to attach value to difference (Johnson, 2006).   Marginalized 
groups like transgender people lose voice or their voices become distortions through the 
dominant group’s lens.    
Dissenting Voices, v. 1, issue 1, Spring 2012 30
  
What portrayals do appear fall into harmful tropes which reinforce stereotypes 
about transgender folks. Many tropes aimed at gender nonconformity play to 
misconceptions of transgender women but as more trans men have become visible, the 
messages have changed to reflect the same sentiments on to them as well. Julia Serano 
(2007) discusses two of these tropes in her book, Whipping Girl. The first is the 
“pathetic,” an individual who is attempting to challenge the notions of gender 
presentation but fails in an obvious way. The very muscular “manly” man in a pink tutu 
exemplifies this trope. Where there would be nothing wrong with that person wearing 
anything he or she wanted, what this image creates is the idea that gender is fixed and 
cannot be challenged. On first glance the onlooker knows that the character is most 
decisively masculine. The pink tutu is the invocation of a strikingly feminine object. This 
translates to any person who the observer can tell embodies a sexed body somehow not 
matching his or her appearance or behavior. Within the gender system in America, men 
have an embodied power that women do not (Bornstein, 1998; Johnson, 2006).   The 
trope of the pathetic takes power away from the man by putting the feminine identified 
object or behavior triggering the entrenched notion of powerless women. Their 
juxtaposition is intentional to reinforce that men are men and should conduct themselves 
as men; any violation of that norm is absurd.  
The few individuals able to escape the pathetic trope many times fall into the 
other trope discussed in Serano’s (2007) book, the “deceiver.”  Where the pathetic had no 
power, the deceiver is consciously using his or her power in order to lure and corrupt 
hapless normal people, mainly heterosexual men, who would be converted to 
homosexuality. Deceivers represent an embodiment of the dangerous nature of any 
Dissenting Voices, v. 1, issue 1, Spring 2012 31
  
challenge to the gender system. They are almost always men masquerading as women for 
some less than respectable purpose. In the 1993 comedy Mrs. Doubtfire, for example, a 
man assumes the identity of an elderly English woman to circumvent a custody battle 
with his ex-wife.  As this and other examples of the deceiver trope play out in cinema, 
characters go through a process on screen to conceal their sex from the other characters 
for any number of reasons.  Films Some Like It Hot (1958), Work it (2011), and Yentl 
(1983) all exemplify this deceiver trope.  Portrayals inevitably lead to comedic scenes 
where characters must juggle situations and maintain their disguise.  Within this juggle, 
the result is always the same: someone, usually a man, discovers the character’s “true 
identity” and exposes this to the community. Afterward, they must remain in their “true” 
sex to face their just punishment. What few examples of non comedic deceivers exist are 
focused on people who choose to identify as trans or gender nonconforming. 
Unfortunately, these are usually based on true stories where someone is killed, usually 
the trans individual, such as Boys Don’t Cry (1999), The Crying Game (1992) and A 
Soldier’s Girl (2003), which all depict tragic outcomes as a result of male to female or 
female to male gender transgressions.  
Using Serano’s (2007) work, both the deceiver and the pathetic limit what is 
known about the character’s internal sense of self. In an evolving world, the media is 
slowly beginning to address increasing numbers of trans identified people. Here, the 
media response has been to create tropes for them that focus on the internal sense of 
gender identity. In this new media climate, the old tropes still continue to be reproduced 
along side new ones. For example, the sociopath/psychopath is an individual who has 
some fundamental flaw that creates the need to act in a gender non conforming way. This 
Dissenting Voices, v. 1, issue 1, Spring 2012 32
  
character behaves in ways designed to suggest that only a psychological illness would 
create the desire to want to occupy a trans space. Most visible in this category is the 
character Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs (1991), who desires to become a woman 
by murdering women and wearing their skin. When Buffalo Bill “does” his gender, he 
becomes less of a person. Butler (2004) comments on everyday interactions involving 
gender where the attitudes and norms that inform the construction of Buffalo Bill as a 
representative figure of trans people causes an extension to his trans  character that both 
repulses and projects onto trans people as a whole.  This character is designed in such a 
disturbing way that nothing about Bill is redeeming. Although the film doesn’t suggest 
that all trans people are deranged killers, the trans aspect of his identity is intertwined 
with his dangerous mental condition.  
As juxtaposition to the older messages about trans folk is the new space of reality 
TV and the docudrama.  In these more recent spaces, studios have set out to capture the 
“real” story of this fringe group of people. At the same time that these programs are 
marketed as documentaries from the perspective to of trans people, the capitalist realities 
of the entertainment industry remain the underlying factor driving what is depicted and 
what is left out. As such, the messages that would be the accurate representation of the 
trans experience have a sensational component and a strong reinforcement of gender 
ideologies. Trans women are universally shown in dresses, applying makeup, or engaging 
in some behavior that communicates that they are feminine women. What does appear on 
screen that might suggest otherwise is the medical procedures that reaffirm a distinct 
barrier between men and women. Taken from earlier discourses on sexuality, anyone who 
wishes to transgress social barriers can be associated with a medical “fix,” but 
Dissenting Voices, v. 1, issue 1, Spring 2012 33
  
problematically, the docudrama pathologizes the trans identity as a medical problem with 
a cure (Foucault, 1978). 
In the MTV series True Life, an episode, “I’m Changing My Sex” (2009), focused 
on trans youth, attempting to document both a trans woman and a trans man’s stories. 
Underneath the camera’s following the two and doing spot interviews with their friends 
or families is the missing piece of gender nonconformity. Both of the young people fit 
into the gender spaces assigned to the sex they are becoming. Although problematizing 
any individual’s identity or choices is completely unfair, when these examples come to 
represent the only portrayals of trans narratives, they transform into a mechanism of 
oppression. The social construction of trans spaces uses media-influenced ideas as its 
foundation, leaving any deviation from that construct as extensions of the other media 
tropes. In this sense, one is allowed to be trans identified so long as it fits into the gender 
system. If not, then they must be a pathetic, a deceiver, or a sociopath.  
Although this discussion paints a rather bleak picture for positive representations 
of trans folks in the mass media, there are healthy depictions of trans identities in foreign 
films and TV, which are slowly making their way into the American consciousness. Ma 
Vie en Rose (1997), a French language film, directly addressed a complex perspective on 
gender nonconformity with a trans identified child named Ludovic. Ludovic’s story 
stands apart from other more home grown attempts at positive trans portrayals as it 
depicts the issues encountered during the transition process of acceptance. Most 
importantly, the producers of the film intend for the audience to identify with Ludovic as 
another child growing into a complicated world. The film challenges the gender system, 
but in a way that provokes the audience to focus on the human dignity within Ludovic.  
Dissenting Voices, v. 1, issue 1, Spring 2012 34
  
Another French language film, Tomboy (2011), begs the audience to consider the 
tomboy identity as a socially constructed space with rules regardless of the feelings of the 
young woman claiming that identity. Where contemporary notions of acceptable gender 
presentation for females give a wider range than that for males, the gender system only 
allows for a temporary freedom for young girls to be tomboys. Inherent in this space is 
the need to clearly mark that individual as female but in the tomboy space as well as the 
temporary nature of the space. Young women are expected to grow out of the tomboy 
identity when the people around them, usually family, deem tomboy rejection necessary 
as part of girl peer bonding.  The film inspires a discourse on that construction by 
conveying a young person in the tomboy space as a multidimensional human being. The 
tomboy identity doesn’t define them but remains integral to their sense of self.  
 Both Ma Vie en Rose (1997) and Tomboy (2011) question notions of the social 
construction of gender with a perspective in gender nonconformity and performance as an 
extension of self. This becomes an important distinction within transgender discourses as 
they critique the gender system allowing for spaces of identity in a larger spectrum 
(Bornstein 1998, Butler 2004).   Media narratives incorporating the formalized structures 
of “transition,” such as the docu-drama, South Park’s episode 901, “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy 
New Vagina” (2005), and Family Guy’s episode 818, “Quagmire’s Dad” (2010) , 
trivialize identity while making transition from one gender to another to be a quick and 
frivolous process. A Japanese TV show challenges these messages by incorporating the 
social and medical aspects of transition into the main plot of the show,  Hourou Musuko 
“Wandering Son” (2011),  which follows the difficult journey of Nitori Shuichi,  a young 
trans woman undergoing the initial stages of transition and negotiating this transgender 
Dissenting Voices, v. 1, issue 1, Spring 2012 35
  
identity while in middle school. Although a fictional account,  this ties in many of the 
realities facing “trans” identified young people: members of his family disapprove, hir 
school has adheres to rigid gender scripts, and ze is negotiating hir desires for a 
relationship with a classmate, all while learning more about hir identity within society.  
While this is a fictionalized account, the attention to a holistic experience of trans identity 
communicates a larger message about the multidimensional nature of transition and of 
any individual on the whole. 
The constructions of society dictated by the mass media cannot be categorized as 
wholly problematic, but the representation of groups comes through the filter of norms 
and values media packages for consumption. Transgender people are multidimensional 
and deserve to have a constructed narrative that reflects their inherent humanity. As the 
current gender order becomes more entrenched in the mass media, the identities of trans 
identified people will be distanced further from the norm. However, some smaller 
transnational discourses are appearing and, should they reach American viewers, have the 
potential to open up a critical dialogue on the values espoused in modern mass media. 
The scholarship on these issues, especially Judith Butler (1997), challenges the public to 
reexamine the construction of gender and realize that real people live in a world of 
fluidity where identity is truly what one makes of it.    
Dissenting Voices, v. 1, issue 1, Spring 2012 36
  
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the real you, or something else entirely. New York: Routledge. 
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London: 
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Transnational Discourses on Gender Variance

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Transnational Discourses on Gender Variance

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