- list the top 10 best lesbian movies
- include one about trans men (with no actual lesbians in it)
- include no trans women
- …
When did this happen? I’ve been reading Autostraddle since I came out six months ago and I’ve been really impressed by...
I wanted to answer the question When did this happen?.
This is a post we wrote five years ago. We were super-ignorant about all things trans then. Pathetically enough, we came up with that list during a rare moment when almost every team member was present, including like 12 interns, and not one of us thought it was weird to include “Boys Don’t Cry” (although we did acknowledge that it wasn’t a lesbian film in the post? specifically we oddly declared: “Boys Don’t Cry definitely isn’t a “lesbian film” — there aren’t any lesbians in it! But it has a lesbian director and a queer sensibility and is important for other reasons so we wanted to talk about it anyhow.”). And honestly that post was far from our last mistake w/r/t trans issues!!
Part of why we’re so committed to trans female inclusion now is because we’re retroactively appalled at how minuscule our collective knowledge was back then despite the fact that we were actively making queer media. If we could be that ignorant, then anybody could! I didn’t know a single g-damn thing about trans women, honestly, besides the very few representations I’d seen in the media growing up, all of which were really awful. I bought it, though. I didn’t know anything else. All the trans misogyny and all the transphobia, I bought it. I pretty much ate what I was served and never questioned it. It’s kind of terrifying. When I read “Whipping Girl” for the first time, almost every behavior she spoke out against was a way I myself had behaved, every media lie she deconstructed was one I’d once believed.
When I first started hearing from people who already knew this stuff, it was from kids just coming out of college who were active in campus LGBTQ groups, took women’s studies & queer theory, etc. I was an English major who dated frat boys, I graduated in 2003. I mention this because people tend to assume I have some kind of “background” in LGBTQ issues, and I don’t, and neither does Laneia, except that I’m constantly self-educating and have been since around 2005. Lately that’s involved a lot of educating about trans issues. But before starting Autostraddle and when I was first coming out in the mid-‘00s, I didn’t have any friends, female or male, who were out as trans or who I knew were trans. i eventually had some friends who had trans male friends so I knew a teeny tiny bit about trans men, but that was it. I don’t know, it just was what it was.
Anyhow, if you want to dislike Autostraddle because we once wrote posts like that, that’s okay, I get it, I’m sorry, and like I said, that’s hardly our worst mistake. this very week a thing went up we (laneia & i) hadn’t seen ahead of time that when we did see, were like, we need to take that down. I’m not trying to convince you to like us or consider us trans-female-inclusive, either. You don’t have to. I do feel like the proof is in the pudding (or in the level of ire we receive from TERFs?) and in the incredible community of trans women who read and write for autostraddle, but you can disagree. i’ve just come to a place in my life where I have to accept that not everyone is going to like what our site is about or what we write about or how all the various cis and trans and otherwise-identified humans of Autostraddle conduct ourselves, and that’s okay. I also have to accept that when I say things like this, it will be interpreted in vastly different ways by vastly different people and I can’t control that either.
but i just wanted to address this question because I don’t want any trans women to think that we live in a world where a website as large/popular as autostraddle, a website which declares itself inclusive of trans women, was still publishing shit like that in 2014, because I don’t think the world needs more depressing news about trans inclusion in queer women’s spaces today.
